‘Recently, I came across a paper co-authored by 37 authors from Stanford, CMU, Michigan, and elsewhere: *The Last Human-Written Paper*.
The core argument is pretty brutal: the paper format we’ve been using for centuries might already be obsolete in the AI era.
The authors point out two “invisible taxes” that we’ve long overlooked:
One is the narrative tax. To tell a compelling story, we delete failed experiments, dead ends, and overturned hypotheses. What AI reads is a “walkthrough guide” to beating the game, but it misses the truly valuable “pitfall logs.”
The other is the engineering tax. The implementation details in papers are usually enough to convince reviewers, but not enough for an Agent to directly reproduce. Many key tricks are still buried in the authors’ heads, code comments, and Slack threads.
So the authors propose ARA, transforming papers directly into “research packages” that Agents can read and execute: not just telling you the conclusions, but packaging in how they were reached, how the code runs, where the evidence chain is, and which paths led nowhere.
I think the most intriguing part of this paper is that it’s not discussing how AI can help humans write papers—it’s asking:
When AI also becomes a reader and executor of papers, should papers still look like they do today?
In the future, the core of research output might no longer be “how much it resembles a paper,” but whether it can be understood, reproduced, traced, and iteratively extended by AI.
Humans have been writing papers for centuries—next, we might start writing research packages for Agents to execute.
What is more striking, in a seemingly ‘progressive’ radical, is that he is not mechanically minded. He shows no interest either in the details of machinery or in the things machinery can do. As Gissing remarks, Dickens nowhere describes a railway journey with anything like the enthusiasm he shows in describing journeys by stage-coach. In nearly all of his books one has a curious feeling that one is living in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, and in fact, he does tend to return to this period. Little Dorrit, written in the middle fifties, deals with the late twenties; Great Expectations (1861) is not dated, but evidently deals with the twenties and thirties. Several of the inventions and discoveries which have made the modern world possible (the electric telegraph, the breech-loading gun, India-rubber, coal gas, wood-pulp paper) first appeared in Dickens’s lifetime, but he scarcely notes them in his books. Nothing is queerer than the vagueness with which he speaks of Doyce’s ‘invention’ in Little Dorrit. It is represented as something extremely ingenious and revolutionary, ‘of great importance to his country and his fellow-creatures’, and it is also an important minor link in thebook; yet we are never told what the ‘invention’ is! On the other hand, Doyce’s physical appearance is hit off with the typical Dickens touch; he has a peculiar way of moving his thumb, a way characteristic of engineers. After that, Doyce is firmly anchored in one’s memory; but, as usual, Dickens has done it by fastening on something external.
There are people (Tennyson is an example) who lack the mechanical faculty but can see the social possibilities of machinery. Dickens has not this stamp of mind. He shows very little consciousness of the future. When he speaks of human progress it is usually in terms of moral progress men growing better; probably he would never admit that men are only as good as their technical development allows them to be. At this point the gap between Dickens and his modern analogue, H.G. Wells, is at its widest. Wells wears the future round his neck like a mill-stone, but Dickens’s unscientific cast of mind is just as damaging in a different way. What it does is to make any positive attitude more difficult for him. He is hostile to the feudal, agricultural past and not in real touch with the industrial present. Well, then, all that remains is the future (meaning Science, ‘progress’, and so forth), which hardly enters into his thoughts. Therefore, while attacking everything in sight, he has no definable standard of comparison. As I have pointed out already, he attacks the current educational system with perfect justice, and yet, after all, he has no remedy to offer except kindlier schoolmasters. Why did he not indicate what a school might have been? Why did he not have his own sons educated according to some plan of his own, instead of sending them to public schools to be stuffed with Greek? Because he lacked that kind of imagination. He has an infallible moral sense, but very little intellectual curiosity. And here one comes upon something which really is an enormous deficiency in Dickens, something, that really does make the nineteenth century seem remote from us — that he has no idea of work.
ODOT goes full Orwell on claims about project schedules. ODOT projects are always on-time and on-schedule–no matter how many times we have to revise the schedule and forget or bury our earlier promises. The reality is that for major project, the Oregon Department of Transportation routinely blows through announced schedules. The now $15 billion Interstate Bridge Project, which was supposed to have finished its environmental review and gotten a record of decision in 2023, is still waiting for that approval, more than two years later.
The I-205 Abernethy Bridge, which ODOT said would be completed in 2025, is still dragging on and will continue through at least 2027–with further work needed to protect this seismic retrofit project from soil liquefaction lasting through 2030 (and costing an additional $130 million). The delays are bad in their own right–and are a key factor in driving up costs (and further enriching ocntractors and consultants). But ODOT continues to deny that anything is wrong. The former IBR project director falsely claimed that the agency never mentioned a 2023 due date for finishing the project’s environmental impact (it’s in the legislative record). And ODOT continues to talk about completing the Abernethy Bridge project “on-time” even though we’re the better part of a year past their originally announced completion date. ODOT has a problem meeting any of its stated schedules–and you can’t fix a problem you don’t admit you have.
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Maryland draws the line at $5 billion for the cost of rebuilding the Key Bridge. Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key bridge became the poster-child for American infrastructure after the container ship Dali crashed into the bridge in 2024. Federal and state governments moved quickly to remove the damage structure and committed to plans to replace the bridge, originally at an estimated cost of about $1.7 billion. The state inked a deal with construction firm Kiewit to commence work on some new pilings, even before the design was settled. The cost, not surprisingly rose, and the latest reports are that Kiewit has asked for as much as $9 billion. But the Marylnad Transportation Department is–unlike some state highway agencies we could mention (looking at you ODOT and WSDOT), isn’t simply rolling over. Maryland transportation secretary Kathryn Thomson said $5 million remains their cost estimate:
“To the extent you’ve heard substantially higher numbers, those are not our numbers, and I continue to say those will never be our numbers,” Thomson said. “So we’re in the 5-billion-ish range.”
The state is moving to terminate–in its words “off-ramp”–Kiewit and find a new construction contractor. The willingness to say “no” rather than allow a contractor to use their considerable leverage to extract more and more public funds, seems to be a rare commodity among state transportation agencies. We’ll continue to follow this project.
Let’s start tearing down urban freeways. A new organization has been formed in New York with the explicit goal of eliminating damaging urban freeways. Fittingly called “Offramp” the organization
This is a refreshingly honest, urbanist take on what to do with freeways. Too many cities seem obsessed with expensive and largely cosmetic “cover” and “cap and stitch” projects that put tiny band-aids on the gaping wounds caused by urban freeways. Typically, these efforts are just an excuse to indefinitely continue, and often expand, urban highways and their polluting, disruptive traffic. It’s time to end them, not pretend to “mend” them.
Road pricing for DC? Which city will be the next to give road pricing a try? After New York’s dramatic success implementing congestion pricing, you’d think that other cities wrestling with congestion problems and stuggling to pay for mass transit would leap to emulate this best practice. Washington DC undertook a detailed study to see how pricing might work in the nation’s capital. Unfortunately the DC Mayor Muriel Bowser tried to bury the report–which was eventually made public. It shows that pricing would dramatically reduce congestion, improve speeds and lower travel times for commuters, and provide millions for transport improvements (just like in NYC). The study estimates that a ten dollar daily inbound “cordon” toll similar to that in lower Manhattan would reduce traffic by about 7 percent (enough to save the average commuter 20 hours per year), and would generate nearly $350 million in gross revenue.
Greater Greater Washington has a summary of the report, and explains that the big beneficiaries of pricing would be automobile commuters, who, as in British parlance, would actually discover that pricing provides “value for money”: you pay a congestion fee, but in return you get a faster trip.
The Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) is currently engaged in an audacious attempt to re-write history. In testimony to the newly formed Joint Transportation Oversight Committee, agency officials claimed that the staggering cost overruns on projects like the I-205 Abernethy Bridge were the result of “rushed” estimates forced upon them by the 2017 Legislature. The facts, however, tell a much different story of expensive, detailed planning followed by a complete collapse in fiscal accountability.
The Myth of the “Slap-Dash” Estimate. ODOT Deputy Director Travis Brouwer recently implied the Abernethy project was greenlit based on incomplete, “back-of-the-envelope” math provided during the 2017 legislative session. This is simply untrue.
The Detailed Directive: The 2017 Legislature did not fund the Abernethy project; instead, it specifically directed ODOT to produce a comprehensive “Cost-to-Complete” study.
The $12.5 Million Report: ODOT spent nearly six months and $12.5 million on preliminary engineering, hiring the consulting firm HDR to produce a 169-page technical report.
“Pretty Confident”: In 2018, HDR officials testified to the Legislature that they had advanced the design to 15-25% completion, consulted with contractors, and were “pretty confident” in their $248 million estimate for the bridge
On-Time? Hardly. The re-writing of history extends to the project’s schedule. While ODOT Director Kris Strickler recently claimed the team is managing for “on-time” completion, the project is already a year behind its original 2025 deadline. New reports suggest “Winter 2026” is the goal, with riverbank restoration dragging into 2030.
ODOT is attempting to re-write history to explain away its failures to accurately forecast project costs. In recent testimonty to the Oregon Legislature, ODOT officials claimed that the reason that the cost for the Salem Center Street Bridge and the I-205 Abernethy Bridge and other projects had doubled, or tripled, had to do with being required to submit rushed and incomplete estimates to the 2017 Legislature. To hear ODOT officials tell the story, the reason that the costs turned out to be much higher than they told the Legislature was because they weren’t given the time or the money to do a proper job of preparing a cost estimate.
That’s simply untrue, especially for the I-205 Abernethy Bridge Project, ODOT’s current largest project. The 2017 Legislature actually didn’t authorize funding for I-205, but instead, as directed by legislation, ODOT prepared a detailed “cost to complete” report that would be a reliable and carefully researched estimate. ODOT hired an outside consulting firm (HDR) at a cost of $12.5 million and took nearly six months to prepare the estimate. In testimony to the Legislature and Oregon Transportation Commission, HDR officials assured that they had consulted with potential contractors, had assessed the market, cost and schedule risks, allowed for an adequate contingency and were “pretty confident” in the accuracy of their estimate, which advanced design to the 15-25 percent stage. Far from being a slap-dash, back-of-the envelope estimate prepared under the gun of a legislative debate, ODOT engaged in a very detailed–and expensive–cost estimate.
The estimated cost of the Abernethy Bridge, (Phase IA of the larger I-205 project) was set at $248 million in that 2018 “Cost to Complete report. As we’ve chronicled at City Observatory, when put out for bid in 2021, the project’s price tag doubled to $495 million, and since then the project’s total cost has now more than tripled to a total of $815 million–and promises to go higher. That huge cost overrun has prompted some significant questions by the Legislature. And ODOT officials have, retroactively, tried to re-write history to make it seem like they didn’t have time to put together a reasonable estimate.
Re-Writing History
In January, 2026, the newly formed Joint Transportation Oversight Committee dug into the extent and reasons for repeated cost overruns on major ODOT projects, what we at City Observatory have described as its “Reign of Error.” In testimony to that committee on January 14, ODOT’s deputy director, Travis Brouwer claimed that the Legislature approved the I-205 Abernethy project based on a rushed or incomplete cost estimate (as with the Salem’s Center Street Bridge). Brouwer implied the Abernethy cost estimate it was a slap dash estimate provided during the 2017 session (as was the Salem Center Street Bridge). Brouwer testified:
What we have seen is that, in particular, with the Center Street Bridge, I would probably hold up to you that. That project was directed to move forward before we had a level of information that would really give us a firm sense of the ultimate cost and scope of the project. I think if you make a similar argument on I 205/Abernathy Bridge. Again, that was in HB 2017, we were directed to do some work.
(emphasis added)
Brouwer omitted many salient facts from his testimony.
First, in fact, in 2017, the Legislature did not appropriate funds for Abernethy, instead, it directed ODOT to produce a detailed “Cost-to-Complete” study for the project.
Second, ODOT undertook a six-month long study, hiring consulting firm HDR, It produced an 169-page report and with an additional 93 pages of appendices–about the same length and level of detail as the recent $17.7 billion cost estimate of the Interstate Bridge Replacement Project.. According to the study, ODOT had spent about $12.5 million on preliminary engineering for the project.
The study evaluated various design solutions, and construction packages and specifications and different delivery methods. It estimated that the Abernethy Bridge (which classified as Phase A) could be constructed for $248 million, and that (Phase B) the widening of I-205 between West Linn and Stafford Road, would cost and additional $198 million to construct.
The HDR Cost to Complete study was presented to the Oregon Transportation Commission in January of 2018, and to the Oregon Legislature’s Joint Transportation Committee in May of 2018.
The $12.5 million report that advanced Abernethy to 15% design in 2018.
In both cases, Steve Drahota of HDR presented the cost estimates, claiming that they had advanced the project to between 15-25% of design, done a very elaborate, disaggregated analysis, with separate risk estimates for different project components. They also said they’d engaged a group of construction contractors to come help validate the estimates. He also said they included an allowance for inflation and expressed the estimate in year of construction dollars (with completion scheduled for 2025). He testified that they were confident of the estimate. They also looked at alternative phasing and delivery packages.(For what it’s worth, Drahota’s HDR was also a key consultant for Rose Quarter, a project where the project cost went from $450 million to $2.1 billion). ODOT commenced construction in 2022. Bids came it at $500 million–double the “Cost to Complete” estimate. Over the next three years they escalated successively to $622 million, $750 million and finally to $815 million (and are expected to go higher, due to as yet unresolved disputes with contractors).
ODOT is trying to re-write history about the Abernethy. They want to blame the legislature for ultimate cost increases because the legislature directed the project be undertaken, even though ODOT didn’t have time to do a proper cost estimate. As we know:
1. The 2017 Legislature did not authorize funding for Abernethy
2. The 2017 Legislature directed ODOT to instead prepare a “Cost to Complete” Report by Feb 1, 2018.
3. ODOT hired HDR and did detailed work on Cost to Complete
4. The Legislature still didn’t authorize funding for Abernethy: OTC moved ahead on its own, pretending to find money from tolling.
5. It wasn’t until 2021 that the Legislature allowed OTC to divert funds from Urban Mobility Strategy and Rose Quarter (even though it provided no more money; because in theory ODOT was still going to pay for the project with toll revenues).
Together, these facts, contradict Travis Brouwer’s characterization of the Abernethy from the January 14, 2026 Joint Transportation Oversight Committee Hearing.
Okay, all right, so that was really the What now is the well, how much and so, based on well, really a 15 to 25% preliminary design, the total budget cost of 500 million and that assumes a bunch of things with it. So one of those big assumptions is a schedule that has a construction completed by January of 2025. Within that $500 million is really built on these various components, preliminary engineering, which includes all the planning work that ODOT did in advance of the consultant team coming on board right away, acquisition for projects at this scale. This is really a fairly small amount of right-of-way, and that was, this goes back to that really streamlining and minimizing impacts utility relocation. There aren’t that many utilities to be relocated compared to many other projects, some of the bridges have some so the overwhelming cost is construction at 450 million. And so we approach the construction cost through a somewhat unique methodology for generating the number so number one is we built up what we thought all of our quantities were even at this 15% level. So getting into true, how much material for each of these different construction items are we generating? And then we ask ourselves, okay, well, how much do we trust that we know that quantity? And so we applied this zero to 20% contingency variability. Basically, do we need more information in which we think we need to put some additional money on it, or we feel pretty confident about it right now, even if it’s really early design scenario. And then beyond that, we said, listen, then let’s apply 15% unknowns contingency, because any number of things can change within the definition that we have. So at the end of the day, we have a 27% contingency, which is actually slightly lower than a lot of other projects. We feel pretty confident about it, because we define those types of rest. The other thing $500 million estimate is escalation to the midpoint of construction for the construction packages themselves, like we’re seeing in the marketplace, especially with the House bill, 2017 projects coming online, escalation is real, and so including that into the cost estimate itself is, is how we generate this $500 million number.
ODOT has attempted to re-write the history of the Abernethy Bridge project in five other respects:
First, it has implied that the project was funded under HB 2017, in the 2017 legislative session; as noted above, the agency was only directed to prepare a cost-to-complete study.
Second, it has mis-represented the source of funds to be used to pay for the project.
Third, it has tried to alter or cover up the original estimated cost of the project. For example, it told the Oregonian in 2026 that the project’s original estimated cost was $500 million–not the $248 million from the 2018 Cost-to-Complete report.
Fourth, it has concealed and mis-represented the completion date of the project.
Fifth, the agency’s project tracking website, which is required by law to accurately convey most or all of this information, contains incomplete, inaccurate and misleading information about the project.
Similar re-writing of on-time performance of the Abernethy Bridge Project
As just one detailed example, take a look at the schedule claimed for the Abernethy Bridge project. ODOT always claims that its projects are under-budget and on-schedule. Take their largest current project, widening and seismic improvements to the I-205 Abernethy Bridge. In a November 2025 letter to the Oregon Transportation Commission, Director Kris Strickler stated:
The project team is actively managing risks to on-time and on-budget completion of the project.
Strickler’s letter implies the project could still be on-time and on-budget. In reality, the project already is way over budget and a year behind schedule. The project was scheduled to be completed in 2025 according to ODOT reports 2024; Press reports say ODOT announced it was postponing completion from Fall 2025 to Fall 2026. The latest ODOT presentation now says the project may be done in “Winter 2026,” (by which they actually mean the fourth quarter of calendar year 2026, not the first quarter), while the schedule of payments to the project’s construction contractor continues through the first quarter of 2027.
Now ODOT admits the project will take even longer, and the full work, to restore the riverbank under the bridge, will take until 2030. As we’ve noted at City Observatory, ODOT’s original “cost to complete” estimate for the project was less than $250 million, then doubled to almost $500 million, and the rose further to $622 million and then $750 million, and most recently $815 million, and ODOT has acknowledged it could go higher. It’s at least a year, and half a billion dollars too late to be talking about delivering this project “on-time and on-budget.”
Appendix: HDR 2018 Cost To Complete Report, Appendix Detail
Two editions ago I mentioned that a WASP Clay 3d printer/plotter had arrived in the studio. Well…
…let’s just say it’s a lot of fun!
I think it’s also fair to say that if you already write code to create designs for a drawing machine you’d find modifying that code to write-files-for/control-a clay plotter incredibly easy.
I am notabout to embark on becoming a potter, I already have enough on my plate without introducing a whole new thing. But having said that, the machine does just live downstairs, and after Kris has finished using it there will be spare clay that has to be used up, and I now have these files laying around.
I did however, create a tool that would let me preview the GCODE to get an idea of what something would look like before I sent it.
The last time I wrote a ray-tracer was back at Uni about 30+ years ago. Coming back to it now, the maths is still pretty much the same. I got it working but I also managed to create something so bad that it actually ran the battery down on the laptop while it was plugged in. Something I didn’t even know was possible.
Meanwhile, I have a favour to ask, two actually, about the same thing.
We - Deep Keep - made a thing called KeepRight (I’ll quickly write why & the background in a moment), it’s about creating a “declaration” about what you’d like to happen to an item, archive, collection after you’re no longer responsible for it (i.e. dead, but not always), and not necessarily your own stuff.
1️⃣ 1️⃣ 1️⃣
So the first favour is about questions.
With a collection/archive of things in mind; physical, digital, mixed, yours, other peoples’, go through the process of creating a declaration for it: https://keepright.info/declaration - we kept it deliberately short to start with, should take like 3mins.
Then let me know (or via the usual channels) what questions we are missing. I’m looking for blind-spots and how it didn’t (or did) work for the things you had in mind.
2️⃣ 2️⃣ 2️⃣
Second favour is for the super technical people, and I’m not totally sure anyone will do this but here we go.
There’s a specification for what the questions are, for how they are asked, and finally for the shape of the saved results - and a bunch of schemas too.
If you’re into specs, schemas, systems, extendability, transportability and/or longevity/data retention, or know someone who is can you give me a once over on where I’m being a fucking idiot, or if it all makes sense.
I’ve done the internet, technology, code and development for years, but even backed by all that this is the first spec/schema I’m putting together for the big-wide-world and while I think it makes sense, a second pair of (human) eyes is always good.
💾 💾 💾
The very (very) quick why; we did a whole bunch of stuff with Flickr and archives of people’s photos. We recognised that what we learnt (more on that on the flickr dot org blog; lots of research lots of workshops) extended beyond that, and there were some juicy problems to solve around keeping shit around for a long time (hence setting up Deep Keep).
But it became super obvious that we needed a small layer in front of just “keeping stuff for a long time” - i.e; context, intention, provenance, governance - that sits alongside copyright (or lack of), and can be printed out and stuffed into a folder/shoe box, kept digitally for humans/machines, or both.
For people here that may be; “what do I want to happen to my art/art-collection when I die?”
Thank you for doing the above and/or forward this request to someone you think may have opinions!
# EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE
I am not a potter, I am a print guy. I love having an A2 printer full of various tones of archival ink and draws of archival paper - almost as much as I love stationery.
I also half own a Riso print studio.
Having a tool that previews GCODE for what a pot may look like, that uses Threejs and webgl gives me access to all the “normals” - which is a shortcut to “how much is this 2d point on the canvas (calculated from a 3d point) pointing towards or away from the light”; i.e. how light or dark is this point.
Which means in addition to the ray traced image, you can get all fancy-pants and throw on a halftone effect…
…which you can separate out into different print channels…
…and then load up into your Riso Studio software to check the colour plates, layout and levels.
Then, you can add the ability to rotate the pot and save out X number of “frames”, to be sent to the Riso printer (and normal printer)…
…but also all the matching SVGs needed for the drawing machine.
So now I’m in the slightly overwhelming position of being able to use a souped up version of my drawing machine code to design pots, vases and perhaps teapots, that can be '“printed/plotted” in clay as an actual real 3d object to be fired and glazed, but also Riso printing, Giclée printed and drawn with whatever pen/pencils/brush etc you want.
Which looks great, I haven’t used it, and anything that brings down the barrier to entry is good. I can especially get behind the “yeah, this GCODE part is specifically written for me” bit.
It’s also a bit of an odd feeling for me. I’ve spent so long putting off, and then starting to make the Drawing Machine 101 tutorials, that I can feel the relevance of them slipping away as AI develops.
I don’t know how Applied Craft has developed the software, but the UI has the rounded generated with AI look about it, which is fine. And we’re at the point that if someone wants to create a pen plot drawing they don’t need to know how to do that, or even use someone else’s tool or software to do it, they can just ask AI.
Which brings me back to; why the hell am I making videos teaching people how to code things that AI can build for them in minutes?
And I think the answer is two fold.
1. Code as Craft - potters still make pots, people still write letters with fountain pens, typewriters are being meticulous repaired.
2. Social Proof - in the future, when I’m making drawing machine art, and someone inevitably says “that was created with AI” or “that was vibe coded” I’ll have a playlist of 40 or so videos of me hand writing code step by step from start to finish, and YouTube videos that predate AI showing my work, that I can point to.
It’s like keeping public sketchbooks in a way, and I’m glad I did it, and continue to do it.
On that note, the next handcrafted newsletter will be with you on Thursday 25th June, 2026, all typos are mine, and I’ve used ‘-’ instead of ‘—’ all the way through, sorry typographers!
A pair of Landsat images shows 40 years of westward urban expansion from Guadalajara, Mexico. The Thematic Mapper on Landsat 5 captured the left image in 1986; the Operational Land Imager on Landsat 8 captured the right image in 2026.
A pair of Landsat images shows 40 years of westward urban expansion from Guadalajara, Mexico. The Thematic Mapper on Landsat 5 captured the left image in 1986; the Operational Land Imager on Landsat 8 captured the right image in 2026.
NASA Earth Observatory / Lauren Dauphin
A pair of Landsat images shows 40 years of westward urban expansion from Guadalajara, Mexico. The Thematic Mapper on Landsat 5 captured the left image in 1986; the Operational Land Imager on Landsat 8 captured the right image in 2026.
A pair of Landsat images shows 40 years of westward urban expansion from Guadalajara, Mexico. The Thematic Mapper on Landsat 5 captured the left image in 1986; the Operational Land Imager on Landsat 8 captured the right image in 2026.
NASA Earth Observatory / Lauren Dauphin
April 13, 1986
April 27, 2026
April 13, 1986 – April 27, 2026
A pair of Landsat images shows 40 years of westward urban expansion from Guadalajara, Mexico. The TM (Thematic Mapper) on Landsat 5 captured the left image in 1986; the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 8 captured the right image in 2026.
Guadalajara, Mexico, was quite a different place when it last hosted World Cup games 40 years ago. The city welcomed matches in June 1986 and did so again in 2026, when South Korea faced Czechia at Guadalajara Stadium in the opening round of the 2026 FIFA World Cup.
In 1986, Guadalajara Stadium had not yet been built in Zapopan, the fast-growing municipality just northwest of Guadalajara. Many of that year’s World Cup matches were held instead at Jalisco Stadium in northeastern Guadalajara. It was in that stadium that France defeated Brazil in a penalty shootout in the 1986 quarterfinals, in what is widely regarded as one of the most memorable World Cup games of all time.
As seen in the Landsat images above, the land where Guadalajara Stadium (also called Estadio Akron) now sits was farmland in 1986. The new stadium, built in 2010 to host Mexico’s Club Deportivo Guadalajara, or Chivas, lies near the Sierra la Primavera volcanic complex, a rugged landscape full of lava flows, volcanic domes, steam vents, and hot springs. The architects who designed the stadium took inspiration from the nearby volcanic terrain, creating a structure that rises from a grassy earthen berm meant to resemble the flanks of a volcano, topped with a white roof reminiscent of a volcanic cloud.
About 95,000 years ago, the volcanic system underneath Sierra la Primavera produced a massive eruption that caused a caldera 11 kilometers (7 miles) in diameter to slump downward. Water filled the depression for tens of thousands of years, but tectonic uplift and the accumulation of sediment eventually led to the demise of the lake. Erosion wore away the softer surrounding rock over time, leaving harder, erosion-resistant volcanic rocks within the circular feature that now stand high above the surrounding terrain.
Starting about 60,000 years ago, several lava domes erupted along the southern edge of the caldera. The youngest of them, Cerro del Colli, formed about 30,000 years ago, leaving the dome-shaped feature just south of the stadium and contributing to a broader landscape dotted with other volcanic domes and cinder cones.
Today, much of the original caldera has been preserved as a forested area known as La Primavera Biosphere Reserve, even as development has partially encircled it during the past 40 years. The population of the Guadalajara metro area has grown from about 2.7 million in 1986 to more than 5.5 million now, with particularly rapid growth in Zapopan, a burgeoning tech hub sometimes billed as “Mexico’s Silicon Valley.” A prominent development visible in Landsat images is Guadalajara Technology Park, one of several new industrial parks in Zapopan. New greenhouses have also come to the area en masse, including south of the reserve, where they are mostly used to grow fruits and vegetables.
World Cup fever runs particularly high in Guadalajara, which is hosting World Cup matches for the third time. During Brazil’s legendary title run in 1970, when Pelé led the team, Jalisco Stadium was the venue for Brazil’s first-round, quarterfinal, and semifinal matches. To commemorate him, the city in May 2026 erected a 9.5-meter (31-foot) bronze statue of the iconic football (soccer) player.
Even the animals at Guadalajara Zoo are taking part in the festivities, with elephants, gorillas, giraffes, capybaras, pumas, and macaws “predicting” match winners by choosing between food, shirts, boxes, soccer balls, and other items. A puma named Muluk predicted South Korea would beat Czechia by sniffing and moving a ball, one newspaper reported.
Guadalajara will host four first-round matches: South Korea vs. Czechia on June 12, Mexico vs. South Korea on June 18, Colombia vs. Democratic Republic of the Congo on June 23, and Uruguay vs. Spain on June 26.
NASA Earth Observatory images by Lauren Dauphin, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Story by Adam Voiland.
A quick refresher: What is El Niño and how can it affect global weather patterns? El Niño is the warm phase of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), a semi-regular recurring cycle that transfers vast amounts of heat and momentum from the tropical Pacific to the global atmosphere. It is triggered every 3–7 years when the […]
File: A Falcon 9 rocket stands in the launch position at Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station ahead of the planned liftoff of the Starlink 6-61 mission on Oct. 22, 2024. Image: Adam Bernstein/Spaceflight Now
SpaceX will mark its historic launch on the stock market Friday morning with a Falcon 9 rocket launch from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.
This will be the 650th flight of SpaceX’s workhorse launcher to date and the 68th Falcon 9 launch so far in 2026. SpaceX will fly the Starlink 10-54 mission, which will send 29 Starlink V2 Mini Optimized satellites into low Earth orbit.
Liftoff from Space Launch Complex 40 is currently scheduled for 8:37 a.m. EDT (1237 UTC), less than an hour before the trading day starts on the Nasdaq Stock Market. The rocket will fly on a north-easterly trajectory upon leaving the pad.
Spaceflight Now will have live coverage beginning about an hour prior to liftoff.
The 45th Weather Squadron forecast an 80 percent chance for favorable liftoff at the opening of the window, which drops slightly down to 70 percent as the window progresses. Meteorologists are watching for interference from cumulus clouds.
SpaceX will fly the Starlink 10-54 mission using the Falcon 9 first stage booster with the tail number B1080. This will be its 27th mission to date, including two crewed flights to the International Space Station for Axiom Space, two cargo missions to the ISS, and the European Space Agency’s Euclid observatory.
A little more than eight minutes after liftoff, B1080 will target a landing on the drone ship, ‘A Shortfall of Gravitas’, off the coast of South Carolina. If successful, this will be the 155th landing on this vessel and the 623rd booster landing to date for SpaceX.
This will be the 55th dedicated launch of Starlink satellites so far this year and the 56th overall mission featuring the spacecraft. SpaceX has more than 10,500 Starlink satellites in orbit.
Going public
The Starlink 10-54 mission marks a turning point for SpaceX as it becomes a publicly traded company more than 24 years after its founding in March 2002. It’s valuation is $1.77 trillion.
SpaceX announced that it would be selling 555.6 million shares of its Class A common stock at $135 each, raising $75 billion for the company.
The Starlink portion of SpaceX is a key driver of its business. In its financial disclosures to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), SpaceX said its income from its connectivity business was about $2 billion in 2024 and $4.4 billion in 2025.
SpaceX’s first Starship Version 3 rocket takes off from Pad 2 at Starbase during the Flight 12 mission on May 22, 2026. Image: SpaceX
SpaceX is betting on its Starship-Super Heavy rocket to launch not only its Starship V3 satellites, but also orbiting data centers to help power the company’s artificial intelligence division, xAI.
SpaceX also hopes Starship can help unlock currently non-existent markets, like point-to-point rocket travel on Earth, asteroid mining, and large-scale infrastructure on Mars.
The company completed its 12th Starship test flight in May and is working towards a 13th flight on a yet to be disclosed date. It’s unclear exactly when the first orbital launch attempt of Starship will take place, but SpaceX has stated its intention to begin deploying Starlink V3 satellites in the back half of 2026.
“Starship is designed to enable a step-function change in our launch capability across reusability, payload capacity, and launch cadence, and is the key enabler of our long-term growth strategy by unlocking entirely new categories of missions,” SpaceX wrote in its prospectus document.
SpaceX said it spent about $3 billion in research and development on Starship in 2025 and $930 million in the first three months of 2026.
I remember the first time I heard about the invention of the iPhone, back in 2007. My friend, who followed Apple products with an almost religious zeal — there were many such people in those days — entered the room and announced “This is the convergence!” We spent the next few minutes gaping in awe at the idea that every single piece of portable consumer electronics was about to be combined into a single device.
For many, it felt like a messianic moment. The iPhone was probably the last big innovation that we Americans embraced as a whole society. Everybody had an iPhone, or wanted one. Engineers loved how the thing was engineered. Humanities PhD students showed off the latest model at parties and admired the sleek design.1 Kids in working class neighborhoods were glued to their iPhones in math class. It was a supercomputer in your pocket, a voice for the voiceless, the tricorder and the communicator from Star Trek, all that and more.
It was also big money. Years before Benedict Evans wrote “The smartphone is the new sun”, every ambitious tech entrepreneur and content creator in America was in on the game. Social media — that infinitely scrolling vertical feed — was the killer app of the smartphone, what the spreadsheet had been for the PC or e-commerce had been for the internet. In 2012, Facebook’s monster IPO kicked off a gold rush, and everyone moved to San Francisco to strike it rich.
But you didn’t need to be a tech entrepreneur in order to get in on the action. The smartphone meant far more eyeballs glued to far more screens for far more minutes of the day, and that meant dollar signs for content creators. YouTubers, Instagram fashion influencers, and Twitter activists became whole new economic classes. Old-style content businesses like newspapers and TV networks saw their doom, but also a potential lifeline. (Eventually even econ bloggers got our piece of the pie; plenty of you signed up for this blog through a scrollable app.)
Beautiful design coupled with brilliant engineering. Technology anyone could use. Economic opportunity for the masses and for the elite. A way to have your ideas and opinions heard by millions of people thousands of miles away, at any hour of any day. No wonder Steve Jobs was the last technologist that everyone agreed was an American hero.
But when I recall that fateful day in 2007, I remember not joy, but a sudden surge of foreboding. That was strange, and out of character for me. I’ve always been a technophile at heart — I grew up as a hardcore Star Trek fan, and until that moment in 2007, each new marvel — broadband, the internet, the laptop computer, etc. — had felt like it was moving us toward that bold utopian future. The iPhone felt different. Some small voice in the back of my head told me: “This is a mistake.” And though I tried to ignore that voice for many years, it remained.
What was I worried about? I think some part of me knew that someday, I would end up saying something like this:
The internet was wonderful because it was a place you could go — a complement to real life, not a substitute. The iPhone promised to put that fantasy universe in our pockets 24/7, and we would never escape. It would be physically possible to turn off our phones, of course, but it wouldn’t be socially possible — you could always touch grass, but after everyone had an iPhone, that would be the only conduit through which you could touch another human mind.
The idea of perpetually tying every human into a global hive mind tripped alarm bells. It reminded me too much of the hive minds I had seen depicted in science fiction nightmares — the Borg from Star Trek, the Blight from A Fire Upon the Deep, the Human Instrumentality Project from Neon Genesis Evangelion. Humans were meant to be individuals — unique, independent incubators of ideas and desires, not terminals or the fingers of a world-mind.
We had spent centuries trying to escape the small, localized versions of the hive mind. The printing press, the car and the telephone had offered freedom from the crushing conformity of small-town life. When broadcast television threatened to smother us with a centrally dictated monoculture, it sparked a decades-long resistance. When the internet arrived, we spent two decades using it to revel in our individuality — we made our personal websites, started blogs, joined small online communities centered around our interests.
Sometime around 2014 or 2015 we woke up to the fact that the world of the Old Internet no longer existed. “The internet” no longer meant the Web — it meant a tiny handful of big platforms. Twitter and Reddit for screaming about politics, Facebook and Instagram for being jealous of your friends’ vacation pics. Gone were the days of painting our individuality on the canvas of the Web. The platforms were the hive minds, we were the neurons, and the smartphone was the axon that kept each of us wired tight into the collective.
“‘Social media is bad,’ he typed on social media!!” This is the perpetual and instantaneous response of many of the neurons…er, people…in my timeline. Indeed, if social media is so bad, why don’t you just put down the phone? But this idea displays a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of network effects. Suppose I decide to get off Instagram and go play pickup basketball instead. If everyone else is on Instagram instead of playing pickup basketball, who am I going to play with?
This is an extreme and simplified example, obviously, but the intuition here comes from real research. Bursztyn et al. (2024) have a paper called “When Product Markets Become Collective Traps: The Case of Social Media”. Here’s a quick summary:
While one would typically assume that a popular product benefits its users…Bursztyn et al. find evidence of a “product market trap:” At least among the college students in this experiment, large numbers of people are choosing to use social media platforms they also wish didn’t exist at all…[T]he authors found that [subjects] would…be willing to pay an average of $24 to deactivate the platform on their campus for four weeks. This amount rose to $43 when they also included the minority of students who weren’t TikTok users. (Results for Instagram were similar and are included in the full policy brief.) [emphasis mine]
The students said that they only stayed on TikTok because other people were on it too, and they were afraid of missing out. FOMO is not utility; it’s a bad equilibrium.
There’s also an impulse to do a sort of “Good Tsar, bad boyars” maneuver, where people say “it’s not the phones, it’s social media”. But this is an argument over whether guns kill people or bullets kill people. Yes, we could access social media from laptops or other stationary devices, but we could only do so for part of the day; that would force us to develop offline interactions and relationships during the other hours, like we did back in 2007. It’s the ever-present umbilical that enables — and perhaps even mandates — the replacement of in-person interaction with an online hive mind.2
In 2007 I suppressed my deep-seated doubts about smartphone technology. I am a techno-optimist, and this was just another miraculous new tool for human empowerment. And yet the two decades since 2007 seem to have only validated my misgivings, across a number of dimensions.
Plenty of evidence has linked smartphones — and the social media apps that take up the single biggest chunk of the time we spend on those phones — to rising unhappiness among the world’s young people:
Since I wrote about this in 2023, the evidence has only grown stronger. Here’s an experiment by Castelo et al. (2025):
We used a mobile phone application to block all mobile internet access from participants' smartphones for 2 weeks and objectively track compliance. This intervention specifically targeted the feature that makes smartphones "smart" (mobile internet) while allowing participants to maintain mobile connection (through texts and calls) and nonmobile access to the internet (e.g. through desktop computers). The intervention improved mental health, subjective well-being, and objectively measured ability to sustain attention; 91% of participants improved on at least one of these outcomes. Mediation analyses suggest that these improvements can be partially explained by the intervention's impact on how people spent their time; when people did not have access to mobile internet, they spent more time socializing in person, exercising, and being in nature. [emphasis mine]
The likeliest explanation is that there is simply something thin and insufficient about online interaction. It’s lacking in some essential emotional nutrient that human beings evolved to harvest from the physical proximity of other human beings. Perhaps it’s something cognitive — the richness of context that tells you that no, your friend’s life isn’t perfect just because they posted a cool video of their trip to Europe, and thus you don’t need to feel constantly envious and inadequate and left-out. Or perhaps it’s something physical — the tiny touch of a high-five or a hug, the simple feeling of the proximity of other human bodies.
Whatever this emotional nutrient is, our young people are starving for it, while they binge on the cheap sugar-alcohol of emoji reactions and story views. In other parts of the world, young people are just starting to break free of this collective trap, but not yet in the United States.
But making teenagers sad is one thing; putting an end to the Human Age on planet Earth is quite another.
The global fertility decline is a long-standing trend. Every country that escapes poverty, urbanizes, and teaches its people to read is going to transition from a high fertility rate (5-7 children per woman) to a much lower rate. Long before the smartphone burst on the scene, most of Europe and the richer parts of East Asia had fallen below replacement-level fertility. Everyone would crack jokes about Japan not having enough kids.
Up and spent most of the morning upon my measuring Ruler and with great pleasure I have found out some things myself of great dispatch, more than my book teaches me, which pleases me mightily. Sent my wife’s things and the wine to-day by the carrier to my father’s, but staid my boy from a letter of my father’s, wherein he desires that he may not come to trouble his family as he did the last year.
Dined at home and then to the office, where we sat all the afternoon, and at night home and spent the evening with my wife, and she and I did jangle mightily about her cushions that she wrought with worsteds the last year, which are too little for any use, but were good friends by and by again. But one thing I must confess I do observe, which I did not before, which is, that I cannot blame my wife to be now in a worse humour than she used to be, for I am taken up in my talk with Ashwell, who is a very witty girl, that I am not so fond of her as I used and ought to be, which now I do perceive I will remedy, but I would to the Lord I had never taken any, though I cannot have a better than her. To supper and to bed. The consideration that this is the longest day in the year is very unpleasant to me. —[It is necessary to note that this was according to the old style.]— This afternoon my wife had a visit from my Lady Jeminah and Mr. Ferrers.
Today a report from the Department of Labor showed that inflation in May hit its highest level since early 2023, reaching an annual rate of 4.2%, up from 3.8% in April. The Federal Reserve likes to keep inflation at 2%. Energy costs are the biggest driver of that inflation, with fuel oil up 59% and gasoline up 41% over their costs last year. Airline fares have risen 27%. Fruits and vegetables are up 6% over their cost a year ago.
At a signing event for the budget reconciliation measure Republicans passed to add an additional $70 billion in funding for Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protect (CBP), the parent agency for Border Patrol, a reporter in the Oval Office asked President Donald J. Trump if he was concerned about the inflation number. Trump answered:
“No, I love it. The numbers were great. You know what I really love? I love the inflation. You know why?”
And then his speech slid into a fantasy rewriting of the history of his war on Iran and his decision to launch it.
Trump claimed that he was telling reporters—and Iran—for the first time that the U.S. was secretly taking oil from Iran. “Do you know we’ve been taking out millions of barrels of oil?” he asked. “Nobody knows it. You know who doesn’t know about it? Iran, until right now. We took out the other night 22 ships, late at night, with no lights, ’cause they don’t have any radar, ’cause we blasted the crap out of it. We took out, that why oil’s $85 a barrel.”
As Eric Schmitt and Jonathan Swan of the New York Times report, Trump appeared to be referring to the well-known U.S. operation to help dozens of commercial vessels traverse the Strait of Hormuz. So far, the journalists report, the U.S has guided more than 200 ships through in a little more than a month. Before the war, about 3,000 ships a month traveled through the strait. The reporters say they could not confirm Trump’s claim that the effort had enabled more than 100 million barrels of oil to reach the market.
Then Trump segued into a rewriting of why he started the strikes in the first place in order to suggest the dramatic hit the economy has taken from the war was part of his plan all along. He claimed he had deliberately made the choice to hurt the economy to stop Iran from producing a nuclear weapon, which he claimed—contrary to his own intelligence officers’ assessments—it was going to have “very soon.”
“I said, look, the one bad thing will be, we hit the best economy we’ve ever hit,” Trump claimed. “And I said to my people, I had [Treasury Secetary] Scott [Bessent], I had [Commerce Secretary] Howard [Lutnick], I had [Defense Secretary] Pete [Hegseth], I had all—I had [then–deputy attorney general] Todd [Blanche] in the room. I said, The one thing we have to do now, we had just hit the highest stock market in history. Highest 401Ks in history. Everything was going well, and I said, I hate to do this to you guys, but Iran’s gonna have a nuclear weapon very soon. We have to go and attack.”
In fact, in his video announcing the strikes and in comments in the early days of the war, Trump emphasized that the U.S. intended to end the Iranian regime, which he claimed had been at war with the U.S. for 47 years, and he urged Iranians to rise up against it. Ending Iran’s nuclear ambitions would come from the regime change he advocated.
In any case, he said today, oil was not nearly as expensive as the $250 a barrel people had said it could reach, so its current level is “pretty amazing.” And the stock market, he said, remains high. He went on to say that his strikes on Venezuela were “a great success” and that Venezuela has “become a happy country,” and that “we went to Iran and essentially we’ve done the same thing.” He claimed Iran’s military has been destroyed and all the Iranian leadership is gone.
When a reporter finally brought him back to the question about inflation coming down, he said that when the war is over, “it’s gonna come down like a rock.”
Meanwhile, John Knefel of Media Matters noted yesterday that Fox News hosts, many of whom supported the initial strikes on Iran, are now arguing that Trump should start bombing again. Their mantra is that it will take only two weeks to win a decisive military victory.
Trump’s relationship with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein is back in the news as New York Times White House reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, who have a book on the Trump presidency coming out, detailed how desperately worried the White House was last summer over the Epstein files. They searched desperately for a way to look as if they were being transparent to appease the MAGA base, while also making sure the files stayed hidden.
The write-up of the story distances Vice President J.D. Vance from the files, suggesting he was “panicked” by them and wanted them released. This position, attributed to him by White House officials, is good for him politically, as he will want to pick up MAGA voters unhappy about the Epstein cover up by 2028, at least—or before, should he need to take the mantle of the presidency from Trump, who will turn 80 on Sunday.
Vance is in the news this week as he seems to court MAGA in other ways, as well. On Monday he announced he would refer Minnesota governor Tim Walz and Minnesota attorney general Keith Ellison to the Department of Justice for an investigation of criminal fraud. The claim that Somalis in Minnesota are engaging in social services fraud while Democrats look the other way is a driving factor behind MAGA politics.
Raquel Coronell Uribe and Tara Prindiville of NBC News report that Walz has called Vance’s attacks on him a “campaign of retribution” meant “to punish blue states like Minnesota.” Ellison told the reporters the allegations were “unfounded” and a “political stunt.” “It is deeply troubling to see official powers and public resources diverted away from serving the people and instead aimed at pursuing political adversaries,” he said. “That is not what government is for, and it diminishes public trust in our institutions.”
Vance has also jumped aboard the unfounded accusation of Trump and his loyalists that the slow counting of ballots in California suggests the election is insecure and the Republican candidate is being cheated. Election denialism is increasingly a hallmark of the MAGA Republicans as they argue any election they lose is fraudulent.
During the 2024 presidential campaign, when caught lying about Haitian immigrants eating pets, Vance admitted he felt it necessary “to create stories so that the…media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people.”
Yesterday, an Iranian drone downed a U.S. helicopter, although a U.S. official told CBS News it was not clear that the strike was intentional. This evening, Trump launched new airstrikes against Iran, saying they were “self-defense strikes” “in response to Iran’s unwarranted and continued aggression,” after the slow progress of negotiations for an agreement to end the war.
U.S. Central Command said U.S. forces “launched strikes on Iranian military surveillance capabilities, communication systems, and air defense sites across Iran. U.S. Marine Corps, Air Force, and Navy assets fired precision munitions on Iranian targets that posed a threat to U.S. forces and international commercial ships transiting regional waters.”
Christoph Koettl and Christiaan Triebert of the New York Times confirmed reports from Iran that U.S. strikes destroyed what appears to have been a drinking water facility. They note that targeting civilian infrastructure can be a war crime under international law.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps responded to the U.S. strikes with their own strikes against U.S. targets in the region and announced it was closing the Strait of Hormuz completely and would attack any vessels trying to cross it.
With the renewed strikes, the price of oil jumped more than $1 a barrel.
Tonight, Trump posted on social media a demand that Republicans in Congress give the U.S. military an additional $350 billion and pass the SAVE America bill that would suppress voting. “No games, no delays, and no weak compromises! Do this ASAP,” he wrote.
“This is a GENERATIONAL Investment in our Military, even bigger than President Reagan’s,” he wrote. The “$350 Billion Reconciliation Bill,” which could pass without any Democratic votes, “is the ONLY path to the full $1.5 TRILLION DOLLAR Military Budget our Warriors need in order to build THE ARSENAL OF FREEDOM.”
He also demanded Republicans pass “THE SAVE AMERICA ACT” requiring proof of citizenship to vote and an end to mail-in ballots “EXCEPT FOR ILLNESS, DISABILITY, MILITARY, OR TRAVEL!” in order to “protect our Elections for Generations to come” and “to secure the NATION for our children and grandchildren.”
Then he added “NO MEN IN WOMEN’S SPORTS” and “NO TRANSGENDER MUTILIZATION SURGERY FOR OUR CHILDREN,” then concluded: “Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP”
While everyone panics about AI messing with the job market, the job market will not be the primary way AI fucks with college students. I know, I know … but worse things are actually coming for us.
As a college student currently in the thick of finals, I see AI harming my fellow college students in several ways that will harm their career prospects outside of an AI agent taking all the jobs. Aside from environmental destruction, unlawful surveillance, and outright theft from artists and writers. As a side note, let it be known, readers, I have never used any of the free LLMs (Large Language Models) apart from Google Search trying to foist it on me without my consent. And yes, people ask “don’t you want to keep up with the times? This is the future.”
BUT!
The main issue facing college students is that AI is making them stupid. I’m not joking, the cognitive atrophy is real. Also, AI is harming the education system itself and eroding trust and connection between professors and students.
Literacy is more than just being able to understand words—it’s the ability to understand nuance, irony, satire, entendre, and even reading a room. When AI summarizes, whether for a research article or a novel, it takes over the student’s thinking for them and degrades their literacy skills.
This is scary because half of college learning is reading articles and writing papers to show your understanding of course materials and original thinking. Group projects are even more tortuous when you have to read literally thoughtless writing from a teammate because they used AI to read the book for them and write their part of the paper.
Some of these students may actually finish college knowing less than when they were admitted because their brains are leaking out their ears with every LLM summary or hallucinated analysis and un-researched paper reference.
They’re even using AI to write and respond to posts in online class discussions. Thanks for the feedback, Chad, but I don’t really care what Grok thinks about the child development class readings.
Truthfully, I find it terrifying.
Then there’s the fracturing of trust between students and teachers. We now have lockdown browser tests with webcams, long “check-in” assignments to ensure students are following along, and essay authorship scans (ironically AI powered and producing so many false accusations). Teachers constantly doubting and searching for the slightest hint of AI, and the students who actually do the work trying to desperately prove their innocence.
It’s a weird combination of 1984’s Big Brother and The Giver’s creepy banality that’s positioning professors who are supposed to guide us as our keepers and adversaries.
AI is creating a future where some college graduates will enter the workforce truly unprepared and, despite the predictions that only those who know how to use AI will have the advantage, will be utterly unable to actually do the work.
Despite the hype, the future will belong to those who can function without AI and still be able to think for themselves, read, learn, and understand complexity. But the rich guys selling AI, and the CEOs gleefully planning to replace workers with bots, really just want us college students to be fucked.
Liv Martin mostly studies psychology at a local university. On occasion, she indulges her passion for writing with short stories, articles and lively online debates. You can follow her on Instagram here.
There’s something really special about the place we call home. It’s the place we probably grew up in. It’s filled with decades of memories. We love the familiar neighborhoods. It’s comfortable. So wanting to stay right where you are as you get older is a natural choice that most of us eventually gravitate towards.
And the good news is that with a handful of practical changes, you can ensure that your living space will forever be the perfect backdrop for your favorite daily routines.
Staying put comfortably is all about looking ahead and setting yourself up for success. By focusing on your everyday environment and daily habits, you can make sure your home stays safe. Functional. Deeply welcoming. Just like how you’ve always seen it.
Simple improvements for everyday comfort
Our homes often need to evolve right along with us. A great place to start is by looking at how you move through your rooms each day. Making minor adjustments can remove daily frustrations and prevent unnecessary strain. You might consider switching out traditional door knobs for easy-to-use lever handles, or upgrading the lighting in dark stairwells and closets so everything is clearly visible.
For larger changes, focusing on the bathroom and kitchen usually offers the biggest benefits. Things like installing a walk-in shower or placing frequently used dishes on lower shelves. These sound like small changes, but they’re really just ways to make daily life more comfortable since you use less energy. Investing in these thoughtful home adaptations means you can move around the home with absolute ease and confidence.
Embracing smart technology for peace of mind
Technology has come a long way, and it’s now easier than ever to use it to your advantage. Modern gadgets can take a lot of the guesswork out of staying safe while you live on your own. Smart home devices, like voice-activated speakers to turn on lights or video doorbells that let you see who is at the front door from your favorite chair, add a wonderful layer of convenience.
Another brilliant tool to consider is a dedicated safety device. Wearing a personal medical alarm for older adults means that support is always within reach if you ever need it. Having that instant connection to assistance gives reassurance to both you and your family. It helps everyone breathe a little easier. It gives them peace of mind. And that’s well worth a tiny bit of inconvenience.
Nurturing your health and social connections
Taking care of your physical well-being is another really important part of staying right where you want to be. Gentle movement, like regular walks or light stretching, helps keep your muscles strong and your balance steady. Eating nutritious meals and staying hydrated also keeps your energy levels up so you can enjoy your hobbies and stay active.
Beyond physical health, keeping up with your social life is just as vital for a happy life at home. Inviting neighbors over for tea, chatting with family on video calls, or participating in local clubs keeps you connected to your community. Taking these proactive steps helps you stay independent for longer and ensures your golden years are filled with joy.
Running a small business in the United States brings opportunities as well as risks. Whether you operate a local service company, an online store, or a growing professional practice, unexpected problems can affect your finances, reputation, and daily operations. Economic uncertainty, cyber threats, regulatory requirements, and fraudulent activity all create challenges that business owners must manage carefully. Many risks become more expensive when business owners address them only after a problem appears. A practical approach focuses on prevention. When you build strong systems, maintain accurate records, and understand your legal responsibilities, you place your business in a stronger position to handle setbacks.
Choose the Right Business Structure and Stay Compliant
The structure you choose affects your personal liability, taxes, and administrative responsibilities. Many entrepreneurs select an LLCbecause it can separate personal assets from business liabilities while offering flexibility in how the business operates. If a customer files a lawsuit against the business, that separation may help protect your personal savings, home, or other assets, depending on the circumstances and applicable laws. Review your state requirements regularly and keep business registrations, licenses, and annual filings up to date. Set calendar reminders for filing deadlines and maintain a secure digital folder for important legal documents. This process reduces the chance of missing critical compliance obligations that could create unnecessary costs.
Protect Business Finances with Strong Recordkeeping
Accurate records help you understand cash flow, prepare tax returns, and respond to questions from lenders or government agencies. When you maintain organized financial information, you can identify unusual expenses quickly and make better decisions about hiring, purchasing equipment, or expanding operations. Keep business and personal finances separate through dedicated bank accounts and credit cards. Use accounting software consistently and reconcile accounts each month. This routine helps you catch errors early rather than spending days correcting problems at tax time.
Strengthen Cybersecurity Before Problems Occur
Cybercriminals often target small businesses because they may have fewer security controls than larger organizations. A single ransomware attack or compromised email account can interrupt operations and create significant recovery costs. Use strong passwords, multifactor authentication, and regular software updates across all devices. For example, a small accounting firm that enables multifactor authentication can reduce the likelihood that criminals gain access through a stolen password alone. Train employees to recognize suspicious emails and establish clear procedures for handling sensitive customer information. These precautions can help prevent disruptions that affect both revenue and client trust.
Guard Against Fraud, Scams, and Identity Theft
Fraud schemes continue to evolve, and small businesses frequently receive fake invoices, phishing emails, and payment requests that appear legitimate. Without verification procedures, employees may unknowingly send money or disclose sensitive information to criminals. Create a process that requires independent verification before approving unusual payments or changing vendor banking details. If an employee receives an email requesting an urgent wire transfer, a quick phone call to a known contact can prevent a costly mistake. Early detection often limits financial damage and gives you more options to resolve issues before they escalate.
Traffic and red light cameras in Macon, GA have become a common part of the local transportation landscape. Municipalities increasingly rely on automated enforcement systems to monitor certain intersections and roadways, helping to identify violations and promote safer driving behavior without requiring an officer to be present at every location.
Many drivers are unsure how these systems operate or how citations are issued. It can be surprising to receive a notice in the mail weeks after passing through an intersection, especially if there was no direct interaction with law enforcement at the time of the alleged violation.
Understanding how automated traffic enforcement works can help motorists make informed decisions behind the wheel and avoid unnecessary penalties. Knowing where these systems are used, how violations are documented, and what rights drivers have can make navigating Macon’s roadways much less confusing.
Keeping an Eye on the Intersection
The mechanics behind automated enforcement systems rely on a highly coordinated network of sensors and cameras. Electromagnetic loops buried deep within the asphalt pavement actively detect the exact physical presence of a motor vehicle as it approaches the thick white stop bar line.
These sensors sync directly with the overhead traffic signals to track light changes with microsecond precision. If a car crosses the marked boundary line after the light turns red, the automated system triggers a sequence of high speed electronic digital cameras instantly.
The flash illuminates the rear of the vehicle to capture clear photographs of the license plate. Technicians review this digital evidence later to verify the vehicle details before mailing out a notice, ensuring the system only targets drivers who clearly violated the traffic law.
Clarifying the Penalty Structure
Receiving an automated citation in the mail can be stressful, but the legal classification of these tickets brings some relief. Because a camera cannot verify who was driving, Georgia law treats these automated system violations strictly as civil offenses rather than standard criminal.
This distinction means the state cannot assess penalty points against your personal state driver’s license for a camera infraction. Unlike a ticket written directly by an active patrol officer, these digital warnings won’t impact your auto insurance premium rates or personal driving history.
The fine associated with these automated electronic violations is capped by state law to prevent unfair financial exploitation. It acts more like a parking ticket than a moving violation, meaning you simply owe the designated city administrative fee without ever facing long courtroom trials.
The Cost of Ignoring Electronic Notices
While camera tickets don’t damage your driving record, ignoring these official notifications can lead to serious administrative trouble. The state of Georgia takes unpaid civil penalties very seriously and has established clear enforcement tools to compel motorists to pay all their outstanding fines.
If you throw a ticket in the trash, the local municipal court will send additional warnings and apply late fees to your account. Eventually, the unresolved matter gets reported directly to the state department of revenue, which handles all active vehicle registration.
The state can suspend your personal license plate privileges, making it illegal to drive your car until the fine is fully settled. This roadblock quickly turns a small, ignored electronic warning into a massive, highly frustrating legal headache during a future routine traffic stop.
Unexpected Consequences at the Stop Line
While city planners implement camera systems to improve public safety, these electronic monitors can sometimes trigger unintended safety hazards. Many safety experts and local drivers argue that automated enforcement changes driver behavior in ways that actually increase the overall immediate local roadway dangers.
When motorists spot a camera box, they often slam on their brakes suddenly out of fear. This nervous, defensive reaction frequently catches trailing vehicles off guard, transforming a simple yellow light sequence into an incredibly dangerous and sudden local highway stopping scenario.
Studies show that while red light cameras reduce severe side impact collisions, they often trigger a corresponding spike in rear end crashes. Drivers must maintain safe following distances near monitored intersections to avoid colliding with motorists who brake unexpectedly to escape these expensive fines.
Conclusion
Navigating automated local traffic enforcement across Georgia requires constant driver vigilance and clear spatial awareness. Knowing where these electronic monitoring devices operate allows you to drive with confidence, ensuring you avoid unnecessary stress and prevent sudden civil citation fines on your own commute.
Staying fully informed about modern enforcement trends ensures you protect your valuable financial assets. By carefully monitoring local roadway rules, you protect your household budget from unexpected and costly surprises that can easily result from ignoring these minor civil penalty ticket notices.
Ultimately, practicing safe driving habits remains your best defense against both electronic citations and real physical road hazards. Keeping a safe travel speed and paying extremely close attention at intersections ensures you arrive home safely without facing any unwanted mechanical or legal road interruptions.
Washington D.C. law firms face stiff competition both online and off. Clients search for answers before they ever pick up the phone. If you’re not visible locally, someone else is.
“You cannot rely on referrals alone. Local search drives walk-ins, calls, and qualified leads. When your firm ranks higher, your reputation follows,” says Bill Fukui from MedShark Digital.
If you wish to expand your caseload and create your online presence, this is how local SEO can be the difference for your law firm in Washington, D.C.
Understanding the Basics of Local SEO for Lawyers
Local SEO is all about having your law firm show up when potential clients look for legal services in a geographic area. Search engines employ geographic signals to figure out which law firms should be noticed.
Washington, D.C., law firms benefit in this way since customers typically seek location-based terms like “family lawyer near me” or “D.C. personal injury lawyer.” Search engines use these signals to connect the search term with businesses that match the location.
Local SEO differs from overall SEO in that it causes visibility in a neighborhood or city. The process causes your business to show up in map listings, local directories, and organic search for your area.
Why Local Search Matters for Lawyers
Washington, D.C., clients expect answers from reliable lawyers close to their area. Search engines can identify intent and direct those in need to highly relevant local law firms.
Closeness is more critical than ever since legal cases do not leave anyone enough time to conduct research. Google, Bing, and Apple Maps prefer businesses with strong local signals, such as an address, reviews, and recent additions, over businesses that are miles apart.
Law firms with strong local search visibility get more walk-ins and incoming calls. Reputation also builds quickly since clients have access to authentic information about your listings.
Top Local SEO Ranking Factors for Lawyers
Search engines prefer relevance, proximity, and authority when it comes to law firms’ local rankings. Proper and consistent details such as your firm’s name, address, and phone number (NAP) convey credibility to search algorithms.
High star ratings and reviews create trust with clients and search engines. Review quantity, quality, and freshness to determine your ranking on local search results. Review replies build your reputation.
Local citations, backlinks from local sites, and activity on platforms like Google Business Profile (GBP) play essential parts as well. Businesses that maintain complete profiles, up-to-date services, and robust local relationships stand out in ultra-competitive markets.
Top Tools to Increase Local Visibility
Google Business Profile is at the center of your local visibility, powering Maps and the local pack. Apple Business Connect and Bing Places extend reach to iOS and Microsoft ecosystems.
Directory programs like Moz Local, Yext, and BrightLocal help sync your law firm’s listings across dozens of sites. Accurate citations clear up confusion for both clients and search engines. Law directories like Avvo and Justia add extra relevance.
Review sites also serve as discovery engines. Programs like GatherUp or Podium ease how your firm asks for and manages reviews. Actively managing your reputation strengthens local rankings.
The Role of Social Media Interaction in Rankings Improvement
Active social media accounts send indirect signals that influence search visibility. While likes and shares are not ranking modifiers, engagement sends online actions that support authority.
Locally relevant posts, i.e., posts on community events or legal updates related to D.C., help further geographic relevance. Search engines notice consistent activity centered on a location.
Client interaction on platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, or X directs traffic back to your own website. More visits, combined with branded searches, increase visibility and establish recognition that complements your firm’s global local SEO strategy.
Take the Next Step in Expanding Your Law Firm Online
A solid online presence in Washington, D.C., begins with the right strategy and the right tools. Local SEO provides your firm with visibility, but effective management of leads and cases ensures that growth produces tangible outcomes.
MedShark offers an integrated platform that unites client intake, communication, and case management. Coupled with solid local SEO as a foundation, your firm is both seen and operationally powerful.
Contact MedShark today and find out how the platform can drive your firm’s next level of growth.
Apple’s Siri team, led by Craig Federighi, held a post-WWDC
keynote tech talk with members of the press this afternoon to
talk through iOS 27 and the new Siri AI. During the talk,
Federighi shared more details about Apple’s collaboration with
Google. Federighi was joined by Amar Subramanya (vice president
of AI), Mike Rockwell (Siri lead), and Sebastien Marineau-Mes
(software VP).
On the Google collaboration, Federighi explained:
Of course, we don’t have the Gemini app as our app. In fact, none
of that client code is part of how we run on iOS. For these
models, we use none of the models that Google deploys to their
customers, nor do we use the infrastructure and means by which
they deploy models to their customers. And then, when it comes to
the knowledge base, we of course don’t use Google Search or
anything like that as the foundation of our system. So I hope
that’s clear. The amount of the Google Assistant we use is none.
So let’s talk about what we do use, or how our system is built.
This “Tech Talk” was good. It was detailed and technical, and there were live on-stage demos of Siri AI in action from Mike Rockwell. I don’t think Apple is ever going to go back to live on-stage major keynotes, but I do think the company is returning to more live events, including demos. There was a big live Siri AI/Apple Intelligence session for developers Tuesday morning in Steve Jobs Theater, which also had live demos. More like this, please.
Perhaps the worst UI crime in MacOS 26 Tahoe was the inexplicable decision to add inscrutable, distracting icons next to every item in the menu bar. You will recall Jim Nielsen writing about it, rightly describing it as exactly the sort of thing that Mac users look down upon in platforms like Google Docs and Windows. You will also recall Nikita “Tonsky” Prokopov writing about it, illustrating that the bad idea wasn’t even implemented well, with different Apple apps using entirely different icons for the same menu items. You will also recall my linking to Nielsen (“I can tolerate being angry about UI changes Apple makes to the Mac. But I can’t tolerate being heartbroken.”) and to Prokopov (“The fact that Tahoe’s menu item icons are glaringly inconsistent and often utterly inscrutable is the fudge icing on a shit cake, but the real embarrassment is that the idea ever got past the proposal stage. No real UI or icon designers think this is a good idea. None.”)
Use menu item icons sparingly and with purpose. Icons allow
people to find menu items more quickly, and help clarify what
selecting an item does. Use an icon to highlight the most common
actions and key features of your app, file system locations,
connected devices, visual concepts like rotating or flipping an
image, and user-generated content like folders and documents.
Don’t display an icon if you can’t find one that clearly
represents the menu item.
This updated advice in the HIG is perfect. Screenshot:
MacOS 26 Tahoe — across every Apple app on the system — is a living example of the updated HIG’s “what not to do” example illustrations (including the second section about groups within a menu). If you’re stuck using Tahoe until Golden Gate arrives, recall this tip to alleviate the problem to some extent.
This is my favorite news from all of WWDC this week. I mean that. In a small way I mean it because I so loathe this aspect of MacOS Tahoe. But in a large way I mean it because it’s proof that the rot has been rooted out of Apple’s software design team. I don’t know if all the untalented hacks are gone, but the untalented magazine-designer hacks with clout and influence all left with Alan Dye. I’ve chatted with a few people from Apple’s design team this week and they’re all loving the work they’re doing and the direction they’re taking Apple’s platforms. Backtracking on these idiotic menu item icons was a necessary first step.
According to EU regulators, the DMA requires Apple to give any AI
system nearly unlimited access to a user’s device, as well as the
ability to act on that access autonomously without a user’s
ongoing visibility and control. That includes the ability to read
and send messages, make purchases, access files, and execute
actions across any app. Security researchers have already shown
that AI systems can be hijacked to steal personal data — like
passwords and photos — and to permanently alter files and
account settings without a user’s consent. As AI systems gain
more capabilities, these risks are quickly increasing in
frequency and scope.
Given the serious risks to users, Apple designed a solution called
Trusted System Agent — an intermediary that would allow virtual
assistants to safely access the same features and capabilities as
Siri AI for devices in the EU. Apple also shared a plan to launch
Siri AI in the EU while gradually rolling out this new solution
over an 18-month period. The European Commission said no. In fact,
the European Commission did not agree to any of Apple’s proposals.
Apple will continue working to bring these features to the
European Union as safely as possible. However, given the clear
dangers to EU users and the regulators’ failure to acknowledge
these risks, there is currently no timeline for Siri AI’s
availability in the EU on iOS and iPadOS.
There’s a lot to unpack here, including more background information — and on-the-record statements — from a briefing Apple held Tuesday that I was invited to at Apple Park. But the bottom line is that Apple’s public statements regarding the DMA and the European Commission have never been this strident before. In the public statements, Apple has always been diplomatic. That’s the word.
Now, they’re a bit more on war footing. There’s a massive gulf between what Apple is willing to do with Siri AI in the EU and what the Commission is demanding from Apple for DMA compliance. As things stand there’s no middle ground. Apple’s offers for compromise have been rejected. Unless one side changes its mind and concedes its current position, Siri AI will never come to the EU, and what Apple is saying here is that they’re unwilling to create the open-access-to-user-data system that the EC is demanding.
And from what I’ve seen so far in a day of testing, EU iOS users are going to miss out on something really good.
Steven Spielberg, on The Rest Is Entertainment on YouTube:
I approached Cubby Broccoli after Jaws was a big hit. I’d always
wanted to make a James Bond film from the day I saw Dr. No, so I
called Cubby after Jaws and volunteered. I said, “If you need a
director, I would love to direct one.” And he said no. And he
moved on.
And then Cubby called me again after Close Encounters came out.
And that was a big hit. And Cubby called me a few years after
Close Encounters and said, “We’d like to use the five notes in
Moonraker.” And I said, “I’ll make you a deal. I’ll give you
permission to use the five notes if you let me direct a Bond
film.” And he said “Nope.” But I gave him the five notes anyway.
In Moonraker, the iconic Close Encounters notes are the passcode to the locked door of a secret lab that Bond (Roger Moore) needs to enter. Probably not so secure to play the passcode digits audible, but it’s a fun Easter egg. I always presumed that EON used it as fair-use homage, without bothering to ask Spielberg or Columbia Pictures for permission.
Spielberg, in his interview with The Rest Is Entertainment, goes on to explain the oft-repeated story that his disappointment over his rejection by Broccoli led to his collaboration with George Lucas to make Raiders of the Lost Ark, which I put on my short list for best movie ever made. The whole opening sequence of Temple of Doom — where Indiana Jones is wearing a dinner jacket and chaos erupts at a nightclub while Jones chases a vial of poison antidote while the other characters chase a diamond being kicked around the floor — is more Bond-like than most Bond films. (Oh, and that Shanghai nightclub’s name: Club Obi Wan. No need to ask permission for those five syllables.)
“We’re changing Fable 5’s safeguards for frontier LLM development to make them visible.” Anthropic said in a statement to WIRED. “We made the wrong tradeoff and we apologize for not getting the balance right.”
There's been a huge outcry about Anthropic's policy, tucked away in their system card, that Claude Fable/Mythos would identify "requests targeting frontier LLM development" and "limit effectiveness" without notifying the user.
It's good news that they're dropping the invisible aspect of this. It would be a whole lot better of they dropped this category of refusals entirely.
We’re rolling out changes to make Fable 5’s safeguards for frontier LLM development visible.
Starting this week, flagged requests will visibly fall back to Opus 4.8—the same as our safeguards for cyber and bio. You will see this every time it happens. On the API, any flagged requests will return a reason for their refusal (coming to server-side fallback in the next few days).
We wanted to deploy Fable 5 to our users quickly and safely. Visible safeguards can be probed, so they have to be robust, which takes time to get right. Invisible safeguards can be targeted more narrowly, allowing us to ship quickly with very few false positives. We went with invisible safeguards for this reason—and that was the wrong tradeoff. You should have visibility into the safeguards we have in place, and why. We’re sorry for not getting the balance right.
Tools can now ask the user questions mid-execution. Tools that declare a context parameter receive a ToolContext object, and await context.ask_user(...) can ask a yes/no, multiple-choice (options=[...]) or free-text (free_text=True) question. While a question is unanswered the agent turn suspends: the question renders as a form in the chat UI and persists to the internal database, so suspended conversations survive a server restart. Once answered, the tool re-executes from the top with stored answers replayed, so call ask_user() before performing side effects. #20
New built-in save_query tool: the agent can save SQL it has written as a Datasette stored query. Saving always requires human approval - the agent shows the full SQL plus the proposed name, database and visibility, and nothing is stored until you click Yes. #20
The ask_user() feature was enabled by the new LLM alpha I built yesterday with the help of Claude Fable 5.
Last May Google briefly released an experimental Gemini Diffusion model. I tried the preview at the time and recorded it running at 857 tokens/second. It was an exciting model, but Google made no further announcements about it.
That research has returned in the best possible way: as a new open weight (Apache 2 licensed) Gemma model, google/diffusiongemma-26B-A4B-it.
NVIDIA are currently hosting the model for free on their NIM cloud API. I used that API to generate this pelican, which took 4.4s (according to time uv run generate.py) to return 2,409 tokens - so at least 500 tokens/second.
On Tuesday the Social Security Trustees released their latest report on the system’s finances. The numbers didn’t change much: Unless something is done, the Old Age Survivors and Disability Insurance (OASDI) program, Social Security’s official name, will be unable to pay full benefits starting in either 2032 or 2034, depending on some technical issues. That’s not far away: If the Trustees are right, the prospect of a Social Security crisis will loom over the next presidential administration.
It’s important to understand, however, the nature of the looming crisis. It won’t be an economic crisis. It won’t even be a serious fiscal crisis. Whatever you may have heard, Social Security isn’t in danger of going bankrupt.
What we’re facing, instead, is potential political crisis. Congress and the White House could easily take action to sustain America’s retirement system. But given the current state of our politics, there’s no guarantee that they will.
There is a widespread misunderstanding of how Social Security works. While Social Security was designed to look like a pension fund, it isn’t. A pension fund pays benefits out of a stock of assets it has accumulated over time. In contrast, Social Security operates as a government transfer program, like food stamps or Medicaid.
Now, unlike food stamps — but like the highway trust fund — Social Security is on paper supported by a dedicated tax, the payroll tax, that is assigned to that program. But I say “on paper” because from an economic point of view assigning the payroll tax to Social Security is just an accounting convention. What matters for the U.S. economy is the overall balance between government spending and government revenue, not the difference between one type of spending and one source of revenue. So there’s no inherent economic significance to the fact that by 2034 payroll tax receipts will be insufficient to cover promised benefits.
There is, however, a legislative issue. As long as the Social Security Administration can pay benefits out of payroll taxes and its cash reserve, there’s no need for Congress to vote each year to authorize benefits — they just keep going out until further notice. However, once those resources become insufficient, benefits will fall —by 17 percent according to the Trustees — unless Congress passes new legislation that “tops up” Social Security’s finances.
Yet the current administration and Republican party are such extremists that there is a real risk that Social Security will be held hostage on behalf of their goals. If this should come to pass, the hostage-takers will claim that shoring up Social Security is unaffordable. Right on cue, Mike Johnson, the Trump-sycophant Speaker of the House, declared on Monday that “entitlement programs” like Social Security “have to be adjusted and fixed,” and that Republicans will introduce a plan to that effect next year.
But this is a ploy, because while the cost of maintaining Social Security benefits at their promised level isn’t trivial, it is in fact affordable. According to the Trustees’ report, the actuarial balance of OASDI up through 2050 — the amount of additional funds it would need to keep paying full benefits for the next 25 years — is 1.06 percent of GDP. To put that number in perspective, the Trump administration proposes increasing military spending next year by $420 billion, equivalent to about 1.4 percent of GDP – without any discussion of whether that’s affordable
Yet how did we get to the point where Social Security will need to be topped up? The main answer is that we have an aging population, with a growing ratio of retirees collecting benefits to workers paying into the system:
Trump’s anti-immigration policies are making this problem worse. According to the Trustees’ report, lower immigration will deepen Social Security’s financial hole because many immigrants are working-age adults who will pay into the system for decades before they collect benefits. In fact, this problem may be much bigger than the report acknowledges: The report’s baseline assumption is that we’ll have net immigration of almost 1.2 million people a year, and even the pessimistic case assumes 750,000 a year. Meanwhile actual net immigration has already been cut far below that — and may now be negative.
Moreover, Social Security is being financially damaged by growing income inequality in America. Payroll taxes are levied only on wages up to $184,500, and they don’t touch capital income. With the distribution of income increasingly shifting from labor to capital, as well as becoming more unequal among wage-earners, revenue from the Social Security payroll tax has been falling as a share of national income. From 1990 to 2024, it fell from 5.02 percent of gross domestic income to 4.46 percent.
Which brings me to the question that, these days, we ask about everything: How might Social Security be affected by the advent of AI?
A short answer: If, as many of us fear, AI accelerates rising income inequality, it will further reduce the payroll tax receipts that currently pay for Social Security and further endanger its finances.
On the other hand, if AI, as its advocates promise, leads to faster economic growth, it will increase the potential tax base that could and should be used to support Social Security and other social insurance programs. But to take advantage of that larger base, we’ll have to get serious about taxing wealth and capital income.
Is Social Security in trouble? Yes, but only because of the way its financing is currently structured — a structure that no longer works well because our society and economy have become so unequal. Moreover, Trump’s immigration policies are further endangering its already deteriorating financial condition.
So don’t believe Republicans’ gaslighting that it will be necessary to cut Social Security benefits. All that is necessary to preserve Social Security is political will to raise taxes on the wealthy and a sensible immigration policy.
This alpha is a significant step on the road to a stable 1.0, finally extending the ?_extra= pattern I introduced in Datasette 1.0a3 to cover queries and rows in addition to tables. That pattern is also now documented!
Because API explorer tools are almost free to build now I had Claude Fable 5 in Claude Code (for the plan) and GPT-5.5 xhigh in Codex Desktop (for the implementation) build me this custom extras API explorer to help demonstrate the feature:
I built this utility library to support an asyncio dependency injection pattern a few years ago. I was using it with Datasette and Claude Fable 5 spotted some bugs in the dependency which it then fixed for me. It's a very proactive model!
NASA pushed its Deep Space Network beyond its limits during the Artemis I mission nearly four years ago. The global array of deep space communications antennas couldn't keep up with the routine demands of 40 robotic science missions and the extraordinary surge required by NASA's Orion space capsule as it flew around the Moon.
The experience in late 2022 reduced or delayed downlinks from several high-profile science missions, including the James Webb Space Telescope and Mars rovers, as the data-hungry Artemis I mission took priority on NASA's communications network. And that was before the first Artemis mission with astronauts onboard. When Artemis II launched April 1, NASA called upon the Deep Space Network (DSN) again to connect Mission Control to the Orion capsule as it soared more than a quarter of a million miles from Earth.
With a crew of four flying inside the spacecraft, the agency's appetite for data from Orion on Artemis II was even higher than it was on Artemis I. But at a little more than nine days, the Artemis II mission was shorter than the 25 days Artemis I spent in space, helping alleviate the communications overload. Artemis I also launched 10 small CubeSats into deep space, many of which required tracking and telecom services from the DSN. Artemis II carried fewer CubeSats.
The surveillance company Leonardo wants more data:
A surveillance company plans to add sensors to automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) that would mean the devices, as well as capture the license plate of passing vehicles, would also sweep up unique identifiers of mobile phones, wearables, and other Bluetooth-enabled devices in those cars, potentially letting law enforcement identify specific drivers or passengers.
The technology, called SignalTrace, would turn ALPR cameras from devices focused on tracking cars to ones that can more readily track the location of particular people. ALPR cameras have become a commonly deployed technology all across the U.S.; SignalTrace would make some of those cameras capable of collecting much more data.
Yes, it’s bad that more companies are collecting this level of surveillance data. But all of this pales in comparison to the type and quantity of data our smartphones already collect about us.
I attended an afternoon hearing Wednesday in D.C. federal court, where Judge Richard Leon declined to block President Trump’s $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” — but in a way that might actually have some teeth. I joined Executive Editor John Light on Substack Live after leaving the courtroom to talk about what went down and why it might be a pyrrhic victory for the administration.
As I told John, the ruling presents “a new legal roadblock to the administration proceeding with the anti-weaponization fund but it is not the same as saying, No you can’t do it or can’t ever do it.
“I think of it like a tripwire. If they were to proceed with the anti-weaponization fund as we know it, they’re going to be right back in court having to explain to Judge Leon why they shouldn’t be sanctioned for having misled him in the first place.”
See the full report below:
David Kurtz goes live after hearing to block Trump’s slush fund by TPM
I want to share a few more thoughts about yesterday’s news out of the defunct Broadview Six case, specifically the all-but-unprecedented release of the transcript of the grand jury sessions from which the indictments came. This was always a case of wild over-charging at a minimum. And that raised the question of just how prosecutors managed to get the case through a grand jury, even with how low a bar that usually is. Well, now we know. They cheated. They wouldn’t take no for an answer.
As David Kurtz notes here, this case seemed fuzzier than most of the other Trump retribution prosecutions. While the indictments singled out a Democratic candidate and lawmaker and those closely associated with them, none of those were high-profile Trump “enemies” like Tish James or James Comey. The prosecutor who initially led the case showed no signs of being especially Trumpy. Defense attorneys tried from the beginning to pry free evidence of White House and/or DOJ interference or direction in bringing the case. But prosecutors said they looked and there was no communication about it. The judge accepted that statement at face value.
It was almost certainly false.
There is reporting suggesting, though not quite nailing down, that the case originated when right-wing influencers noticed the presence of then-congressional candidate Kat Abughazaleh at a raucous protest outside an ICE facility in suburban Chicago. Through her work at Media Matters, especially dogging the career of Tucker Carlson, she was a known and much vilified figure among hard core MAGA influencers. They tweeted about it to Pam Bondi and others.
We’ve learned subsequently about the role of Aakash Singh, who seems to be the point man for the Trump DOJ directing and/or strong-arming U.S. attorneys offices to pursue the Trump agenda, political retribution cases and commit official misconduct. We know that Singh was in contact with the Chicago office about this case. We know that Singh had told U.S. attorneys offices to try to do things like what lead prosecutor Sheri Mecklenburg and U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros did in fact do.
So we have the outlines of how this all went down. But we don’t yet have the hard evidence. Everything lines up according to an expected script. But that hard connective evidence is mostly lacking. That’s only going to come if there’s a real investigation. And the judge in the defunct Broadview case seems poised to conduct one, or at least make a serious attempt at it. A big question is whether any of the attorneys possibly facing disbarment are going to decide to talk. If one does, things could move very fast. But given the potential sanctions in play that doesn’t seem likely, at least not yet.
It seems highly likely that Boutros lied to the judge the day the case finally collapsed. If he didn’t lie with the open-and-shut clarity required in a perjury case, he certainly willfully mislead her. He went into court in person and apologized to the judge for the misconduct that had been uncovered. But he insisted that he was only then finding out about it.
Again, it seems highly likely that that is not true. That’s for two reasons. First there is clear evidence both in the grand jury proceedings and in reliable reporting that Boutros’ office found out about at least some of the misconduct in real time and took steps to clean it up. It seems very unlikely that Boutros wasn’t looped in on those efforts and what made it necessary. Meanwhile Boutros’ own appearance before the grand jury on the morning of the day they finally handed down the indictment suggests he participated in the pressure campaign which resulted in the misconduct.
Boutros went before the grand jury, asked if anyone had strong views about issues like immigration and invited those people to leave. It’s what Mecklenburg did in the grand jury, what Singh told U.S. attorneys offices to do when grand juries got unruly. We already had the transcript of that conversation. Boutros tried to create a lot of deniability. But looked at in the full context it seems clear that Boutros was aware of the absolute need to get this indictment and on the third try decided to add his own weight to it, while trying as well as he could to keep his fingerprints light.
All the evidence suggests that Boutros knew about and was part of the pressure campaign, participated in it, and knew about the misconduct that was spurred by it.
Then there’s the arguably more serious misconduct tied to the subsequent redaction of the transcript, a clear-cut effort to mislead the judge about the case and prevent the defense from learning about the prosecutorial misconduct. That redaction came under lead prosecutor William Hogan, who replaced Mecklenburg after she was detailed to work for the Senate Judiciary Committee. Hogan is known as very Trumpy. He also has a spotty ethical record. He was once fired from the U.S. attorney’s office for misconduct but eventually won his job back in a proceeding before an administrative judge. He is also handling the investigation into E. Jean Carroll, which … yes, is being handled out of the Chicago office. He seems like the guy Boutros is going to for help on the cases D.C. wants handled.
Boutros clearly wants to keep his job, and Blanche wants him to fight for it. So a lot is going to come out of just what comes out of Judge April Perry’s courtroom. That investigation (in the generic not the technical sense) is for now where we are likely to get the most important information about the details of DOJ/White House involvement in this case and the larger map of DOJ corruption of prosecutions and U.S. attorneys offices across the United States.
The U.S. and Iran have drifted back into active combat and President Trump is on Truth Social promising again to rain destruction down on the country and now more explicitly promising the outcome which triggered this conflict in the first place: the idea that Trump would duplicate in Iran what he has, kind of amazingly, pulled off so far in Venezuela. It’s a good moment to remember what’s going on here — what we’re doing here, big picture.
This war has been going on for almost four months. But most of that time has been under one or another kind of ceasefire, albeit often honored in the breach. A friend recently compared it to the so-called “Phoney War”, the eight-month period in 1939 and 1940 when Germany, France and Britain were nominally at war, though full-scale combat didn’t begin until the invasion of France in May 1940.
But this is different. And the key reason isn’t so much the dynamics of the conflict itself as the personalist rule that now defines the U.S. government under Donald Trump’s second presidency. As I’ve argued previously, the core issue here is that Trump lost this conflict either in its first hours or days. The clerical government didn’t fall, which was always a long shot at best. Iran moved to menace and then close the Strait of Hormuz. Then Trump made it clear with his actions that he was more responsive to the pain of the conflict (primarily electoral for him) than Iran was. All of that became clear at the very beginning. To put it in simple terms, he lost. Governments sometimes fall in such moments. Under less personalist regimes there are apparatuses in governments which can move toward some conclusion. But here we are operating entirely within the grievances, fears, whims and general psychodrama of a single man.
When I think about this I think about someone who makes a really bad bet on a stock which drops to 20% of its value soon after you buy it. That guy won’t ever sell because as long as he doesn’t sell he can pretend it’s just a short-term reverse. He doesn’t have to lock in the reality of the defeat. Keeping the remaining capital parked in a moribund company is the rent he pays to avoiding facing reality.
Trump’s position is just the same. We’re in this unending groundhog day quasi-war, with weekly cycles of “just-about-done deal, really I promise!” followed by new threats because Trump can’t accept what happened. Presidents always call the shots on big questions of war and peace within the executive branch. But you don’t get the current situation in anything else but the personalist regime Trump has constructed around himself.
I’m seeing some commentary this morning that Trump’s new round of threats to “Venezuelanize” Iran is reacting to Fox News’ demands that he escalate the conflict, or “finish it,” as they put it. That may be the immediate trigger, the latest geriatric reaction to that Trumpworld mixture of soft criticism and goading encouragement. But the big picture remains the same. We’re stuck in this groundhog day tragicomedy because Trump acted on impulse in a vast act of executive self-soothing, and now he is unable to move forward because actually moving forward — as opposed to remaining in place, stuck like a couple in a broken marriage — because that requires facing the consequences of his own actions, which he is entirely unable to accept.
I’m not a huge basketball fan. A casual one, mostly. But it’s become more central to my sports interests over the years. When I was a kid, baseball and football were the only sports and baseball was … well, baseball. What else was there to say? At least in our home that’s how it was. But I’ve been pulled in the same way as the whole society has by the rise of American basketball over the course of my lifetime. And I’ve been pulled hard into Knicks’ destiny run. You’ll see other commentary about last night’s game, literally the biggest comeback in NBA playoff history. But I wanted to share one moment with you, one that came after the game when Knicks captain Jalen Brunson went on ESPN’s Inside the NBA post-game show.
Brunson got asked about the game. And then he got asked a series of questions that were on the order of, was there a moment when you thought we’ve lost this game? that you started to lose hope? Brunson made some general comments and then he said this: “You’re allowed to think about the worst possible scenario. But you gotta go out there and do something about it.”
I heard it and it immediately clicked for me on many levels: clarity, epiphany. I rewound the YoutubeTV feed a couple times because I wanted to get the wording exactly right. Perseverance and loyalty and dignity have always been very important to me — the values or totems through which one can come into alignment with oneself — probably for reasons tied to childhood experiences but unfolding from there into a general outlook that infuses how I think about politics and, more broadly, how to think about and act in the world.
When I heard this I thought, This is a good mantra for fighting fascism, too. But it applies to every part of life.
In 2008, 1.9% is the share of the mobile-subscribing population with an iPhone wireless subscription. As a percent of all adults that is 1.6%.
In 2009, it is 4.3%. 3.6% of all adults.
In 2010, 6.8%. 5.5% of all adults.
Plus conception to birth takes nine months (give or take!), noting that actual family planning may make this lag far longer. In 2008 fertility rates already were falling pretty sharply. The whole “maybe the iPhone messes up your dating processes” factor also requires some time to operate, especially since iPhones as a network of many many users, and whatever negative effects on socializing you think that might have, was still to lie in the future. And what you could access on the iPhone then was far more limited than today.
So when the authors talk about diffusion explaining 33–52% of the decline in the general fertility rate among American women 15–44, I still do not get how that is supposed to operate.
The explanations I am hearing seem to be parasitic on world intuitions from 2026, not the time period under consideration.
In that earlier essay, I say that computer science is probably still a reasonably good area to study, but that you
should also expand your skills beyond “just� computer science to help make yourself more employable in the future.
In this essay I want to think more about what AI means for universities in general and computer science programs in
particular.
Note: I apologize that this is a longer essay. I have provided a Table of Contents to help you navigate it.
An initial question that many people are asking is: in the era of AI, is the University still relevant?
This is not a new question. Many people have pointed to famous software industry figures who dropped out of college as
proof that a university education isn’t useful in technology. And most people who have worked in Silicon Valley know at
least one excellent engineer who either dropped out or simply never went to college.
So a college degree has never been a hard requirement for a successful career in technology. But, in reality, most
software engineers have some sort of college under their belt and many of the best developers have studied computer
science in their undergraduate education.
That being said, there is
clearly an emerging crisis
in Computer Science education that needs to be addressed in order to keep the university relevant in the post-AI world.
Historically, many computer science departments have looked at writing code as a secondary skill, to be picked up by
students on their own, while the department focuses more on the theoretical foundations of computer science.
Since I was mature enough to have an opinion on the matter, I have viewed this as wrongheaded: I think you need to learn
how to write code in order to appreciate those deeper theoretical foundations of computer science. If you can’t code up
a linked list or use a hash table effectively, learning about the big-O behavior of them is much more abstract and
difficult to grasp.
Ironically, in the era of AI, many professional environments are also starting to look at raw coding somewhat
skeptically, sometimes insisting that their own engineers not write code at all, but rather use agents to generate it.
This approach may work for more experienced seniors, who have already written a lot of code and know what reasonable
code looks like, but it puts junior developers in a bind: they don’t have pre-AI experience writing code, and now they
are going into environments where no one is writing code.
As I said in “Yes, And�, you must write the code if you want to develop the ability to read code.
How is that supposed to happen at companies where nobody is writing the code?
I think this presents an opportunity for Computer Science departments: we can be the places where young software
engineers write the code. By refocusing our curriculum on practical, code heavy assignments we can give students a safe
environment, free of the time pressures and demands of corporate work, to write the code.
This experience can then put them in position to go into environments that use AI more heavily with the confidence that
they know how to code and, because of that, are in a position to read and understand the code necessary for their
career.
Now, of course, students are famously lazy and famously clever in figuring out how to be lazy. So, many students will
use AI to complete many of these code-heavy assignments. They will learn very little or nothing, but will get a good
grade because, let’s be honest, AI can perform at or above the level required for most reasonable undergraduate
projects.
Here another irony of the AI era becomes evident: Universities are now in a position to signal competence in a way that
nearly no other institution can. AI has made online testing pointless. I know this because the last semester I offered
online tests (which I like to do because it is convenient for my working students) the testing scores were through the
roof.
While I feel I am a pretty good teacher, this was clearly a case of AI being used by my students, despite my pleas.
When thinking about what I could do about this I realized that we had all the infrastructure for the perfect answer: in
person, on paper testing. Universities have large lecture halls, expensive printers, testing centers for people who need
additional help, etc.
Previously, I would have scoffed at this infrastructure as antiquated. But now I see that it puts me in a position to
more accurately establish the competence of my students in a way that is difficult to game: I offer in-person quizzes,
with one page of handwritten notes and no digital equipment, roughly every three weeks of my courses.
Of course students can still cheat, but the quizzes are proctored and now at least they have to work for it.
This in-person, on-paper testing infrastructure puts universities in a unique position to provide a high signal-to-noise
indication of the competence of their students to the outside world.
While I believe that the University CS degree is not only still relevant, but perhaps of more value than it was in the
pre-AI era, I do think that significant changes need to be made to adapt to the new state of affairs. In this section I
will describe what I have done over the last year with my courses, what I plan to do in the near future & then finish
with some more speculative changes that I believe would help increase the usefulness of undergraduate CS degrees.
As with take home quizzes, due to the use of AI, homeworks & projects are no longer a strong signal of a students
understanding of material.
Homeworks must become for the student’s benefit, opportunities for them to learn the art of writing code, rather than
for evaluating their competency.
This is actually a good thing: homeworks can be more ambitious and the students that want to learn will have more
opportunities to write more advanced code.
Yes, some (many?) will cheat on assignments, but the good students will have an opportunity to write code in a supportive
environment.
To address this fact, I have reduced the weight of assignments in my classes from 60-80% (I have always had
code-heavy classes) down to 50%, and I expect most students will get A’s on most assignments.
Another homework related change that I have made is that my assignments are now more ambitious and realistic. I don’t
mean they are much harder.
Insead, what I mean is that I can, with the help of AI, present much larger software systems to my students with
better sample data, as a basis for their projects.
This allows students to see software systems that go beyond “Hello World� levels of complexity and to develop the ability
to navigate, read and write code in a larger, more complicated and realistic context.
Another thing I have found in the post-AI era is that my office hours traffic has dropped precipitously. I have always
done my office hours in the computer lab on campus and, particularly for my compilers class, expected large crowds of
students to come in asking for help on projects.
I think, unfortunately, this is most likely due to many students using AI to solve their programming problems.
However, there is a more optimistic read here: the students are using AI to better understand the projects and therefore
do not need as much one on one help.
While I am ambivalent in many ways towards AI, this is an area where AI can significantly improve the university
experience for students: with proper use, AI can be a fantastic TA. It is infinitely patient, has no other students
waiting in line or it’s own classes to attend to and it is usually very competent at undergraduate level concepts in
computer science.
The danger, of course, is that students simply use AI as a code generator to complete assignments and head off to the
bars.
To address this danger, I ship a CLAUDE.md/AGENTS.md
file in my class repos that directs AI agents to act like a good TA rather than a code generator.
Of course students can modify or delete this file, but there is no system so perfect that no one needs to be good.
As I discussed above, Universities have infrastructure for in-person testing that make them uniquely qualified to assess
expertise and competence in the post AI world.
I have switched to all in-person quizzes, roughly every three weeks. The three-week cadence gives enough time to cover a
significant amount of material, even if holidays are interspersed in those weeks, while de-escalating each quiz when
compared to a traditional midterm/final setup.
I also allow one page of handwritten notes. I do not allow printed notes. The idea here is to force the knowledge
through the student’s eye-brain-hand pathway multiple times in order to help reinforce it.
My students have grumbled about this process, but also admit that it works in helping them learn the material.
My questions are all written response, never multiple choice. Sometimes I ask for prose, sometimes I ask for pseudocode,
sometimes I will provide code and ask students to annotate/explain it, etc. This makes it harder to grade the tests, but
also makes it much harder to cheat.
I have found that AI is very good at suggesting questions based on class material for quizzes. I will work with an AI
agent based on my class slides (see below) to create appropriate quiz questions and then create a quiz review sheet to
help students study for the quiz based on it.
Students love the review sheet because it helps them focus their studing efforts.
I think that, from a learning perspective, the butt-in-chair quizzes have been the single most positive change I have
made to my classes. I now make quizzes 50% of a student’s grade, and my class grading curve has returned to a reasonable
shape.
Another adjustment I have had to make is that demos & visualizations are now very cheap to create with AI.
For a long time I was unhappy with the computer emulators that were available to me to teach my computer
systems class. I wanted a 16-bit
computer that struck a balance between the simplicity of something like The Scott
CPU and the full complexity of something like
SPIM.
Two summers ago we spent an entire summer building such a computer, called The Montana Mini
Computer that provided strong visualizations of how low level computing works.
Unfortunately, when I got into a class using it, I realized that the architecture I had picked was too exotic (mixing
concepts from MIPS & the JVM) and that students would be better off learning an assembly closer to x86. x86 would be
particularly useful later in our security classes.
I was able to work with AI to produce a new MTMC that was much closer to x86 in only a few weeks. It was so successful
that I switched to the new version of the MTMC mid-class in fall, and used it exclusively in spring.
Another visualization that I have created with AI is a JVM emulator that shows how stack frames and the operand stack
work together to do computation. It is a visualization that I always wanted, but was unable to create. This was not due
to lack of skill on my part (I am a reasonably competent programmer) but just lack of time and energy (I am old.)
So I have had to reset my thinking on demos & visualizations: If you can think of a demo and describe it, and if you are
a reasonably good programmer, you can probably create it.
I have moved all my class slides to Markdown, using a tool called slidev and, generally, embraced
Markdown for all my class content: SYLLABUS.md, etc. (Previously I was using Google
slides for my lectures.)
All Markdown content is checked in to my class repository that students get.
Moving all my content to Markdown has been tremendously beneficial:
I can run AI analysis over my slides and look for gaps or inconsistencies
Students can run the content through an AI agent to create a more effective TA
It is much easier to bulk-update my slides if I make a major change to a class
I have always liked Markdown and, with slidev, I have nice syntax highlighting and access to
Mermaid for technical diagrams. Or I can use good ol’ ASCII art, which is often
very effective.
Having everything locally in text/Markdown makes it much easier for AI tools to work effectively in my classes. As I
mentioned above, AI agents can easily look at my class slides and suggest quiz questions I might ask.
The final way that I have been using AI to improve my classes is in automating everything possible. I have always had a
significant number of scripts that I use for the infrastructure in my classes: an autograder.py that runs the
autograding for project checkpoints in CI, etc.
I have become much more aggressive in what I will automate and optimize now.
For example, I am using Tampermonkey to make parts of
Canvas LMS easier to work with for my work flows:
I can paste in a youtube URL, and it will automatically create a link for me in Canvas
I can drag and drop files directly from my OS into Canvas
I have also created command line scripts for scheduling new Youtube streams, parsing our autograder output into Canvas
compatible format, etc.
At this point, if there is friction somewhere in my class I try to think how I would remove it if I had the time, then
consider if an LLM could generate that solution.
With on-paper quizzes becoming a standard, it has become clear that I need a strong pseudocode standard for students to use on
quizzes.
We are working on an “executable� pseudocode, Notch, to address this. It is english-like
(it is an xTalk variant) and uses standards from Java, so the students should
be able to pick it up easily. We will of course be lenient on syntax when it is used as pseudocode.
I intend to provide a pseudo-code guide that students are allowed to bring to quizzes for reference.
In many of my classes I will have students give end-of-semester presentations and I often offer a reward for the best in
show. In the upcoming year I am splitting these presentations into two tracks: AI & non-AI.
This will allow students who do not want to use AI to compete with one another and, I hope, encourage more students to
not use AI for their projects.
I will stress that I will review the non-AI winner’s code base and, if I sniff any AI, they will be heavily penalized.
AI is disrupting Open Source work significantly. It changes the calculus on build vs
buy dramatically
in favor of build. This is made more compelling by people recognizing that dependencies are
liabilities, especially from a security perspective.
Of course much of the AI model training set consists of open source work and many open source developers are
understandably upset about this.
Chad Whitacre, an open source advocate who I respect tremendously, has decided to step away from technology
entirely due to the situation.
I do not have any good answers of how to prevent AI models from using open source work for training, nor do I have a
good answer for financing open source work in general.
However, one possibility that I see is that universities become more explicitly involved in open source work, by forming
open source groups. We have done so at Montana State to support tools we use in our
classes.
Universities have independent financing that allows them to pursue projects with steady (if unglamorous) levels of
financial backing. This also dovetails with the public mission of many universities. Montana State, for example, is a
land grant university, founded for “the advancement of agriculture, mechanical arts and military tactics.�
Leaving aside military tactics, open source is one way that public universities can contribute to the public good in a
meaningful way.
This upcoming semester I am going to spend more time communicating the dangers of AI to my students. The most obvious
short term danger is that they won’t write the code and, therefore, will not learn the
skills needed to read the code.
They may get good grades on assignment, but my quizzes will be difficult and, when they enter the real world, they will
not be able to work effectively, either with or without AI.
I have been telling my students for many years now that they face far, far more temptations to behave poorly than any
generation before them. That they face more difficult temptations in a week than their grandparents generation faced in
years and perhaps decades.
With AI we now have another dimension, automated cheating, along which they will need to exercise even greater virtue
than previous generations.
I stress to them that I admire the heroism of their generation in resisting these temptations.
(I think older generations would do well to recognize this fact.)
An idea proposed by MSU professor Laura Stanley is “CS+�:
integrating computer science education plus other majors in a meaningful way. Studies have shown that this increases
the appeal of computer science more broadly to the student body.
I think this is a fantastic idea and will be working with our department to help re-orient our minor towards this
concept. My hope is that we can refocus the minor and the first two years of our major program towards practical
problem-solving with computers.
Perhaps AI will reduce the number of computer scientists needed in the world (I am skeptical of this claim) but it will
certainly not reduce the need for technically adept students across the economy, both public and private. I think we can
present a strong case to non-CS majors: “You can be a good X, but add CS and you will be among the best!�
I think this program can obviously appeal to engineering, science and technical majors such as economics, etc. However,
I also think it is an opportunity to expand into liberal arts and social sciences. I can imagine a “CS+� minor being
extremely useful for a sociology major, for example, and hope we can reach out to students in those departments once we
have established the shape of our program.
This may not just be a matter of my own preferences (I admit I like this idea conceptually, not just practically): if CS
departments do not consider this sort of program they may see falling enrollment as students avoid the CS major due to
AI fear.
I think it would be very forward-thinking for computer science departments to create network isolated computer labs.
These systems could be used to assess student competency while still providing a nice computing environment with IDEs,
etc. without the risk of AI-generated solutions.
I can imagine assignments and quizzes that utilize this resource quite effectively. It would be a large investment and
require management and upkeep, but could be very valuable if done well and perhaps become a centerpiece of a
department’s teaching strategy.
Finally, another way to avoid AI poisoning the evaluation of students is, again, returning to the past: sitting down and
having a conversation with a student to determine their grade.
While I do not have experience directly with oral exams, my experience in office hours tells me that I can determine the
competence of a given student in roughly five minutes of conversation, guiding the conversation to the level that they
are comfortable with, giving hints where necessary, etc. and determine a reasonable grade for them in a manner that
would be very hard to game.
Now, many of my classes have 100+ students, and if it took, say, 15 minutes per student interview, that is 25 hours of
total interview time. This is not realistic given the current structure of classes (I currently have 3 hours of lecture
over 15 weeks, or 45 total hours.)
However, a forward-looking university might restructure finals week (or perhaps two finals weeks) in such a way to allow
oral exams, and it would provide a much better final analysis of students’ achievement in a class.
(Of course it would be a lot more work for professors, so I view this as unfortunately unlikely.)
So, yes, I think The University is still relevant in the post-AI era and, in fact, may become more relevant due to
some structural advantages it has, particularly in signaling student competence to the outside world.
I do think computer science departments will need to adjust to the new realities and consider some somewhat radical
changes in order to maximize their value to their students. Most importantly, I think universities should increase their
focus on providing hand-coding opportunities to students, since these opportunities are becoming less available after
students leave school.
I hope that this essay helps computer science educators improve their course offering so that we can continue to produce
competent and confident computer scientists for the foreseeable future.
Note: No AI was used in the writing of this essay. AI was used to correct typos and to produce the table of contents.
Coryn Bailer-Jones’ The Physics of Interstellar Travel fills a need which has become apparent only in the last twenty years. Indeed, going back to the turn of the century, one would find the idea of traveling to another star discussed only in relatively isolated pockets, often presented at the tail end of conferences devoted to other astronautical topics. Papers, though, were being written at an increased rate, building on early work begun in the 1950s through the efforts of luminaries such as Les Shepherd and Eugen Sänger and continuing into the era of Robert Forward. By the year 2000, a number of mission designs had been created, still very much on the back burner but of high interest to specialists.
In today’s landscape, interstellar travel has become a vibrant topic. The wave of interest that energized the field incorporated high-visibility projects like NASA’s 100 Year Starship and in 2016, the emergence of the Breakthrough Starshot Initiative, which focused directly on the design of a probe that could reach a nearby star, presumably Proxima Centauri, within a human lifetime. Public interest in starflight has likewise been galvanized by the fast pace of exoplanet discovery, and growing attention to the question of studying such worlds through actual missions. Cementing the enthusiasm has been a stream of Hollywood depictions that offered viewers enticing imagery of such journeys.
The surge in papers discussing interstellar flight has exposed the lack of a college- and graduate-level treatment, a textbook wholly devoted to this topic. The Physics of Interstellar Travel meets that need with the precision of a key clicking home in a lock. It is a thoroughly researched analysis that presents travel to a star within the context of known physics, validating the perception that such journeys are within the realm of future engineering. Early chapters on orbital mechanics and the mathematics of rocketry illustrate the fact that each section can stand on its own in specialized classes at higher levels, while the quantitative analysis offered here will be of use to any student who has mastered college physics and is ready for the next educational step.
Although Bailer-Jones accepts the idea that star travel violates no physical laws, he is careful to acknowledge the challenges that emerge and the direction of future work that will eventually meet them. The principles of rocketry lead him to present fusion and beamed lightsail concepts as the likeliest paths forward, with the clarity provided by mathematical analysis applied to options including ion engines and antimatter. The nature of the interstellar medium is considered in terms of dust mitigation as well as the possibility of ramjet solutions. Communications and navigation receive thorough treatment but so do the essentials of orbital mechanics and relativistic motion.
The Physics of Interstellar Travel is, in short, a comprehensive extension of current textbooks in astronautics into the realm of missions once thought to be impossible. This book’s mathematical rigor should clarify for rising students the realization that steps we take today can result in practical outcomes, with the goal of reaching another star conceivable by the end of this century. Bailer-Jones advocates a step-by-step approach in which precursor work always tests new ideas to avoid the problem of future missions making earlier ones obsolete before they have reached their target. Where science and engineering have not yet taken us, this textbook illustrates the direction of steps forward, aiding the community in the construction of the needed roadmap.
A few weeks ago we looked at a simulation of technological evolution by economist Brian Arthur, in which he was able to start with simple building blocks (such as a NAND gate) and evolve surprisingly complex circuits (such as a 12-way AND gate or a 4-bit adder) by randomly combining increasingly useful existing components. We analyzed this as a way of simplifying a search problem: by using existing, working components as modules that can be combined, a few at a time, into more complex modules, and then combining those into even more complex modules, many unpromising and time-consuming branches of the search tree are screened off, and the simulation can find useful technologies amidst an enormous branching set of possibilities.
Real human technology is, of course, not generated by randomly combining components together and seeing if they do anything useful; the randomness in these simulations is just a way to see how easy or hard it is to create new technologies under different conditions. But biological technology — the huge panoply of lifeforms that exist on earth, from microscopic single-celled organisms to whales the size of a 737 — is also generated by randomness. Evolution builds biological technology bit by bit by harvesting the fruits of genetic variation, often caused by random mutation, preferentially selecting the most fit organisms to propagate their genes into the future. Over billions of years, this process can generate astoundingly complex biological systems.
What’s interesting is that biological evolution uses a very similar trick to Arthur’s circuit simulation. By leveraging modularity at the genetic level, populations of organisms can increase the rate that useful genetic variants spread through the population, effectively increasing their rate of information acquisition. Sexual reproduction, along with other ways of sharing genetic material like horizontal gene transfer, is essentially a mechanism for doing this. We can show this with some simple simulations.
Evolution and reproductive strategies
The simplest way for an organism to reproduce is asexual reproduction, where a parent produces a child that’s a genetic copy of itself. Simple single-celled organisms, for instance, reproduce by cellular fission, dividing into two or more “children” that each have the same genes as the original parent.
But children won’t necessarily be identical copies of their parents. Due to genetic mutation, some genes might get randomly altered during the fission process, producing children with slightly different genes. In some cases, these mutations might be useful, giving additional functionality such as antibiotic resistance and thus better odds of surviving and reproducing. Because of their contribution to the organism’s fitness, over time the useful mutations will become more and more common in the population.
We can demonstrate this with a simple simulation. In our simulation, we start with a population of 100 creatures, each of which has a genome of 200 individual genes. A gene can either be a 1 (the “good” version of the gene) or a 0 (the “bad” version of the gene). The initial population is random, with each creature having roughly a 50-50 mix of good and bad genes. Each iteration of the simulation, each creature produces two children. A child copies the genes of its parent, but due to mutation each gene has a 0.2% chance of being flipped, going from a 1 to a 0 or vice versa. The 100 most fit children (where fitness is just the sum of each gene value, since 1 is the “good” version of the gene in our simplified model) are selected to continue the next generation, and the cycle repeats. This is a simplification compared to how evolution actually functions — for one, it treats genes as contributing to fitness independently, ignoring the fact that the fitness value of one gene often depend on other genes — but it’s enough to show some of the dynamics at work.
When we run this simulation, the proportion of “good” genes in the population steadily rises over time as more-fit offspring outcompete less-fit offspring. Depending on the mutation rate, the population may eventually reach maximum possible fitness of 200, or plateau at some level below it.
The problem with this strategy — producing children that are noisy copies of a single parent, and relying purely on random mutation as a source of genetic variation — is that once you’re at above-average fitness, mutations are likely to be bad on average. If a genome has more 1s than 0s, a random change will be more likely to change a 1 to a 0 than a 0 to a 1. Thus for parents of above-average fitness, their children will on average have lower fitness.
Because mutation is random, there will nonetheless be variation, and some children will end up with higher fitness than their parents. And because selection eliminates the least fit each iteration, the pool of selected children will have higher average fitness than their parents, allowing average fitness to increase over time. But mutation reducing average fitness drags down this process.
You can see this in the graph below, which shows a simulation with slightly different parameters (a genome length of 1000 and a mutation rate of 2%) to more easily see the trends. The top graph shows the distribution of population fitness at generation 50, and the second graph shows the distribution of the population’s children prior to selection. You can see that, thanks to mutation, average fitness has dropped, though due to randomness some proportion of the children have lucked into getting higher fitness. The last graph shows the children after the top half of the distribution has been selected. Average fitness rises, and is now above the initial population, though just barely.
Now let’s look at a simulation of a different reproductive strategy: sexual reproduction, where children get their genes from two parents rather than just one. In this simulation, we still have a population of 100 creatures with genomes of 200 genes, each of which can either be a 0 or a 1. But now children have two parents, and in each iteration members of the population are paired up randomly and each pair produces four children. Children get their genes from both parents with each gene having a 50% chance of coming from a particular parent. The top 100 most fit children are then selected for the next generation, and the iteration continues. In this simulation, there is no mutation, so genetic variation entirely comes from reshuffling the genes of the parents.
Like the previous simulation, the population gradually reaches maximum fitness. But sexual reproduction gets there much faster. With asexual reproduction, after 200 generations the population was around an average fitness of 187. With sexual reproduction, the population average reached the fitness maximum of 200 in just 33 generations.
The key is that sexual reproduction introduces genetic variation without reducing average fitness. Since children are a random combination of their parents’ genes, on average they’ll have the same fitness as their parents (with some randomly having higher fitness, and others randomly having lower fitness). When the most-fit children are selected for the next generation, this is taking the top half of a distribution with a much higher average than the distribution of children in the asexual simulation. Average fitness thus rises much faster.
If you work out the math (or, as I did, simply read the math that someone else worked out), in an asexual population the rate of fitness increase is 1/(8*f), where f is the differential normalized fitness. (The normalized fitness of a population is the average fraction of good genes in that population; so a population where, on average, a member has 150 good genes in a genome of 200 would have a normalized fitness of 0.75. Differential normalized fitness is the normalized fitness of the population minus 0.5, the normalized fitness of a randomly generated population.) Early on, fitness of a population can increase quickly, but the rate soon drops below an increase of 1 unit of fitness per generation (one gene flipped from a 0 to a 1 on average). As a population gets closer to maximum possible fitness, the rate of fitness increase approaches 0.25 (flipping one gene, on average, from a 0 to a 1 every four generations).
With sexual reproduction, on the other hand, the rate of fitness increase turns out to be much higher: it’s proportional to the square root of the length of the genome.
The informational power of genetic recombination
One way to think about why sexual reproduction is so powerful is to look at lineages of descent. Say that one of the members of our asexually reproducing population stumbles across a new, useful mutation. Because genes are passed from one parent to one child, the only way this gene can spread throughout the population (in the absence of some other member of the population also stumbling across it) is if the children of whoever has it outcompete the children of everyone else. In this scenario, the population eventually ends up consisting entirely of descendants of one particular member of the population — as a necessary condition of this spread, every other genetic lineage (along with whatever useful mutations they might have stumbled across) gets wiped out.
We can see this in our simulation results. The chart below assigns each member of the initial population, and their children, a unique color. The simulation starts out with 100 different colors (one for each member of the population), but this quickly gets winnowed down to a much smaller number. After a few generations, the population is one uniform color, all descendents of one particular member of the initial population. (This chart is from one particular simulation run, but repeated runs will show the same behavior.)
If we redo the color coding whenever the population reaches the point where everyone is descended from a single ancestor, we see that this happens repeatedly. In the chart below, the population at generation 48 are all descendants of one particular member of the population who lived in generation 25. At generation 80, they’re all descendants of one particular member alive from generation 48.
In evolutionary biology, this phenomenon is known as “clonal interference”: if two different beneficial mutations arise in different members of the population of the same generation they can’t be shared and so they end up competing against each other, and one beneficial mutation ultimately gets wiped out.
Image of clonal interference via wikipedia. In the bottom image of an asexually reproducing population, beneficial mutations “B” and “A” appear in different lineages, but then “B” is wiped out, only reoccuring later through mutation and subsequently spreading through the population. In the top representation of a sexually reproducing population, B and A independently arise but can quickly be shared, spreading through the population much faster.
With a sexually reproducing population, on the other hand, useful mutations can be shared much more easily. In an asexual population, a member has one parent, one grandparent, one great-grandparent, and so on. But in a sexual population, a member has two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, etc. Beneficial variation from earlier generations can spread much more easily.
We can see this in the graph below, which shows the proportion of genes of the original members of a sexually reproducing population represented in the gene pool at any given time. We can see that the proportion stays very high: genes from almost 75% of the original population are found in the population after 34 generations. In the asexual population, this was 1% (and would be even lower in larger populations, since it’s just 1/total starting population).
We previously noted that Brian Arthur’s circuit simulation took advantage of modularity, finding useful subcomponents, locking in their designs, and then using those to build more complex technologies. Once the simulation finds a 3-way AND gate, it can use that to make a 4-way AND gate, which it can use to make a 5-way AND gate. We likewise noted that if you’re trying to build an 8-bit adder by randomly combining NAND gates together, it’s vastly easier if you can add one NAND gate at a time and verify you’re correct than if you have to guess all 68 gates at once.
You can think of this like someone solving a combination lock. A lock with a five-digit combination, with 100 possible values for each digit, has 100^5 = 10 billion possible combinations. Trying combinations one by one would take forever.
Technological modularity is like being a skilled lockpick that can check whether each individual digit attempted on a combination is correct (maybe by listening carefully you can hear a telltale “click” when the dial is in the right spot). Now instead of searching over 10 billion possible combinations, you’re doing five searches over 100 possible values each, or 500 possibilities total. The space of possible options that must be considered is vastly reduced.
Sexual reproduction is, as I understand it, doing something similar: by letting genes from two parents be combined to form children, it effectively lets the fitness of each gene be tested independently, turning the search from something like “find the best 200-gene genome” to something closer to 200 parallel “find the best gene at this location” searches. In our combination lock analogy, the modular circuit simulation is sort of like turning the dial until you hear a “click,” which indicates that the given number is correct. Sexual reproduction is more like trying a bunch of different random combinations, getting back a score for “how close this combination is to being solved,” and using that to infer which “dials” are correct. The search space is correspondingly greatly narrowed, and the search proceeds much faster.
With Arthur’s technological search, we couched this reduction in terms of information theory, calculating the bits of information gleaned per iteration. (As a reminder, a “bit” is just “something that cuts the number of possibilities to consider in half.”) In our 8-bit adder, 68 NAND gate search, finding the working arrangement required narrowing down 2^853 possibilities, or 853 bits. Trying to get all 68 gates right at once got us less than 0.000001 bits per attempt, requiring a long and painful search. But with modularity — going gate-by-gate and knowing whether each gate is in the correct location — we accumulate information much faster, around 0.003 bits per attempt (3,000x faster than nonmodular search).
We can similarly look at biological evolution and the spread of useful genetic variants in terms of information acquisition. For our simulations, the information we have at a given time is a function of how “certain” the population is about the value of each gene. With our starting, randomized population for each gene approximately 50% of the population has a 1 and 50% has a 0, we’re maximally uncertain, and we have 0 bits of information for each gene. When the population has reached maximum fitness (every member having a 1 for every gene) we’re maximally certain, and we have 1 bit of information for each gene. Total information is thus roughly equal to 2 * (F - G/2), where F is fitness and G is genome length.
We can see that information is acquired much more quickly in our sexual reproduction simulation than in our asexual simulation.
There’s an important caveat to all the above analysis: it assumes that genes independently contribute to fitness: that is, that the usefulness of gene 27 isn’t a function of gene 145. When genes are coupled like this, and the usefulness of one genetic variant is a function of what other genetic variants you possess (as they often are in practice), the evolutionary search process gets much more complex to analyze. (Stuart Kauffman has done a lot of work here with his concept of NK landscapes, which you can read about here and here.) But the simple, additive fitness case is still useful for understanding these evolutionary mechanics.
It’s also important to know that in real life, asexually reproducing organisms like bacteria have ways of sharing genes between them that get them some of the benefits of sexual reproduction. Bacteria widely engage in what’s known as horizontal gene transfer, which is exactly what it sounds like: genes being transferred between existing members of a population. This is apparently how genes for antibiotic resistance mostly spread, and some analyses suggest that 20-80% of bacterial genomes are the result of this sort of gene transfer.
Conclusion
The technological search process benefits greatly from modularity: being able to break a technology down into subcomponents with specific functionality, and determining whether those subcomponents are functioning properly. In information theoretic terms, this greatly narrows the possibilities that must be considered in a search process. It’s interesting to see that biological evolution, which creates and operates in an entirely separate domain, uses a similar sort of trick: using genetic recombination (in the form of sexual reproduction and horizontal gene transfer) to make the search process more modular and gain information more rapidly.
(For more about these ideas about evolution and information acquisition, including a much more rigorous mathematical treatment, see chapter 19 in David Mackay’s book “Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms.”)
Or maybe they’re just afraid to say it. Yesterday, the NY Times ran a palace intrigue story about the Trump administration’s attempt to manage the fallout from the Epstein files. It’s clearly informed by Vice-President Vance’s people, but it’s still pretty interesting.
But it’s clear from reading the story that the NY Times reporters along with the political press corps in general seems either unable or unwilling to understand that the Epstein Files are not (just) a ‘sex scandal’ that could topple Trump, but a load-bearing structure for conspiracist MAGA ideology. Throughout the entire story, which is about how they really did not manage the Epstein files well, there is no attempt to explain at all why this scandal mattered to the faithful and other scandals, like being an adjudicated rapist, did not.
The reporters never really broach why the Epstein Files are so important to MAGA et alia. There are some hints, in that NY Times British crossword clue style, where they imply Vance, Patel, and Bogino are true-believer conspiracists, so unlike the other members of the Trump administration, they understand what the Epstein Files mean to MAGA and the Republican faithful.
In 2026, if you’re covering the Epstein files and you can’t explain to your readers that the Epstein files, which to the Republican base are just the latest iteration of QAnon-Comet Ping Pong conspiracies, offer meaning and (pseduo)explanation for the Republican faithful, then you really are failing to inform your readers.
Whether this is a lack of understanding or an unwillingness to present the unvarnished truth is left as an exercise for the reader.
Draft defense bill funds Pentagon at requested discretionary levels but excludes $350 billion in proposed reconciliation spending, casting doubt on Golden Dome and other space programs
June 8, 2026 – Washington, D.C.—The Commercial Space Federation (CSF) is pleased to welcome Besxar and Charter Space as new space supply chain members, adding expertise in space-based semiconductor manufacturing […]
British small satellite specialist Open Cosmos is seeking more time to deploy its proposed sovereign broadband constellation for Europe after running into launch issues.
Thales Alenia Space and Airbus Defence and Space won contracts to build the next generation of radar imaging satellites for Europe’s Copernicus Earth observation program.
With the evolution of new military technologies, the trajectory of war has undergone a massive change. Historically, wars were fought through direct confrontation on the battlefield, while contemporary warfare is […]
The astronaut named commander of Artemis 3 is confident that his crew will be ready for what NASA has called one of its most complex missions in just a year.
The recent cancellation of three geostationary satellites is another blow for insurers hoping their legacy cash cows would bring home much-needed income following a bruising run of claims. SES disclosed […]
OMB, joined by some forty grantmaking agencies—NSF, HHS, DOE, NASA, DOD among them—has proposed a sweeping rewrite of the rules governing all federal grants, the Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance.
American science has long been state funded but not state directed. Since Vannevar Bush, money has flowed through many agencies to independent universities, allocated largely by peer review. The system has flaws—conformity, gerontocracy, waste—but it had one great virtue, the system was decentralized and not under state control. This rule proposes to bring science funding under top-down, state control.
Program goals must now be “aligned with administration policies and priorities” (§ 200.202). Merit review is subordinated to politics: “senior appointees must conduct these reviews,” ensuring “that discretionary awards advance the President’s policy priorities,” while “peer review remains advisory and does not replace agency discretion” (§ 200.205). And every grant becomes terminable at will, whenever it “no longer effectuates program goals, Federal agency priorities, or the national interest *as they exist at the time of the termination*” (§ 200.340, emphasis added). Universities must even ensure their subrecipients don’t “significantly damage the reputation of… the Federal Government” (§ 200.332)—a loyalty clause for scientists.
All this is sold as cutting “burdensome conditions,” a goal I would support, but sadly that is bullshit. The proposed rules add more paperwork and many more layers of bureaucratic review. Payment requests must include written justifications. Every disbursement gets screened through Treasury’s “Do Not Pay” system. Every recipient must run E-Verify. Applicants must disclose any employee who worked at the awarding agency within two years. And on top of the existing review machinery sits a new pre-issuance review committee of “senior appointees” second-guessing the experts. Fixed amount awards—pay for outputs, not inputs—an innovative reward mechanism are *eliminated*, so every award now gets routine cost monitoring and financial reporting.
Political review of every award, peer review demoted, agency review promoted, termination whenever “priorities” change. Chilling. It’s a nightmare of petty low-trust review of the kind that is already drowning science. I must deal with this kind of nonsense all the time. More is not better.
The machinery is centralized too. OMB’s guidance becomes binding regulation, effective government-wide with no agency rulemaking. One dial in the White House now turns every grant program in the country.
The new rules will be sold as getting rid of DEI but that is an excuse to bring in the commissars. The new rules don’t depoliticize science they create even more politicization with the sign flipped, and the drafters admit it:
In the previous administration, executive agencies frequently chose to subsidize and expressly prioritize projects based on their ideological alignment with the categories of activities discussed in the proposed version of § 200.300. See, for example, E.O. 13985, sec. 1, 86 FR 7009, 7009 (Jan. 25, 2021) (“It is therefore the policy of [the Biden] Administration that the Federal Government should pursue a comprehensive approach to advancing equity . . . .”). In this administration, executive agencies will continue to use their discretionary authorities in a manner consistent with current Executive Branch policy. If executive agencies were entitled to subsidize those types of activities during the previous administration, there is no constitutional basis to prevent the government from reaching a different policy determination regarding which activities to fund during this administration.
Read that twice. Tip your hat to the new constitution, take a bow for the new revolution. Will science prosper when it is whipped by political turnover? Research runs on decade timescales; administrations run on four-year ones.
A decentralized funding system is inefficient the way markets and federalism are inefficient—we give up some economies of scale and get experimentation, error correction, and robustness in return. A system in which every award advances “the President’s policy priorities” is efficient the way ministries of science are efficient. We know how that experiment ends.
America is moving in the wrong direction. We should double down on what made America great. Instead we are adopting all of the loser policies of authoritarian nations.
Medical aid in dying and hospice care are now available for pets too.
The New Yorker has the story:
When Should You Say Goodbye to a Pet? Across the country, the booming industry of pet hospice is teaching people how to face the loss of their beloved companions. By Sunita Puri
" In the nineteen-seventies, hospice care evolved as more people resisted the compulsion to extend life at all costs, preferring instead to focus on dying comfortably, often at home. Now caring for a sick pet involved the same questions: What is a good quality of life? How much suffering is too much? And when is the right time to let go?
...
"The concept of pet hospice emerged in the eighties and nineties. In 1994, Amir Shanan, a Chicago-based veterinarian, was asked by a couple to euthanize their beloved dog at home. He started to advertise his work, and more people began calling. Their desire to give their pets a graceful end was so strong that they were willing to invite a stranger into their homes to do it. Shanan was astounded.
"Eventually, pet owners began to tell Shanan that they needed his help well before it was time for euthanasia. “With euthanasia, the focus is on the time of death, and grief after the loss, but there is so much more that happens in the time between a bad diagnosis and death,” Shanan told me.
...
" In 2009, he founded the International Association for Animal Hospice and Palliative Care, which now has more than fifteen hundred veterinarian-members around the world. Shanan recruited a team that helped him develop guidelines, create a training program for veterinarians, and write an early textbook on the subject, which was published in 2017. The organization believes that dying is “a normal process,” and that its work allows pets and their families “to attain a degree of mental and spiritual preparation for death.”
"Although pet hospice is modelled on human hospice, there are fundamental differences between the two. Human hospice, which is covered by most insurance, involves treating the emotional, spiritual, and physical suffering caused by a terminal illness as it unfolds naturally. Enrollment requires a prognosis of less than six months to live, and euthanasia is never considered. (Some states have legalized medical aid-in-dying, in which patients self-administer a life-ending medication, but euthanasia, in which the medication is administered intravenously by a health-care provider, is illegal in the United States.) "
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifts off from Space Launch Complex 4 East (SLC-4E) at Vandenberg Space Force Base to begin the Starlink 17-44 mission on June 11, 2026. Image: SpaceX
SpaceX launched its next Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base on Thursday morning, a day before the company’s stock becomes publicly available on the Nasdaq.
The Starlink 17-44 mission added another 24 broadband internet satellites to the company’s low Earth orbit constellation. There are more than 10,500 Starlink satellites currently in orbit.
Liftoff from Space Launch Complex 4 East happened at 8:05:59 a.m. PDT (11:05:59 a.m. EDT / 1505:59 UTC). The rocket flew on a south-southwesterly trajectory upon leaving the pad.
SpaceX launched the mission using the Falcon 9 first stage booster with the tail number B1071. This was its 34th flight after launching five times for the National Reconnaissance Office, five SpaceX rideshare missions, Germany’s SARah-1, NASA’s SWOT, CAS500-2 for South Korea and 20 previous Starlink delivery flights.
The first stage booster launched on the SpaceX drone ship, ‘Of Course I Still Love You,’ positioned in the Pacific Ocean about eight and half minutes after launch. This was the 202nd landing on this vessel and the 622nd booster landing for SpaceX.
On Tuesday, NASA announced the crew for the Artemis III mission, which is scheduled to be flown no earlier than summer 2027. As part of the announcement, space agency officials also discussed plans for the crew to dock with both a Blue Origin lander and a SpaceX Starship lander during the spaceflight in low-Earth orbit.
The presentation, although informative, still left open key questions about the landers' readiness and what exactly they'll look like. After the crew announcement, Ars sat down with Jeremy Parsons, NASA's Artemis program manager, to answer some of these questions.
This interview, conducted at NASA's Johnson Space Center, has been lightly edited for clarity.
Tyler and Katja discuss why communism made East Germans more loyal to the system while it bred dissidents in Poland and Hungary, how happy or unhappy life in the GDR actually was, Tyler’s own bleak day-trip to East Berlin in 1984, the underrated literature of the GDR (Christa Wolf, Brigitte Reimann), whether Good Bye, Lenin! got the era right, why it’s no coincidence that Richter and Polke came from the East, the strange coexistence of communist prudishness and Germany’s nudist culture, what Merkel’s East German background did and didn’t give her as a chancellor, why East Germans remain dramatically underrepresented in leadership positions today, what makes Weimar the cultural and spiritual heart of Germany, why relatively few Jews ever settled there, how much the citizens of Weimar knew about Buchenwald, what actually killed the Weimar Constitution, how she’d rewrite the Treaty of Versailles, Hitler’s citizenship problem, underrated German thinkers, the complacency behind Germany’s current economic decline, which side of the Weißwurstäquator she’d choose to live on, and much more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: Why did the Weimar Constitution fail?
HOYER: How much time have I got?
COWEN: Americans typically think it’s that the proportional representation system allowed too many small parties to enter into government. That’s one factor, but what else is there?
HOYER: There are plenty of factors, I think. Some of these are inbuilt flaws, like the proportional representation that you just mentioned. Another one that’s often referred to as Article 48, which was a kind of emergency article that was in the constitution that allowed the president to bypass parliament and the other democratic structures in time of emergency.
If you just follow down this route, then the fall of the Weimar Republic becomes inevitable. If you’re just assuming that there were all these flaws in the constitution already, so therefore it was bound to fail, I don’t think that is the case because when you study this closely, you do see all these kinds of forks in the road as to where things could have gone differently. I don’t think the system was set up to fail. I think these things contributed to the brittle nature of this. I think there was perhaps a degree of naivety there in 1919 to think that you could have this ultra-democratic system without any guardrails.
When you think how long it took the American Founding Fathers to sit there and really work out every angle, and “What if we got a mad president, what do we put in there to try and protect against that?” Those sorts of things. That process is so rushed in 1919 that they just put an ultra-liberal democracy in place, which allows extremists to hijack it. That is part of the reason. I think the other group of reasons is the circumstances under which the system is born. It’s basically born into crisis. It comes on the back of the First World War and then runs into economic trouble very quickly. That never really goes away despite the so-called gilded years in the middle. All of that’s propped up by American money, even the stability years of the middle 1920s. The moment that falls because of the Wall Street crash, you basically get the very economic foundation taken away again.
The subtitle I chose for the book, Life on the Edge of Catastrophe, I’m trying to hint at the fact that that’s how a lot of people felt. They were literally balancing constantly for this entire time, really, after 1919, on the edge of their own personal catastrophes. It was always unemployment, hyperinflation, trying to get enough food. People were dying of diseases. There’s the Spanish flu. There’s tuberculosis. It’s always something or other. People don’t feel that the system is giving them stability. I don’t think there ever really is a feeling that this can really work long term.
People do, at the slightest whim, think, “Oh, maybe we just need to go back to a system where someone makes the decisions.” The Weimar Republic actually dies in 1930, three years before Hitler comes into power, as a democracy. He takes over a system, I think, that’s already given up on being a democracy, even at that point. As I say, I could talk about this for two days and still be lining up factors. It is complex.
COWEN: The army is interfering in politics quite early and pretty frequently.
HOYER: Yes. They still think that because of the nature of the Prussian system previously, it’s often been said that “Prussia wasn’t a state with an army, but it was an army with a state.” That intrinsic self-confidence, if you want to call it that, of the army, that they are really calling the shots, that doesn’t really go away.
People also often forget that in the First World War, you have the so-called silent dictatorship, which is basically the army running absolutely everything under Hindenburg’s system, from the economy and culture to newspaper output and everything else. Again, that they don’t just suddenly turn that off in 1919. They do try and make their influence heard ongoingly.
Then the young Weimar Republic has to make a pact with the military because they defend them effectively against communists and also right-wing Putschers. They depend on the military in that way as well for security. They do try and build up a new military, but they never go Stalin-style and purge everybody who was there previously. They keep the existing elites largely in place, so they inherit an army that isn’t loyal to them, that’s still loyal to the old system.
TEMPO detected high concentrations of nitrogen dioxide during the morning commute at 7:05 a.m. local time on May 18, 2026 (left), along the New York-Washington corridor. The instrument detected lower levels of the gas at 3:05 p.m. (right), after chemical reactions involving nitrogen dioxide had contributed to elevated ozone concentrations in the afternoon.
NASA Earth Observatory/Michala Garrison
TEMPO detected high concentrations of nitrogen dioxide during the morning commute at 7:05 a.m. local time on May 18, 2026 (left), along the New York-Washington corridor. The instrument detected lower levels of the gas at 3:05 p.m. (right), after chemical reactions involving nitrogen dioxide had contributed to elevated ozone concentrations in the afternoon.
NASA Earth Observatory/Michala Garrison
TEMPO detected high concentrations of nitrogen dioxide during the morning commute at 7:05 a.m. local time on May 18, 2026 (left), along the New York-Washington corridor. The instrument detected lower levels of the gas at 3:05 p.m. (right), after chemical reactions involving nitrogen dioxide had contributed to elevated ozone concentrations in the afternoon.
NASA Earth Observatory/Michala Garrison
TEMPO detected high concentrations of nitrogen dioxide during the morning commute at 7:05 a.m. local time on May 18, 2026 (left), along the New York-Washington corridor. The instrument detected lower levels of the gas at 3:05 p.m. (right), after chemical reactions involving nitrogen dioxide had contributed to elevated ozone concentrations in the afternoon.
NASA Earth Observatory/Michala Garrison
7:05 am
3:05 pm
TEMPO detected high concentrations of nitrogen dioxide during the morning commute at 7:05 a.m. local time on May 18, 2026 (left), along the New York-Washington corridor.The instrument detected lower levels of the gas at 3:05 p.m. EDT (right), after chemical reactions involving nitrogen dioxide had contributed to elevated ozone concentrations in the afternoon. NASA Earth Observatory images by Michala Garrison.
More than 35 million people live along the New York–Washington corridor and breathe the region’s air. While air quality has improved significantly in recent decades, outbreaks of ground-level ozone remain common, particularly in the warm summer months, when the chemical reactions that produce the pollutant accelerate and stagnant air allows ozone to accumulate.
A reminder of this seasonal phenomenon came earlier than usual in 2026, when a mid-May heat wave prompted the New York State Department of Health and the New York Department of Environmental Conservation to issue a health advisory on May 17 over concerns about ozone. The code orange advisory warned young people, older adults, and those working or exercising outdoors to limit activity due to ozone’s respiratory and cardiovascular health impacts.
As expected, ground-based air-quality sensors operated by state and federal agencies showed ozone reaching unhealthy levels for sensitive groups on May 18, something that typically happens several times per year. Meanwhile, NASA’s TEMPO (Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring of Pollution) instrument observed the event from geostationary orbit 22,000 miles (35,000 kilometers) above the equator, a unique vantage point that allows the sensor to collect frequent observations of air pollution.
TEMPO detects nitrogen dioxide (NO2), a gas emitted by burning fuels, particularly by motor vehicles, that contributes to ozone formation. “There’s often a clear and interesting pattern in TEMPO’s nitrogen dioxide data during ozone alert days,” said Hazem Mahmoud, an atmospheric scientist at NASA’s Atmospheric Science Data Center at Langley Research Center. “We see high concentrations of nitrogen dioxide during the early morning commute that drop off sharply in the late afternoon as ozone increases.”
The decline occurs as sunlight fuels photochemical reactions involving nitrogen dioxide, volatile organic compounds, and oxygen that lead to ozone formation. By late afternoon, these reactions deplete much of the available nitrogen dioxide, slowing ozone production until the cycle begins again the next day.
The pair of images above underscores the pattern. The image on the left was acquired at 7:05 a.m. local time when nitrogen dioxide concentrations were high during the morning commute. By 3:05 p.m. (right), most of the nitrogen dioxide had declined substantially, and surface ozone levels were elevated (below). Meanwhile, afternoon sea breezes appear to have transported the remaining nitrogen dioxide slightly to the west. Note that the data shown is provisional, and processing methods are still being refined.
Sensors on earlier polar-orbiting satellites, such as OMI (Ozone Monitoring Instrument) and TROPOMI (Tropospheric Monitoring Instrument), sampled nitrogen dioxide over New York once per day. After its launch in 2023, TEMPO began providing data every hour, allowing researchers to track the evolution and dispersion of air pollution at much finer time scales.
“TEMPO is helping fill data gaps between ground stations and allowing us to ask new questions,” Mahmoud said. The mission provides data that can improve not only air quality forecasts during crisis situations, such as wildfires, but also the atmospheric models used to forecast the daily rhythms of urban pollution. Such models help researchers understand how natural factors such as winds, humidity levels, and air temperatures influence pollution plumes over the course of a day.
TEMPO detected elevated ozone concentrations in an area extending from New York City to Washington, D.C., at 5:05 p.m. on May 18, 2026.
NASA Earth Observatory/Michala Garrison
TEMPO also detects ozone directly, but determining how much of that ozone is near the surface versus higher in the atmosphere can be challenging. Most of Earth’s ozone resides in the stratosphere, well above the troposphere, where people live and breathe. At times, however, stratospheric ozone can be transported downward into the troposphere. During events known as stratospheric intrusions, it can even descend far enough to affect air quality at the surface and add to the ozone produced at ground level.
By combining TEMPO observations with other sources of information, researchers are studying the processes that influence the distribution of ozone vertically in the atmosphere. On May 18, NASA’s ground-based tropospheric lidar network (TOLNet) in New York City recorded high concentrations of ozone near the surface, indicating that TEMPO was detecting mostly surface-level ozone associated with urban emissions and not ozone aloft, said Mahmoud.
However, on May 19, the same sensor observed a layer of ozone descending from above 5 kilometers (3 miles), he added, a clue that some of the ozone TEMPO detected that day may have originated in the stratosphere. “This is the type of information that leads to better air quality forecast models and more accurate alerts,” Mahmoud said. “Alerts can affect tens of millions of people and lead to disruptions in school, sports, and other activities, so it’s essential that they be as accurate as possible.”
On June 6, New York authorities issued another health advisory for ozone. People interested in following the event can access daily near-real-time TEMPO observations of ozone, nitrogen dioxide, and other gases on NASA’s Worldview browser, on an interactive Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics browsing tool, and on NASA’s Earthdata portal.
NASA Earth Observatory images by Michala Garrison, using TEMPO data from NASA Earthdata.Story by Adam Voiland.
Asked to answer as a typical human, every cutting-edge model rated us markedly more neurotic, less open, less agreeable and less conscientious than they rated themselves. The gap on Neuroticism alone is 1.69 points on a 5-point scale.
Across 31 models from those seven labs they answer the personality tests in unison: high openness, low Dark Triad, Universalism on top, Power dead last in every single model.
In a post last week, I wrote about the progressive anti-monopoly movement’s increasing disconnect from reality. I wrote:
[C]onsider the movement’s choice of targets. These include some industries with high profit margins, but also some with very low margins. These include grocery stores, airlines, and health insurers. Grocery stores and health insurers both consistently have much lower profit margins than American corporations in general, often hovering near the zero mark.
Commenter Matthew argued that the low profit margins of insurers are not a reason not to worry about their market power:
The idea that health insurers have “low margins” so they are OK is nuts…Private health insurers in the US do not lower costs and do not improve patient care…In the flow of money between patients and providers, private insurers just sit in that flow like a tapeworm and take money out to sustain themselves…
There is a lot of evidence…[W]ith the current status quo, 10 -15$ out of every 100$ of healthcare premiums a person spends is just going to the private insurer….That would be fine if the insurance companies secured lower costs for their members; it would be the useful service they provide…But there is no evidence that they do.
Matthew’s argument doesn’t really address the point of my post. Private insurers might be inefficient, or even unnecessary, but this is very different from them being extractive monopolies. It is absolutely incredibly relevant that health insurers have very low profit margins. If $10 of every $100 spent on health care premiums goes to the insurer, but the insurer isn’t profitable, this just means that the $10 is going to cover the insurer’s operating costs. It is not money being funneled into the pockets of the people who own the insurance companies.
In fact, the more general fact here is that private insurers are not the main reason why American health care costs so much more than health care in other developed nations. Almost all of the excess cost goes to providers rather than to insurers. Private insurers may be an unnecessary middleman, but the amount they extract from the system is not large compared to the amount that gets either appropriated or wasted by the people providing the care.
So why do Americans — especially American progressives — focus so obsessively on health insurers instead of health providers? In a post two years ago, I hypothesized that it’s because insurers are the part of the system we have direct contact with — the people who have to tell us “no” when we can’t afford some treatment.
Insurers have thus become what Jeremiah Johnson calls “sin-eaters” — the hapless fall guys who bear the brunt of all Americans’ rage, despair, and frustration at a broken system in which the insurers play only a very minor role.
The more progressives focus on venting rage and making accusations at insurance companies, the less effective they will be in actually delivering Americans cheaper health care.
Anyway, here’s the post I wrote back in 2024, which fleshes this all out in greater detail.
“I’d rather die than owe the hospital til I get old” — Courtney Barnett
When UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was gunned down in the street in cold blood the other day, a bunch of people on the internet gloated and cheered:
The jokes came streaming in on every social-media platform, in the comments underneath every news article. “I’m sorry, prior authorization is required for thoughts and prayers,” someone commented on TikTok, a response that got more than fifteen thousand likes. “Does he have a history of shootings? Denied coverage,” another person wrote, under an Instagram post from CNN. On X, someone posted, with the caption “My official response to the UHC CEO’s murder,” an infographic comparing wealth distribution in late eighteenth-century France to wealth distribution in present-day America…On LinkedIn, where users post with their real names and employment histories, UnitedHealth Group had to turn off comments on its post about Thompson’s death—thousands of people were liking and hearting it, with a few even giving it the “clapping” reaction. The company also turned off comments on Facebook, where, as of midday Thursday, a post about Thompson had received more than thirty-six thousand “laugh” reactions.
In general, I think it’s a very bad look to endorse murder. And I think this kind of thing is a sign of how stressed-out and mentally unbalanced our country is after an era of unrest. (The chief suspect, who was just apprehended, looks like a random crazy guy rather than a leftist ideologue.)
But more fundamentally, I think the outpouring of schadenfreude1 at Thompson’s killing reflects some deep-seated popular misconceptions about the U.S. health care industry. A whole lot of people — maybe even most people — seem to regard health insurance companies as the main villains in the system, when in fact they’re only a very minor source of the problems.
All my life, Americans have been raging at health insurers. Who could forget this clip from the 1997 movie As Good as It Gets?
It’s not hard to understand why people hate health insurers. When you interact with the U.S. health care system, the providers — the hospital staff, the doctor, the nurses, the technicians — all just take care of you. The only time they ask you for money during your doctor visit is when you pay your copay at the front desk, and that’s usually not that big — if the bill is big, they’ll send it to you later. So for the most part, your interaction with the providers is just you walking up and asking to be taken care of, and them taking care of you.
Your interaction with the health insurer, on the other hand, feels like a struggle against an enemy who wants to destroy you. If you get a big hospital bill days after your visit, it’s because the insurer wouldn’t cover the whole cost. If the bill is a surprise because the provider didn’t tell you they were out of network, that also feels like the insurance company’s fault — why wasn’t that provider in their network?
Even more terrifying is when insurers deny coverage completely, which happens to about 10-20% of claims. It feels like you’ve been robbed. You paid this company a hefty premium every month, and in exchange you expected them to pay for your health care if you needed it. And now you needed it, and they won’t even uphold their end of the bargain? Why were you even paying them the premium in the first place?
Everyone knows that denying claims is in the insurance company’s financial interest. The more they can get away with taking your monthly premium and then weaseling out of their end of the bargain, the more their shareholders and executives can walk away with giant bags of money. They’re the ones buying huge houses and yachts and whatever on the money they made from finding some technical reason to send you and thousands upon thousands of people like you into medical bankruptcy after your chemotherapy. Who wouldn’t be mad?
And yet when we take a hard look at the question of why Americans pay so much more for their health care than people elsewhere in the developed world, insurance companies and their profits just aren’t that big of a piece of the story.
First of all, insurance companies just don’t make that much profit. UnitedHealth Group, the company of which Brian Thompson’s UnitedHealthcare is a subsidiary, is the most valuable private health insurer in the country in terms of market capitalization, and the one with the largest market share. Its net profit margin is just 6.11%:
You can see that the company’s net income — i.e., its total profit — was $23.1 billion in 2023. That’s a lot of money, but it pales in comparison to the $241.9 billion that the company spent on medical costs. Even the company’s $54.6 billion in operating costs — of which Brian Thompson’s own $10 million salary represented 0.018% — are dwarfed by actual medical costs.
In fact, the actual health insurance business — taking premiums and paying out claims — is even less profitable than these numbers might suggest. As Axios recently reported, insurers’ profits are increasingly coming from other lines of business.
What does this mean? It means that if UnitedHealth Group decided to donate every single dollar of its profit to buying Americans more health care, it would only be able to pay for about 9.3% more health care than it’s already paying for. If it donated all of its executives’ salaries to the effort, it would not be much more than that.
What about those denials of coverage, copays, deductibles, and so on? In fact, Americans are paying a smaller percentage of their health costs out of pocket than people in most other rich countries!
Note that the song lyric at the top of this post, about a woman in anaphylactic shock worrying that she won’t be able to afford her hospital bills, is from a band in Australia, not the U.S. This isn’t a coincidence — although Australian medical costs are fairly low, the proportion they pay out of pocket is unusually high.
In other words, Americans’ much-hated private health insurers are paying a higher percent of the cost of Americans’ health care than the government insurance systems of Sweden and Denmark and the UK are paying. The only reason Americans’ bills are higher is that U.S. health care provision costs so much more in the first place.
On top of all that, health insurance companies don’t actually look very inefficient, in terms of their administrative costs. Yes, we all know that the fragmented U.S. health system is a paperwork nightmare, with different providers and insurers drowning each other in forms and approvals. And Elizabeth Warren has claimed that switching to national health insurance would save huge amounts of money by reducing administrative costs. But when we look at United Health Group’s operating costs in the diagram above, they’re only 22.6% of the actual cost of medical care.
In fact, the Kaiser Family Foundation does detailed comparisons between U.S. health care spending and spending in other developed countries. And it has concluded that most of this excess spending comes from providers — from hospitals, pharma companies, doctors, nurses, tech suppliers, and so on:
This means that eliminating all administrative waste and inefficiency in the entire U.S. health care system — not just at insurance companies, but administration of government insurance programs — could save Americans at most about $680 per person every year. And the true savings would probably not anywhere close to that amount — part of America’s greater costs are certainly an income effect, due to the fact that Americans have higher incomes than people in other rich countries.A few hundred bucks a year is not nothing, but it’s only a small fraction of the $5683 more that we pay relative to other countries.
So the fundamental reason your health care costs so much is not that the health insurance companies are lining their pockets. And it’s not that insurers are an inefficient mess. It’s that the actual provision of America’s health care itself just costs way too much in the first place.
The actual people charging you an arm and a leg for your care, and putting you at risk of medical bankruptcy, are the providers themselves. The smiling doctor who writes you prescriptions and sends you to the MRI and refers you to a specialist without ever asking you for money knows full well that you’re going to end up having to wrangle with the insurance company for the cost of all those services.
The gentle nurse who sets up your IV doesn’t tell you whether each dose of drugs through the IV could set you back hundreds of dollars, but they know. When the polite administrative assistants at the front desk send you back to treatment without telling you that their services are out of your network, it’s because they didn’t bother to check. The executives making millions at “nonprofit” hospitals, and the shareholders making billions on the profits of companies that supply and contract with those hospitals, are people you never see and probably don’t even think about.
Here’s a good Bloomberg story on predatory pricing by hospitals. Hopsitals bilk insurers, who are forced to pass on the higher costs to patients, who then blame the insurers instead of the hospitals.
Excessive prices charged by health care providers are overwhelmingly the reason why Americans’ health care costs so cripplingly much. But they’ve outsourced the actual collection of those fees to insurance companies, so that your experience in the medical system feels smooth and friendly and comfortable. The insurance companies are simply hired to play the bad guy — and they’re paid a relatively modest fee for that service. So you get to hate UnitedHealthcare and Cigna, while the real people taking away your life’s savings and putting you at risk of bankruptcy get to play Mother Theresa.
So the way to make our health care system affordable is not to browbeat insurers, in the hope that they will be able to reduce their profits and pay for us to have cheap health care. Insurance companies simply do not have the power to do that, even if you threaten to shoot them. What we need is to reduce costs within the actual medical system itself. One idea is to have the government insurance system play hardball with providers, negotiating lower prices. is what the Biden administration had Medicare do with some drug companies. There are some risks to this approach — if it’s executed clumsily it can suppress innovation — but it’s basically what every other rich country does, so the track record is decent. There are probably other ways to foster competition and increase efficiency in the medical care system.
But focusing all our anger on the middlemen of the U.S.’ bloated health care system is just a way of shooting the messenger.
Update: Matt Bruenig argues that insurers really are to blame. He claims that inefficiency in the system is a bigger driver of costs than I realize, because providers have to spend money dealing with insurers — something the KFF numbers don’t include. He also alleges that some of this “inefficiency” is actually intentional on the part of the insurers — a disguised way to pay themselves out.
But I don’t think this passes the smell test. If insurers were so good at extracting money from the system, why are they so unprofitable? The average company in the S&P 500 has a profit margin of 12%, but these insurers have margins of 1% to 3%. If they’re so good at extracting money from providers, why are shareholders — and executives who own stock — not getting a piece of that money? It doesn’t make sense.
Also, provider-side administrative costs don’t just include the money providers spend wrangling with insurers — it includes the money they spend on the executives, managers, and billing departments who figure out how to charge patients $700 for every injection of IV drugs, or hundreds of dollars for a hospital pillow, or $10,000 for an MRI.
So no, I don’t buy Bruenig’s argument here. Though I still do agree with him that national health insurance would be a good idea — mostly for the negotiating power, not for the administrative cost savings.
Update 2: Over at Tyler Cowen’s blog, a commenter argues that profit margins are not a good guide to the financial success of a business, and that instead one should look at return on equity (ROE). That’s fine, I wasn’t talking about the financial success of health insurance companies; I was simply showing that they don’t have the ability to pay for much more health care than they’re currently paying for. But for what it’s worth, the ROE of health insurers is pretty low. The S&P 500’s weighted average ROE is usually around 15%, and has been a bit higher lately. Here’s what health insurers were earning:
They had a couple of good years in there, but in general it’s underwhelming. UnitedHealth Group, which does include businesses other than the low-margin health insurance business (e.g. providing health care and pharmaceuticals), is doing pretty well with 26%.
But if you look at the list of companies with the highest ROE, you see health care providers or suppliers like HCA Healthcare (272%), Cencora (234%), Abbvie (84%), Mckesson (84%), Novo Nordisk (72%), Eli Lilly (59%), Amgen (56%), IDEXX Laboratories (53%), Zoetis (46%), Novartis (44%), Edwards Lifesciences (43%), and so on. If you want to know which shareholders are making the real money in the health care industry…well, it’s the shareholders of those providers and suppliers.
Up and all the morning helping my wife to put up her things towards her going into the country and drawing the wine out of my vessel to send.
This morning came my cozen Thomas Pepys to desire me to furnish him with some money, which I could not do till his father has wrote to Piggott his consent to the sale of his lands, so by and by we parted and I to the Exchange a while and so home and to dinner, and thence to the Royal Theatre by water, and landing, met with Captain Ferrershis friend, the little man that used to be with him, and he with us, and sat by us while we saw “Love in a Maze.” The play is pretty good, but the life of the play is Lacy’s part, the clown, which is most admirable; but for the rest, which are counted such old and excellent actors, in my life I never heard both men and women so ill pronounce their parts, even to my making myself sick therewith.
Thence, Creed happening to be with us, we four to the Half-Moon Tavern, I buying some sugar and carrying it with me, which we drank with wine and thence to the whay-house, and drank a great deal of whay, and so by water home, and thence to see Sir W. Pen, who is not in much pain, but his legs swell and so immoveable that he cannot stir them, but as they are lifted by other people and I doubt will have another fit of his late pain. Played a little at cards with him and his daughter, who is grown every day a finer and finer lady, and so home to supper and to bed.
When my wife and I came first home we took Ashwell and all the rest below in the cellar with the vintner drawing out my wine, which I blamed Ashwell much for and told her my mind that I would not endure it, nor was it fit for her to make herself equal with the ordinary servants of the house.
Artemis 3 crew members NASA astronaut Randy Bresnik, commander; ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Luca Parmitano, pilot; and NASA astronauts Frank Rubio, mission specialist, and Andre Douglas, mission specialist, are seen during the Artemis 3 crew announcement event, Tuesday, June 9, 2026, at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. Image: NASA/John Kraus
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, responding to questions about the agency’s selection of an all-male crew for the Artemis 3 mission, said the astronauts were chosen based solely on their experience, skill sets and availability.
Isaacman wrote on the social media platform X that “I have seen reactions ranging from disappointment to outrage.” One such response on Reddit called the crew announcement “massively upsetting.”
“Women represent 50 percent of the population,” the post read. “They deserve at least one seat on every mission from a government run agency.”
But Isaacman strongly defended the crew selection, saying he had “personally been to space twice with 50 percent female crews. My closest advisors and some of the smartest engineers I know are women. In our latest NASA leadership organization, nearly 50 percent of the center directors and mission directorate leadership are women.
“The last astronaut candidate class selected under this administration was majority female [six women and four men] because they were the best of the best, including one astronaut [Anna Menon] I previously went to space with.”
NASA announced its 2025 Astronaut Candidate Class on Sept. 22, 2025. The 10 candidates, pictured here at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston are: U.S. Army CW3 Ben Bailey, Anna Menon, Rebecca Lawler, Katherine Spies, U.S. Air Force Maj. Cameron Jones, Dr. Lauren Edgar, U.S. Navy Lt. Cmdr. Erin Overcash, Yuri Kubo, Dr. Imelda Muller, and U.S. Air Force Maj. Adam Fuhrmann. Image: NASA/Josh Valcarcel
During an event Tuesday at the Johnson Space Center, NASA revealed the astronauts who had been selected for next year’s Artemis 3 mission, a flight to test rendezvous and docking procedures in low-Earth orbit with moon landers being built by SpaceX and Blue Origin.
The mission will be commanded by Randy Bresnik, 58, veteran of 149 days in space during a shuttle flight and a space station stay. European Space Agency astronaut Luca Parmitano, 49, a veteran of two long-duration ISS stays, will serve as pilot.
Also on board: Andre Douglas, 40, a space rookie with broad engineering experience, and Frank Rubio, 49, who logged a U.S.-record 371 days in space aboard the ISS in 2022-23.
The four members of NASA’s SpaceX Crew-12 mission emerge from the Neil Armstrong Operations and Checkouts building to greet friends and family before heading out to Space Launch Complex 40 for their flight. Left to right: Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev, NASA astronaut Jack Hathaway, NASA astronaut Jessica Meir, ESA astronaut Sophie Adenot. Image: Michael Cain/Spaceflight Now
In an interview that aired on CNN Wednesday, Bresnik said the selection of an all-male crew for Artemis 3 was “certainly not intentional.”
“You can look at our astronaut office and see the wide diversity within the office, whether that’s gender or background or nationality or heritage,” he said. “And certainly, the boss had to pick the crew for this flight that he had available that had the skill sets that he needed.”
NASA currently has about 35 active-duty astronauts. The list includes 15 women but does not yet include the six currently in training to join the astronaut corps.
The Artemis 2 crew, the program’s first to carry astronauts, included Christina Koch, who became the first female to fly around the moon. NASA’s Jessica Meir and ESA’s Sophie Adenot are currently in orbit aboard the International Space Station and Jasmin Moghbeli is in training to command an upcoming Crew Dragon flight to the lab complex. Bresnik said two more yet-to-be-announced women are in training for a downstream flight.
“The office gets what it needs when it needs it, and we’ll certainly have all these other people that you mentioned, you know, female military test pilots or just other female astronauts, that’ll be picking up on the follow-on Artemis missions,” Bresnik said.
NASA astronaut and SpaceX Crew-13 Commander Jessica Watkins is pictured in her pressure suit during a training session at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California. Image: SpaceX
In any case, the Artemis 3 crew brings a wide variety of skills to what is essentially a flight test in low-Earth orbit.
Bresnik is a former “TOPGUN” graduate and military test pilot while Parmitano flew high-performance jets for the Italian air force. Rubio holds a doctorate in medicine and is a former UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter pilot. Douglas holds three master’s degrees and a Ph.D. in engineering.
Isaacman said the astronaut office “assigns the crew that gives the mission the best chance of meeting its objectives, taking into account many factors, including the background and expertise of the astronauts, such as test pilot experience, development work on specific programs, and availability.”
He added that critics of the Artemis III crew selection “may not be aware of the pipeline of crews already preparing to launch to the space station, or those who have been undergoing lunar-specific training that would be a better fit for a future surface mission.”
Isaacman concluded by saying Bresnik and his crewmates were “experienced, qualified and deserve to be celebrated for the mission they have been assigned, just as the crews that follow will be celebrated when their time comes.”
Yesterday afternoon, President Donald J. Trump officially nominated acting attorney general Todd Blanche to become the attorney general of the United States.
Before going to the Department of Justice, Blanche was Trump’s personal attorney. He led Trump’s criminal defense team in the case of falsifying records to cover up hush-money payments to adult film actress Stormy Daniels, as well as his defense against the two cases brought by special counsel Jack Smith: the one indicting him for trying to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and the one indicting him for retaining classified documents after leaving office.
Since he took over for former attorney general Pam Bondi, Blanche has openly flouted the law in order to do Trump’s bidding. He secured indictments against people Trump perceives to be enemies, including former FBI director James Comey for posting on Instagram a picture of seashells arranged to form the number “8647.”
He backed the deal Trump made with the Department of Justice to establish a $1.776 billion slush fund to pay off those convicted of committing crimes surrounding Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election, including storming the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Blanche put his name to the second half of that deal that seems to be being eclipsed by the slush fund: an agreement between Trump and the Department of Justice promising to drop any pending claims against Trump, his oldest sons, or the Trump Organization for past illegalities in tax returns, and promising not to conduct audits of Trump’s tax returns.
In the 1920s, gangster Al Capone kept his hands clean of direct evidence of the crimes he committed. The federal government finally took him down by convicting him of federal income tax evasion.
Trump’s nomination of Blanche directly challenges Republican senators to collude with him to flout the will of rank-and-file Republicans and break the law. In November 2025 the Senate voted unanimously to pass the Epstein Files Transparency Act. This law required the Department of Justice to release all the files compiled by the FBI in its investigation of sex offender Jeffrey Epstein no later than December 19, 2025.
The Department of Justice has ignored that law. To date, it has released about half the files. Many of those it has released are heavily redacted although the law expressly prohibits such redactions. Instead, the Department of Justice released previously unknown names of Epstein survivors.
Mike Spector and Lindo So of Reuters reported yesterday that those survivors are now under threat from Trump supporters. “She’ll be unalived,” someone wrote under a news report of an accuser demanding the release of the files. “She really should’ve stayed quiet. RIP.”
In her testimony before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Bondi told members of Congress that Blanche “was in charge of the process and the entire release of the Epstein files.” Bondi also said that she had “nothing to do with” the transfer of Epstein’s associate Ghislaine Maxwell, a convicted sex offender, from prison to a minimum security camp. As Annie Grayer, M.J. Lee, Paula Reid, and Marshall Cohen of CNN reported, that transfer happened just after Blanche interviewed Maxwell for nine hours.
In that interview, Maxwell said nothing that would tie Trump to Epstein’s crimes, language Trump loyalists used to push back against the story reported just weeks before by Khadeeja Safdar and Joe Palazzolo in the Wall Street Journal that what appears to be Trump’s signature is at the bottom of a birthday card to Epstein suggesting the two shared a “wonderful secret.” The words were written over a drawing of a naked girl.
MAGA Republicans supported Trump in 2024 because he promised to release the Epstein files, and Senate Republicans responded to their anger that the Trump administration was hiding those files by voting unanimously to require—not request—their release. Now Trump is demanding they abandon those voters to put the man behind that cover-up into office as the top law enforcement officer in the country.
As David Kurtz of Talking Points Memo explained today, if Republican senators confirm Blanche, they will be rubber-stamping Trump’s perversion of the Department of Justice and encouraging it to continue, blessing “wide-ranging and extreme” corruption. “No accountability, no roadblocks, no pumping the brakes.”
That rubber stamp on criminality would fall just as the corruption of the administration has become too obvious to pretend doesn’t exist.
New stories out today examine new aspects of that corruption.
Joshua Kaplan, Justin Elliott, and Alex Mierjeski of ProPublica reported that an Indian billionaire appears to have gotten Trump to ease sanctions against his family’s energy empire by investing $100 million in a Texas start-up company in which Donald Trump Jr. is an investor.
Upon the Ambani family’s investment in America First Refining, the start-up secured beneficial U.S. policies for which it had been lobbying. The journalists report that longstanding problems with the company make it unlikely that the refinery America First has promised will ever get built, especially at a time when refineries are expensive and unprofitable.
The journalists note that it has become “a theme of Trump’s second term: overseas investors with interests before the administration putting money into the Trump family’s business interests.” Last December, looking only at publicly disclosed investments—the one the journalists uncovered today was secret—Forbes estimated that Don Jr.’s net worth had jumped from about $50 million to about $300 million since the 2024 election.
In Mother Jones today, scholar of corruption Casey Michel explored the many connections between Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and Middle East billionaires who have invested billions in his investment fund Affinity Partners, essentially buying access to the president and U.S. policymaking even as the inexperienced Kushner represents the U.S. in sensitive negotiations in the region.
Kushner’s plans include a deal for a $1.6 billion tourist resort in Albania along a stretch of coastline and a pristine island protected as a critical area of biodiversity. Critics claim Prime Minister Edi Rama backed the Affinity Partners project to curry favor with the Trump administration. Protesters have taken to the streets in Albania’s capital, Tirana, chanting “Albania is not for sale!” and calling for Rama’s resignation.
White House press spokesperson Anna Kelly told Mithil Aggarwal, Raf Sanchez, and Mo Abbas of NBC News that Kushner is a “volunteer” for the government and that his business activities “have nothing to do with the President or the administration.” Asked if Rama’s government had backed the project to gain favor with Trump, she said: “This is the same, tired narrative that Democrats have pushed against President Trump, his family, and his administration for a decade.”
An investigation by Tom Bergin, Michelle Conlin, Koh Gui Qing, and Tom Wilson of Reuters today shows that the Trump family has made at least $2.3 billion in their crypto currency licensing adventures since Trump began his second term. It also shows that more than a million people who invested in their enterprises have suffered at least $2.3 billion in losses.
The journalists report that the investors they interviewed believed that Trump’s position as president and “what they perceived as his business acumen” guaranteed they would make money. “Some said they still hold on to the hope that Trump will make things right. Others expressed regret, anger and embarrassment.”
Trump and MAGA Republicans celebrated the model of governance used by prime minister of Hungary Viktor Orbán during his 16 years in power, calling for the U.S. government to mimic his rejection of immigration, undermining of the rule of law, and destruction of liberal democracy in favor of what Orbán called “illiberal democracy” or “Christian democracy.”
After voters threw out Orbán and his party with a supermajority that would empower the country’s new leaders to investigate their predecessors, the extraordinary corruption is coming to light. Marton Dunai of the Financial Times reported today that tracking the financial transactions of the Orbán government has shown that it siphoned off at least 160 billion euros, equivalent to about $185 billion dollars, from European Union funds, with the corruption peaking in Orbán’s last year in office as loyalists worked to grab what they could as Orbán’s power was crumbling.
But, as Andrew Higgins and Lili Rutai reported in the New York Times just before the election that swept Orbán and his party out of power, many Orbán loyalists jumped ship. Although they risked government persecution from Orbán should he win reelection, they took the gamble that the future belonged not to him but to his opponents.
Trump appears to be trying to prevent such defections in the ranks of the Republican senators by forcing them to confirm Blanche, thus rubber-stamping his perversion of the rule of law and joining him in his utter disregard of the demand of Republican voters for the release of the Epstein files.
There may well be an effort to downplay the Blanche confirmation process, but make no mistake: it is a very big deal indeed.
So folks in this area continue to discuss the CA-40 congressional race, which was pretty much designed under Prop 50 terms to result in two Republicans battling to the death inside a steel cage with hamsters, cheeseburgers and those miniature Slurpees everyone loves.
Wait.
Where was I?
Right—CA-40. So the latest results have been offered up, and they’re pretty interesting …
First, because we’ve predictably wound up with the two leading Republicans, who will (truly) use the next four months to spend millions of dollars beating one another up with mailings that will drive all of us to drink.
Second, it’ll be fascinating to watch Young Kim now shift back from I-love-MAGA! to I’m-the-centrist-y’all-love! now that the primary is over and she needs to woo … us. To quote KISS, “I’ve gotta laugh, because I know I’m gonna die.” Like, it’s actually funny, in that pathetic sort of way.
Third, Joe Kerr has landed 16,491 votes. And since I’ve promised y’all that the lead Democrat’s name will never again appear on this site, I’ll just say … hmm … the LA Interloper Ice Cream Truck Person of Interest Who Continues to Blather Incoherently on Instagram at a Staggering Pace should maybe stop solo-bashing Lisa Ramirez.
Hell, if I’m Ramirez and/or the LA Interloper Ice Cream Truck Person of Interest Who Continues to Blather Incoherently on Instagram at a Staggering Pace, I look at Kerr’s totals and think, “Why, Joe? Why?”
And I’m not mad at Kerr, because (truly) this district was created for Republicans to win. But, if we’re being honest, bro never had a realistic shot. And, if we’re also being honest, the majority of those 16,491 probably go to Lisa, not the LA Interloper Ice Cream Truck Person of Interest Who Continues to Blather Incoherently on Instagram at a Staggering Pace. Why, I’ll note that in the heat of the race, a Lisa supporter/political guru told me Kerr’s presence was profoundly hurting L.R., who lacked the LA Interloper Ice Cream Truck Person of Interest Who Continues to Blather Incoherently on Instagram at a Staggering Pace’s money, but dominated in likability and zest.
I don’t disagree.
•••
To be clear, Joe is a good dude. But also to be clear, going forward I’d like to see more of our candidates ask themselves, “What’s my purpose here?”
What I mean is, are you in it because running is fun and you’re bored? Are you in it because of ego? Are you in it because you want to make changes? Are you in it to make speeches? To eat free chicken? To legitimately win?
To enter politics, you have to have a big head. It’s true, and anyone who disagrees is likely a political figure with a big head. But, deep down, you also have to be able to self-assess and ask yourself the important questions.
Namely, can I triumph?
And, also namely, am I causing other decent people to lose?
Here’s a refresher on the story: People outside the constitutional convention in 1787 waited to hear what kind of government the members came up with. This was shortly after the revolution. What constitution we would have was being debated and it was not at all clear which kind would be chosen. Some wanted a very democratic system. Some wanted, not quite a king but a lifelong president who had very broad power. Some wanted essentially an aristocracy, allowing only the rich and powerful and well connected to be in positions of making decisions with very little influence from the people.
The story, probably made up later, was that when they were done and leaving the convention hall a woman asked Ben Franklin what kind of government the nation would have. His answer was, “A republic, if you can keep it”.
A “republic” meant a representative democracy. Representatives would make decisions but they would be selected by voters. Some current conservatives try to twist “republic” into meaning we should not be a democracy at all, but that’s not true and not what the members of the convention meant, by their own words.
But perhaps a better quote would have been, “A republic, if you want it”. After all, there had just been a strong disagreement within the convention because of those who wanted the public input as removed as possible from influence on the decision makers, being sure more democracy wouldn’t work. They thought either the public doesn’t know enough (always debatable) or it would be chaotic, or the majority would rule like a tyranny over minorities. That is minorities such as minority religions or any other groups not in the main. That’s why our constitution acknowledges rights, so even a minority religion or other group has freedom too.
But our nation’s history has always had a tension from those who don’t quite buy the idea of democracy. In any given time there are those who feel a strong leader or group would get things done better. That might mean allowing the top to indulge in some corruption, and might mean some rights are lost, but the idea is, that’s the only way to get things done. Actually trying to have democracy and all our rights fully enforced is too unwieldy and just doesn’t get things done. With our long Congressional stagnation you could see where people might feel that way.
There are also always those who are just greedy. On the large scale it’s those among the leaders of industry and finance who warp the system to their benefit without regard for how that conflicts with what voters want or with the peoples’ rights. On the small scale, consider white people during the Jim Crow era who supported it, because making black people work almost like slaves made whites richer and they liked that.
On a still smaller and more subtle scale there’s a form that has always been around and continues today. The idea, most promoted by Republicans, to minimize regulation so industry and finance can run unhindered. If that results in some people getting hurt by unsafe work conditions or unsafe products, well, that’s just the price that prosperity requires. Likewise the top-down, supply-side economics that focus on letting the rich maximize the gap between the wealthy and everyone else under the same rationale.
And how have Republicans, especially, but also too many Democrats, and others pushing the same ideas, how have those policies and leaders and office holders managed to keep those ideas going? Keep the votes often almost 50-50 on related issues? Because so many of us kind of agree. Yeah, that candidate might be more favorable to business owners than to unions, but if I vote for the other one who is pushing democracy and rights, we might keep those rights but be poorer, or so we’re told. But if I vote for the one favoring the rich, we might lose some protection of rights, we might end up with a bigger divide between the top and the rest, but maybe I can end up on the winning side of that divide.
It’s the same old trade off in different forms. The idea that it’s just not practical to have all that democracy and all those rights. It’s too unworkable. We should just accept that a certain amount of damage and corruption and unaccountable centralized power is the way things need to work. And too often too many of us tend to lean that way. That’s obvious in our most recent presidential election where a little over half the voters chose a corrupt, narcissistic, power hungry, abusive candidate who had tried to lead an insurrection to overthrow our democracy and rights once already.
So the question that should have been posed is not, “if you can keep it”. The question is, do enough of us lean that direction, favoring democracy and rights over partial authoritarian rule? The question to the woman and to the nation as a whole is not about keeping it. What it’s about is, “if you want it”. So, do enough of us even want it?
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I am traveling this week and don’t have time to write a serious post. Instead, I’ll provide a take that is probably stating the obvious, but I don’t recall reading elsewhere. And since it’s fairly short I’ll skip my normal practice and deliver two free posts in a row. First, a few facts:
The decades after WWII saw many cultural, political and economic changes. The birth control pill and the loosening of divorce laws. Feminism and civil rights. Rock and roll and drugs. Soft on crime policies and a sharply rising crime rate. The end of the gold price peg and soaring inflation. The welfare state and affirmative action. A dramatic expansion of (unfunded) Social Security benefits. Environmentalism and NIMBYism. The most important changes began during the 1960s.
The decades after WWII saw a notable baby boom, generally dated from 1946 to 1964. I was born in 1955, smack dab in the middle of that period. I am a typical baby boomer.
Now I’m going to say something that might be controversial but is obvious when you think about it. I am not personally to blame for all of the cultural, political and economic policy changes of the 1960s.
I say this because I frequently see boomers being blamed for every single ill in modern society. The peak period of change was roughly 1965, sometimes called “the liberal hour”. I was ten years old. Not a single baby boomer was out of their teens. If you wish to blame a generation for all the ills of modern society, please blame the Silent Generation and the Greatest Generation. They got rid of traditional morality and pushed divorce rates much higher. They put Social Security on an unsustainable path. They ended the gold price peg for the dollar. They created affirmative action and NIMBYism. The ended the death penalty. Heck, they even invented rock and roll.
I also see people suggest that boomers are the lucky generation. No, it is smaller generations that are lucky. Big generations face a highly competitive job market. In 1982, I was paid $19,700/year as an assistant professor, at a time when the unemployment rate was 10%. Even in real terms, starting salaries for young Gen X professors had moved far higher by the late 1990s and early 2000s. It was mostly the silent generation and perhaps a very few early boomers that left college and entered a strong job market during the 1960s.
Even worse, my generation entered the job market at a time when the feminist revolution shifted many women from being housewives to career women, so labor force growth was even higher than working age population growth:
Real wages stagnated in the 1970s and 1980s.
The Supreme Court’s “soft on crime” rulings in the 1960s and early 1970s were not made by boomer justices. The feminist revolution was led by silent generation types like Gloria Steinem. The population control movement was led by Paul Ehrlich, also a member of the silent generation. Martin Luther King was a member of the silent generation. Please don’t assume that things that happened during the baby boom (and even soon after) were caused by baby boomers. Last time I looked, Congress is not composed of young children:
The 1976 election was the first one where I could vote. I recall pundits being surprised by the substantial support for Gerald Ford in college areas, as younger voters were already starting to edge back toward the center. The student radicals of the 1960s were often silent generation members. In my hometown of Madison, the antiwar movement was led by Paul Soglin, who later become mayor. I thought of him as a boomer, but he was from the final year of the silent generation.
In my mind, rock music is associated with boomers. But rock and roll was developed in the mid-1950s, and even the second wave (Beatles, Beach Boys, the Stones, The Who, Dylan, Hendrix, Paul Simon, Lou Reed, etc.) were silent generation people. The film Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice nicely shows how silent generation members led the cultural change of the 1960s. The boomers just followed along.
I’m not saying that younger people should not despise the boomers, but please do so for the right reasons. Hate them for taking credit for innovative sixties pop music that was created by silent generation musicians. Hate them for their current selfishness on issues like NIMBYism and Social Security. Hate them for their hypocrisy—romanticizing their youthful adventures while opposing drug legalization. But please don’t hate us for all the changes that occurred during the 1960s (some of which were good, BTW.)
As an aside, inWhere the Music Had To Go, Jim Windolf points out that teenagers at Beatles concerts in 1964 screamed so hysterically that the music could not be heard, while older Dylan fans sat silently listening to acoustic folk music. So the terms “silent” and “boomer” fit these two generations in more ways than one. Windolf says that Dylan fans despised the “teenyboppers”, but does not say what Beatles fans thought of the folkies. Perhaps it was one of those “I don’t think about you at all” situations.
Time is continuous and the relationships between people and events are often not what they seem. Lines between generations are arbitrary. My mother was born June 7, 1926 (six days after another pretty lady), near the end of the Greatest Generation. But she was mostly in high school during WWII, so culturally she’s perhaps a bit like the Silent Generation. When she was a few days old, she was closer in time to the last days of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams (who both died on July 4, 1826) than to her current life. She’s experienced more than 40% of American history. For some reason that fact boggles my mind, as to me she’s sort of timeless, an eternal “mom”.
Happy 100th birthday.
PS. My favorite poster advertises a festival in Granada, Spain. Decades after I bought the poster, I noticed the date. Ever since, 1926 has been my favorite year:
The theme for this week’s episode is tick, tick, boom.
America is running out of time to catch up with China on manufacturing, and we’re physically incapable of spending an hour together without bringing it up. Release the glorious machines please!! We also go behind the scenes on Kylie’s reporting on motors and actuators — the unglamorous parts that sit in every joint of a humanoid robot, account for roughly 60% of what that robot costs to build, and come almost entirely from China. Her piece profiles the two startups trying to change that. Plus a new proposed bill out of Congress that would kick Unitree’s robot doggies to the curb.
Then the rockets send Ashlee off on his space tangents. Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin had an expensive mishap recently when an explosion took out the rocket, its launch pad, and possibly America’s dreams of beating China back to the moon. Ashlee walks through why a pad explosion can be a near-death moment for a rocket company, and why SpaceX — now flying roughly every two days while everyone else is grounded or behind — increasingly just wins by default. Plus the new Starfall capsule, SpaceX’s move into making medicine and maybe chips in orbit, and the wild logic behind a $1.77 trillion IPO.
We also got into the media drama consuming our X timeline: the firing of Scott Pelley from 60 Minutes. Ashlee tweeted an opinion, the trolls came for him hard, and he pleads his case here. We’re a little biased since, well, we’re off building this whole new-media thing ourselves. Will there still be a ticking clock and a man in a suit raking in views twenty years from now? Tune in for what we think, and leave your hot take in the comments.
The Core Memory podcast is on all major platforms and on our YouTube channel over here. If you like the show, please leave a review and tell your friends.
(Ed. Kylie - Don’t think I forgot to make you a playlist. “Lazy Eye” and “New Slang” were key to my college experience. I first crushed on Rivers Cuomo thanks to “Perfect Situation.” Listen to it here, and don’t forget to leave a comment to win tickets to their tour).
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Timestamps
00:00:00 – Intro
00:02:05 – The American Actuator Crisis
00:06:51 – WestMag vs. Atlas Motion Systems
00:14:21 – Uncle Sam Pays Attention
00:16:47 – Chinese Robot Ban
00:21:16 – A Robot in Every Home
00:24:29 – Are You AGI-pilled Yet?
00:27:23 – Shoutout to Micayla Sortland
00:31:01 – Blue Origin’s Explosive Launch
00:42:52 – Low Earth Orbit Drugs
00:49:42 – The Two-Trillion-Dollar Elon Bet
00:57:07 – Founders Fund’s Viral “Mafia” Game Night
Every modern presidential administration has issued fact sheets describing and, yes, discreetly touting its recent policy moves. But Trump’s minions don’t do discreet. Click on any of their fact sheets and this appears:
And if, in the midst of this “Golden Age”, someone should observe that Americans aren’t feeling so golden, and are in fact feeling very feeling negative about the economy, the Trumpist answer is that it’s all fake news. Kevin Hassett, the administration’s top economist, says that low consumer sentiment numbers are “being driven by Democrats who have Trump derangement syndrome.”
So it will be news to Hasset that rural whites – who are very Trumpy – have now fallen victim to Trump derangement syndrome. Or, more accurately, they are finally awakening to the nightmarish reality that Trump has created for them.
When I say that rural whites are very Trumpy, I mean very Trumpy. In 2024 Donald Trump narrowly won the popular vote, with only a 1.5 percentage point margin. But he won rural areas by 30 points.
Trump won rural areas by such a large margin because farmers were wildly optimistic about what he would do for them. The Purdue/CME Ag Economy Barometer, which is basically an index of farmers’ economic sentiment, surged with Trump’s victory:
Today, the rural Trump bump is nowhere to be seen. In fact, white rural voters’ views about Trump’s economic policy have turned astonishingly negative. Normally, partisanship strongly colors economic perceptions. According to a recent Fox News poll, only 29% of Americans approve of Trump’s handling of the economy, while 71% disapprove. Yet 60% of Republicans still approve.
Remarkably, however, rural white voters are no longer behaving like non-rural Republican voters. They are almost as negative on the economy as the population as a whole, with only 32% of rural whites approving of Trump’s handling of the economy, and 68% disapproving. Trump has made the rural economy so bad that reality has overridden Trump voters’ usual tendency to make excuses for him.
The unavoidable reality is that things are really very bad in rural America. Moreover, the devastation hitting the heartland is squarely a consequence of Trump’s actions and not, like the Biden inflation of 2021-22, a result of forces outside presidential control.
First, there is Trump’s trade war, which has raised the cost of living for all Americans. But farmers have been hit especially hard because they are highly dependent on imported inputs. The tariffs raised the prices of farm machinery, chemicals and fertilizer. The final straw was the loss of foreign markets to rival agricultural exporters such as Brazil -- losses that began during the trade wars of Trump’s first term and have accelerated during his second term:
In 2025 the damage to the American farm economy from Trumpian policies caused a 46% rise in farm bankruptcies. The carnage looks much worse this year: farmers are being hit with another double whammy from the effects of the Iran war.
Like Trump’s tariffs, the Iran war is hitting farmers both as consumers and as producers. Along with all Americans, they are facing an overall rise in the cost of living as a result of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Farmers are also suffering from a large increase in agricultural operating costs. For example, the crisis in the Strait has raised the price of diesel fuel, which runs most agricultural machinery, more than it has raised gasoline prices. In addition, there has been a sharp increase in the price of fertilizer because a significant share of the world’s supply comes from the Persian Gulf.
The carnage in the heartland raises the question of why rural whites so overwhelmingly believed that Trump would improve their lives. After all, Trump made no secret of his intention to pursue aggressive tariff policies that would start a global trade war. And U.S. agriculture is a highly globalized business. It sells much of what it produces overseas — for example, normally we export 40 percent or more of our soybean crop. Furthermore, it was entirely predictable that tariffs would raise the prices of farm machinery, chemicals and fertilizer.
It’s true that farmers didn’t know either that Trump would attack Iran or that he would botch the war so badly. But his indifference to the impact of his actions on ordinary people’s lives should have come as no surprise to anyone paying attention. When he said “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation” when making decisions about Iran, the news was that he admitted it, not that he felt that way.
Why, then, did rural Americans vote to return Trump to office? Obviously, culture war issues and racism played important roles. But it’s also clear in hindsight that rural whites weren’t willing to see their livelihoods destroyed in order to stick it to the liberals by voting for Trump. Instead, they fell for a fantasy, believing that by voting for Trump they could simultaneously own the libs and do well financially.
Instead, they have been betrayed: far from supporting a conservative vision of rural life, Trump is destroying their livelihoods with his vandalism.
How will rural voters respond to this betrayal? Recent polls show that the Senate race in Iowa, which Trump won by 13 points in 2024, is now effectively a tossup. The heartland may be awakening to reality, with immense political consequences.
Easy solution to slow down recursive AI self improvement:
The lab with the top-ranked model must agree THEY must not use it for working on frontier AI
But everyone else should have access to it.
By definition, this means the frontier doesn't advance.
It also has the critical benefit of avoiding a dangerous power imbalance.
Anthropic has chosen the opposite of the safe path: they are allowing themselves, the current top lab, to use their top model for frontier AI research. They've said they'll sabotage others who try.
This means the AI frontier advances, & power imbalance increases.
(To be clear, I don't think we should try to slow down recursive AI self improvement - I think we should open it up and democratize it as much as possible. My point is: if you claim we should slow down, and you have the best model, you should ensure your org can't use it.)
Jonathon Ready highlights one of the more eyebrow-raising details from the 319 page system card for Fable 5 and Mythos 5. Here's a longer excerpt, highlights mine:
In light of the ability of recent models to accelerate their own development, we’ve implemented new interventions that limit Claude’s effectiveness for requests targeting frontier LLM development (for example, on building pretraining pipelines, distributed training infrastructure, or ML accelerator design). Using Claude to develop competing models already violates our Terms of Service, but enforcing this restriction through our safeguards avoids accelerating the actors most willing to violate these terms.
Unlike our interventions for cybersecurity, biology and chemistry, and distillation attempts, these safeguards will not be visible to the user. Fable 5 will not fall back to a different model. Instead, the safeguards will limit effectiveness through methods such as prompt modification, steering vectors, or parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT). These interventions will not affect the vast majority of coding work. We estimate they will impact ~0.03% of traffic, concentrated in fewer than 0.1% of organizations.
I believe this is the first time Anthropic have announced these kinds of silent interventions. The justification still feels pretty science-fiction to me - the linked article talks about "recursive self-improvement". I'm not at all keen on a model that silently corrupts its replies to questions about "ML accelerator design" purely to slow down research that might conflict with Anthropic's own goals!
Update: Anthropic walked back this policy in the face of widespread outrage from the research community.
I didn't have early access to today's Claude Fable 5 release, but I've spent the past ~5.5 hours putting it through its paces. My initial impressions are that this is something of a beast. It's slow, expensive and has been quite happily churning through everything I've thrown at it so far. As is frequently the case with current frontier models the challenge is finding tasks that it can't do.
First, let's review the key characteristics.
Anthropic claim that Claude Fable 5 offers the same performance as Claude Mythos 5, except with much more strict guardrails in place to prevent it being used for harmful things. Those guardrails trigger often enough that the Claude API has new mechanisms for letting you know when you hit them, and even has a new option to request it falls back to another model automatically if something gets rejected.
Claude Mythos 5 is out today as well, Anthropic say it "Shares Claude Fable 5's capabilities without the safety classifiers".
The models have a 1 million token context window, 128,000 maximum output tokens and a knowledge cut-off date of January 2026.
They are priced at twice the price of Claude Opus 4.5/4.6/4.7/4.8: $10/million input tokens and $50/million output tokens. There's no increase in price for longer context usage.
I don't have a reliable, comprehensive, and date-verified list of all of Simon Willison's open source projects, and I want to be honest about that rather than risk giving you inaccurate dates or fabricated entries.
Here's what I can tell you with reasonable confidence:
Well-known projects by Simon Willison:
LLM (~2023) – A command-line tool and Python library for interacting with large language models.
Datasette (~2017) – A tool for exploring and publishing data, probably his most prominent recent project.
sqlite-utils (~2018-2019) – A Python library and CLI tool for manipulating SQLite databases, often used alongside Datasette.
Django (2005) – He is one of the co-creators of the Django web framework, along with Adrian Holovaty, originally developed at the Lawrence Journal-World newspaper.
He also maintains a large ecosystem of Datasette plugins and many smaller utilities (often with names like shot-scraper, various *-to-sqlite tools for importing data, etc.).
That's not bad. Here's the start of the response for the exact same prompt from Fable 5 - both models were running without access to search:
I think you mean Simon Willison — the prolific open source developer, co-creator of Django, and creator of Datasette.
An important caveat upfront: a truly complete list isn't feasible. Simon Willison is famously prolific — he has published hundreds of repositories (Datasette alone has 100+ plugins, many written by him), and my knowledge has a cutoff date, so I'll be missing his most recent work. Below are his notable projects with approximate initial release dates, most recent first:
Notable projects (approximate dates)
files-to-prompt (April 2024) – concatenates files into a single prompt for LLMs
datasette-extract (2024) – plugin for extracting structured data using LLMs
LLM (May–June 2023) – CLI tool and Python library for interacting with large language models, plus a large ecosystem of plugins (llm-gpt4all, llm-mistral, llm-claude, etc., 2023 onward)
symbex (June 2023) – search Python code for symbols
ttok and strip-tags (May 2023) – CLI tools for token counting and HTML cleanup for LLM pipelines
datasette-lite (May 2022) – Datasette running entirely in the browser via WebAssembly/Pyodide
shot-scraper (March 2022) – automated website screenshots via Playwright
In the past I've stated that I don't care about how much models know - I want them to be able to manipulate text and code in useful ways and actively look up the information they need via search tools, not bake it into their weights.
But knowledge like this is a reasonably good proxy for model size - you can cram a whole lot more details about the world into a larger number of parameters.
Does knowing more stuff mean the model is better at the tasks we pose to it? I can certainly imagine how a coding model with deeper knowledge of modern libraries and patterns could crunch through coding tasks more effectively.
Is Fable really bigger than Opus? Anthropic haven't said anything about model size, so all we have are tea-leaves, but the speed, pricing and my own poking at its knowledge make me think that it's a large model. Maybe the largest yet from any vendor.
Using Fable in Claude.ai
Anthropic made Fable 5 available across all of their surfaces - the Claude.ai chat interface, Claude Code for web, Claude Code CLI and Claude Cowork as well. The model is available "until June 22nd" on the subscription plans (I'm on $100/month Max at the moment), after which it will be billed extra.
Claude.ai is often under-estimated. Since September 2025 every chat has had access to a full container environment to run code, including the ability to install additional packages and even clone repositories directly from GitHub.
Last week I released micropython-wasm, a Python library that uses wasmtime to run a custom build of MicroPython in WebAssembly to act as a sandbox for untrusted Python code.
I decided to see if Fable could upgrade that to running full Python instead. I started with this prompt:
Clone simonw/micropython-wasm from GitHub and research how this could use a full Python as opposed to MicroPython
Fable identified that it could use Brett Cannon's cpython-wasi-build builds for this, but was unable to download them itself due to environment restrictions.
So I grabbed the two zip files from that page and uploaded them to Claude:
Here's the Brett Cannon builds (python-3.zip, _build-python-3.zip as attachments)
And that was that. It churned away for a few minutes and got the entire thing working.
Part of the response included:
I tried the cleaner single-zip-stdlib approach to shrink the filesystem surface, but CPython's getpath bootstrap fails to find encodings from inside a zip without more prefix finessing — the directory-preopen approach works reliably, so that's what the PoC uses. The zip path is solvable but needs _PYTHONHOME/frozen-getpath work.
So I said:
Try a bit more at the single-zip-stdlib problem
Then a little later:
I want a wheel that has the whole system in it, the Python wrappers and the WASM files and the stdlibrary, so I can do uv run --with path-to-whl python -c "demo code"
Adding features to Datasette Agent and LLM using Claude Code
Before I'd realized it was Fable day, my stretch goal for today was to add a new feature to Datasette Agent: I wanted tool calls within that agent software to gain the ability to pause mid-execution and request approval directly from the user.
This felt like a suitably meaty task to throw at the new model.
Over the course of the day Fable not only solved that problem, it also identified and then implemented four issues in my underlying LLM library that would help support this kind of advanced pause-resume mechanism in tool calls.
It got everything working first using somewhat gnarly hacks, but the moment I told it that changes to LLM itself were in scope it set to work unraveling the hacks and turning them into supported features of LLM instead.
My stretch goal turned into LLM 0.32a3, almost entirely written by Fable. Here are the release notes:
Driven by the needs of Datasette Agent's human-in-the-loop ask_user() feature, made the following improvements to how tool calls work:
Tool implementations can declare a parameter named llm_tool_call in order to be passed the llm.ToolCall object for the current invocation. This allows them to access the current llm_tool_call.tool_call_id. See Accessing the tool call from inside a tool. #1480
Every tool call is now guaranteed a unique tool_call_id - providers that do not supply one get a synthesized tc_-prefixed ULID. #1481
Tools can raise a llm.PauseChain exception to cleanly pause the tool chain, useful for things like waiting for human approval. The exception propagates to the caller with .tool_call and .tool_results (completed sibling results) attached, and no model call is made with a placeholder result. See Pausing a chain from inside a tool. #1482
Failure semantics for concurrent tool execution: async sibling tool calls always run to completion before a pause or hook exception propagates. #1482
Chains can now resume from a messages= history ending in unresolved tool calls: the calls are executed through the normal before_call/after_call machinery before the first model call, skipping any that already have results. The execute_tool_calls() method also accepts a new optional tool_calls_list= argument for executing an explicit list of ToolCall objects in place of the calls requested by the response. See Resuming a chain with pending tool calls. #1482
Fixed a bug where the async tool executor silently dropped calls to tools not present in tools= - these now return Error: tool "..." does not exist results, matching the sync executor. #1483
I'm really impressed with the quality of API design, tests, code and documentation that Fable put together for this. I spent several hours on it today, but it feels like several days' worth of work.
How much I've spent
I recently started using AgentsView to help track my local LLM usage across all of the different coding agents. I published a TIL today about adding custom Fable pricing to that tool, which I expect will not be necessary in the very near future.
After setting the price, I ran this command to start a localhost web server to explore my usage:
uvx agentsview serve
Here's the treemap showing the breakdown of my Fable usage across various projects today:
I used $110.42 worth of tokens today, all as part of my $100/month subscription.
And some pelicans
I ran "Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle" against all five thinking effort levels with Fable.
Here are the results, including the token cost for each one:
That is the topic of my latest Free Press column. I will spare you the discussion of the AIs, but here is what I have to say about the humans:
I am here to tell you that there is no ghost in the machine. But perhaps more importantly, there is barely a “ghost” in your own human machine. “Are people conscious?” is a better and more scientifically plausible question than whether AIs are conscious.
If there is one near-universal tendency of humans, it is to attribute intent where none is present. Prehistoric humans anthropomorphized nature and attributed natural events to good and bad deities. These kinds of beliefs persist today, not only in the folk religions of the world, but in human obsessions with fortune tellers, tarot cards, and the supernatural…
If there is one systematic flaw that humans have, it is an excessive willingness to ascribe conscious intent and to anthropomorphize purely natural and material entities. It seems we are strongly disposed toward this bias.
Yet few of us are willing to examine what is perhaps the biggest and most significant way we make this mistake. When it comes to understanding ourselves, so many of us assume that “we are in charge.” We identify our phenomenological stream of consciousness with our actual selves, and treat that consciousness stream as the true decision maker.
The reality is that you—whatever we take that concept to mean—make most or maybe all of your actual decisions in parts of your brain that precede what you take to be the conscious choice. Among experts in neuroscience, this is not a controversial proposition. As brain surgeon Theodore Schwartz explained to me: “I do not think we have free will in the way that most people do. I think that our brains make decisions for us. We carry out those behaviors, and then we write a story that makes it into a logical timeline that makes us feel as if we were the ones, that there was a self that made that decision, whereas, in fact, that self didn’t really exist.”
…Sometimes I like to say that “I am only conscious at the margin.” Tongue in cheek, I will suggest that I am only conscious enough to avoid the self-contradiction of asserting that I am not conscious at all. I feel I am honest enough to just not be very impressed by my own flow of conscious awareness or its ability to perform complex calculations. Still, I recognize that it is all I have got, so I need to treasure it, however paltry it may be.
And by the way I do not think the AIs are conscious, no more than I believe in the Thunder God of Thor.
2. Denazification of the United States? Denazification actually consisted of: “…dissolution of Nazi organizations, licensing/control of new political organizations, individual classification by denazification tribunals, and temporary or permanent disabilities on voting, standing for office, party membership, officeholding, public speech professions, and public/private employment.”
Satellites have become essential infrastructure. Financial markets rely on their timing signals. Military operations depend on their communications and surveillance. Navigation, disaster response, logistics, climate monitoring, most systems that underpin […]
A Los Angeles-based startup has raised $5 million to fund an in-orbit computing demonstration next year, ahead of plans to deploy more than 100,000 orbital data centers to meet surging demand for AI infrastructure.
The share of Gross Domestic Income accruing to labor has been declining in recent decades while the share accruing to capital has been rising. In the graph below, I show labor compensation as a share of GDI (left axis). Labor share has indeed been trending down–some of this could be an artifact of the data, e.g. an increase in proprietor’s income (labor) mislabeled as capital income, more pass throughs and so forth—but for the purposes of this post I will accept that the labor share has declined. What does this mean?
The natural response is to think that because the share going to labor has fallen and the share going to capital has risen that there has been a transfer of income from labor to capital. That is possible but it is not the only interpretation and it does not follow mechanically from the share data.
I have also plotted total compensation to labor (in real terms) in the graph above and far from shrinking it is higher than ever and growing. Moreover the right axis is logged so you can also see that outside of recessions the growth rate of labor compensation looks quite steady (similar slope over time). (Labor compensation per member of the labor force is noisier but looks similar).
The recessions in 2008 and 2020 are worth noting because these are periods when the labor share was high and locally at a maximum! The reason, of course, is that GDI was shrinking in these periods more than labor compensation. In other words, capital takes a bigger hit than labor in a recession. This is a good reminder that a high share of GDI is not what workers most care about–a high absolute level of GDI is more important for the bottom line.
In short, the data are consistent—not proof of, but consistent with—a story in which capital has become more productive, raising output. More productive capital also raises the demand for labor, so while more of the new output goes to capital in the first instance, the pie is growing and labor’s absolute compensation has grown with it. Yes, if the shares had stayed constant and output had grown just as much, labor compensation would have been higher still. And if my grandmother had wheels, she would have been a bicycle.
"For generations, the world’s top horse breeders have carefully mixed bloodlines for temperament, strength, conformation and athleticism. Each new foal bore the promise of outperforming a carefully chosen set of parents. It isn’t quite natural selection, but it isn’t far off.
"Now the equestrian world might be hitting a plateau: exact genetic replicas of successful horses and ponies. In other words, clones.
...
"Polo player Adolfo Cambiaso, regarded by many in the sport as the greatest of all time, essentially created the sporthorse cloning industry when he made a slew of genetic copies of his best ponies, starting in the early 2000s—and began winning tournaments on them.
"In 2010, a clone of his champion mare Cuartetera sold at auction for $800,000, an eye-popping sum for a polo pony at the time
...
"Cloning is a controversial practice, but particularly so in horse sports. It is banned in thoroughbred racing and competitors in other disciplines are divided, with some saying it creates unrealistic expectations and stifles advances in breeding.
...
"The Fédération Equestre Internationale, the governing body for Olympic horse sports, banned clones from competition in 2007. But it reversed that decision in 2012 after determining they didn’t provide competitors with an unfair advantage, due to the myriad environmental factors that go into producing a champion, like parentage, training, the rider, the type of food it eats and even the shoes it wears.
...
"Buenos Aires-based Kheiron Biotech, an equine cloning company, produced around 400 cloned horses during the season that ended in February, mostly of various polo ponies. "
The Australian immigration system must exclude dickheads, bullshitters, and bludgers.
This post has been inspired by Joe Walker’s recent set of three exemplary interviews (Martin Parkinson (former Treasury, author of 2023 migration review), Mark Cully (historian), Mike Pezzullo (senior border official 2013-2023)) on the subject of immigration policy. This comes against a backdrop of growing scepticism within the West on current levels of immigration, concerns about integration, cultural compatibility, rising costs of living, straining public services and infrastructure, and the rapidly increasing popularity of hardline anti-immigration political parties who, in some cases, have already won defining majorities within the Western democratic system.
(As I publish this, protests are occurring in Ireland. I actually held off on publishing this for about a month in the hope I could drop it on an immigration slow news day, but it was not to be. This post is not about any specific recent event.)
My position, as an immigrant, is that I would like immigration systems to be successful and publicly supported at the highest possible sustainable rate. The question I’m here to ask is: what would a crazy awesome immigration policy in Australia look like that could enjoy majority support and work well for everyone?
Some people might argue that the existing system is perfect and ideal as it is and that the missing piece is either a misinformed or inadequately propagandised public. This sentiment is captured well in Bertolt Brecht’s poem:
“Would it not in that case Be simpler for the government To dissolve the people And elect another?”
Certainly one evolving challenge is that the general population, now exposed to a wide and broadening variety of information through fragmented social media, has developed much stronger mimetic resistance to astroturfed ideas. The standard of rigour and transparency necessary to convince the general public that certain policy measures purportedly enacted in their own best interest are in fact in their best interest is much higher than it ever was.
In order to be successful, a reformed immigration system would need to counter the growing contradictions and challenges of the existing one. If immigration has increased our living standards, why is it that housing, health care, education, and childcare are more unaffordable than ever? If immigrants commit crimes at a lower rate than the general population, why is it that the criminal statistics of immigrants in Australia are classified – knowledge about public safety that is literally illegal to know or disseminate? If immigrants are generally hardworking, contributive members of society, why is it that hospitals are breaking beneath the strain of the dependents of immigrants who are brought here late in life with exceedingly complex medical problems?
To put the answer up front: Australia should adopt transparent market-based mechanisms for determining permanent residency, and it should be based on age-calibrated minimum income tax contributions. The market can expose the necessary information on sufficient levels of cultural and economic integration in a way that a bureaucratic judgment system never can.
This is not selling Australian citizenship to the highest bidder. Under this proposal, a 35-year-old single migrant would qualify for permanent residency on a salary below what three-quarters of Australians their age earn. Rather than being elitist, it requires only a clear net positive contribution. This proposal just happens to be one that, for the first time in Australian history, would be capable of mathematically demonstrating that every new migrant adds wealth to Australia from the moment they arrive. Not on average, not after twenty years, but today, individually, verifiably. That is the unique political property of the architecture I describe below.
The current system can’t be patched
In his interview with Joe Walker, Martin Parkinson describes in some depth the complexity of the points-based immigration system. This points system is designed to guide immigration officers in making decisions as to whether particular immigrants can be accepted. The system, however, has not evolved substantially in more than 25 years and it is clear that on the most important metrics the point system is either saturated or is not sufficiently discriminative. Immigrants, both good and bad, understand that it’s a game and the game must be played.
One thing that came through to me in more than two hours of interview is the steadfast refusal of Martin Parkinson to discuss the potential value of a market-based system for resolving this problem, which is an interesting oversight from an economist that ran Treasury for three years. Instead we have endless discussion of wrangling between dozens of stakeholders, including employer bodies who want to increase immigration to push down wages of Australians and increase their margins, versus employee bodies who want to restrict access to labour through licensing and guild agreements to increase the scarcity of their constituents’ skills and drive up their wages. The result is poorly managed chaos that fails Australian-born citizens, poorly filters aspirational immigrants, and betrays the hopes of the more than two million “temporary migrants” who lack certainty about their future status.
Over and over, we are told, Australia suffers from fundamental labour shortages in certain skilled and unskilled trades for jobs that Australians simply can’t or won’t do – and this is despite more than 30% of contemporary Australians being born overseas! I don’t know if I believe this. I think that there are some known difficult, dirty, and dangerous jobs that are seen as socially undesirable, but I grew up in a relatively rural part of the Central Coast in the 1990s when nearly everyone, very few of whom were immigrants, did jobs like that. None of them were rich but pretty much all of them were able to afford housing, a car, health care, and education, often with large families. Employing a socially uncapitalized temporary immigrant underclass to clean toilets, change nappies, and slaughter animals might result in lower prices for those particular services but the economic imbalance just translates into higher prices that compensate in other parts of the economy, along with the moral cost of exploiting people with fewer choices.
The key attribute of market capitalism is that sustained shortages are impossible because prices will adjust to meet supply and demand. Cutting off access to entry-level or low skill jobs for Australians in preference for cheaper foreigners merely accelerates Australia’s path to a plantation economy that exports exclusively low margin commodities and must import, at the seller’s discretion, any other necessity. Australia is currently enduring the folly of this policy in securing access to such necessities as refined petroleum, but the principle holds in general and is unlikely to magically correct itself.
Markets are not perfect and money is not a measure of someone’s worth. However money is the mechanism by which we allocate labor and capital within our economic system because its finite nature forces users to collapse their preferences towards what they actually need rather than their stated preferences. Simply put, money aligns incentives towards mutually acceptable outcomes. We would all like to live in a world where the wealth of Australia was able to bring a high quality of living and modern health care to the billions of people worldwide who would benefit from it, but this is not the reality that we currently live in. As a result we must make choices, and a financial filter is transparent, non-discriminatory, and fair.
There is also a deeper point about what such a filter selects for, which I should make plainly. Sustained high earning in a modern economy requires impulse control, executive function, conscientiousness, the ability to cooperate within institutions, the willingness to defer gratification, the time horizon to make decisions whose payoff is years away. These are the traits Australians most want in fellow residents anyway. They are also traits the electorate is unable to test for explicitly without producing legally indefensible discrimination. A fiscal filter measures the result rather than the trait, and so it guarantees fairness in a way that is blind to nation of origin, race, gender, religion, and other protected characteristics.
The first leg: a fiscal filter: No Bludgers
The first leg of this proposal is that we deftly sidestep the concern or accusation within Western societies that immigrants have a tendency or a perverse incentive to become freeloaders in a system they didn’t build, by simply insisting that all prospective immigrants meet certain minimum taxation thresholds in order to be eligible for permanent residency and the utilisation of public benefits. These thresholds must necessarily exist on a sliding scale, based on age and on the number of prospective dependents to be brought in.
The whole point of this exercise is to maximize opportunities for high-quality immigrants in the most fair and transparent way possible. We are ensuring that we maintain Australia as a destination of preference for extremely talented international migrants. So it follows that a highly qualified 20-something who has many years of high productivity and good health ahead of them to contribute to the Australian system should face a lower set of hurdles than a similarly qualified 60-year-old who has far fewer years of productivity ahead of them, and who also wants to bring in their retired 80-year-old parents, who both happen to need new hips and treatment for cancer.
Younger children should receive a different treatment than retiree dependents as younger children ideally will grow up to become highly productive and contribute to our society in a way that retirees simply cannot. Note that this also creates the correct incentives around immigrants who would then work hard to up-skill in the Australian labour environment to earn the right to bring various family members into Australia. It could become a point of pride to immigrate as a solo migrant to Australia in your 20s and to learn and work and be promoted fast enough to bring your extended family in in your 30s. This mechanism also delegates needs-based triage of access to Australia and its carefully created and curated environment to the migrant families who would understand best who most needs them, instead of requiring immigration department officials to “say no to Nana” forever.
Of course Australia should remain open to migration for non-working people but as they are not paying income taxes, their material contribution to the Australian system would have to be levied at the point of entry in the form of some analogue to the US Gold Card.
In general, if an immigrant meets these minimum viable fiscal contribution thresholds, then their immigration status need not be tied to a particular employer, deleting any possibility of the coercion or exploitation that has become rampant in the US H-1B program.
I’ve included a table here with some numbers calibrated to present Australian GDP, derived from a present-value calculation using Treasury’s own service cost estimates and a 3% real discount rate. These numbers would have to be indexed to inflation, and accumulate for sponsored dependents. The mandatory waiver of Age Pension entitlement by new entrants is built into them. Without that single change, all the thresholds roughly double after age 60, because the pension is a $28,000 per year ongoing entitlement that no working-life tax record can outrun. Ensuring sustainability of the pension for existing citizens and PR holders is a separate conversation largely subsumed by superannuation. New migrants self-fund their retirements. That is the single largest fiscal lever in this proposal and it is the one that makes everything else feasible.
Table 1.
Age at entry
Annual tax for net-positive contribution
Implied gross salary
Percentile of full-time Australians their age
25
$6,000
$47,000
30th
35
$10,200
$61,000
24th
45
$19,200
$89,000
47th
55
$38,800
$147,000
81st
65 (Gold Card upfront)
$200,000 once
—
—
75 (Gold Card upfront)
$360,000 once
—
—
These numbers do not place an arbitrarily high bar. They will enable a rock-solid defence of the proposition that every immigrant to Australia, individually, is a net contributor to the system from the moment they arrive.
There is a general challenge to these fiscal hurdle schemes, which is adverse selection. They exclude prospective migrants who cannot afford the price of entry, but they include people who would still end up extracting more value than they pay on entry. A pay-as-you-go system can avoid this, but I still think it’s relatively straightforward to tally up the net costs of the total pool of migrants in some age cohort and set the price of admission accordingly. This approach also aligns incentives, because in order to expand access to immigration for retirees, Australia would need to enable innovation in the provision of, in particular, healthcare services, in order to improve service and lower costs.
Note also that this system does away with all the problems Parkinson describes around skilled labour, certifications, and points-based systems derived from industry boards complaining about skill shortages. In particular we no longer need public servants to attempt to arbitrate the quality or validity of job qualifications obtained from overseas institutions, nor to worry about the perverse incentives of Australian-based diploma mills that purport to offer a pathway to citizenship. We can admit all the foreign students we want. If they are able to land a job that pays a sufficiently high salary and they meet the tax threshold upon graduation, then great. If they don’t, then they may return to their home country. Universities must be compelled to publish statistics regarding the job market success of their students and curate their admissions and courses to match – once again aligning incentives while promoting fairness and transparency.
Who actually administers this
The most important feature of this proposal is what it doesn’t require. No Department of Salary Fraud Detection needs to be staffed. No new agency administers it. The verification mechanism is the Australian Taxation Office, which has decades of experience cross-matching declared income against observed consumption, and already operates the data infrastructure required. Salary deposits are direct-deposit only, which AUSTRAC already monitors under existing anti-money-laundering thresholds. Consumption audits, which check that a migrant declaring $300,000 in income does not, in fact, live like one declaring $100,000, are something the ATO does routinely for domestic tax fraud cases at this income level.
The fraud surface area in this architecture is microscopic. A wealthy migrant takes the Gold Card because it eliminates the entire ongoing-compliance question. A productive migrant meets the tax threshold genuinely. The salary-inflation kickback scheme that occurs to everyone as a theoretical attack (employer nominally pays $300,000, requires $200,000 cash kickback) requires committing ongoing AUSTRAC-detectable tax fraud against the Commonwealth while the migrant, who owns their visa and can resign at any moment, declines to do so. It is a strictly dominant strategy. Any employer demanding cost claw-back from a migrant, such as visa fees, sponsorship costs, or training bonds, commits a strict-liability criminal offense with personal jail time for named officers, not corporate fines that are just a cost of doing business. The system polices itself by aligning incentives.
What gets deleted is the entire scaffolding of the current architecture. Occupation lists go. The points test goes. Labour Market Testing goes. The Business Innovation and Investment Program (which Treasury’s own modeling shows costs $80,000 per migrant in lifetime fiscal impact) goes. State nomination quotas, Designated Area Migration Agreements, and Labour Agreements go. The Migration Agents Registration Authority and the ~7,000-strong, $1B-plus migration agent industry go. Skills assessments by industry bodies for migration purposes go. Approximately 60-70% of the Department of Home Affairs selection branch goes. Seven hundred pages of migration regulation collapse to one page of thresholds. The only parts that remain are key stakeholders with skin in the game.
The waiver tier
There is one mechanism worth allowing precisely because of the second-order consequences it produces.
Any migrant whose tax record falls below the threshold may elect to remain in Australia by permanently waiving access to Medicare, the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, Age Pension, NDIS, and means-tested welfare. In exchange, they hold mandatory catastrophic private insurance and pay cash at point of sale for any health and aged-care services they consume. They continue paying income tax, GST, and indirect taxes the same as everyone else. This is voluntary on both ends, as the alternative is exit.
The first purpose of this tier is to let migrants whose tax contribution is below threshold continue contributing to the economy without consuming public services. It also allows foreigners to access the Australian health care system on fair terms without resorting to impersonation of a resident friend or relative.
The second purpose, more important in the long run, is that a cohort of 50,000 to 200,000 cash-paying Australian residents creates a genuine price-discovery layer in dental, GP visits, elective surgery, aged care, and pharmaceuticals. None of these services currently trade at market prices in Australia, because Medicare and PBS set prices for around 70% of the volume. The waiver cohort produces the first genuine cash-pay healthcare market this country will have had in two generations. Once cash-pay infrastructure exists serving the waiver cohort, the question of whether existing Australian citizens should also be allowed to opt into faster, market-priced care becomes a live political question rather than a hypothetical one. This is how you actually deregulate healthcare in a country with a constitutional commitment to healthcare socialism. It takes 15-25 years and it is the only path that enables a graceful transition to a competitive, innovative healthcare model that has a hope of meeting Australia’s future needs without bankrupting the entire country.
The third purpose of the waiver tier is to encourage less productive migrants to self-deport. The system does not need to forcibly remove anyone. A migrant who cannot meet the tax threshold and does not want to pay cash for services chooses to leave. The architecture is voluntary, self-policing, and produces the right outcome at every margin without enforcement bureaucracy. The difference is that Australia is no longer spending vast quantities of treasure bribing non-contributive migrants to live here and consume services, wealth and opportunities that could be made available to team players. Does this make Australian migration relatively more hostile to prospective migrants who want to sit on their arse and get free money? Yes.
The medical, aged-care, and pharmacy lobbies may choose to fight the waiver tier harder than any other element of the proposal. That intensity is the signal that it’s the right idea – one receives the most flak when one is over the target.
Replace professional gatekeeping with insurance markets: No Bullshitters
Parkinson cites the figure of approximately 250,000 permanent residents admitted as skilled migrants who apparently cannot work in their assessed profession. His framing is that this is pure productivity loss. People we said were qualified who can’t get licensed by the relevant state board. The implied diagnosis is that the licensing bodies are creating bureaucratic obstacles that should be streamlined to bring these desperately needed skills into the workforce.
The true reading is harder. Stage 1 skills assessment is gameable: Engineers Australia’s Competency Demonstration Report for engineers from non-Washington-Accord countries is a self-written essay for which a thriving ghostwriting industry exists in Hyderabad and Lahore, among other places. AMC pass rates for international medical graduates run around 21-28%, compared to 67% for the UK’s equivalent PLAB exam and 68% for Canada’s NAC. AHPRA itself tiers source countries into “comparable” (UK, Ireland, US, Canada, Singapore, NZ) and “non-comparable,” which is an explicit admission that the visa-stage equivalence claim is false. A meaningful fraction of the 250,000 are people whose original credentials were lower-quality than the visa system pretended, and Stage 2 licensing is doing real work catching them.
The problem here is that on one hand, Australian licensing boards are running a protectionist, racist racket excluding genuinely qualified foreign professionals, and on the other hand, Australian licensing boards are protecting consumers from the potentially catastrophic consequences of insufficiently competent foreign practitioners who, if they can’t navigate the bureaucracy of Australian occupational licensing, sure as hell shouldn’t be building bridges, wiring houses, and performing heart transplants. As with many things, the truth lies somewhere in the middle, but how can we expect a political or bureaucratic process to adjudicate this correctly or fairly without real world information?
The right market-based solution is not some kind of bridging program funded by a levy on universities – yet another tax on productive parts of the economy. The right solution is to augment the bureaucratic licensing monopoly with an insurance market. Any foreign-trained doctor, engineer, accountant, or other regulated professional should be permitted to practice in Australia if they can obtain professional indemnity or malpractice insurance from an Australian carrier at a rate equivalent to that paid by an Australian-trained practitioner, then the licensing body must explicitly justify why they should not be allowed to practice. If they cannot obtain insurance without a large risk premium, then the matter speaks for itself.
This is elegant for several reasons. Insurers are in the business of pricing risk and making money. The insurance company has actual money on the line. They pay out when professionals harm their clients. They have actuarial data on outcomes. They have no protectionist incentive, unlike the AMA or the engineering institutions. They will assess each applicant individually, may require an examination or a period of supervised practice, may decline applicants whose credentials don’t actually translate. Most importantly, they have skin in the game in a way that AHPRA, Engineers Australia, and the specialist medical colleges manifestly do not. The market does the safety assessment, with real consequences for getting it wrong, and the protectionist guilds lose their gatekeeping monopoly overnight.
Applied to the 250,000: those whose qualifications and skills genuinely meet Australian standards will pass the insurance market test and begin practicing. Those who cannot, either because their credentials were inflated, because their training was inadequate, or because they are not actually competent at the work, will not be insured and will not practice. If they fail to meet the tax threshold in due course, they will either accept the waiver tier or leave. The system handles this without a single new bureaucratic process and without subsidising people who were never going to deliver the productivity their visa promised.
Holding the universities accountable
Australia is a rule-of-law country and migrants who came in good faith should not be the targets of accountability measures. But universities and their executives are not entitled to derive infinite income by arbitraging the Australian migration process. The international education sector has, for more than 25 years, operated as a migration laundromat with full institutional knowledge of what it was doing. Vice-Chancellor remuneration is explicitly tied to international enrolment growth. Marketing materials feature “pathway to PR” messaging the institutions know is misleading at the rates they are enrolling. The Senate’s 2023 interim report on the international education sector documented the migration-laundromat pattern, as did the Parkinson Review the same year, after a decade of sector lobbying had successfully suppressed similar findings in earlier reviews.
The first priority is to fix the system going forward. The following are some market-based proposals to align incentives between educational institutions and foreign students, who are otherwise ripe for exploitation.
Bonds posted by universities for each new international student, calibrated to the institution’s historical PR conversion rate. High-performing programs post negligible bonds; the diploma-mill segment posts bonds that make its current business model financially nonviable. Refundable to the student if they fail to qualify under the new system within four years of graduation.
Fixing incentives will induce the correct behaviour in university leadership, but in particularly egregious cases, we could explore personal clawback of executive remuneration tied to international enrolment growth metrics over the past decade where institution-level outcomes fell below documented standards. Royal Commission precedent.
Class actions under the Australian Consumer Law for material misrepresentation. Marketing materials of many institutions over the past decade meet the legal definition of material misrepresentation regarding likelihood of PR outcomes. This is purely prospective enforcement of existing law against actors who escaped enforcement through sector lobbying. The damages should flow to the affected students, not to the institutions.
There is no rule-of-law principle that requires the Australian taxpayer to continue indemnifying the universities and executives that built the laundromat.
The data Treasury refuses to publish
Denmark publishes, annually, the per-person net fiscal contribution of immigrants to Denmark broken down by country of origin. The publication is called Indvandreres nettobidrag til de offentlige finanser. It is read carefully by the Danish public, debated openly in parliament, and forms the empirical basis for a Danish migration policy that has shifted decisively over the past decade without producing the collapse in public consent that Australia has experienced.
Australia produces the equivalent data. The Multi-Agency Data Integration Project (MADIP) cross-links ATO records, Centrelink records, Medicare records, and visa records. Treasury’s FIONA model publishes fiscal-impact figures by visa category: Skilled Employer Sponsored at +$291k lifetime, Skilled Independent at +$205k, BIIP (business indication and investment program) at -$80k. Treasury does not publish the equivalent data by country of birth. The 2016 Productivity Commission report did not. The 2021 Treasury FIONA paper did not. The 2023 Parkinson Review did not.
This omission cannot be accidental. Treasury’s stated reason, when pressed, is “social cohesion concerns.” Translation: we believe the public would not handle the data well, and we have decided to protect them from it. This is paternalism dressed as prudence, and it is the proximate cause of the collapse in public trust in Australian migration policy. Voters can tell when they’re being bullshitted, and respond by withdrawing consent entirely.
Publish the data. The single most useful sentence to insert into Australian political discourse is: What does the data say? Followed by: Why isn’t it published?
The second leg: Housing-indexed migration limits
The second leg of the proposed system comes down to ensuring that immigration flows are calibrated to real-world Australian cost-of-living issues. We do this by aligning incentives between policymakers on issues pertaining to supply-side challenges in Australia and policymakers on issues pertaining to the demand side. To keep this conversation of a sensible length, we will constrain our discussion here to housing alone although a discussion around education, healthcare, and childcare is also worthy of consideration.
In any case, it is clear that the above-inflation increase in costs of service and care industries is driven largely by massive relative inflation of costs in housing, which in turn is driven by an imbalance between supply and demand. If all the houses cost more than a million dollars then no nurses, firefighters, police, or teachers can afford to live in a city.
It is no secret that housing prices in Australia have enjoyed, if that’s the right word, an unprecedented period of speculative expansion. The consequence is that younger Australians who are setting out are denied the possibility of home ownership. This in turn affects family formation rates and artificially depresses the birth rate in a way that endangers the long-term viability of Australian culture. Houses are not intrinsically productive and the material costs of houses are not that high. Yet the current Australian economy seems to expect that Australians should be willing to pour the vast bulk of their lifetime GDP into servicing enormous loans on structures that they cannot live without, instead of investing it in children and businesses.
Rough back-of-the-envelope math suggests that returning housing prices to a level that would sustain the ongoing social reproduction of Australian culture would require a doubling of current supply, a radical prescription that underlines the short-sightedness and near-hopelessness of the hole we’ve managed to dig for ourselves. Of course a sufficiently large correction to housing prices would be a severe economic blow to all current holders of equity tied up in the Australian housing market but this is probably the lesser of two evils, if the alternative is the extinction of children born in Australia.
In any case it is insane to admit half a million or a million migrants every year in a country that cannot build enough houses to contain them all. Therefore it is reasonably straightforward to ramp the threshold of admission based on taxation or a large visa fee to cap the total number of migrants per year to a level that is proportional to, and algorithmically determined by, the rate of expansion of housing supply, such that housing prices are on a trajectory to normalisation in an acceptably short time frame.
I suggest that total immigrant numbers be kept below 100,000 in any year in which housing prices increase faster than inflation and expand to a maximum of 500,000 a year in cases where housing prices are actually decreasing.
Table 2.
Year-on-year housing price change
Maximum permanent admissions
Rising > inflation
100,000
Rising at inflation
200,000
Stable in real terms
300,000
Falling 0-3% real
400,000
Falling > 3% real
500,000
This makes immigration policy counter-cyclical rather than the current pro-cyclical pattern, in which we admit the most people exactly when the country is least able to house them. It also creates a direct incentive for state and federal governments to attack housing supply constraints, because doing so unlocks higher migration numbers, which are popular with the business community and the universities. The alignment is in the right direction for the first time in 30 years.
There remains an unskilled labour question that the fiscal mechanism does not directly handle. The seasonal agriculture sector, parts of construction, and aged care all currently rely on migrant labour that would not clear the tax threshold. These sectors are currently exploiting desperate migrant labour as a shadow subsidy to keep prices artificially low. Letting prices rise to market clearing is the right answer. The Productivity Commission has said this for 30 years and been politely ignored every time. For the residual cases that are genuinely temporary, a PALM-equivalent guest-worker program (3-year maximum, no PR pathway, employer bonds against exploitation, mandatory return-home period) handles them transparently without pretending they’re on the path to permanent settlement.
The third leg: integrity and rule of law: No Dickheads
The third leg of the system is around social cohesion, integrity, and rule of law. The Australian immigration process requires every migrant to pledge the Australian Values Statement.
I confirm that I have read, or had explained to me, information provided by the Australian Government on Australian society and values.
I understand that Australian society values:
respect for the freedom and dignity of the individual;
freedom of religion (including the freedom not to follow a particular religion), freedom of speech, and freedom of association;
commitment to the rule of law, which means that all people are subject to the law and should obey it;
parliamentary democracy whereby our laws are determined by parliaments elected by the people, those laws being paramount and overriding any other inconsistent religious or secular “laws”;
equality of opportunity for all people, regardless of their gender, sexual orientation, age, disability, race, or national or ethnic origin;
a ‘fair go’ for all that embraces:
mutual respect;
tolerance;
compassion for those in need;
equality of opportunity for all;
the English language as the national language, and as an important unifying element of Australian society.
I undertake to conduct myself in accordance with these values of Australian society during my stay in Australia and to obey the laws of Australia.
I undertake to make reasonable efforts to learn the English language, if it is not my native language.
I understand that, if in the future I meet the legal qualifications for becoming an Australian citizen and my application is approved, I will need to pledge my loyalty to Australia and its people.
It is not very complicated, but it’s also equally clear that a minority of migrants to Australia are falsely pledging alignment with these classical liberal values and then aggressively importing ideologies of hate, violence, and extremism from distant lands already cursed by these terrible ideas.
How can it be that every prospective migrant to Australia is screened for adherence to fundamental liberal values, and yet survey work consistently finds a non-trivial minority of certain immigrant communities who, in private, do not in fact share those values? In his interview with Joe Walker, Mike Pezzullo observed that in relative terms the genuinely problematic cohort is very small but in absolute terms it has been large enough to produce repeated “incidents” on Australian soil. Where “incident” is a strange euphemism for repeated outrageous terrorist plots and attacks.
I don’t want to create an Australia that polices thought crime. At the same time we need to be mindful that the system is obviously being gamed and adherence to fundamental Australian values is currently not enforced.
Lying to an immigration officer is fraud. Residency obtained by false representation is voidable when the fraud is discovered. There is no provisional period after which a successful lie becomes safe. A university can rescind a PhD if it later discovers the data was fabricated, even decades later, because the degree was never validly earned in the first place. The same principle applies to permanent residency obtained by misrepresentation. If evidence emerges five, ten, or twenty-five years after admission that an applicant lied about their identity, qualifications, beliefs, history, or intentions, their residency is revoked and they are deported. There is no statute of limitations on fraud against the immigration system. This is not retrospective punishment. It is the recognition that the original grant was conditional on truthful representation and if the condition was never met, the grant is void. Even if they live in a marginal electorate.
Similarly, if an immigrant is admitted to Australia on a refugee visa claiming asylum from a foreign country and is subsequently found to have visited that country, that calls into question the validity of the initial claim. Residency revoked, deportation follows, and capacity is created for people with genuine need.
Criminal conduct fits the same frame. Temporary migrants and permanent residents who serve prison sentences in Australia must be deported on completion of their sentence. The threshold is a single sentence of meaningful length — Section 501 currently uses 12 months as the cutoff but that seems absurdly lenient to me, since it costs $160,000/year to house a prisoner. Migrants should respect and fear the Australian justice system. 95% of current migrants and millions of prospective migrants have no difficulty obeying basic laws. If you cannot stay out of prison in Australia, you are not entitled to permanent residency in Australia. There is no productive discussion to be had about whether prisons in a criminal migrant’s country of origin are worse than Australian prisons. It is not Australia’s responsibility to provide a more luxurious incarceration experience to people who have demonstrated they cannot live as law-abiding members of the community here. Why should we underfund schools and hospitals to house, feed and clothe criminals who came here illegally or under false pretenses and whose behaviour reveals no respect for their new home? We are not going to re-instantiate penal colonies!
To protect the ongoing political health and sustainability of the immigration program, we must hold all immigrants to high standards of personal integrity and contribution to Australian society. The mechanism is the existing Section 501 character test (preserved), the existing Australian Values Statement (strengthened from rhetorical declaration to substantive condition revocable on breach), the existing ASIO referral process for high-risk profiles, and a narrow extreme-position screen modelled on the equivalent US INA §212(a)(3) provisions — designated terrorist organisation membership, public advocacy of violent overthrow of democratic government, documented sectarian violence history. None of this requires racial or religious tests, all of which I would reject as both unjust and unnecessary.
The reason I treat this as a third leg rather than a first one is that the fiscal mechanism is doing most of the work the electorate cares about already. The traits the system selects for via the tax threshold are precisely those that are correlated with civic compatibility, and in a way that is far harder to fake than any declared-belief test. Once the architecture is right, the cohesion issues become a small residual rather than the dominant policy challenge.
What about the 2.3 million?
Approximately 2.3 million people are currently in Australia on temporary visas. The instinctive response of any policy proposal is to grandfather their existing pathway expectations under the old rules. I am not going to do that here. Grandfathering retroactively-failed visa policies onto the people currently caught in the resulting limbo is its own injustice, and running two parallel migration systems for 10-15 years is administratively absurd.
The new system must apply equally to everyone. Every current temporary visa holder is re-evaluated against the new criteria within a defined window, ending at the end of the first full financial year since enactment. If they meet the tax threshold for their age cohort, they receive permanent residency immediately and the bridging-visa machinery that currently traps them dissolves. If they don’t, they can purchase the Gold Card at the applicable price, accept the waiver tier, or leave. Most of the people currently in limbo would welcome the certainty, even those who don’t qualify outright. The existing system already deports people slowly and miserably through bridging-visa expiry; the new system does it quickly with clear, fair, transparent rules and a defined timeline.
A one-time regularisation window is offered to the estimated 60-100,000 undocumented residents on the same terms: meet the new threshold within the financial year and receive permanent residency, or exit.
The 250,000 stuck professionals discussed above are a subset of this population and handled by the same rule. Insurance-based licensing gives them a fair shot at practicing their nominal profession. If they can qualify under that and earn enough to meet the tax threshold, they get permanent residency. If they can’t, they don’t. Some significant fraction of this cohort were never going to be productive at their assessed skill level and the system that admitted them was lying about what their credentials meant. We are not going to spend Australian taxpayer money on trying to back fill an educational credential they purport to have already achieved and which is not available to regular Australian students. They go home, new immigrants get a shot.
This is harder than the grandfathering approach but cleaner, faster, and fairer. The people currently in limbo are paying the cost of the existing policy failure; they should be the first beneficiaries of the new policy clarity, not the last.
Conclusion
I don’t imagine for a second that this proposal will meet with thunderous applause and universal acclaim. Much of what it states is quite radical, if rigorously consequentialist. But opponents who scream the loudest may be found to be the greatest beneficiaries of the current system, which is unfair, unaffordable, and rapidly losing legitimacy.
This is not a system that promises to admit fewer migrants. It is a system that promises to admit better-matched migrants, transparently, on terms that the Australian electorate will recognise as fair, and at quantities calibrated to what the country can actually absorb. It captures for existing Australians the surplus value of access to one of the most desirable countries in the world, rather than leaving that surplus on the table for migration agents, diploma-mill universities, and exploitative employers to extract. It replaces credential-laundering bureaucracies with insurance markets that have actual skin in the game. It applies a single, clean set of rules to new applicants and the existing population alike, so that everyone knows where they stand. It doesn’t ask the taxpayers who have already paid for it once to pay yet again to clean up the mess.
Above all, it produces, for the first time in Australian history, a migration program that can mathematically defend the proposition that every new resident adds wealth to Australia from the moment they arrive. Not on average. Not after twenty years. Today, one by one, verifiably.
Australia is one of the best countries in the world to live in. We have built that, and we maintain it, at considerable cost. We are not obliged to be a sucker about it.
This was published in English (and Polish) in 1986 under the title One Human Minute:
So it was not humanoid automata that former the new armies but synthetic insects (synsects) — ceramic microcrustacea, titanium annelids, and flying pseudo-hymenoptera with nerve centers made of arsenic compounds and with stingers of heavy, fissionable elements…The flying synsect combined plane, pilot, and missile in one miniature whole. but the operating unit was the microarmy, which possessed superior combat effectiveness only as a whole (just as a colony of bees was an independent, surviving unit while a single bee was nothing).
…The nonliving, synthetic “locust” was incomparably more lethal, since it was made that way by its designers. It possessed a preprogrammed autonomy, so that communication with a command center was unnecessary.
…the microarmy was one giant flowing or flying aggregate of self-assembling elements. It started out dispersed, approaching its objective from many different directions, as strategy or tactics demanded, in order to concentrate into a preprogrammed whole on the battlefield. For this fighting material did not leave the factory in final shape, read for use, like tanks or guns loaded on a railroad flatcar; the mechanisms were microproductive blocks designed to fuse together into a war machine at the designated place. For this reason, such armies were called “self-bonding.”
…Amid a swarm of self-guided, programmed microarms, a man in uniform was as helpless as a Roman legionary with sword and shield against a hail of bullets. In the face of special types of biotropic microarms capable of destroying everything that lived, human beings had no choice but to abandone the battlefield, for they would be killed in seconds…
A microarmy could easily penetrate all systems of defense and go deep into enemy territory. It had no more trouble accomplishing this than did rain or snow. Meanwhile, high-powered nuclear weapons were proving more and more useless on the battlefield.
The Southern Patagonian Icefield is the largest expanse of ice in the Southern Hemisphere outside of Antarctica. The mass of glacial ice extends hundreds of kilometers along the spine of the Andes, feeding dozens of dynamic outlet glaciers that grind their way down from higher elevations. Many of these rivers of ice terminate in the sea or in proglacial lakes.
An astronaut aboard the International Space Station photographed one of these glaciers—Tyndall Glacier in southern Chile—through a layer of ethereal clouds on May 10, 2026. Fragments of ice that had calved off its terminus were visible floating on Lago Geikie.
Like most Patagonian glaciers, Tyndall has been shrinking since the end of the Little Ice Age about 150 years ago. Lago Geikie formed at Tyndall’s terminus around 1940, according to glaciologist Mauri Pelto of Nichols College, and gradually expanded as the ice retreated. Part of the glacier previously terminated in Lago Tyndall to the east, but thinning ice cut off that outlet by 2010, Pelto said. (The ice’s retreat also exposed bedrock along its eastern edge that contains scores of ichthyosaur fossils.)
Along with thinning, ice calving off the glacier’s front has reduced its volume. Tyndall has lost 2.2 kilometers (1.4 miles) in length since November 2022, Pelto said, following about a decade of limited retreat with considerable thinning. A significant calving event in March and April 2023 contributed to the recent uptick in ice retreat. During that time, satellites observed several large icebergs breaking away from Tyndall’s terminus.
Austral autumn in 2026 was a time of active calving retreat at Tyndall (and some neighboring glaciers), Pelto said, albeit more incremental than three years prior. “The substantial crevasses crisscrossing the glacier near the calving front lead to many smaller icebergs,” he said. On the other hand, larger tabular icebergs tend to form when there are fewer deep crevasses near the terminus and the glacier’s ice is thinner.
May 10, 2026
The ice cliff at the terminus casts a substantial shadow, which can help scientists estimate the height of the glacier’s front. Pelto’s calculations, using information about the Sun’s position provided with the image, indicate that Tyndall’s front loomed 30–40 meters (100–130 feet) above the lake surface in May 2026. Observations from orbit, including astronaut photographs, can help scientists monitor and understand glaciers in remote regions where ground-based observations are scarce.
As for what comes next for Tyndall, Pelto expects many more small icebergs to continue breaking off, given the heavily crevassed appearance of the calving front. “Look for a burst of iceberg production next fall.”
Astronaut photograph ISS074-E-582898 was acquired on May 10, 2026, with a Nikon Z9 digital camera using a focal length of 560 millimeters. It is provided by the ISS Crew Earth Observations Facility and the Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit at NASA Johnson Space Center. The image was taken by a member of the Expedition 74 crew. The image has been cropped and enhanced to improve contrast, and lens artifacts have been removed. The International Space Station Program supports the laboratory as part of the ISS National Lab to help astronauts take pictures of Earth that will be of the greatest value to scientists and the public, and to make those images freely available on the Internet. Additional images taken by astronauts and cosmonauts can be viewed at the NASA/JSC Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth. Story by Lindsey Doermann.
Republicans’ views of same-sex couples are now similar to what they were between 2005 and 2014.
Americans’ support for LGBTQ+ rights has slid downward after peaking in the early 2020s, according to a new Gallup poll.
Support for marriage equality has been steadily declining since it reached an all-time high of 71 percent in 2022.Now,65 percent of Americans believe same-sex marriages should be valid. Broader support for LGBTQ+ people also continues to dip: 62 percent of Americans believe that gay or lesbian relationships are morally acceptable, compared with 71 percent in 2022.
What’s changed? In the past five years, anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric has become a staple of both state and federal politics, as conservatives accuse queer and trans people of influencing children’s identities in schools, sports and hospitals. Politicians including President Donald Trump have spent millions on campaign ads attacking transgender people, while conservative groups and super PACs push out their own anti-LGBTQ+ ads. Nearly 50 organizations have launched a new campaign lobbying to end marriage equality, despite the Supreme Court showing little to no interest in revisiting its landmark 2015 ruling.
The dip in support for LGBTQ+ rights comes largely from Republicans. In 2021 and 2022, Gallup found that 55 percent of Republicans supported same-sex marriage, but now only 37 percent do. In 2022, over half of Republicans found gay or lesbian relationships to be morally acceptable; now 35 percent feel that way.
Other markers of LGBTQ+ acceptance are also waning: A recent study from the Williams Institute, a think tank at UCLA Law, found that HIV stigma has increased in recent years despite significant progress in treatment and prevention. More adults feel fear and blame toward people living with HIV than they did only a few years ago, and a higher share of adults have at least one stigmatizing belief about people with HIV. Conservatives expressed the most stigma.
According to Gallup, Republicans’ views of same-sex couples are similar to what they were between 2005 and 2014 — essentially turning back the clock on LGBTQ+ acceptance.
In a statement, the Human Rights Campaign, the country’s largest LGBTQ+ advocacy group, said that backlash against the LGBTQ+ community has had only limited success.
“Marriage equality is still backed by two-thirds of the American public, our federal protections are codified through the Respect for Marriage Act, and more than 800,000 same-sex couples are in loving marriages all across this country. This is exactly why Pride, our visibility, and our stories matter now more than ever. We will not let extremists define who we are or who we love,” said Jarred Keller, senior press secretary at the Human Rights Campaign.
These cultural shifts are also affecting how Pride month is recognized. This year, Republican governors across several states — including Indiana, Tennessee and Alabama — have rebranded June as a month to celebrate heterosexual marriage and families, the Associated Press reports. But those proclamations aren’t stopping local parties: In Birmingham, Nashville, and Indianapolis, Pride is already in full swing.
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Market Design
![Screenshot of a cost tracking dashboard with two panels. The first panel is titled "Cost Attribution" with toggle buttons for Project / Model / Agent and Treemap / List, with Project and Treemap selected. Italic text reads "Click to hide from chart". A treemap shows a large red block labeled prod_datasette_agent $99.26 89.9%, with smaller blocks to its right labeled cloud (blue), datasette (teal), llm (red), and money (pink), plus a tiny orange sliver. A legend lists: 1 prod_datasette_agent $99.26, 2 cloud $3.98, 3 datasette $2.81, 4 llm $2.30, 5 money $1.92, 6 simon $0.15. The second panel is titled "Top Sessions by Cost" and lists nine sessions, each with a "Claude" badge, a prompt excerpt, a project name with a session UUID (omitted here), a token count, and a cost: 1. Review ./datasette-agent and ./datasette-apps - we are going to add a new feature to agent but you ... prod_datasette_agent, 78.2M, $99.26. 2. issues.db is a copy of the Datasette issues database. There are a LOT of notes in there relating to... datasette, 826.8k, $2.81. 3. Consult fly-docs and then look at datasette.cloud (which launches fly machines) and datasettecloud-... cloud, 924.7k, $2.61. 4. simonwillisonblog.db is a copy of my blog, plus all my software releases and other interesting thin... money, 542.9k, $1.92. 5. Look in datasette.cloud and figure out all remaining steps and decisions that need to be made in or... cloud, 455k, $1.37. 6. Review PRs and issues filed against this repo within the last 4 weeks and see if any deserve to be ... llm, 323.3k, $0.95. 7. run mypy, llm, 320.9k, $0.76. 8. [Image #1] fix this in github actions, llm, 183.9k, $0.59. 9. simon, simon, 26.4k, $0.15.](https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2026/agentsview-fable-full-day.jpg)
Casey Handmer's blog
