An unusually active sunspot region is now crossing the Sun.
Alphabet has lined up banks to sell a rare 100-year bond, stepping up a borrowing spree by Big Tech companies racing to fund their vast investments in artificial intelligence this year.
The so-called century bond will form part of a debut sterling issuance this week by Google’s parent company, according to people familiar with the matter. Alphabet was also selling $15bn of dollar bonds on Monday and lining up a Swiss franc bond sale, the people said.
Century bonds — long-term borrowing at its most extreme — are highly unusual, although a flurry were sold during the period of very low interest rates that followed the financial crisis, including by governments such as Austria and Argentina.
Here is more from the FT, let us see how the yield comes in…
The post This security will be pricing *something* (but what?) appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Could not rise and go to the Duke, as I should have done with the rest, but keep my bed and by the Apothecary’s advice, Mr. Battersby, I am to sweat soundly, and that will carry all this matter away which nature would of itself eject, but they will assist nature, it being some disorder given the blood, but by what I know not, unless it be by my late quantitys of Dantzic-girkins that I have eaten.
In the evening came Sir J. Minnes and Sir W. Batten to see me, and Sir J. Minnes advises me to the same thing, but would not have me take anything from the apothecary, but from him, his Venice treacle being better than the others, which I did consent to and did anon take and fell into a great sweat, and about 10 or 11 o’clock came out of it and shifted myself, and slept pretty well alone, my wife lying in the red chamber above.
So, in the aftermath of publishing a book, authors often find themselves heading to Amazon to check out reviews. I’m not saying it’s particularly healthy or reasonable, but we (as a species) pretty much all do it.
Why? Because even though we try and project a writer-ish confidence, we’re a thin-skinned lot of gnomes and hobbits. We put our shit out there, and we hope people dig it. We certainly hope people buy it.
Anyhow, it’d been a few days since I last visited. And the most recent review of my book, “Only God Can Judge Me: The Many Lives of Tupac Shakur,” was this …
Initially, I was like, “Whoa—that person really hates my writing.” But then I read the name. And, I dunno, it sounded familiar. Really familiar. Carmela Atria. Carmela Atria? Do I know a Carmela Atria?
So I Googled.
And—bam! Yes!
Carmela Atria is your dime-a-dozen right-wing MAGA zealot peanut brittle who makes a lot of cackling noises back in Putnam County, N.Y., where I was born and raised. A few years ago she gained some note for being a racist piece of shit. If you don’t believe me, check out this article, headlined, CARMEL SCHOOL BOARD CANDIDATE UNDER FIRE FOR RACIALLY-CHARGED POSTS. Of the Jan. 6 attacks, she wrote on social media: “The whole thing is such a joke. Democrats labeled it as a drama insurrection for the gullible audience just for show and hype. Meanwhile, the convictions are trespassing and disorderly conduct. I’m not saying it was right, but it was so obviously a set up. Brandon is now acting as though it’s a tragic day as compared to 911. Not all Americans feel this way. Many of us don’t even respect the left corruption in Congress. They are ruining this country. I could give 2 (poop emoji) they were afraid for their lives.”
Atria later said (wait for it) her social media was hacked, and the posts weren’t hers. Which … OK, girl.
But, really, there’s a bigger point here. A more important one: If you’re someone like Carmela Atria, and you wanna take shots at an author whose politics you dislike, and you want to do so via a one-star Amazon review … for fuckity fucks sakes, DON’T USE AN ACCOUNT WITH YOUR REAL NAME ATTACHED TO IT! Jesus Christ, how hard is it not to be a moron? Girl, exercise some judgment and create a fake account. It’s far from an arduous process.
Also, I know you didn’t read the book, because that would involve reading a book that doesn’t involve some kooky-ass global conspiracy weirdness.
The thing is, these people are easily swayed and shrub dumb. It’s the unifying MAGA connection. Carmela Atria, Brett Favre, Lisa Davis, Amber Smith, Mike Munzing. They exist on the lowest plane, where moths rest and crumbs fall and dogs discard their hardened excrement. They’re uneducated and unenlightened and easy marks for people screaming “Communist!” and “Anarchist!” and “Socialist!” They know not what those words mean. Just that they are words.
So, dear Carmela Atria, I am sorry you disliked the book you did not read.
I am also sorry you didn’t receive sufficient love as a child.
PS: What’s so bad about working at Home Depot?
PPS: If you want a good laugh.
On February 9, 1950, Senator Joe McCarthy (R-WI) stood up in front of the Republican Women’s Club of Wheeling, West Virginia, at a gathering to celebrate President Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. The senator waved a piece of paper and later recalled telling the audience: “I have here in my hand a list of 205—a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department.” He said he didn’t have time to share the names of all those individuals, but he assured the audience that the Democratic administration of President Harry S. Truman was refusing to investigate “traitors in the government.”
Secretary of State Dean Acheson, who was busy trying to hammer together the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the Marshall Plan to provide aid to European countries rebuilding after World War II, later said McCarthy’s Wheeling speech was a good representation of the senator’s work. It was “the rambling, ill-prepared result of his slovenly, lazy, and undisciplined habits.”
McCarthy was an undistinguished junior senator running for reelection and needed an issue. With his dramatic statement, he found it in attacks on the postwar rules-based international order those like Acheson were trying to build. The staunchly Republican Chicago Tribune, whose editor hated the idea of using American resources to help foreign governments, trumpeted the story and threw its weight behind the idea that Democrats were trying to destroy the United States.
The next day, McCarthy pledged to share the names of “57 card-carrying Communists” in the State Department with Acheson, so long as the secretary would let Congress investigate the loyalty records of the people in his department. Then McCarthy telegraphed Truman, charging him with protecting communists in government. The Chicago Tribune put the accusations on the front page, and McCarthy’s office sent out copies of his missive. “Failure on your part will label the Democratic party as being the bedfellow of international Communism,” McCarthy wrote.
McCarthy’s critics pointed out that he never produced any evidence of his wild claims, but their outrage gained far less attention than the claims themselves. He yelled, he made crazy accusations, he leaked fragments of truth that misrepresented reality, he hectored and badgered. He perfected the art of grabbing headlines and then staying ahead of the fact-checkers. By the time reporters called out his lies, they were already old news, and the fact checking got buried deep in the papers. The front page would have McCarthy’s newest accusation.
The outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950, when communist North Korea, backed by the Soviet Union and Communist China, invaded South Korea, stoked anticommunism, and McCarthy’s warning that there was a secret plot among Democrats to make America communist gained traction. He spoke widely across the country that summer, and in the midterm elections in fall 1950, every candidate he endorsed won. Using his lies to gain power, McCarthy rampaged across the next years, ruining lives through lies and innuendo.
McCarthy’s star fell abruptly in May 1954, when Americans watched him lie and berate witnesses in televised hearings. But in that same month, the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, opened up a different avenue for far-right extremists to argue that Democrats were undermining American society by trying to usher in communism. Reaching back to the racist tropes of Reconstruction, they claimed that federal protection of Black equality before the law was socialism because enforcing civil rights required government personnel who could be paid only through taxes. Those calling for equality before the law were, in this formulation, redistributing money from taxes levied on hardworking white taxpayers to undeserving Black people.
The idea that a secret group was undermining America to make it socialist continued into the 1980s, when films like Red Dawn—in 1984 the bloodiest movie ever made—told the story of a group of everyday Americans fighting communists who were taking over their town with the collaboration of the government. In the film, the Wolverines, an embattled group of high school football players in Colorado, fight off a communist invasion of Soviets, Cubans, and Nicaraguans. The mayor and his son cooperate with the communists, making the heroic Wolverines the underdogs fighting both world communism and their own government.
The idea that everyday Americans had to fight their government to protect the nation so inspired a group of young men that in 2003, when leaders in the George W. Bush administration decided to search for Saddam Hussein, they named the effort Operation Red Dawn. The soldiers began by looking in two sites they dubbed Wolverine 1 and Wolverine 2.
With the U.S. economy so obviously weighted toward the wealthy in the past decades, garnering power by warning that Democrats are trying to usher in socialism has been a hard sell. But that idea has evolved among far-right thinkers to underpin another conspiracy theory that fits snugly in the space previously occupied by the idea that Black and Brown Americans and their allies are destroying the country through socialism.
The Great Replacement theory says that elites—often a code word for Jews—are deliberately replacing white European populations with nonwhite immigrants using mass migration and white birth rates that are lower than those of migrants. Those indebted peoples will, the theory goes, keep the elites in power in exchange for social welfare programs.
Like the conspiracy theory about socialism, the Great Replacement theory has roots in the nation’s past. In 1916, lawyer Madison Grant wrote The Passing of the Great Race: Or, The Racial Basis of European History. Grant’s book drew from similar European works to argue that the “Nordic race,” which had settled England, Scotland, and the Netherlands, was superior to other races and accounted for the best of human civilization. In the U.S., he claimed, that race was being overwhelmed by immigrants from “inferior” white races who were bringing poverty, crime, and corruption. To strengthen the Nordic race, Grant advocated, on the one hand, for an end to immigration and for “selection through the elimination of those who are weak or unfit” through sterilization, and on the other hand, for “[e]fforts to increase the birth rate of the genius producing classes.”
Grant’s ideas were instrumental in justifying state eugenics laws as well as the 1924 Immigration Act establishing quotas for immigration from different countries. But his ideas fell out of favor in the 1930s, especially after Germany’s Adolf Hitler quoted often from Grant’s book in his speeches and wrote to Grant, describing the book as “my bible.”
A 1973 French dystopian novel anticipated the modern Great Replacement theory by showing immigrants from third-world countries destroying European society, but observers tend to date the emergence of this theory from the 2011 publication of Le Grand Remplacement, or The Great Replacement, by Renaud Camus, a French writer who claims that Muslims in France are destroying French culture and civilization. The theory has become influential among the far right in Europe and Canada. But it moves in a straight line from the Republican insistence that Black voters and their allies would destroy the U.S. with socialism.
Trump nodded to the Great Replacement theory in his 2016 run for the presidency, saying when he announced his candidacy in 2015 that Mexico was “sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”
On August 11, 2017, the influence of the Great Replacement theory on Americans burst into public awareness when racists, antisemites, white nationalists, Ku Klux Klan members, neo-Nazis, and other alt-right groups met in Charlottesville, Virginia, to “Unite the Right.” They chanted “you will not replace us,” “Jews will not replace us,” and “blood and soil.” In addition to that Nazi slogan, they gave Nazi salutes and carried Nazi insignia.
Rather than denouncing them, President Trump refused to condemn them, telling a reporter that there were “very fine people, on both sides.” That statement marked Trump’s open embrace of the far right that backed the Great Replacement theory, snaking it into public discourse through lies like the claims that former president Joe Biden had created “open borders” and that countries were sending “migrant criminals” to the U.S., and by repeating terms like “illegal monster,” “killers,” “gang members,” “poisoning our country,” “taking your jobs,” and a dead giveaway: “the largest invasion in the history of our country.”
At the urging of then-candidate Trump in January 2024, Republicans refused to pass a bipartisan immigration reform measure hammered out by Senate negotiators over months. The bill appropriated $20.3 billion for border security, increased the number of immigration judges to end case backlogs, sped up asylum processes, and closed the border during high-traffic periods. It did not include a path to citizenship for those brought to the U.S. as children, the so-called Dreamers, making the measure skew toward Republican demands rather than Democratic priorities.
Nonetheless, Trump urged his supporters to kill it, and they did, teeing up a campaign in which he and his running mate, Ohio senator J.D. Vance, emulated Senator Joe McCarthy as they hammered on immigration fears, lying about open borders and migrant crime, claiming that a Venezuelan gang had taken over and was terrorizing Aurora, Colorado, and insisting—falsely—that Haitian immigrants were eating white neighbors’ pets in Springfield, Ohio.
While many Trump voters appeared to cling to the belief that a Trump administration would deport only “criminal” immigrants, which they thought meant those who had committed violent crimes, Trump’s team appeared to embrace the Great Replacement theory that defined all non-white Americans as a threat to the nation. Now, along with Vice President J.D. Vance, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, and others, they are making the idea of purging Brown and Black people from the United States central to federal policy both at home and abroad.
In September, Trump told European nations at the United Nations General Assembly that “the unmitigated immigration disaster” is “destroying your heritage.” “If you don’t stop people that you’ve never seen before, that you have nothing in common with, your country is going to fail,” Trump told them. “It’s time to end the failed experiment of open borders. You have to end it now. I can tell you, I’m really good at this stuff. Your countries are going to hell,” he said.
McCarthy’s supporters in the 1950s claimed that his lies were necessary for keeping Republicans in power: the ends justified the means. Neither journalists nor politicians could figure out how to counter McCarthy’s tactics. It was the American people who finally destroyed his career, turning against him when they realized he was hurting decent people and lying to them to gain power.
Suddenly reporters ignored him, the Senate “condemned” him, and he died only two and a half years later, likely from complications relating to alcoholism. Wisconsin voters elected Democrat William Proxmire to replace him. Proxmire told voters that McCarthy was “a disgrace to Wisconsin, to the Senate, and to America.”
—
Notes:
Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department (1969; rpt. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1987), p. 362.
Richard Rovere, Senator Joe McCarthy (1959; rpt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), pp. 250–251.
Chicago Tribune, February 9, 1950, p. 5.
Chicago Tribune, February 11, 1950, p. 7.
Chicago Tribune, February 12, 1950, p. 1.
New York Times, February 12, 1950, p. 5.
Boston Globe, February 12, 1950, p. C29.
Boston Globe, February 14, 1950, p. 12.
Washington Post, February 14, 1950, p. 10.
Washington Post, February 24, 1950, p. 22.
New York Times, February 22, 1950, p. 28.
Washington Post, February 18, 1950, p. B13.
https://archive.org/details/passingofgreatra00granuoft/mode/2up?q=weaklings
https://www.nps.gov/people/madison-grant.htm
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/08/opinion/a-disquieting-book-from-hitlers-library.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/15/us/politics/trump-aurora-colorado-immigration.html
https://www.euronews.com/2025/09/23/your-countries-are-being-ruined-by-migration-trump-tells-europe
https://www.politico.com/story/2015/04/this-day-in-politics-april-20-1966-117125
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/what-is-the-great-replacement-what-are-its-origins-2022-05-16/
https://cmsny.org/correcting-record-false-misleading-statements-on-immigration/
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2024/10/21/fact-check-12000-trump-statements-immigrants
https://www.splcenter.org/resources/reports/racist-book-camp-saints-gains-popularity/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/local/charlottesville-timeline/
Links for you. Science:
What cardiologists want you to know about MAHA’s push to eat more fat
Utah measles total rises to 216; CDC deputy director says losing elimination status ‘cost of doing business’
US withdraws from the World Health Organization
Trump’s HHS Trashes Top African Health Organization as “Fake” and “Powerless”
Measles Surges In The U.S. As Public Health Systems Falter
How cities are changing social behavior in urban animals
Other:
ICE watchers in Maine say they were threatened by federal agents
ICE arrested me without cause. What I saw will haunt me forever.
Remembering the Boston Massacre as Minneapolis Writhes Under Occupation
Jeff Bezos Is Putting The Washington Post Into Hospice
The Badge Is a Burden Not a Privilege. The power of state violence comes with the obligation to uphold a higher standard, not permission to excuse a lower one
The Talk of D.C.: Rumors Flying that Trump Admin Wants to Undo Bike Lanes in Capital
A Failure In Plain Sight. Who, if anyone, will acknowledge the obvious, and do something about it?
He’ll Know Better Next Time
I Have A Great Idea For Retraining ICE Agents
Started/Going
Fetterman household seems to have different opinions on ICE chaos
The Worst House Democrat
In the 1940s, a hand-me-down bridge ran over the Potomac
On Treasure Island, One Grocer and a Patchwork of Neighbors Keep People Fed
Was This a Murder Too Far?
Virginia shows Democrats a real path forward
The commenters won. Which Trump administration official is a former Gawker commenter?
Europe’s far right and populists distance themselves from Trump over Greenland
Escalation Dominance and Theory of Mind
Chris Madel ends GOP bid for governor, says he can’t support federal ‘retribution’ against Minnesota (this is the same guy who donated to the defense fund of the ICE operative who murdered Renee Good)
ICE and America’s flailing autocrat
Minnesota Vikings Radio Broadcaster Taking Leave of Absence After Mocking ICE Protestors
Rift at influential Silicon Valley venture firm shows tech’s divide over ICE shooting
Militarize the Police! A Thought Experiment
Palantir Defends Work With ICE to Staff Following Killing of Alex Pretti
From World Cup Supporter to ICE Staging Area: The Two Faces of The Home Depot in 2026
There is no such thing as other people’s children
Tennessee Republican bill would limit federal office to natural-born citizens
“This Is Blackmail”: Critics Slam Pam Bondi’s Demand for Minnesota Voter Rolls
Trump’s Agents Brutally Arrested Him On Video. Now He’s Speaking Out.
The launch of the next crew rotation mission to the International Space Station will have to wait at least another day after NASA and SpaceX leadership determined weather along the flight path would be unacceptable.
Leaders moved the launch of Crew-12 from pad 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station to no earlier than Thursday, Feb. 12. That would place liftoff at 5:38 a.m. EST (1038 UTC) for NASA astronauts Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway along with European Space Agency astronaut Sophie Adenot and Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev.
During a prelaunch briefing on Monday, NASA’s Commercial Crew Program Manager Steve Stich said weather along the ascent corridor for SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket would’ve been unacceptable, if the Crew Dragon spacecraft needed to abort following liftoff.
“We could see high winds along a lot of that track, up to 24 to 28 knots, especially in what we would consider our higher risk areas, the staging area,” Stich said. “There’s a low pressure system that’s kind of moving in and setting over that staging area and it’s driving those winds up. And we can really see the models agreeing over the last 24 hours.”
Stich noted that while Feb. 12 is the current target date, that too doesn’t look great from a weather perspective. Teams will further evaluate after getting the latest weather models on Tuesday morning.
“The good news is we have good opportunities for the remainder of the week and so, we’ll go ahead and launch when we’re ready, when we have favorable weather,” Stich said.
The launch preparations come as United Launch Alliance (ULA) is preparing for its first flight of 2026. A Vulcan rocket is scheduled to lift off from Space Launch Complex 41, just down the road from where Crew-12 is set to depart, during a two-hour window that opens at 3:30 a.m. EST (0830 UTC).
Because of the close timing between the two, Stich said Crew-12 has priority on the Eastern Range and if the weather permits, ULA would have to stand down from attempting a launch on Thursday. But if NASA waives off a launch attempt on Thursday prior to getting into launch day work, ULA would be able to launch its Vulcan rocket on the USSF-87 mission for the U.S. Space Force.
Stich said the other big obstacle on the range is the upcoming wet dress rehearsal tanking test for the Artemis 2 launch campaign. As of Monday afternoon, NASA hasn’t announced a date for that fueling demonstration.
“Right now, we don’t see conflicts this week, but we continue to talk to them all the time,” Stich said, referring to the Artemis 2 launch and ground teams. “They’ve made progress at changing out a few seals and they’re doing some testing on those seals and we’ll make sure we have an integrated operation where we can go fly on Crew-12, since we have a vehicle at the pad that’s ready to go and Dragon fueled with hypergols, and then we’ll work them in as well when they’re ready to go do their wet dress.”
If NASA decides that a launch on Thursday, Feb. 12, is not possible, the agency has a backup on Friday. Feb. 13, which would see a liftoff at 5:15 a.m. EST (1015 UTC). In that scenario, the Dragon spacecraft — nicknamed Freedom — would dock with the ISS about 3:15 a.m. EST (0815 UTC) on Saturday, Feb. 14.
Stich said a launch attempt on Saturday would be tricky since it creates a longer than ideal transit time from liftoff to the Dragon catching up with the ISS and docking, also referred to as “long phasing.”
“It takes quite a number of hours to get to ISS. It’s around 42 to 44 hours,” Stich said. “We would look at that one very carefully because the Dragon is a great spacecraft, but it has a limited, finite ability to be in space. And so, we want to make sure we optimize the amount of time we spend on the front versus the time we could spend on the back end.”
He noted that they also have viable launch options on Feb. 15-17 as well, if those dates become needed.
Over the weekend, SpaceX conducted a static fire test of its Falcon 9 rocket at SLC-40 to ensure the health of its vehicle before proceeding to a launch attempt. During his remarks on Monday, William Gerstenmaier, SpaceX’s vice president of Build and Flight Reliability, said they did have to replace a component following the engine burn demonstration.
“We found one check valve that was a little sluggish and held back a little bit of pressure. It’s on a transfer tube seal,” Gerstenmaier said. “We typically see that with static fires. We haven’t done many static fires lately, but in this case, we saw that.
“We removed the check valve, put a new one in. We boroscoped the line. We saw a little bit of moisture in the line. That’s probably indicative of what caused the problem. There’s likely some ice formation that may have caused a slight pressure rise, but again, that’s part of the diligence we go through to make sure everything is absolutely ready to go fly.”
Crew-12, SpaceX, and @NASA completed a full rehearsal of launch day activities pic.twitter.com/9zNdQvfZlk
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) February 9, 2026
Following that work on Sunday, on Monday morning, NASA and SpaceX went through a launch day rehearsal with the flight team of Crew-12 along with the rest of the launch support team. The so-called dry dress rehearsal went smoothly, according to Gerstenmaier.
“This is only our second launch from pad 40 with crew, so this is a chance for us to make sure things were really ready and that activity went extremely smooth this morning.”
Part of the reason why Crew-12 and future Dragon flights are set to launch from SLC-40 is because of work towards future Starship flights at Launch Complex 39A and also focusing on Falcon Heavy missions at that pad as well.
Additionally, teams are working to remove the crew access arm at LC-39A to do some repair work.
“We’re going to do some maintenance on some bearings on the crew arm. I think the general plan is we’ll keep the crew arm on the ground after we do those repairs, but we’re ready to put the crew arm back up again, if we need to go back and launch crew from pad 39A,” Gerstenmaier said. “It doesn’t say we’re backing away from 39A for crew flights. We’ll just have it in reserve when it’s needed and we need to do this repair of the bearings on the arm.”
Gerstanmaier said the crew access arm needs to come down from the tower in order to get to the bearings. SpaceX attached a crane to the arm last week and has been doing some work from cherry pickers in preparation for its removal.
“These are the bearings that actually hold the arm to the tower. They’re unique to 39A. They’re very different than they are for the arm that’s on 40 and to physically get access to those, the arm needs to be removed,” Gerstenmaier said.
“Those bearings have to come out and they have to be reinstalled. We’ll do that work at the Kennedy Space Center. And the intent there is, we don’t need to put the arm back up because, again as I described […] when we get a call up for a mission and we have to go fly a mission, if it requires that, we have plenty of time to get the arm back up. That’s the easy piece.”
Yup:
Human capital—encompassing cognitive skills and personality traits—is central for labor-market success, yet personality remains difficult to measure at scale. Leveraging advances in AI and comprehensive LinkedIn microdata, we extract the Big 5 personality traits from facial images of 96,000 MBA graduates, and demonstrate that this novel “Photo Big 5” predicts school rank, job matching, compensation, job transitions, and career advancement. The Photo Big 5 provides predictive power comparable to race, attractiveness, and educational background, and is only weakly correlated with cognitive measures such as test scores. We show that individuals systematically sort into occupations where their personality traits are valued and earn higher wages when traits align with occupational demands. While the scalability of the Photo Big 5 enables new academic insights into the role of personality in labor markets, its growing use in industry screening raises important ethical concerns regarding statistical discrimination and individual autonomy.
That is from a new NBER working paper by
The post For a long time I have been predicting the return of phrenology appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
1. The Southern Cone Thesis (speculative).
2. Ranking potato chips (NYT). Kettle, says I.
3. Henry Oliver visits Shenandoah.
4. Context is that which is scarce.
5. Seb Krier all the way down.
6. What a city on the moon plan might look like, and its problems.
The post Monday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
This is amazing:
Opus 4.6 is notably better at finding high-severity vulnerabilities than previous models and a sign of how quickly things are moving. Security teams have been automating vulnerability discovery for years, investing heavily in fuzzing infrastructure and custom harnesses to find bugs at scale. But what stood out in early testing is how quickly Opus 4.6 found vulnerabilities out of the box without task-specific tooling, custom scaffolding, or specialized prompting. Even more interesting is how it found them. Fuzzers work by throwing massive amounts of random inputs at code to see what breaks. Opus 4.6 reads and reasons about code the way a human researcher would—looking at past fixes to find similar bugs that weren’t addressed, spotting patterns that tend to cause problems, or understanding a piece of logic well enough to know exactly what input would break it. When we pointed Opus 4.6 at some of the most well-tested codebases (projects that have had fuzzers running against them for years, accumulating millions of hours of CPU time), Opus 4.6 found high-severity vulnerabilities, some that had gone undetected for decades.
The details of how Claude Opus 4.6 found these zero-days is the interesting part—read the whole blog post.
News article.
Germany’s top intelligence officials made waves last year by calling for the creation of a European spy network to lessen Europe’s dependence on American intelligence. After Washington’s sudden freeze of American intelligence sharing with Ukraine in March, German officials — and their European counterparts — have grown increasingly attuned to deficiencies in key capabilities they […]
The post There’s a way forward for sovereign European space intel, but is there the will? appeared first on SpaceNews.
I worked for each of these humans. They either hired or promoted me. I worked for them for many years. As is my way, I’ve vastly altered the details of each human, but the core issue I describe is the core issue. Also, each of these humans is very smart. No dummies.
Here are their introductions:
An Introduction to The Artist
They hired me. I could tell via the interview process that, like me, they were an introvert. The interview was awkward. Long pauses. Odd questions. No feedback. I got the gig because everyone else who interviewed told me I was a fit, but whether they thought I was a fit or not, I will never know.
First day on the gig. I was sitting at my desk, and they walked into my office, hands in pockets, stood in the door, and asked, “How was your first day?”
… because someone told them that is what you do with new hires.
They are The Artist. Burdened with creativity, all the vision. You could see it in the things they built. Inspired. Somewhere along the way, someone decided to make them a manager. Direct reports. The hope that the art they created would scale with the number of humans.
The challenges were many and diverse, but the core issue is the value of the things this manager was capable of creating, which blinded everyone else to the fact that they were reading books about being a manager, following the rules, but either not caring about what good looked like being a manager or not knowing.
“How was your first day?”
I told them. I walked through each 1:1 I had (five), shared my first very raw impressions (many), and asked them what they thought. The reason I knew someone told them to ask me about my day was that they had absolutely no clue what to do with my assessment of the day. Blank stare. They either didn’t understand or didn’t care. I couldn’t tell which.
Introducing, The Dictator
They promoted me. It took a couple of years of hustle, but they went for it. First meeting in the new role, and we’re in the basement for what is called a product review. Engineering, product managers, and designers. Small affair. Happens when it’s clear we’re at an impasse. A large enterprise customer is threatening to bolt unless we solve a critical feature issue. Not a lot of people — everyone here can contribute significantly.
Product kicks off the discussion with a timeline and three fact-filled slides. Framing the conversation. Small clarification questions, but everyone has been briefed beforehand, so we get to the heart of the problem. Cutting to the chase: it’s a design issue. We had the right requirements, we built it correctly, but our design is wrong. It is confusing the customer. The good news, Design is on it — Design vetted the deck with engineering, and they’ve got solid proposals. This meeting should be a formality, but the Dictator is here.
When we reach the discussion portion of the meeting, the Dictator starts asking questions. Does this mean this? Yes. Have they seen that? They have. If the feature is supposed to do this, why does that happen? Well, I’m glad you asked. We have… and that’s when it happens.
No, no, no, I know you have a proposal, I want to litigate some more. This back and forth goes on for an hour. Several of us attempt to redirect back to the proposal and do not succeed. Soon, we’re at the whiteboard designing a new feature, and the punchline is: the feature is wrong. It’s clumsy at first glance and bad when you’ve thought about it.
And no one says a thing. We leave the meeting, having agreed on building a feature that anyone who has read the deck knows is wrong. And we built it.
And last but not least, please welcome, The Knife
They promoted me, too. I’m not quite sure why.
After it happened, it took a month before we had a 1:1. I would get random requests for information or suggestions, but mostly I ran my show as I saw fit. When the 1:1 showed up on my calendar, I was one part relieved, one part excited, and one part nervous.
I walked into their office, and they were on the phone. Pointing at me to sit down. They were talking to finance people, and my recollection of the vibes of that call is The Knife thought the world was about to end, like that weekend, and they needed to act quickly to protect their assets. (Note to reader: the world did not end that weekend. In fact, while it might feel otherwise, it still has not ended.)
I sat for twenty minutes of a thirty-minute 1:1 listening to all the details regarding the end of the world, wondering why they had huge bulk boxes of granola on the floor, and then they were done.
I don’t know what we talked about. Not a clue. Not even going to invent anything because all I remember is that they pulled a hunting knife out of a drawer in their desk and started talking about something. Not the world ending, not about the granola, and not about the knife they were examining, twirling in their hands.
It wasn’t threatening. I was not in danger. It was just fucking weird.
Ok, forget you read those introductions.
If you and I were at a bar and I explained the respective track record of The Artist, The Dictator, and The Knife in their respective roles, you would consider them good at their job. If I further explained objectively what they had done for their respective teams and companies in terms of generating shareholder value, you would vigorously nod, “Yeah, these are successful humans.”
It’s stronger than that, I can confirm that these are wildly successful leaders.
I can further confirm that each were very bad managers.
Let’s start with my belief that a manager’s job is to tell you where you are, and a leader’s job is to tell you where you are going. With this simple definition, The Artist, The Dictator, and even The Knife, as we’ll see, were strong leaders. They knew where we were going.
An easier way to understand the difference is that leaders are stronger at strategy and managers are stronger at operations. When do you need which? Depends an an endless set of factors, including team size, their place on the organization chart, company culture, and many more. The thing to remember is your boss likely leans strategic or leans tactical.
Let’s continue with the fact that you are going to end up with a bad manager at some point, and it’s not your job to change them — you can’t. In fact, the more senior the leader, the less you’ll be able to influence them.
Let’s finish with the fact that while I despise many of the traits of these humans, I learned essential lessons.
Ok, now remember those introductions.
The Artist is bad because they don’t value humans. It’s not the part of the equation they care about. Maybe introversion? But mostly because they’re an artist, and what artists care about is the art. Not the essential humans who build the frame, find the right paints, brushes, and make sure The Artist can work in a clean, well-lit place. That’s just noise.
My approach with The Artist was education. I believe they understood the motivations and intent of other humans, but because they were so focused (and rewarded for) the art, they did not spend the time to understand the consequences. They did not appreciate why a team that understood the mission, how they were going to achieve it, and how each individual could meaningfully contribute made for better art.
I started with verbal explanations of complicated human situations. I got blank stares, so I started to write before 1:1s. When the stakes were high, I stared hard at the situation and wrote and rewrote the situation, my assessment, and my recommendation — over and over. The Artist saw the work, recognized how much work I was putting into explaining situations they were ignoring, and sometimes they’d engage. Sometimes not.
The Dictator is bad because this dictatorial approach was everywhere, not just in the basement. Our 1:1s started with less than 30 seconds of pleasantries before they started the rant. It was the dictatorial rant about the most recent interesting problem, and, wow, they had opinions. My initial job was to hold on for dear life.
My approach with The Dictator was one of the most important lessons I’ve learned. Yes, The Dictator used their position to bully the conversation, but I couldn’t deny that The Dictator cared deeply about the problem in front of us. The Dictator stared hard at the problem, the challenge, the opportunity, and they saw a single detail.
The Dictator cared deeply and had no time for anyone who did not share this belief.
In the next product review, I went hard on pre-game. I reviewed the deck, found the gaps, and had them filled. I spent 1:1 time with the product manager, and I walked around downtown San Francisco with the designer to hear the backstory. When The Dictator did The Dictator thing and started to shove the conversation in a useless direction, I told them, “This path has been explored. We understand this is a flawed direction, and here’s why.” I don’t remember what we were litigating, but I vividly remember the burning look on The Dictator’s face, Oh. You care, too.
This changed nothing about The Dictator’s approach. It still felt like a constant battle, but by doing the work of caring deeply, the battle was not one-sided. Yes, this is not how you treat humans, but this is how I developed my habits to see situations where my job was to be an expert.
The Knife is… just bad. Back to the beginning, no dummies here. This is an intelligent person, and they did a good job leading a team, but they had absolutely no business attempting to manage one.
Education didn’t work. Verbal explanations weren’t brushed aside; they listened, but then they responded… about something else. Written attempts went unread. Caring deeply didn’t work either. Seeking common ground… trying to reverse engineer what this human cared about was like trying to thread lukewarm lemon Jell-O through a needle.
The Knife could lead. When they spoke to the team about topics totally unrelated to the problems ahead, we somehow learned a lesson. Our 1:1s remained bizarrely off topic. Sometimes they called with random requests that I barely understood, but I acted on them.
But the lesson was stay the hell out of the way. Let them do their work, however inscrutable.
As essential lessons go, stay the hell out of the way doesn’t feel particularly helpful, but this is not the lesson.
Everyone is an adjustment. The person you need to be with your boss, their boss, your team, and everyone else is slightly to significantly not you. You will need to adapt how to prepare, how you communicate, and how you act with each of them. Some adaptations are trivial and familiar, but others require you to find a different perspective to help build new habits. Yes, one would hope your leader knows when to manage, but you don’t pick your bosses; you decide who you are with them.
Today's email announces a 9am Eastern time deadline tomorrow (that's 6am in California). And it looks like a fine conference.
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Gerd Gigerenzer writes about Danny Kahneman and his work, through the lens of Gigerenzer's own long and distinguished career criticizing and reinterpreting the biases and heuristics framework introduced by Kahneman and Tversky.
The Legacy of Daniel Kahneman: A Personal View by GERD GIGERENZER Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics,Volume 18, Issue 1,Summer 2025, pp. 28–61https://doi.org/10.23941/ejpe.v18i1.1075
"Let me end with what may be Kahneman’s most important legacy: his willingness to engage in what he called “adversarial collaboration”. One can hardly overestimate the emotional strain it caused him. His openness to debate began with the three joint talks we had in the early 1990s and continued through the adversarial collaborations he initiated with several of his critics.
"Learning to separate the personal from the intellectual—to debate an issue without assuming malicious intentions on the other side—is one of the most virtuous and difficult achievements in science. The history of science is full of stories of those who failed to do so. Renaissance mathematicians once dueled over solutions to cubic equations, and Newton famously broke Leibnitz’s heart during their dispute over who invented calculus. That rivals eventually learned to speak to each other with respect, and even to cooperate, is a relatively recent development in the sciences (Daston 2023). "
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Side note: when I looked into the sentence "Renaissance mathematicians once dueled over solutions to cubic equations" I found that it didn't refer to guns or swords but rather to mathematical duels, which were exchanges of problems to see who could solve them, before open publication of methods became a scientific norm.
Is time a property of the Universe? Yes, if you conceive of it as heat: a mind-boggling yet oddly comforting perspective
- by Aeon Video
Sea pandas or sadistic killers? These enigmatic creatures invite contradictory labels that say far more about us than them
- by Jason Colby
Record warm winter-to-date continues across most of the American West; already abysmal mountain snowpack dips to record low levels in many areas (except…higher elevations in southern Sierra!) Well, it sure has been a winter to remember thus far across the Western U.S. Astonishing, record-breaking warmth has pervaded nearly entire region (with few exceptions, though one […]
The post After a long, dry, and very warm January, a cooler & wetter pattern will return to the U.S. West, with partial relief amid record-low mountain snowpack first appeared on Weather West.
To be clear, I am not blaming Singapore on this one. But it is striking to me how much Americans do not talk about Singapore any more. They are much, much more likely to talk about Europe or England, for instance. I see several reasons for this:
1. Much of the Singapore fascination came from the right-wing, as the country offered (according to some) a right-wing version of what a technocracy could look like. Yet today’s American political right is not very interested in technocracy.
2. Singapore willingly takes in large numbers of immigrants (in percentage terms), and tries to make that recipe work through a careful balancing act. That approach still is popular with segments of the right-wing intelligentsia, but it is hardly on the agenda today. For the time being, it is viewed as something “better not to talk about.” Especially in light of some of the burgeoning anti-Asian sentiment, for instance from Helen Andrews and some others. It is much more common that Americans talk about foreign countries mismanaging their immigration policies, for instance the UK and Sweden.
3. Singaporean government looks and feels a bit like a “deep state.” I consider that terminology misleading as applied to Singapore, but still it makes it harder for many people to praise the place.
4. Singapore is a much more democratic country than most outsiders realize, though they do have an extreme form of gerrymandering. Whatever you think of their system, these days it no longer feels transgressive, compared to alternatives being put into practice or at least being discussed. Those alternatives range from more gerrymandering (USA) to various abrogations of democracy (potentially all over). In this regard Singapore, without budging much on its own terms, seems like much more of a mainstream country than before. That means there is less to talk about.
4b. Singapore’s free speech restrictions, whatever you think of them, no longer seem so far outside the box. Trump is suing plenty of people. The UK is sending police to knock on people’s doors for social media posts, and so on. That too makes Singapore more of a “normal country,” for better or worse (I would say worse).
5. The notion of an FDI-driven, MNE-driven growth strategy seems less exciting in an era of major tech advances, most of all AI. Singapore seems further from the frontier than a few years ago. People are wishing to talk about pending changes, not predictability, with predictability being a central feature of many Singaporean service exports.
6. If you want to talk about unusual, well-run small countries, UAE is these days a more novel case to consider, with more new news coming out of it.
Sorry Singapore, we are just not talking about you so much right now! But perhaps, in some significant ways, that is a blessing in disguise. At least temporarily. I wrote this post in part because I realize I have not much blogged about Singapore for some years, and I was trying to figure out why.
Addendum, from Ricardo in the comments:
The post Why is Singapore no longer “cool”? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Tyler tries to cure my immigration backlash confusion, but not to my satisfaction. The overarching flaw: He equivocates between two different versions of “backlash to immigration.”
Version 1: Letting in more immigrants leads to more resistance to immigration.
Version 2: Letting in more immigrants leads to so much resistance to immigration that the total stock of immigration ultimately ends ups lower than it would have been.
Backlash in the first sense is common, but no reason for immigration advocates to moderate. Backlash in the second sense is a solid reason for immigration advocates to moderate, but Tyler provides little evidence that backlash in this sense is a real phenomenon.
Do read the whole thing, but I feel I am obviously right here. Bryan should read newspapers more! If I did not provide much evidence that backlash is a significant phenomenon, it is because I thought it was pretty obvious. A few points:
1. I (and Bryan all the more so) want more immigration than most voters want. But I recognize that if you strongly deny voters their preferences, they will turn to bad politicians to limit migration. So politics should respect voter preferences to a reasonable degree, even though at the margin people such as myself will prefer more immigration, and also better immigration rules and systems.
2. The anti-immigrant politicians who get elected are very often toxic. And across a wide variety of issues. The backlash costs range far wider than just immigration policies. (I do recognize this does not apply in every case, for instance Meloni in Italy seems OK enough and is not a destructive force. She also has not succeeded in limiting migration, and probably cannot do so without becoming toxic. So maybe that story is not over yet. In any case, consider how many of the other populist right groups have a significant pro-Russia element, Russia being right now probably the most evil country in the world.)
3. If immigration runs “out of control” (as voters perceive it) in your country, there will be anti-immigrant backlash in other countries too. For instance in Japan and Poland. Bryan considers only backlash in the single country of origin. In Japan, for instance, voters just handed their PM a new and powerful mandate, in large part because of the immigration issue. The message was “what is happening in other countries, we do not want that happening here.” The globalization of communications and debate increases the scope and power of the backlash effect considerably.
Most of all, it is simply a mistake to let populist right parties become the dominant force in Europe, and sometimes elsewhere as well. You might think it is not a mistake because we need them to limit migration. Well, that is not my view, but I am arguing it is a mistake to get to that margin to begin with.
In short, we need to limit migration to prevent various democracies from going askew. Nothing in that argument contradicts the usual economic (and other) arguments for a lot of immigration being a good thing. And still it is a good thing to try to sell one’s fellow citizens on the case for more immigration. Nonetheless we are optimizing subject to a constraint, namely voter opinion. Why start off an intertemporal bargaining game by trying to seize as much surplus (immigration) as possible? That to me is obvious, more obvious every day I might add.
The post Bryan Caplan on immigration backlash appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Today’s Picture of the Week shows the full scope of Paranal’s beauty. Cerro Paranal in Chile’s Atacama Desert, the mountain peak home to ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), is a site of many marvels. And this panoramic image taken by Chilean astrophotographer Alexis Trigo certainly captures them all.
Right in front, one of the movable Auxiliary Telescopes (ATs) stands tall. While this "relatively" small 1.8-m telescope has its eyes shut, its bigger siblings, the Unit Telescopes (UTs), each with an 8.2-m mirror, are scanning the sky. The lasers emerging from the UTs each create a bright artificial star on the sky, so the shifts and swirls of the atmosphere can be measured and corrected to deliver sharp data.
The UT4 telescope, seen here to the right, had been equipped with four lasers for several years already. But in November 2025, when this image was taken, additional lasers were being tested in the other three UTs. These new lasers are part of an upgrade to the VLT Interferometer (VLTI) and its GRAVITY instrument, called GRAVITY+. The four UTs can work together as a huge virtual telescope, and these new lasers will allow them to observe much fainter objects than before.
But the telescopes are not the only marvel that stands out in this picture: the dark sky in the background is just as striking, with the centre of the Milky Way shining to the left. This view is unfortunately polluted by many “scratches” caused by satellite megaconstellations, a growing threat for astronomy that ESO is working hard to mitigate.
Donald Trump has chosen Kevin Warsh, a harsh critic of the Federal Reserve who has called for “breaking some heads,” as the next Fed chair. Last week I wrote about what the Fed is and what it does. Today I’ll talk about the Fed’s policy record, with emphasis on the criticisms offered by Warsh and others.
The history of the Fed is inextricably intertwined with the history of the U.S. economy. You can’t understand the Fed’s policy choices — how, for example, it came to own more than $8 trillion in assets — without understanding the challenges it faced. So today’s post will be structured around historical events and the Fed’s policy responses.
I don’t want to go too far back. There are huge controversies about Federal Reserve policy and its effects during the stagflation of the 1970s, and for that matter during the Great Depression of the 1930s. But these historical controversies aren’t directly relevant to current policy debates.
Nor, I realized while drafting this post, is this the place to discuss recent events — in particular the post-Covid inflationary shock of 2021-2023. To include the debate over that shock would make this post too long. So that’s for next week.
Today I will focus on events and policy disputes after the mid-1980s but before Covid. As I explained last week, by 1985 the Fed’s tight money policy, under the direction of Fed Chair Paul Volcker, had broken the back of persistently high inflation – a hangover from lax monetary policy during the Nixon Administration and oil shocks. Taming inflation cameat a high cost -- an extremely severe recession.
In the aftermath of those epochal events both the U.S. economy and Federal Reserve policy settled into an extended period of relative calm, which economists sometimes call the Great Moderation. However, calm never lasts. In 2008 the United States and the world economy as a whole were wracked by the global financial crisis. The Fed’s response to that crisis was deeply controversial, with harsh criticism coming especially from the political right.
Then, just as the Fed was trying to “normalize” its policies, Covid struck, followed by a severe bout of inflation. The Fed’s response also remains deeply controversial — but that’s for the next primer.
Why does this history matter? Because, to a remarkable extent, attacks on the Federal Reserve today are coming from the same people who were vituperatively critical of the Fed during the global financial crisis and its aftermath. Over time, the Fed’s choices in response to the crisis were overwhelmingly vindicated by the economy’s response to those choices, which refuted the claims of the Fed’s harsh critics. But the turning of the political wheel has now put the people who were proved wrong about monetary policy in charge of Trump administration policy. And, in the person of Kevin Warsh, in charge of the Fed itself. So monetary policy disputes from the global financial crisis era remain all too relevant.
Beyond the paywall I will address the following:
1. Federal Reserve policy before the global financial crisis
2. Federal Reserve policy during and after the global financial crisis
3. The debate over quantitative easing
4. Why this history matters now
Friend and neighbour Karen James made me a Kākāpō mug. It has a charismatic Kākāpō, four Kākāpō chicks (in celebration of the 2026 breeding season) and even has some rimu fruit!
I love it so much.
People on the orange site are laughing at this, assuming it's just an ad and that there's nothing to it. Vulnerability researchers I talk to do not think this is a joke. As an erstwhile vuln researcher myself: do not bet against LLMs on this.
Axios: Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6 uncovers 500 zero-day flaws in open-source
I think vulnerability research might be THE MOST LLM-amenable software engineering problem. Pattern-driven. Huge corpus of operational public patterns. Closed loops. Forward progress from stimulus/response tooling. Search problems.
Vulnerability research outcomes are in THE MODEL CARDS for frontier labs. Those companies have so much money they're literally distorting the economy. Money buys vuln research outcomes. Why would you think they were faking any of this?
Tags: thomas-ptacek, anthropic, claude, security, generative-ai, ai, llms, open-source
No, this is not an AI post. Codex is a NYC bookshop at 1 Bleecker St., at Bowery. It is quite extraordinary in its curation of used books. The fiction section is large, yet you can pick up virtually any title on the shelves and it is worth reading. A wonderful place to go to get reading ideas, plus the prices are reasonable and the used books are in decent shape. Such achievements should be praised.
The post *Codex* appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
(Lord’s day). Up, and it being a very great frost, I walked to White Hall, and to my Lord Sandwich’s by the fireside till chapel time, and so to chappell, where there preached little Dr. Duport, of Cambridge, upon Josiah’s words, — “But I and my house, we will serve the Lord.” But though a great scholler, he made the most flat dead sermon, both for matter and manner of delivery, that ever I heard, and very long beyond his hour, which made it worse.
Thence with Mr. Creed to the King’s Head ordinary, where we dined well, and after dinner Sir Thomas Willis and another stranger, and Creed and I, fell a-talking; they of the errours and corruption of the Navy, and great expence thereof, not knowing who I was, which at last I did undertake to confute, and disabuse them: and they took it very well, and I hope it was to good purpose, they being Parliament-men. By and by to my Lord’s, and with him a good while talking upon his want of money, and ways of his borrowing some, &c., and then by other visitants, I withdrew and away, Creed and I and Captn. Ferrers to the Park, and there walked finely, seeing people slide, we talking all the while; and Captn. Ferrers telling me, among other Court passages, how about a month ago, at a ball at Court, a child was dropped by one of the ladies in dancing, but nobody knew who, it being taken up by somebody in their handkercher. The next morning all the Ladies of Honour appeared early at Court for their vindication, so that nobody could tell whose this mischance should be. But it seems Mrs. Wells1 fell sick that afternoon, and hath disappeared ever since, so that it is concluded that it was her.
Another story was how my Lady Castlemaine, a few days since, had Mrs. Stuart to an entertainment, and at night began a frolique that they two must be married, and married they were, with ring and all other ceremonies of church service, and ribbands and a sack posset in bed, and flinging the stocking; but in the close, it is said that my Lady Castlemaine, who was the bridegroom, rose, and the King came and took her place with pretty Mrs. Stuart. This is said to be very true. Another story was how Captain Ferrers and W. Howe both have often, through my Lady Castlemaine’s window, seen her go to bed and Sir Charles Barkeley in the chamber all the while with her. But the other day Captn. Ferrers going to Sir Charles to excuse his not being so timely at his arms the other day, Sir Charles swearing and cursing told him before a great many other gentlemen that he would not suffer any man of the King’s Guards to be absent from his lodging a night without leave. Not but that, says he, once a week or so I know a gentleman must go … [to his whore – L&M], and I am not for denying it to any man, but however he shall be bound to ask leave to lie abroad, and to give account of his absence, that we may know what guard the King has to depend upon.
The little Duke of Monmouth, it seems, is ordered to take place of all Dukes, and so to follow Prince Rupert now, before the Duke of Buckingham, or any else.
Whether the wind and the cold did cause it or no I know not, but having been this day or two mightily troubled with an itching all over my body which I took to be a louse or two that might bite me, I found this afternoon that all my body is inflamed, and my face in a sad redness and swelling and pimpled, so that I was before we had done walking not only sick but ashamed of myself to see myself so changed in my countenance, so that after we had thus talked we parted and I walked home with much ado (Captn. Ferrers with me as far as Ludgate Hill towards Mr. Moore at the Wardrobe), the ways being so full of ice and water by peoples’ trampling. At last got home and to bed presently, and had a very bad night of it, in great pain in my stomach, and in great fever.
Footnotes
Links for you. Science:
Multiple potential measles exposures in DC: Check sites and dates (associated with the March for Life; they took the Metro, so D.C. readers should check this)
How America’s WHO exit could affect flu shots, outbreaks, and future pandemics
Public health giant William Foege, who helped eradicate smallpox, has died at 89
The return of measles: how a once-vanquished disease is spreading again
Our Vaccine System Is Delicate. Trump Just Threw a Bowling Ball at It.
Kennedy’s head of U.S. vaccine panel wants to see kids get measles, polio. For science!
‘They saw them on their dishes when eating’: The mushroom making people hallucinate dozens of tiny humans
Other:
The Trump Administration Is Publishing a Stream of Nazi Propaganda
Another Execution by Death Squad in Minneapolis
I’ve Covered Police Abuse for 20 Years. What ICE Is Doing Is Different.
Sound and Fury
They Killed Alex Pretti, But They Couldn’t Crush Minneapolis
Downtown Crossing office building could soon become hundreds of apartments
The Congresswoman Criminalized for Visiting ICE Detainees
Abigail Spanberger’s First Move as Virginia Gov. Was a Masterstroke
As the world finally punches back, was this the week Donald Trump went too far?
She stood up to ICE. Then came the death threats. Arizona Sen. Analise Ortiz won’t back down
The AI-Powered Web Is Eating Itself
The Evil Man and the Empty Congress
Get ready for the AI ad-pocalypse
Ruling-Class Control of AI Is Making Things More Expensive and You Poorer
Monsters. And their enablers are accessories to murder
White House Terror Tactics Are Pushing Blue State Leaders to Active Resistance
The Trump administration has a Nazi problem
JD Vance Drops Odd Comments About Pagans at Brothels Discarding ‘Baby Skeletons’ at March For Life
Donald Trump doesn’t want us to believe our own eyes
The Four Types of Trump Supporter
Hakeem Jeffries met privately with Silicon Valley donors in bid to ‘mend fences.’
The taking of Liam Ramos reveals the sheer sadism of ICE
DOGE Worker at SSA Signed Agreement With Group Seeking to ‘Overturn Election Results,’ DOJ Says
How to Bless the Fire After Your Synagogue Burns
Trump’s E.P.A. Has Put a Value on Human Life: Zero Dollars
When Is a Conflict of Interest a Conflict of Interest? What a new preprint on industry influence in social media research really forces us to confront
Trump Blurts Out Real Reason for Insurrection Act Threat—and It’s Dark
What happened when Gavin Newsom sent a ‘surge’ of state troopers to fight crime in Oakland
Minnesota doctors say immigration crackdown is forcing patients to hide, endangering lives
Elon Musk’s latest feud is a mudslinging match with a budget airline
States of Denial
So I play pickup basketball every Sunday morning, and when I’m done I always text the wife. The exchange goes thusly …
ME: "You want anything?”
WIFE: Burrito. Egg white, steak and cheese.
ME: “From where?”
WIFE: U know where.
It’s 100 percent true. I do know where, because for the past, oh, five years, I’ve regularly wrapped hoops by driving 10 minutes from the courts and over to Aliso Coffee & Donut—one of my favorite spots on earth.
And, to be clear, this is not a paid advertisement. Hell, I don’t even know the names of the people who work there. But here’s what I can tell you about Aliso Coffee & Donut: You walk in, and the folks are chatty, and upbeat, and cool, and friendly. There’s the owner, a middle-aged dude from Detroit who relocated his family to the OC to operate the store. There are the two bros (the owner’s sons), both probably in their mid-20s—caps backward, smiles effusive, Lions and Tigers allegiances clear on their caps and Ts. And they greet everyone (every … single … person) with a grin, a “How’s your weekend?”, a “What can I do for you?” There’s sports talk, there’s weather talk, there’s food talk, there’s …
Never, ever political talk.
I don’t know if the guys from Detroit like Trump or hate Trump. I don’t know if they support ICE or want to abolish ICE. Fuck, I don’t even know if they vote. But, in these painful times, I believe (strongly) it’s important to have locations in life that have nothing to do with the pressing issues of our era; locations where your primary worry is the content of your burrito and the crispness of your apple fritter1.
For me, Aliso Coffee & Donut is that spot.
Make certain to find yours.
The fritters are so damn good.
Yesterday two right-wing circuit judges signed off on the Trump administration’s new mass detention policy: the extraordinary assertion that vast numbers of noncitizens throughout the country can be arrested and held in detention centers without the right to release until they are deported.
As Steve Vladeck explained in December in One First, this new policy dramatically expanded the number of immigrants suddenly subject to arrest and long-term detention. U.S. judges overwhelmingly rejected the new policy; Vladeck quoted Politico’s Kyle Cheney, who reported that in more than 700 cases, at least 225 judges appointed by all modern presidents—including 23 appointed by Trump—have ruled that the new policy likely violates both the law and the right to due process.
But the administration handpicked a right-wing circuit to rule on the policy, and last night, as Vladeck explained today in One First, Judge Edith Jones and Judge Kyle Duncan of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit okayed the Trump administration’s new rule denying detained immigrants the right to release on bond. That includes, as Vladeck wrote, “millions of non-citizens who have been here for generations; who have never committed a crime; and who pose neither a risk of flight nor any threat to public safety.” It is likely the plaintiffs will appeal the decision.
This policy has dramatically increased detention of immigrants. Before it, the U.S. held about 40,000 people on any given day. Now, according to Laura Strickler and Julia Ainsley of NBC News, the United States is currently holding more than 70,000 immigrants in 224 facilities across the nation, 104 more facilities than it had before Trump took office. Those detainees include children.
Private prison companies under contract with the U.S. government operate these detention facilities, including the $1.2 billion Camp East Montana located at Fort Bliss Army base in Texas, where a medical examiner recently ruled the death of detainee Geraldo Lunas Campos a homicide. The cause of the January death of Victor Manuel Díaz there remains unclear, although officials claim it was “presumed suicide.” A third man, Francisco Gaspar Andrés, died in December after being transported from the camp to an El Paso hospital for treatment for a serious medical condition.
On January 20, Judd Legum of Popular Information reported that ICE stopped paying third-party providers for medical care for detainees on October 3, 2025, and that it would not start even to process claims again until at least April 30, 2026. It told medical providers to “hold all claims submissions” until then. A source in the administration told Legum that some medical providers are now denying detainees medical care.
From 2002 to 2023, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) helped to make sure detainees had medical care if an ICE facility couldn’t provide it, with ICE paying the VA for the coverage. But in 2023, Alabama Republican senator Tommy Tuberville lied that President Joe Biden was “robbing veterans to pay off illegals,” and on September 30, 2025, a small right-wing nonprofit sued to get documents from the Trump administration about the VA’s role in detainee care. On October 3, Legum discovered, “the VA ‘abruptly and instantly terminated’ its agreement with ICE,” leaving it with no way to provide prescribed medication or access off-site care.
According to Legum, ICE said it could not provide “dialysis, prenatal care, oncology, [and] chemotherapy.” ICE officials described the loss of care as an “absolute emergency” that needed an immediate solution to “prevent any further medical complications or loss of life.” But it did not get solved.
Douglas MacMillan, Samuel Oakford, N. Kirkpatrick, and Aaron Schaffer of the Washington Post reported that according to ICE’s own oversight unit, Camp East Montana at Fort Bliss, Texas, has violated at least 60 federal standards for immigrant detention. The contract for the $1.24 billion project was awarded to a small business that operates out of a residential address and has, as Lyndon German of VPM News reported, “little to no publicly available record of managing immigration facilities.”
Last April, at the Border Security Expo in Phoenix, Arizona, acting director of ICE Todd Lyons told attendees: “We need to get better at treating this like a business.” He called for a deportation process “like [Amazon] Prime, but with human beings.” In the Republicans’ July 2025 budget reconciliation bill—which they call the One Big Beautiful Bill Act—they put $45 billion into additional funding for ICE detention.
In November and December, NBC News and Bloomberg reported that the Trump administration was considering “mega centers” for detaining people. Fola Akinnibi, Sophie Alexander, Alicia A. Caldwell, and Rachel Adams-Heard of Bloomberg reported that in November, ICE issued a $29.9 million contract—just below the threshold of $30 million that would require open bidding—to KpbServices LLC for “due diligence services and concept design for processing centers and mega centers throughout the United States.”
In December, Douglas MacMillan and Jonathan O’Connell of the Washington Post reported that the administration was working to put in place a national detention system that would book newly arrested detainees into processing sites before sending them to one of seven warehouses that would hold 5,000 to 10,000 people each. MacMillan and O’Connell reported that “sixteen smaller warehouses would hold up to 1,500 people each.” From there, people would be deported.
“These will not be warehouses—they will be very well-structured detention facilities meeting our regular detention standards,” a DHS spokesperson wrote to Angela Kocherga and Dianne Solis of KERA News in Texas. “It should not come as news that ICE will be making arrests in states across the U.S. and is actively working to expand detention space.”
Strickler and Ainsley reported Thursday that the Department of Homeland Security has already secured at least three facilities. It paid $87.4 million for one outside Philadelphia and $37 million for another outside San Antonio, a warehouse of nearly 640,000 square feet. ICE bought a building the size of seven football fields in Surprise, Arizona, outside Phoenix, for $70 million.
But there is increasing criticism of the new warehouses as Americans mobilize against the violence and abuse of ICE and Border Patrol.
Officials from Surprise answered concerns about the federal facility with a statement saying: “The City was not aware that there were efforts underway to purchase the building, was not notified of the transaction by any of the parties involved and has not been contacted by DHS or any federal agency about the intended use of the building. It’s important to note, Federal projects are not subject to local regulations, such as zoning.”
On Tuesday, February 3, more than a thousand people turned out for the Surprise City Council meeting to oppose the establishment of the federal detention center. One of the speakers reminded the council of Ohrdruf, the first Nazi camp liberated by U.S. troops, on April 4, 1945. He said:
“The U.S. Army brought the leading citizens of Ohrdruf to tour the facility, which turned out to be part of the Buchenwald network of concentration camps. A U.S. Army colonel told the German civilians who viewed the scenes without muttering a word that they were to blame. One of the Germans replied that what happened in the camp was ‘done by a few people,’ and ‘you cannot blame us all.’ And the American, who could have been any one of our grandfathers, said: ‘This was done by those that the German people chose to lead them, and all are responsible.’
“The morning after the tour, the mayor of Ohrdruf killed himself. And maybe he did not know the full extent of the outrages that were committed in his community, but he knew enough. And we don’t know exactly how ICE will use this warehouse. But we know enough. I ask you to consider what the mayor of Ohrdruf might have thought before he died. Maybe he felt like a victim. He might have thought, ‘How is this my fault? I had no jurisdiction over this.’ Maybe he would have said, ‘This site was not subject to local zoning, what could I do?’ But I think, when he reflected on the suffering that occurred at this camp, just outside of town, that those words would have sounded hollow even to him. Because in his heart he knew, as we do, that we are all responsible for what happens in our community.”
—
Notes:
https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/26884355/ca5detention.pdf
https://kfoxtv.com/news/local/family-questions-handling-of-migrants-death-at-camp-east-montana
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-18/ice-plans-to-greatly-expand-detention-capacity
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2026/01/29/ice-kids-in-detention-numbers
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2025/12/17/children-immigration-detention-dilley-ice
https://surpriseaz.gov/1155/City-News?contentId=2a6d02c6-8bb9-4a6f-b2b4-9734b84b929a
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/09/ice-todd-lyons-deporation-amazon
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/timeline-event/holocaust/1942-1945/liberation-of-ohrdruf
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/09/16/ice-detention-center-immigration-violations/
https://www.nilc.org/articles/ice-is-detaining-indiscriminately-and-releasing-almost-no-one/
https://www.welcometohellworld.com/a-surprise-zone-of-interest/
https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/blog/ice-expanding-detention-system/
Bluesky:
Car update: I had to reject a delivery of tyres from the cancelled Black Circles order, and the local tyre place had to delay fitting because they realised at the last minute that three of the tyres they’d had delivered were the wrong size… but finally a nice man came and in an hour had swapped all our tyres over for new ones (Michelin CrossClimate 2, tyre fans).
The 12V battery is still knackered, probably more so now. I had to take Pippa the cat to the vet for her annual vaccination this week and that already slightly stressful adventure was made more so by having to jump-start the car, setting off its alarm, both as we left the house and the vet.
I braved talking to the male men in the local garage who now have a new 12V battery on order.
Finally, yes, of course I got a parking fine after entering the wrong registration. £60 if payed promptly. I guess we can add, “potentially pay an extra £60 for parking,” to the list of downsides of going to the cinema.
§ Next problem: A slow leak coming through the utility room ceiling from a bathroom upstairs.
§ I am very tired of the rain. Every surface is either a pothole-ridden, flooded road or a muddy quagmire. We’re always checking whether local driving routes are passable today. We’d probably have been stuck home for a few days if a farmer hadn’t dug a trench across a field relieving one of the most frequently-flooded roads.
Add on winter’s darkness, much more extreme in the countryside given the lack of streetlights. Are you weird and want to walk somewhere after 5pm? Take a headlamp and maybe something fluorescent, and be prepared to press yourself against a wet, spiky hedge as headlights turn the blind corner ahead.
The different seasons are so much more stark here compared to in a town or city. Summer is a relative joy of course.
§ We watched two films on telly this week:
2. Charter city plans for Nevis? (FT)
3. Michelangelo’s foot for $27 million.
4. Philosophy intern position at Mercatus.
5. Taking governmental equity stakes in American companies.
6. The One Child Policy was not even the most important way the Chinese government discouraged births.
8. The Inkhaven Residency (for writers).
9. The political status of the Faroes (NYT).
The post Sunday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
AI technology can generate speculative-growth equilibria. These are rational but fragile: elevated valuations support rapid capital accumulation, yet persist only as long as beliefs remain coordinated. Because AI capital is labor-like, it expands effective labor and dampens the normal decline in the marginal product of capital as the capital stock grows. The gains from this expansion accrue disproportionately to capitalists, whose saving rate rises with wealth, raising aggregate saving. Building on Caballero et al (2006), I show that these features generate a funding feedback—rising capitalist wealth lowers the required return—that can produce multiple equilibria. With intermediate adjustment costs, elevated valuations are the mechanism that sustains a transition toward a high-capital equilibrium; a loss of confidence can precipitate a self-fulfilling crash and reversal.
That is from a new NBER working paper by Ricardo J. Caballero.
The post You gotta’ believe! appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Southern People Weekly just published an interview about the new edition of the Chinese translation of my 2015 book Who Gets What and Why. After talking about the book, they also asked questions about scientific work and Nobel prizes, and I'll include some of that below. (The English translation mostly renders "Roth" as "Ross," but in at least one place I am "Irwin Rothu.")
Here's the link (in Chinese and in translation):
正文
为什么“天上撒钱”不一定是好事？
南方人物周刊 2026-02-04 14:10
Why isn't "money falling from the sky" necessarily a good thing?
Southern People Weekly 2026-02-04 14:10
Southern People Weekly: Although Nobel Prize-winning research often stems from studies conducted many years ago to see if it can withstand the test of time, in the long run, both the nationality distribution of laureates and the evolution of research topics reflect, to some extent, changes in the global economic power structure and intellectual trends. How do you view this interaction between "academics and the times"?
Ross: That's certainly true, both in the long and short term. After World War II, the United States' scientific research and university strength rose rapidly, leading the world and producing a large number of Nobel laureates. Among them were scholars who grew up in the United States, as well as scientists who were forced to migrate from Europe due to war and political circumstances.
Today, I have some concerns that the United States may be actively relinquishing this long-accumulated advantage—when outstanding scholars from around the world no longer feel comfortable and secure in American universities, they may choose to pursue their careers in China or Europe. Another noteworthy change is that, in the past, most economics professors at Peking University and Tsinghua University held doctorates from top American universities such as Princeton, MIT, or Harvard; now, an increasing number of professors are completing their doctoral education at Chinese universities. Overall, this is a good thing; more people dedicating themselves to scientific research benefits the world. I only hope that top American universities will continue to welcome scholars from all over the world.
Southern People Weekly: Every year when the Nobel Prize winners are announced, similar discussions erupt in China—despite its stellar economic performance, China still boasts a sparse number of Nobel laureates. A Chinese-American Nobel Prize judge, when discussing this phenomenon, stated that China's current evaluation system, centered on the number of papers and impact factors, objectively pushes research efforts towards already highly crowded and popular fields. The key to a breakthrough lies in identifying important research gaps and sustaining long-term, continuous investment. What advice do you have for young Chinese researchers?
Ross: There isn't just one way to do scientific research. Some people choose to tackle well-known, unsolved problems; they're running a "sprint." If you're not confident that you're smart enough to solve these well-known problems faster than others, then becoming famous through a sprint isn't for you.
Another path is to choose a job that requires long-term accumulation. I'm not referring to a marathon, which is still a race where speed is paramount, but rather to becoming a musician, which requires long-term creation and continuous exploration of new musical styles or genres to gain recognition.
Southern People Weekly: Your career path is the second one.
Ross: Yes, I've never considered myself smarter than anyone else. There wasn't much interest in matching theory early on, but I was very interested in it. My first paper on matching theory was initially submitted to an economics journal, titled "Matching Economics: Stability and Incentives." The journal's editor at the time was George Stigler, who was also the Nobel laureate in economics that year (1982).
He replied with a very polite letter, saying he had read the paper and found it "very interesting," but the only part of the entire article that could be considered economics was the word "economics" in the title. The paper discussed how to achieve stable matching through institutional arrangements in the absence of price adjustments and analyzed the incentives of participants. Stigler is one of the core economists of the Chicago School, known for his in-depth research on price theory. In his view, my paper did not constitute economic research.
So I published the paper in a mathematical operations research journal. Thirty years later, I won the Nobel Prize. During this time, matching theory gradually became part of economics, attracting more and more economists' attention. How could it not be (economics)? How people go to school, find jobs, and allocate kidney transplant resources are essentially matching problems. That (rejected) paper later became one of the papers cited in the Nobel Prize review.
Regardless of which path you choose, you should not make the Nobel Prize your research goal, because winning the prize itself is highly accidental.
Southern People Weekly: So, chasing a certain direction just because it seems important or popular may not necessarily bring you the success you want; similarly, you shouldn't give up your passion just because it's not popular or hasn't been recognized yet.
Ross: I often tell my graduate and doctoral students that you have to find a research area that is attractive enough to you. Because most days, you may not make any progress, but at the end of the day, you can still say to yourself, "Well, today was pretty interesting too." It is this enjoyment that draws you back to the work time and time again. ... you can't make something you dislike into something great.
...
Southern People Weekly: Some media outlets have summarized the Trump administration's trade strategy as using high-pressure threats, setting tight deadlines, and structured negotiation frameworks to leverage uncertainty and bargaining power to force concessions from the other side. From a game theory perspective, how do you evaluate this strategy?
Ross: I have some concerns that the current U.S. administration may not yet fully grasp the importance of being a reliable partner. Any long-term partnership, like a marriage, cannot involve daily discussions about "who does the dishes." True long-term cooperation means investing in the future at every moment, not just focusing on immediate gains. I fear we have overlooked this.
...
Southern People Weekly: Your academic journey also had its share of ups and downs—you dropped out of high school due to a lack of motivation, but successfully applied to university by taking weekend engineering courses at Columbia University; you failed your doctoral qualifying exam, but gained the appreciation of Bob Wilson (the American economist who won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2020), thus avoiding an unexpected interruption to your academic career. Do these life experiences influence your views on "matching mechanisms"?
Ross: Absolutely. There's something "magical" about the PhD program: when we admit students, we base our decisions on their undergraduate performance—the only information we have when making admissions decisions. But when we "sell" them and help them find jobs, we base our decisions on the research they've done during their PhD studies.
In other words, we admit students based on their ability to learn existing knowledge and complete coursework, but evaluate and recommend them based on their ability to discover the unknown and create new knowledge. These two abilities are not entirely the same. Unfortunately, we don't have a good way to accurately predict how outstanding a person will become as a researcher based solely on their undergraduate performance.
##############
Earlier interview:
I have unearthed a few old articles typed during my adolescence, between 1996 and 1998. Unremarkable at the time, these pages now compose, three decades later, the chronicle of a vanished era.1
The word “blog” does not exist yet. Wikipedia remains to come. Google has not been born. AltaVista reigns over searches, while already struggling to embrace the nascent immensity of the web2. To meet someone, you had to agree in advance and prepare your route on paper maps. 🗺️
The web is taking off. The CSS specification has just emerged, HTML tables still serve for page layout. Cookies and advertising banners are making their appearance. Pages are adorned with music and videos, forcing browsers to arm themselves with plugins. Netscape Navigator sits on 86% of the territory, but Windows 95 now bundles Internet Explorer to quickly catch up. Facing this offensive, Netscape opensource its browser.
France falls behind. Outside universities, Internet access remains expensive and laborious. Minitel still reigns, offering phone directory, train tickets, remote shopping. This was not yet possible with the Internet: buying a CD online was a pipe dream. Encryption suffers from inappropriate regulation: the DES algorithm is capped at 40 bits and cracked in a few seconds.
These pages bear the trace of the web’s adolescence. Thirty years have passed. The same battles continue: data selling, advertising, monopolies.
Most articles linked here are not translated from French to English. ↩︎
I recently noticed that Google no longer fully indexes my blog. For example, it is no longer possible to find the article on lanĉo. I assume this is a consequence of the explosion of AI-generated content or a change in priorities for Google. ↩︎
An early morning rocket engine test at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station brings NASA and SpaceX one step closer to flying the next long duration mission to the International Space Station.
At 3:16 a.m. EST (0816 UTC) on Sunday, Feb. 8, the nine Merlin 1D engines at the base of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket roared to life for about 10 seconds. This static fire test at Space Launch Complex 40 was designed to validate the systems on the launch vehicle before flight.
Teams will evaluate the data from the test to ensure that they are ready to progress towards launch day. There will also be a dry dress rehearsal ahead of the mission, which will see a full run-through of launch day operations.
NASA astronauts Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway along with European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut Sophie Adenot and Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev will don their flight suits at the Neil Armstrong Operations and Checkouts building before being driven to the pad where they will practice boarding the Crew Dragon Freedom spacecraft.
The crew are all wearing upgraded flight suits, similar to the one worn by Crew-11 Pilot Mike Fincke during his mission that concluded in January. Once on orbit, Crew-12 will perform a roughly eight-month mission onboard the ISS.
This will be the second human spaceflight mission to take off from SLC-40. On launch day, SpaceX will also use its new landing pad, called Landing Zone 40, which will receive the booster, tail number 1101, less than eight minutes after liftoff.
That is the new Knausgaard book, excellent and moving. Better than any Knausgaard work other than the first two volumes of My Struggle. The ending is especially good and meaningful, revising much of what came before. You can buy it here.
The post *The School of Night* appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
From Anonymous:
Hello Professor Cowen,
I hope all is well with you and that you have navigated the recent weather alright.
I have a thought that I wanted to run by you that related to phones and teen anxiety.
You have cited a variety of studies that say that phones and social media do not cause anxiety. As you may recall, I have taught junior high and high school for almost 30 years. I did see a big spike in anxiety for my students, especially females, around the years 2010-2017/18ish. I used to think “phones,” but now I’m not sure. The anxiety spike has declined. My last ‘anxious’ class of seniors are now seniors in college. Students today are on the phones as much as those in the past.
Here is my theory: Students started to feel more anxious around 2010 because they could sense the coming seismic cultural and political shifts coming, of which phones were a harbinger or carrier. They were mostly not conscious of this, and couldn’t express it, but they were trying to cope.
Now, they have coped. My current seniors have unusual political ideas but are mostly optimistic. I contrast them to a centrist friend of mine who does some DC work and constantly thinks the sky is falling.
Now, adults are more anxious, not students. Adults are starting to see these seismic shifts and they are trying to cope. Perhaps they are projecting their own anxiety onto their kids, and are behind the times with the cause. Phones may have helped drive anxiety 10 years ago, but maybe not anymore. Students have coped and adjusted to a new equilibrium.
It is also possible that phones serve as a good/useful “myth” (I mean this in a positive sense) for the shifts we are seeing and the anxiety many feel . We need something tangible to hold our thoughts on the shifts in culture, and we have chosen phones. Thus, the clash over phones today might be between those who think in mythic/symbolic ways, and those who think in more scientific ways. Both are right in their own perspective. The new cultural and political shifts over the last 10-15 years would naturally bring on anxiety. Phones are not the cause of the shift, but a good symbol of it.
The post A new hypothesis (from my email) appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
The idea is simple: Unvouched users can't contribute to your projects. Very bad users can be explicitly "denounced", effectively blocked. Users are vouched or denounced by contributors via GitHub issue or discussion comments or via the CLI.
Integration into GitHub is as simple as adopting the published GitHub actions. Done. Additionally, the system itself is generic to forges and not tied to GitHub in any way.
Who and how someone is vouched or denounced is up to the project. I'm not the value police for the world. Decide for yourself what works for your project and your community.
Tags: open-source, ai, github-actions, generative-ai, mitchell-hashimoto, ai-ethics
Claude: Speed up responses with fast mode
New "research preview" from Anthropic today: you can now access a faster version of their frontier model Claude Opus 4.6 by typing
Market Design
/fast in Claude Code... but at a cost that's 6x the normal price.
Opus is usually $5/million input and $25/million output. The new fast mode is $30/million input and $150/million output!
There's a 50% discount until the end of February 16th, so only a 3x multiple (!) before then.
How much faster is it? The linked documentation doesn't say, but on Twitter Claude say:
Our teams have been building with a 2.5x-faster version of Claude Opus 4.6.
We’re now making it available as an early experiment via Claude Code and our API.
Claude Opus 4.5 had a context limit of 200,000 tokens. 4.6 has an option to increase that to 1,000,000 at 2x the input price ($10/m) and 1.5x the output price ($37.50/m) once your input exceeds 200,000 tokens. These multiples hold for fast mode too, so after Feb 16th you'll be able to pay a hefty $60/m input and $225/m output for Anthropic's fastest best model.
Tags: ai, generative-ai, llms, anthropic, claude, llm-pricing, claude-code
A sunny day in early 2026 revealed the remnants of a winter storm on Arizona’s high desert—and produced a striking, if somewhat puzzling, display of light and shadow in the Grand Canyon. An astronaut aboard the International Space Station captured these photographs of the distinct topography on January 26, 2026.
Snow flurries were flying in the area the previous two days, as they were across much of the central and eastern U.S. Hazardous conditions within Grand Canyon National Park prompted officials to close Desert View Drive, which runs along a portion of the South Rim shown in the photo above, and to issue warnings about icy trails. (The North Rim is closed to traffic in winter and early spring.) When the road reopened around the time of these photos, a layer of white remained on both the South Rim, at an elevation of around 7,000 feet (2,100 meters), and the North Rim, at about 8,000 feet (2,400 meters).
Snow is typical at these high elevations in winter. The South Rim and North Rim see average season totals of 58 inches and 142 inches, respectively. At lower, warmer elevations, precipitation tends to fall as rain. On January 24, for example, snow fell on the plateau, while a weather station at Phantom Ranch on the canyon floor recorded 0.06 inches of rain.
If these photos make the iconic feature of the American West look more like a mountain range than a vast chasm, the effect is likely due to a visual illusion called relief inversion. Many people have an unconscious expectation that a light source should come from the top of an image. In these images, however, the Sun is shining from the south, or the bottom of the photos. Though the shadows on the canyon walls may be visually deceiving, the presence of snow helps to signal that the flat areas sit at higher elevations.
Astronaut photographs ISS074-E-208838 and ISS074-E-208848 were acquired on January 26, 2026, with a Nikon Z9 digital camera using a focal length of 400 millimeters. They are provided by the ISS Crew Earth Observations Facility and the Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit at NASA Johnson Space Center. The images were taken by a member of the Expedition 74 crew. The images have been cropped and enhanced to improve contrast, and lens artifacts have been removed. The International Space Station Program supports the laboratory as part of the ISS National Lab to help astronauts take pictures of Earth that will be of the greatest value to scientists and the public, and to make those images freely available on the Internet. Additional images taken by astronauts and cosmonauts can be viewed at the NASA/JSC Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth. Story by Lindsey Doermann.
Stay up-to-date with the latest content from NASA as we explore the universe and discover more about our home planet.
The colorful formations found in this bowl-shaped escarpment in southwestern Utah are the centerpiece of Cedar Breaks National Monument.
The glow of city lights, the aurora, and a rising Moon illuminate the night along the northwest coast of North…
An astronaut captured a moonrise—and much more—in a series of photos taken from the International Space Station.
The post A Grand, Snow-Rimmed Canyon appeared first on NASA Science.
What is Miranda really like?
