Republicans’ views of same-sex couples are now similar to what they were between 2005 and 2014.
Americans’ support for LGBTQ+ rights has slid downward after peaking in the early 2020s, according to a new Gallup poll.
Support for marriage equality has been steadily declining since it reached an all-time high of 71 percent in 2022.Now,65 percent of Americans believe same-sex marriages should be valid. Broader support for LGBTQ+ people also continues to dip: 62 percent of Americans believe that gay or lesbian relationships are morally acceptable, compared with 71 percent in 2022.
What’s changed? In the past five years, anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric has become a staple of both state and federal politics, as conservatives accuse queer and trans people of influencing children’s identities in schools, sports and hospitals. Politicians including President Donald Trump have spent millions on campaign ads attacking transgender people, while conservative groups and super PACs push out their own anti-LGBTQ+ ads. Nearly 50 organizations have launched a new campaign lobbying to end marriage equality, despite the Supreme Court showing little to no interest in revisiting its landmark 2015 ruling.
The dip in support for LGBTQ+ rights comes largely from Republicans. In 2021 and 2022, Gallup found that 55 percent of Republicans supported same-sex marriage, but now only 37 percent do. In 2022, over half of Republicans found gay or lesbian relationships to be morally acceptable; now 35 percent feel that way.
Other markers of LGBTQ+ acceptance are also waning: A recent study from the Williams Institute, a think tank at UCLA Law, found that HIV stigma has increased in recent years despite significant progress in treatment and prevention. More adults feel fear and blame toward people living with HIV than they did only a few years ago, and a higher share of adults have at least one stigmatizing belief about people with HIV. Conservatives expressed the most stigma.
According to Gallup, Republicans’ views of same-sex couples are similar to what they were between 2005 and 2014 — essentially turning back the clock on LGBTQ+ acceptance.
In a statement, the Human Rights Campaign, the country’s largest LGBTQ+ advocacy group, said that backlash against the LGBTQ+ community has had only limited success.
“Marriage equality is still backed by two-thirds of the American public, our federal protections are codified through the Respect for Marriage Act, and more than 800,000 same-sex couples are in loving marriages all across this country. This is exactly why Pride, our visibility, and our stories matter now more than ever. We will not let extremists define who we are or who we love,” said Jarred Keller, senior press secretary at the Human Rights Campaign.
These cultural shifts are also affecting how Pride month is recognized. This year, Republican governors across several states — including Indiana, Tennessee and Alabama — have rebranded June as a month to celebrate heterosexual marriage and families, the Associated Press reports. But those proclamations aren’t stopping local parties: In Birmingham, Nashville, and Indianapolis, Pride is already in full swing.
“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.
Up and after ordering some things towards my wife’s going into the country, to the office, where I spent the morning upon my measuring rules very pleasantly till noon, and then comes Creed and he and I talked about mathematiques, and he tells me of a way found out by Mr. Jonas Moore which he calls duodecimal arithmetique, which is properly applied to measuring, where all is ordered by inches, which are 12 in a foot, which I have a mind to learn.
So he with me home to dinner and after dinner walk in the garden, and then we met at the office, where Coventry, Sir J. Minnes, and I, and so in the evening, business done, I went home and spent my time till night with my wife.
Presently after my coming home comes Pembleton, whether by appointment or no I know not, or whether by a former promise that he would come once before my wife’s going into the country, but I took no notice of, let them go up and Ashwell with them to dance, which they did, and I staid below in my chamber, but, Lord! how I listened and laid my ear to the door, and how I was troubled when I heard them stand still and not dance. Anon they made an end and had done, and so I suffered him to go away, and spoke not to him, though troubled in my mind, but showed no discontent to my wife, believing that this is the last time I shall be troubled with him.
So my wife and I to walk in the garden, home and to supper and to bed.
I'm a recent convent to AgentsView, Wes McKinney's (previously of Pandas fame) Python toolkit for analyzing transcripts of coding agents from your own computer.
AgentsView can calculate your token spending based on those transcripts, across multiple different coding agents (Claude Code, Codex, Pi and more.)
You can run it via uvx like this to get as ASCII table of spending numbers in your terminal:
I think those numbers are right, I got them from this pricing page. Fable is 2x the price of Opus for input and output.
With the config file edited I can run Fable again to get pricing estimates. I used the serve command to get a web application on port 8080:
I've used the equivalent of $82.92 in tokens since getting access to Fable 5 about four and a half hours ago. This is all included in my $100/month Claude Max subscription though, which based on prior experience will likely give me around 10x the token usage compared to if I was paying list price.
A friend told me the executive vice chair of the Democratic Party of Orange County “ripped into” me on Facebook.
“Really?” I replied.
He proceeded to (kindly) forward me the letter, which was a reaction to this post, headlined, KATRINA FOLEY WILL LIVE ON. It was written by Lauren Johnson-Norris, a person I’ve yet to meet [To her credit, she also e-mailed me the note. I’d missed it—my bad].
Here you go …
And, of course, we live in this era fueled by rage and backlash, where I’m supposed to rip into Johnson-Norris and defend everything I wrote and growl and bark and shoot little snot sparks from my nostrils.
But, well, I think it’s a good letter.
I really do. As I’ve written about more than once, women do (factually) get the short end of the political stick. A toad like Trump can bark and slam and insult—and he’s tough and rugged. A supernova like Hillary Clinton can appear cold—and she’s impersonal, rude, offputting. Fuck, all you have to do is look at the California gubernatorial race, where Katie Porter lost the day she was caught behaving in the manner of 100 million male CEOs before her. Those guys receive promotions. She plummets in the polls.
So, yes, it sucks. No diggity, no doubt.
That being said, I will make a strictly political point: Johnson-Norris writes, “The most telling aspect of your piece is that competence alone does not appear to be enough.” And … well … eh … um … yeah. It’s not. It should be, obviously. Like, Foley-Dixon shouldn’t even be close. But the reality is, most voters don’t pay attention to the nitty gritty. Katrina Foley apparently distributed $50,000 in business recovery grants to local restaurants. She pushed to build a new Fire Station 1 on Royal Palm. On and on and on. Her list of accomplishments are long and impressive. But the depressing-as-fuck reality is, the vast majority of voters will never know. They’ll see her mailing, maybe catch a commercial, perhaps meet her once at the OC County Fair. People form incredibly quick impressions, and—like all of us—those impressions are generally banal and vapid. She remembered my name. He talked to be about the Angels. She was eating a candy apple. Do women get this worse than men? 100,000,000 percent. It’s not even close. Again, it sucks.
But I don’t operate this website in a bubble. Katrina Foley does not come off particularly warm. It doesn’t make her (at all) a poor supervisor, but it does (in my opinion) impact a local campaign, where handshakes and nods and small rallies matter. As I noted in the original post, my first time seeing Katrina Foley on the campaign train was pretty … awkward. That doesn’t make her bad at her job. But part of this job (sadly) is exposure to voters. Positive exposure. Warm exposure.
It sucks. It’s not cool. I feel Lauren Johnson-Norris’s frustration, and I share it. I’m gonna think a lot about her letter, and my own biases.
On June 8, 1789, Representative James Madison of Virginia stood up to address the House of Representatives in order to introduce a series of amendments to the U.S. Constitution.
Initially, Madison had been opposed to the idea of spelling out the rights on which the new government couldn’t intrude because he thought the document itself limited what the government could do. But he had come around to the idea of specifying the areas in which the new government could not intrude after voters opposed ratifying the Constitution until it included protections from government interference in their rights.
When Madison rose to introduce his amendments to the Constitution, ten of which would eventually be adopted and become the Bill of Rights, the Constitution had been ratified, but ratification had stalled. Two states of the original thirteen, North Carolina and Rhode Island, had not yet ratified the Constitution. Others had done so only with the promise that a list of rights would be forthcoming.
One of the amendments Madison proposed was especially dear to him. It was, as he told his colleagues, that “[t]he civil rights of none shall be abridged on account of religious belief or worship, nor shall any national religion be established, nor shall the full and equal rights of conscience be in any manner, or on any pretext, infringed.”
That proposal was the basis for what became the first part of the First Amendment to the Constitution, which reads: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
With the wounds of religious persecution both in Europe and in the colonies still fresh, Madison cared deeply about keeping the government away from religion.
In 1772, when he was 21, Madison watched as the government of Virginia had itinerant preachers arrested for preaching against the established church in the state. By the next year, he had begun to question whether established religion, which was common in the colonies, was good for society. By 1776, many of his broad-thinking neighbors had come to believe that society should “tolerate” different religious practices; he had moved past tolerance to the belief that men had a right of conscience.
In that year, he was instrumental in putting Section 16 into the Virginia Declaration of Rights. It reads, “That religion, or the duty which we owe to our Creator, and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence; and therefore all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience; and that it is the mutual duty of all to practice Christian forbearance, love, and charity toward each other.”
In 1785, in a “Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments,” he explained that what was at stake was not just religion, but also representative government itself. The establishment of one religion over others attacked a fundamental human right—an unalienable right—of conscience. If lawmakers could destroy the right of freedom of conscience, they could destroy all other unalienable rights. Those in charge of government could throw representative government out the window and make themselves tyrants.
The concerns about inequality behind the First Amendment are being illustrated right now in the twenty-first-century United States. Those concerns come from an unlikely direction.
On Thursday, June 4, 2026, Nick Mordowanec of Military dot com reported that under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, the Department of Defense had removed about 180 faith traditions from its number of recognized religious faiths and belief systems. As John Ismay, Alexandra E. Petri, and Aimee Ortiz of the New York Times note, of the 31 religions still recognized by the Defense Department, 22 of them are Christian denominations.
Left off the new list of Christian faiths was the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints, whose members are commonly known as Mormons.
MAGA has worked to impose the ideology of evangelical religion on America. In the military, Mordowanec notes, Hegseth has pushed Christian theocracy through extremist Christian-based prayers services with a Christian nationalist preacher who has said women’s suffrage was a bad idea and has defended slavery, and has described Trump’s war on Iran as a holy war. Michelle Boorstein and Sammy Westfall of the Washington Post add that Hegseth has urged chaplains to focus on scripture rather than psychology and has said those who disagree with him are God’s enemies.
Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) is a Mormon and represents Mormons in Utah. Lee has been a staunch MAGA supporter to the point that he was a key figure in urging President Donald J. Trump to stay in office in 2021 despite the fact he had lost the election.
But on Friday, Lee—the ultimate MAGA insider—found his religion excluded from the “Christian” category that the Trump administration embraces, turning him abruptly into an outsider.
Lee spent the weekend posting angrily about the slight that suggested Mormons aren’t Christians, only to have other posters deride his faith. He posted 37 times on social media insisting that the Defense Department’s classification be expanded to include Mormons under the “Christian” category, recording and reposting a video saying “As of two days ago, the Pentagon recognizes every Christian faith in America as Christian. Except one. That’s not okay, and it needs to change—now.”
Finally, yesterday, he posted that he had “just got off the phone with President Trump[.] We discussed the Pentagon’s ‘Christian list’[.] I won’t speak for him, but I’m thrilled about where this is heading[.] We’re most fortunate that President Trump (1) loves Latter-day Saints, and (2) is our commander in chief[.] Stay tuned[.]”
Today the Defense Department edited its list of religions so that no group is labeled “Christian.” Lee posted that he was grateful to Hegseth “for correcting the error” and said he agreed with Hegseth’s statement that “[t]he Pentagon’s job is not to adjudicate theological debates, but instead to ensure sincerely-held faith is respected and encouraged in our ranks.”
Madison and those who wrote, debated, passed, and ratified the Bill of Rights believed that making people’s religion—their right of conscience—depend on the approval of the president would destroy self-government.
A former U.S. Army chaplain told Mordowanec that the Defense Department’s limit to the religions it recognized was “horrible.” “When I raised my hand to become an Army chaplain, I swore that I would support and defend the Constitution. The First Amendment is the free exercise of religion for everybody. That’s what I was buying into.” Referring to the revised list, the former chaplain added: “As far as I’m concerned, that’s a violation of the United States Constitution.”
On June 8, 1789, Madison urged his colleagues to pass the new amendments to demonstrate that those who had pushed the adoption of the Constitution “were as sincerely devoted to liberty and republican government” as those who opposed it, and that those who wanted a strong new government were not, in fact, trying “to lay the foundation of an aristocracy or despotism. “ It would be a good thing, he said, to cement support for the government by reassuring Americans that those in favor of the new government had no “wish to deprive them of the liberty for which they valiantly fought and honorably bled.”
AI slop is invading the web. A recent story about disallowing LLM-generated
submissions on Lobsters triggered a lot of debate. My personal worst
offenders are LinkedIn articles with AI-generated images and uninspired
articles filled with emojis from people trying to masquerade as experts on a
subject they don’t care enough to write themselves. While I am unhappy about
this situation, I rely on LLMs for grammar, copyediting, and
translation. I don’t see this as a contradiction.
I am a native French speaker, but I blog in both English and French. When I
started writing this blog in 2011, I was composing in French and translating
to English, but I found it was better to work in the reverse order to
avoid unnatural and non-idiomatic constructions. One of my goals is to write
“good” English but I never felt it was my strong point.1 For example, verb
tenses are often an issue, even if I mostly stick with the present tense. I
learn the rules and forget them right away. I also don’t feel like hiring an
editor for something I see as an hobby.
I know that LLMs may alter the author’s voice when editing, but the
corrections in the second step are minor. The prompt asks to “apply light
stylistic edits,” with some guidance around avoiding passive voice, long
sentences, bland verbs, and filler words. It also defines the target audience:
technical with a B2 level in English.
In the following excerpt, I used “long time” instead of “long-standing.” The
former is missing an hyphen and applies to people—a long-time friend, while
the later relates to a situation—a long-standing agreement. I had a hard
time understanding the reason of the second change: the LLM prefers a
defining relative clause to provide the definition of “RIB sharding.”
As the Internet routing table contains more than 1 million routes, Akvorado
needs to scale to tens of millions of routes. This has been a long
time long-standing challenge, but I expect this issue is now
fixed by using RIB sharding, a method to split that
splits the routing database into several parts to enable concurrent
updates.
In the next modification, the LLM puts “device” instead of “equipment.” This is
correct as “equipment” is an uncountable noun. I know that, but I still fall
into this trap.
When Akvorado does not find a route from a specific device, it falls back to a
route sent by another equipment device.
I ask the LLM to use “descriptive verbs” and it complies by replacing a
multi-word predicate with a lexically rich verb:
The benchmarks demonstrate it has better performance than
outperforms other packages, both packages for
lookups, insertions, and memory usage.
It also fixes grammar errors. In the next excerpt, a “list of routes” is a
singular expression. Moreover, “stored” is a state and I should not use “into”
as it expresses a change.
The list of routes for each prefix are is not stored
directly into in the prefix tree.
As a last example, consider the following snippet. The “require” verb
accepts a noun or an object followed by a to-infinitive. I can’t use it with
just a to-infinitive.
An alternative would be to have one prefix tree for each peer but it would
require to configure configuring all routers to export
their routes.
As someone who didn’t grow up speaking English, I struggle with these grammar
rules despite reading a lot of English material.3 French is more
complex to get started but more systematic. English is full of irregularities.
On each page, I disclose in the footer whether an AI modified the content. There
are three levels:
🧠: no AI or almost no AI (e.g., grammar corrections)
✨: enhanced (e.g., copyediting)
🤖: generated (e.g., translated from another language, even if human-edited)
Hover or tap the icon to reveal the AI’s name and its role in the document.
Example of AI usage disclosure: Claude Sonnet 4.5 edited this article.
The graph below shows which tool altered each post, year by year. Recently, I
applied the grammar skill to past articles. Since 2018,
French articles have been translated with the help of DeepL first, then of
an LLM. Since 2024, English articles are copyedited.
AI usage over the years. Hover or tap a band for the details.
If you are strongly against any usage of LLMs specifically for writing, I hope
you accept my more nuanced position on the usage of these tools as a trade-off
to provide clearer and more engaging articles. Years of literature on improving
English told us it is important to choose the right word to keep the reader
engaged.
[…] Good writing consists of mastering the fundamentals (vocabulary,
grammar, the elements of style) and then filling the third level of your
toolbox with the right instruments.
― Stephen King, On Writing
Note
Unlike other recent articles, I did not use an LLM to edit this post:
an unnamed person kindly accepted to proofread it. I translated it to French
without using an LLM either.
I am quite happy with the writing tools provided by Kagi. Both the
translate tool and the dictionary are a valuable help to find
different wordings. I also lean on Kagi’s research assistant when
researching a topic. ↩
When I was ten, I played Monkey Island 2 in English without having
taken any classes. I used a dictionary to translate word by word and I found
the irregular verbs confusing—and not in the dictionary. ↩
But the most telling detail wasn’t what Apple announced. It was
how it chose to show some things off. Many of the Apple
Intelligence demoes featured someone standing, phone in hand,
pressing buttons or using voice commands in real time, while
another camera showed off the phone’s response.
These weren’t live onstage, anything-could-go wrong demos; they
were pre-taped. But they looked far more like proof of working
features than what Apple showed at WWDC 2024, when the company
unveiled Apple Intelligence and a new Siri to the world
through slickly produced videos that turned out to be more promise
than product.
The demos were all shot in single takes, with no editing. In fact, I think most of them were single takes of multiple demos back-to-back. That’s the way it should be, even when they feel a little slow. When a demo feels slow, the solution isn’t to edit the video — it’s to make the feature work faster.
This new version of Siri is built on Apple Intelligence, allowing
Siri to draw on personal context understanding and help users find
what they need in the moment across messages, emails, photos, and
more. For example, users can ask Siri to find a restaurant
recommendation a friend messaged them about, surface a hotel
confirmation number from an old email, or pull up photos with
friends and family from a recent trip. And personal context
understanding extends to third-party apps when developers
integrate with Spotlight.
With even more systemwide app actions, Siri AI lets users get
things done across apps, like drafting an email from scratch, or
editing and sharing a set of photos. Using onscreen awareness,
Siri AI can answer questions related to the content on a user’s
screen. For example, if a user gets a text about a potluck with
friends, they can brainstorm with Siri on what to bring and then
add a recipe to the Notes app.
In addition, Siri AI can use broad world knowledge to get
up-to-date information from the web on virtually any topic and
generate a helpful answer, such as when and where to see the next
solar eclipse, or when a musician is coming to town. Users can
extend almost any response from Siri into a rich conversation and
ask follow-up questions.
I like the name “Siri AI”. “New Siri” wouldn’t have legs because eventually this won’t be new. This should be the dividing line between Siri as we know it and Siri as it should be. The demos I’ve seen so far (I still don’t have access on my iOS 27 testing device) are impressive. Well, impressive compared to old Siri. They’re table stakes for generative AI. But Siri AI is the only system that can draw upon your personal data in the apps on your devices, and perform actions based on the app intents supported by the apps on your devices. It is in some ways less capable than ChatGPT or Claude, but in other ways has more potential. It’s a very different approach and I think it’s the right one for Apple.
They need to execute, they need to prove this can scale, and most of all, they need to get third-party apps on board with App Intents and App Schemas. But it seems like they’re doing all of that. This is not a done deal but it is very realistic.
These new capabilities are powered by the next generation of Apple
Foundation Models, custom-built in collaboration with Google and
its Gemini models for deeply integrated Apple Intelligence
experiences. These latest models run on device and on servers
using Private Cloud Compute.
Every facet of the new Apple Intelligence architecture is built
privacy-first, from the latest Apple Foundation Models to the core
operating system technologies that integrate these models deep
into Apple’s platforms. Apple Intelligence uses on-device
processing and Private Cloud Compute to help protect users’
privacy. Private Cloud Compute gives users access to
frontier-level intelligence, while extending the privacy and
security of iPhone into the cloud.
What’s confusing about this Apple-Google partnership is that Google pretty much calls all things AI “Gemini”. The models are “Gemini”, the assistant is “Gemini”, and the feature integrations are “Gemini”. So Apple is taking pains to emphasize that they’re building atop the Gemini models, not the Gemini assistant.
One way to think about it is this. Let’s say you’re a Google Gemini app user. That’s the assistant. Now you start using the new Apple Intelligence (that builds atop the Gemini models) and the new Siri AI (that builds atop the new Apple Intelligence). When you go back to the Google Gemini app, nothing you did using Apple Intelligence and Siri AI is visible to the Gemini app. And nothing you continue to do in the Google Gemini app is visible to Apple Intelligence or Siri AI.
Sign-up forms were built for humans in browsers, so how do AI agents programmatically register with services?
Enter auth.md. By exposing a single, machine-readable Markdown file at your service root, AI agents can dynamically discover your OAuth Protected Resource Metadata, parse required scopes, and authenticate seamlessly.
With native support in WorkOS AuthKit, you can now implement this protocol out of the box, giving AI tools a standardized, secure way to log into your application.
Mark Gurman, reporting (?) for Bloomberg two short months ago:
Apple Inc. plans to open Siri to outside artificial intelligence
assistants, a major move aimed at bolstering the iPhone as an AI
platform. The company is preparing to make the change as part of a
Siri overhaul in its upcoming iOS 27 operating system update,
according to people with knowledge of the matter. The assistant
can already tap into ChatGPT through a partnership with OpenAI,
but Apple will now allow competing services to do the same.
The company is developing new tools to allow AI chatbot apps
installed via the App Store to integrate with the Siri assistant,
said the people, who asked not to be identified because the plans
haven’t been announced. The chatbots will also work with an
upcoming Siri app and other features in the Apple Intelligence
platform.
That means, for instance, if users have Alphabet Inc.’s Google
Gemini or Anthropic PBC’s Claude installed, they’d be able to send
queries to those services from within the Siri voice assistant,
just like they have been able to with ChatGPT since Apple
Intelligence launched in 2024.
Maybe Apple ran out of time today, and will announce this tomorrow? Maybe they forgot to announce it? Maybe they scrapped the next-generation Siri that existed two months ago and in the last month rebuilt another entirely new next-generation Siri? I’ll bet something like that is what happened.
Write your own exam question and answer it, for microeconomics. Not a math question, but a high level PhD level question. You will be graded on the quality, interest, and creativity of the question as much as by your answer.
Late last week, a high-profile list of frontier AI folks, policy experts and biologists released a letter calling for immediate measures to mitigate the risk of AI-mediated bioterrorism. The details in the letter are scant – you can read it at screendna.org– but the gist is simple. As Dario Amodei, Sam Altman and Demis Hassabis see it, AI is making it too easy for bad actors to harm America using biotechnology, and the solution is to regulate biology rather than the models. In the current reality, where the US biotech industry is getting crushed by China in every metric that matters, introducing shortsighted regulation is not a mistake America can afford to make.
The published letter accompanies a report by the Institute for Progress with specific recommendations on securing the biotech supply chain, along with a NY State Assembly bill proposing new requirements for DNA synthesis service providers. Specific proposals focus on introducing KYC (Know Your Customer) laws as a start, which is a benign request on the surface. The logic here is that bioterrorism threats – like an individual actor trying to revive the extinct but still-deadly smallpox virus or give pathogenicity to an existing bacterial strain – all require designing and manipulating DNA fragments. Biologists have the option of extracting these DNA fragments from live organisms or buying them as a commodity through 200 or so international DNA service providers. Most opt for the latter, but the former still remains an option even with this bill in place.
Although no legal mandate currently exists, the majority of the approximately 50 US DNA synthesis providers proactively screen 90% of incoming orders. Exceptions to this voluntary screening are generally limited to very short sequences and a handful of smaller vendors. The proposed bill adds little actual screening. What the bill would add via the KYC requirements are barriers to American biotech start-ups at the exact moment new ideas and energy are needed in a stumbling industry. Much of the restrictive legislation currently strangling American innovation started out innocuously. Look no further than Good Manufacturing Practice requirements, which have effectively given China the reins of the cell and gene therapy industry. New requirements placed on synthesis providers are likely to go similarly, as there is no way to enforce KYC laws for international vendors, granting them a competitive advantage against our home-grown DNA synthesis companies.
By the authors’ own admission, none of the measures stop a sufficiently driven actor, particularly those operating on behalf of an adversarial state. Offensive knowledge and materials cannot be contained indefinitely, as demonstrated by the benchtop DNA synthesizers already available for purchase. This proposed legislation endorsed by AI leaders is likely to act as a foothold on which costs can be raised, blunting a market that startups rely on. Worse, AI doomers worry models will soon zero-shot novel pathogens. But, if threats can emerge from an effectively limitless sequence space, exhaustive screening is computationally impossible. Codifying existing algorithms is simply not a realistic response to curbing future threats, as they are easy to circumvent as it is. At best, this legislation is ineffective, and at worst it further incentivizes American biotech companies to look abroad for synthesis. None of the legislation applies to Chinese oligo synthesizers, who, along with their AI colleagues, do not red-team, regulate raw AI models or use KYC laws. Chinese counterparts are not thinking much about biosecurity at all, which puts American competitors at a disadvantage if new legislation creates even the slightest friction.
Security must come primarily from defense, but not one built on regulatory grounds. Widespread pathogen surveillance, sequencing, rapid diagnostics and a constant stream of emergent biotechnology platforms act as fantastic countermeasures to any threats. COVID is the clearest example of this. The speed of the mRNA response is owed almost entirely to infrastructure that happened to be available at a time of crisis - mRNA therapies coupled with the selective deregulation of the first Trump administration. Lipid nanoparticle delivery was nascent, but again, was an option simply because the broader innovation environment supported its development. Genomic surveillance was available to help manage the pandemic because of previous work and innovation done by pioneering sequencing providers. A regulation-first posture optimizes against a bad actor that cannot really be stopped, while a capacity-first angle provides an agility best suited to biosecurity challenges.
It’s worth mentioning that these measures are extremely unpopular with lab biologists. A concern from biologists, including exceptionally prominent founders (who are reluctant to speak up because of their business with big AI labs), is that legislation like that proposed and backed by the AI industry acts to further the goals of frontier labs without absorbing any of the blowback. This is all done at the expense of America’s already-struggling bio-economy. While new regulations aimed at the non-existent screening problem are being discussed, frontier labs are fighting pushes from outsiders looking to regulate models over a certain size, citing their heated rivalry with the growing Chinese AI labs. Furthermore, Anthropic has taken to adding strict, self-imposed filters on basic bio-related topics, providing further proof that AI labs buy into the idea of self-governance as opposed to de facto governance.
Frontier labs ultimately do these things because they resist rules that they view as misaligned with the actual pace and shape of their core technology. Just like with those AI-focused bills, it’s likely DNA synthesis restrictions will contribute to strangling the US’s attempts to escape from its current biotech death spiral. It’s a problem best left to industry players, which have already demonstrated a serious commitment to safely providing synthesis services without the need for stifling government intervention.
A couple of months ago, we went out to Nevada to hang with JB Straubel, the founder and CEO of Redwood Materials and the co-founder of Tesla. JB took us on a tour of Redwood’s massive battery recycli…
The Federal Communications Commission has waived a requirement for Amazon to launch half of its satellite broadband constellation by the end of July, a key regulatory reprieve that buys the tech giant time to get more of its spacecraft into orbit.
Amazon won regulatory approval for the Amazon Leo network in July 2020. The FCC's authorization came with two deadlines. First, Amazon had to launch half of its 3,232 satellites by July 30, 2026, in order to maintain authorization to launch the rest of the network. The regulator gave Amazon a deadline of July 30, 2029, to have all of its first-generation satellites in orbit.
It has been apparent for some time that Amazon would not meet the FCC's requirement to launch half of its satellites—1,616 spacecraft—by the end of next month. Amazon filed an application in January requesting the FCC extend the deadline to July 2028 or waive it altogether. The commission decided on the latter option, removing any time limit for the 50 percent deployment milestone, but keeping the July 2029 deadline in place for the entire constellation.
Artificial Intelligence has revolutionized the digital space by transforming how algorithms interpret and rank results. But as these technologies evolve, they will continue to get even better at parsing text and parsing visuals.
“In an AI-driven search environment, visual optimization isn’t just about aesthetics; it’s about context, quality, and relevance. Businesses that align their content strategies with these principles will dominate the digital landscape,” says Seth Price, founder and CEO of BluShark Digital.
This would mean that the optimization of our online content does need a review. In the case of more complicated algorithms of modern AI-powered search engines, alignment with their capabilities is to be given in terms of importance for interpretation through visuals.
This guide looks into some must-know strategies to get your images optimized for this new AI-centric ecosystem.
Harnessing Relevance in Image Optimization
To AI-driven search engines, context is king. Google doesn’t just view an image when indexing; it gains context from supporting content that may come in several ways, including captions, among other page texts. Placing images near relevant text increases their chances of being found. It tells the AI what your image is all about by relating it directly to supporting texts on the same page.
Moreover, infusing your images with descriptive alt-text is more than just doing an accessibility good deed; it peeks into the SEO by giving search algorithms some substantial details about what the visuals are showing. A thoughtful use of text and imagery leads down a road paved with enhanced optimization prospects.
Navigating Safe Search Parameters
Notably, when optimizing your images for AI-powered search, safe search filters should ring in your mind. These algorithms are supposed to filter out stuff likely to be inappropriate for different types of audiences and will be very important in determining the appearance of your digital assets.
Before publishing any image on your website, review it to ensure it doesn’t violate rules or get flagged as unsafe: this will allow your content to have the widest reach while protecting you from having content on your site offend certain viewers or affect your brand’s reputation.
Improvement of Image Quality
The quality of your images could be their make-or-break factor in this AI-powered search environment. High-resolution pictures fascinate human viewers, while their level of detail serves the wants of algorithms in doing proper analyses and classifications.
Use only clear, sharp, well-lit photos devoid of blurriness and artifacts. The more focused your picture is, the better the AI tools will understand what it is supposed to represent, thus raising its visibility in search results. Superior image quality speaks volumes about professional credibility and enhances user engagement; it is worth investing in both technology and visitor satisfaction.
Mastering Entity Identification
In AI-powered searches, understanding and leveraging entity identification can significantly enhance how relevant your images appear in query results. AI models, such as those employed by Google, meticulously analyze images to identify distinct entities—objects, places, people—that provide context and relevance to visual content.
Implementing structured data or schema markup on your website becomes essential to capitalize on this capability. This structured approach helps search algorithms define the entities within your images more clearly. Essentially, when you tag an image with accurate schema metadata, you’re giving it a contextual boost that aligns it more precisely with related search queries.
Three-Step Visual Optimization Strategy for Enterprises
All the various enterprises or businesses operating several chains of location should implement visual optimization in a more strategic and integrated manner. Start with centralizing your digital assets for easier management and to ensure consistency across all platforms for brand consistency.
Then, optimize these assets for various channels. For every platform, different sizes, formats, or qualities may be required or work best. Optimizing the images to the specifications will surely increase the performance and engagement of viewers for each channel.
Use metadata and structured data tags to make your visual content identifiable. Again, this enhances the possibility of discoverability by linking your image to a certain query in the search results.
Partnering with Experts: Blue Shark Digital
Consider consulting experts to optimize your visual content for AI-driven search. At BluShark Digital, we know all the little details to make various digital channels optimized according to our customer needs. If you want to operate your online existence without friction, feel free to contact us at BluShark Digital.
The U.S. military has likely been quietly broadcasting codes for its global encryption network using public GPS for nearly 20 years, turning each satellite into a hidden “numbers station,” according to Steven Murdoch…
That means every device that uses GPS has been receiving hidden government information for years, and nobody outside the military knew it until now.
[…]
Murdoch discovered that this particular sentinel was transmitted by all 31 operational satellites within a window of a few hours on May 26, 2011, potentially heralding the activation of a new operational system. He confirmed that this timeline coincided with the rollout of the military’s Over-the-Air Distribution (OTAD) and the Over-the-Air Rekeying (OTAR) by cross-referencing declassified documents, including a 2015 presentation about the dates of the operation.
“There was a perfect match between the timeline and that presentation and the change points that were automatically identified from the data,” Murdoch said. “That was the smoking gun that made me think: This is what it’s for.”
These automated systems replaced the cumbersome manual distribution of cryptographic keying material, allowing military GPS receivers around the world to be rekeyed remotely through satellite broadcasts rather than through onsite procedures.
Can artificial intelligence (AI) refute economic theory? I document experiments in which I asked several AI models (Gemini, Refine, Claude, and ChatGPT) to check the correctness of four published papers in economic theory, each containing an error that I helped identify or correct. ChatGPT Pro performed best, occasionally constructing counterexamples and corrected proofs, while other models fared worse. However, no model located a true error without substantial human guidance, and data contamination complicates interpretation. I argue that a competent human paired with a frontier model can outperform current peer review, but AI cannot yet refute economic theory on its own.
A quick video, thankfully not from Midtown Manhattan
Hi there. Paul Krugman with a very quick update.
I haven’t done a regular post today because I’m jet-lagged out of my mind, but I just wanted to weigh in on something that will be happening a few minutes after I record this. Which is that a significant piece of Midtown Manhattan — the area surrounding Madison Square Garden — is about to be closed to all pedestrians.
This is because of the Knicks game which is in Madison Square Garden. And Donald Trump is attending the Knicks game. Which means that the game entry itself is going to require enormously strict security. People are forbidden from bringing any kind of bag in there. It means that what should be an exciting joyous occasion is going to become quite hellish with long lines and who knows what else.
But what really may not be obvious to many people — you might not know if you’re not a New Yorker — is that Madison Square Garden sits on top of Penn Station.
That’s a story in itself, but there it is. And Penn Station is the busiest transit hub in America. It is where 600,000 or so people pass through on their way to and from New York by way of the Long Island Railroad and New Jersey Transit. I’ve spent a lot of my life waiting for trains at Penn Station.
And it’s completely insane to ruin people’s day like that. You could say, well, what else are you going to do if you’re going to have to provide security for the President of the United States? And the answer is, Why does he have to go to this thing? The simple way to make several hundred thousand people’s lives noticeably better, at least for today, would be to just not go to the damn game. He can watch it on TV. He can go have a cage match in the ripped up White House lawn, if he likes.
It’s not such a small thing. It shows a kind of contempt for ordinary people and a kind of self-aggrandizement — I want this so I’m going to make other people’s lives miserable just to indulge my whim — that is part and parcel of everything else that’s going on. It’s a small thing but my god I would actually have had a problem if I went into my office today because my office is not that far from Penn Station. It’s not in the banned zone but it’s going to be nightmares all around.
All right, just another message that the people in charge do not care about people like you.
The new Siri AI features do at least look feasible with today's technology, especially since Apple are licensing a custom Gemini-derived model that they can run on their own Private Cloud Compute.
It sounds like they'll be taking advantage of vision LLMs to extract information from the user's screen, which neatly sidesteps the need for every existing application to ship custom code in order to integrate with Apple Intelligence. Vision LLMs were a much less mature category in June 2024.
The new Core AI library looks like a good step in enabling developers to finally take full advantage of Apple's hardware for running their own models. It integrates with Meta's open source PyTorch ecosystem, using these Core AI PyTorch extensions:
Core AI PyTorch Extensions (coreai-torch) is a Python package that bridges PyTorch and Core AI. You can use it to bring up an existing PyTorch model — exported as a torch.export.ExportedProgram — into a Core AI AIProgram ready to run on Apple hardware, traversing the FX graph node-by-node and mapping ATen operators to Core AI operations.
You can install an iOS 27 Developer Beta today, which supposedly has the new features - but you then have to make it through a waiting list for access to the new Siri AI. Aaron Perris from MacRumors reports having made it off the waitlist so we may start seeing credible reports on how well Siri AI works in the very near future.
Update: These Private Cloud Compute Gemini models are running in Google Cloud, and using NVIDIA hardware. According to Expanding Private Cloud Compute on Apple's Security Research blog:
For the most demanding tasks, including agentic tool-use and complex reasoning, we worked with Google and NVIDIA to extend our PCC infrastructure to Google Cloud systems using NVIDIA GPUs, while maintaining Apple's powerful security and privacy protections. [...]
PCC on Google Cloud leverages many of the same architectural security patterns as PCC on Apple silicon to implement these layered protections: initial network data parsing for each request happens in a dedicated process within its own namespace, shared inference software is recycled with a short time-to-live duration, and attested keys are held in a separate, dedicated confidential VM isolated from external inputs. [...]
As with PCC on Apple silicon, all binaries will be published for public inspection.
Over the years I’ve done a bunch of one-off books, booklets, flyers. Not intended for printing presses, but rather single hand-made copies. Just for the love of it, not intended for sale. In fact, it’s the way I started making books.
I posted the first one here — made in 1965 — on April 14, 2026, and this is the 2nd one, done maybe a year later, consisting of six pages.
On a weekend, Sarah and I and our son Peter, age 5, had gone to spend the weekend with some friends at their country shack in Mariposa County (in Yosemite territory). We also took along Heidi, one of Peter’s friends.
One morning I went out in a field with my camera. I was sitting on a rock when Heidi came across the field and engaged me in a game of hide and seek.
Heidi, where are you now? (She would be about 60 years old.)
I’m gonna start posting excerpts from some of these books here. All the subsequent ones are larger; below are a bunch of them. Many of them were from my road trips.
Two of these (the two on either side of the two boys silhouetted) were 20-30 pages, 14” by 11,”” and hand lettered. With these two, I actually printed two copies at Krishna Copy in San Francisco, on a Canon Laser Copier (the first of the color copy machines, which cost around $60,000). I then had a bookbinder friend glue backing pages together and then bind the two books.
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Drones have rapidly transformed modern war. The U.S. military, the most sophisticated, best supplied force in history, has been humiliated by Iran, largely thanks to Iran’s effective use of inexpensive drones to menace shipping, energy production, and even U.S. bases. Meanwhile, Ukraine’s growing superiority in drone warfare is increasingly giving it the upper hand over Russia. Remember, not so long ago the American far right celebrated Putin’s macho posturing and his supposed military invincibility.
Given this radical turn of events, shouldn’t the United States be eager to make a drone deal with Ukraine, benefiting from its technology and expertise?
Apparently not. The Hill reports that Donald Trump has been dragging his feet on such a deal, quoting U.S. military analysts who say that they don’t understand the delay and that they are “mystified.” But I assume that they’re being disingenuous and prefer to avoid saying the obvious. In fact, Trump’s unwillingness to make a deal that would clearly benefit America’s national interest is no mystery at all.
I’ll get to the obvious in a moment. First, let me take a slight detour into something that seems unrelated but in fact helps explain drone aversion: this administration’s hostility to renewable energy and its desperate, doomed and wasteful effort to revive the coal industry.
There was a time when “drill, baby, drill” could be portrayed as a realistic, hard-headed position. Does anyone remember the Cheney Energy Task Force? However, in the past few years, radical declines in the cost of solar power, wind power, and batteries — which solve the problem that the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow — have made renewables the most cost-effective way to generate electricity. By contrast, coal is completely unviable. Here are the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s estimates for utility capacity additions in 2025:
Yet Trump is trying to block renewable energy projects any way he can and has just invoked wartime authority to spend $700 million subsidizing new power plants using “clean, beautiful” coal.
Why? Part of the answer is big money. Fossil fuel interests were huge supporters of Trump in 2024. In fact, the Trump presidency is itself the result of billions of dollars spent by the Koch Brothers and others to corrupt and undermine U.S. political institutions -- the Supreme Court very much included. Anti-renewable, pro-fossil fuel policy is their reward, along with the destruction of the Voting Rights Act and the adoption of Project 2025.
What’s the other part? Clean energy has become a bogeyman in the culture wars: mining and burning coal are considered “manly” activities, while renewable energy is portrayed as woke and effeminate. Real men don’t worry about black lung and airborne particulates, let alone climate change.
So a combination of big money and fragile male egos drives Green Derangement Syndrome. And the same is true for both the Iran debacle and the refusal to learn from the catastrophe by turning to Ukraine.
Why was the United States so unprepared for the Iranian drone threat, despite the obvious successes of Ukrainian drones against Russia? Well, as investigative reporters delve into the story, I would urge themto follow the money.
America has a huge, highly profitable defense industry, dedicated to a suite of technologies that are rapidly being rendered obsolete, as $4 million Patriot missiles, that take years to build, are being used to shoot down $35,000 Shahed drones that can be manufactured in months.
So it wouldn’t be surprising if defense-industry interests are playing a significant role in the Trump administration’s refusal to admit that the rules of war have changed — the same way that fossil fuel companies have campaigned against the new realities of energy technology. After all, a deal with drone-savvy Ukrainians would mean less money going to US defense contractors.
While this is speculative, we do know that recognition of the drone revolution in warfare by Trump and his inner circle would require that they abandon their fantasy of macho military power. Pete Hegseth has been purging the military of capable officers — especially Blacks and women — he considers insufficiently loyal to Donald Trump. Beyond loyalty tests, however, he has exalted the importance of “warrior ethos” and physical fitness, as if he were leading the 300 Spartans rather than a high-tech military in an age of drones and electronic warfare.
It’s true that Hegseth, perhaps chastened by his abject failure in Iran — why does he still have a job? — recently admitted that the U.S. has learned from Ukraine. But an admission that his entire conception of war was wrongheaded will be a step too far for him.
Likewise, Trump himself is in love with big, expensive weapons as symbols of virility and power. He’s still pushing for giant “Trump-class” battleships, even though they would be sitting ducks in a modern war. Just ask the Ukrainians, who have used missiles and naval drones to force Russia’s once-vaunted Black Sea Fleet to cower in a fortified refuge. But Trump doesn’t want to give up his fantasies.
And he’s especially unwilling to learn from Ukraine. After all, he cut off aid to Ukraine in a hissy fit over Zelenskyy’s well-deserved reputation for heroism, only to he humiliated by Ukraine’s refusal to lose its war. Admitting that he needs Ukrainian help would be a further humiliation.
As I said earlier, there is no mystery about why Trump refuses to make a drone deal with Ukraine. Never mind the national interest. In military strategy as in energy policy, Trump is betraying America in the service of money and machismo.
The Artemis 3 crew poses for an official portrait. From left to right: Andre Douglas, Luca Parmitano, Randy Bresnik, Frank Rubio. Image: NASA/Bill Stafford.
The crew of NASA’s next Artemis moon program mission was announced Tuesday, setting the stage for a flight to Earth orbit next year to test rendezvous and docking procedures with moon landers being built by SpaceX and Blue Origin, a critical milestone before sending astronauts back to the moon for landing in 2028.
The Artemis III mission will be commanded by Randy “Komrade” Bresnik, 58, a former Marine fighter pilot and “TOPGUN” graduate who logged 149 days in space during a space shuttle flight in 2009 and a long-duration stay aboard the International Space Station in 2017.
Joining him will be pilot Luca Parmitano, 49, a European Space Agency astronaut and veteran of two long-duration stays aboard the space station; Andre Douglas, 40, a space rookie and backup crew member for the recently completed Artemis II around-the-moon mission; and Frank Rubio, 49, who spent a U.S.-record 371 days in space aboard the ISS in 2022-23.
“We are doing flight tests on every single flight, incrementally determining the flight envelope, expanding it, proving out capabilities and making the operational procedures that we have more and more precise,” Bresnik told a crowd of supporters at the Johnson Space Center. “Because every single mission we will do after this will be more challenging and more complex.
“We are certainly humbled as a crew,” he continued, “being that unifying link between the phenomenal Artemis II mission we just had two months ago and the Artemis IV mission that will follow ours, where we will again … land humans on another celestial body.”
Toward the end of the ceremony, Artemis II commander Reid Wiseman passed a symbolic baton to Bresnik, a handoff from one crew to the next in NASA’s drive to return astronauts to the surface of the moon.
“Randy, in your comments, I really loved when you said that you all are the link from (Artemis) II to the surface, and that really resonated with me,” Wiseman said. “And you guys know, we’ve been carrying these batons around for way too long. So with that, the Artemis II crew, Komrade, hands you the baton. You’ve got the controls.”
Launching atop a Space Launch System rocket in an Orion capsule, Bresnik’s crew will practice chasing down one moon lander at a time to make sure rendezvous and docking procedures work as planned before committing to an astronaut moon landing when those procedures will have to be carried out in lunar orbit.
The flight will pose a major test for mission managers and engineers with NASA, SpaceX and Blue Origin, who will have to launch multiple heavy-lift rockets in a matter of days and then coordinate their flights in a multi-vehicle sequence of tightly scripted maneuvers.
“This test flight will enable us to prove we can carry out highly choreographed operations with our (commercial) partners across hardware interfaces, software, propulsion systems and life support elements with crew in the high stakes space environment,” said Jeremy Parsons, the Artemis program manager.
“Are we able to launch in sequence with our partners across multiple launch pads and meet up at precise points in space? How do our spacecraft, designed and built across NASA and different partners, operate together in an integrated way in an unforgiving environment?”
He said “every aspect” of the Artemis III mission “will give us insight into how to refine our plans for Artemis IV and beyond, and buy down risk.”
The Artemis III crew announcement comes as Blue Origin continues to recover from a catastrophic launch pad explosion May 28 that destroyed a New Glenn rocket like the one that will be needed to carry the company’s Blue Moon Mark II lander into Earth orbit next year. The company’s only operational launch pad, located at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, suffered major damage.
The Jeff Bezos-owned company says it expects to return to flight before the end of the year, but the mishap threw a wrench into the New Glenn launch schedule, delaying flights of the Blue Moon Mark I, an uncrewed lunar cargo ship intended to help pave the way for the larger, more capable piloted version.
Whether the New Glenn rocket and pad 36 at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station will be back in operation in time to launch a flight-ready Mark II lander for Artemis III remains to be seen.
SpaceX has had its own problems perfecting the huge Super Heavy-Starship rocket needed to launch that company’s lander. SpaceX is equipping a Starship upper stage with a docking mechanism for the Artemis III flight, but the vehicle will not be an operational lander. It’s not yet known when the Elon Musk-owned company will have an Artemis lander ready for flight tests.
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said he is pushing both companies to have their spacecraft ready for launch in 2027 as part of the Artemis III mission.
“I’d say it’s extremely unlikely we would ever launch that mission unless both were ready, so that we could achieve those important test objectives and bring down risk for Artemis IV when they land on the moon,” he said.
The Artemis program is intended to get astronauts back to the moon by the end of 2028, well ahead of Chinese “taikonauts” and their long-standing goal of walking on the moon by the end of the decade.
Even though NASA sent 12 astronauts to the moon’s surface between 1969 and the end of 1972, winning the Cold War space race with the former Soviet Union, the agency wants to establish a near permanent presence on the moon with the Artemis program, maintaining its position as the world leader in space travel, research and technology.
NASA is planning to launch a series of robotic landers and lunar satellites along with the Artemis IV and V missions followed by two astronaut landings per year thereafter. That will set the stage for construction of a moon base near the lunar south pole beginning in the 2029-2030 timeframe.
The south polar region is an attractive target because of permanently shadowed, ultra cold craters thought to harbor ice deposits, providing an in situ source of water, air and rocket fuel. With habitats in place, along with solar and nuclear power stations, rotating astronaut crews could live and work on the moon for long durations much like space station fliers have done in Earth orbit for the past quarter century.
But there are multiple threats to the Artemis schedule, including the readiness of the required rockets and landers that could push Artemis III into 2028. Whether any additional piloted test flights might be needed between the Artemis III mission and a moon landing remains to be seen, but NASA managers said Tuesday they were optimistic Artemis III will be able to launch as planned in 2027.
The Artemis III mission will be similar in some respects to NASA’s Apollo 9 flight in March 1969 when three astronauts tested the spindly lunar excursion module in Earth orbit after a successful lunar orbit mission, Apollo 8, at the end of 1968. The Apollo 10 crew then tested the lunar module in orbit around the moon before Apollo 11 finally landed in the Sea of Tranquility in July 1969.
The Artemis program’s version of Apollo 8, sending Artemis II commander Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen on a flight around the moon, was successfully completed in April.
As of now, Artemis III is the only test flight with astronauts on board that NASA is planning before making a landing attempt in 2028 with whichever lunar lander is available. However it plays out, NASA is requiring a successful unpiloted lander touchdown on the moon before the Artemis IV mission will proceed.
Where Things Stand last night covered what seems to be the beginning of the 2026-specific flooding of the “zone” with “shit,” to use Steve Bannon’s infamous terminology. (I am distinguishing these state- and primary-specific attacks from the more general muck of election conspiracy theories we have been wading in daily for the better part of a decade.) The conspiracy theory machine is off and running, fueled by conservative dismay that reality TV star-turned-dilettante politician Spencer Pratt (R) will not advance to the November general election against LA Mayor Karen Bass (D). Perhaps making it more painful is that he was in recent days supplanted in second place by Nithya Raman, a DSA-backed Democrat. The AP projected Monday that Raman and Bass will face off in November.
JD Vance is the latest person to get involved with spinning false narratives from conservatives’ ire. “Do you trust this election?” a grinning Jesse Watters asked Vance last night on Fox, teeing him up.
Vance: They're still receiving ballots and the way that they're coming in just so happens to work out such that the Republican is getting kicked out of the final two so it's a Democrat versus Democrat runoff. That seems pretty shady to me… pic.twitter.com/Y8xLuxTGXk
Vance professed ignorance about what could possibly be happening with California’s election results, rolling out a version of a conspiracy theory well worn by his boss since 2020.
“How is it that you had Karen Bass was in first place, Spencer Pratt was in second place and then this other woman was in third place — you would expect these mail in ballots to kind of meet that same basic pattern where number one would get the most votes, number two would get the second most votes, and so on,” he mused.
“The way that they’re coming in just so happens to work out such that the Republican is getting kicked out of the final two so that it’s a Democrat versus Democrat runoff,” he added a moment later. “That seems pretty shady to me.”
Of course, as TPM readers — and, I suspect, JD Vance — know, Democrats are more likely to vote by mail. In states like California that count mail-in votes after Election Day votes, the results tend to shift toward Democrats over time. It’s called the “red mirage,” and it’s been discussed over and over and over since Trump’s election theft attempt in 2020.
I just heard the news that Gordon Wood, a towering figure in the scholarship of Early American history, died yesterday at 92. Adding more upset to the news is the fact that he died after being struck by a car in East Providence. He died later in a Providence hospital. (One knows that people in their 90s are in the last years of their lives; a violent death like that makes it more of a gut punch.)
As I’ve mentioned a few times over the years Wood was my dissertation advisor at Brown. So he played an important role in my life. What ended up being my area of specialty, the topic of my dissertation, was pretty distant from the focus of his scholarship. He was concerned with the decades surrounding the American Revolution and the early Republic. My focus was on the middle 17th century and the interplay between economic interactions and inter-communal violence between English settlers and the Indians of Southern New England. In a way he indulged my interest in these questions that were pretty distant from his. He had very little time for cant or jargon or, as he saw it, theory.
His greatest impact on me may have been as a writer. Wood was what I would call business-like as an advisor. Not long after I arrived at Brown in the Fall of 1992, I went up to talk to him after a lecture class I was taking with him and also to get back a paper I’d written. As he handed me the paper, he told me with a sort of glancing wince that I needed to learn how to write clearly, or just better. He may have just said, you don’t write very well. (I may still be trying to soften the moment in my recollection more than 30 years later.) I had not been aware this was a problem. So it was a predictably crushing thing to hear. I asked him what he suggested, as we both stood there at the front of the lecture hall, now with most of the undergraduates filed out. He told me to get a book called Style: Toward Clarity and Grace. I did that. I got it and pored over it and it ended up becoming foundational to pretty much all my understanding of how to write.
There’s a strong element of graduate education, perhaps especially in the humanities, that is a bit like confronting God. Because your advisor is basically a god. Whether they’re one generally is one thing. Among historians Wood was about as close as you get to God-status. But I mean it here in the sense that that person holds a lot of your fate in their hands. There’s a lot about graduate education that can be isolating. So that experience can be intense. You spend a lot of time thinking about your advisor’s take on you. When they come down from on high with tablets for you to study you study them for everything they contain. And maybe more than that.
Some advisors are gods of wrath, others are maybe Jesus feeding people and being warm and fuzzy, some are kind of mainline protestant: stately, business-like, not too much emotion. Wood was like that, in my experience, the mainline protestant type. He also had an infectious smile.
Another conversation in Wood’s office remains with me. After my preliminary exams, which you take after a couple years of course work before you begin on your dissertation, I began questioning whether I really wanted to be an academic. I’d managed to get a paper published in a respected academic journal that year and I’d done well on the exams and I think the relative success made me slow down and question whether this was what I really wanted to do. It was a foundational crisis of confidence about the direction of my life. I’d been sure I wanted to do this since high school. But suddenly I was very uncertain.
At some point I went to Wood’s office to discuss my doubts with him. I think I wanted him to get me back on track, say something that would quell these doubts. After we discussed the matter he said to me, “What it really comes down is that there’s an audience of maybe 300 people you’re writing for. And you have to decide whether that’s enough for you.”
The comment hung there in the air. I had the impression from him that he was expecting a yes, that this framing of the matter would lock things down for me. That was the logic of the conversation. But sitting there, I remember very clearly thinking in my head, no, it’s really not. It’s really not at all.
I didn’t say that, of course. You don’t speak to God that way. I don’t know what I said. I just remember the moment of realization because he framed the matter in a way that clarified everything for me, just not in the way I expected and, at least then, wanted.
I may write more on Wood’s scholarship. But you can read that from others and probably more expertly. I thank him for his impact on my life.
As a Mainer, I have been waiting (and waiting and waiting:-) for you to weigh in on Platner, since I respect your opinion so much and this whole thing has been crazy. I have been amazed at the over the top reactions and use of new info to verify black and white priors from so many in the media and on socials. Most of that is from people outside Maine. In my little corner here:
1. Mainers REALLY respect the hard work Platner is putting in. Quiet hard work is highly valued here. It’s not just 80 town halls. He goes anywhere and everywhere to talk with any group that invites him, walks any picket line he’s invited to. It’s probably hundreds of meetings, town halls, and just showing up for a cause at this point in the campaign. He appears with other candidates to boost their visibility, and has helped the three best candidates (in my opinion) form a ranked choice coalition in the tight governor’s race.
2. The first time I saw him last September, he insisted the race isn’t about him (ironic I know!). He said it was about 40 years of the system being designed to concentrate power with a few, and it would take decades of hard work beyond individual candidates and campaigns to undo it. As part of that, he asked people in the audience to volunteer to defeat a voter restriction referendum and pass a red flag law referendum. The campaign had info on how to support that work at the event. He then led his volunteer networks in days of action door knocking, phone calling etc. before election day. Polls showed tight margins, but we ended up winning those battles in landslides. Likewise, his support has helped get funding for a rape kit bill that Mills had pocket vetoed and left to languish. Whether you believe he is sincere or not, his volunteers are notching impressive progressive victories in the state for good causes at a time when many of us were feeling totally hopeless and ineffectual.
3. Good lord, the fixation on the tattoo. I was a history minor and history TA in college. I’ve watched documentaries and war movies for 40+ years. I never knew what a Totomkopf was till I saw and heard about it during this campaign. The hysteria about this and insisting he is some closet Nazi, when he has 1300 Reddit posts out there with plenty of stupid shit in them but not one espousing any support for Nazis is insane. If the guy had any fascist tendencies, it would have shown up there. Now about that misogyny . . .
4. Honestly, it’s a cliche, but people really need to get offline and go out and touch grass. Or build some furniture. Or plant a garden. People just living their lives in Maine are deeply concerned about the price of gas, groceries, and especially, our unsustainable property tax hikes. Lack of home health care for elders, maternity wards closing down, food banks being overrun with clients . . . all this stuff weighs heavily on us every day, and Collins’s schtick is wearing quite thin. Will she win again? Who knows. But having lived through Gideon’s campaign as a 2nd District resident, Platner is an infinitely stronger candidate. Plus Collins is much frailer, older, and more Trump aligned this time. I doubt she will debate Platner, given how uncontrolled her tremors are (definitely Biden debate potential there).
More may come out that’s truly disqualifying, but so far none of this is it. Democrats really want Collins gone, and the state has trended bluer in the past few years. I wish everyone would calm down and focus on the policy issues. If they do, Platner wins. If Democrats online want to win some self-righteous battle on the internet with a bunch of strangers about a tattoo or a 12 year old toxic relationship … they might as well get paid by some Leo outfit because they are only boosting Collins. Eyes on the prize.
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On Monday evening, President Trump will appear at Madison Square Garden during game 3 of the NBA championship series between the New York Knicks and the San Antonio Spurs. When his face flashes on the jumbotron — or perhaps when the crowd first notices him up in his luxury box — the boos will begin. There may be chants of “Trump sucks! Trump sucks!” or something even more creative and vulgar.
One must wonder what Trump thinks is going to happen when he shows up at this game. Perhaps the collection of sycophants with whom he surrounds himself have said, “There might be a few libs who will boo you, sir, but the people love you, and those woke antifa punks will surely be drowned out by the cheers!”
On the other hand, it might be that Trump wants to be booed. He has used sporting events before to create his own mini-dramas: In 2017, when some NFL players (including those on the San Francisco 49ers) were kneeling silently during the national anthem to protest police violence against Black people, Trump dispatched Vice President Mike Pence to Indianapolis for a game between the Colts and the 49ers with instructions to storm out dramatically when the predicted kneeling occurred. Reporters traveling with the VP were even told beforehand that Pence would be leaving in mock-outrage.
And of course, Trump often attends sporting events when he knows fans of the sport in question are heavily Republican — UFC, NASCAR — so he can soak up the cheers.
But he doesn’t actually understand sports.
I don’t mean that he isn’t a fan and doesn’t know the ins and outs of various sports; he seems like a casual fan at most. I’ve never seen him express any deep interest in any particular sport, the way George W. Bush did with baseball or Barack Obama did with basketball (unless you count golf). That’s completely fine; some people like sports and some people don’t; there’s nothing inherently morally superior about either position. Trump seems most compelled not by the drama of the games but by the muscular bodies of some male athletes, a topic he’ll go on about in rather vivid terms:
I imagine his staff has made sure he doesn’t get a look at Heated Rivalry, which could send him spiraling into an emotional crisis. In any case, what I mean when I say Trump doesn’t understand sports is that he doesn’t have much grasp of how sports operate at a sociological level, which is why he can’t participate in the way he wants in a phenomenon like the one happening in New York right now.
This is sports at its best
If you haven’t been following the story, the Knicks are now two games away from winning their first title since 1973. The years since then have seen some good teams, but the story of Knicks fandom has been one of regular disappointment and frustration. Which is what makes this playoff run even more exciting to people in New York.
At their best, sports can unite a community in a shared feeling of belonging that will transcend race, age, economic class, and other kinds of barriers. If you’ve ever lived in a city that had an underdog team heading toward a title, you know how it can take hold of the local culture. You start to see the team logo everywhere, from shop windows to t-shirts to flags affixed to people’s cars. Wherever you go people are talking about it, whether it’s among coworkers and friends or just standing in line to get a cup of coffee. It can make you feel newly proud and bonded to your city, and it turns watching a game from something you might do just because it’s fun and dramatic into something collective and uplifting.
I know some people will say “Pshaw!” because they think sports are a pointless distraction that the capitalist overclass uses to turn our attention away from our own oppression. Yes, sports do that too and always have. But that doesn’t mean they can’t sometimes make life more rich, at least for those who do care. Why are thousands of people who can’t afford the insane ticket prices (tickets for Game 3 on StubHub as of this writing range from $3,839 to $161,895, and no that is not a typo) going to gather in bars, restaurants, and giant outdoor watch parties rather than sitting at home on their much more comfortable couches? Because they want to experience the hope and excitement and drama and joy with other people, which in this age of disconnection is nothing to sneeze at.
You know who gets this? The city’s mayor:
Is Mamdani a shrewd politician capitalizing on a feel-good story? Of course! But he’s not just making a bet with the mayor of San Antonio to exchange local delicacies (the tradition that has become mundane and perfunctory), he’s doing things that are meant to enhance that sense of community and love of the city that he has put at the core of his political brand.
Trump isn’t capable of that, because “People are excited about the Knicks, I will go there so they can see me and cheer, and other people will see them cheering for me” is about as complex as his thinking gets on this subject.
Conservatives have decided that Knick fandom is inherently liberal, which it sort of is — basketball skews left in both its players and its audience anyway, and New York is, well, New York. Ben Shapiro already proclaimed after seeing Mamdani and other lefty New York politicians riding the Knicks bandwagon that “For the good of the United States, New York must lose. Because otherwise, you’re going to have these people celebrating.”
And if Knicks fans boo Trump, which they absolutely will, the right will do what it does best: cry and complain about how they and Trump are victims. After the booing happens, the conservative media — Fox News, all the mini-Fox networks like Newsmax and OAN, Elon Musk’s X, a hundred right-wing podcasts — will proclaim that this was the greatest insult the office of the presidency has ever received, a crowd of sub-human barbarians attacking the noblest of presidents who just wanted to enjoy the game. They will say that the booing was itself an act of violence, evidence that the left is out of control and must be subdued.
But don’t worry: Their spoil-sportage will only make them look weak and whiny, and Trump will fail in his lame attempt to capitalize on the Knicks’ success. Because he just doesn’t get it.
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When Tropical Storm Helene struck Western North Carolina in September 2024, it didn’t just damage homes — it devastated businesses and with it, the economy.
Eighteen months later, many are still mounting a comeback. Some have rebuilt stronger but others are barely holding on as they navigate the challenges of trying to recover while maintaining their culture and boosting tourism numbers back to what they were. The River Arts District, historic Biltmore Village and Chimney Rock are three of the many economic hubs in the region trying to bounce back even stronger than before.
This short documentary captures the resilience and reality of business recovery in those areas — the victories, the setbacks and the people refusing to give up.
This micro documentary is part of Caught in the Current: Helene Recovery in Asheville and Beyond a project that we have partnered on with the School of Journalism at Northeastern University. Their enterprising students took on the story of Asheville, North Carolina, a community still dealing with the devastation of Hurricane Helene, 18 months later. As part of our mentoring program, we’re amplifying their efforts by sharing the amazing work produced by their students. Visit the official interactive magazine for the project HERE.
“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.
The 5,300 grants and programs killed in the Trump administration’s cuts to the U.S. Agency of International Development include U.S.-funded animal disease monitoring projects operated by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization.
A list of terminated programs sent to Congress this week and obtained by Agri-Pulse includes $250 million that went to projects housed under the FAO’s Global Health Security Program.
Among the GHS projects killed were some dedicated to monitoring and containing avian flu and New World Screwworm in Central America, monitoring avian flu outbreaks in Asia and improving the detection of new strains, and efforts to combat swine fever, according to a person familiar with the situation granted anonymity to speak frankly.
…The FAO received stop work orders for the programs in late January, which were followed up by termination orders around a month later, a person familiar with the situation said.
The stop work orders went out just days before the United States ended a temporary suspension of cattle imports from Mexico and as officials were working to implement protocols to prevent the spread of New World Screwworm to U.S. herds. Livestock trade across the southern border resumed Feb. 1 with animal inspection and treatment requirements before export.
Meanwhile, the U.S. is now reporting threefive cases of screwworm, several of which are 200-400 miles away from the other cases (two are in adjacent counties). That might–note the word might–mean there are more cases of screwworm that we are missing.
If A.I. assisted "surveillance pricing" is going to identify you as a high willingness-to-pay consumer, maybe it will be a good idea to train an A.I. shopping agent to impersonate a low willingness-to-pay consumer on your behalf.
"Businesses have long tracked customers’ search behavior and buying history and used that information, along with other factors like a consumer’s location, to offer promotions and discounts to motivate purchases. Dynamic pricing, where the same fare or rate shifts for everyone based on supply and demand, also has become common across industries, including airfares and ride-shares. What is different now and concerning to researchers is the possibility that online retailers could use personal data to set a higher base price for individual consumers, without their knowledge, when algorithms detect things like urgent need or high disposable income.
...
"It is difficult to find more than isolated cases currently. However, many researchers believe personalized pricing will become increasingly common as the technology to make it possible improves. ...
" Software that automates price-setting—often driven by artificial intelligence—can help retailers seamlessly turn that data into tailored pricing.
"In early 2025, the Federal Trade Commission released initial findings of an investigation into surveillance pricing (another term for personalized pricing). It determined that companies were selling pricing and consumer-data tools to help retailers across various industries set individualized prices—a strong indication to some researchers that retailers were headed in that direction.
NASA’s Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft stand at Launch Complex 39B on Tuesday, March 31, ahead of the planned launch of Artemis 2. Image: Michael Cain/Spaceflight Now
NASA is set to introduce the world to the four astronauts who will fly the Artemis 3 mission Tuesday morning.
The announcement will take place at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, with the event kicking off at 10:30 a.m. CDT (11:30 a.m. EDT / 15:30 UTC). According to a social media post by NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, in addition to announcing the crew and backup crew members, the agency “will also be providing a confidence update on the mission.”
Spaceflight Now will be live-streaming the event on our 24/7 stream on YouTube, Launch Pad Live.
The identity of the four crew members isn’t known publicly, but will be unveiled in a fashion similar to the crew naming for the Artemis 2 mission in April 2023. A number of issues, including needing further analysis on the Orion heat shield ultimately delayed the Artemis 2 from fall 2024 to launching on April 1, 2026.
The Artemis 3 mission is currently the only mission in the program designed to exist entirely in low Earth orbit. Heading into Tuesday’s event, the plan for the mission was for the Orion spacecraft to rendezvous and dock with one or both of the Human Landing System landers: Blue Origin’s Blue Moon Mark 2 and SpaceX’s Starship.
Based on the data gathered and the development for each, one of the two landers would be selected to fly the first lunar landing mission for the Artemis program. That mission is Artemis 4, which NASA hopes to fly as soon as early 2028.
Tuesday’s announcements come as many questions about the details of the mission remain unknown to the public. Those include the planned duration of the overall mission, the duration that Orion will be docked with each lander, and whether or not some or all of the crew members will be able to cross from Orion into the HLS landers.
Both Blue Origin and SpaceX have been fairly tightlipped when it comes to specifics about their HLS landers, as they compete to perform the first U.S.-led crewed landing since 1972.
Artemis 3 is likely to not demonstrate one of the technically challenging hurdles for the landers: propellant transfer. Both architectures will rely on that to support landing missions on the Moon. The companies have not revealed exactly how many launches will be needed to fuel their landers for the trip to the Moon.
Neither SpaceX nor Blue Origin have publicly shown a flight version of the HLS edition of Starship or Blue Moon Mk.2. NASA has not said if either company will have a representative to speak on behalf of their lander programs.
Artist concept of a SpaceX Starship lunar lander on the surface of the moon. Image: SpaceX.
SpaceX just launched the first test flight of its Starship Version 3 rocket, the iteration of the rocket that will be used on its Artemis missions. But the flight while largely successful did encounter issues with the Super Heavy booster and the Raptor engines used on both stages.
SpaceX has yet to perform an orbital flight of its Starship rocket.
An artist’s impression of Blue Origin’s lunar lander on the moon’s surface. Graphic: Blue Origin/NASA
Meanwhile the explosion of a Blue Origin New Glenn rocket at its pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station leaves that company without its only orbital launch pad. Company leadership vowed to return to flight with New Glenn before the end of the year, which would be a remarkably fast recovery by industry standards.
In recent media appearances, Isaacman said that the agency was looking to decouple the Blue Moon landers from the New Glenn rocket and fly them on another launcher, like SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy. There may be some logistical hurdles to that, since the Blue Moon landers may need to be fueled with liquid hydrogen at the launch pad, a capability that currently doesn’t exist at SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy pad, Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center.
One other big watch item for Tuesday is whether or not the AxEMU spacesuit being developed by Axiom Space will be ready to fly on the Artemis 3 mission. On Sunday, the company unveiled the Liquid Cooling and Ventilation Garment (LCVG) for the suits, which was designed and manufactured in partnership with Prada.
I really loved this article. A one-time increase in per capita growth from 2% to 2.1% for a single year, then dropping back to 2%, would permanently raises the level of GDP per capita – and because that small gain recurs and compounds every year afterward across the population, it would add up to roughly a trillion dollars in cumulative value. https://abundanceandgrowth.org/p/a-little-progress-is-worth-a-trillion
When people talk about pausing AI development, I can’t help but think about the enormous cumulative value that would get lost over time, the higher rates of absolute poverty that would persist across the world, and the needless deaths from delayed medical advances. There may be worlds where some version of this is something to consider, but the evidentiary bar for delaying technological development should obviously be pretty high.
A little more than five years ago, a shiny white Falcon 9 rocket made its debut flight, boosting a Cargo Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station. Over the next year, it would launch a pair of astronaut missions and a handful of commercial spacecraft.
But since then, this first stage booster, designated B 1067, has mostly flown Starlink missions. It has launched them one after another, always returning safely to a drone ship before undergoing refurbishment and flying again. Sometimes it has flown twice in a single month.
On Monday morning, B 1067 once again took to the skies, launching 29 Starlink Internet satellites into low-Earth orbit from Florida. Upon landing on the A Shortfall of Gravitas drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean, the vehicle completed its 35th mission overall, retaining its title as fleet leader for SpaceX.
The old saw “Brazil is the country of the future, and always will be” now seems so wrong. The place feels increasingly conservative, and it is aging rapidly. In the domestic airport you see couples with only a single kid, not two or three kids, never mind four.
It does not feel like the next Pelé will be coming from Brazil.
Sao Paulo as a city is much improved. The murder rate has plummeted, and the nice neighborhoods are very nice and are growing in size. The business community is strong, interesting architecture abounds, and there is a real arts scene. It is arguably Latin America’s number one city, with only Mexico City as a rival. It has, along with Mexico City, evolved into a “must know” global city, though it is rarely treated that way by outsiders. In the three days I spent there, going around to many places, I did not see a single person who was evidently a foreign tourist. That is crazy, but also a sign there is good value here.
Sao Paulo has food to die for. It is top tier for Brazilian (of course), meat/steak, Japanese, and Italian, and pretty good in many other offerings as well. I had a wonderful fifteen-course omikase for $110 at a Michelin star restaurant. The establishment, Kan Suke, has only eight seats, but I could get a table by inquiring only an hour in advance.
For Italian food it is probably the second best country in the world? For meats it might be number one, at least if you are willing to put aside the small country of Uruguay. For beans it is top two, and the fruits are excellent as well. Chocolate ice cream and gelato abound. All constraints considered, I would rather spend a week dining out here than in London or Paris or Rome, or for that matter New York City.
Observers should be more optimistic about the Brazilian economy. Yes it is overregulated and the government is locked into far too much spending. But hyperinflation is now a distant memory, a reasonable fiscal consolidation occurred in the 1990s, and the country has plenty of its own energy. Keep in mind that for emerging economies, years of negative growth are a major problem. Brazil now has sidestepped most (not all!) of those risks. Slow, steady growth should be able to get them somewhere, albeit at a langorous pace.
My biggest worry about Brazil is demographics and shrinking population. In recent times TFR has been in the 1.3 to 1.4 range, hardly satisfactory. A shrinking population is bad per se, and also it will hurt many regions of the country due to imperfect market integration, both nationally and globally. More importantly, the country does not have an obvious and easy option for pulling in a higher number of desirable immigrants, at least not relative to its size. There is Venezuela and Bolivia, but the former of those may go away as a major source of people.
Will Brazilian fertility tick back up? Will Brazil re-attain its status as a highly influential culture on the world scene, as it was in the 1960s through early 1990s? Unclear. But if the question is “should you go visit?”, the answer is a definite yes.
A period of unsettled weather brought scattered showers and thunderstorms to California’s Bay Area on May 27, 2026. That afternoon, a break in the clouds left downtown San Francisco and nearby communities beneath mostly cloud-free skies, allowing an astronaut aboard the International Space Station to take this photograph.
The image captures two of the region’s iconic bridges. The Golden Gate Bridge connects the northern San Francisco Peninsula with Marin County to the north, while the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge spans the bay toward Oakland to the east.
Near the center of the image, Golden Gate Park stands out as a long, rectangular strip of green amid the dense urban landscape. Spanning more than 1,000 acres (400 hectares), the park encompasses meadows, gardens, wooded areas, and lakes. Additional green space toward the north around the Golden Gate Bridge is part of a national recreation area.
The nadir (downward-looking) perspective also provides a clear view of the patchwork of street grids, which were laid out over San Francisco’s hilly terrain as the city grew in successive stages. In the heart of the downtown area, Market Street runs southwest to northeast and serves as a prominent divider between two distinct grid orientations: one aligned with the bay and the other aligned with the street.
Along the northeastern and eastern waterfront, various structures extend into the bay. Toward the north, these include a historic wharf, seawalls, and piers—most built in the early 1900s, though some date back into the 1800s. The adjacent waters support heavy maritime traffic, including cargo and container ships, cruise vessels, and regional ferries.
Breaking waves are visible along the western coast, including at Ocean Beach, the 3.5-mile stretch of sandy shore adjacent to Golden Gate Park. On May 27, the National Weather Service warned of hazardous conditions at the region’s beaches due to strong northerly winds. Long-period swells from the northwest contributed to the increased risk of rip currents as well as sneaker waves in the days after this image was acquired.
Astronaut photograph ISS074-E-619284 was acquired on May 27, 2026, with a Nikon Z9 digital camera using a focal length of 800 millimeters. It is provided by the ISS Crew Earth Observations Facility and the Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit at NASA Johnson Space Center. The image was taken by a member of the Expedition 74 crew. The image has been cropped and enhanced to improve contrast, and lens artifacts have been removed. The International Space Station Program supports the laboratory as part of the ISS National Lab to help astronauts take pictures of Earth that will be of the greatest value to scientists and the public, and to make those images freely available on the Internet. Additional images taken by astronauts and cosmonauts can be viewed at the NASA/JSC Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth. Story by Kathryn Hansen.
Howdy, folks! Today’s roundup is mostly a bunch of follow-ups to posts I wrote before. It’s very hard to decide when to post about a particular topic, and it often happens that some relevant news story or piece of data comes out a little bit later. These roundups are a good way of cleaning up those loose ends.
Today we start with a truly wacky policy proposal by the esteemed Thomas Piketty…
1. What on Earth is Thomas Piketty talking about?
Unlike many people, I never pretended to have read Thomas Piketty’s book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. I simply didn’t read it. I did read a number of the papers that the book was based on, which is often a better and quicker way of getting the key points of a book like that. I thought those papers were a good and important addition to the economics literature, even if the messy reality of inequality didn’t always fit the simple story Piketty told, and the data he relied on was less reliable than we might want.
Despite the limitations of Piketty’s work, it sparked a long-overdue and generally healthy debate about inequality. And Piketty’s basic policy solution — tax rich people more — was pretty reasonable, even if his proposed numbers were too extreme. I did roll my eyes when Piketty stood on a stage at an academic convention and accused Greg Mankiw of being in the pocket of rich people.1 But overall his work seemed pretty serious and often reasonable.
However, after years of relative silence, Piketty has burst back onto the scene with some work that seems very unreasonable. He and his team at the World Inequality Lab — which includes his longtime co-authors Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman — have come out with a grand plan for fixing the world. And for the most part, it’s total nonsense.
Piketty described the new plan in a thread on X. Its main focus, perhaps surprisingly, is not inequality — it’s climate change!
First of all, Piketty’s baseline climate change scenarios appear based on a very outdated model — the RCP8.5 scenario, an extreme projection that essentially all serious climate scientists have now rejected. This choice of baseline suggests that Piketty et al. were trying to find ways to justify maximal policy intervention, instead of starting from the science.
Piketty’s preferred solution to climate change is degrowth. He envisions detailed central planning to achieve deliberate impoverishment of large portions of the world’s population — mandated reductions in the consumption of various specific goods, including food.
In addition to the dubious morality of deliberately impoverishing untold millions of human beings based on scientific models that have already been rejected, this kind of scheme is just utterly unworkable. Back in 2021, when I wrote about why degrowth is a political nonstarter, I declared that “implementing the kind of reallocation schemes that degrowthers throw around with abandon would require global economic planning that would put Gosplan to shame.” Piketty knows this, and thinks it’s a good thing.
Even more ridiculously, Piketty envisions a global fiscal authority to carry out this insane plan via global taxation:
Let’s set aside the obvious fact that countries are just not going to agree to give up their spending and taxation power — even the EU refuses to have a fiscal union, and it’s rather insane to imagine Indians and Chinese people agreeing to let themselves be taxed by Tanzania and Nigeria — and just point out how this proposal ignores the basic economics of climate change.
Climate change is a global negative externality — the reason countries don’t all just impose their own local carbon taxes and solve the problem is that there’s an incentive to free ride and let other countries handle it. That exact same free rider problem applies to the global fiscal authority that Piketty envisions. There’s a clear incentive for any country to simply drop out of the fund and let other countries fix climate change for them.
It’s obvious that Piketty et al. are just looking for a reason to levy high taxes on the global rich. This is the “World Inequality Lab” we’re talking about here. And it probably made sense to try to ally with other factions of the progressive movement — degrowthers, “decolonial” leftists, and so on — in order to get support for their desired policies.
But the result here is not going to be a good one for Piketty, Saez, Zucman, and their team. No country is actually going to embrace the idea of a global fiscal authority to fight climate change. In calling for this sort of thing, Piketty et al. simply make themselves look less like serious economists and more like opportunistic activists on the fringe of a “green” movement that’s already in steep decline.
2. Tokenmaxxing, cont.
In a post this week, I noted that “tokenmaxxing” — simply using as much AI coding output as you can and hoping that it pops out something valuable — is hitting its limits:
Well, here’s a follow-up. John Burn-Murdoch of the Financial Times recently made this nice chart, using data from the Demirer et al. (2026) paper that I discussed in my post:
The number of apps with significant usage is actually going down in the age of AI, even as people are releasing floods of new apps into the world. Meanwhile, Bob Elliott notes that since generative AI was created, there has been a rapid acceleration in many measures of text output, even though the economy hasn’t accelerated much:
This doesn’t look like a simple story of “bottlenecks” and “weak links” — if it were that, we wouldn’t see so many new apps and e-books hitting the market. The deeper story here may be that demand for many of the things that generative AI produces might be a lot more inelastic than we thought. The things we really want a lot more of may not actually be the things that generative AI is yet equipped to provide. As the AI industry advances, of course, that will probably change.
3. Western militaries are obsolete, and Trump is making it worse
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post about how all militaries not based around large masses of cheap drones are now functionally obsolete:
This includes America’s military, which is based around a few big expensive “platforms” like fighter jets, aircraft carriers, and tanks. I’m not saying those weapons will all be useless in future wars, but if that’s all you have, and you don’t have masses of cheap drones, you will lose wars to countries that do have masses of cheap drones — such as China, if they ever get serious about turning their mighty industrial base toward making billions of weaponized drones.
The Lowy Institute has a good report explaining why Western militaries seem incapable of learning to use the essential weapons of modern warfare. They write:
Western military institutions…are failing to energetically learn from modern wars. Despite four years of unprecedented visibility into Ukrainian battlefield innovations, and the recent war in Iran, Western forces have not institutionalised key lessons into doctrine, force structure, or procurement priorities…The recent war in Iran has confirmed and amplified many of Ukraine’s lessons, particularly on the centrality of drone warfare, the inadequacy of Western counter-drone capabilities, [and] the effectiveness of cheaper long-range strike systems…And yet the response of Western institutions…has been characterised by rigidity, inertia, and what can be called a humility deficit: an unwillingness to genuinely confront the implications of what is being demonstrated in real time on real battlefields.
The U.S. military could, of course, learn from Ukraine — currently the #1 best country in the world in drone warfare. But the unrelenting hostility and disdain toward Ukraine from Donald Trump and the MAGA movement has prevented America from taking advantage of Ukraine’s expertise:
The Trump administration’s hesitancy in signing a major drone deal with Ukraine is slowing the U.S. military down in an area where it’s already trying to play catch-up…[T]he U.S. has so far refused to embrace Kyiv as a partner in its drone development…
[E]ven with senior Pentagon officials — including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Army Secretary Dan Driscoll — lauding Kyiv’s drone abilities, the Trump administration is still biding its time on taking full advantage of the Ukrainian capabilities, a delay that experts say is potentially kneecapping the U.S. military…
“I don’t know what the hang-up would be in denying ourselves the ability to take advantage of that. I don’t think there’s any good reason,” Rebeccah Heinrichs, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute think tank, said of Ukraine’s drone capabilities…One former official [called] the hold-up “lethargy” on the part of the Trump administration and “a certain amount of hostility towards Ukraine coming from the very top.”
MAGA basically created a fantasy world where Russia is a defender of Western values, Ukraine is somehow an arm of global wokeism, Ukraine is part of Russia’s legitimate “sphere of influence”, and Russia is a mighty superpower with a manly martial culture that would eventually be able to grind the Ukrainians down and inevitably triumph.
The problem with this fantasy was that it was fantasy, and if you believe in fantasy too long, reality tends to intercede. By allowing themselves to believe their own anti-Ukraine mythology, Trump and his followers are cutting themselves — and the U.S. Military — off from access to crucial modern military technology.
4. Tariffs on China are helping poor countries grow
In my last post, I argued that Europe should put tariffs and other trade barriers on Chinese imports, in order to protect its own strategic defense-related industries. But this is actually a lot harder than it sounds. Even if Europe blocks final goods from China, China can still export intermediate goods to “third countries” that assemble those goods for final export to Europe. In fact, China has done this in response to American tariffs, reducing (though not eliminating) the decoupling effect.
But if that happens, it’ll be very good for the “third countries”! Assembly work isn’t the most valuable part of the supply chain, but it does create value, and it does create lots of jobs, and it does create local companies that then have the potential to climb up the value chain someday and start making their own components. In fact, this is exactly what China did! Back in the 2000s, China did a lot of the low-value assembly work for components made in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan; now, most of that has been onshored, but it was still important for China to go through that initial phase of learning to slap together iPhones and computers and cars.
So if putting tariffs and other trade barriers on Chinese-made goods just ends up shifting assembly to poor countries…well, that’s not the worst outcome in the world. It’ll help counteract Chinese companies’ home bias — their natural tendency to want to build factories in China instead of overseas.
“Made in China” is becoming “made by China”—all over the world…Faced with higher Western tariffs and weak demand at home, many Chinese factories are moving abroad, making everything from appliances to automobiles everywhere from North and South America to Eastern Europe…In Mexico, Chinese investment in industries such as the automobile sector generated more than 100,000 jobs from 2020 to 2023, according to one analysis…In 2024, Chery Automobile, China’s top car exporter, helped to rescue a small factory in Barcelona that struggling Japanese automaker Nissan no longer wanted…
Jeep maker Stellantis this month said it planned to build EVs with two separate Chinese companies in Spain and France. Ford and Geely are in discussions about a potentially similar deal in Spain, and have also discussed whether the collaboration might extend to the U.S…Midea, the home appliance maker…opened a roughly $100 million factory in Brazil making refrigerators and washing machines in 2024. Its subsidiary, Welling Auto Parts, opened its first overseas manufacturing facility in Mexico last year.
So even in the worst-case scenario where trade barriers don’t reduce dependence on Chinese supply chains, they can help spread the blessings and bounty of industrialization to a bunch of poor countries who need the factories more than China does. The flying geese must fly!
5. Is India’s growth under Modi impressive, or disappointing?
I recently came across this chart, showing various aspects of India’s infrastructure boom:
This is all pretty incredible. India’s poor infrastructure has long been regarded as a bottleneck to urbanization, manufacturing, and economic growth in general. Whatever else you think of the government of Narendra Modi, it has built a lot of infrastructure.
But over that same period, overall growth has been slower than we’d like to see. Anand, Felman, and Subramanian have a recent paper in which they argue that India’s GDP growth rate from 2011 to 2023 was overstated by somewhere between a quarter and a third:
India’s annual economic growth during the boom years between 2005 and 2011 may have been underestimated by about 1–1½ percentage points on average, and subsequent growth between 2012 and 2023 may have been overestimated by about 1½-2 percentage points…The first methodological issue leading to the misestimation is that the economy’s formal sector has been used as a proxy for the vast informal sector, even though the latter was disproportionately hit after 2015 by demonetization, the introduction of the goods and services tax, and the COVID-19 pandemic…The second methodological issue…is that the deflators for many sectors have been based on commodity prices, which have moved sharply relative to others. [emphasis mine]
If Anand et al.’s estimates are right — and they marshal a huge amount of supporting evidence — then it suggests that Modi’s tenure in office has been mixed. A couple of big policy missteps — demonetization and a botched tax rollout — hurt the informal sector of the Indian economy, while massive infrastructure investments have helped.
The implication here is that Modi and his successors should lean into what works. They should focus more on marshaling national resources and applying those resources toward rapid growth — two things that China did very well in the 1990s and 2000s.
6. Friends don’t let friends cite George Borjas
I’ve been writing over the years about how the right’s favorite immigration economist does shoddy, subpar work. Despite having a job at Harvard, George Borjas — whose analyses miraculously always seem to find that immigration is much worse than all the other economists think it is — consistently uses both poor data and flawed methodology. In another roundup back in February, I pointed out how Jianxin He and Adam Ozimek had found yet another example of Borjas doing subpar economics:
Borjas’s February 2026 working paper attempted to answer whether H-1B workers earn less than comparable native-born workers…[His] findings result from substantial data errors.…The most significant mistake is a…mismatch between his H-1B and native-born samples: the H-1B applications span 2020-2023, while the ACS data covers just 2023…[Accounting for this discrepancy cuts] the wage gap roughly in half…
The second error stems from controlling for geographic wage drivers using each worker’s PUMA (public use microdata area)…The problem is that Dr. Borjas uses the PUMA where visa holders work alongside the PUMA where native workers live. Consider a native-born software developer working at Google in Mountain View who resides in a cheaper area like Fremont. If residential areas have lower average wages than business districts, this mismatch systematically inflates the apparent native wage and negatively biases the H-1B wage gap.
Again and again and again, economists catch Borjas at it. It seems pretty obvious that Borjas simply wants to conclude that immigration is bad, and doesn’t much care about methodological errors as long as they reach his desired conclusion.
In order to fight back against this accusation, Borjas decided to accuse his critics of ideologically-driven research instead. In a paper with Nate Breznau, he wrote:
Our study exploits an opportunity to observe 158 researchers working…during an experiment. After being asked their position on immigration policy, they used the same data to answer the same empirical question: Does immigration affect public support for social welfare programs? The researchers estimated 1253 alternative regression models, and the estimated impacts ranged from strongly negative to strongly positive. We find that teams composed of pro-immigration researchers estimated more positive impacts of immigration on public support for social programs, while anti-immigration teams estimated more negative impacts. The differences arise because different teams adopted different model specifications. The underlying research design decisions are the mechanism through which ideology enters the process of producing parameter estimates.
The idea here seems to be to turn one researcher’s clear pattern of errors into a he-said/she-said sort of situation. If all researchers just engineer results based on their ideology, then why should we selectively get mad at Borjas for doing what everyone else does too?
But — surprise! — it turned out that this Borjas paper also contained critical errors that invalidated the whole result! Katrin Auspurg and Josef Brüderl pointed out in a comment paper that if you fix one simple coding error in Borjas’s analysis, his entire result about ideologically-driven research just vanishes into thin air:
Borjas and Breznau…recently reported that researchers’ ideology influences their empirical findings. Although we were able to reproduce B&B’s numerical results, our reanalysis shows that the reported association is not robust. Specifically, the association hinges on a coding error. Data from four teams that contradict the ideology hypothesis were excluded from the analysis due to idiosyncratic variable coding. Correcting this error renders the ideology effect no longer statistically significant. Also, B&B employed a different outcome variable and weighting scheme to that used in a previous paper based on the same data. These two analytical decisions further contribute to the observed ideology effect. Correcting the coding error or using the same specification as in the previous paper renders the ideology effect indistinguishable from zero. Therefore, we conclude that B&B do not provide robust evidence of ideological bias in this context. Instead, the reported association appears to be a statistical artefact resulting from questionable modelling decisions. [emphasis mine]
How does this just keep happening again and again, and why is it always Borjas?
In any case, I think the implication here is pretty clear: Friends don’t let friends cite George Borjas.
Up and to my office a while, and thence by coach with Sir J. Minnes to St. James’s to the Duke, where Mr. Coventry and us two did discourse with the Duke a little about our office business, which saved our coming in the afternoon, and so to rights home again and to dinner. After dinner my wife and I had a little jangling, in which she did give me the lie, which vexed me, so that finding my talking did but make her worse, and that her spirit is lately come to be other than it used to be, and now depends upon her having Ashwell by her, before whom she thinks I shall not say nor do anything of force to her, which vexes me and makes me wish that I had better considered all that I have of late done concerning my bringing my wife to this condition of heat, I went up vexed to my chamber and there fell examining my new concordance, that I have bought, with Newman’s, the best that ever was out before, and I find mine altogether as copious as that and something larger, though the order in some respects not so good, that a man may think a place is missing, when it is only put in another place.
Up by and by my wife comes and good friends again, and to walk in the garden and so anon to supper and to bed. My cozen John Angier the son, of Cambridge coming to me late to see me, and I find his business is that he would be sent to sea, but I dissuaded him from it, for I will not have to do with it without his friends’ consent.
I realize with everything going on, including the fascist takeover of the U.S., complaining about Trump attending game 3 of the NBA Finals tonight is small change. But it’s really annoying me. It’s going to be bad for some of the fans (the fans who can’t get in traditionally gather outside to watch the game on a big screen–and the Secret Service has banned that). But tonight is likely going to be a great, intense game: it’s essentially do or die for the Spurs, and the first game of the series to be played in front of the rabid New York Knicks fans.
And that fucking guy has to show up. We can’t even get three hours of good basketball without seeing his ugly mug. I’m guessing they’re going to go out of their way to keep Trump’s image off of the Madison Garden screens, otherwise the boos are going to rain down (Mayor Mamdani also plans to attend, and while this would never happen, it would be hilarious if they alternated screens between Mamdani and Trump, leading to the ensuing alternating cheers and boos).
Meet the Press today aired an interview host Kristen Welker taped Friday with President Donald J. Trump. It showed Trump losing control and walking out of the interview when Welker challenged his insistence that the 2020 presidential election and the recent California election were rigged.
Weirdly, he kept referring to the U.S. as “your” country when he was speaking to Welker, and to “your” elections. It was almost as if he was a foreign observer offering criticism of the U.S.
As Welker repeatedly pointed out that he has never produced any evidence for his assertions, he got madder and madder, calling the media—NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN—one-sided and crooked. He insisted “there’s more evidence than ever presented.” When she asked again if he had evidence, he said: “All I have to do is look.” When she continued to ask for evidence, he said: “You’re either crooked or you’re stupid.”
Finally, he got up, pulled off his mic, and left, telling her: “Let’s call it quits because I’ve had enough. Thank you darling. Have a good time.”
One of the things Trump spat at Welker was that “[a] country can never be great with a dishonest press.” With this statement directed at the legacy media, once again, Trump illustrated that he was accusing his opponents of what he, himself, is doing, a classic authoritarian technique to muddy the waters so people stop trying to figure out what is real and cease to believe anything.
Scott Pelley, who was fired last week from 60 Minutes after thirty-seven years as a CBS correspondent, spoke with Lulu Garcia-Navarro of the New York Times in an interview that appeared today. Pelley explained that CBS News director Bari Weiss, appointed after Trump loyalist David Ellison took over the network, asked for changes to a story about the anti-ICE and Border Patrol protests in Minneapolis over the winter.
Hours before airing, he explained, after the story had been approved, Weiss sent an email to Pelley’s boss asking them to make the protesters look more violent and to say that before an officer shot her, Renee Good was driving toward him.
But she wasn’t. Pelley continued: “On the video, you see the officer standing slightly off the front of the car. And you clearly see Ms. Good’s wheels turned completely as far as they will go, away from the officer. But he shoots her in the head, kills her, and says something about her that I can’t repeat in polite company.
“We have gone out of our way in our plan from the very beginning to show the protesters for the responsibility that they had. We had already scrubbed the video archives, looking for those scenes. Somehow that wasn’t enough for Ms. Weiss. The video showed that the officer wasn’t standing in front of the car and she wasn’t driving toward him, but that’s what the president said about that, and that’s the way she wanted it described.”
Pelley said: “There was a thumb on the scale for the president’s version of events that I felt was a level of political influence that I had never seen in 37 years at CBS News.”
In her interview, Welker challenged Trump over more than his election denial. He didn’t appear to like questions about the economy or his war on Iran, either.
Meeting with Trump in Wisconsin, at his team’s request, Welker asked Trump about the economy, noting that “Gas is up. Diesel is up.” Trump answered: “It’s all coming down as soon as the war’s over.” Welker continued: “Seventy percent of farmers say they can’t afford fertilizer.” Trump responded: “The farmers are doing very well.” He added: “All of them support me because there’s nobody been better to farmers.” He continued: “You know I had a great first term. I had the greatest economy ever. And you know what? This one’s blowing it away.”
As for Iran, Trump denied to Welker that he had ever promised to stay out of foreign wars, although Jane C. Timm of NBC News reminded readers that he told Pennsylvania voters in 2024: “I will not send you to fight and die in stupid foreign wars that never end. I will not send our sons and daughters to go fight for a war in a country that you’ve never heard of. We’re not going to do it. We’re going to bring our troops home, and we’re going to focus on America First.”
In the interview, Trump pushed back on the idea that he needs to settle the Iran crisis quickly despite his promises to end it fast. He compared his Iran adventure, which so far has lasted just over three months, to the Vietnam War at nineteen years, the Korean War, and World War II. Here, too, he used that odd “you,” as if he were looking at the U.S. from outside. He suggested that the loss of thirteen U.S. military personnel in Iran is light compared to the losses of those other wars.
Despite his administration’s insistence that he doesn’t need congressional approval for his war on Iran because it’s not a war, Trump repeatedly referred to it as a war.
Trump also told Welker he hopes to revive the $1.776 billion slush fund his acting attorney general Todd Blanche said was dead.
Trump increasingly looks like a loser, and as he does so, more and more people appear willing to challenge him.
They are following in the footsteps of CNN’s Daniel Dale, who has fact-checked Trump for years now. Dale reported yesterday that a statistic about Black employment Trump cited in a speech in Wisconsin on Friday was so obviously false even Trump questioned it.
“And we’ve also had huge drops in—and I’ll tell you, this is something that’s amazing: African American unemployment is now doing better than it’s ever done,” Trump said. “And I don’t know where that stat came from, but I’ll take it,” he said. “I don’t know where the hell that stat come—but we’ll take it.”
Yesterday, Susan Douglas and Paul Romano, a political organizer and a Vietnam War veteran respectively, represented by the Public Integrity Project, filed a federal lawsuit to stop the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) cage fights at the White House on Trump’s birthday, a week from today. Fighters are expected to “conduct the ceremonial weigh-ins and face-offs at the Lincoln Memorial, make pre-fight walkouts from the Oval Office, and do combat in a massive structure now under construction just steps from the Executive Residence.”
“This plan is deeply corrupt,” the lawsuit alleges. It is being organized by the UFC, “whose chief executive, Dana White, is a close friend and ally of the President. The President is giving White and his company what none have enjoyed before: unfettered access to the White House and Lincoln Memorial to stage a private, for-profit sports event, with all the promotional and branding opportunities that accompany such access.” One executive recently called the event “the greatest earned-marketing tool of all time.”
The lawsuit notes that “[f]ederal law tightly restricts private use of the national capital’s most sacred monumental spaces” and that Trump and the administration appear to be using the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence to relax those rules. But, it notes, the UFC fight is tied to Trump’s 80th birthday rather than the nation’s 250th, and is being organized not by the congressional planning body for the 250th, but by UFC.
The suit lists the many ways in which the UFC fight is a money-making venture for the company and for Trump, including the fact that he bought between $15,000 and $50,000 of stock in the parent company of UFC, TKO Holding Group.
Trump has announced he will attend Game 3 of the NBA Finals between the New York Knicks and the San Antonio Spurs at Madison Square Garden tomorrow night, forcing street closures and Secret Service perimeters for the event. Today, fans expressed their fury at the news that they would have to arrive at least two hours early and that he was “ruining the vibe” of the New York moment.
So based on the latest totals, it appears Katrina Foley, the incumbent county supervisor, will march on toward the general election, where she will (yet again) face off against Republican Diane Dixon.
And, based upon voting trends and tendencies, odds are strong Foley pulls out the November win and remains on the job.
However …
In the course of her campaign, I was struck by a few things that someone should probably let Foley in on. And I don’t say this to be jerky, but because this is a local political website, and shit matters to me …
First, never, ever, ever, ever, ever talk like this again.
Never, ever, ever …
Why? Multiple reasons. To begin with, it comes off as waaaaaaay too cocky and self-assured. But even more important, the best way to drive supporters to the polls is to stress the exact opposite of confidence: You’re nervous. Diane Dixon has a wildly smooth apparatus working for her. The hard right is throwing millions of dollars into the race. It’s gonna be super tight. I need all of you to not only vote, but tell your friends to vote.
Second, present better.
Foley is, by all accounts, tremendous at her job. She’s a no-brainer, especially against a bougie lightweight like Dixon. But, man, she isn’t the easiest sell. I attended a Katrina Foley event, oh, seven months ago. A lot of people there. Multiple candidates. And after one Democratic colleague wrapped his remarks by encouraging people to donate to his campaign, Foley stressed that her race was more financially pressing and urgent. It was painfully awkward and inappropriate, but sorta Katrina-esque. You don’t walk away from her thinking, “Man, it’d be great to hang.” You walk away thinking, “I mean, I guess so.”
And, to reiterate: Katrina Foley is great at her job. But she’s not smooth, or warm and cuddly. Which you sorta need to be, especially in local races. Hell, you at least need to fake it a bit. Dixon sucks, but she comes off grandmotherly. People love grandmothers.
Third, knives out.
When we get past this crazy season, it’s time to bring out the butcher knives on Dixon. The woman is a warmed-over MAGA puppet; a Will O’Neill fever dream. She’s unaccomplished, hoity, out of touch, lame. One can coast through a primary with, “Hey, I’m grandma! Want a candy?” But now shit gets real.
Jerry was a great guy, and equally wonderful is his fiance Andrea, who was by his side every … single … step … of the way.
Anyhow, a Go Fund Me was recently set up by one of Jerry’s close friends. It’s 100-percent legit and warmly intended. This is what he wrote …
The world recently lost one of its most brilliant souls, Jerry Rocha. Jerry passed away on June 3, 2026 after a 5 year battle with stage 4 Colorectal cancer. Jerry waged an epic battle deserving of recognition in the halls of Valhalla or worthy of recognition in the archives of the Jedi Order. The tales of his bravery in the face of an unrelenting enemy will echo through Hyrule, across The Great Sea and live in The Lorule Kingdom for eternity. If you got any of those nerdy references then you truly loved Jerry and the light he brought to this sometimes dark world.
On June 3rd I not only lost my best friend and brother, but more importantly Andrea Lassen lost the love of her life. Andrea over the last 5 years has been Jerry’s real life Guardian Angel. Extending his life countless times by making him go to the doctor instead of brushing off a blocked colon as gas or a blood clot in his neck as a pulled muscle. Without Andrea’s love and care we wouldn’t have had Jerry for as long as we did. Now it’s time to return that favor. Andrea this past January had to leave her job to become a full-time caregiver after Jerry’s health took a turn. With these last 4 months of lost wages, mounting medical bills and after death costs Andrea could really use some Guardian Angels herself.
So I’m asking you to please, if you can, give whatever you can or at least light the Beacons of Gondor and spread the word (if you got that reference then you really got Jerry). I know times are tough and everything costs more, but if you can spare anything it would mean the world to me and help Andrea in this time of need. Also, to quote my late, great best friend, “Don’t Make a Fuck Outta Me” (IYKYK)
AI is like religion. Either you believe it changes everything, or
you don’t believe at all. There is no moderate position; nobody
believes in AGI “more or less,” just like nobody is “casually
religious.” If God exists, the only coherent response is to
reorganize your entire life around that fact, as priests do. If
you pray sometimes, then you are just an atheist who’s also
fearful. When tech companies spend hundreds of billions on capital
expenditures to add sparkly AI features to Office, Gmail, and
Instagram, I only see fearful atheists — guys who don’t believe
in AI but pretend just in case.
In 2026, the four largest cloud and AI infrastructure providers — Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft — committed to spending $670
billion on CapEx. Apple, in contrast, spent $12.7 billion on
capex last fiscal year and projects $14 billion for 2026, 2%
of what its peers are spending. The conventional reading in
Silicon Valley is, naturally, that Apple is losing. Siri has been
a punchline for years — an internal executive called the delays
ugly and embarrassing — and critics say that Apple has not
been the same without Steve Jobs. It is falling behind, they
say, and moving way too slowly for AI.
I disagree with this portrayal: Apple is the most powerful tech
company in the world right now because it’s acting according to
what it believes.
Some of you, I bet, will object to Romero’s notion that no one is “casually religious”. Almost everyone I know is casually religious, you might be thinking. But read the whole piece. What he’s saying is that if you’re “casually religious” those are just words. You’re not living your life according to your professed beliefs (casual or not). And that’s how most of Apple’s peer companies seem to be approaching AI.
I’m not sure he’s right, but he might be, and I think his take is at least closer to right than wrong. Apple is making an enormous bet on AI — but their bet is that they don’t need to spend hundreds of billions per year on AI infrastructure (most of it fattening Nvidia’s bottom line) to reap the benefits. If Apple’s right we should start seeing it come together tomorrow.
(Arguably we’ve already seen it coming together — demand for Apple’s products and services has gone up, not down, so far in the AI era. Entrenched leaders often grow during the initial stages of extinctive disruptions — BlackBerry’s biggest year for sales (revenue) and investor confidence (market cap) was 2011, four years after the iPhone debuted — but the disruptors are there. There’s not yet a single threat on the market to the iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, or AirPods — nor to Apple’s services revenue.)
I recently launched the macOS version of Shopie, an app I first
released on the iOS App Store late last year. Shopie helps you
keep track of products you’re interested in by letting you create
wishlists and notifying you whenever a product’s price,
availability, and other details change.
Unlike my other apps, where I typically blend AppKit (or UIKit)
with SwiftUI, Shopie is built entirely in SwiftUI. I wanted to
keep it that way to maximize code reuse across iOS, iPadOS, and
now macOS. This post explores how far SwiftUI can take you on the
Mac in 2026, especially if your goal is to build an app that feels
truly native to the platform. It’s not meant to be an exhaustive
review of SwiftUI on macOS. It’s simply a collection of recipes
and issues I ran into while porting Shopie, a fairly small app,
and keeping it 100% SwiftUI.
Andrade’s examples are copious. His conclusion is damning:
Apple dropped the ball here. AppKit was ahead of its time and
UIKit was a more polished version of AppKit. A serious
cross-platform framework that unified the two should have happened
long before SwiftUI. Instead, Apple left AppKit to fossilize and
then tried to leapfrog the problem.
You can see the result everywhere. SwiftUI is productive, modern,
and often delightful, right up until you try to make a really good
Mac app. Then suddenly you’re fighting the framework for things
the Mac solved 20 years ago.
There’s something really wrong with SwiftUI. Amongst the apps I use, the best example is Apple Journal. Basic stuff that’s worked reliably for decades — some things that heretofore had worked forever — are dangerously broken. If you’re running MacOS 26 Tahoe, open Journal and make a new dummy entry. Type something like “The quick brown fox.” Then double-click on the word “brown” and delete it. Now invoke Undo.
What you expect is for the word “brown” to reappear. What happens is ... the whole sentence disappears. Gone. Invoke Redo and you only get back to “The quick fox.” The word “brown” is just gone forever. It’s nowhere in the Undo stack. That’s just profoundly fucked up. I’ve never seen anything like this with an AppKit app, ever. (I’ve never seen it with a UIKit app either — and the same thing happens on iOS with Journal. It’s just that you notice it less often because we don’t invoke Undo and Redo nearly as often there.)
I actually use the Journal app and I’ve lost entire sentences of text to this incompetent implementation of Undo. Editing text in Journal is dangerous because SwiftUI is so bad at something as fundamental as text editing. AppKit has had this solved since 1989 or so, a decade before Apple reunified with NeXT. And my example here is just one of many. Andrade documents a whole bunch more in his post. [Shopie is a good modern Mac app — you can practically see from reading his post that Andrade’s hands are scarred from dozens of paper cuts.
So while the world is largely focused on Apple’s AI-related announcements at WWDC tomorrow, I’ve got SwiftUI (on all platforms) and Mac-assed Mac development high on my list. Apple’s developer message used to be that it was not just easy to develop apps for their platforms, but that it was easy to develop good idiomatically native apps. You got the correct complex behavior — for things like Undo/Redo — out of the box. That’s still true for AppKit and UIKit, but it’s never been true for SwiftUI, and SwiftUI is now seven years old. That’s too long for any excuses to hold water.
Luxembourg’s OQ Technology plans to test direct-to-smartphone satellite connectivity next year in Germany using a local telco’s cellular spectrum, setting up a challenge to U.S.-led services in the emerging market.
Quantum Space, a company led by a former NASA administrator developing highly maneuverable spacecraft for national security missions, will go public by merging with a special purpose acquisition company.
For anyone who wasn’t sure whether China was in it to win the space race and dominate the rapidly growing space economy, its filings in December for 200,000 more satellites […]
Across Europe, border environments are becoming increasingly dynamic and complex. Activity can shift within hours—vehicles reposition, staging areas disperse, small watercraft alter routes, and nodes of activity appear and disappear […]
SAN FRANCISCO – NewOrbit Space, a UK startup developing satellites for very low Earth orbit (VLEO), has raised $18.5 million in a Series A investment round. With the funding, announced […]
Amazon no longer faces a July 30 cutoff for deploying half its planned 3,232 broadband satellites, but the reprieve comes with a temporary loss of spectrum priority that could give SpaceX and other rivals more leverage in orbit.
“America is at risk of high impact GPS jamming and spoofing from space” was the title of my SpaceNews opinion article in October 2024. Little did I know that its […]
Few challenges are more familiar to local sports teams than balancing growing expenses with limited budgets. Equipment costs, travel expenses, facility rentals, tournament fees, uniforms, and administrative needs continue to rise, placing pressure on organizations that want to remain accessible to players and families.
The easiest solution is often increasing participation fees, but that approach can create new problems. Higher costs may discourage involvement and place additional strain on families already managing multiple expenses. As a result, many successful teams focus on generating additional revenue in ways that strengthen the organization without making participation more expensive.
Building Stronger Community Partnerships
Local businesses are often looking for opportunities to increase visibility while supporting community initiatives. Sports teams provide a natural way to create those connections.
Partnerships can take many forms, from sponsorships and event support to donations and promotional collaborations. Businesses frequently appreciate opportunities to associate their name with positive community activities, particularly when those activities involve youth development and local engagement.
The strongest partnerships tend to create value for both sides rather than functioning as simple financial transactions.
Selling Merchandise People Actually Want to Wear
Many teams offer merchandise, but not all merchandise generates the same results. Products that feel generic or low quality often produce limited interest.
Successful fundraising merchandise usually focuses on items people genuinely enjoy wearing outside of games and practices. Parents, supporters, alumni, and community members are more likely to purchase products they would choose to wear regardless of the fundraising aspect. For some organizations, items such ascustom carhartt hats become attractive options because practical apparel tends to remain useful long after a season has ended.
When merchandise provides real value, fundraising becomes much easier.
Turning Events Into Community Gatherings
Many teams already organize games, tournaments, and seasonal activities. Expanding these events into broader community experiences can create additional fundraising opportunities.
Food vendors, raffles, family activities, sponsorship displays, and community involvement often increase attendance and engagement. The goal is not simply generating revenue but creating events that people genuinely enjoy attending.
A well-organized event can strengthen community support while simultaneously helping the organization meet financial goals.
Encouraging Small Contributions From More People
Fundraising efforts sometimes focus heavily on securing a small number of large donations. While major contributions are valuable, broad participation can be equally important.
Small recurring contributions from a larger group of supporters often create a more stable source of funding. Alumni, parents, former players, local supporters, and community members may all be willing to contribute when given simple opportunities to do so.
The cumulative effect of many small contributions can become surprisingly significant over time.
Making It Easier for Supporters to Stay Involved
One reason fundraising campaigns struggle is that supporters lose connection with the organization between seasons. Teams that maintain communication throughout the year often find it easier to generate ongoing support.
Updates, community involvement, social media engagement, and volunteer opportunities help strengthen relationships with supporters. People are generally more willing to contribute when they feel connected to the team’s mission and progress.
Fundraising becomes easier when support is built on relationships rather than occasional requests for money.
Protecting Valuable Equipment and Resources
Raising money is important, but managing resources effectively is equally valuable. Teams that reduce waste, extend the life of equipment, and protect existing investments often improve financial stability without generating additional revenue.
Storage and organization can play an important role in this process. Equipment, uniforms, promotional materials, and seasonal supplies often represent significant investments. Solutions fromWheekeep fit naturally into conversations about organization and storage because preserving equipment properly can reduce replacement costs and help teams make better use of the resources they already have. Saving money can sometimes be just as valuable as raising it.
Sustainable Fundraising Creates Long-Term Success
The most effective fundraising strategies are rarely the most aggressive. Instead, they are the ones that can be repeated successfully year after year without creating fatigue among players, families, or supporters.
Community partnerships, useful merchandise, engaging events, broad participation, and responsible resource management all contribute to stronger financial foundations. Individually, each strategy may produce modest results. Together, they can significantly reduce the pressure to increase participation fees.
Teams that approach fundraising as an ongoing part of community building often discover that financial support becomes easier to maintain because people feel invested in the organization’s success. Ultimately, the goal is not simply raising more money. It is creating a stronger and more sustainable program for everyone involved.
I'm planning several plugins for Datasette Agent which can make edits to existing pieces of text - things like collaborative Markdown editing, updating large SQL queries, and editing SVG files.
Agentic editing of text is a little tricky to get right. My favorite published design for this is for the Claude text editor, which implements the following tools:
view - view sections of a file, with line numbers added to every line.
str_replace - find an exact old_str and replace it with new_str - fail if the original string is not unique
insert - insert the specified text after the specified line number
Rather than recreate these patterns for every plugin that needs them I decided to create this base plugin, datasette-agent-edit, which implements the core tools in a way that allows them to be adapted for other plugins.
If you’re a user—owner?—of this cryptocurrency, this is important:
On May 29, the security researcher Taylor Hornby found a critical vulnerability in Zcash Orchard privacy pool using Claude Opus 4.8. The Zcash team hired Hornby specifically to look for this kind of issue. He found one fast enough to be embarrassing.
The Orchard pool is the newest and most advanced shielded transaction system in the cryptocurrency Zcash. Introduced in 2022, it allows users to send and receive ZEC while keeping transaction details private. It uses zero-knowledge proofs to validate transactions without revealing amounts or participants. The bug: a specific check that was supposed to validate transaction inputs wasn’t actually enforcing the rules it appeared to enforce. An attacker could have exploited the flaw to feed false inputs into that check and generate ZEC from nothing, with the zero-knowledge proof system blessing the fraudulent transaction as valid.
It’s fixed; that’s the good news. The bad news is that there’s no way of knowing if anyone exploited the vulnerability to steal money. And this fragility is the fundamental problem that makes blockchain such a bad idea.
In April, Anthropic initated Project Glasswing. The idea was to let companies use their new model to find and fix vulnerabilities in their own software. It was a fantastic PR move, and so many press outlets have uncritically parroted Anthropic’s claims that it’s now common wisdom that Mythos is better at finding software vulnerabilities than other models. Which is just nottrue.
In any case, Anthropic has published a Project Glasswing status report. It’s finding a lot of vulnerabilities in software—yay! Some of them are even dangerous. But almost none of them has been patched. It’s weird. There’s something fishy about the data that I don’t understand. That Anthropic refuses to release details—that it just says “trust us”—is a big problem here.
There are a few local data points your Platner piece doesn’t mention that may become important.
1. Mills is still on the ballot, and she’s been making a point of saying so since the first article about the sexts came out. Her lawn signs, which had largely disappeared, are springing back up all over town with reminders about that. She sees an opening, she’s trying to exploit it, and she has a receptive audience.
2. This is just the view from one local Dem club, but it’s no more obvious now that Platner is the candidate than it was that Biden was the candidate in ’24 — and Biden’s name is coming up a lot. People know that if Platner ultimately can’t weather the latest news (or if more is coming), we can’t afford to wait to coalesce behind Mills. (I’d prefer Costello, but know he’d lose to Collins).
3. Ranked choice is a wild card. There are a lot of ways to strategize about ranking Mills #1 or #2, but a lot of people who a couple of weeks ago had no reason to think about it are now trying to suss out what ranking on Tuesday will give us the best shot in November.
4. At least in my local Dem club, the latest news is landing much differently than the sexting stuff, the tattoo, the social media posts, etc. A couple of months ago, we were really split between the two candidates, but everyone agreed we’d work hard for whoever won the primary. When Mills suspended campaigning, we were all on board for Platner. Not so now. No one is voting for Collins, but some are saying they just can’t vote for Platner anymore. I think that’s going to cost Platner some critical votes (and volunteers) in a very close race in November.
5. Property taxes have surged in Maine since the last time Collins ran (partly a function of lots of people moving to Maine and property values rising). A lot of Dems are finding themselves trapped in homes they can’t afford. That’s creating a lot of energy on the right and having a big effect in local races across the state. As much as progressives like Platner and dislike Mills, the calculus of where to find the votes to beat Collins seems to be shifting.
A lot of people (including me) agree with you that the first and only priority is to beat Collins. But for a lot of us, how to do that has become a much tougher call.
One of the three satellites that make up NASA’s INCUS (Investigation of Convective Updrafts) mission sits on a fixture at the facilities of Blue Canyon Technologies in Lafayette, Colorado. The satellite completed testing in preparation for launch in late May 2026. The mission will make the first space-based survey of the dynamics of tropical convective storms.
The three nearly identical satellites will fly in tight coordination in low Earth orbit, with the first and second satellites separated by 30 seconds, and the second and third satellite separated by 90 seconds.
Each satellites carries a radar designed to observe the vertical motion of air and water — known as convective mass flux — as storms develop and evolve. The middle satellite will also carry a microwave radiometer.
The INCUS mission is set to launch in 2027 from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia.
Funded through the Earth Venture Mission-3 acquisition under NASA’s Earth System Science Pathfinder Program and led by principal investigator Sue van den Heever at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, INCUS is one of several missions fulfilling the clouds, convection, and precipitation requirements of NASA’s Earth System Observatory, a set of interconnected missions set to study our home planet’s dynamic natural systems and how they interact. The mission is also part of FALCON (Fleet for the Atmosphere Linking Commercial Observations with NASA), a fleet of atmosphere-observing satellites that will combine hardware contributions from NASA centers, universities, and commercial partners.
Here's a paper that points to the increasingly common practice of law grads taking multiple consecutive clerkships.
George, Tracey E. and Yoon, Albert and Gulati, Mitu, Stacking the Deck (May 29, 2026). Virginia Public Law and Legal Theory Research Paper No. 2026-33, Virginia Law and Economics Research Paper No. 2026-10, Vanderbilt Law Research Paper, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=6850719 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.6850719
Abstract A federal judicial clerkship is a government-funded Golden Ticket that opens doors otherwise closed to most. This ticket grants entry to a one-year apprenticeship-an exclusive glimpse behind the judiciary's gates that functions as a mentorship-rich fourth year of law school. Historically, a second passage through those gates was exceedingly rare, typically reserved for those en route to the Supreme Court. That norm has fractured. Increasingly, graduates make repeated passes through the gates, taking two, three, or even four clerkships in succession-a practice now known as "stacking." Each additional passage comes at a cost: it reduces the number of clerkship opportunities available to others and delays the clerk's entry into the legal profession. Drawing on roughly 130 interviews with judges, we examine both the rise of stacking and the forces driving it. Our central argument is that stacking is not an irrational pathology but a rational market response to a structural information failure-and that well-intentioned reform efforts have, perversely, made the problem worse. Judges agree that certain forms of stacking are troubling. Yet few see ready solutions. The problem, as they describe it, is not a lack of awareness but a structure of incentives that makes restraint individually irrational, even if the collective outcome is seen as suboptimal. This Essay diagnoses those structural failures and evaluates the most promising paths forward.
In economics, Marx is relegated to the history of thought as his ideas were an economic dead end and a political disaster. Yet Marx-influenced literary criticism is a dominant mode of analysis in nearly every English department in the country. It’s not that the English professors are all Marxists, it’s that even the non-Marxists reach for Marxian concepts–class, ideology, alienation, material conditions, commodification–when analyzing texts. These concepts may be useful for analyzing a Victorian novel of the landed classes but they have become a default economics for all of literature. That default is odd. Class analysis predates Marx and society can be divided into more than one set of classes; material conditions do not supersede all artistic agency; and capitalism contains figures—entrepreneurs, speculators, intermediaries, innovators, discoverers—who are great subjects for art yet fit poorly into the Marxist moral geometry. Not surprisingly, Marxism handles capitalism’s protagonists badly.
Is Marxian economics the only economic lens one can apply to literature? What would a Hayekian literary criticism look like? The place to start is the great Paul Cantor’s pioneering essay on Thomas Mann’s “Disorder and Early Sorrow,” a slight-seeming story set in Weimar Germany during the hyperinflation. Cantor shows that when one reads the novella through Hayek and Mises rather than Marx, the story opens up.
Start with inflationary psychology and its ramifications. Inflation shortens time horizons. When money loses value by the hour, saving is foolish and the rational move is to spend as fast as you earn—Mises’s “flight into real goods.” Prudence, discipline, and respect for the past become maladaptive. Speed, improvisation, risk-taking, and a certain youthful irresponsibility become survival traits.
Thus, Cantor/Mann tell us that inflation changes psychology and inverts the authority of age over youth. The old are set in their ways and often living on fixed incomes that inflation has wiped out; they cannot adapt. The young have known nothing but instability and go with the inflationary flow effortlessly. So the conservative virtues that once commanded respect are in decline while youthful recklessness starts to look like competence. Thus, Mann’s world has “gone mad in the worship of youth”: the children call their father by his first name, the teenagers are “the big folk,” and Professor Cornelius literally crouches down to his children’s height as the hierarchy collapses around him.
Money is a society’s primary measure of value, so Cantor/Mann argue that when you shake a people’s faith in their money, you shake their other faiths. Thus Cantor ties the conviction-less skepticism of Cornelius—and the broader Weimar nihilism and disequilibrium that helped feed the rise of Nazism—to monetary disequilibrium.
In short, inflation converts economic disorder into moral, social, psychological, and finally ontological disorder. Prices become unstable, then values, then identities, then reality. The modern feeling of absurdity and inauthenticity that critics reflexively pin on capitalism, Cantor/Mann argue is due to government-created inflation and paper money.
A Marxist could read the same story and find the inevitable contradictions of capitalism. Cantor reads it and finds the consequences of the state debasing the currency. Both are economic readings of literature. Only one of them has the economics correct.
Cantor is the place to begin but a Hayekian literary criticism could go much further. Atavism, the impossibility of social justice, products of human action but not of human design, spontaneous order, the fatal conceit, subjectivism, the sensory order–there is a lot of Hayekian ideas that literary interpretation could draw upon.
A Hayekian criticism would ask questions like how do characters acquire and process knowledge? Which institutions transmit information successfully, and which corrupt it? How do money, law, language, and custom function as social coordination mechanisms? Why do some attempts at rational redesign end in disaster? Read War and Peace as a critique of the great-man theory of history, Brazil and The Lives of Others as the fatal conceit degenerating into ignorance, fear, and absurdity. The Wire as a Hayekian epic of spontaneous order that demonstrates the illusion of social justice. Cantor’s essay on Mann shows the method, the broader project remains underdeveloped.
Addendum: Don’t forget my earlier WSJ piece, Capitalism: Hollywood’s Miscast Villain which gives an economic, one might even say Marxist, explanation for why film directors in particular disdain capitalists.
The U.S. general fertility rate has fallen by 22% since 2007, a sustained decline not readily explained by economic conditions, contraceptive use, housing or childcare costs, or other commonly cited factors. We assess the potential role of a different shock: the diffusion of the smartphone. The U.S. rollout of the iPhone, the first modern smartphone, provides a natural experiment: from June 2007 through February 2011, the device was sold only on AT&T, allowing us to identify its effect from variation in AT&T’s mobile broadband coverage. Entropy-balanced Poisson and synthetic difference-in-differences event studies imply that access to the iPhone reduced births by 4.5–8.0% at ages 15–19 and 3.2–6.6% at ages 20–24, with statistically significant but smaller declines among older cohorts. Placebo analyses applied to Verizon and Sprint’s pre-2011 coverage footprint are null. Taken together, these cohort effects imply that the diffusion of the iPhone deepened the decline in births among women under 30 while suppressing the rise in births among older women. Overall, the diffusion of the iPhone explains 33–52% of the decline in the general fertility rate among women aged 15–44. National-survey evidence on time use and sexual behavior is consistent with the iPhone reducing in-person interactions, increasing pornography use, and reducing sexual frequency.
That is from Caitlin K. Myers& Ezekiel Hooper. An interesting and difficult to discuss question is how much we actually want teen fertility rates to decline, and to what extent we should consider such declines a good thing.
Note also that as this study is set up it does not discriminate against the ” the iPhone effect on fertility is mainly a thing of timing” hypothesis. And a Paul Novosad comment.
I loved your talk about AI and wanted to bounce an idea off you.
I think AI may be bad for corporate profit margins.
A lot of companies make money because their customers can’t be bothered to monitor them more closely, or to insource something. Customers let the company make some money in exchange for doing a decent-enough job and making the problem go away.
Bank of America has $2 trillion of deposits, not a penny of which is optimized. Most enterprise software vendors could be switched out far more often, or displaced by home-built software, but it’s too much of a pain. I could run a 12-party RFP for an Uber ride or a pair of socks, but I don’t.
In a sense, many professionals are an extension of the same idea. I could research my own real estate law, or my own insurance, whether business or personal, but I don’t because it would be too hard.
Google Search might be the biggest example. It makes money because advertisers know they need to be at the top of the results to be found. But my agent will happily search all the results across multiple search engines.
AI agents should change all this. By acting as incredibly rational and vigilant sourcing agents, CFOs, and experts for their users, they will take rents previously collected by these toll-takers and redistribute them to consumers.
And I don’t think the AI stack itself necessarily makes much profit. Commodity and open-weight models are hot on the heels of the major model companies, and competition in GPUs should intensify. Indeed, making a GPU is in some ways similar to making software, so perhaps it can commoditize substantially. Chip manufacturing may remain high-margin, but there are now plenty of entrants drawn in by the shortage who could make TSMC’s market more competitive over time.
Some companies will win. Low-cost providers may gain share as customers switch more often. Richer consumers may consume more high-end goods. Companies with genuinely advantaged business models and limited competition will be able to become more efficient. But my overriding sense is that the equilibrium outcome is lower margins for companies.
Of course, people will build new businesses, and maybe they will use AI to generate very high margins in ways I haven’t considered. That would prove me wrong.
But if this lower-margin hypothesis is true, the knock-on effects are probably positive for AI adoption, since it will make the models more popular with consumers.
And if your view is that AI drives GDP growth to be only 5–10% higher over the next decade, it’s possible that a 100–200 bp decline in corporate margins from roughly 12% would mean companies in aggregate don’t see much benefit — or in fact lose — even as consumers are better off.
Imagine for a moment you are lying back, gazing up at the red-orange celestial clouds in today’s Picture of the Week. What shapes do you see? A chicken pecking seeds on the ground, the head of a dragon, or something else entirely?
These pareidolia-inducing clouds are a pair of nebulae — collections of dust and gas in interstellar space — called Gum 10 and Gum 11. Visible mostly from the southern hemisphere, they are part of a larger complex, in which stars are born. Gum 10 is the brightest cloud that occupies most of the image, whereas Gum 11 is the fainter, detached cloud to the bottom-left. Their bright glow comes from a special interaction between hydrogen and the hot massive stars in each nebula. These stars emit ultraviolet light, which has enough energy to tear electrons away from their atoms, forming ions. These electrons eventually recombine with hydrogen ions, which causes the emission of the specific shade of red light seen in this image. The black lines in the nebula come from dust that blocks the light behind it.
This image was taken with the VLT Survey Telescope (VST), which celebrates the 15th anniversary of its first light today! The VST project was a joint venture between ESO and the Capodimonte Astronomical Observatory (OAC), part of the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF). Today the VST is solely managed by INAF and is hosted by ESO at its Paranal Observatory in Chile. The data behind this picture comes from a project called VPHAS+, which uses the VST to scan across the plane of our Milky Way galaxy, intended to better understand the lifecycle of stars.
Jabal al Fāyah rises from the Rub’ al Khali desert in an image captured by the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 8 on October 23, 2025.
NASA Earth Observatory / Lauren Dauphin
About an hour’s drive east of Dubai’s gleaming towers and artificial islands, a quieter, more natural landscape takes shape. At the far northern edge of the Rub’ al Khali, a saffron-colored sand sea laps against the Al-Hajar Mountains. A series of pale ridges rises finlike from the desert plain, with the largest—Jabal al Fāyah—standing 412 meters (1,352 feet) above sea level.
The Landsat 8 satellite captured this image of the ridges cutting across the Emirate of Sharjah in the northern part of the United Arab Emirates on October 23, 2025. To geologists, the limestone ridges are a reminder of the region’s watery past, signs that this land lay underwater tens of millions of years ago when the sedimentary rock layers were deposited.
Jabal al Fāyah functions as a barrier, trapping windblown sand in dune fields to its west. The weathering of iron-bearing minerals in the sand grains gives the dune fields their orange hue. To the east, the branching channels of overlapping alluvial fans extending from the Al-Hajar Mountains carry gravels and eroded sediments from basalts and other dark mafic rocks.
The dark rocks to the east—part of the Samail Ophiolite—are known to geologists for being among the world’s largest, best-preserved, and most accessible exposures of ancient oceanic lithosphere, the rigid outer layer of Earth that includes both the crust and upper mantle. Oceanic lithosphere like this is normally subducted and recycled back into the mantle when tectonic plates collide. But in this area, a large section from beneath the Tethys Sea was scraped off and thrust onto the Arabian plate in a process called obduction.
Dubai lies to the west of the limestone ridges, and the Al-Hajar Mountains lie to the east, in an image acquired by the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 8 on October 23, 2025.
NASA Earth Observatory / Lauren Dauphin
The Jabal al Fāyah ridges themselves are made up of marine limestone that was deposited on top of the ophiolite over tens of millions of years spanning the late Cretaceous through the early to mid-Paleocene. Limestone typically forms along continental margins in warm, shallow oceans, often in lagoons and coral reefs, out of the calcium carbonate found in the shells and skeletons of marine life. In many parts of the ridges, coral fragments and marine invertebrate fossils are visible embedded in the rock. A feature called Fossil Rock sits a few kilometers north of Jabal al Fāyah and adjacent to the limestone ridge Jabal Mulayḩah. It contains an abundance of snail, clam, and sea urchin remains.
For archaeologists, the ridges are at the center of a much more recent tale of human adaptation and survival that has played out in just the past few hundred thousand years. The ridges and parts of the surrounding landscape—inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2025—are dotted with dozens of archaeological sites that trace human occupation on the Arabian Peninsula back to between 210,000 and 120,000 years ago, to the Middle Paleolithic. That was a period when waves of anatomically modern humans (Homo sapiens) migrated out of Africa and shared the planet with other groups such as Neanderthals.
Many of the sites contain stone flakes, blades, scrapers, hand axes, and other stone tools. The archaeological treasure trove offers early evidence of modern humans surviving in a harsh desert environment and raises questions about the routes modern Homo sapiens may have taken on their journey out of Africa.
Geological evidence indicates that lakes periodically formed on the east side of the ridge, providing critical food and water resources that would have supported early inhabitants in this unforgiving climate. Rocky overhangs along the ridge would have provided shelter from the heat and wind. Some of the sites show evidence of intermittent occupation beginning as early as 210,000 years ago, making this one of the earliest signs of human habitation on the Arabian Peninsula.
NASA Earth Observatory images by Lauren Dauphin, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Story by Adam Voiland.
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If you can make it in person, you should come. The California Theater is a beautiful big theater and tickets are still available.
You can also watch tonight’s show in live stereoscopic immersive in the Theater app from Sandwich Vision on Vision Pro. A purchase of the ticket to the live show, the Theater app for $12.99, is also good for replay forever — with surprise bonus features included. It’s a fun, truly immersive way to experience the show.
Hope to see you there tonight, one way or the other.
Market Design
