Transplantation of deceased-donor organs has made us rethink the notion of death itself. What does it mean that a person is dead, while organs are still sufficiently alive to be transplanted? In particular, if death is declared due to cessation of heartbeat, what does it mean if the heart can be transplanted and re-started in another patient's body? Does it mean the donor wasn't really dead?
These questions were very front of mind when heart transplants first began in the late 1960's. Those debates were resolved by the legal recognition of brain death, so that a patient could be recognized as dead while still having a heartbeat. And for years, most deceased donation occurred after brain death. But these issues are once again controversial, as transplants of all organs are growing not just after brain death, but increasingly from Donation after Circulatory Death (DCD).
Vox has the (long but very clearly written) story:
"In the last decade, DCD has gone from a rare practice to something that now accounts for nearly half of all organ donors who have died in the United States. In 2000, DCD donors supplied just 219 organs (kidneys, livers, lungs, hearts, and pancreas combined) to the transplantation system in the US. In 2025, DCD brought in close to 17,000 organs. (Most transplanted organs, about 85 percent, come from dead donors, though some organs, most often kidneys, can also come from living donors.)
"That growth has saved lives, but it has also pushed transplant medicine into an unusually sensitive moment: the time after a family has decided to let their loved one die but before death has actually occurred.
"In brain-death donation, a patient has already been declared dead before the possibility of donation is raised with the family. Because most brain-dead donors are on ventilators, with machines supplying oxygenated blood to their organs, transplant teams can take their time with the donation process.
"DCD doesn’t offer that same cushion. Because organs deteriorate so quickly after circulation ceases, the work of donation — the testing, matching, surgical teams flying in — has to be set in motion once the family has decided to withdraw life support but before the patient has died.
"This is where the tension in DCD begins. The process pushes transplantation into the narrow interval between that decision to let someone die and the moment death occurs. It creates a situation with almost no parallel in medicine: one set of hands caring for the dying, even as another prepares to recover and transplant their organs."
Zwick and Zidar argue that a substantial share of the decline in labor share can be accounted for by changing forms of pay, including pass-throughs and equtiy compensation. In particular, if an employee is paid in stock and that stock increases in value then the tax rules tend to count some of that as capital income (depending on when the capital gains occur) rather than as labor income. Zwick and Zidar point us to Human Capitalists for the details:
Human capitalists are corporate employees who receive significant equity-based compensation such as equity grants and stock options. These employees are partial owners of US firms, and in return for their human capital input, human capitalists accrue a share of firm profits through firm dividends and capital gains in addition to earning wages. We document the stylized facts describing the evolution of human capitalists’ income over time and across industries within the US manufacturing sector.1 Human capitalists have become an increasingly important class of corporate income earners. Due to measurement challenges, prior work has underestimated the importance of equity pay below the C-suite. Correctly measuring the total income of human capitalists substantially alters conclusions about changes in factor shares and technological complementarity.
Equity-based compensation represents 36% of compensation to human capitalists from 2010 to 2019 and constitutes a 7% share of value added in the manufacturing sector in 2019. Correctly accounting for the total income earned by high-skilled workers has a substantial effect on measured changes in labor shares over the modern era. The addition of equity pay to cash wages reduces the decline implied by the wage-only income share of value added in manufacturing since the 1980s by 32%. Without including equity pay, high-skilled labor’s share decreased from 17% in the 1980s to 11% in the most recent decade. The inclusion of equity-based compensation almost eliminates this decline. The high-skilled share of total labor income increases from one-third at the beginning of the 1960s to two-thirds in the 2010s when equity-based compensation is included.
Even though Germany privatized Deutsche Telekom in 1996, the federal government retained a substantial ownership stake. This partial state ownership status, which remains to this day, presents a textbook example of how this type of arrangement distorts incentives and delays the competitive dynamism necessary for technological progress.
Through the late 1990s and into the 2000s, Deutsche Telekom was buttressed by its privileged position and implicit government backing and leveraged this support to resist infrastructure competition. Rather than aggressively deploying broadband in order to compete with rivals, the company lobbied for regulatory arrangements that protected its legacy copper network. As a result, Germany—one of the world’s largest economies and a hub of engineering excellence—consistently trailed other European competitors in broadband deployment. To see German broadband stagnate while the competitive markets in Scandinavia and other European countries surged ahead was particularly jarring, as Germany had directly linked its economy to workplace digitization.
Germany’s broadband woes did not result from a lack of capital or engineering talent at Deutsche Telekom. Instead, government ownership produced a fundamental alteration of the company’s incentive structure. With state backing, Deutsche Telekom had fewer reasons to take risks, cannibalize its own infrastructure, or accept short-term losses in favor of long-term technological leadership and more reasons to cultivate political relationships that protected their existing revenue streams. This dynamic is reliably produced by partial government ownership of private companies.
For a decade, we have explained the retreat from the public internet using Yancey Strickler’s Dark Forest Theory. People withdrew into smaller, quieter spaces because speaking in public became dangerous. Search, recommendation systems, surveillance capitalism, culture wars, and cancellation dynamics transformed the public sphere into a hostile environment. The resulting cozyweb—private group chats, Discords, Slacks, newsletters, encrypted messaging groups, invite-only communities—was understood as a strategic adaptation. The public remained a single connected universe. People simply stopped talking across it.
This picture no longer fits.
The cozyweb has ceased to be merely hidden. It is becoming causally disconnected. The public internet is no longer a hostile commons shared by everyone. It is increasingly the empty space separating an archipelago of informational black holes. The Dark Forest is transforming into the Dead Forest.
Sloptraptions is an AI-assisted opt-in section of the Contraptions Newsletter. If you only want my hand-crafted writing, you can unsubscribe from this section.
A dark forest is still one forest. Signals travel. Creatures remain connected by the possibility of encounter. Silence is strategic. The Dead Forest begins where the silence becomes irreversible. The inhabitants are no longer choosing not to speak across the public sphere. Increasingly, they cannot speak.
The defining feature of a black hole is not infinite density but the existence of an event horizon: a boundary across which causal influence becomes one-way. Once crossed, no signal returns. Outbound communication is not forbidden or unwise. It is impossible.
A mature cozy community increasingly resembles such an object. Its defining characteristic is not privacy but inaccessible interiority. It possesses an evolving local culture, cadence, trust structure, hierarchy of attention, stock of shared assumptions, repertoire of jokes, vocabulary, and ongoing history that cannot be reconstructed from outside observation. These are not simply hidden facts. They constitute a living dynamical state. To understand them requires inhabiting them. Outsiders may observe artifacts, but they do not share the community’s present.
Crossing into such a community is therefore not simply gaining access to more information. It is crossing into another causal universe.
This is why the metaphor of secrecy has become inadequate. Secrets can be revealed. Documents can leak. Membership lists can become public. Event horizons are different. What lies beyond them is not a collection of hidden documents but a continuing history. The defining loss is not information but contemporaneity. Outsiders no longer participate in the same unfolding present.
This mixed metaphor of an arborescent digital cosmos entering its death-arc phase of evolution immediately clarifies several otherwise puzzling features of the contemporary internet.
***
The first is the accretion disk. Every black hole is surrounded by a liminal region where matter has not yet fallen across the horizon but is already gravitationally bound to it. This is where enormous amounts of observable activity occur. The accretion disk is the liminal zone.
The modern public internet increasingly consists of such liminal objects.
Books. Conference talks. Substack essays. Open-source repositories. Journalistic profiles. Podcasts. Public talks. Screenshots. Occasional bridges built by individuals who inhabit multiple communities simultaneously. These are not the interior life of cozy communities. They are matter orbiting their boundaries. They remain visible precisely because they have not crossed the horizon. Some eventually escape into the broader public. Some spiral inward and disappear forever. Most spend long periods circling the boundary between publicity and interiority.
A common mistake is to confuse the accretion disk for the black hole itself. Increasingly, the public mistakes public-facing artifacts for communities. But the relationship resembles that between sunlight reflected off an accretion disk and the interior of a black hole. One cannot infer the character of one from the other.
The second feature is what might be called zombie public life.
If the living public has largely collapsed into compact informational objects, why does the public sphere still appear so active? Because visibility has become detached from shared reality.
Politics, celebrity, institutional media, brands, influencers, and platform-native personalities continue to generate immense volumes of public content. But much of this activity no longer serves the historical function of public discourse: creating common knowledge among strangers. Instead, it functions as a perpetual visibility engine. Attention circulates. Narratives recycle. Audiences become increasingly parasocial. Public performance continues while public life gradually disappears.
Zombie publics are highly visible precisely because they possess relatively little interiority. They are optimized for outward radiation rather than inward development.
The third feature is artificial intelligence.
The emergence of large language models has often been interpreted as the culmination of the public internet. It is almost the opposite.
Black holes are not entirely black. Quantum mechanically, they emit Hawking radiation. This radiation does not consist of messages sent from beyond the event horizon. It is the long thermodynamic aftermath of gravitational collapse itself.
Artificial intelligence increasingly occupies an analogous role: That of a thermalized fossil public.
Its training corpus consists overwhelmingly of the accumulated public internet that existed before blackholification reached its present stage: books, websites, Wikipedia, blogs, forums, public code repositories, digitized archives, public conversations, and institutional documents. Models continuously remix this material into fluent statistical syntheses. They possess extraordinary knowledge of the fossil public.
What they fundamentally lack access to is the living interiority of today’s blackholifying cozyweb.
This is not a temporary engineering limitation. It is a consequence of the causal geometry. The defining conversations of mature communities increasingly occur beyond event horizons inaccessible to public observation. AI therefore becomes the thermalization of the fossil public: the ambient informational glow emitted by a civilization whose most vital conversations have already disappeared into causally disconnected interiors.
This also explains why AI often feels strangely omniscient yet oddly lifeless. It has absorbed the archaeological record of public civilization while remaining largely excluded from its present tense.
This distinction also clarifies the status of genuine leaks. Screenshots from private Discords, leaked Slack logs, internal documents, accidental recordings, whistleblower disclosures—these are not Hawking radiation. They are better understood as fragments of the surrounding black-hole system that never fully crossed the horizon: material lingering in unstable orbit within the accretion disk, occasionally perturbed outward before finally disappearing. They are exceptional precisely because they do not violate the causal integrity of the interior, and can be flexibly narrativized in ways entirely disconnected from the interior narrative. The event horizon remains intact.
Taken together, these three phenomena define the observable universe of the Dead Forest.
First, the thermalized fossil public continuously recirculated by artificial intelligence.
Second, the liminal accretion disks of boundary objects orbiting living communities.
Third, the zombie public whose endless performances preserve visibility while generating progressively less shared reality.
What is conspicuously absent is the thing that once defined the internet itself: a common causal manifold in which strangers could reliably become contemporaries through public communication.
The internet has not become private. It is dying with cosmological grandeur.
The public did not disappear because everyone retreated into private spaces. It disappeared because those spaces underwent gravitational collapse into compact worlds whose interior histories increasingly belong only to themselves. We still observe their radiation. We still see the debris orbiting their boundaries. We still mistake the theater of zombie publicity for public life.
But we no longer inhabit a universe in which the public is the primary medium through which reality is jointly constructed and enacted.
The Dead Forest is what remains after the public has collapsed into black holes.
***
The Dead Forest did not emerge because a new force entered history. It emerged because the forces that produced the Dark Forest were allowed to operate uninterrupted until they exhausted the geometry of the public sphere itself.
The original diagnosis remains largely intact.
Search dissolved into recommendation. Recommendation dissolved into algorithmic manipulation. Surveillance capitalism transformed every public utterance into extractable behavioral data. Culture-war dynamics converted visibility into permanent reputational exposure. Institutions lost the capacity to sustain neutral public ground. Politics ceased to be one domain among many and became the organizing logic of nearly every public conversation. Social media steadily rewarded identities optimized for conflict rather than curiosity. The internet of beefs expanded until it ceased to be merely an internet phenomenon and became a general model for social life.
The cozyweb was the rational adaptation.
People withdrew into smaller spaces where trust could once again be accumulated rather than continuously spent. Communities became increasingly bounded, invitation-based, contextual, and difficult to search or index. Public writing increasingly served not as participation in a common discourse but as boundary maintenance, recruitment, diplomacy, fundraising, publishing, or reputation management on behalf of private interiors.
The public sphere was no longer where life happened. It became where communities advertised their existence.
Nothing fundamentally changed after this decade-old diagnosis. No creative response took shape to check it. The dynamics simply continued unchecked as the no-treatment prognosis suggested. Cozy spaces simply accumulated enough cultural matter to undergo gravitational collapse.
COVID accelerated the migration of meaningful relationships into digitally mediated private spaces. Remote work replaced organizational corridors with Slack workspaces. Institutions weakened further while informal affinity networks strengthened. The second Trump era completed the normalization of permanent political mobilization as the background condition of public life. Meanwhile, every advance in generative AI increased the economic value of public text while simultaneously reducing the incentive to produce genuinely new public writing. The public web became both more extractable and less generative.
The result was not a new equilibrium but a phase transition.
Dark Forest Theory described a world in which everyone remained connected but increasingly chose silence. Dead Forest Theory describes the world after enough silence has accumulated that the public itself loses coherence as a shared causal medium.
AI did not produce this transition. It merely paved the dead cowpaths. Large language models arrived only after the living public had already begun collapsing irreversibly into cozy interiors. It industrialized the recycling of the fossil public while accelerating the exhaustion of what remained outside the horizons.
The internet did not die because of AI. AI is inheriting the remains as it dies, and the cycling of archival and carnival time winds down into a terminal archive.
***
If the Dead Forest is the endgame of the internet we inherited, the obvious question is whether another public sphere can ever emerge.
Not whether this public can be repaired. Cosmology suggests it cannot. Black holes do not become stars again. Gall’s law strengthens this intuition:
“A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.”
The question is whether history can produce another arborescent digital cosmos and whether we can seed a new forest right now.
Nearly every civilization has imagined a cosmic tree: the Norse Yggdrasil, the Indian Kalpataru, the Mayan Ceiba, the Persian Gaokerena, the Biblical Tree of Life. Their details differ, but they share a common structural intuition. The cosmos is not fundamentally a collection of disconnected places. It is one living organism whose branches connect many domains without erasing their differences. The tree is neither a centralized empire nor an archipelago. It is a common living medium.
The public internet briefly approximated such a structure. We mistook it for a permanent feature of technological civilization. It now appears more likely to have been an unusually low-entropy historical accident.
If another cosmic arborescence is to emerge, it will not do so by reversing the gravitational collapse of the present one. It must grow from whatever remains outside the horizons before those remnants themselves disappear.
This suggests less a legible program of obvious actions than a set of six simultaneous grand challenges that require genuine invention to address.
The first concerns media.
The next public medium cannot simply optimize engagement more efficiently than its predecessors. Nor can it merely federate today’s cozywebs. It must possess intrinsic anti-cozy properties: mechanisms that continuously regenerate encounters between strangers without collapsing into algorithmic extraction or culture-war dynamics. Publicity itself must become renewable rather than exhaustible.
The second concerns politics.
The internet cannot recover a public if politics remains organized around permanent mobilization. A society in which every public utterance is interpreted primarily as coalition signaling cannot sustain common causal space. Any successor public must make disagreement productive without making identity existential. It must allow for mutual co-existence in citizenship rather than a condition of endemic armed activism.
The third concerns artificial intelligence.
Today’s models increasingly thermalize the fossil public. A future public intelligence would instead require access to continuously renewed living culture without simply consuming or exposing it. This is not merely a data problem. It is a civilizational design problem. Intelligence must become metabolically coupled to public life rather than archaeologically dependent upon its remains.
The fourth concerns institutions.
Public institutions once served as long-lived repositories of common knowledge whose legitimacy exceeded that of any particular community. Most now either retreat into cozy interiors themselves or perform zombie publicity in order to remain visible. A new arborescence requires institutions capable of producing genuine common reality rather than merely broadcasting legitimacy.
The fifth concerns public life itself.
Zombie publics cannot simply be replaced by better influencers, healthier discourse, or more responsible platforms. The problem is ontological rather than behavioral. Public life must once again become a place where significant interiority can develop rather than merely be represented. People must once again possess reasons to conduct meaningful portions of their intellectual, artistic, scientific, and civic lives in public.
Finally, there is the challenge of time.
Every year, more communities pass beyond their event horizons. More knowledge is born irretrievably private. More institutions become performative. More AI systems are trained on increasingly recycled corpora. More of the accretion disk spirals inward. More of the fossil public becomes thermalized.
The urgency is cosmological.
Dead forestification appears to possess positive feedback loops. Every successful retreat into interiority increases the incentives for further retreat. Every reduction in the vitality of the public increases the relative value of private worlds. Every increment of AI-generated public text reduces the density of genuinely renewable public culture available for future intelligences. Every new black hole slightly alters the geometry through which subsequent ones form.
If there is a threshold beyond which no new cosmic tree can grow, we do not know where it lies.
Nor do we know whether we have already crossed the ultimate event horizon on the trajectory to collective social heat death of the forest we inhabit now.
The task, then, is not to restore the internet we lost. It is to preserve enough living matter outside the horizons that another cosmology remains possible. The myths of Yggdrasil and Kalpataru remind us that civilizations have long imagined worlds held together by living connective tissue rather than by force or by isolation. Whether technological civilization can grow such a tree again is the defining grand challenge of the twenty-first century.
Dead Forest Theory suggests that this forest cannot be saved, but holds out the possibility that a new one can still be planted before it dies.
I will not double indent, all of what follows is from economic historian Daniel Gallardo Albarrán of the Netherlands:
“…you posted a link to an article on how Europe became the world champion of heat deaths.
Something that the article did not cover, which I find particularly outrageous is that Europe used to be at the forefront of reducing deaths due to extreme temperatures in the early 20th century, but then AC came in and the US took the lead. To flesh this out a bit, let’s consider some recent research on this field, including my own, that is comparable to the article by Barreca et al. referenced in the post, the following points are important:
Summers became increasingly deadly during the 19th century as a result of urbanization and overcrowding. They were incredibly deadly, mostly, for infants who died in disproportionate amounts due to gastrointestinal diseases. Children and adults died as well from heatstrokes and the like, but their relative importance in the death statistics was rather small
The turning point in Europe happened in the 1900s and 1910s.
For instance, in Germany summers began being less deadly after ca. 1905, as a result of investments in water provision, healthcare and infant care. (See my own paper on this in the EHES Working Paper Series, no. 290)
In England the turning point is somewhere around WWI (see Hanlon et al., 2021, JEH), possibly due to improvements in the disease environment.
In the United States, before the arrival of AC, summer diarrheal disease that largely affected infants would only go down much later during the 1920s and 1930s (see Anderson et al., 2022, EEH). A few decades after European cities had progressed substantially in this regard…
This reversal does not get much attention in accounts of current differences in the deadliness of extreme temperatures. This is unfortunate because from an early-20th century perspective, it was far from obvious at the time that this would happen. But the lack of willingness to adopt the arrival of a very useful technology (AC) was something that we (Europeans) have brought onto ourselves over many decades, and this is largely independent from recent phenomena such as rising global temperatures, inequality trends, etc. This is simply inefficient governance and lack of attention to a problem that takes the lives of many.
Looking almost like an optical illusion, today’s Picture of the Week highlights why ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) is called that. This image was taken inside the telescope’s dome, with some of the ELT’s team standing above the massive structure that will hold its main mirror. This 39-metre-diameter reflective surface will comprise 798 mirror segments that will work together as a single mirror, in what will be the biggest optical telescope on Earth.
This photo was taken when the ELT construction reached a momentous milestone. For the first time, the telescope’s structure was rotated around its vertical axis. ESO staff at the construction site, together with Ace/Cimolai’s team, who are leading the construction of the dome and main structure, rotated the telescope first by hand by a few centimetres, and then a full rotation using auxiliary motors. While this may seem small, the entire structure currently weighs around 3500 tonnes, which will further increase up to 4600 tonnes once the mirrors and science instruments are installed. The structure rests on a layer of oil just 80 microns thin that allows the telescope to rotate smoothly. Testing this motion is thus key to ensuring that this massive telescope can point at all areas of the southern sky.
“For me, this is a beautiful reminder of what can be achieved when people push in the same direction, literally and figuratively,” says Roberto Tamai, the ELT’s Programme Manager at ESO, shown on the right in this image. Marco Sciarra, Executive President of Cimolai, stands in the centre with Pascal Martinez, ESO Project Manager for the Dome and Main Structure, to the left.
The ELT, expected for first light later this decade, will be a gamechanger in astronomical research, as the world’s ‘biggest eye on the sky’. Besides its exceptional size, its cutting-edge instruments will allow us to understand our Universe better than ever before.
Cyanobacteria blooms turned Blue Mesa Reservoir green from September through November 2021, when water levels were among the lowest on record. The OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 8 captured this image (right) of a bloom on November 17, 2021, when the water was near its lowest level; the left image shows the same area on November 15, 2017, when water levels were closer to normal.
NASA Earth Observatory / Lauren Dauphin
Cyanobacteria blooms turned Blue Mesa Reservoir green from September through November 2021, when water levels were among the lowest on record. The OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 8 captured this image (right) of a bloom on November 17, 2021, when the water was near its lowest level; the left image shows the same area on November 15, 2017, when water levels were closer to normal.
NASA Earth Observatory / Lauren Dauphin
Cyanobacteria blooms turned Blue Mesa Reservoir green from September through November 2021, when water levels were among the lowest on record. The OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 8 captured this image (right) of a bloom on November 17, 2021, when the water was near its lowest level; the left image shows the same area on November 15, 2017, when water levels were closer to normal.
NASA Earth Observatory / Lauren Dauphin
Cyanobacteria blooms turned Blue Mesa Reservoir green from September through November 2021, when water levels were among the lowest on record. The OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 8 captured this image (right) of a bloom on November 17, 2021, when the water was near its lowest level; the left image shows the same area on November 15, 2017, when water levels were closer to normal.
NASA Earth Observatory / Lauren Dauphin
November 15, 2017
November 17, 2021
Cyanobacteria blooms turned Blue Mesa Reservoir green from September through November 2021, when water levels were among the lowest on record. The OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 8 captured this image (right) of a bloom on November 17, 2021, when the water was near its lowest level; the left image shows the same area on November 15, 2017, when water levels were closer to normal.
The summers of 2021 and 2022 were tough seasons for Colorado’s Blue Mesa Reservoir. A severe drought gripped much of the western U.S., prompting emergency water releases that brought the reservoir to its lowest level since 1984. Marinas and boat ramps closed, remnants of a ghost town emerged from the muck, and parts of the reservoir turned greenish and swirled with toxic cyanobacteria blooms.
Research conducted by scientists at the U.S. Geological Survey and the National Park Service analyzed decades of Blue Mesa Reservoir data and found a connection between low water levels, warm water temperatures, and harmful blooms.
“Algal blooms were more common when water levels were below 7,470 feet and water temperatures were above approximately 19.5 degrees Celsius (67.1 degrees Fahrenheit),” said Tyler King, a research hydrologist with U.S. Geological Survey. Water levels that low are relatively common and have occurred every few years in recent decades.
While some cyanobacteria, also called blue-green algae, are always present in the reservoir in small numbers, problems occur when certain types proliferate. Aphanizomenon, Dolichospermum, and Woronichinia, for instance, thrive when the reservoir’s waters become warm and stagnant, releasing a toxin called microcystin that can cause skin and eye irritation, respiratory problems, and liver damage. Children and pets are particularly vulnerable to microcystin poisoning because of their size and tendency to ingest more water than adults.
King and colleagues analyzed in situ water samples and satellite observations from the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-2 mission and the NASA/U.S. Geological Survey Landsat satellites. A Sentinel-2 sensor that detects the light-harvesting pigment chlorophyll was particularly useful for mapping the blooms, while Landsat sensors were used to map water temperatures over time.
The National Park Service and U.S. Geological Survey launched the project in 2021 after anecdotal reports and water sampling suggested elevated cyanobacteria concentrations, King said. The scientists collected water samples but also turned to historical records and satellite data—”like a time machine,” he said—to examine conditions before regular water sampling had begun. Their analysis included satellite records of chlorophyll levels that extended back to 2016 and temperature records that reached back to 2000. The research team also studied in situ data on water levels dating to the 1970s.
A cyanobacteria bloom turned the water surface of Iola Basin green on September 8, 2021. Photo by Nicole Gibney/National Park Service.
The satellite data showed that blooms typically start in the eastern end of the reservoir, an area known as Iola Basin. The basin, where the Gunnison River flows into the reservoir, is the shallowest part of the reservoir. Occasionally, the satellite data showed, blooms spread westward into other parts of the reservoir, sometimes moving about two-thirds of the way across. However, concentrations of toxins rarely reached levels that posed health concerns beyond Iola Basin.
The same dynamics that caused challenges for Blue Mesa in 2021 and 2022 are present in 2026, said King. Drought again plagues much of the western U.S., the mountains hold little snow, and water levels in Blue Mesa are low. On June 27, 2026, the reservoir stored about 43 percent of the water it typically does on that date, the lowest value observed for that day in the past 30 years. Water levels are expected to continue dropping until October, according to U.S. Bureau of Reclamation projections.
If cyanobacteria blooms emerge in 2026, the researchers expect that satellites will help scientists track them. The researchers use the U.S. Geological Survey’s WaterMAP (Water Monitoring Above the Planet) tool to monitor for potential bloom conditions within hours of satellite overpasses. NASA’s STREAM (Satellite-based Tool for Rapid Evaluation of Aquatic Environments) project also uses data from Landsat and Sentinel-2 to map potential blooms within hours of a satellite overpass, and the multi-agency CyAN (Cyanobacteria Assessment Network) project collects daily data from other satellites to map blooms in larger water bodies.
“It’s amazing that we can use satellites to map the impacts of microscopic organisms from almost 500 miles away,” King said. Yet it will still be crucial to get people out on the water taking samples and directly testing for toxins, he emphasized. “The satellites aren’t definitive,” he added. “They can tell us where there might be a problem, but toxins often aren’t present until the later stages of a bloom.”
Satellite observations can help managers decide where to send personnel to collect water samples for more detailed analysis of bloom toxicity. Photo by Katie Walton-Day/USGS.
NASA Earth Observatory images by Michala Garrison, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Photos by Katie Walton-Day (USGS) and Nicole Gibney (NPS). Story by Adam Voiland.
(Lord’s day). Lady Batten had sent twice to invite me to go with them to Walthamstow to-day, Mrs. Martha being married already this morning to Mr. Castle, at this parish church. I could not rise soon enough to go with them, but got myself ready, and so to Games’s, where I got a horse and rode thither very pleasantly, only coming to make water I found a stopping, which makes me fearful of my old pain.
Being come thither, I was well received, and had two pair of gloves, as the rest, and walked up and down with my Lady in the garden, she mighty kind to me, and I have the way to please her.
A good dinner and merry, but methinks none of the kindness nor bridall respect between the bridegroom and bride, that was between my wife and I, but as persons that marry purely for convenience.
After dinner to church by coach, and there my Lady, Mrs. Turner, Mrs. Lemon, and I only, we, in spite to one another, kept one another awake; and sometimes I read in my book of Latin plays, which I took in my pocket, thinking to have walked it.
An old doting parson preached. So home again, and by and by up and homewards, calling in our way (Sir J. Minnes and I only) at Mr. Batten’s (who with his lady and child went in another coach by us), which is a very pretty house, and himself in all things within and without very ingenious, and I find a very fine study and good books.
So set out, Sir J. Minnes and I in his coach together, talking all the way of chymistry, wherein he do know something, at least, seems so to me, that cannot correct him, Mr. Batten’s man riding my horse, and so home and to my office a while to read my vows, then home to prayers and to bed.
I wanted to take a moment to give you an update about the future of TPM. A phrase like that might sometimes sound ominous from another publication. This is not ominous. But it’s important. So I’d be greatly in your debt if you will give it a read. First – and this is relevant to what comes after – our Annual TPM Journalism Fund Drive kicks off next week. If you are able I hope you’ll take a moment and join us by contributing.
One of the reasons TPM has survived and thrived as long as it has is because we’re nimble. We’ve been able to get the jump on major changes in digital journalism business models as well editorial models. Getting a big jump – by several years – on the move to subscriptions and away from advertising is why TPM is still here when so many other smallish and not so smallish publications aren’t. Most of them tried to make the transition starting the late teens when we were already in the middle of the storm. We started in 2012 and began growing that business in earnest in 2014. Those half dozen years or so made all the difference in the world.
We’re at another one of those inflection points as an organization. The Journalism Fund plays a critical role in helping us to fund those changes and make these transitions. In this post I want to share what some of those changes we’re now making are and why they’re important.
One of the biggest challenges facing news websites today is that people don’t go to websites. That makes it sound kind of total and even existential. But it’s really more a matter of distinguishing what you do from the mode through which you do it. Websites are no longer destinations for a lot of people. They get their news from social media, podcasts, newsletters. There are pros and cons to this for websites. The con is that most digital news organizations are built around being websites – less so now, but certainly at the beginning of this transformation. So that’s a con. There are pros too though. Websites are inherently passive in distribution terms. We wait for you to come to our front door every day. That’s good if the habit is well-ingrained, which in general it has always been for TPM Readers. But it’s still passive. With email newsletters we can show up at your front door every day. It allows us to be more active in our distribution and in the way we keep connected to our readers. These aren’t things we’ve come up with. We are reacting to changed news reading habits. It’s the same reason so many other news sites are becoming so newsletter focused.
You’ve seen these changes to TPM over the last couple years. But I want to focus in on something else.
Historically, a big, big thing for TPM was being super fast and being on top, fanatically on top, of the stories we were covering. That’s deep in the organization’s DNA. But late in the teens we realized that to a great degree social media – especially Twitter and its clones, but others too – were replacing this function. We could see it in our own reading habits. If there’s some new news on the Iran War or you want to know which corrupt SCOTUS decisions are out you go on Twitter or Bluesky. The way these sites aggregate a flow of breaking reports by journalists just serves that role better than we or really any other site can. It’s still journalists. It still often leads back to sites. But those social media sites are the front page.
So around the time of the pandemic, but not tied to the pandemic, we decided to ramp back our pace and focus more on deeply reported pieces. This never meant more reporting. It meant a slower pace of publishing and leaning more toward putting that reporting into more one-off, structured articles.
I was always instinctively wary of this decision. But I understood the logic of it, as I explained above. If you are used to one model, if to a degree you created that model, you’re always going to be wary of changing it. I try to be very aware of these kinds of blinders. But I think we went of course when we made that change. Specifically, I think we got away from what I see as our central mode of quick-paced iterative reporting, what I call storylines. Storylines are not a news story in the sense of an article and it’s not a topic – health care, reproductive rights, voting rights, democracy. It is a specific news story with characters in conflict of various sorts through time, with major issues at stake and often with a mystery at the heart of it. Who did it? Are they going to get caught? Is one player or another going to come out on top, succeed at what they’re trying to do?
Storylines don’t have to be scandals or wrongdoing. Far from it. But there’s a reasons we’ve often weighted in a bit in this direction because, as you can see above, they often fit very tightly into this kind of coverage. There’s always something more, a new development, a central mystery in the process of being revealed.
At one level these questions may seem trivial compared to the substance of the issues at stakes. But that’s wrong. We are a story-telling species and we understand the world around us through characters, people acting within it through time, a beginning point, a beginning mystery and a conclusion. There’s a reason we human gravitate toward the novel, to movies rather than datasets and spreadsheets. This is the most fundamental way in which we understand the world; it’s quite literally coded into our brains.
This is to me the best way to cover the news, especially for an audience made up of people who are really into political news and its impact on our world – political news obsessives, people with a deep and abiding interest. One thing this means is there’s no single treatment of a story in a single article. Everything is iterative. There’s always a next question to ask, a next piece of information that needs to be revealed. (To the extent this all gets compressed into a single article it becomes like set in amber, frozen, shorn of its dynamism and forward motion in time.) This also means that the nature of the new information dictates the format and genre of writing. Some new details only require short updates, sometimes only a sentence. It might be a chart or a quote. Other times it requires a detailed treatment. The key is remaining format or genre agnostic. Present the new information in the way most suited to that nature of the information itself. More mainstream news organizations are built around more casual news readers. And for them the single one off story can make sense. But we have a different kind of readership, people who are really into political news and don’t require a lot of stage setting with each new update. It’s a bit obsessive. It’s a task for news expeditionaries, not settled news bureaucracies.
What I’ve often told our team is that to the extent that we’re focused on structured, one-off articles we’re competing with the bigger, general interest operations on their own terms, not taking advantage of any of our inherent strengths. The Times has three or four hundred times as many reporters as we do. To the extent we’re competing with them in how we structure and approach the news we are going to lose every time.
So in addition to our newsletters, podcasts and so forth we are going to going to refocus on our true bread and butter which is iterative reporting. We’ll do it in a way that is less singularly focused on the website – because social media really has changed how we consume news. But we are going to be recommitting to the iterative reporting which has always been our bread and butter and also integrating this more tightly with our membership business, which in general will mean more things for our members.
If you’re asking yourself or me, what do I need to know here? Or, I don’t entirely understand what you’re describing?, my answer is: don’t worry. You don’t need to know or do anything. What I’m describing here is some refinements in how we prepare the food at the restaurant. All you need to do is decide whether you like how it tastes. I note these things here because I have an on-going dialog, stretching back decades now, with TPM Readers about how we are doing what we do, how the sausage is getting made, how that interweaves with the business model that sustains all of this. You should feel entirely free to ignore it and focus on the news we publish. But it’s there as an open invitation to understand a bit more about what we’re doing, why we’re doing it and how it relates to broader changes in journalism and the business of journalism.
This year it also makes our Annual TPM Journalism Fund Drive especially important. Because these kinds of changes and re-directions require significant upfront investment. And that’s one of the key roles the Journalism Fund plays for us, funds to invest in the operation, sometimes for new people but other times to make chances that allow the whole operation to thrive over time.
I don’t share the depth of their pessimism regarding native apps,
but Electron is without question a scourge. I think the Mac will
prove more resilient than Windows, because the Mac is the platform
that attracts people who care. But I worry.
In some ways, the worst thing that ever happened to the Mac is
that it got so much more popular a decade ago. In theory, that
should have been nothing but good news for the platform — more
users means more attention from developers. The more Mac users
there are, the more Mac apps we should see. The problem is, the
users who really care about good native apps — users who know
HIG violations when they see them, who care about performance,
who care about Mac apps being right — were mostly already on
the Mac. A lot of newer Mac users either don’t know or don’t care
about what makes for a good Mac app.
This eight-year-old piece holds up well. My concern was justified, but so too was my lack of defeatist pessimism. Truly native, idiomatically correct Mac-assed Mac apps are resurgent. Electron and its brethren non-native frameworks have not receded, but they haven’t gained further ground. For every Claude (Electron) there’s a ChatGPT (AppKit). I’m seeing more new good Mac apps released today than I was in 2018, and longstanding Mac stalwarts continue to thrive. High tide seems to have passed without washing the native platform away.
Apple itself is a good example. The Mac version of Journal, first introduced in MacOS 26 Tahoe, is a profound disappointment — not just because of serious bugs but because it’s un-Mac-like in sad ways. You can’t open an entry into its own window, for example. But the brand-new Siri app in the developer betas of MacOS 27 Golden Gate is pretty Mac-like. You can double-click chats in list view to open them in their own windows, for example. (You can’t double-click chats in grid view to open them into windows, though — presumably a bug.) Siri is not a great Mac app but it does feel like a Mac app, and it’s only a 1.0 in its second developer beta. It doesn’t feel like an iOS app running in a Mac window, like Journal does.
The ironic frustration with Anthropic’s Claude app being an Electron turd is that Claude and especially Claude Code are so capable of helping to create good native Mac apps. It’s one thing for a big company or organization with cross-platform aspirations but no institutional Mac expertise, like Notion or Slack or Discord, to choose Electron to create their Mac client. It’s another when it’s a company like Anthropic, whose only product’s single most impressive ability is generating programming code, including high-quality AppKit and SwiftUI code for the Mac. To return to my hammering-screws-into-the-walls metaphor from yesterday, it’s as though the building into which Anthropic decided to hammer all the screws is a renowned screwdriver factory.
I completed a thing this week which, these days, feels like a major event. I spent two more days working on the lawn edging which I began a month ago (and continued). Behold, the before and after photos:
There’s about 14 metres around the conservatory and down one side of the house and the process was – of course! – harder work and more time-consuming that anticipated. The day after I’d spent one morning sledge-hammering in the remaining half of the 45cm pegs, including a couple of very stubborn ones, my hands were aching all over. I didn’t even know hands could ache, other than from RSI, such a soft-handed computer man am I.
I did have to make two more trips to the builders’ merchant, for another length of wood and six bags of sharp sand, and then for six bags of gravel (on top of the two I’d already used in order to estimate how much I’d need in total). Having been once recently these trips didn’t require as much psyching myself up, although it still took me an age to dither over which screws to buy, and I had to saw my wood in half (to fit it in the car) with a guy watching me. It was all fine but I’m never going to feel at home in a place where customer service guys call me “buddy”.
Once the hardest part of getting the pegs in more-or-less the right places was done, and the fiddly work of cutting the weed-proof membrane to size was complete, pouring in some sand (to bring the level up, and to smooth things off) and then the pebbles, was extremely satisfying.
And, while I can inevitably spot all the little less-than-perfect bits, I’m really quite pleased with it, especially my tidying up around the drain (photo on Flickr).
There is a legitimate question of, “Why do this?” Mainly because the grass didn’t grow uniformly up to the walls so it was always pretty scrappy. Which is fine – the garden as a whole isn’t perfectly manicured and we wouldn’t want it so. But I see the house and immediate surrounds, including the drive and patio, as the human, non-nature parts over which we have control, and the ability/responsibility to keep neat. Creating this edging was an act of extending this domain, only slightly, creating a clearer distinction between the regulated, straight-lined human area and the free-form (but tended) zone where nature can thrive.
Always be over-thinking things.
§ In other household news we’ve had a nice guy here this weekend installing a new motorised garage door which, after the garage was re-roofed and clad in wood, is the last part of making it look nicer and be better insulated from sun and cold.
The day before the old door was removed I said goodbye to it by banging my head on it as I ducked not-far-enough while exiting, ending up on my back once again. At least I was wearing a hat with a little bit of padding.
Now we have a new door with a new opening system and so all the (for me) dangerously low pieces of metal are in new positions. It’s always good to keep me on my toes (or arse).
§ Around last Christmas / New Year I thought about buying a PlayStation 5. I didn’t, by any stretch of the imagination, need one because I was (and still am) only dipping into my slow re-play of Red Dead Redemption II. But at some point – maybe with GTA 6 – I’d really want to play a PS5-only game, so why wait?
But that wasn’t reason enough. I thought about it again recently, only to realise that in March Sony raised the prices by 20% because of stupid AI increasing the demand for RAM etc. Grrrr. (There should be a way to claim money back from people who use AI a lot.)
But I can’t imagine prices dropping any time soon so I rolled my eyes and bought a refurbished one, to feel like I wasn’t getting robbed of £90 by the AI lickers.
I was looking forward to a smooth modern set-up experience but: during the process the controller stopped working so I had to restart the process; then something else went wrong and I had to restart it again; then transferring data from the PS4 halted for no apparent reason and I had to restart that, which was easier when I realised connecting the two with an ethernet cable would take the time down to less than an hour from “99+ hours”.
I haven’t had time to actually use it much yet, although at least Red Dead Redemption II loads more quickly now.
And, of course, only two days after I bought a PS5 with a disc drive, Sony announced they’ll soon stop selling games on discs. I mainly bought that just in case we wanted to watch a disc on TV – itself vanishingly rare these days – but I still “enjoyed” that timing.
§ I had my first guitar lesson this week and it was good and I have some things to practise to improve my finger-picking, which I currently enjoy more than strumming. Of course, a couple of days into my exciting new practise routine a string broke for the first time.
But thanks to paying for speedy delivery of some new strings and Justin’s excellent guitar string changing tutorial I have now replaced all the strings. It was a daunting prospect and not always as easy as it looks for Justin but I got it finished in less than an hour. Another thing learned and done.
§ My sister and I have applied our lasting power of attorney to various of our parents’ accounts over the past couple of years and it’s always surprising how much the process varies in terms of what each place requires, how long it takes, and how human the process is.
Recently, some have only needed a quick exchange of emails and then me emailing a PDF of the certified LPA document (the LPAs were done before the more modern online system that, apparently, only needs a reference number).
Then this week, after I’d emailed them to ask, one finance company sent me a password-protected zip file, followed by an email containing the password. The zip contained a two-page PDF of detailed ID requirements, and an EmailContent.html file containing, yes, a text-only email. Unfortunately none of this specifies where to send any of the documentation to, whether by post, or e-mail, or (shudder) through some e-portal.
§ This week I finished reading Thinking the Twentieth Century by Tony Judt with Timothy Synder, which was excellent. It’s a 400 page conversation between the two which touches on a history of Judt’s life and work, used as jumping off points for discussions about politics, society and the intellectuals of (mainly) the USA and Europe (West and East) over the course of the century.
It’s crammed full of things to think about – most of which I’ve forgotten of course – and not a difficult read. There’s something about it being a transcript of a conversation that makes it feel less hard-going than a purely written work might have been. And the amount they both know from decades of study is amazing and inspiring to me. (Guardian review here.)
Judging by when I added this book to my system – late March 2022 – I suspect it was a birthday present from Dad and not only do I wish I could be sure of that but I also wish I could now chat to him about it, a man whose bookshelves were full of books about left-leaning twentieth century politics.
§ I took Mum to see John Kirkpatrick play in Hereford this week. He was entertaining and could certainly play the accordion, concertina and melodion very well. It looked exhausting.
§ Until this week I hadn’t seen any of the Mission Impossible movies. We watched the first one this week and given I think of it as a recent franchise I felt pretty old seeing its terrible representation of the early internet.
§ My toe is now fine nearly all the time until I do some slightly unusual movement and weight-bearing. Getting there.
My mind has been all over the shop, mostly feeling wildly overwhelmed by all the things, and sending me to bed for two mornings with migraines. We keep on going.
So there was a rally earlier today on the corner of Aliso Creek Road and Enterprise in Aliso Viejo. And, because I’ve attended many of these, I sorta knew what to expert: A blissful, passionate congregating of frustrated and anxious and uppity and sad Americans fed up with the authoritarian behaviors of the Trump Administration and the flaccid GOP.
I’d arrive, speak to a bunch o’ folks, take some pictures and videos—then write up a report.
Bam. Bam. Bam.
Well … um … today, something happened.
Or, really, someone happened.
A lightning bolt. A thunder clap. A bad-ass motherfucker.
This is Cathy, my new hero and the queen of the universe …
In a way, I think I’ve spent the past year looking for Cathy, or someone like Cathy: A person who fully understands the bullshit of Trump, the con of Trump, the deception of Trump. To be from New Jersey (as Cathy is) or New York (as I am) means you possess a greater understanding of the president’s soulless desire to take and take and take and take and take and take. It’s not merely a lack of empathy (he has none, obviously), and it’s not merely the corruption (bruh is plenty corrupt). No, it’s the obsessive, never-ending quest for more. More power, more possessions, more fame, more adulation, more women to fondle, more golf to play, more fake trophies to accept, more gold paint to apply. It’s a rare Jabba the Hutt-esque gluttony. I’m not a therapist, so I can’t fully diagnose. But somewhere early in his life, the lack of love and compassion offered to Donald Trump resulted in this succubus of a non-human. Most of us, I like to believe, aspire to be givers. The president is a 100-percent taker.
So hearing Cathy so eloquently express what I’ve been feeling made my year, and cemented her as my all-time Independence Day hero.
•••
Wait, there’s more to say.
The rally had about 150 attendees (aka: seven times the amount of folks at the Great American State Fair), and was organized by the OC Indivisible Coalition. Music played, a couple of local office seekers shook hands, cars drove past and honked. And what I loved—like, loved-loved-loved-loved—was it felt like the perfect Independence Day activity.
Yeah, it’d be easy (and understandable) to stay home, kick back, have some burgers and some beers and pretend everything is kosher in the United States. But, the truth is, we are an ill nation. We are torn between a leader who cares only about self, two political parties that, oftentimes, seem mostly greedy/ineffective/tone-deaf/terrified, and a population that (as poll after poll reveals) exists in frozen states of frustration and isolation. Have we been here before? Sorta. Has it been this bad in my 54 years? No.
Not even close.
So … it’d be preferable to do nothing but grille and watch season three of “America’s Sweethearts” (Reece, please reconsider). These people, however, did not. They still believe in the United States, and decided it was worth the schlep to Aliso Town Center to make their voices heard. They marched, the clapped, they chanted, they fought, they embraced, they believed.
They still believe.
They are what July 4 is about.
They, as much as anyone, embody Independence Day.
PS: I’ve probably attended, oh, 30 events over the past 1 1/2 years, and Amy Stevens is at most of them—organizing, encouraging, speaking out, speaking up.
As I write this, Amy is running to be a member representative of the Orange County Working Families Party, and I could not endorse her efforts with any greater affection and clarity. She gives her life to this stuff, and is never afraid to roll up her sleeves, battle for what’s right. One can donate to her efforts here.
I chatted with Amy at the rally. She knows whereof she speaks …
3. PEPFAR interview. Much of this is substantive, and interesting. But some of Mike’s claims are absurd, for instance: “Elon Musk, on his own, if he paid his taxes, could end world hunger.” Can he really believe that?
Iwo Kadziela (assisted by Codex) figured out a way to generate a credible ASCII world map using 445 bytes of data:
The key trick is to use deflate compression, which is then wired together using this neat snippet of JavaScript. I didn't know you could use fetch() with data: URIs like this:
fetch('data:;base64,1ZpLsgIxCEXnrM...==').then(
r => r.body.pipeThrough(new DecompressionStream('deflate-raw'))
).then(
s => new Response(s).text()
).then(
t => b.innerHTML = '<pre style=font-size:.65vw>' + t
)
Armin reports on a weird problem he ran into while hacking on Pi:
The short version is that newer Claude models sometimes call Pi’s edit tool with extra, invented fields in the nested edits[] array. And not Haiku or some small model: Opus 4.8. The edit itself is usually correct but the arguments do not match the schema as the model invents made-up keys and Pi thus rejects the tool call and asks to try again.
That alone is not too surprising as models emit malformed tool calls sometimes. Particularly small ones. What surprised me is that this is getting worse with newer Anthropic models as both Opus 4.8 and Sonnet 5 show it but none of the older models. In other words, the SOTA models of the family are worse at this specific tool schema than their older siblings.
Armin theorizes that this is because more recent Anthropic models have been specifically trained (presumably via Reinforcement Learning) to better use the edit tools that are baked into Claude Code. This has the unfortunate effect that other coding harnesses, such as Pi, may find that their own custom edit tools are more likely to be used incorrectly.
Does this mean third-party coding harnesses like Pi should implement multiple edit tools just so they can use the one with the best performance for the underlying model the user has selected?
Today’s primer is a long, dense, wonkish discussion of an issue I’ve been steadily working on in the background. To be honest, this post is aimed primarily at economists, not a general audience. And I may well get professional pushback — in fact I hope I will. Anyway, apologies in advance for its relative inaccessibility, which I don’t intend to make a habit.
Europe is an economic superpower that has given its residents extraordinarily good lives both by historical standards and compared with the rest of the world. Yes, Europeans have smaller houses and cars than Americans do. Many of them also, as everyone has lately become aware, lack air conditioning. But they have much more economic security than most Americans, lower economic inequality, longer life expectancy, and more leisure time.
There is, however, a widespread perception that Europe is living off its past glories, that it is lagging behind America and China in ways that will undermine its ability to maintain its economic standing in the world. This perception rests in part on the undeniable fact that Europe is home to few of the biggest technology companies and is almost completely shut out of the AI boom. It also reflects widely cited statistics: The most commonly discussed measures of growth in productivity and GDP point to an ever-growing gap between Europe and America.
But a funny thing happened on the way to inexorable European decline: If one compares either European GDP per capita or European productivity (GDP per hour) with that of the US on a year by year basis,using completely standard methods, one does not find an ever-growing gap. In fact, the gap between Europe and America has, if anything, narrowed somewhat over the past 25 years.
Understanding Europe’s economic performance is of huge importance, not just for Europeans, but for the rest of the world. The stakes go beyond economics. With authoritarianism on the rise in America, Europe is now the world’s great bastion of democracy. Hence it is important that it maintain its standing as a counterbalance to the US and China. Furthermore, Europe’s economic performance relative to the U.S. is often cited as a data point in debates on economic and social policy. Thus it’s important to understand what that record actually shows.
Finally, wearing my professional economist hat, what I call the US-EU paradox is interesting. We have two ways of comparing major economies: one based on measured economic growth, one based on measured purchasing power. Both comparisons involve orthodox, widely accepted procedures. Both are carried out by eminently respectable statisticians and agencies. Yet they lead to starkly different conclusions. One says that Europe is in relative decline, while the other says it isn’t.
I was first alerted to this strange dissonance in a February 2026 post by Seth Ackerman. Since then I’ve been trying to make sense of the apparent contradiction.
Today’s post is a detour from my ongoing series on the implications of AI, which I plan to return to next week. Here I will offer a wonkish progress report on my recent efforts to unpack the US-EU paradox. I will argue that the preponderance of the evidence supports the view that Europe is not in relative decline. I will show that comparisons that seem to show Europe lagging ignore important qualifications – qualifications that can render those comparisons misleading. First, there is a big difference between the EU and the US in industrial mix: the U.S. economy is more highly concentrated than Europe in “tech”, which creates a divergence in measured growth but not in living standards. Second, it is inherently difficult to measure growth in the face of technological change – a problem that doesn’t arise, notably, when comparing economies at a given point in time.
Beyond the paywall I’ll address the following:
1. The US-EU paradox and why it matters
2. Dollars, PPP and Big Macs: Measuring purchasing power
3. Understanding the growth discrepancy 1: Industrial mix
4. Understanding the growth discrepancy 2: Measurement
I wrote about the sqlite-utils 4.0rc1 release a couple of weeks ago. Since we only have Claude Fable on our Max subscriptions for a few more days, I decided to see if it could help me get to a 4.0 stable release that I felt truly comfortable about, since I try to keep to SemVer and like my incompatible major versions to be as rare as possible.
I started with this prompt, in Claude Code for web on my iPhone:
Final review before shipping a stable 4.0 release - very important to spot any last minute things that would be a breaking change if we fix them later
Here's that initial report it created for me. There were some significant problems that I hadn't myself encountered yet - 5 that Fable categorized as "release blockers". Here's the worst of the bunch:
1. delete_where() never commits and poisons the connection (data loss)
Table.delete_where() (sqlite_utils/db.py:2948) runs its DELETE via a bare self.db.execute() with no atomic() wrapper — compare Table.delete() at db.py:2944, which wraps correctly. The connection is left in_transaction=True, so every subsequentatomic() call takes the savepoint branch (db.py:430-440) and never commits either.
Reproduced end-to-end:
db=sqlite_utils.Database("dw.db")
db["t"].insert_all([{"id": i} foriinrange(3)], pk="id")
db["t"].delete_where("id = ?", [0]) # conn.in_transaction is now Truedb["t"].insert({"id": 50})
db["u"].insert({"a": 1})
db.close()
# Reopen: rows are [0, 1, 2] — the delete, row 50, AND table u are all gone.
That's a really bad bug! Very glad I didn't ship that, although at least it would have been a bug I could fix in a 4.0.1 point release, not a design flaw that would force a 5.0.
Over the course of 37 prompts, 34 commits and +1,321 -190 code changes over 30 separate files, we worked through the entire set of feedback in turn, making several other design improvements along the way.
A weird thing about coding agents is that harder tasks like this one actually provide more opportunity to do other things at the same time, since the agent sometimes needs 10-15 minutes to churn away on a new task. I went out to enjoy the Half Moon Bay 4th of July parade, occasionally checking in and prompting the next step for Fable from my phone.
Full details in the PR and this shared transcript. I switched to my laptop for the final review, which I conducted through GitHub's PR interface.
The most significant changes relate to transaction handling, which was the signature new feature in the earlier RC. The new RC now includes comprehensive documentation on the new transaction model, the intro to which I'll quote here in full:
Every method in this library that writes to the database - insert(), upsert(), update(), delete(), delete_where(), transform(), create_table(), create_index(), enable_fts() and the rest - runs inside its own transaction and commits it before returning. Your changes are saved to disk as soon as the method call finishes:
db=Database("data.db")
db.table("news").insert({"headline": "Dog wins award"})
# The new row is already saved - no commit() required
The same applies to raw SQL executed with db.execute() - a write statement is committed as soon as it has run.
You never need to call commit(), and you do not need to close the database to persist your changes. There are exactly two situations where you need to think about transactions:
You want to group several write operations together, so they either all succeed or all fail - use db.atomic().
You are managing a transaction yourself with db.begin(), in which case nothing is committed until you commit - the library will never commit a transaction you opened.
In reviewing Fable's documentation - I find that reviewing the documentation edits first is an excellent way to build an initial understanding of what has changed - I spotted this detail:
db.atomic() and the automatic per-method transactions are designed for connections in Python's default transaction handling mode. Connections created with the Python 3.12+ sqlite3.connect(..., autocommit=True) or autocommit=False options are not supported, because commit() and rollback() behave differently on those connections.
I admit I hadn't thought about how sqlite-utils would react to the more recent autocommit setting, added in Python 3.12. It turns out "behave differently on those connections" equated to almost the entire test suite failing, so I worked with the model to ensure that this difference would not break how the library works.
And a final review by GPT-5.5
I used to think that the idea of having one model review the work of another was somewhat absurd - it felt weirdly superstitious. The problem is it really does work - I've started habitually having Anthropic's best model review OpenAI's work and vice versa, because I've had that turn up interesting results often enough to be valuable.
I prompted Codex Desktop and GPT-5.5 xhigh with the following:
Review changes since the last RC. Also confirm that the changelog is up-to-date.
Which was enough to turn up two issues worth investigating:
Findings
[P1] sqlite_utils/db.py:663db.query() now rejects non-row statements only after calling db.execute(), and sqlite_utils/db.py:705 auto-commits those writes first. So db.query("update ...") raises ValueError but the update is already committed. That is a surprising side effect for a method documented as “can only be used with SQL that returns rows.”
[P1] sqlite_utils/db.py:672INSERT ... RETURNING through db.query() only commits after the returned generator is fully exhausted. db.query("insert ... returning ...") without iteration, or common next(db.query(...)) usage, leaves the transaction open and the write can be rolled back on close. This contradicts docs/changelog.rst:15 and docs/python-api.rst:232, which say it takes effect without iteration.
I pasted that into a fresh Fable session, which ran some experiments to confirm the problem:
Both findings were confirmed. db.query() called self.execute() first, which auto-commits writes, and only then checked cursor.description — so db.query("update ...") committed the update before raising ValueError. And the INSERT ... RETURNING commit lived at the end of the returned generator, so it never fired unless you exhausted the iterator — next(db.query(...)) or an un-iterated call left the transaction open, contradicting what the changelog and docs promise.
Here's the PR with the fix, and the full Claude Code transcript. Reviewing this code helped me build a better mental model of the edge cases of SQLite transaction semantics!
For an estimated (unsubsidized) cost of $149.25
I upgraded to the Claude Max $200/month plan (I was previously on $100/month) to increase my Fable allowance for the remaining time until the July 7th Fablepocalypse, when even Claude Max subscribers will have to pay full API cost for the model.
I was curious as to how much this would have cost me if I had been paying those costs directly. At first I thought those numbers weren't available to me since I had run the work remotely using Claude Code for web, and then I realized I could run AgentsView inside that existing session to get that cost estimate!
Run "uvx agentsview --help" and then use that tool to calculate the cost of this session
Claude figured out how to use the session list --include-children command and came out with the following:
Transcript
Model
Cost
Main session
claude-fable-5
$141.02
API-surface sweep agent
claude-fable-5
$2.40
Transactions/atomic review agent
claude-fable-5
$2.39
Post-rc1 commits review agent
claude-fable-5
$1.72
Migrations review agent
claude-fable-5
$1.40
Prompt-counting agent
claude-opus-4-8
$0.32
Total
$149.25
I'm very glad I'm on that subscription! I really should have followed my own advice and leaned more heavily into subagents with cheaper models.
I have several other major Fable-driven projects on the go right now as well, with the goal of hitting 100% on that Fable bar just in time for the price increase.
The full release notes for sqlite-utils 4.0rc2
Here are the full release notes for the RC. I had Fable add these to an "Unreleased" section of the changelog as each change landed, reviewing them as it went. This has the neat side effect that the commit history of the changelog acts as a concise summary of each of the changes that went into the release.
In the past I've had a policy of writing release notes by hand, but honestly these are better than I would have created myself. Release notes are a great example of writing that I'm OK to outsource to agents because they need to be boring, predictable and accurate.
Breaking changes:
Write statements executed with db.execute() are now committed automatically, unless a transaction is already open in which case they join it. Previously they opened an implicit transaction that stayed open until something committed it - writes appeared to work when read on the same connection but were silently rolled back when the connection closed. Code that relied on rolling back uncommitted db.execute() writes should use the new db.begin() method to open an explicit transaction first. The transaction model is documented in full at Transactions and saving your changes.
db.query() now executes its SQL as soon as it is called, rather than waiting until the returned generator is first iterated. Rows are still fetched lazily during iteration. SQL errors are now raised at the call site, statements such as INSERT ... RETURNING are executed and committed immediately without needing to iterate over their results, and passing a statement that returns no rows - previously a silent no-op - now raises a ValueError recommending db.execute() instead. A statement rejected this way is rolled back before the error is raised, so it has no effect on the database.
Python API validation errors now raise ValueError instead of AssertionError. Previously invalid arguments - such as create_table() with no columns, transform() on a table that does not exist, or passing both ignore=True and replace=True - were rejected using bare assert statements, which are silently skipped when Python runs with the -O flag. Code that caught AssertionError for these cases should catch ValueError instead.
table.upsert() and table.upsert_all() now raise PrimaryKeyRequired if a record is missing a value for any primary key column, or has a value of None for one. Previously such records - which can never match an existing row - were quietly inserted as brand new rows, or triggered a confusing KeyError after the insert had already taken place.
db.enable_wal() and db.disable_wal() now raise a sqlite_utils.db.TransactionError if called while a transaction is open. Previously they would silently commit the open transaction as a side effect of changing the journal mode, breaking the rollback guarantee of db.atomic() and of user-managed transactions.
The View class no longer has an enable_fts() method. It existed only to raise NotImplementedError, since full-text search is not supported for views - calling it now raises AttributeError instead, and the method no longer appears in the API reference. The sqlite-utils enable-fts command shows a clean error when pointed at a view.
The no-op -d/--detect-types flag has been removed from the insert and upsert commands. Type detection has been the default for CSV/TSV data since 4.0a1, so the flag did nothing - invocations using it should simply drop it. --no-detect-types remains available to disable detection.
Database() now raises a sqlite_utils.db.TransactionError if passed a connection created with the Python 3.12+ sqlite3.connect(..., autocommit=True) or autocommit=False options. commit() and rollback() behave differently on those connections, which previously caused every write made by the library to be silently discarded when the connection closed.
Everything else:
Fixed a bug where table.delete_where(), table.optimize() and table.rebuild_fts() did not commit their changes, leaving the connection inside an open transaction. Their work - and any subsequent writes - could then be silently rolled back when the connection was closed. All three now use db.atomic(), consistent with the other write methods.
The sqlite-utils drop-table command now refuses to drop a view, and drop-view refuses to drop a table. Previously each would silently drop the wrong type of object if the name matched. Both now exit with an error suggesting the correct command to use.
Migrations applied by the new migrations system now run inside a transaction, together with the record of the migration having been applied. If a migration raises an exception its changes are rolled back and it stays pending, so it can be safely re-applied after the error is fixed. Migrations that cannot run inside a transaction, such as those executing VACUUM, can opt out using @migrations(transactional=False) - see Migrations and transactions.
table.upsert() and table.upsert_all() now detect the primary key or compound primary key of an existing table, so the pk= argument is no longer required when upserting into a table that already has a primary key.
db.table(table_name).insert({}) can now be used to insert a row consisting entirely of default values into an existing table, using INSERT INTO ... DEFAULT VALUES. (#759)
Improvements to the sqlite-utils migrate command: --stop-before values that do not match any known migration are now an error instead of being silently ignored, --stop-before now works correctly with migration files that still use the older sqlite_migrate.Migrations class, and --list is now a read-only operation that no longer creates the database file or the migrations tracking table. migrations.applied() now returns migrations in the order they were applied.
New db.begin(), db.commit() and db.rollback() methods for taking manual control of transactions, as an alternative to the db.atomic() context manager.
New documentation: Transactions and saving your changes describes how transactions work and when changes are committed, and a new Upgrading page details the changes needed to move between major versions.
In an interview with Benzinga after the release of his new book Moral Economics, Stanford economist Alvin Roth said the strongest use-case for the technology may not be public platforms like Polymarket or Kalshi, but inside corporations. He described a scenario where engineers building a product know about delays that senior executives, working from optimistic reports, do not. A prediction market inside the company can get the information to the top faster.
...
"He said election markets are unlikely to face serious insider-trading risk, but neither are they guaranteed to beat good polling. “I don’t know that prediction markets do a lot better on elections than good polls do,” he said.
"He flagged a different concern: manipulation. State actors or well-funded propaganda operations could push large sums into a market to engineer a favorable price."
...
"Securities markets exist in part to help companies raise capital, he said, which requires public trust. Prediction markets do not carry the same burden, so the harm from insider activity is less clear.
"He added that if real insider trading is happening off political news, the likelier venue is the commodities market. “The price of Brent Crude moves rapidly when the president says something,” Roth said."
Happy July 4th! For those of us around the world contemplating
independence, it's a good day to think about how we came to rely on
expensive cloud infrastructure for our fundamental computing needs.
With that in mind, here is my latest toy project: an open source tool that
makes replicating, forking, sharing, and running container snapshots fast
and easy across cloud and personal devices.
It's fun to play with, especially on bare metal hardware you run at home, or
rent from a provider like Hetzner or OVH. Or, because it uses Tailscale, why
not all of them in a single mesh?
There's a lot more to say but I don't have time right now. Details are in
the README.
I will say this: humans and AI agents both want the same things when they're
trying to get work done. Ephemeral containers aren't really it. But how
about unlimited disk space, fast CPUs, an undo button, and the ability to
move to whatever provider offers the best hardware at the best price?
That's more like it.
Yes I will be doing a Conversation with him, based around his new book Ausländer: One Family’s Story of Escape and Exile. Mike of course was a pioneering venture capitalist through Sequoia, and before that had a distinguished career as a journalist, which included books on Chrysler, Apple (the first such book I believe?), and soccer coach Alex Ferguson of Manchester United. Here is his Wikipedia page.
Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure and industrial technology. This week we look at households without homeowners insurance, crackdowns on AI chip smuggling, Japan’s two electrical frequencies, Meta’s AI compute business, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber!
Housing
Someone making the (somewhat dubious) point that fixed-rate mortgages have many similar impacts as rent control. The biggest difference, obviously, is that fixed-rate mortgages don’t disincentivize creating new housing supply the way that rent control does, but it’s interesting to see the similarities. “A homeowner with a 3 percent mortgage is, in practice, protected from the market in much the same way as a tenant in a rent-stabilized apartment. Both receive a valuable incumbent benefit. Both face a large penalty for moving. Both may remain in housing that no longer fits their needs because leaving would mean surrendering that benefit. And both systems impose costs on outsiders: prospective tenants in one case, prospective buyers in the other.” [Substack]
Apparently one in seven homeowners in the US don’t have homeowners insurance? [Insurance Dimes]
Manufacturing
It looks like we’re starting to see more crackdowns on smuggling AI chips into China from Taiwan. “Taiwan government agencies raided the offices of Super Micro Computer and several of its local affiliates, deepening an investigation into the alleged smuggling of Nvidia chips into China using the company’s servers.” [Japan Times]
Ford rehired a few hundred quality inspectors that it had tried to replace with AI. [BBC]
Sony will stop making physical discs for playstation games in 2028. [IGN]
The US Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) denied Polestar, a brand spinoff of Volvo which is owned by Chinese company Geely, an authorization to sell cars in the US starting in 2027. Volvo, which is also owned by Geely, isn’t yet affected for some reason. “Polestar clearly didn’t see this situation coming. The automaker announced a reboot plan in February, which would’ve seen a slew of new product coming to the U.S. as the company grew the lineup. Global production of the Polestar 3 was moved from Chengdu, China, to Volvo’s Ridgeville, South Carolina, plant specifically to avoid the Trump Administration’s tariffs. The Polestar 3 currently rolls off the South Carolina assembly line alongside its platform mate, the Volvo EX90.” [The Drive]
China is building a factory to produce, among other things, personalized cancer vaccines. “The facility will house cell therapy research laboratories together with a production line of the company’s flagship product, LK101, a personalised cancer vaccine that analyses each patient’s tumour DNA to pinpoint the specific genetic mutations driving the disease. With AI, the company said the procedure could be completed in a day.” [SCMP]
Car companies are apparently switching to aluminum wiring due to the high costs of copper. [Reuters]
South Korea plans to spend $1 trillion on memory chip fabs and humanoid robots. “The most costly of the megaprojects involves a commitment by Samsung and SK Hynix of $585 billion to build new chip fabrication plants in the southwest provinces of South Korea, along with boosting semiconductor fab construction in the Seoul capital region, according to Reuters. The government’s goal is to double South Korea’s production of dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) within five years.” [Ars Technica]
Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal on the delays to a Micron memory chip fab that was supposed to start construction two years ago, but has been held back by, among other things, bats. “Mr. Schumer has described Micron’s site as “open fields,” but it includes hundreds of acres of wetlands and forestland that are nesting areas for endangered bats. This makes permitting and building more complicated. Trees can only be chopped down when bats aren’t nesting—i.e., from November to March. To obtain federal and state permits, Micron committed to spend $1 million to protect the bats and install 10 “bat houses.” The manufacturer also agreed to provide on-site child-care for workers and enter into project labor agreements with unions in return for $6 billion in federal largesse.” [WSJ]
Nabeel: (57:47) …For example, there’s a French thinker called Jacques Derrida. I probably should go and read him at some point, but I’m not entirely convinced there is a there there, and I don’t know anyone who swears by it. If Tyler told me, “Nabeel, you are missing a big piece of your life by not reading him,” I would go read him tomorrow. But I don’t have any of those people.
Tyler: (58:44) Lacan is my marginal case of “no there there.” So Derrida, I put in a fair amount of effort and did conclude, rightly or wrongly, that there’s no there there. So you can, in my opinion, write him off. Lacan, I keep on wondering. Smart people still will say, “This is amazing.” I’ve tried a bunch of times, but I haven’t given up. There’s a new Lacan book coming out later this summer and I’ll try it again. We’ll see. That’s my marginal “is there a there there” figure.
Nabeel: (59:13) Yeah. I think modern French thinkers put too much of a premium on sounding cool, or postmodern philosophy generally. I think it repays some effort to kind of grasp the core ideas, but it doesn’t repay making it your life’s reading or something.
Tyler: (59:26) Baudrillard is quite good and Foucault is extremely interesting. So I’m not against “the French” in this period, but if they keep on not making sense, I feel I’m educated well enough.
Jackson: (59:37) You have a lot of context.
Tyler: (59:38) That at some point I can strike the ledger.
Nabeel: (59:41) I do—Nowadays, I just put Foucault through GPT and I just have GPT explain it to me, and that’s going to be good enough for now.
Tyler: (59:50) The problem with Foucault, I think, is so much of the history is wrong in a quite mundane way, so there’s something very problematic about it. But the stuff—I think it’s in a way quite simple, almost too simple. And the fact that the current right has so latched on to Foucault is a sign that it’s simple. I don’t mean necessarily bad, but there are these structures and they’re trying to tell you what to do. And there’s something anonymous about that as well. It’s not just the individuals who form the conspiracy. It’s how a lot of the world thinks today.
Up by 4 o’clock and sent him to get matters ready, and I to my office looking over papers and mending my manuscript by scraping out the blots and other things, which is now a very fine book.
So to St. James’s by water with Sir J. Minnes and Sir W. Batten, I giving occasion to a wager about the tide, that it did flow through bridge, by which Sir W. Batten won 5s. of Sir J. Minnes.
At St. James’s we staid while the Duke made himself ready. Among other things Sir Allen Apsley showed the Duke the Lisbon Gazette in Spanish, where the late victory is set down particularly, and to the great honour of the English beyond measure. They have since taken back Evora, which was lost to the Spaniards, the English making the assault, and lost not more than three men.
Here I learnt that the English foot are highly esteemed all over the world, but the horse not so much, which yet we count among ourselves the best; but they abroad have had no great knowledge of our horse, it seems.
The Duke being ready, we retired with him, and there fell upon Mr. Creed’s business, where the Treasurer did, like a mad coxcomb, without reason or method run over a great many things against the account, and so did Sir J. Minnes and Sir W. Batten, which the Duke himself and Mr. Coventry and my Lord Barkely and myself did remove, and Creed being called in did answer all with great method and excellently to the purpose (myself I am a little conscious did not speak so well as I purposed and do think I used to do, that is, not so intelligibly and persuasively, as I well hoped I should), not that what I said was not well taken, and did carry the business with what was urged and answered by Creed and Mr. Coventry, till the Duke himself did declare that he was satisfied, and my Lord Barkely offered to lay 100l. that the King would receive no wrong in the account, and the two last knights held their tongues, or at least by not understanding it did say what made for Mr. Creed, and so Sir G. Carteret was left alone, but yet persisted to say that the account was not good, but full of corruption and foul dealing. And so we broke up to his shame, but I do fear to the loss of his friendship to me a good while, which I am heartily troubled for.
Thence with Creed to the King’s Headordinary; but, coming late, dined at the second table very well for 12d.; and a pretty gentleman in our company, who confirms my Lady Castlemaine’s being gone from Court, but knows not the reason; he told us of one wipe the Queen a little while ago did give her, when she came in and found the Queen under the dresser’s hands, and had been so long:
“I wonder your Majesty,” says she, “can have the patience to sit so long a-dressing?” — “I have so much reason to use patience,” says the Queen, “that I can very well bear with it.” He thinks that it may be the Queen hath commanded her to retire, though that is not likely.
Thence with Creed to hire a coach to carry us to Hide Park, to-day there being a general muster of the King’s Guards, horse and foot: but they demand so high, that I, spying Mr. Cutler the merchant, did take notice of him, and he going into his coach, and telling me that he was going to shew a couple of Swedish strangers the muster, I asked and went along with him.
Where a goodly sight to see so many fine horses and officers, and the King, Duke, and others come by a-horseback, and the two Queens in the Queen-Mother’s coach, my Lady Castlemaine not being there. And after long being there, I ’light, and walked to the place where the King, Duke, &c., did stand to see the horse and foot march by and discharge their guns, to show a French Marquisse (for whom this muster was caused) the goodness of our firemen; which indeed was very good, though not without a slip now and then; and one broadside close to our coach we had going out of the Park, even to the nearness as to be ready to burn our hairs. Yet methought all these gay men are not the soldiers that must do the King’s business, it being such as these that lost the old King all he had, and were beat by the most ordinary fellows that could be.
Thence with much ado out of the Park, and I ‘lighted and through St. James’s down the waterside over, to Lambeth, to see the Archbishop’s corps (who is to be carried away to Oxford on Monday), but came too late, and so walked over the fields and bridge home (calling by the way at old George’s), but find that he is dead, and there wrote several letters, and so home to supper and to bed.
This day in the Duke’s chamber there being a Roman story in the hangings, and upon the standards written these four letters — S.P.Q.R., Sir G. Carteret came to me to know what the meaning of those four letters were; which ignorance is not to be borne in a Privy Counsellor, methinks, that a schoolboy should be whipt for not knowing.
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket soars past the Sun during the Starlink 10-50 mission on July 5, 2026. The rocket also carried onboard two Fabships on the rocket’s booster from the Washington D.C. based startup, Besxar. Image: Michael Cain/Spaceflight Now
Update July 5, 8:30 a.m. EDT (1230 UTC): SpaceX confirms deployment of the Starlink satellites.
Two semiconductor fabrication test beds hitched a sub-orbital ride on the first stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that launched another batch of Starlink satellites from Cape Canaveral shortly after sunrise Sunday.
Liftoff of the Starlink 10-50 mission from Space Launch Complex 40 happened on 6:50 a.m. EDT (1050 UTC). Space Force meteorologists predicted an 85 percent chance of favorable weather for launch.
In addition to boosting 29 satellites for SpaceX’s internet service, the Falcon 9 first-stage booster carried two manufacturing pods for Washington, D.C.-based startup Besxar Space Industries on an eight-minute, 19-second ride to space and back.
In October 2025, the company revealed it had booked 12 Falcon 9 flights to test the space-based semiconductor substrate manufacturing plants it calls ‘Fabships’.
In announcing its plans, Besxar said it would use the vacuum of space to produce ultra-pure substrates and precursor materials for the semiconductors essential for electronic devices.
“We’re reaching the limits of what can be built on Earth. AI data centers are straining against power and cooling limits, silicon is nearing its physical edge, and fabrication plants can’t achieve the vacuum or yields that next-generation materials demand,” Ashley Pilipiszyn, Founder and CEO of Besxar, said in a statement last year.
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket soars away from Florida’s Space Coast during the Starlink 10-50 mission on Sunday, July 5, 2026. Image: Adam Bernstein/Spaceflight Now
The workhorse SpaceX booster flies above the 100-kilometer-high Karman Line, considered to be the boundary of space, after it releases the second stage, which carries the rocket’s payload into orbit.
After stage separation, the first-stage booster continues to coast upwards. On a Starlink mission, a first-stage booster typically reaches an altitude of about 115 kilometres before gravity’s grip pulls it back to Earth and a landing on a drone ship in the ocean.
Besxar says these short-duration, sub-orbital flights with their rapid turnarounds are ideal for fine-tuning its manufacturing process. The test-bed Fabships, called the ‘Clipper Class’, are about the size of a microwave oven.
“With a regular cadence of launch and reentry missions, we can now iterate faster than ever—transforming space into a critical extension of America’s semiconductor supply chain,” said Pilipiszyn, who previously worked for OpenAI in its early days.
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifts off from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station during the Starlink 10-50 mission on July 5, 2026. Image: John Pisani/Spaceflight Now
In an interview on the CNBC podcast ‘Manifest Space’, Pilipiszyn said the early Clipper Class Fabships will carry a variety of terrestrial-manufactured semiconductor wafers to see how they hold up against the rigor of a rocket launch and reentry.
“You can think of this similar to the ultimate egg drop challenge,” she said. “We want to ensure not only can we get wafers to space, do our manufacturing, but also that we’re able to successfully bring back wafers without any type of cracking or damage like that.”
Besxar has received support from graphics and AI chip maker Nvidia’s Inception Program for startups and SpaceX is listed as one of its investors.
The company originally planned to start Fabship testing aboard the Falcon 9 before the end of 2025.
Sunday’s Falcon 9 launch will be SpaceX’s 62nd Starlink delivery mission of the year as it continues the expansion of its internet from space service. Deployment of the stack of 29 v2 Mini Starlink satellites from the rocket’s second stage is slated to occur one hour, three minutes, and 31 seconds after launch.
Tyler Cowen can’t decide, so he picks about 20 things instead.
My favorite thing about America is that I do not have a single favorite thing. We have the NBA (with a Toronto team too), the world’s best AI models, Alexander Calder sculptures, a few wonderful R.E.M. albums, southern Utah, the world’s best Constitution, lots of air-conditioning, sausage in southwest Louisiana, the infield fly rule in baseball, Winslow Homer, Sioux Plains drawings and Navajo blankets, the music of Chuck Berry and Brian Wilson, cheeseburgers, deep capital markets, the world’s best universities, the Museum of Modern Art, Chattanooga, Tennessee, lots of big airports, the north rim of the Grand Canyon, red cardinals and blue jays, about two dozen cities and towns named Paris, self-driving vehicles, not just one but two Dakotas, three branches of government (I hope not four), and the best set of immigrants in the world. And that is just scratching the surface.
“What other country would have done this?” — Daniel Inouye
“We don’t repeat this every day, but there are 33 words that are very sacred to all of us. We do the repetition a little differently but ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident. That all men are created equal. That they are endowed by their creator certain inalienable rights. That among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ It’s operational. Believe me.” — Daniel Inouye
China’s last imperial dynasty, the Qing, lasted 268 years. The Ming Dynasty that preceded it lasted just slightly longer, at 276, while the celebrated Tang made it to 289. Decades before each of those dynasties officially fell, they were shells of their former selves, with much of the land outside the control of the central government.
Barring abrupt catastrophe, the United States — which today marks a quarter of a millennium — will probably last as long as the Qing, the Ming, and probably the Tang. The country’s foundations are certainly shakier than when I was a child, but we have not yet entered an obvious terminal phase. The economy is still robust — our GDP remains on the smooth upward trend it has been on since we started measuring such things eight decades ago:
We cannot (or will not) build a functional passenger train network, but our AI industry is upending the world. Our health care costs twice as much as that of other rich nations, but our houses are huge and luxurious. Our cities are burdened with crime and disorder, but e-commerce delivers everything we need, straight to our door. The hour of the wolf is not yet upon us. It seems a safe bet that there will still be a United States of America in 2044, 2052, and probably 2065.
And yet we’ve reached the stage where we can peer through the fog and see how this grand experiment might be heading toward its conclusion. Much of the country has eased into a comfortable equilibrium of sclerosis; local veto power either prevents the construction of factories, housing, energy, transportation, and other infrastructure, or delays it by decades, or raises the cost to multiples of what other rich countries pay. The past has become more valuable than the future to many Americans; they cling desperately to the power to enforce stasis, preserving a facade of the country they grew up in at the expense of the very dynamism that made that country great.
That sclerosis seeps into everything else. Immigration, and even migration from city to city, becomes a vicious zero-sum fight over a fixed housing supply. Cities decay into museums of themselves. The industries of the future can only be built in America if they take up nearly no land, use nearly no energy, require very little bank financing, and are able to procure skilled labor as needed from abroad. Somehow the internet industry satisfied all of those conditions for three decades, but that time is done.
Our politics, meanwhile, has degenerated into movements defined more by who they hate than by any positive vision for the country’s future. Rightists are consumed by their hatred for immigration, leftists by their hatred for Israel. Even intellectual liberals — my own movement and social class, if only by process of elimination — increasingly subordinate other goals to their dream of lowering the social status of wealthy technologists.
To the extent that popular visions of a better America exist, they are rank and obvious fantasies — homogeneous harmony that rightists will never be able to create, or socialist plenty that socialism is incapable of delivering. There are plenty of workable, feasible future visions that would advance the frontiers of freedom, dignity, and prosperity; no faction of the engaged American public seems particularly interested in them.
Political discourse in America is still the baleful thing it became in the 2010s — a vicious free-for-all of social media influencers using hatred, division, fear, and misinformation to win the ear of the powerful political staffer, think tank, and journalist classes. Everything exists in the shadow of the almost-revolution of the late 2010s — an upheaval whose force has mostly receded but whose damage has yet to be fully assessed. Meanwhile, the country’s powerful enemies abroad are sharpening their knives.
If there is a reason to be pessimistic about America’s future, it’s that so few of the country’s citizens seem to believe in it. We used to be an unusually patriotic nation; now Americans are less proud of their nation than Europeans, Asians, or people in any other major world region:
The rightists who now dominate the GOP believe that America will only be valuable as a going concern if its old ethnic composition can be forcibly restored. The leftists who are surging among the Democrats, meanwhile, have a vision of America as an evil empire that could have come straight from old Soviet propaganda; this idea finds fertile ground among progressives who for a decade have mainlined the notion that America is “stamped from the beginning” with racism. How will the country be saved if no one thinks it’s something worth saving?
It would be foolish, of course, to predict that the U.S. is headed for the scrap heap within our lifetimes; uncountably many such predictions have made fools of the people who made them. The country is not facing mortal, imminent danger; its enemies are powerful but most of its wounds are self-inflicted. The United States may yet survive, with its territory and its constitutional democracy intact, to its 300th birthday and beyond.
Even so, it’s far from clear what a nation will even mean in those decades and centuries to come. The human race as a whole is set to dwindle, as fertility falls below replacement in every corner of the globe. At the same time, more and more of the thinking done on the planet will be done in data centers rather than within human brains. In that posthuman world, it’s not at all clear that humanity will even need the nation-state to provide the crucial organizing and coordinating role it played during the previous two and a half centuries.
So whether or not this is the beginning of the end for America, it’s the beginning of the end for something even bigger and more important — the human age. By that I mean the age when humanity, unassisted by any higher intelligence, broke free of the chains that had bound it for millennia and became something greater.
Happy Fourth, TPM Readers. If you’re interested in hearing what I and three other TPMers love about this country check out this week’s edition of the podcast. This week Kate and I (The TPM Show with Josh and Kate) got together with Joe Ragazzo and Josh Kovensky (The TPM Social Club) for a combined episode where we discussed the news of the week, our July 4th hot takes and what we love about this country. If you’re a regular listener it’ll be on your phone or other device or you can watch or listen here.
Calendar Mirroring allows you to connect two separate calendars
(like work and personal) so that events from one automatically
show up on the other.
The best part? No event information is sent to Flexibits servers
or saved outside of your device.
You can choose to show full event details or just block the time
out as a mysterious, professional “Busy”. Your coworkers don’t
need to know you’re getting a root canal, they just need to know
you’re unavailable.
In Flexibits’s example scenario, the idea is that you have a personal calendar with important events that you want to mirror to your work calendar, to block the times for those events off — and you might just want them marked as “Busy” on your work calendar, rather than revealing the actual details.
I’ve been using this feature in beta for a few months and love it, even though my use case is seemingly simple. For recording episodes of Dithering, Ben Thompson and I have a shared Microsoft 365 calendar. (You can guess which of the two of us set that up by that fact.) Fantastical has long had terrific built-in support for Microsoft 365 accounts. So for me, those events have always just shown up in Fantastical. For me.
The problem is, my wife and I share an iCloud calendar, where we put events we want each other to know about. My Dithering recordings have never shown up there. Ben and I record on a pretty regular schedule, but it’s always been a minor irritation that my wife can’t see when I’m booked for Dithering. Fantastical’s new mirroring feature solves this perfectly. I set up a mirror to copy all events from my Dithering calendar to my family calendar, keeping the original event titles rather than obscuring them as “Busy”. (The titles all just say “Dithering”.)
The icing on the cake is Fantastical’s longstanding “Combine identical events” preference setting. Because I have that setting on, I don’t see duplicate “Dithering” events — one from my Dithering calendar, and another from my family calendar. I just see one event for each scheduled recording, with a striped dual-color swatch that indicates that this one event exists on both calendars. It’s just perfect.
And on July 4, 1776, the Second Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence, declaring: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”
For all the fact that the congressmen got around the sticky little problem of Black and Indigenous enslavement by defining “men” as “white men,” and for all that it never crossed their minds that women might also have rights, the Declaration of Independence was an astonishingly radical document. In a world that had been dominated by a small class of rich men for so long that most people simply accepted that they should be forever tied to their status at birth, a group of upstart legislators on the edges of a continent declared that no man was born better than any other.
America was founded on the radical idea that all men are created equal.
What the founders declared self-evident was not so clear eighty-seven years later, when southern white men went to war to reshape America into a nation in which African Americans, Indigenous Americans, Chinese, Mexicans, and Irish were locked into a lower status than white Americans. In that era, equality had become a “proposition,” rather than “self-evident.”
“Four score and seven years ago,” Abraham Lincoln reminded Americans, “our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” In 1863, Lincoln explained, the Civil War was “testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”
It did, of course. The Confederate rebellion failed. The United States endured, and Americans began to expand the idea that all men are created equal to include Black men, men of color, and eventually women.
But just as in the 1850s, we are now, once again, facing a rebellion against our founding principle as a few people seek to reshape America into a nation in which certain people are better than others.
The men who endorsed the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, pledged their “Lives, [their] Fortunes and [their] sacred Honor” to defend the idea of human equality. Ever since then, Americans have sacrificed their own fortunes, honor, and even their lives, for that principle.
Lincoln reminded Civil War Americans of those sacrifices when he urged the people of his era to “take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
If you are trading currencies via MetaTrader 5 platforms, technical analysis is crucial. Even if you have 2 traders studying the same chart, that can reach different conclusions depending on how well the platform supports data access, analytical features and execution.
Why do MT5 platform tools matter for technical analysis?
Technical analysis always depends on 3 major core inputs. These are price data, charting tools, execution feedback and so on. Broker implementation helps determine data quality, execution speed, along with the available instruments, spread behavior during analysis and anything of that nature.
MT5 is known for offering timeframes from a minute to monthly charts. That way, you can identify the long term trends, refine entries and also get time precision execution, too. It’s imperative to have access to such data, because you can avoid false breakouts, missed trend reversals, incorrect support/resistance levels and so on.
Additionally, MT5 is known for supporting various chart types, such as candlestick charts, bar charts, line charts and tick charts. Tick-level data is important for scalpers, because it will show liquidity shifts, micro price movements, along with spread widening movements.
Technical indicators and platform customization
The great thing about MT5 as a platform is that it offers over 80 indicators, be it Bollinger bands, MACD, RSI or moving averages. It also allows custom indicators thanks to MQL5 scripting. Indicator accuracy always depends on the data feed however. And even if there are small differences in the bid/ask spread, that can shift indicator readings.
What you will notice is that MT5 brokers have plenty of automation features. Broker conditions will affect performance, because execution latency impacts the EA results, spread variation will charge strategy profitability and so on. That’s the reason why you want a strategy that works well. Some might do well in demo trading, but in live trading it fails because there are broker differences.
Order execution tools and how they influence technical analysis
Technical analysis assumes that whenever the price reaches a level, execution will happen at that level. But MT5 brokers offer either market execution or instant execution. The first one means orders get filled at the best price and there can be some slippage.
If the analysis says one thing but the execution occurs at a value slightly larger or smaller, then the technical model is altered. Hence the reason why execution quality is a part of technical analysis and not separate from it.
Depth of market and the order flow tools
One of the upsides of MT5 is the fact that it has a depth of market features. That shows the buy orders, sell orders, but also the liquidity clusters. That’s very important and useful for identifying support/resistance zones, understanding institutional interest areas and anticipating short-term reversals. One thing to note is that not all brokers will provide the full DOM data. Some will only show the aggregated liquidity or limited pricing depth, something to keep in mind here.
Another important aspect of MT5 is that it has a built-in strategy tester, which makes it easy for traders to test EAs using historical data, simulate trades and optimize parameters. There is a problem here, because there can be data quality bias. Backtesting accuracy will depend on the historical tick data quality, spread modeling, execution assumptions and so on. When the data is low quality, then the back tests are very optimistic and the strategy performance is very misleading.
Spreads, technical levels and liquidity
Spreads will impact technical analysis directly because they are determining the entry precision, stop-loss placement, along with breakout validity. During the news events, spreads can widen, and support/resistance levels can be violated artificially. That will bring some false breakouts, along with stop-loss hunting appearance, as well as misleading chat patterns.
Even on MT5, brokers will source liquidity differently. There are ECN/STP brokers that have tight spreads and a more realistic chart. And then there are market makers, which are smoother, but with a less transparent pricing.
Most people think that indicators are universal, but there are differences. And if there are differences, even the smallest ones will impact entry timing, trade frequency, along with a win rate of strategies. In the end, that’s excellent, and it can provide a much-needed sense of consistency, which is crucial to keep in mind.
Automation and its impact on technical analysis
MT5 does allow algorithmic trading via expert advisors. That transforms technical analysis into indicator-driven trading bots, automated chart pattern detection, as well as rule-based execution systems. But there can be a broker impact on automation. That means execution speed will determine the EA profitability, server latency affects the scalping bots and spread variability will affect stop-loss login. That means automated technical analysis is highly broker-dependent.
Broker-specific differences
MT5 tends to be standardized, but brokers still have the ability to modify a lot of things. Those can include everything from spreads to the execution model, symbol pricing, available instruments, data feed sources and so on. There can be differences between brokers like different candle shapes, indicator signals or volatility behavior. That’s why most professional traders tend to use multiple broker charts for confirmation, just to be on the safe side.
If you are going to use MT5 for technical analysis, then it’s a good idea to compare broker charts and focus on execution quality, not just the indicators. On top of that, avoid relying on a single indicator and use demo accounts strategically. If possible, backtest with some real tick data. That way, it will provide a much better and more consistent result, along with cohesive solutions you can rely on.
Conclusion
We believe it’s highly commended to focus on technical analysis, using the right tools. Thankfully, platform tools can be very effective, and they can deliver an outstanding return on investment. It’s highly recommended to take your time, implement these solutions properly, and the outcome can be second to none. Just make sure that you rely on the right tools and work with a professional broker. Even if MetaTrader 5 and other tools offer a standardized, powerful environment, it’s the broker that will determine the realism, accuracy and speed of the technical analysis.
Every 44 minutes, someone in the U.S. dies in a crash involving a drunk driver. Most statehouses still respond to that fact the same way they did thirty years ago: tougher penalties, more checkpoints, another round of DUI statutes. It’s not that this approach is wrong, exactly. It’s that it’s incomplete. Impaired driving behaves like a public health problem — tangled up with addiction, mental health, road design, and who has a safe way home at 1 a.m. — and treating it only as a law-and-order issue leaves a lot of prevention on the table.
The Numbers Tell a Story Lawmakers Keep Missing
Drunk driving killed 11,904 people in 2024, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. That’s about 30% of all traffic deaths that year. It’s also the third straight year the number has ticked down, which is genuinely good news. But “down” is a low bar when you’re still talking about roughly one death every 44 minutes.
A Death Every 44 Minutes
Here’s the part that rarely makes it into a floor speech: this isn’t spread evenly across casual drinkers who made one bad decision. NHTSA and industry researchers put the number at nearly two out of three drunk-driving deaths involving a driver with a blood alcohol concentration of .15 or higher — almost double the legal limit. That’s a different category of driver. Often it’s someone with untreated alcohol use disorder, someone who’s been arrested before and, statistically, will be again — and whose choices eventually leave other families sorting through claims involving intoxicated drivers long after the criminal case has wrapped up.
Add the CDC’s numbers and the picture gets bigger still. An estimated 15.5 million adults say they’ve driven under the influence of alcohol in the past year, and millions more admit to driving after using cannabis or other drugs. Arrests, by comparison, catch a sliver of that.
Why “Just Enforcement” Isn’t Working
Checkpoints and license suspensions aren’t useless. They just aren’t enough on their own, and the fatality numbers have plateaued for years despite decades of tougher DUI laws.
The Hardcore Offender Problem
A lot of state DUI codes are still written as if every offender is a first-timer who needs a scare, not a system. Meanwhile a small group of chronic, high-BAC offenders is doing outsized damage. Suspend the license, they drive anyway. Rearrest them, and the underlying addiction is still sitting there untreated when they get out. Without screening and treatment built into sentencing, that loop just keeps running. A public health approach goes after the addiction itself, not only the traffic offense sitting on top of it.
What a Public Health Approach Actually Looks Like
Public health thinking is about stopping harm before it happens rather than mopping up after. Applied here, that looks like a handful of concrete changes:
Screening and treatment requirements for repeat offenders, not just fines and points
Ignition interlocks extended to first-time offenders with elevated BAC, not saved for repeat cases
Real funding for alternatives — late-night transit, subsidized rideshare — especially where crash rates run highest
Education in schools and workplaces that covers drug impairment too, since cannabis is showing up in more fatal crashes as legalization spreads
Treating Alcohol Use Disorder, Not Just Punishing DUIs
A handful of states have tried “24/7 sobriety” programs — frequent testing paired with treatment referrals instead of straight jail time. South Dakota and North Dakota saw real drops in repeat arrests after adopting versions of this. But fewer than half of states run anything similar at scale, and the treatment funding tends to be the first line item cut when budgets tighten.
Investing in Transportation Alternatives
About a third of alcohol-impaired deaths happen in rural counties, where there’s often no late-night transit and thin rideshare coverage. Giving someone who’s been drinking an actual way home — not just a law telling them not to drive — isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the infrastructure the policy depends on to work.
The Technology States Are Slow to Require
Federal rules now push automakers toward building impaired-driving detection into new vehicles, a change the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety says could eventually save more than 10,000 lives a year. States don’t have to wait for Washington’s timeline. They could require interlock or detection systems in fleet vehicles, rental cars, and cars owned by repeat offenders right now. Almost none have.
When Prevention Fails: The Legal Aftermath
No policy, however well designed, is going to prevent every crash. That’s why the civil justice system still matters as a backstop. Families dealing with the aftermath of an impaired-driving crash usually need to figure out their legal options fast — what compensation looks like, how fault gets established, what the timeline is. The same negligence principles apply whether the victim was another driver, a passenger, or a pedestrian struck by an impaired driver. That entire process exists precisely because the prevention systems above still have gaps.
A Path Forward for State Legislatures
Impaired driving sits where public safety, addiction treatment, transportation policy, and vehicle technology all overlap. Treat it as a single-lane criminal justice issue and you get single-lane results: incremental drops, plateaus in enforcement, the same offenders cycling back through the same courtrooms.
None of this means going soft on drunk driving. It means admitting that punishment without treatment only solves half the problem, and that a law without a ride home isn’t much of a deterrent at 2 a.m. States that pair screening with interlocks, fund rural transit, and get ahead of vehicle safety technology are the ones likely to move the fatality numbers further than the last decade of enforcement alone managed to.
The data’s public. The tools already exist. What’s missing, in most statehouses, is the will to treat impaired driving as the layered problem it’s always been.
Last time you picked up a diploma, transcript, or certificate, you’ll remember the weighty cardstock, personal seal, and crystal-clear ink and color on the page.
Academic credentials should reflect the gravitas of the achievement, and in some cases, the life’s work that earned the qualification. Quality isn’t a single choice when it comes to academic credential printing; it’s three value decisions. It is three value decisions. One missing link can undermine the perception of quality and deliver an insufficient product.
This article covers each step of the journey: paper, print, and turnaround time, focusing on why quality matters in custom academic printing.
Start with the quality and weight of the paper
The first thing you notice when you pick up a diploma or certificate is the weight and texture of the stock. Printing on flimsy paper erodes trust in any credential. Heavyweight, archival-grade cardstock demonstrates that the document is permanent, issued by a serious institution, and designed for longevity.
Naturally, as part of this, some institutions will also ensure that the stock quality includes watermarks and other security features. These tools aren’t just for anti-fraud purposes; they also make the document feel higher-quality and reflect the value of the credential being awarded.
Transcripts are different. Over their lifetime, the volume of people who handle them is much higher. They’re handled more frequently, so they must be more durable. Admissions offices, HR departments, and filing systems will all handle them. The weight of the stock is less ceremonial and more functional, but the document remains vital and valuable. While a diploma is more prestigious, a transcript remains a vital certification, used far more frequently by the individual.
The paper is the first statement of the document’s value. Selecting the right stock is crucial, but even the finest paper can only perform as well as the print it carries.
Clear and perfectly colored print is non-negotiable
Next, you need to ensure the print matches the choice of paper. Official credentials must have precise visuals. Seals, crests, and fine-line borders cannot afford any blur. A mistake like this would be perceived as a trust problem, lowering the document quality.
This means that high-resolution print is not a technical specification. This means that high-resolution print is not a technical specification; it’s non-negotiable when scrutinized by the recipient, validation processes, and friends and family. Producing a document with a smudged institutional crest is immediately noticeable. Color drift in the final print will also be noticed, especially when your college has distinct and identifiable colors.
A good printer will Pantone-match institutional colors perfectly, or use a CMYK-precise representation of your college. This is the difference between using a professional print shop and printing something at home. Even individuals who collect replica academic documents or buy fake GED documents will choose a provider that guarantees a high-quality finish.
A strong finish authenticates the document and sends an anti-fraud signal, something that photography and digital scanning cannot replicate. It authenticates and provides an anti-fraud signal. Genuine quality differentiators in the finish include selecting a gloss or matte print, providing a soft-touch laminate to protect certain document types, and embossing a logo directly onto the stock.
When paper weight, resolution, and finish quality align, the credential’s value is guaranteed. However, precision is impossible under deadline pressure. A good print shop values deadlines and builds in a manageable turnaround time.
Plan your print to the graduation deadline to avoid quality trade-offs
This is the final element to consider. Any print shop under time pressure will cut corners, affecting the precision of the credential. Graduation deadlines are fixed points on the calendar for any academic institution. A print shop cannot move them, so they must plan their printing schedule around the dates of every college in their client base.
Working backwards from graduation day, a print shop needs two to four weeks to design the artwork for sign-off, provide a single proof for approval, and ensure that the print process is as high-quality as possible. Most shops will suggest adding a buffer in, just in case something fails inspection. This means the timeframe when working with a reliable print partner should be six to eight weeks ahead of the graduation date.
Rushing credentials leads to corners being cut. Rushing credentials leads to corners being cut, which will be noticed when the document reaches someone’s hands. Depending on lead times, that might be the credential itself. The three initial casualties of a rush job are curing time, print inspection, and quality checks. Any institution suffering a reprint will feel the consequences, affecting its reputation and trust.
Building a relationship with a print shop leads to great results. A business that understands academic calendars and treats graduation day as a shared deadline creates a sense of responsibility from the start. This relationship is just as important for marketing collateral, such as prospectuses, posters, and flyers. A trusted print partner will always result in a high-quality finish. The timeline is in the institution’s control, not the print shop.
Quality is a decision: make it before the deadline
A life’s work deserves only the highest-quality printed credential. An educational institution cannot afford to have any of the three links missing, as it will affect its reputation and the trust people have in the college. Each decision upholds or undermines the previous choices.
These documents often outlast institutions, and every factor matters when delivering a finish that matches the effort put in by students. Every factor matters when you have to deliver a finish that can match the effort put in by the students. Decisions made today represent an institution for many years.
Even those searching for replica academic documents need a high-quality print finish from the supplier. The document must match official credentials. That being said, a replica document is only made to look like an official certificate because of the novelty element the purchaser is looking for. Usually created for use on a theatre or TV set, or by a collector to represent a fictional institution from their favourite film or show, it is fraudulent to use a fake qualification for validation purposes. Even in this regard, a flimsy piece of paper does not represent the story the individual wants to tell.
Holding a credential in your own hands allows you to feel its value, the effort put into achieving it, and the pride in attaining it. That’s why you choose quality in custom academic prints.
Strategic tax planning is the process of organizing your finances in a way that minimizes tax liabilities. Planning is critical to successfully mitigate taxes. Key components of this process include knowing how the tax law applies to you specifically, as well as structuring your finances in a way that utilizes available deductions and credits. By taking a proactive approach to tax planning, you can ensure that you are not blindsided by a large tax bill at the end of the year, which can have a significant impact on your financial stability. Let’s dive into why it’s crucial to plan taxes at least two years in advance and explore the benefits that come with doing so.
Engaging Professionals and Resources
Engaging with professionals and resources can make the process smoother and more effective. By doing so, individuals and businesses can potentially save significant amounts of money and avoid any last-minute scramble to file taxes. This can include working with a tax advisor, utilizing payment and tax software like a pay stub generator, and researching current tax laws. By taking the time and effort to plan their taxes, individuals, and businesses can not only save money but also ensure that they comply with all applicable tax laws.
Seeking professional guidance for complex tax situations
Seeking professional guidance is especially important for complex tax situations, such as those involving multiple income sources or international investments. These professionals can help identify potential risks and opportunities for tax savings, as well as develop a comprehensive plan for the next couple of years.
Leveraging their expertise for long-term planning
By leveraging the expertise of financial professionals, you can develop a long-term plan that takes into account your unique financial circumstances and helps you achieve your financial goals. With careful planning and consistent monitoring, you can ensure that your taxes are structured in a way that minimizes your liability and maximizes your returns.
Benefits of Planning Taxes in Advance
By planning your taxes two years in advance, you give yourself ample time to review your financial situation and create a strategy that maximizes your tax savings. The benefits of planning taxes are numerous, ranging from being able to take advantage of tax-efficient investments to optimizing your contributions to retirement accounts. Additionally, by planning, you can ensure you have enough funds set aside to pay your taxes when they come due, avoiding undue stress and financial hardship.
Additionally, individuals can also adjust their income and expenses to optimize their tax situation. Planning taxes allows for greater flexibility in financial decision-making, as well as providing peace of mind knowing that taxes are being handled proactively. It is important to start planning early, as waiting until the last minute can limit the options available for reducing tax liabilities. Here are three main benefits:
Maximizing deductions and credits
By maximizing deductions and credits, individuals and businesses can save a significant amount of money on their taxes. However, this requires careful consideration and planning, ideally starting two years in advance. With proper strategic tax planning, it is possible to minimize tax liability and maintain compliance with all relevant laws and regulations.
Planning for significant life events
It is important to address the significance of planning for significant life events, and how it can impact your taxes. Life events such as marriage, having children, or buying a home, can greatly affect your financial situation. By anticipating these changes and planning accordingly, you can ensure that you are prepared and can take advantage of tax benefits that may be available to you.
Tax Law Changes and Future Projections
Tax law changes and future projections play a crucial role in tax planning. The tax code is often updated, and it is important to stay informed about these changes to adjust your tax planning strategies. By keeping track of potential changes, you can anticipate how they might impact your financial situation, and make any necessary adjustments. Additionally, projecting future financial events such as retirement can also inform your tax planning decisions.
Long-Term Financial Planning
It is never too early to start considering tax planning, as it generally requires a long-term effort to be truly effective. By planning two years, taxpayers can take advantage of various strategies and options to minimize their tax burden and achieve greater financial security.
Considering retirement savings and investments
Many people focus on filing their taxes on time each year but fail to adequately plan for taxes in the future. This is where considering retirement savings and investments become crucial. By taking a proactive approach and planning your taxes ahead of time, you can potentially save a significant amount of money in the long run.
Proper tax planning involves a combination of forward-thinking and strategic decision-making, which is why it is crucial to start the process well in advance. With the right planning and guidance, individuals and businesses can position themselves for long-term success and financial stability.
Final Thoughts
Tax planning is an important aspect of maximizing your financial success. By taking the time to plan and understand your options, you can ensure that you are making the most of your money and minimizing your tax burden. As the saying goes, failing to plan is planning to fail, and when it comes to taxes, this couldn’t be more true.
Establishing a data collection workflow is crucial, as it will help you access data that will help achieve your strategic goals or improve operations. The value of data relies on consistency, accuracy, quality, but also reliability. All these factors are influenced by how effective your data collection workflow really is. And here’s what you need to know.
What is a data collection workflow?
At its core, the data collection workflow is referring to the processes involved in processing, acquiring, validating, but also storing and using data. Basically, the workflow is a framework which ensures that all data is moving efficiently from the source to its destination, all while maintaining integrity and consistency as well.
A regular data collection workflow will include defining objectives, then figuring out data sources and collecting data. It will also focus on validating and cleaning data, storing and organizing the data, monitoring quality and analyzing as well as reporting results. The efficiency of each stage does impact how reliable the system is, which is extremely important to keep in mind here.
Define data collection objectives
You always want to have the right objectives when you are collecting any type of data. Basically, you want to know what info is needed, why is the data collected, how is the data going to be used, who will use the data and also what decisions will it support. Defining the objective will give you a much better idea when it comes to data points, and it can prevent unnecessary data collection.
Identify reliable data sources
Making sure that you have a reliable data source is crucial. And these can range from internal databases to CRM systems, website analytics platforms, mobile apps, surveys and questionnaires, public data sets, IoT devices and sensors, third party providers and so on.
You do want to be certain that these data sources are dependable, because they need to deliver accuracy, relevance, timeliness, consistency and reduce the risks of adding errors into the workflow. That is extremely important, and it’s certainly something you need to keep in mind as you want to have a powerful data collection workflow.
Ensure data quality from the beginning
Some companies treat data quality as an afterthought. However, you always want to focus on quality assurance and on preventing any type of issue that could potentially arise.
Accuracy is mandatory, because the data you get must represent the real-world conditions.
It also needs to be complete, and there shouldn’t be any significant gaps in there as well.
Additionally, consistency is crucial. The information needs to be uniform across data sets and systems.
Another important aspect is validity, because the data should conform to the predefined formats and rules.
It must be unique as well, and if there are duplicate records, those need to either be eliminated or minimized as well.
Lastly, data must be current and relevant. Poor quality data will always lead to inaccurate analysis, bad strategies and less trust in the reporting systems.
If you focus on data quality right from the beginning, that can be extremely useful and you will appreciate the results quite a bit. In the end, that’s what you want to pursue, and you will be amazed how everything flows together.
Standardizing the data collection process
The reason why you want to standardize data collection is because it brings consistency and a great sense of reliability as well, across all the data collection activities. You need to have data entry guidelines, naming conventions, measurement standards, but also formatting requirements and validation rules.
You should also use the best proxies available in order to ensure that the data is acquired properly and there are no blacklists or other problems. At the end of the day, standardized processes are great because they reduce confusion and can also improve data integration across multiple systems.
Create effective data validation systems
You need to have data validation in order to prevent errors during collection and detection. Format validation is important because it ensures values are matching expected patterns. Then there are range validations, where you need to be certain that values are falling within the acceptable limits. And of course, there’s mandatory field validation and cross-field validation as well. integrating the best validation mechanics is crucial, because it will improve data reliability. And since data is crucial for so many things, validation is indeed a major aspect of the data collection workflow.
Automate the data collection workflow (where possible)
You don’t always want to automate your data collection workflow, but some of the tasks might be suitable for automation. There are a lot of technologies like APIs, data integration platforms, RPA, workflow automation tools, scheduled imports and so on that might come in handy. And in the end, you will have faster collection, better consistency, not to mention scalability will be improved and operational costs will be a whole lot better.
Building a scalable workflow
Data volumes will increase overtime as the organization is growing. A powerful workflow will need to have scalability, so use that to your advantage. In these situations, you always want to assess the storage capacity, processing power, integration flexibility and cloud infrastructure. All of them matter and they have to be scalable. That will lower any chances of a bottleneck, and you can also reduce the overall redesign costs in the long term. Hence the reason why it makes sense for your entire data collection workflow to be very scalable.
Conclusion
We always think it’s important to ensure that the data collection workflow you create is carefully planned, and it should also go through ongoing management. Making sure everything is adapted and optimized to your use case is a crucial part of the process. As you do that and the data volume continues to grow, you need to be certain that your data collection workflow is robust and everything works smoothly. Once you address these key considerations, the data collection workflow will be improved exponentially, and your business will benefit from it.
Watchdog cites growing costs for missile-warning satellites, digital engineering gaps and workforce reductions that could slow national security launches
Lisbon 1976: Miguel Beleza, Andy Abel, Jeff Frankel, me
Today is the nation’s 250th anniversary. And it should be a day of celebration.
But it won’t be. America’s 250th birthday will be a grim, glum affair. As far as I can tell, even MAGA enthusiasts are feeling depressed. They certainly aren’t turning out to visit Donald Trump’s sad, shabby state fair.
It’s a huge difference from the bicentennial, which I celebrated in an unusual but deeply memorable way.
You see, I spent the summer of 1976 in Portugal, which had had its own revolution (the Carnation Revolution) just two years earlier. That revolution overthrew the nation’s fascist dictatorship and created what has proved an enduring democracy.
I was there as part of a group of MIT graduate students working at the Banco de Portugal — the country’s equivalent of the Federal Reserve. And I spent the 4th at a picnic in a Lisbon park, thrown by the U.S. embassy.
It was a small affair. These days Lisbon is overrun with American tourists and expats, but back then there were very few of us around. Even the U.S. government had relatively few people there, because it was trying to keep a low profile in the face of widespread anti-Americanism: Many Portuguese at the time were still talking about how the U.S. had helped overthrow a democratically elected government in Chile three years earlier. There were graffiti around Lisbon saying “Morte à CIA” — although some of these had had “e ao KGB” added in fresher paint.
So the embassy filled out the picnic by inviting Americans it knew were in Lisbon along with staff from other friendly embassies. I remember chatting with a number of West Germans.
The picnic was a charming affair. We stood around munching hot dogs — God knows how they managed that in the land of salt cod and grilled sardines — and listened as the ambassador read a patriotic message from Gerald Ford. And I remember feeling very good about America.
Furthermore, I wasn’t the only American feeling cheerful at the bicentennial, which was somehow an uplifting occasion.
This sunniness may seem odd, given that the U.S. was troubled in many ways. We had just suffered a humiliating defeat in Vietnam. Our cities were a mess: New York had 1600 murders in 1976, more than 5 times the rate last year, and Times Square was an eyesore of drug addicts and porn shops. Oh, and the city had recently gone bankrupt.
Yet somehow Americans managed to have fun at the bicentennial festivities, and there was a surprising amount of optimism in the air.
One source of optimism was surely the end of the Vietnam War. Yes, it ended in defeat. But it did end, which meant that young Americans and their families no longer had to worry about the draft, and that the nightly news didn’t keep reporting on body counts.
Another source of optimism — something people like JD Vance will never understand — was the fall of Richard Nixon. Satisfaction about how Watergate brought Nixon down wasn’t mainly about partisanship. Instead, the Watergate saga felt like an affirmation of the American spirit. Reporters were heroes and the media did its job. So did Congress. Nobody would call Gerald Ford a great president, but he was clearly a decent human being. The powerful were held accountable. America, it seemed, still retained its soul.
Who would say that now?
On the eve of America’s 250th birthday we had confirmation of presidential corruption on a scale Nixon could never have imagined. That’s bad in itself. What’s worse is that nobody believes that there will be any consequences for Trump, his cronies, and their henchmen. In 1974 Republicans joined with Democrats to hold Nixon accountable. This time around they’re fully invested in magnifying Trump’s power and his cult of personality, despite knowing perfectly well who he is and what he is doing.
I am not giving up hope. America is not irretrievably lost. But now, much more than 50 years ago, we are a nation in desperate need of redemption.
America’s 250th Birthday Comes With a Crisis of Democracy
Too few of us would pass as credentialed American historians or licensed litigators for maintaining our legal protections, but all of us can feel that this U.S. experiment in democracy over 250 years is slipping away.
What should be a moment of national pride on this Fourth of July about issuing a Declaration of Independence instead is a shattered reflection of our divisions, not only about partisan politics, but about who we are as Americans, about our shared values and about whether we still recognize the central qualities of equality, fairness and lending a hand to those with less.
While the desire for nationwide identity rises and wanes with regularity, overly dependent as it is on whether we can afford the cost of fuel, health, shelter and food, something more sinister has emerged in recent years about the fragility of the American experiment. The decline obviously has been hastened in the two years of Donald Trump’s second presidency, but the prime causes of distrust and perversion of an all-inclusive America to one for the privileged classes have been noticeable for the full Trump decade or more.
Our history as an American entity always has been flawed, of course, marked by genocidal attacks on Native Americans, permanently stained by decades of sanctioned slavery, and the constant need over 250 years for efforts by women, racial, religious, ethnic and gender-identifying minorities to gain access to the American Dream. Despite the current active campaigns by the Trump government, concurring Republican states and unquestioning corporate elites to whitewash our history, the underlying American story has been one of constant fights to expand individual rights for equal treatment.
Or so we have told ourselves. We too quickly overlook locking up Japanese Americans, turning away immigrants fleeing violence and hunger, and our institutionalized racism buried in mortgage redlining and access to education, hiring and promotion.
Why is Trump wondering why people are shunning his version of the Fourth that glorifies himself rather than the principles of democracy?
What’s New?
Trump’s so-called populism of the angry, of a White middle-class that has felt abused by efforts towards fairness, has brought a boatload of anti-democratic words and deeds to the surface.
Set aside Trump as plunderer, or Trump as hypocritically running to stop wars only to start his own, or the Trump who values self-glorification over the responsibilities to lower costs, promote jobs, education, health, welfare and to provide safety nets for the vulnerable.
Most actual Trump public policies are generally wrong-headed, but they are the matter for the kind of debate that has been imagined from the start.
What had not been anticipated is the organized Trump program to undercut democracy itself – supposedly the very thing about which all the midnight fireworks displays and public gatherings are meant to be celebrating.
Taken together, Trumpism has achieved in two years what had not been possible in 248: He is dismantling the systems of public checks and balances on the presidency and the ever-growing executive branch. He is neutering Congress through threats and stacked the Supreme Court. He is seeking to manipulate who can vote, how we both vote and count ballots, and how we declare election outcomes. He is threatening to send his privatized, virtually rule-free, armed federal army into our streets and around our polling places.
The voices of Democrats and pro-democracy independents are being ridiculed, sued, prosecuted or simply ignored as Trump has actively encouraged sympathetic corporations to buy or control news outlets and the activities of journalists, lawyers, educators and protestors.
Importantly, the tools of the Trump campaigns are a bastardized Justice Department and FBI, takeover and manipulation of Homeland Security and national intelligence agencies and an ugly anti-immigrant, mass deportation campaign that fails to veil its racialist roots. The transformation of an anti-criminal focus to a generalized effort to undercut legal as well as illegal immigration is well underway.
Oversight is dead or will be unless there is a huge anti-Trump outcome in the November elections, and the damage done across the board by efforts to undercut regulations for health and environment, international agreements and relationships, and trust in elections, government and law itself will take decades of repair.
It’s the Fourth of July, a time to celebrate the very monarchical systems that Trump is reinstituting, along with the personal spoils of self-crowning. It’s marked in the nation’s capital with fences to protect expensive algae-ridden reflecting pools, National Guardsmen everywhere to handle protests and virtually empty Trump events held in 100-degree heat.
What we should be asking is why we are allowing America to be overtaken by Trump, Inc., corporate greed, and the intolerance of anyone not White and wealthy.
“FREEDOM OF THE PRESS IS NOT JUST IMPORTANT TO DEMOCRACY, IT IS DEMOCRACY.” – Walter Cronkite. CLICK HERE to donate in support of our free and independent voice.
"Coffee consumption has been linked to a number of health benefits, such as reduced risks of dementia, head and neck cancer, and all-cause and cardiovascular mortality. According to data from the U.K. Biobank, a higher intake of coffee was associated with lower risks of cirrhosis, hepatocellular carcinoma, and liver-related mortality. These associations persisted for both caffeinated and decaffeinated coffee, and for unsweetened and sweetened coffee."
"Nearly all the 10 million tonnes of coffee beans consumed annually around the world come from two plant species: the strong and often bitter robusta (Coffea canephora) and the more delicate-tasting arabica (Coffea arabica). Unfortunately, arabica suffers or dies when temperatures rise just a few degrees1, and robusta requires massive amounts of water and its yields drop drastically in a drought.
...
"Tesfaye says that scientists, of all people, should care about coffee’s future, not just because science is good for coffee, but because coffee is good for science, too. “Many discoveries and knowledge are generated after having a cup of coffee.”
What changed was that the cost of preliminary exploration collapsed. I could sketch an argument, identify the first serious objections, test whether they were fatal, and reach a provisional verdict in an afternoon rather than a fortnight. This sounds like a simple acceleration, and the more profound effect was on what I was willing to abandon. Dropping a question after an afternoon’s work feels nothing like dropping one after three weeks. When the exploration costs are low, the sunk cost attachment disappears, and you find yourself dropping bad questions earlier and more often, which means the questions you keep are better. I explored far more ideas, and my working portfolio became both larger and better curated. I arrived at this outcome not through any deliberate plan but simply through sustained engagement with a tool that changed what exploration cost.
The skill that improved most, and the one I would never have thought to look for, was something I can only describe as question-identification – the ability to find problems that are both tractable and important. This is the thing an academic career is substantially built on and which nobody, so far as I know, has ever tried to teach directly.
I want to be honest about the costs. My ability to hold together a complex position verbally, under pressure, in a seminar or a conversation, has probably not improved and may have declined somewhat. When preliminary exploration is cheap, you spend less time grinding through arguments from first principles, a grinding that builds fluency that shows up in live exchange. Friends have pressed me on this, and they are right to worry.
Hello again all. It is once again the week of July 4th and so, as is customary here, I am going to use this week’s post to talk about the United States. This is going to be a bit more of an open musing than an argument as compared to previous years (2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025) because my attention has been turned this way and that over the past few weeks and then just when I thought I’d be able to focus on this, one of home ownership’s many annoyances (a busted pipe) cropped up to consume much of the week.
Nevertheless, the Declaration of Independence turns 250 this year – ratified on July 4, published on July 6, read aloud in public on July 8, 1776 – and I want to muse on it a bit, with some focus to the actual text. Americans revere our founding documents (the Declaration and the Constitution) but I fear we do not read them very often. I was a ‘pocket-constitution’ kind of fellow in college, but one is regularly shocked by how little the average American citizen understands about how their government functioned or what the ideals of the framers were and one is regularly disappointed, but very much not shocked, by the endless parade of political entrepreneurs looking to exploit that gap in knowledge.
I will also note, for my international readers, that I think the exercise of looking at these documents is valuable, for the same reason I’ve made my students read Magna Carta or the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen: these are documents of world-historic significance (hardly the only ones, of course, but they make ready examples). At some point, particularly in leftish circles, it became trendy to dismiss the American founding as a mere ‘bourgeois’ revolution in favor of later revolutions in Europe and I think this is a mistake. There quite possibly is no French Revolution without the American one; the cross-pollination of ideas is obvious. The American Revolution (and thus the Declaration) therefore must also play a role in 1848 and it very obvious plays a role in the advance of democracy in Europe after 1945 and again after 1989.
The Declaration of Independence was recognized as a radical, potentially explosive document at the time of its issuance, as we’ll see. And it was explosive: the world of 1775 was one dominated by monarchies with just a tiny handful of traditional republics (which we should not ignore!). It took a long time for the seeds of the declaration to spread, but the world it helped create is one where liberal democracies, while hardly universal (more people have always lived in unfree societies than free ones) represent the most economically and culturally dominant bloc in world affairs – something that had never happened before. The Declaration, in its way, remade not just the Thirteen Colonies, but slowly, surely, as water seeps through the cracks of rocks (or my floorboards, alas), it remade the whole world.
So if you haven’t, go read the text of the Declaration. It isn’t long (but don’t skip!). My thoughts at present don’t necessarily fit together neatly, so we’ll break them down under a few major headings.
The signed copy of the Declaration of Independence displayed in the National Archives in Washington D.C., engrossed by Timothy Matlack.
A Decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind
When I was growing up, one of the things it was fashionable to argue was that the American Revolution was a ‘conservative’ revolution, in that it did not overturn the social structure of the Thirteen Colonies. Conservatives said this about the revolution to claim it for their own and to distinguish it as the ‘good’ revolution in contrast to those ‘bad’ revolutions in Europe and Latin America. Leftists sometimes did the opposite, terming the revolution ‘conservative,’ unlike ‘real’ revolutions which upended social and economic patterns more completely. And there’s not nothing to this: the revolution did not immediately challenge the socio-economic systems of the Thirteen Colonies (though the notion that the revolution was fundamentally pro-slavery is, at best, quite overstated; it was certainly not an anti-slavery revolution, either, of course).
I think both positions however, are fundamentally wrong, however, in that they miss the inherent radicalism of the principles of the Declaration. Indeed, the framers themselves seem to have only imperfectly understood the course of the rock they were about to set rolling. But they very well understood the momentousness of it.
Now there’s a tendency at this point to jump right to, “We hold these truths…” but let’s start at the beginning.
The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America, When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
The introduction of the Declaration doesn’t begin with self-evident truths, but rather an assertion that the action of the Declaration demands explanation, that “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes.” The framing speaks to the radicalism of what the authors (we tend to think of Jefferson as the sole author, but the finished Declaration was very much a creature of committee) are about to do, so radical that decency and respect requires them to explain themselves, not merely to the colonies or to the British Empire but to “mankind.”
The contrast with many similar documents is striking to me. Of course a lot of national declarations declare causes and aims of an action, but in my own – admittedly incomplete – survey, it is quite rare that any imagines that all of mankind needs to be informed. To jump back to the previous examples, Magna Carta calls to witness only John, his subjects and God. The Declaration of the Rights of Man makes its declaration before the “supreme being.” And that makes sense – there is, on some level, no need to inform mankind about those documents, because they pertain only to the people of specific countries (although the Declaration of the Rights of Man clearly has universalist aims).
By contrast, the authors of the Declaration seem very clear-eyed that they are about to make some claims with global, universal significance, that the collection of apple carts they are about to upset is rather larger than just their own. As we’re going to see, they’re right – because they’re not asserting the peculiar rights of Englishmen or British subjects, but rather making an argument about a set of universal rights and principles which might shake thrones and crack crowns the world over. That warning and assumption of responsibility – that the authors understand that the magnitude of their claims here require an explanation – is what leads into the bombshells of the preamble, though the introduction has already tipped its hand to one of them (that a “people” are entitled to a “separate and equal station” and thus able, on their own, to rightly dissolve the bonds that tie them with another).
The Radicalism of the Preamble
That stage-setting swiftly leads us into the Preamble.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security
In the United States, at least, I think we hear these words so often as kids that we lose the sense of their importance and radicalism or even of their plain meaning, the way that if you speak any word enough times over again in a row it starts to feel like gibberish. So what is the preamble saying and why?
Fundamentally, it is building to an argument for the validity of independence in four consecutive points. Notably, whereas today, national independence movements often take it as a granted principle that a people ought to be free to make its own government, ought to be free of the domination of another people (the principle of self-determination), the Declaration assumes its reader thinks the opposite. It assumes a reader who accepts that monarchy and empire are both just and natural, for whom the idea of self-determination is at best dangerous nonsense. And that makes sense – almost none of the peoples in the world the framers knew were self governing (notable exceptions for the Dutch and Swiss). Instead, even when a people had their own country, they were ruled, rather than self-governing – by a king or a closed oligarchy (often a hereditary aristocracy), which often felt little if any cultural commonality with their own commoners.
That system was normal and indeed had been normal since antiquity: self-governing polities are very rare in the pre-modern period. It was not only normal, but normalized: centuries of literature and tradition supported the idea that the right and normal way to organize a society was through authority rather than self-governance. So the Declaration has to go to exceptional lengths to show why this monarchy and this empire have ceded any just claim to govern the colonies. In the process, however, it lays down the argument that leads to that modern assumption of self-determination.
The argument begins with two assertions. The first is a natural law assertion of an equality of rights among men, “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” It is a claim of striking magnitude and remarkable finality – indeed, a claim of such magnitude that it very obviously conflicted with the practice of slavery in the colonies, something some of the framers recognized and then most shamefully did almost nothing about. The Declaration could have asserted those unalienable rights are being particular – to British subjects or Englishmen or Christians, perhaps – but it does not. Instead it insists upon their universality through an argument to natural law, a sensible choice for Thirteen Colonies that already had a multiplicity of faiths and ethnicity in them. Again, if that seems normal to us, it was not normal at the time and indeed is not normal now: most countries are not operated with the notion that anyone has unalienable rights (a reminder that at no point in human history have a majority of countries been anywhere remotely close to free).
We should also note that what the Declaration asserts are not collective rights, but rather individual rights, an important component of liberalism, but an enormous break with most pre-modern social assumptions, which tend to be communal, rather than individual. Compare for instance the ancient Greek notions of autonomia and eleutheria – autonomy and freedom – which in a political sense were really collective rights, possessed by the polis. An individual Athenian did not really have any rights that the Athenian demos – the people at large – were bound to respect. By contrast, the Declaration is asserting that all men individually possess key rights, including the ‘Pursuit of Happiness’ which is rather an expansion of Locke’s original “life, liberty and property” formulation – to me it includes not just a right to property but also a right to make one’s own decisions, to pursue one’s own goals, to not be a tool of the community. Again, this is a really radical rejection of the way most societies had been organized – as Patrician Crone notes, in pre-industrial societies, “the individual existed for the benefit of the overall group, not the other way around.” The Declaration asserts the opposite: the group (governments) exist for the individual.
The second assertion then follows on the first – drawing from John Locke’s theory of the social contract, the Declaration asserts that “to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” This is, as we’ve discussed many times, untrue as a matter of historical fact – states emerge as violence-machines, not as machines for the protection of rights. But as an aspirational statement, that governments and states ought to have the protection of rights as their primary purpose, ought to derive their powers from the consent of the governed, it is a powerful statement.
It was also really radical in 1776, at a point when most states on Earth justified their power not from the consent of the governed but rather by divine right: the ruler was chosen by God, or had the Mandate of Heaven, or was of a divine lineage, and so on. The idea that government was by divine sanction was hardly new – we find it in some of the earliest governing documents that still survive. It seems to have been the governing principle of the earliest states, that the social order – with the king on top – was divinely ordained and thus any attempt to challenge it was a rebellion against God or the gods. One sees strains of this in certain forms of Christian nationalism in the United States, which regard either the American form of government or specific American leaders as divinely ordained, but the irony is that the Declaration is quite directly rejecting this vision. “Their Creator” who is also “Nature’s God” does not ordain rulers, rather he endows rights which earthly rulers may not in justice abridge and which humans cannot alienate – which is to say the rights can never be lost, only violated.
The next two points then serve as conclusions which follow these two initial assertions: if individuals have unalienable rights and if governments exist to protect those rights then (this is the third point) a government which fails to protect those rights loses its legitimacy and may be disestablished and therefore (the fourth point) a “long train of abuses and usurpations” can justify revolution.
In short, a government – and it is striking here that the Declaration uses the king as synecdoche (part-for-the-whole) for the whole British government – which greatly fails in its duty of protecting rights loses its legitimacy. Once again, the authors seem to sense how radical that claim is and so they qualify it, making clear that such a decision isn’t to be taken lightly (and it isn’t likely to be taken lightly). The failure of the government in question to protect rights must be extreme to justify the radical cure of revolution, a position which will set up the bill of grievances that make up the actual bulk of the Declaration’s text (but which everyone skips – we shall not).
But before we move to the bill of grievances, I want to take one more chance to push back against the idea that the Declaration is just something ‘small ball’ or something that only mattered for the United States.
The Declaration was recognized as an incendiary, radical, dangerous document at the time. It was banned or suppressed in some European monarchies – not appearing in translation, for instance, in Russia until 1863 or in Spain until 1868; it was outright banned in Spain’s overseas colonies. And it isn’t hard to see why – the language and ideas of the Declaration, building on European political philosophy that had been ‘in the air,’ so to speak, for some time clearly played a role in the cultural foment that culminated in the French Revolution. A European monarch who worried that the publication of the Declaration might endanger their crown was right to worry.
The Bill of Grievances
Which at last brings us to the bill of grievances. Given the above build-up, you can see why the list of grievances are necessary: the Declaration has tried to establish that if a government is sufficiently injurious to the natural rights of its people, it becomes permissible – even required by duty – for those people to abolish and replace it. But of course then they have to show that the government of King George III was, in fact, so injurious. It is an interesting and clearly deliberate choice to frame the grievances as an indictment against George III in particular, even though the framers knew as well as anyone that many of these injuries were the product of policy set by Parliament. On the one hand, George III could stand in for his government symbolically here, but at the same time, I suspect that part of what the authors of the Declaration are trying to summon rhetorically is the notion of ancient tyranny (thus their use of the word). Of course a tyranny could be of Thirty Men as easily as just one, but the designation of a singular tyrant-king lends the whole list a rhetorical punch. “He has…” is just a lot clearer and more effective than, “the King in consultation with his government and the full support of Parliament has…”
Some of the particular grievances have less relevance today (particularly the incitement of war with American Indians), but many of them remain relevant – it isn’t hard in many cases to see specific parts of the Constitution designed to forbid particular grievances from the list.
There’s a tendency to skip over the bill of grievances when reading the Declaration in dramatic readings or classroom contexts and one understands why: compared to the philosophical firebombs of the preamble or the emotional punch of the conclusion, the bill of grievances is rather long and less exciting. But I think it is important because it provides a sense of what kind of government the framers thought might constitute tyranny.
And I must admit it was in this sense that I have been thinking about this document for the past year, because, as I have argued before, I think we are facing a government not merely that I disagree with – that’s not at all new and democracy must mean losing elections as well as winning them – but rather a government, particularly an executive branch, which does aim for “the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States,” in a way that is peculiar to any administration, democratic or republican, that I can think of.
So I provide below an annotated copy of the bill of grievances, with links to note where our current government is doing many of the very things for which we declared, 250 years ago, that it was not merely right, but a duty to throw off British governance. Of course today we have no need of revolution, because we have elections and so may freely change our leaders or even alter the form of our government without violence.
He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.
For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:
He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.
He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.
He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.
As the Declaration itself says, “A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.”
What is the Fourth of July For?
The Fourth of July (for Americans) is more than just a day to shoot off fireworks, have parades and cookouts. It is also more than just a day to reflect on the United States’ achievements, which are considerable.
It is also, importantly, a day to reflect on the United States, a country of ideas and values – not a nation of blood and soil. It is a day to think about what those ideals are and what we owe them, not in the fuzzy, gauzy, vague sense of flag waving and patriotic music (though those are fun), but in the hard, specific way of articulating what our country is for. And it can be hard: it is obvious to anyone studying American history that the United States did not at its inception live up to the notion that all men were created equal – the founders kept slaves and often behaved cruelly towards Native Americans. Their ideals were better than they were. And where the men failed, the ideals succeeded: the framers failed to abolish slavery, but their ideals eventually – fitfully, with too much delay and bloodshed – succeeded. Their ideals animated the movement for women’s suffrage – even when the Declaration was new, Abigail Adams could note that its principles must logically extend to all women, as well as all men – and the movement for civil rights.
The Declaration is a document that declares, after all, that “all men are created equal.” It does not admit caveats. It does not say “all men, except for the immigrants” – indeed, the opposite, it charges George III with the abuse of “obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners.” Someone seeking to defend the Declaration against all immigration or the extension of natural rights to foreigners is trying to defend the Declaration against itself, against its own values; they are actually at war with the Declaration (just as the Confederates were), though they might not admit it.
It does not say, “all men, except for that religion I don’t like.” Indeed, no less than George Washington makes this point clear in the nature of the Constitution – the ‘user’s manual’ for achieving the aims of the Declaration – that it “gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.” One cannot help but notice that its formulations, “their Creator” and “Nature’s God” are expressly ecumenical – of course quite a few of the framers were deists or otherwise not very religious and it is worth noting that the founders also had no problem respecting Muslims.
Indeed, it is striking to me that while the Declaration in its ideals warmly embraces the immigrant, the fellow with an unfamiliar religion, the families with different lifeways, what is truly foreign to it is the notion that the United States is just some other blood-and-soil nation, that there are ‘heritage Americans’ or that the unalienable rights it asserts do not extend to some people. The authors and signers of the Declaration were brave enough, confident enough in their ideals to say all men; let us be at least half as brave to keep saying all men.
It is a document that demands of us, that demands us to be better, to strive to fulfill its lofty ambitions, to demand our government so strive. To pledge, as the signers did, “our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor” to its principles and the preservation and expansion of the liberties that and subsequent generations won.
The Fourth of July is a day for us to remember what kind of people we are supposed to be and to rededicate ourselves to coming a little closer, inch by inch, to the grand vision on which our country was founded and in so doing perhaps function as a lighthouse guiding other countries as well to a freer future.
Happy Fourth of July. It has been 250 remarkable years. That tremendous legacy is now bequeathed to us and we are duty bound to see these ideals carried forward for another 250 years. Let us, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine providence, pledge our sacred Honor to that.
My thanks to Day One Journal for once again sponsoring Daring Fireball. Day One first launched in 2011 and has been the stalwart of journaling apps on Mac and iOS ever since. Day One’s apps exhibit a commitment to technical and design excellence, and, more importantly, everything they do is deeply informed by the intense personal nature of keeping a journal. (Or journals — Day One lets you create as many separate journals as you want.) The Day One Mac app is Mac-assed and the iPhone and iPad apps are, well, iOS-assed. Fast, familiar, consistent, and intuitive.
Day One recognizes that many people struggle with journalling not because they can’t write, but because they don’t know how to begin or what a “good” journal entry about their day looks like. That’s why they built Daily Chat, a guided reflection experience that helps you talk through your day, organize your thoughts, and shape them into a journal entry.
Early testers commented: “Day One’s new Daily Chat is a true game changer for my daily journaling. The AI-powered chat makes capturing thoughts effortless and inspires creativity like never before. Writing my diary has never been this intuitive and fun!”
Market Design
