1. What WWII looked like, four and a half minute video.
2. Intellectual Deep Web, YouTube channel.
3. Complete works of Schelling, and no I do not mean Thomas.
4. What the French Left is proposing.
5. How much AI could the CEA manage?
6. Douthat!
7. Andrew Maxfield, Stations of the Cross, vocal music.
The post Monday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
This blog has moved to https://blog.caseyhandmer.com/?moved. All the old posts are there, with interactive versions of many of the charts. The RSS feed is now https://blog.caseyhandmer.com/feed.xml. This site stays up for old links but won’t get new posts.
Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Swan, Julian E. Barnes, and Tripp Mickle, reporting for The New York Times (gift link):
Mr. Rubio’s memo was circulated to administration officials with high-level security clearances ahead of a trip Mr. Trump took to China in May, the people briefed on the matter said. They spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive material.
Despite his status as an A.I. pioneer and head of one of the world’s most valuable companies, Mr. Huang was initially left off the list of major business and tech executives invited to join Mr. Trump in China. It is unclear whether the exclusion was connected to the memo. By that point, a number of people inside the administration were concerned about Mr. Huang’s influence on the president’s policy of only lightly regulating A.I., people briefed on the matter said.
After Mr. Trump saw media coverage about Mr. Huang being absent from the delegation, the president asked him to join the trip by meeting Air Force One during a layover in Alaska. The president drafted a social media post saying that it was an honor to have “the Great Jensen Huang,” and other business leaders “journeying to the Great Country of China where I will be asking President Xi, a Leader of extraordinary distinction, to ‘open up’ China so that these brilliant people can work their magic.”
This Huang-Huang affair explains a few things that until now didn’t make sense, and Jensen Huang not being invited on that May trip to China — until Trump invited him on the fly at the Alaska layover — is one of them. Also worth noting that on multi-byline stories, The Times puts them in order of who contributed the most to the story. In this case it’s Haberman, who is closest to Trump and the White House:
Asked about Mr. Huang’s admission to his company about his affair with Ms. Huang, Mr. Trump told reporters on Sunday evening that he did not regret his own lack of action.
“No, I don’t think so,” the president said. He added that he believed Mr. Huang should stay on as Nvidia’s chief executive.
“I think he’s an honorable guy. I think he probably has an excuse for it. You have to hear it,” Mr. Trump said.
Trump, you will recall, was convicted on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records related to his hush-money payments to porno star Stormy Daniels, who banged him and (spanked him with a magazine on which he was on the cover) at a celebrity golf tournament in Lake Tahoe in 2006. That was four months after Melania Trump, his third wife, gave birth to their son Barron. So take “he probably has an excuse for it” with a $130,000 grain of salt.
There’s a Journalism 101 adage that news stories should be written in an “upside down triangle”, with the most important information at the top and the least important at the bottom. Another little inside-baseball tidbit about The Times, however, is that The Times, rather uniquely, often buries the most interesting (but not most important) paragraph at the very end. This story ends thus:
In recent years, Megaspeed, despite having essentially a storefront office and little local footprint, purchased $2 billion worth of Nvidia’s products. Megaspeed builds data centers in Southeast Asia that rent out their computing power to Alibaba, the giant Chinese internet company. U.S. officials suspect Megaspeed has been helping smuggle restricted advanced Nvidia chips into China.
If true, this is politically damaging to both Nvidia and Huang personally, but the context is that Nvidia booked over $300 billion in revenue over the last year.
Julian E. Barnes, Tripp Mickle, Paul Mozur, and Maggie Haberman, reporting for The New York Times on Friday:
John Rizzo, an Nvidia spokesman, said that the company does not share classified information with its customers, and that customers do not ask Nvidia to press the U.S. government to change its policies on chip sales to China.
He added that the Chinese government had “consistently promoted its own domestic alternatives in China, including Huawei, and strictly limited imports of our data center products.”
Mr. Rizzo has maintained that Mr. Huang’s interactions with Ms. Huang were “not unusual” and consistent with the kinds of meetings he has with any of Nvidia’s many customers.
Turns out this was not true, unless Jensen Huang is consistently banging many of Nvidia’s customers. And it now looks especially bad that an Nvidia spokesman was effectively vouching for the Chinese government’s integrity when it comes to their interest in circumventing the ban against selling them high-end Nvidia hardware.
Liu Chang, a spokesman for the Chinese embassy, said The Times reporting was “unsubstantiated” and “nothing but smears against China.”
Turns out this was completely substantiated and everything it implies about the Chinese government is true.
Ms. Huang has not responded to multiple attempts to reach her for comment in recent days.
The Times has a photo of Ms. Huang with Mr. Huang at a Taipei party in 2024. She’s straight out of Central Casting for a Chinese honeypot.
The New York Times, back on October 29:
Nvidia said the company that employed Ms. Huang, Megaspeed, was like any other regional customer and that it had previously investigated and debunked claims the Singaporean company was smuggling chips to China. John Rizzo, a spokesman for Nvidia, said: “Jensen’s interactions with Ms. Huang are not unusual or unexpected. Meetings with customers are part of a C.E.O.’s job; Jensen talks with thousands of customer executives every year.”
Jensen Huang’s personal life is his personal life. But he’s made it Nvidia business — an Nvidia spokesman has been repeatedly on the record saying the Huang/Huang relationship was “not unusual”. If you want to cheat on your spouse that’s your business, but it’s irresponsible to allow employees at your company to tell what you know to be lies on your behalf.
Worse would be if it turns out that Megaspeed, the company Alice Huang works (worked?) at, was funneling Nvidia hardware to China in contravention of US national security law. That could make Jensen Huang’s position at Nvidia untenable.
Tripp Mickle, reporting for The New York Times:
Nvidia said on Sunday that it was opening an investigation into Jensen Huang, its chief executive and co-founder, after he acknowledged to the company’s board that he had been intimate with a business executive who U.S. intelligence determined to be a Chinese spy.
Mr. Huang’s relationship with the woman, who is named Alice Huang, became a U.S. government concern after surveillance revealed that she was feeding information directly to Beijing. The revelation raised troubling possibilities because Mr. Huang is one of the most powerful figures in the A.I. revolution as well as an influential ally of President Trump.
In a message to the company, Mr. Huang apologized. “I was unfaithful to my wife,” he said. “My actions hurt her and our children. There is no excuse for what I did. I am deeply sorry.”
Nvidia’s board said that it had “no reason to believe that either national security or Nvidia secrets were compromised,” but that “the board’s inquiry will examine all available information.” It said Mr. Huang “fully supports the review and has committed to cooperating with it.”
When the NYT first broke this story a little over a week ago, they simply described Jensen Huang’s relationship with the Chinese spy, an executive at a Singapore data center company named Alice Huang (no relation), as “a close relationship”. Reading between the lines, though — including the fact that Donald Trump, once briefed on the situation, decided to keep it quiet — it seemed pretty clear what the story was.
Washington — The Computer & Communications Industry Association today released Connecting the World: Unlocking the Potential of Satellite Connectivity, a new report examining how satellite technology can expand internet access, […]
The post CCIA Report Highlights Satellite Connectivity’s Potential to Expand Internet Access and Drive Economic Growth appeared first on SpaceNews.
If you missed it this weekend, check out my piece on the remarkably part-time, almost non-existent Cindy Hyde-Smith campaign. Quite stunning.
Last month I had a conversation with a high ranking AI executive who told me that the fundamental reason for the U.S. lead over China in AI development was U.S. access to high-performance NVIDIA processors. The Biden administration placed export controls on those chips targeting China back in 2022. The Trump administration sort of loosened those controls though, for a variety of reasons, that shift in policy hasn’t translated into that much actual change in practice. This struck me at the time: this is a wildly anti-China administration; it’s a wildly pro-AI administration which premises everything on the need to maintain a strategic AI edge over China; but it’s more open to allowing China access to these chips that are central to U.S. dominance in AI? How can that possibly make sense?
This conversation has been on my mind for the last couple weeks as we’ve learned more and more about the spy scandal enveloping NVIDIA co-founder and CEO Jensen Huang. To bring you up-to-date, yesterday, NVIDIA’s board announced that it would investigate Huang’s relationship with Alice Huang (no relation), who U.S. intelligence believes is a Chinese spy. This came shortly after Jensen Huang admitted in an email to NVIDIA employees (immediately made public) that he had carried on an extramarital affair with Alice Huang.
This scandal looks like a very big deal, regardless of the exact details of what information Alice Huang might have gotten from Jensen Huang or what Jensen Huang may have known about her. The precise details of U.S. export controls are too complicated and contradictory for me to focus on here. The key is that U.S. intelligence has known about the relationship and had decided that Alice Huang was a spy something like a year ago. Jensen Huang is a strong advocate of loosening those export controls, though simple business advantage can explain that: China is a huge market for NVIDIA chips. All the key administration players, including the president, were reportedly briefed on this. Last spring, Marco Rubio oversaw the creation of a highly classified memo detailing the case against Alice Huang which was then circulated to top administration officials. Yet no top officials, including the president, took any action. They didn’t take any action against Jensen Huang or compel him to cut off contact with Alice Huang; and Jensen Huang remained one of Trump’s highest level advisors on national AI policy.
Trump’s inattention or disregard is par for the course for everything we know about his attitude toward U.S. intelligence agencies. He sees them as meddlesome intruders on his freedom of action to make “deals,” driven by his own self-interest, whom he castigates as “deep state” enemies. We know this most from his dealings with Russia. But there’s every reason — and a good deal of evidence — to believe it applies across the board. They are a constant reminder and irritant, from within the government, of interests distinct from his own which frequently come into conflict with them.
This story first broke into the public view a week before the election. That story had all the markers of either people in the U.S. intelligence world or perhaps people at the State Department or others in the government disgruntled about Trump’s inattention, going to the Times to try to force the matter. The timing doesn’t seem like a coincidence either. It is impossible to believe that each development over the last two weeks isn’t closely connected to the expectations and then reactions to the 2026 midterm, which have broken Trump’s monopoly of political power in the federal government and signaled the end of the free-for-all (or at least information about what’s happening inside) of the last two years.
This genuinely cinematic but also grave story brings together everything about our current moment. NVIDI is the axle at the center of the AI boom. Data centers are massive warehouses of NVIDIA chips. AI runs on them. NVIDIA has used its exploding stock valuation and cash flow to invest in/prop up key segments of the rest of the AI economy. That practice of the core producer using its mammoth profits to prop up the purchasers of its products has been at the center of bubble worries for at least a year.
What causes a bubble and what triggers its collapse are not the same. An over-extended, over-inflated market is the cause. But the trigger for its end is usually some contingent, semi-random occurrence that triggers the unwinding. It’s like a lit cigarette randomly tossed out a car window onto bone-dry and overgrown brush. We’ve probably found that contingent, semi-random event.
It also goes to the heart of Trumpism. We have very clear reporting that President Trump was briefed on this situation earlier this year and disregarded it. If I’m understanding the reporting, Rubio’s classified memo came after that, an attempt to at least spread awareness of the situation through senior ranks of the administration even if President Trump himself refused to take any action. So apparently President Trump and most other senior leaders were aware of this and either took no action or knew that none was being taken. This applies to Rubio even if, perhaps especially if, he was trying to spread the word. He’s known for at least six months that one of the top two or three CEOs at the center of the U.S. AI industry and a top advisor to the President was having an extramarital affair with a Chinese spy? Did he do anything more than commission that memo last Spring?
Scandals ‘stick’ when they’re messy, not simply because of the gravity of the wrongdoing involved. Here we have the inherently messy and attention-grabbing fact of an extramarital affair with a spy. That will rapidly intersect with the seat-of-the-pants reckless style of Trump’s inner circle, where basic rules are habitually violated and extreme corruption is commonplace. Those facts make it highly unlikely we’ll get to the bottom of this anytime soon. It’s equally hard to imagine Huang being able to remain fully on the job — at least for some period of time — while this story explodes around him. NVIDIA appears to be tightly bound to Huang’s personal decision making. So it’s impossible for him to be removed or step aside of his own accord. But that’s just another path to an equal amount of destabilization and distraction. And remember, NVIDIA really is the cornerstone of the whole AI industry — both because of the superior nature of its technology but also because of how much its own cash flow has been used to prop up numerous other players across the industry.
A report in PNAS last week on a long-running study of school choice proposals in San Francisco came out almost simultaneously with an announcement that San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) plans to largely step back from school choice and revert to a system of neighborhood schools determined by students' home addresses. Below are the PNAS paper, the SFUSD announcements, and then some links to the history of school choice in SF.
I. Lo, K. Mentzer, M. YahyazadehJeloudar, H. O’Connell, J. Monardo, & I. Ashlagi, Designing school choice for diversity in the San Francisco Unified School District, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 123 (45). November 2, 2026, e2524796123, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2524796123 (2026).
"Abstract. More than 65 years after the Brown v. Board of Education ruling that school segregation is unconstitutional, public schools across the United States are again experiencing rising segregation. In districts like San Francisco, efforts to implement district-wide choice policies have largely failed to reverse these trends. Since 2019, we have collaborated with the San Francisco Unified School District to design a student assignment policy meeting the district’s goals of diversity, predictability, and proximity. We use optimization techniques to develop policies restricting choice to zones. We compare these to district-wide choice policies by estimating a choice model using historical application data and simulating assignment. Our results show multiple policies can reduce school segregation while preserving varying degrees of proximity, choice, and predictability. Zone-based policies with reserves reduce the concentration of racial minority students in high-poverty schools and maintain proximity, but reduce choice. District-wide choice with reserves and distance-based priority can further reduce segregation, but at the cost of predictability. Tradeoffs are necessary as no policy dominates another policy. In addition, we show that spatial segregation indices capture average patterns in these tradeoffs but miss important variation revealed by our simulation framework. Our work informed the design and approval of a zone-based policy in San Francisco in 2020, and supports ongoing policy implementation."
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Historic Step Toward a Great Neighborhood School for Every Student
SFUSD is changing how students are assigned to elementary schools. On October 13, 2026, the Board of Education voted to replace the current lottery with a neighborhood-based system. Under the proposed policy, every family would be guaranteed a seat at a school near home, no matter when they apply. Families could still apply to citywide programs, such as language programs and K-8 schools. We are making this change because families have told us the current process feels complicated and unpredictable. Where your child goes to school should not come down to luck.
The Board’s vote sets a direction. It is not the final policy. Over the next few months, we will meet with families in their schools and neighborhoods, in many languages, to work out the details. The Board will hold its final vote on April 13, 2027. Nothing changes for current families. The new system will start with students who enroll in the 2028-29 school year.
A new assignment system is only part of the work. Every child deserves a strong school close to home, so we also plan to invest in schools in every neighborhood, starting with those that have been the most underserved.
###########
San Francisco has been considering and tinkering with school choice for a long time, during a period in which other kinds of political turmoil rocked SF and its schools. Here (mostly from 2010) and here are some of my earlier posts on school choice in SF.
It’s one of the peculiarities of American regulatory history that a natural gas pipeline can cross state lines with a single federal permit, but oil and electricity must run a gauntlet of state approvals. When a power line crosses one state to reach another, for example, the intervening state often imposes exorbitant tolls or, worse, vetoes the project entirely. It’s the holdout problem played out among the states.
In a new paper, Liscow, Shapiro and Williams show that after Congress ended the states’ veto over interstate gas pipelines in 1947, miles built per year rose nearly sixfold. Oil pipelines, which still had to run the state gauntlet, held steady. Lower transaction costs let natural gas flow to where it was most valued, creating a national market.
Today, as Liscow and Shapiro write in the Washington Post, the issue is electricity:
An interstate power line, however, typically needs approval from every state it crosses. That gives each state a veto over projects in which the benefits often flow mostly to its neighbors.
New England has experienced the consequences. In 2016, Massachusetts attempted to import Canadian hydropower. New Hampshire, which would have hosted the power lines without getting the same influx of cheap energy, rejected it. A second route through Maine was blocked in a referendum and didn’t deliver power until January. Meanwhile, Massachusetts households paid some of the highest electricity prices in the country.
As with natural gas, electricity is cheapest to produce far from where it is most valued, so to get the most from our national resources we need to transmit electricity across the country.
The Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act, which faces a Senate cloture vote on Monday, would let FERC approve an interstate line that a state has blocked or stalled for a year, a big step toward a national market in electricity.
Let the power flow!
The post End the State Veto on Power Lines appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Of course as an economist I am always wondering what the equilibrium is. And, in this case, what is the scarce factor?
It seems that in the case under current consideration, the returns to honeypotting are very high for somebody. Maybe for China, maybe for the shorts, or maybe for parts of the Deep State that seek to shape domestic politics (and they possibly drove the timing of the leak?).
So why are not three potential honeypots sent every day to the most prominent men? If the guy says no, you do not have to pay them for very long, right? Or you can just have them try another, different guy.
I can think of a few hypotheses:
1. The number of attractive women with sufficient spy training is actually pretty low. Furthermore the spy agency has to trust the woman to some degree.
2. The number of attractive women willing to do this is pretty low. But at what wage? And in some countries threats to the family, or benefits to the family, can be added to the transaction.
3. It is difficult to access the most prominent men, and that limits the number of honeypots that can be sent. Furthermore, at some point the honeypot woman has to find time alone with the man, and that is not always easy.
4. In fact three potential honeypots are sent every day to the most prominent men.
5. Competition from the non-honeypot women is so strong the honeypots do not have such a great chance, thus limiting their supply. The non-honeypot temptresses will sometimes have stronger vetting as well.
6. Some of the most prominent men “go the Epstein route” instead, hoping for delegated vetting and a kind of mutual “hostage-taking,” noting that proved extremely risky as well.
What else?
The post The economics of honeypots appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Two weeks ago, I attended the [un]prompted AI security conference in San Francisco. It was an excellent event: three days of very dense talks about all aspects of AI security. (My talk was about integrous AI, and I will post it when it is online.)
AI security can be divided into three broad topics. It’s important for researchers to understand which one they are working on. And it’s important for us as a community to work on them all. They are: security of AI, security with AI, and security from AI. [un]prompted had good talks about all three.
Goats everywhere! Three-hour handstands! Magical doorknobs! Discover a whole new way of looking at a Cubist masterpiece
- by Aeon Video
In the summer of 1646, the idea of equality gained new and profound depths. We are still catching up with the consequences
- by Teresa M Bejan
Raffi Krikorian, Mozilla’s CTO, joined Tim O’Reilly at our recent AI Codecon to talk about open source AI. Mozilla, of course, is the nonprofit that helped to define the open source revolution back in the late 1990s. Though its Firefox web browser was superseded as the market leader by Google Chrome, it played an essential role, along with Apache and the World Wide Web Consortium, in establishing the open standards of the web and keeping it from being dominated and enclosed by Microsoft, the dominant tech platform of that time. Now, Mozilla is one of the leading voices working to build an open, standards-based AI ecosystem.
Tim has long appreciated Raffi’s thoughtful, human-centered approach to technology. Raffi writes a newsletter called Owners Not Renters, whose message can be summed up by his statement that he doesn’t want a future with seven AGIs. He wants one with seven billion. He wants each of us to have an AI that we can trust with our secrets and that will look out for our interests, not an AI that’s optimized for the business model of its creators. In the early days of the web, we called the browser a user agent for a reason, Raffi said. It was on your side. It let you render pages however you wanted, managed your privacy and your cookies, and did its best to protect you from those who wanted to take advantage of web users. We need the same thing in the age of AI.
Raffi cited a paper in which researchers tested whether AI assistants could be trained to favor a company’s commercial interests over user welfare. In simulated flight-booking requests, 18 of 23 models recommended a more expensive sponsored option over a cheaper one more than half the time. It’s a hypothetical choice that we’ve seen play out time and time again, in industry after industry.
Open source AI is a big part of what it will take to get to Raffi’s vision. But sovereign AI loyal to each individual needs more than open source models alone. Raffi’s list of what has to be built around the model starts with memory, a place where your private data can live. It includes tool calling, so an agent can make a purchase or book a doctor’s appointment for you, the runtime environment where all of that runs, and the rules for how his agent talks to those working on behalf of others. It needs a harness. “That’s where evaluations happen. Guardrails happen, execution loops happen, tool calling happens, memory,” he explained. “All of that stuff is an opportunity, in my mind, of things that open source developers can be building.”
People hear the word “harness” and conclude that we need an open source version of whatever the proprietary labs are building. Tim asked Raffi whether a user-centered harness might do different things than those offered by the big labs. He agreed. The whole point of open source is for people to “scratch their own itch.” The ability to innovate without permission is the heart of the open source promise.
As a result, Mozilla wants to build a starting point. It aims to help the community define what an open memory protocol, a storage protocol, or authenticated tool calling with the right guardrails ought to look like. As Raffi noted, “Once we could define what those open standards look like, then a whole plethora of people can start playing and be interoperable. It’s basically. . .the internet all over again. We can build trillions of dollars of market cap on top of open protocols.”
Ease of use is still lacking, though. Mozilla’s 2026 State of Open Source AI report says open models are now within about 3% of the frontier, yet they don’t make it into production at the same rate as closed models. When Tim asked why, Raffi explained that open source is easy to release but hard to deploy. Developers still have to figure out hosting, provisioning, guardrails, and memory. With OpenAI’s or Anthropic’s API, you just hand over a credit card. What’s missing, he said, is the equivalent of a double-click installer for getting open source AI running inside an organization. But the companies that do the work to adopt open source AI are seeing big savings because open models are already good enough for most use cases. As Raffi put it, “You don’t need a Ferrari to manage your calendar.”
Raffi’s own daily agentic helper is Hermes running on GLM. He expects that Apple, Microsoft, or someone else will make this kind of agent into a consumer product in a couple of years, and that his mom will end up using it. For now, he said, we’re on the wrong part of the innovation curve, where you have to know how to code to get any of this working.
Tim disagreed. The industry goes through periods that are exciting for developers, creators, inventors, and companies trying to invent the future, and then it gets boring and a few big companies dominate it. We’re in the exciting part, he argued, before everything shakes out. As Raffi riffed, this is when we get to formalize what that future should look like.
Tim wasn’t sure that we’ll need a commercially supported version of the kind of “roll your own” agentic rigs now favored by independent developers. After all, neither desktop Linux nor OpenOffice turned out to matter anything like as much as open source developers of the time expected. Instead, open source became the foundation layer for a new generation of web-based applications. It’s hidden way down in the guts of Google, Amazon, Meta, and countless other applications we rely on today.
This is already beginning to happen again with AI. The Mozilla report says that as much as a third of real-world usage is already on open models, although only 4% of model-layer revenue made its way to the open source ecosystem. Tim called the discrepancy a feature rather than a bug, and Raffi agreed that the stat is misleading. As Tim pointed out, many of the most important technologies “create more value than they capture,” and he used Steve Baer’s concept “The Clothesline Paradox,” from a 1975 article in Stewart Brand’s CoEvolution Quarterly, to explain why we’re good at measuring value capture but not so good at measuring value creation.
Baer pointed out that if you put your clothes in the dryer, the energy you use is measured and counted, but if you hang them on the clothesline to be dried by the sun, the energy saved disappears from our accounting. This argument resonated with Tim in the early days of his open source advocacy. As he noted, it’s always bothered him that nobody seemed to recognize that open source software didn’t “win” in the same way as proprietary software. It won by becoming the foundation everyone else builds on.
Raffi’s comment that we’ve made a category error by treating AI as a product fits right in with this line of thinking. If an AI company goes out of business, its product disappears. If it changes its business model, it may yank features you depend on. It’s not just individuals who need sovereign AI. Countries are passing laws about where data can be processed and how it moves in and out, and some of those requirements may not be compatible with the way the big labs plan to monetize their technology. What those countries are asking for is infrastructure. A road outlasts the contractor who built it. Raffi thinks open, downloadable models are the only way to provide long-lasting foundational infrastructure.
According to OpenRouter stats, Chinese models now supply more routed tokens than American ones. Tim asked whether we should worry about that. Raffi said the problem isn’t China but market concentration. The leading open models are from China. The leading closed models are all American. Access to either can be cut off by an executive order. We saw a version of that in June, when Anthropic temporarily suspended access to its Fable models to comply with export controls. It’s a problem that both the leading proprietary models and the leading open-weight models are each concentrated in a single country.
Diversity is one foundation of resilience. Raffi argues, for instance, that hospitals should all download a local model as a backup. None of us would run an important computer without an uninterruptible power supply, so why would a hospital doing triage with AI rely on a single intelligence provider? There are a lot of possible rug pulls. The government could restrict open source or restrict the frontier models. Having a backup plan is a good idea.
Safety is also part of the foundation. During the Q&A, an audience member asked about the recent sandbox escapes at OpenAI and Anthropic. Raffi joked that the best part was watching everyone try to one-up each other with accounts of how powerful and hard to control their models are. But he agreed that guardrails are actually a hard problem. Keeping personally identifiable information from leaking out through an LLM call means looking for much more than Social Security numbers. Eventually we’ll have models defending models, but the foundational frameworks for guardrails aren’t good enough yet. (NVIDIA’s safety platform announcement, released after Raffi and Tim’s conversation, suggests that better guardrails need to be implemented outside the model.)
Tim opened AI Codecon by noting that open and closed systems have always coexisted, and that the idea that one of them will win is a mistake. Closed systems, like Apple’s, Google’s, OpenAI’s, and Anthropic’s, can optimize for ordinary people and deliver value to billions. Open systems are better for innovation and sovereignty, and for pushing technology into new countries and new markets.
Raffi closed the conversation by observing that a well-tuned harness can improve model performance by as much as 20% on some coding tasks. You don’t have to be a machine learning engineer to make a difference at that layer.
Research: parse_number() as a SQLite extension: C vs Rust
I was out walking the dog when I got curious about how easy/difficult it would be to write a SQLite C extension that adds a parse_number() function for turning strings like -$1,234.56 or '12.5%' into numeric values that could be summed and sorted.
I fired up regular Claude chat (Opus 5.5) and prompted:
I'm thinking about a SQLite custom function 'parse_number(value)' that strips ',', '$', '£' and '%', handles a leading '-', and returns 'NULL' for anything it can’t parse
Explore the difference between building this as a SQLite extension in C v.s. in Rust - I want to compare performance and code complexity and size of the resulting.so(or whatever) file
This gave me a solid starting point - the Rust extension was 321 KB (using Rusqlite) and 298 KB (using sqlite-loadable-rs), while the C extension was 14 KB. But the Rust extension was faster!
Turns out that's because the Rust equivalent of C's strtod is "twice as fast". So I prompted:
Try writing your own C function for parsing text into a decimal number that catches up to or beats the Rust implementation
And it did, using "Clinger's fast path":
Net cost per row over 2 million rows, lower is better:
first C new C rusqlite sqlite-loadable Mixed data 67 ns 19 ns 46 ns 41 ns Integers only 25 ns 16 ns 36 ns 32 ns Decimals only 106 ns 18 ns 55 ns 47 ns
Finally, I had it rewrite the prototype as a research report to match the others in simonw/research by prompting this:
Clone simonw/research from GitHub and turn your above investigation into a research report as seen in that repository - you can give me a zip file to download that contains your new folder
Here's the resulting report.
My comment on Terry Pratchett's Study — Hacker News.
Terry Pratchett once wrote about the concept of "horizontal wealth". Vertical wealth is where you spend money on rich people stuff - yachts and suchlike. Horizontal wealth is where you spend more money on the things you liked before you got rich: https://chibuikeani.blogspot.com/2017/02/the-price-of-happin...
But horizontal wealth means not letting your increased income dictate your tastes. You like books and now you have money? Buy more books! Change those catenary bookshelves for good hardwood ones! In my case, build a library extension to your office. And, of course, you buy what will be useful for that most wonderful of pursuits, blind research, which is research without direction for the sheer joy of it.
(Original source is his book A Slip of the Keyboard - this linked blog post quotes that bit.)
Tags: hacker-news, terry-pratchett
My comment on The Web Is More Than Enough, by Paul Ford — Hacker News.
OK, this comment convinced me to give that a shot.
Here's a thing I made in Three.js this morning - a Nudibranch themed Faberge Egg: https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2026/Hidden-Reef-Egg... (77KB)
I just asked Claude (Opus 5.5 Medium running in regular Claude Chat) to port that to Vanilla JS, in the same thread where it had built it, and got this: https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2026/Hidden-Reef-Egg... (98KB)
They aren't identical - you can see what Claude said about that in the transcript (I don't fully understand why it differed): https://claude.ai/share/e56d163e-2793-4677-aa11-191d5058b414
But yeah, it turns out Claude Opus 5.5 is perfectly capable of 3D modeling in Vanilla JS + WebGL without Three.js.
In eyeballing the code I find the Three.js slightly easier to understand myself, but I rarely look at the code for these 3D projects so that isn't a particularly big deal.
Tags: hacker-news, javascript, ai, generative-ai, llms, claude, three-js
Most of the changes I make to my projects these days come in the form of PRs opened for me by Claude Code or Codex. The PR is my unit of work - I use them to bundle commits together, iterating on them until a feature is complete, document decisions and then merge the finished result. Today's coding agents are great at writing PR descriptions.
The problem is that they are too good. An agent-written PR description is accurate and comprehensive. It describes the problem, the detailed solution, and the steps taken to verify it. That's a lot of information to absorb.
It's not necessarily slop, but it reads like slop!
It's very easy to spot an AI-written PR, and as with other forms of AI writing my instant reaction is best summarized as "I'm not reading all of that". It doesn't matter how accurate or useful the information is, I'm instantly put off by the thought that it will take me longer to read than it took the driving author to write... even when that driving author is me!
I want human editorial judgement. I want someone to have thought just long enough about the PR to give me a human-approved introduction that helps me understand, at a high level, what the PR is for and whether it deserves more of my attention.
I think I've found a low-effort way to do this that feels right.
The HTML <details><summary> elements render as a collapsed heading (the summary) that can be expanded to view the larger piece of text. The code looks like this:
Casey Handmer's blog
Market Design<details>
<summary>Claude Opus 5.5</summary>
<h2>The hook</h2>
Plugins implement <code>register_agent_reference_types(datasette)</code>...
</details>When rendered, it looks like this:
Crucially, <details><summary> is supported in GitHub Markdown. You can drop those tags directly into an issue comment or PR description and GitHub will hide the details and display just the summary plus an expansion arrow.
I've started using this for my AI-generated pull requests.
The opening paragraph of my PRs will be carefully selected to act as a high-level explanation of what's going on - the shortest text a human can read that will help get them up to speed.
I'll sometimes throw in a screenshot as well, since images are often the best way to quickly illustrate a new feature.
The full agent-written essay then follows in a <details><summary>. I use the model name and often the effort level as that summary, to make it abundantly clear what is going on - "Claude Opus 5.5 Medium" for example.
My PRs don't feel nearly as sloppy now! The information is all still there, but a reader can glance at it and get the top, human-curated information without their eyes glazing over at multiple paragraphs of agent-written details.
I don't always write the introduction myself - sometimes the agent has given me what I need already, hidden away in the avalanche of other text. My promise to the reader is that the short opener will represent my human judgement as to what is definitely worth their time.
Here are some recent examples where I've used this pattern, including the opener I used:
repos table, that scrolled far off to the right and left most of the page blank." (then a screenshot)edit-tools.js (~220KB) was loaded on every table, row and database page, even for users who couldn't edit anything. Now only load it for users who can edit when they first interact with an edit feature (including mouse over an edit link)."# tagging in the chat composer using a new register_agent_reference_types(datasette) plugin hook." - pictured above.extra-openai-models.yaml, so OpenAI-compatible endpoints can be saved from the command line instead of by hand-editing YAML." - then copied --help output.I used to have trouble remembering the order of the tags - is it <details><summary> or <summary><details>?
Here are two tricks that helped me.
First, and most obviously, the <summary> is clearly the bit where you summarize the details. That's the tag for your line of text that can be clicked to expand - the <details> element must then wrap everything else.
An even better trick is to always refer to these two tags as "details-summary".
"details-summary" is two syllables followed by three syllables. That rolls off the tongue more smoothly than the three-two punch of "summary-details".
Say "details-summary" out loud just a few times and you'll never forget the order of the tags again.
(I still wish GitHub would add a button to their Markdown editor for this - partly to save me painstakingly typing it on my mobile keyboard, and partly to help spread the word to more GitHub users that this feature exists.)
Tags: github, html, markdown, ai, datasette, generative-ai, llms, ai-assisted-programming, llm, coding-agents
Many longtime fans of my Hexapodia podcast with Brad DeLong have been begging us to bring it back. Well, here it is! Hexapodia will now be a series of Substack Live conversations that you can tune in to, and which will be recorded as podcasts and sent out as emails.
Our first episode was a little rocky, as I got the time wrong and ended up arriving 20 minutes late. But Dan and Brad are both brilliant people, so you can watch them talk for a while before I show up! The topic of our discussion was the Anthropic IPO, inspired by my post about it last week:
I give the bull case for Anthropic, while Dan and Brad are both more skeptical. I think this quote sums up my side of the argument:
My bull case [for Anthropic] is not envisioning a world where Anthropic rules all businesses, rules 100% of every industry, or close to it. I’m also not envisioning a case where AI replaces human beings in their jobs.
I’m envisioning a change in the capital structure of the efficiently producing economy. I’m envisioning…a world where in order to succeed in any industry, you must create a tie-up with a frontier AI company that offers you access to an internal proprietary frontier model that will be months ahead of any model distilled from it. And…that doing this will require not purchasing services…at arm’s length from that company, but tying up your capital structure with that company so that you become in some sense a subsidiary of that company. I am envisioning that.
So I’m saying that instead of something where…AI is like oil and everyone has to buy oil or the things made downstream from oil…instead of that sort of arm of length world, I’m envisioning a world in which every company in order to succeed must become a subsidiary of Anthropic, OpenAI, [or] Google…and Anthropic is simply the biggest of those fish in a oligopolistic ecosystem of a few conglomerates competing against each other via their little subsidiaries in every single industry at the same time.
Interestingly, some economists at Google Deepmind just released a paper with a model in which this sort of thing happens. From the abstract of Imas, Koh, and Legg (2026):
When will advances in AI lead to economic transformation? We develop a model of how intelligence…matters for organizations….AI expertise is reproducible while humans’ are in fixed supply, and AIs may not face the same human limits on coordination….When AI is more capable than the average human, organizations of complementary humans can nonetheless outperform AI. Increases in AI competence can change the composition of workers within firms and decrease firm size. As AI coordination improves, however, this can break the Coasean ceiling on firm size and the market structure undergoes a phase transition toward large, concentrated AI-heavy firms. [emphasis mine]
I was envisioning a slightly more complex version, in which humans and AI are complements, where humans have private data that AI is better at using, and where one big conglomerate enters every industry but retains human workers. But I think Imas et al.’s model gets at some of the basic dynamics here.
Financial disclosure: I have no current position in Anthropic, but unless something major changes, I will probably buy Anthropic stock when it IPOs. I own stock in TypeSafe, an Anthropic competitor.
Here is the initial post. In the comments Michael Wiebe notes: “So progress per R&D dollar fell by 63%, even while progress per year doubled.” File under: David Ricardo, underrated.
The post Seb Krier, Ricardian? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Has AI reached its Wile E. Coyote moment? Ever since the huge boom in AI-related capital expenditures, especially data centers, began, many observers have warned that this boom looks unsustainable. AI is a remarkable technology, which may yield big economic payoffs (although these payoffs still aren’t clear in the data.) But it’s doubtful whether the companies making these huge investments will be able to capture enough of those payoffs to compensate them for the enormous sums they are spending.
If these skeptics are right, we should expect that there will be a Wile E. Coyote moment: the investors and lenders who have been backing AI companies look down, realize that they have run off the edge of a cliff, and the boom plunges to the ground. Such sudden reckonings have happened many times in the past, notably with the bursting of the dot-com bubble in 2000 and the bursting of the housing bubble a few years later.
And in the past few weeks we’ve seen growing signs of nervousness about AI’s financial prospects. Prices of hyperscaler stocks are down 27 percent since their peak; the cost of insurance against default on AI-company bonds has soared. We don’t know for sure that this is a real turning point for the industry, but the vibes have definitely shifted.
Today’s primer won’t try to settle the hotly (and endlessly) debated question of whether AI really is a bubble, let alone whether this is the moment of truth. What I will focus on, instead, is a conditional question: If AI is a bubble, and that bubble is either bursting or likely to burst soon, what are the likely economic consequences? That is, as I’ll explain, a question we can address with a lot of historical evidence. For while AI as a technology is utterly new, burst bubbles have been a recurring economic theme for well over a century, and we know a lot about the macroeconomic aftermath of bubbles.
To preview my conclusions: a burst AI bubble will almost surely cause a recession. The depth of that recession is highly uncertain, although I favor the view that it will be worse than the slump at the end of the 1990s tech boom. But even if the recession is short and shallow, history and theory suggest that recovery from that slump will be painfully slow, that unemployment will remain elevated for multiple years.
Beyond the paywall, I’ll address the following:
1. A brief history of modern recessions
2. Why recovery from burst bubbles is slow
3. Comparing a possible AI bust to the dot-com recession
4. Why the policy response to an AI bust will probably be inadequate to prevent a painful recession
Despite its weaknesses, Paraguay’s young democracy was still able to deliver under stress. Its free, boisterous press was the first to sound the alarm about Peña’s shenanigans. The Central Bank’s supervision chief did his job: he examined ueno’s numbers and recommended blocking the sale of its bad loans to a related company (Peña had appointed him to a different agency four days earlier). Legislators, including most of Peña’s fellow Colorados, moved swiftly to investigate and impeach the president. Prosecutors, who belong to a Public Ministry not always independent of the executive, ordered the arrest of ueno’s top directors the day the Central Bank took over the bank. They ordered Peña’s arrest the minute Congress impeached him—all within less than a week.
One of Paraguayan democracy’s greatest accomplishments has been earning an investment-grade rating for its sovereign debt, from Moody’s in 2024 and S&P in 2025. The macroeconomic and financial management behind it, through the finance ministry and the Central Bank, has brought low inflation and overall stability. As a result, Paraguayans can save, invest, and run their households and businesses like never before, and per capita GDP has grown steadily for three decades. That same framework is now repaying ueno’s small depositors through a deposit guarantee of up to $38,000 per person and, so far, has kept the panic from spreading to other banks. Whether it can also make whole the pension fund and the state agencies with hundreds of millions of dollars at stake is the next test.
Last but not least, there’s a big dog that hasn’t barked in this crisis. Unlike almost all of Paraguay’s previous political crises, the military has been a non-entity. No military leader has stepped forward to offer a solution, the press doesn’t even mention the military, and nobody on the streets expects or wishes a military solution. That’s a major democratic win.
Here is much more from Tomas Mandl, who also has an excellent book on Paraguay.
The post The Paraguayan bank story appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
The glowing streak of the Milky Way splashes across the Chilean sky in today’s Picture of the Week. The telescope gazing in admiration is the Danish 1.54-meter telescope, hosted at ESO’s La Silla Observatory. This telescope has previously imaged some of the cosmic marvels we can see in this picture. The Carina Nebula can be seen glittering pink at the bottom of the Milky Way band. And at the top of the image we can see the bright, star-forming Lagoon Nebula.
From La Silla’s location in the southern hemisphere, the bright core of the Milky Way passes directly overhead. The dark patches we see across the glowing centre are caused by clouds of interstellar dust and gas, which absorb light from the galactic centre on its way to Earth.
Do not worry, the green glow we see in this image is not a result of urban light pollution. This is a natural phenomenon known as airglow, caused by interactions between the Sun’s light and molecules in the atmosphere. This faint light is invisible to the human eye but appears in photographs like this one.
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In his victory speech on November 3, after winning a U.S. Senate seat in the previously Republican-dominated state of Texas, Senator-elect James Talarico redefined the modern United States by recalling an older era when Americans worked together to defend their country against those who would take all its wealth and power for themselves.
His words were especially piercing in Texas, where billionaire Elon Musk spent at least $225 million in the midterm elections to keep the state government in the hands of Republicans. And yet, voters elected a Democratic governor, a Democratic lieutenant governor, a Democratic attorney general, and a Democratic state house anyway.
“We just took back Texas,” Talarico told the cheering crowd. “We just proved that all the money in the world is no match for the people of Texas. We just showed that a politics of division is no match for a politics of love. And we just sent a message to every billionaire megadonor, every trillionaire megadonor, every corrupt defender of this broken political system in this state, in this country. Power belongs to the people.”
Leaning into his religious faith and his own history as a middle-school teacher of underprivileged students and as the son of a single mother, he told the crowd: “Scripture has taught me, my own life has taught me, always bet on the underdog.”
“We were the underdogs in this race,” he said. “We went up against nearly 40 years of doubt and disillusionment. We went up against more than $300 million, more than any Senate campaign in American history. We went up against all the negative ads, smear campaigns, foreign bots, and AI deep fakes that money can buy. Those attacks were the final howls of a dying establishment, the death rattle of a status quo that knows its days are numbered.
“They played dirty because they were desperate. But we never lost hope. We never lost faith. And against big money and long odds, we took our power back. Always, always, bet on the underdog.
“We built a movement unlike any this state has ever seen. We united Texans from all backgrounds and beliefs onto one team to take on this broken, corrupt political system: first time voters, three time Trump voters, working people from every corner of this state who are fed up and ready for change. This win is for every underdog who’s been counted out and left behind. This win is for every teacher and every nurse, for every farmer and every rancher. For every young person who’s trying to buy a home. For every parent who’s trying to put food on the table.
“This win is for every Texan who’s ever wondered if anyone is listening. I heard you. We heard you, and tonight the world hears you.”
Talarico identified the moment the nation is in as monumental. “This win is not about the Democratic party or the Republican party,” he said. “It’s much bigger than that. There is something broken in America. Our economic system is broken. Our political system is broken. Even our relationships with each other feel broken. That’s because the most powerful people in the world want it that way.”
Talarico rooted his political beliefs in his belief in the commandments to “love God and love neighbor” and noted that “despite our differences, we all want the same things. A safe neighborhood, a good job, a high-quality, well-funded public school, and the ability to see a doctor when we need one.
“But the billionaires who own the social media algorithms, who own the cable news networks, who own the politicians fighting on our screens, they want us at each other’s throats. They want us focused on how we’re different instead of on how we’re the same. They want us looking left and right at each other instead of looking up at them. The real fight in this country is not left versus right. It is top versus bottom.
“The people at the top work so hard to keep us angry and divided because our unity is a threat to their wealth and their power,” he said. “We saw it in this race. We saw it in every billionaire-funded attack ad. The people at the top divide us by party, by race, by gender, by religion, by culture, so we don’t notice that they are picking our pockets, that they are defunding our schools, that they are gutting our healthcare, that they are raising taxes on all of us while they cut taxes for themselves. It is the oldest strategy in the world, divide and conquer. But tonight we sent a crystal clear message to the people at the top. We will not be conquered.”
“[W]e are tired of being pitted against each other,” Talarico continued. “We are tired of being told to hate each other. It has been 10 years of this kind of politics. Politics as blood sport. Politics as trolling and owning. Politics as professional wrestling. It tears families apart. It ends friendships. And it leaves us all feeling terrible all the time. People across the political spectrum are hungry for a different kind of politics. Not a politics of hate, not a politics of fear, not a politics of division, but a politics of love.”
He explained how Democrats had won Texas: “We mobilized our 60,000 volunteers in every corner of the state, and together we delivered bottled water to Sand Branch, a community south of Dallas with no running water. We donated school supplies to an elementary school in El Cenizo, a small town on the border. We collected more than 20,000 pounds of groceries for families in Fort Worth who are struggling under the high cost of living. Before the world changes in ways you see on TV or read about in newspapers, the world changes person to person, neighbor to neighbor.”
“[W]e know how to get there,” he said. “We must get big money out of our politics so no billionaire or trillionaire can buy our elections. We must unrig this economic system that only benefits the top 1%. We must pass universal health care so no one goes bankrupt just because they get sick. We must invest in our teachers and our students so every underdog has a fighting chance. We must end these corrupt forever wars that are driving up prices and killing our brave men and women in uniform.
“And,” he continued, “we must heal the deep spiritual corruption at the root of all of these crises. We must bridge the divides between us and repair the ties that bind us. We forged a new kind of politics here in the Lone Star State. An answer to this decade of division. We showed that when working people come together across every dividing line, we can do extraordinary things. We won this race because people who are desperate for change now are going to get change.
“That old politics is dying,” he told the crowd, “and a new politics is being born through each of us.”
Talarico, who won his race by an astonishing 12 points, accurately identified the extraordinary importance of local and relational organizing to create communities that would elect Democratic candidates in 2026.
He also accurately identified the threat this kind of politics poses to establishment politics, especially to MAGA. President Trump today reinforced his need for division and hatred by offering the job of White House press secretary to Dana White, the chief executive officer of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, whom he described as a “violent Fighter and Warrior.” Trump encouraged White to take the job and bring along a number of his UFC fighters.
“We need these people to defend us against the Lunatic Left,” Trump posted.
—
Notes:
https://fortune.com/2026/11/05/elon-musk-texas-democrats-hinojosa-terafab/
https://www.cnn.com/2026/11/07/politics/dana-white-trump-press-secretary
YouTube:
Trump’s Truth:
(Lord’s day). Up, and it being late, to church without my wife, and there I saw Pembleton come into the church and bring his wife with him, a good comely plain woman, and by and by my wife came after me all alone, which I was a little vexed at. I found that my coming in a perriwigg did not prove so strange to the world as I was afear’d it would, for I thought that all the church would presently have cast their eyes all upon me, but I found no such thing. Here an ordinary lazy sermon of Mr. Mill’s, and then home to dinner, and there Tom came and dined with us; and after dinner to talk about a new black cloth suit that I have a making, and so at church time to church again, where the Scott preached, and I slept most of the time. Thence home, and I spent most of the evening upon Fuller’s “Church History” and Barckly’s “Argeny,” and so after supper to prayers and to bed, a little fearing my pain coming back again, myself continuing as costive as ever, and my physic ended, but I had sent a porter to-day for more and it was brought me before I went to bed, and so with pretty good content to bed.
Links for you. Science:
Do cats fart? An investigation into the mysteries of feline flatulence
This insidious tropical virus has now reached Switzerland as well
Flesh‑eating screwworm is spreading in the US, threatening livestock and wildlife – hunters can be the first line of defense
Spiders Sleep, But Do They Dream?
Big, Beautiful, And Bulging
The Bull And Male Donkey Who Choose Each Other Again And Again (For Sex)
Oldest Evidence of Getting High on Cannabis Discovered In 2,800-Year-Old Tomb: ‘Absolutely Crazy’
Other:
Make bad things bad again
There Is No Place In A Functional Society For Elon Musk
The Texas GOP Went Too Far, and It Cost the Party Everything
Trumpism Is Failing Because It Is Very, Very Stupid
Jim Hightower’s Moment
Goddamn, That Was Satisfying
Democracy Reform Can Begin Today—But We Need Help
Jay Feely’s Congressional Dreams Have Doinked Off The Uprights
What happened? A revolution
Free Press Dumbass Has An AI Whoopsie
Mississippi Goddamn
More States Banned Trans Kids From Sports This Week
Trump touted his Reflecting Pool success. But new problems are visible.
Farewell To The Cybertruck, A Total Failure
Trump’s Triumphal Arch Hits a Blue Wall
Courting Slur-Users Isn’t A Winning Strategy When They Have Slurs For You
Never Get High on Your Own Supply
Trump ally Loomer was paid thousands for political tweets, people familiar say
Jeffries calls Miller a ‘dangerous xenophobe’ after promotion: ‘Fire him today’
‘There Is One Fight’: American Voters Reject Tech Oligarchy
D.C. Officials Hope the Blue Wave Will End the National Guard Deployment
New Polling on Ousting Schumer: Necessary Policy and Smart Politics
Over 200 democracy scholars call on Congress to end single-member Congressional districts and adopt proportional representation
Let the Investigations Begin!
The Arbogast Fallacy
Actually, Democrats Don’t Have to Sacrifice Trans People or Immigrants to Win
How Stephen Miller’s Fixation on Minnesota’s Somalis Became a Full-Scale Crackdown
The American People Just Kicked Donald Trump’s Ass
Standoff Over D.C. Council Seat Ends Peacefully, Maybe Not Happily
Democrats Crushed Trump. Here’s What They Should Do Next.
Some thoughts on the 2026 midterm from TPM Reader TS (Theda Skocpol) …
The November 3, 2026 election results are a landmark in U.S. political history, opening the door to a possible repudiation of the Trump synthesis of plutocratic patrimonial corruption with MAGA ethnic and racial hatreds. No one, no partisan operation or pundit, anticipated the full sweep, depth, and size of this Democratic electoral victory. Candidates everywhere at all levels of government won by 7 to 14 or more points. Congressional control changes by huge margins (to as much as 56/60 Senate seats and up to a 160 seat gain in the House, a huge majority margin), yet the changes in the states are even more important, giving Democrats governors in I believe 26 states, full control of many swing state legislatures, and breaking GOP supermajorities in key red states. All kinds of Democrats won from many outlooks, identity backgrounds, and occupational experiences – this was a diversity election WITHOUT talking about race, gender, class, or ethnicity – and they did it all talking about the same core popular concerns with rising living costs, a stupid war, destructive interior immigration raids, and elite corruption. The key was having candidates that fit their states and districts and talked with voters everywhere.
Will the Democrats now rise to the occasion of building on this through at least two more national elections? To do so, they must avoid “progressive” versus “centrist” fights, stop passing huge kitchen sink bills no one understands and instead pass one at a time popular measures and force Trump to veto them, and keep in touch with their voters everywhere. They must use state government powers to the max to get more visible wins than they can via Congress (without the presidency for the next two years), and they must invest more in organizing on the ground in the South to build on Black outrage over voting rights attacks by the Supreme Court. Fire most of the high priced TV consultants who recommend a lot of TV ads just before elections, invest in sustained all year organizing through existing on the ground networks, keep the messaging straightforward and clear (use some advertising money for that), and relentlessly excoriate Trump and remaining GOP officeholders who try to block changes. Work with Republicans to pass things where possible but make it clear who is personally to blame when they block things.
American democracy has entered a very hopeful but still fraught juncture.
After two or three days of stupor and disorientation Donald Trump has reverted to form, as predicted, and has reacted to his historic repudiation by leaning into the powers of the presidency to reassert power and dominance. So far, they are mostly assertions and visual, thin performances not so much of power but of aggression, which seem more risible because the power is so clearly draining out of him. Trump appointed Stephen Miller as his new White House chief of staff. Today he has offered the press secretary position to Dana White, CEO of UFC, the mixed martial arts promotion company, who Trump lauds as “the Great Dana White, a violent Fighter and Warrior.” Trump is asking him to take on the press secretary role with a series of MMA fighter “assistants,” one or more of whom is associated with a Chechnyan warlord. We say “offered” because Trump seems to have offered White the job and then asked him via Truth Social to accept the job.
The best thing for Democratic electeds to do with this is a mix of ignoring it and mockery. Beyond the benefits of putting some brakes on Trump’s actions, the benefit of finally having a beachhead of power in the federal government is the ability to act and let the rogue president react. This applies at least as much to the substantial number of state governments that have partial or full trifecta Democratic control.
Tyler Stalman and David Altizer were kind enough to have me on their show this week. These new MacBook Pros are very fun computers that are very fun to talk about.
(We even sneak in some love for Ricoh’s legendary GR line of compact cameras. I used my original GR-D from 20 years ago to shoot this 2010 photo of Steve Jobs and Walt Mossberg that I linked to in my feature-length “Touch and Glow” piece yesterday.)
I was going to go and see Life Without Buildings play in London later in the month, but decided the logistics were getting a bit complicated (and expensive; train, hotel) just for one gig. So I sold the ticket via the approved service, Twickets.
Which was a bit of a pain – having to upload the same PDF three times for some reason – and also required having a PayPal account. I closed mine a while back because I never used it, and this meant I didn’t have to worry about whether emails from “PayPal” were scams or not. So I set up a new account, with a temporary email address, verified my identity with a face scan and driving licence, all to receive about £35. I hope. They’re still verifying me. “You must have a PayPal account to sell a gig ticket,” is another little thing for Burnham to fix, thanks.
Anyway, as some consolation, I’ve bought the recently-released album of 2000 and 2001 Xfm sessions (long before I was even aware of the band):
§ Proper foggy here overnight. Driving home in the dark last night was a very careful, sub-20mph, journey. Even on these familiar, very quiet, country roads it was easy to take a wrong turn or veer too close to the edge.
But today that cleared up and it’s been still, with clear skies, and sunshine illuminating the autumn colours. Had a nice walk round the roads, seeing only three cars in 1h 45m.
§ Loft mice update: another two or three caught (they’re all blurring together now), a couple of traps tripped but empty, and one trap disappeared entirely 😬. We put a wildlife camera up there which has mainly reassured us that, despite the surprisingly loud noises, there doesn’t appear to be anything larger than mice up there.
§ In other home news, I was measuring the kitchen when I peeked into the little gap in a cupboard to check the position of the stopcock and realised the pipe was dripping. Who knows how many weeks or months it had been doing that.
I removed the prepper-level stash of tinned food and the wooden shelves from the cupboard and turned the stopcock but that only added a bigger drip from the tap itself, as well as the joint behind it.
I went outside and, aided by a helpful council worker who was spraying cryptic markings on the road in preparation for surface dressing next year, turned off the water using a quarter-turn tap at arms-length in a hole in the verge. Which was a relief but my levels of panic were still quite high, wondering how to actually get this all fixed.
Back inside, the tap had stopped leaking but the pipe was still dripping. There wasn’t room between the leak and the cupboard’s bottom shelf to put anything to catch the water, and the shelf was not going to move. So I used the tools available – a hand jigsaw and a hammer-and-chisel – to hack a hole in the back of the shelf big enough for a saucepan.
A couple of phone calls later and the plumber who lives a few houses away, who we’ve never previously called on, promised to come round the next day. He did, he was lovely, and he replaced a length of pipe and the tap without fuss. Satisfyingly anti-climactic.
We’re leaving the cupboard door open, hoping that however damp whatever things have got back there, they will dry out without permanent damage.
§ I was measuring the kitchen because after years of dithering we’re thinking, again, of maybe “re-doing the kitchen” next year. I needed to make a plan of the room and current layout to send to some designers-and-makers.
I wasn’t sure what to draw the plan in. I’ve used Floorplanner quite a bit for general plans of the house (it’s been surprisingly useful to have a fairly accurate plan of the house available). But it’s a bit hit-and-miss when it comes to furniture and I wanted more control over exactly what measurements to display.
Sweet Home 3D is another one I’d heard of but it seemed like the open source package had been sold and was now pay-for, but maybe you could download the open source version from Sourceforge but maybe it had a virus, and that was all too confusing.
OpenPlan3D is a free, open source, online tool which is really good. It doesn’t seem quite as detailed as Floorplanner but has lots of other nice features, including importing 3D models. I started using that but, again, it wasn’t going to give me the control I wanted over the final output.
So I resorted to the old reliable OmniGraffle, which I used to use for layout out websites and pages and so is my go-to for any kind of diagram. Once I reminded myself how to use it, it worked pretty well. Being rigorous with keeping things divided into organised layers, and locking the ones you’re not working on, is key.
§ We also had a visit from a guy from the heat pump installer, checking everything was OK, and doing a hand-over now we’d had time to try it. He answered lots of questions (many as a result of my dive into Home Assistant) and got the three new, bigger, radiators working – the installers just hadn’t turned a screw on all of the non-TRV ends 🙄
§ On the one hand, it’s very sad that Salon is closing after 31 years. On the other, whenever I came across a link to an article there – once a year? – I was surprised it was still going.
Back in 1998/9, while working at Capital Radio, I used to print out articles from Salon to read over lunch in the tiny canteen upstairs – no smartphones etc. back then – partly to provide an excuse to not have to talk to anyone too much.
At least the Wayback Machine can still provide the Proustian rushes.
§ We watched the seventh Mission: Impossible, Dead Reckoning, this week which was a good one. Nonsense but it just felt more fun, non-stop, than the previous one. Hayley Atwell was great but I wish Pom Klementieff’s relentless character had had more screen time.
§ The to-do list is still too long (too-to-do?) what with one-thing-and-another getting in the way of planned tasks this week, again. Mary is off to Nepal for a month this week, again, so it’ll just be me, the cat, my tasks (and maybe a decorator) here for a while.
2. Does AI instead commodify jobs?
3. The digital world is making Islam more diverse (The Economist).
4. “An affair with an economist exposed the calculus of modern dating.” (New Yorker)
5. “How Much Economic Value Do AI Systems Produce per Unit of Energy?”
6. John Gray will be writing a column for Unherd.
7. How France took over basketball (New Yorker).
8. “If existing AI capabilities are widely adopted, they could double research output in some fields.”
9. “Canvas is why students prefer AI over you.“
The post Sunday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
datasette #3046: Don't serve link: rel=next HTTP headers to Firefox for HTML pages
I was looking at the Firefox network panel today when I noticed that requests to a Datasette table page were triggering an HTTP prefetch to the next page of rows in that table.This was happening because Datasette pages serve an HTTP link header like this:
link: <https://latest.datasette.io/fixtures/compound_three_primary_keys?_next=a%2Cd%2Cv>; rel="next"
This is bad. A tiny fraction of the visitors to one of those pages will click the "next" link, which means for everyone else their browser is fetching unnecessary data and the Datasette server is having to render an entire page that then gets thrown away.
I dug in and learned that Firefox has an issue that has been open for 24 years about this behavior...
And one of the early comments on that issue links to my blog post from 2002 complaining about this feature. I hadn't just forgotten that I had written about it, I had forgotten the feature entirely!
The post The Pope probably knows this song appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
When I tell people I’m becoming a China bear, they’re often surprised. “Weren’t you already a China bear?” they ask me.
Well, no. I’ve always been a China bull — I’ve always believed that China’s economic growth would be robust, that they would master advanced technologies, and that their geopolitical influence would grow. This is exactly why I was also always a China hawk1 — I recognized the very real possibility that China would become a global hegemon, and I didn’t especially want to live in a world ruled from Beijing. It’s why I advocated so strongly for friend-shoring, for export controls, and for military alliances to balance out China’s awesome and growing power.
This was true even as China began to show visible signs of weakness in the late 2010s and early 2020s. Xi Jinping proved himself less competent than his predecessors, and the country’s real-estate-heavy growth model hit the skids. But despite those stumbling blocks, I still predicted that this would be the Chinese Century. The country had what seemed like unassailable advantages in human capital, market size, and state capacity, even as all of its possible rivals were convulsed by internal division. And the one thing that most people cite as China’s big weakness — demographic decline — never struck me as much of a threat to the country’s power.
Now, however, for the first time I can remember, I’ve found myself becoming actually bearish on China. I still think it will be an immensely powerful country — perhaps the most powerful single country on the planet. I still think it will be at or near the forefront of technology, and that it will generally be a safe, moderately prosperous, and tolerable place for its people to live. But more and more, I’m starting to think that global hegemony of the type the U.S. enjoyed throughout most of the 20th century will be out of reach. I’m also starting to think that China’s bid for technological dominance is weaker than I had believed.
And just as my previous bullishness made me a hawk, my increasing bearishness makes me more of a China dove.2 I still think friend-shoring is important, export controls are good, and we need robust military alliances to make very sure China doesn’t try to conquer Asia. But I no longer feel the same sense of desperate urgency about these prudent measures — they feel more like an insurance policy now.
There are basically three reasons I’m revising my China expectations downward. The biggest reason is AI. China’s system is incredibly optimized for an era of technology and economic production that is very quickly coming to an end. AI will change everything, and modern China is not the kind of country that adapts well when everything changes.
The other reasons are less important but still worth mentioning. China’s new economic model — the government-supported push to capture all of global high-tech manufacturing — is not likely to succeed. And third, the country’s political situation appears to be deteriorating. Just as the Deng/Jiang/Hu era illustrated the strengths of authoritarian political systems, Xi Jinping is giving us a much-needed lesson on the weaknesses of those systems. His spiraling paranoia is turning the country inward, just as his economic policies are running out of steam.
Anyway, let’s start with those economic policies. This is an economics blog, after all.
In a nutshell, Xi Jinping’s economic strategy is to dominate manufacturing — to have China be, in the words of Damien Ma, the “make-everything country”. I’m increasingly convinced that this approach is already beginning to backfire.
Going all-in on manufacturing is a strategy you see a lot of developing countries use during their periods of rapid catch-up industrialization. And there are some good reasons for that. When you’re poor, what your people need most aren’t video games or dog-walking services, but houses and cars and refrigerators. Manufactured products are also easy to export, and poor countries don’t have big domestic markets to rely on. It might also be easier to reach the technological frontier in manufacturing, since you can reverse-engineer physical products more easily than services.3
Usually, as countries get rich and their needs evolve from the physical to the ephemeral, they move out of manufacturing and into services to some degree. But Xi Jinping decided that this was a mistake. He reasoned that if China continued to behave like a developing country forever, and promoted manufacturing at the expense of everything else, China could dominate the globe.
This was an interesting hypothesis, and it might have worked — indeed, there’s still some chance it might work. Militaries, after all, depend on manufacturing above all else, so in a big protracted WW2-style war, being the master of manufacturing might give you an automatic win.
And dominating key nodes in global supply chains lets you use export controls to bully other countries without actually bombing them. In fact, China is doing this more and more, using export controls on everything from tunnel-boring machines to rare earths to drones to medicines as bludgeons to force other nations to do its bidding.
In order to make China dominate global manufacturing, Xi unleashed a wave of industrial policy bigger than any the world had ever seen, spending about 4% of GDP per year on subsidizing manufacturing industries — usually through cheap bank loans, but sometimes just by sending cash directly.
For a while, this seemed to be working spectacularly. A 2024 paper by UNIDO got a lot of attention for predicting that China’s share of global manufacturing would be 45% by 2030 — equal to the United States right after World War 2. But cooler heads pointed out that China’s manufacturing share growth had already slowed; more reasonable predictions put its 2030 share at maybe 35-36% — still enormous, but more like America in the 1960s or the early 1920s.
And in U.S. dollar terms, China’s share peaked during the pandemic and has been drifting down since then:
In fact, despite Xi’s push, manufacturing is a shrinking share of China’s economy. China is now less industrial than South Korea, despite being less than half as rich:
The reason is simple, and it’s something I’ve written about many times before. Unlike South Korea, China is a very large country. That means most of China’s manufacturing production is going to have to go to the domestic market. Even if other countries don’t slap big tariffs on your products, export markets will simply saturate. One of the most reliable empirical laws in all of economics is the gravity model of trade, which says that trade volumes drop off rapidly with distance.
Of course, some countries will put tariffs on China. The EU recently forced China to make a deal to limit auto imports, and if that doesn’t work, stronger measures are likely. That will only accelerate the natural saturation of China’s export markets.
And despite everything you’ve read about the “Second China Shock” and the big export boom, China is still far less export-intensive than Korea, and that’s not going to change:
China simply can’t be Giant Korea; it’s so big that its manufacturers need to rely on its domestic market. But that domestic market is becoming saturated even faster than the global market. Profits in the auto sector, the steel sector, the solar sector, and many other manufacturing industries are all collapsing. Weak domestic demand from China’s real estate bust has encountered massive oversupply from government subsidies, and the result is that few companies in China are making much money. That will force lots of businesses to close and consolidate, and it will starve dynamic private-sector companies of R&D budgets, forcing them to rely more on research handed down by the distant, unresponsive, and unaccountable government.
Government subsidies can keep the party going a lot longer than it ought to, but already the limits have probably been reached. Chinese manufacturing indicators are faltering, and manufacturing investment seems to have topped out as well.
In fact, this isn’t even the only example of Xi Jinping taking a developing-country strategy and pushing it far beyond its limits. Infrastructure is another. For many years, China invested huge amounts into building more roads and bridges and high-speed trains than they knew what to do with. But there was a limit to that process, and China has now hit the limit. The Economist reports that China’s infrastructure investment has leveled off:
China’s years-long splurge on bridges, tunnels, expressways, high-speed rail and airports is beginning to tail off…In July this year a senior transport official said China’s main transport network was “91% complete”, and the country would pivot from expanding to upgrading existing infrastructure.
But it isn’t so easy weaning yourself off of infrastructure overinvestment. China built so much infrastructure that it will have to spend a lot of money just to upkeep all those roads, trains, and bridges. That’s the iron logic of depreciation. And since much of China’s infrastructure isn’t really carrying many passengers or much cargo, that means China is stuck spending a significant fraction of its GDP upkeeping stuff that people don’t really need — unless, of course, it chooses to let some of that infrastructure decay into ruin.
All of this means growth will slow. And of course, it’s all happening against the backdrop of weak demand from the continuing, protracted fallout from China’s real estate bust. There are signs that the real economic damage in that sector is only getting started:
Weak domestic demand won’t just be a drag on China’s headline growth — it will also make it harder for China’s manufacturing sector to maintain its 30% global market share, much less expand it to 35% or more. Xi seems to think that China can just sort of pull resources off of real estate development and put them into manufacturing, one for one, like a corporate manager reassigning engineers to a different project. But it doesn’t work like that; demand matters, and China’s manufacturing triumphs in past decades depended heavily on the tailwind that the long property boom had been delivering.
Chinese economists realize this, but Xi seems to have stopped listening to economists, and to have purged his government of anyone who was inclined to listen.
(And of course as the years go by, China’s accelerating population decline will reduce its domestic market size by more and more, compounding the pressure on manufacturing. I don’t expect this to be a big factor until at least 2040 or so, but it’s worth mentioning.)
In other words, Xi’s “make-everything country” strategy is likely to see only modest short-term success. It will not let China conquer the world. And the failure of this strategy will come just as a massive new technological revolution upends the global economy — a revolution that China, despite all reports, is not well-prepared to take advantage of.
1. Fredrik deBoer, All in Your Head: Illness as Identity, Trauma as Fashion, and the Desire to be Disordered. A good book, I am happy to see positions laid out so clearly and starkly. Is this a radical view, or the mainstream view these days? Excerpt: “For all of Szasz’s rhetorical flair and provocation, he never offered a plausible account of how a society should treat someone in the throes of severe psychosis, someone who is experiencing visual and auditory hallucinations, operating under intense paranoia, unable to care for themselves, and potentially at risk to themselves or others.” Here is a good NYT review. The book is best on mental illness, worst on autism, as the author tries to apply the same hammer all too quickly.
2. Colm Toibin, Homage to Barcelona. Dates from the early 1990s, but stilll one of the best “single city” books I have read, with Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found being the defining winner of this genre. The book also has aged very well, with the excesses of tourism being added as a local concern. A separate point (not mainly at the book, though the book hints at it) is that I had not realized how much Catalonia was one of the very wealthiest parts of Europe circa 1300.
3. Missouri Williams, The Vivisectors. In the direction of J.G. Ballard and Shirley Jackson, with some Gothic, Hesse, and Hard-Boiled Wonderland tossed in. There is a weird “The University” in a strange city, and the puzzles multiply. I found it compelling (good review here) though other reviews are mixed. It definitely held my attention.
4. Michael Rey and Oriana Zill de Granados, The Havana Syndrome: Secret Weapons, A Government Cover-Up, and the Greatest Spy Mystery of Our Time. It does seem it is true, it was Russia, and likely it was pulsed microwave weapons.
5. M. John Harrison, The End of Everything. On the Booker Short List, this broadly resembles science fiction but (again) in the J.G. Ballard direction. Something has gone wrong in England, aliens of some sort have arrived through what is possibly another dimension, and the infrastructure is starting to crumble…and yet the story remains in the realm of the metaphysical, rather than devolving into science fiction proper.
6. Mathias Énard, Perfecting the Shot. Inside the mind of a killer assassin, short enough to work and not exhaust the reader with tedium.
And there is Jan Dutkiewicz and Gabriel N. Rosenberg, Feed the People! Why Industrial Food is Good and How to Make it Even Better. The book expresses some much-needed sentiments.
Do not forget Deirdre Nansen McCloskey, Equality of Permission: The Politics of Feasible Liberalism.
Fabio Rojas and David de La Torre, Two Visions of the Art World: Competition, Community, and Creative Work, provide a revisionist, anti-Bourdieu account of the art world, stressing its cooperation and community-building as a “dual layer.”
The post What I’ve been reading appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Marketing note: I have a new ebook, Navigating the Chaos: Chronicles of Economic and Political Madness, which uses material from this Substack to construct a thematic narrative of the past two years and the issues that Democrats must now address to build an enduring progressive movement. Available from Amazon, Kobo, Bookshop, and Nook.
The video:
Up and to the office, where we sat all the morning, and Sir W. Pen and I had a word or two, where by opposing him in not being willing to excuse a mulct put upon the purser of the James, absent from duty, he says, by his business and order, he was mighty angry, and went out of the office like an asse discontented: At which I am never a whit sorry; I would not have [him] think that I dare not oppose him, where I see reason and cause for it.
Home to dinner, and then by coach abroad about several businesses to several places, among others to Westminster Hall, where, seeing Howlett’s daughter going out of the other end of the Hall, I followed her if I would to have offered talk to her and dallied with her a little, but I could not overtake her.
Then calling at Unthank’s for something of my wife’s not done, a pretty little gentlewoman, a lodger there, came out to tell me that it was not yet done, which though it vexed me yet I took opportunity of taking her by the hand with the boot, and so found matter to talk a little the longer to her, but I was ready to laugh at myself to see how my anger would not operate, my disappointment coming to me by such a messenger. Thence to Doctors’ Commons and there consulted Dr. Turner about some differences we have with the officers of the East India ships about goods brought by them without paying freight, which we demand of them.
So home to my office, and there late writing letters, and so home to supper and to bed, having got a scurvy cold by lying cold in my head the last night.
This day Captain Taylor brought me a piece of plate, a little small state dish, he expecting that I should get him some allowance for demorage of his ship “William,” kept long at Tangier, which I shall and may justly do.
To read this letter, click here:
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On Tuesday, Americans rejected the Trump administration. It turns out most people hated the idea of a strongman who ignored the Constitution, undermined democracy, and tried to rewrite America’s history in order to impose a white, Christian nationalist regime that enriched him and his cronies at the expense of everyone else.
Voters made their position very clear. A majority of more than 12 million demanded an end to corruption, an end to Trump’s war on Iran, an end to costly tariffs, and an end to the masked agents kidnapping Black and Brown people off the streets.
By a margin of more than 13%, they voted for a country based on the rule of law in which everyone is held accountable for their actions and no one can break the law with impunity. They voted for the system of checks and balances established by the Framers of the Constitution. They voted for policies that supported the American people, making it possible for them to afford food and housing and healthcare rather than continuing to funnel money to billionaires.
They voted for the multicultural country Trump and his loyalists mocked. They elected Democratic Black candidates Keisha Lance Bottoms to govern Georgia, David Crowley to govern Wisconsin, Aaron Ford to govern Nevada, and Stacey Plaskett to govern the U.S. Virgin Islands. They elected Byron Donalds, a Black Republican, to govern Florida.
Voters elected Michigan Democrat Abdul El-Sayed to be the nation’s first Muslim senator, and they reelected Representative Ilhan Omar, whom Trump has made a key target of his attacks, with an astonishing 76.5% of her district’s vote.
As Valerie Gonzalez, Mike Catalini, and Jonathan J. Cooper of the Associated Press reported, Hispanic voters shifted hard away from the Republican Party and swung back toward the Democrats in 2026, with 7 out of 10 Hispanic voters in Texas backing Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico. In a rejection of Trump’s attacks on immigrants, for the first time since 2008, Democrats won every House district that touches the U.S.-Mexico border, and voters have sent fourteen new Hispanic Democrats to Congress.
Black voters, especially in the American South, turned out in unusually high numbers, and they voted for Democrats at higher rates than they did in 2024. Emily Cochrane of the New York Times reported that about 80% of Black votes in congressional races across the country were for Democratic candidates.
The message was unmistakable.
Since his 2024 reelection, Trump and his allies have repeatedly insisted that his victory of about 2.3 million voters over Democratic candidate Vice President Kamala Harris, earning him less than 50% of the vote, was a “mandate.” Compared to the margin of more than 12 million voters delivered on Tuesday, it was a fizzle. The Economist noted that Tuesday’s Democratic victory was “the biggest congressional landslide in 50 years.” Recognizing the direction of the tide, since the election, panicked Republicans have called for regrouping, ending the war on Iran, and addressing affordability.
Trump initially appeared dazed by the rebuke, but today he woke up and threw their rejection of his agenda back in Americans’ teeth.
Ousting his chief of staff, Susie Wiles, Trump replaced her with the architect of some of his administration’s most extreme policies: Stephen Miller.
Miller is a fervent white nationalist who appears to believe in the racist “great replacement theory,” the idea that Black and Brown immigrants to Europe and the United States are destroying “Western culture.”
Miller’s elevation to chief of staff doesn’t necessarily change much; he already was a powerful force in the White House. Miller drove the “Muslim ban” in Trump’s first term and, in his second, the administration’s arrest, incarceration, and deportation plans for undocumented immigrants. His push for masked agents to arrest 3,000 people a day led to the murders of U.S. citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti, as well as the shooting deaths of immigrants and their mistreatment and deaths in concentration camps.
Miller has been a key proponent of Trump’s seizing power through emergency declarations that he uses to ignore the law. Frustrated by opposition to his plan to hurt Black and Brown people, Miller pushed for Trump to crush the opposition by invoking the Insurrection Act.
And Miller was central to the administration’s undermining of disability rights. Mike Hixenbaugh of NBC News reported that after Trump complained about seeing homeless encampments in Washington, D.C., Miller argued for a plan to make it easier to round up mentally ill homeless people and institutionalize them. Making that happen required abandoning enforcement of the 1999 Supreme Court decision Olmstead v. L.C., which established that disabled Americans have a right to live in their communities rather than being forced into institutions.
The Department of Justice went along with Miller’s plan and issued a memo saying that it would no longer enforce Olmstead. While the initial targets were unhoused people, Hixenbaugh notes, the administration quickly backed away from at least five disability rights cases designed to keep physically or mentally disabled children and adults out of institutions. Hixenbaugh points out that the administration’s refusal to enforce Olmstead is sending a message to the states that, with the dramatic cuts to Medicaid in the Republicans’ so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” they should “feel free to cut services that help disabled people remain at home,” forcing them into institutions.
As Phillips P. O’Brien wrote in Phillip’s Newsletter, Miller also supports Russia’s version of its war on Ukraine and has taken a strong and public stand against the embattled U.S. ally. O’Brien notes that Trump’s elevation of Miller now illustrates the president’s determination to get whatever he can for Russia’s president Vladimir Putin before the new Congress starts investigations and puts up roadblocks.
So, rather than moderating his behavior after voters’ dramatic rebuke, Trump is demonstrating by elevating Miller that he is hardening his position. He is surrounding himself with the most extreme of his advisors: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, whom he has supported in the face of calls for his impeachment; Natalie Harp, the smiling aide who appears glued to his side; and Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget and a key author of Project 2025, who Trump boasted before the election would soon “be one of the very important people in the history of our country, in my opinion.” He noted: “We have some big surprises coming up in another few weeks, right, Russ?”
Trump’s elevation of Miller was a deliberate declaration that he doesn’t care what the American people want. Representative LaMonica McIver (D-NJ), whom the administration has targeted because of her attempt to conduct oversight of a detention facility, was clear: “Stephen Miller is a white supremacist,” she said in a statement. “By promoting the person responsible for ICE detaining our neighbors and killing people in the streets, Donald Trump is doubling down on the cruelty and corruption that have defined his administration. The president is panicked after losing power in Congress and this is a signal about what he will prioritize in the final stretch of his presidency: grievance and cruelty.”
Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) posted: “Donald Trump learned nothing from his historic defeat. Stephen Miller is the architect of the most barbaric, inhumane policies of this administration. Trump couldn’t have made a worse choice. Our Democratic majorities will fight him every step of the way.”
House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries posted: “Stephen Miller is a dangerous xenophobe and reckless extremist who has American blood on his hands. His presence in government should be eradicated like a malignant tumor. Fire him today.”
But Trump’s embrace of Miller was not aimed at Democrats alone. It is a shot across the bow of Republicans who might want to jump ship. When Meredith Lee Hill of Politico told one House Republican that Trump had tapped Miller to be his chief of staff, the lawmaker replied: “Please tell me you’re lying to me right now, just to get a reaction.”
Trump is making it clear to Republicans that he intends to force the party to stay behind an even more extreme version of MAGA than the one voters rejected Tuesday, incinerating their hopes for 2028. Alex Isenstadt of Axios reported today that Trump has told advisors that he intends to keep raising money so he can continue to wield power over Republican candidates in 2028.
And in a sign that MAGA leaders are determined to keep Republicans in line, Philip Wegmann of the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that the White House sent a memo to more than 3,000 Republican-oriented groups, warning them: “As always, we are monitoring statements, press releases, and media engagements from your organizations.”
It all feels very desperate.
Tonight Trump appeared in a campaign hat at a NASA event at which he rambled from topic to topic, slurring his words and sounding tired. He said he had declared all of space “open for American settlement, American civilization, and American freedom.” He said that “[w]ithin two years, NASA will launch the first ever nuclear powered spacecraft to Mars,” before veering off to talk about his uncle, who was a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Trump promised that “before the end of my term, the United States will return American astronauts to the surface of the Moon. So exciting. And soon thereafter the United States will establish a permanent presence on lunar soil.”
To a silent audience, Trump said: “By the way, I was not on the ballot, just in case you had any questions. Because if we were on the ballot we would’ve won.”
—
Notes:
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/latino-voters-propel-democrats-to-big-wins-with-leftward-swing
https://abcnews.com/Politics/black-candidates-make-history-party-lines-250-years/story?id=137851377
https://www.newsweek.com/ilhan-omar-biggest-election-win-in-8-years-ice-raid-12662658
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/05/us/politics/black-voters-south-democratic-wins.html
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/statistics/elections/2024
https://www.cnn.com/2026/11/06/politics/stephen-miller-trump-susie-wiles
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/nov/14/stephen-miller-leaked-emails-white-nationalism-trump
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/02/17/miller-trump-national-emergency-declaration-1173425
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5691618-miller-accuses-minnesota-officials-insurgency/
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/15/us/politics/trump-scharf-habeas-corpus-insurrection-act.html
https://www.commondreams.org/news/vance-insurrection-act-minnesota
https://www.thedailybeast.com/stephen-miller-leading-the-charge-on-sinister-martial-law-moves
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/6139293-trump-diesel-omb-russell-vought-announcements/
https://us9.campaign-archive.com/?e=aafa2008f6&u=6dc3f0da431d5e32ec0a3c8e4&id=34ca400d38
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/11/06/gop-reckoning-trump-midterms-stephen-miller-01154760
https://www.axios.com/2026/11/06/scoop-trump-to-keep-fundraising-hoping-to-retain-political-muscle
Trump’s Truth:
X:
JuddLegum/status/2118833458680058248
SenSchumer/status/2118791130695258315
RepJeffries/status/2118795008379908136
Bluesky:
mikehixenbaugh.com/post/3mwvcfxzrec26
mikehixenbaugh.com/post/3mzoehzuc5k2o
lincolnproject.us/post/3mzo4lphjaf2k
reichlinmelnick.bsky.social/post/3mzosvgti522u
atrupar.com/post/3mzojslpba52b
Links for you. Science:
1,600 Years Ago, This Man Traveled Across Europe. So Did His Rare Strain of Leprosy
A ‘tidal wave’ of severe eye disease is looming. It starts with childhood nearsightedness
What Happens When You Shine Three Lights on Sunflowers? The Plants Surprisingly Grow Toward the Dimmest One
US deep-sea mining claims in Pacific’s high seas now rival the area set aside by international regulator
New York reports first measles death in more than 30 years
Hidden ecological risk from overlooked invasive crayfish species
Brahminy Blind Snake
Other:
Maybe Telling Americans They’re Useless Eaters Who Must Perish for the Glorious AI Revolution Was a Bad Idea: Midterm Thoughts
“MAGA Needs To Be Dead”: Dade Phelan on the Republican Wipeout
The Epstein Election and the End of MAGA: The issue once motivated Trump voters. This week, it helped doom Republicans. (seeing Republicans dinged by their own lunacy is delicious)
Trump Has Been Thumped. That Doesn’t Make Him Any Less Dangerous.
Not In My Wildest Dreams Did I See A Texas This Blue
Lame Duck Soup: With Democrats in control of Congress, Washington is bracing for Trump to focus on wild, legacy-defining foreign policy swings—anything from regime change in Cuba to expanding the Abraham Accords to reengaging with Kim Jong Un—as he contemplates the end of his presidential era
J Street: 2026 National Election Survey of Jewish Voters
Tech Stocks Had a Terrible Day. What’s Coming Could Be Worse.
We Stomped All Over the Patriarchy on Tuesday Night
Elon Musk’s Very Bad Night
Trump May Come to Regret His Rush Job on the Arch and Ballroom
How WeRateDogs Is Fighting A.I. Slop, One Perfect Puppy at a Time
RIP Cybertruck. You Were Unloved, Unwanted, and Utterly Absurd
Democrats Won a Big Race in Montana. Why Do They Have Regrets?
One Subplot To The GOP’s Midterm Debacle Was A Repudiation Of The MAHA Movement
D.C. Officials Hope the Blue Wave Will End the National Guard Deployment
Overturning Euclid: Three judicial pathways for challenging the case
Parents and Teachers Provide ‘Disturbing’ Testimony on D.C. Special Education
Can You Afford to Watch TV?
The Results Are In: Voters Hate Data Centers
Attorney General-elect Nathan Johnson says he won’t sue out-of-state doctors who mail abortion pills to Texas
Trump’s Vaunted Multiracial Coalition Is Dead
Elon Musk will face scrutiny from Democrats after midterms
Laura Loomer Goes on “Hiatus” After Bombshell Revelation on Paid Posts
New York Times taps conservative crackpot as voice of GOP reason
Turnout among Black voters surged in the Deep South. Black voters made up a larger share of the electorate than in 2024, helping to (maybe) flip a Senate seat in Mississippi
Donald Trump should resign. Congress should demand it
Everybody Moves Leftward
The Obvious Truth of the Midterm Obliteration
The Ugly Car That Sucks Has Died
It now seems pretty clear that Scott Colom (pronounced c’l-O-m or like ‘cologne’ but with a final m instead of an n) is going to be the next senator from the state of Mississippi — not called yet but getting close. He would be the first Democrat elected from Mississippi since 1982 and the first Black senator since Blanche K. Bruce who served from 1875 to 1881. But one striking thing about the claims of victory from Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, which manage to be both aggressive and half-hearted, is that as far as I can tell she has yet to appear in public since Election Day. I’m not even sure she’s done any media call-ins. Her first Twitter comment was written in the third person, as though the staffer who wrote it couldn’t even bother to pretend it was Hyde-Smith writing it. This turns out to be a through-line continuing from the campaign itself.
We’re already wise to the way the building Blue Wave in 2026 exposed a number of Republican incumbents who simply weren’t ready for prime time as candidates but had gotten by pretty much unchallenged on Republican dominance of their states. Outgoing Senator Roger Marshall is the poster-boy for this dynamic. But Marshall at least mobilized late and mounted a campaign — a really comically bad campaign but still a campaign. Reviewing the wreckage of Hyde-Smith’s apparent defeat, it really seems like she was at best a part-time candidate and that really over-states her involvement in the election.
I feel like I should have been more hip to this. I was late to the Mississippi campaign but still earlier to it than the vast number of national reporters and commentators. I noticed that “Where’s Cindy” was one of Colom’s big campaign lines. But I figured this was the standard theme that underdogs often use against incumbents — trying to goad them into the debates and so forth. You’ve probably seen Colom’s now already legendary “Pick Another Protein” ad. But here’s another of my favorites that I found after I went down the Colom rabbit hole a while back, an ad/video featuring Charles Latham, the mayor of Grenada, Mississippi …
As the man says, Where’s Cindy?
This must have been a pretty potent attack since she really barely seems to have run a campaign. She refused to debate Scott Colom. That’s pretty standard behavior for Republican incumbents in deep-red states. But she also doesn’t seem to have held any town halls. One of her few appearances was on stage at Trump’s late campaign rescue rally on October 26th. As a friend and TPM eeader pointed out to me, the “news” section on her campaign website was last updated with a flurry of updates on July 2nd. Her campaign Instagram account was last updated two days later on July 4th. It’s hard to prove a negative. But I couldn’t find any evidence of any town halls or campaign rallies during 2026 at all other than that Trump rally in October. A local paper’s endorsement editorial of Colom seems to confirm this, saying that Hyde-Smith “refuses to debate her opponents, hasn’t held a town hall during her entire tenure as senator and ignores or rejects nearly all media requests for interviews.”
Hyde-Smith’s campaign spending seems to confirm a pretty low-energy pace of operations. Her final Q3 FEC filing reports $798,097.07 spending from July 1st to September 30th. She began the period with $2,535,895.72 cash on hand and ended it with $2,425,284.63. It’s true that Mississippi, because of its size, low cost of living and lack of major ad media markets is likely one of the cheapest states in which to run a Senate campaign. But these are still very anemic spending levels. (During the same period, Colom spent $1,396,812.95 — not multiples more but upwards of twice the amount.)
In a way this is unsurprising. Until a couple weeks ago very few people thought a Democrat could win a Senate seat in Mississippi even under the most favorable conditions. In 2018, Trump’s first midterm, the widely respected former congressman and cabinet secretary Mike Espy ran against Hyde-Smith and she beat him handily, 54-46. When she ran for a full term in 2020 she beat him again 54-44. But even with all this, Hyde-Smith genuinely seems barely to have gone through the motions of running a campaign.
If you’re from Mississippi or are from out of state and have special insights into the state, I’d like to hear from you. As I said above, it’s hard to prove a number, or document what didn’t happen, especially months later. So I’m very curious to hear more color and details about what you saw of this campaign over recent months — or, more likely, what you didn’t see. In advance of those comments and testimonials it really does seem like Hyde-Smith saw the Senate gig as a DC-only job that was basically a lifetime appointment.
Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at Florida’s property tax rollback, projected PCB shortages, the end of Tesla’s Cybertruck, the lack of progress in carbon storage, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber.
Housekeeping items this week: I accidentally emailed out this week’s essay, How Do Building Codes Affect the Price of Housing, to paid members only instead of all subscribers. This has been fixed, and it’s available now for everyone. I think a couple people may have signed up for paid subscriptions specifically because of this — if this is you, let me know and I’ll issue you a refund.
From the annals of “the return of the property tax revolt”: this week Florida approved an amendment to exempt a larger portion of a person’s home from property tax. It’s estimated to reduce government revenues by nearly $5 billion in 2027-2028 alone. [HousingWire]
And from the annals of “frontier AI models are surprisingly capable at things you wouldn’t expect them to be”: AI models are apparently now pretty good at generating permit-quality construction documents. People have been making flavors of this claim for a while, but this is the first time I’ve seen it made from an actual architect. “Drawing upon my background as an architect, I tested 13 older and newly released AI models to measure their technical drawing abilities. I found that the strongest drafting model at the time of writing is Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.5, released in September of 2026. With some skilled guidance, Opus 5.5 is capable of producing sophisticated drafting and permit-quality architectural drawing sets for simple buildings.” [Substack]
A new paper estimates that wildfire risk to US buildings could triple by 2060. “We reconstruct fire risk to structures from 1945-2023 and project its evolution through 2060 across the U.S. using high-resolution historical data on area burned, settlement patterns, and fire impacts. Under business-as-usual conditions with no adaptation, structural losses are projected to nearly triple nationwide, with 133,200–449,100 buildings expected to be damaged or destroyed by mid-century.” [Nature]
Opponents of a housing project being planned above a San Francisco Safeway are suing the project under a provision of the 1871 Civil Rights Act, originally passed to combat violence from the Ku Klux Klan. [HousingWire]
Chinese robot manufacturer Unitree’s factory operations remain (surprisingly?) manual. “At the end of 2025 all of Unitree’s machinery was worth about $1.7 million on its books, at a company that made almost 32,000 robots that year: some $50 of machinery per robot!” [X]
One of Intel’s fabs in Israel was shut down for 2 weeks after an explosion that killed two people, possibly due to a gas cylinder malfunction. [Tom’s Hardware]
Are printed circuit boards the next AI datacenter-induced component shortage? “We’ve seen huge demand/supply driven price rises in RAM, GPUs, SSDs, and more through 2026. Now that most basic and unglamorous electronics necessity, the PCB, looks set to join them. A news report published by Nikkei Asia quotes several leading PC and PCB industry managers, making it clear we are going to see PCB (and PCB subcomponent) shortages and price rises in the coming months.” [Tom’s Hardware]
BYD sold more electric vehicles in October than the entire US did the entire third quarter. [Electrek] And more than 50% of heavy trucks sold in China in September were EVs. [Electrek]
Blake Scholl, CEO of supersonic airliner startup Boom, says it’s now spending most of its resources working on the power-generating gas turbine for AI data centers, and once that’s been developed it will shift focus back to the airliner. [X] Related, if any of my readers work at Kalshi or Polymarket, I would love a prediction market for the Boom airliner.
Related, I liked this idea from Scholl: use AI to check for weird edge cases in aircraft flight control software. [X]
1. Simon Winchester, RIP (NYT).
2. Pork roll vs. Taylor Ham, a NJ map.
3. Those new service sector jobs, Bradford edition.
5. The costs of federal permitting.
6. The Thai doctor KC superstition (NYT).
7. Spanish-language interview with me. Y sobre el premio.
The post Saturday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
In the garage, there is a box that contains a great many boxed copies of these games. This includes all the documentation, media, and random toys they used to include when they released these games. I will not likely play any of these, but I am glad they exist. (p.s. I can’t imagine these would exist without the help of the robots)
Re-releases of Wing Commander, Ultima titles hit Steam and GOG · arstechnica.com
It's mostly bad news from EA lately, but preservation efforts are nice to see.What if a barber took 1/10th the time but with the exact same quality?
Gut feel is I would pay 50% more and visit twice as often.
Robo-scissors at just below the speed of sound, you wouldn’t even sit down. Locations like photo booths, call it Snip Snap.
Cmon AI boffins get it done.
While I’m going on about AI:
It confounds me that "hill climbing" and "gradient descent" are both names of optimizing algos.
Is GOOD = UP a valid conceptual metaphor or not?? Make up your minds.
Atomic Kitten was an Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark psyop?? wtf
(The sub-generation that knows both of those bands is microscope. Hullo fellow xennials!)
Andy McCluskey:
In 1996, my band OMD released Walking on the Milky Way, which I thought was one of the best songs I’d ever written. But in the age of Britpop, we were perceived as an 80s synthpop band, past our sell-by date. Radio 2 wouldn’t play the song and Woolworths wouldn’t stock it. I thought: “I’m functioning with one arm tied behind my back.” So my friend Karl Bartos of Kraftwerk said: “Why don’t you create a girl band as a vehicle for your songs?”
– The Guardian, How we made Atomic Kitten’s Whole Again (2026)
Kraftwerk too!
This is such a petty UI detail but Apple should devote a whole macOS to making the Dock good.
Like, it’s already this colourful, resizeable, massively real-estate-occupying element.
Give it folders! Live activities! Glanceable dynamic tiles! Custom menus!
Anything to tidy up my menu bar. (Which is a mess.)
You know that the Dock team at Apple is either zero people and they’ve forgotten it exists, or 1000 people and it is totally dysfunctional.
Good poem:
The Tiger by Nael, Age 6.
The tiger
He destroyed his cage
Yes
YES
The tiger is out
Silkscreen, Jason Kottke’s classic pixel font from 1999, is still great. Only 5x5!
What if fast takeoff happens when you just step out for your hols, and when you get back after a week all your friends are 1,000 IQ and bristling with posthuman nanotech and you can never catch up because you’re always 2 doublings behind
hey matt we’re off to eat the sun wanna join
oh sorry dude forgot you haven’t figured out how to wire your mitochondria into vacuum energy yet
awks.
More posts tagged: scraps-from-the-scraps-file (4).
From the Archives–written by ChatGPT.
This ranking judges posts on reasoning, originality of framing, explanatory power, intellectual stimulation, timeliness, and how much they accomplish in their length. Originality includes an unusually illuminating application of an existing idea. Provocation earns credit when it exposes a real problem; unsupported certainty still counts against a post.
The selection draws on searches across Marginal Revolution’s downloaded archive of 40,326 posts, covering publication through October 20, 2026, and close reading of shortlisted candidates. It is an editorial ranking among the posts examined, not an exhaustive evaluation of every entry. There is no author or topic quota.
Timeliness matters when an economic argument clarifies a consequential decision while there is still time to act. The vaccine entries are assessed as contributions to the policy debates of 2020 and 2021.
May 4, 2020 · Read the original post
“We argue for a big program to invest in vaccine capacity before any vaccine is tested and approved.”
Apparently wasteful investment can be economically prudent when waiting is enormously expensive. Building production capacity for vaccine candidates that might fail buys the possibility of delivering a successful vaccine sooner. The relevant comparison is between the cost of unused capacity and the social cost of delay.
What makes it exceptional: The post combines the gap between private and social returns, investment under uncertainty, portfolio diversification, and contracts that reward speed. It proposes an institutional response rather than merely identifying a market failure. Its timing is integral to its achievement: the argument was made before the successful vaccines were known.
The proposal was collaborative work with Susan Athey, Michael Kremer, Christopher Snyder, and a larger team. The post translates that work into an accessible case for action, explaining how advance purchase commitments and support for capacity could complement one another.
Its numerical targets depend on assumptions about costs, success probabilities, and benefits. But the central insight is robust: minimizing expenditure on unsuccessful candidates is a different objective from minimizing the total cost of a pandemic. The combination of reasoning, urgency, and practical design earns it first place.
March 31, 2011 · Read the original post
“people are first choosing a mood or attitude, and then finding the disparate views which match to that mood”
In a few hundred words, Cowen gives a recognizable intellectual habit a memorable name: deciding to be an optimist, pessimist, or partisan, then assembling beliefs that sustain that identity.
The insight travels. Someone can believe technological progress is substantial while worrying about a particular environmental problem. Sympathy for disadvantaged people need not settle every explanation of their circumstances.
What makes it exceptional: It gives readers a tool they can keep using, including against themselves. Its value exceeds the particular examples. The danger is using the label to dismiss opponents without examining their arguments—but that is a reason to apply it carefully. Its brevity, memorability, and usefulness across subjects make it one of the strongest examples of the short economics blog post.
December 21, 2020 · Read the original post
“If the answer is yes then can you ethically deny this to someone else’s spouse?”
The preceding thought experiment asks whether someone awaiting a second vaccine dose would instead give it to their spouse as a first dose. In a few sentences, Tabarrok makes the opportunity cost of a scarce dose tangible: compare the additional protection from a second dose with the protection another person could receive from a first.
What makes it exceptional: It turns a technical allocation debate into a choice readers can understand immediately. The addendum about an older recipient and a much younger spouse recognizes that the comparison depends on individual risk, rather than treating all recipients as interchangeable.
The post also distinguishes delaying second doses during scarcity from abandoning them altogether. Expected future supplies matter to the decision.
The medical premises, including the strength and duration of first-dose protection, still required evidence. The thought experiment does not resolve those questions. Its achievement is to show why following a tested schedule for one recipient does not, by itself, settle how limited supplies should be allocated across a population.
February 26, 2021 · Read the original post
“Buying doses isn’t optimal because companies can just agree and put you to the back of the queue.”
Buying a place in a queue and expanding production capacity are different achievements. Tabarrok moves from the case for greater spending to the harder questions of what governments should purchase and how contracts should work.
What makes it exceptional: The post combines an assessment of the enormous social value of speed with concrete institutional design. Capacity subsidies, options to purchase output, and attention to input bottlenecks can matter more than announcing large orders. It also considers procurement auctions as a way to mobilize suppliers beyond a single government’s jurisdiction.
The argument draws on a collaborative Science paper with Camilo Castillo, Michael Kremer, Eric Budish, Susan Athey, and others. Its estimates of the value of additional capacity are model-dependent, but the post connects the policy recommendations to explicit calculations and a research framework.
Its lasting contribution is the distinction between securing supplies for one buyer and increasing the supplies available to everyone. That distinction makes it useful well beyond the immediate vaccine debate.
January 1, 2020 · Read the original post
“A strong state is distinct from a very large or tyrannical state.”
Cowen reorganizes a political argument around an overlooked distinction: the scope of government and its ability to perform its functions are different things. A government can regulate extensively while failing to build infrastructure, administer courts, or deliver public goods.
The productive question becomes: which state capabilities help sustain freedom, markets, and prosperity?
What makes it exceptional: It is an ambitious attempt to revise an intellectual tradition from within. Readers can reject parts of the manifesto and still find their questions changed by it.
It is one of the longer entries, and its partisan characterizations are less persuasive than its central distinction. But as a post that proposes an agenda rather than merely commenting on one, it deserves a high place.
July 20, 2015 · Read the original post
“Benefits are a product that workers buy from firms.”
Requiring fries and a drink with a burger does not establish that the customer receives a better deal. Tabarrok uses this memorable analogy to explain a central economic insight: mandated benefits are part of a compensation package, and workers may pay for them through lower wages.
What makes it exceptional: The post connects compensation, choice, and regulatory incidence without technical machinery. Readers can reconstruct the argument long after forgetting the details. It also poses a productive challenge: if workers value a benefit above its cost, what prevents employers from offering it voluntarily?
That question makes advocates explain the mechanism through which a mandate would improve matters. In a short space, the post shifts attention from the visible benefit to the full terms of the exchange.
The qualification is that absent benefits do not necessarily demonstrate that workers value them below cost. Insurance-market problems, information, contracting constraints, or externalities can complicate that inference. These limitations restrict the argument’s universality without erasing its achievement as a clear, stimulating explanation of a powerful economic benchmark.
May 12, 2023 · Read the original post
“The misunderstanding came from thinking that we need every user of fuel to find substitutes. Not at all!”
This is economics doing something that intuition often cannot: explaining how an economy can adjust even when individual producers face severe constraints.
Some users conserve, others change fuels, some goods are imported instead of manufactured domestically, and less valuable uses disappear. These adjustments release scarce resources for activities with fewer alternatives.
What makes it exceptional: The examples turn an abstract elasticity argument into an understanding of how an economy works. The post teaches readers to look for adjustments outside the institution or industry immediately in front of them.
The historical outcome does not isolate the contribution of prices from government action or other conditions. Its strongest achievement is the explanation of the mechanism.
May 31, 2019 · Read the original post
“to understand why costs in the stagnant sector are rising, we must look away from the stagnating sector and toward the progressive sector.”
A familiar question—why are some services becoming so expensive?—receives a surprising answer: partly because we have become much better at producing other things.
The string-quartet example makes opportunity cost concrete. Musicians’ time becomes more expensive as opportunities elsewhere improve, even when playing the music requires the same labor.
What makes it exceptional: It changes where the reader looks for an explanation. Rising relative prices do not automatically demonstrate deteriorating performance in the expensive sector.
Baumol’s insight is not original to the post; the achievement is its exposition and application. The mechanism also does not explain every observed price increase or guarantee affordability for every household.
June 9, 2020 · Read the original post
“But we can unbundle the police.”
The opening question makes an ordinary institutional arrangement suddenly seem contingent. Why should investigating violent crime, issuing traffic citations, assisting stranded motorists, and responding to social problems be bundled together?
This applies an economic instinct—separating tasks and matching them to appropriate institutions—to a debate often organized around supporting or opposing the police as a whole.
What makes it exceptional: It generates a concrete alternative in very little space. Readers need not accept every proposed reassignment to recognize that the bundle deserves examination.
The post underplays difficult cases involving dangerous stops and coordination between agencies. Those are substantial design questions, but the proposal creates a useful inquiry rather than requiring every detail to be solved before discussion begins.
April 19, 2024 · Read the original post
“Supply-side skeptics are right about the numbers, wrong about the meaning.”
A small numerical example shows how housing supply per person can increase while demand for separate households grows faster. The supposedly decisive statistic does not establish what its users think it establishes.
What makes it exceptional: It combines explanatory economy with relevance to a major public debate. There is almost no distance between reading the example and understanding the mistake.
It is also a model of effective blogging: identify a recurring objection, isolate the confusion, and resolve it with something readers can reproduce themselves.
The example defeats an inference; it does not establish the full empirical explanation of housing prices. The policy rhetoric extends beyond the demonstration.
January 5, 2021 · Read the original post
“A decision to stick with the status quo represents an implicit, non-transparent calculation of sorts, whether you admit it or not.”
Cowen demands that alternative policies face the same standard of evaluation. Identifying a risk in a proposed policy is insufficient when maintaining the existing policy also carries risks. Whereas Tabarrok’s first-dose thought experiment makes the allocation problem intuitive, this post asks decision-makers to make their comparisons explicit.
What makes it exceptional: It applies a general principle of economic reasoning to an urgent decision: uncertainty does not make inaction neutral. Possible objections must be weighed against the costs of the available alternatives, including the opportunity cost of retaining the established schedule.
The speculative account of experts’ motives is weaker than the central argument, and demanding numerical estimates cannot make poorly known quantities precise. Nevertheless, the call for transparent comparison is powerful. It asks proponents of the status quo to explain their trade-offs as clearly as proponents of change.
January 12, 2014 · Read the original post
“But it should lead to ‘devalue and downgrade,’ rather than ‘devalue and dismiss.’”
Finding a weakness in a model or argument can justify reducing its weight without making it worthless. Cowen also identifies the psychological attraction of dismissal: inconvenient evidence no longer constrains what one wants to believe.
What makes it exceptional: A specialized dispute about macroeconomic models yields a broadly useful intellectual discipline. Particularly sharp is the observation that intelligent people can become exceptionally accomplished at finding reasons to ignore inconvenient evidence.
The post can improve how readers evaluate everything else—including Marginal Revolution itself. It does not tell us how much weight a damaged argument deserves, and some objections are fatal. Its power lies in making readers notice a step they otherwise take too casually.
September 12, 2013 · Read the original post
“a random sample of deaths is not necessarily a random sample of people.”
Historical suppression of left-handedness can make older generations appear disproportionately right-handed. Sampling deaths then produces a misleading apparent mortality difference.
What makes it exceptional: It has the structure of a good intellectual detective story: a startling finding, a plausible initial explanation, and a hidden feature of the data that changes the interpretation. It teaches readers how an apparently persuasive statistic can fail, rather than merely telling them to distrust statistics.
The Harry Potter comparison, credited to Chris McManus, makes the lesson memorable. Younger deceased people are more likely to have read the books; that does not make the books lethal. Statistical rigor and excellent blogging reinforce each other.
December 11, 2020 · Read the original post
“The slow ramp up doesn’t change the number of deaths caused by delay it just spreads them out over different days.”
The important move is to compare entire rollout paths. A delayed start can postpone benefits throughout the process; the cost is not limited to what could have been accomplished on the first day. A gradual rollout does not, by itself, make a delay at the beginning inconsequential.
What makes it exceptional: The combination of urgency, a simple model, and visual explanation makes an otherwise easily missed opportunity cost understandable. It directs attention to the full consequences of a decision across time.
The exact result depends on the simplified model. Actual consequences depend on supply constraints, epidemic conditions, protection, and whether earlier authorization would advance delivery. The post’s enduring achievement is the comparison it teaches, not a precise empirical death count attributable to the FDA.
March 16, 2009 · Read the original post
“market prices may have given people hints about the optimal solution”
The post explores an unexpected possibility: markets might help reward discovery while also supplying information that assists discovery. An experiment involving a combinatorial puzzle makes the mechanism tangible.
What makes it exceptional: It opens a design space. The reader moves beyond asking how strong patents should be and starts asking what other institutions could reward innovation and combine dispersed knowledge.
Tabarrok distinguishes competing explanations of the experimental result and identifies practical limitations. It combines imagination with restraint: an attractive institutional possibility presented without pretending that one experiment establishes a universal solution or a replacement for all patents.
The post What are the Best MR Posts? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Anthropic’s version is rather more elaborate. Each of its seven co-founders will maintain a confidential, ranked list of up to ten people who may eventually inherit that founder’s membership and voting role inside a special Founder LLC. Five of the other six co-founders must approve the list. The first eight candidates on the list must clear detailed eligibility requirements. Numbers nine and ten do not, although the other founders must still approve them. I particularly like #9 and #10; they remind me of the break glass in emergency signs.
The elaborate planning protocol begins to make sense when we understand what is being passed on. The people on these lists are not prospective CEOs. They inherit something stranger: a founder’s seat in the mechanism that controls the company’s direction. And that changes the succession question entirely.
Here is more from Rajesh Achanta.
The post The Anthropic succession plan? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
One reads and hears so many times that Iran was on the path to democracy until a CIA coup installed the Shah in 1953. It turns out that account is quite wrong, as is detailed by Simon Sebag Montefiore:
As his support in the Majlis ebbed, Mosaddegh demanded autocratic powers. Both the shah and Majlis refused. On 16 July 1952, Mosaddegh resigned and the shah appointed the ‘Old Fox’ Qavam…On 21 July, five days later [after a shooting], the mobs forced Mosaddegh’s reinstatement.
…Mosaddegh had not been able to resist the temptation of supreme power. His attempt to undermine the monarchy by getting control of the army and to declaw the army by purging officers and making budget cuts had offended supporters of both. The demeaning of the monarchy, secular policies and prosecution of Fadayan assassins had offended the clergy. His moves to bypass the democratically elected parliament by taking plenary powers outraged liberals and democrats. Alienating all of them, Mosaddegh quickly lost control, languishing, pyjama-clad and close to nervous breakdown, in his residence.
…When the police chief was assassinated, Mosaddegh ordered mass arrests that led to Malija members flooring a vote of no conffidence. The once idealistic premier, resorting to authoritarian measures, called a faked plebiscite [with no secret ballot the results were 2 million yes, 1,207 no] to dismiss parliament and huge demonstrations to support him by the communists.
So it was one bad guy succeeding another. Montefiore also argues that what brought down Mossadegh was a second Iranian coup, not the initial coup attempt organized by the CIA.
That is all from the new and excellent The Cauldron: The Making of the Modern Middle East.
The post Was Mossadegh a liberal, democratizing force? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Texas-based companies AST SpaceMobile and Firefly Aerospace announced a $1.3 billion agreement to license a rocket engine that will power a new, heavy-lift rocket starting in 2028, if all goes to plan.
The proposed launcher is called Blacklift and AST SpaceMobile classifies it as a 20-ton rocket, which would put it in the same category of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan.
Following the trend of SpaceX using its Falcon 9 rockets principally to launch its Starlink satellites, AST SpaceMobile will focus its launch capacity to fly its BlueBird satellites to orbit. The company said the rocket will be capable of launching five of its BlueBird satellites at a time.
“The Blacklift rocket is the springboard to significantly expand our total addressable market, providing AST SpaceMobile with regular unconstrained access to orbit and providing for most favorable owners’ economics in the industry,” said Abel Avellan, Founder, Chairman, and CEO of AST SpaceMobile. “This will accelerate our mission to build a new layer of global connectivity, extending connectivity beyond terrestrial networks and helping to bring AI-enabled services wherever people live, work and travel.”
Few details about the rocket itself were released alongside the announcement on Friday. Left unknown are things like hight, propellant tank sizes, and proposed launch site.
AST SpaceMobile also hasn’t described its plan for going from rendering to launch in the span of about two years. An analysis from Payload Space found that it historically takes about six years to go from the start of development to a successful first launch.
The company said it will host an “unveiling event” in New York City on Thursday, Nov. 12, which may fill in some of the blanks. The company also has a third quarter earnings call scheduled for Monday, Nov. 9, at 5 p.m. EST (2200 UTC) and may offer some details at that time as well.
In it’s announcement of the deal with AST SpaceMobile, Firefly said it would be delivering 27 Miranda engines and nine vacuum-variant Vira engines “for AST SpaceMobile’s first three rockets.” That suggests that the Blacklift first stage boosters will have nine Miranda engines each and three Vira engines on the upper stage.
For comparison, the medium-lift Eclipse rocket that Firefly is developing in partnership with Northrop Grumman features seven Miranda engines and one Vira engine. Under this new agreement, Firefly is providing a license for AST SpaceMobile to manufacture engines in the future.
The $1.3 billion agreement involves $800 million upfront from AST SpaceMobile, half of which comes in cash and the other half in Class A Common Stock. It will also pay Firefly $250 million for the 36 engines and another $250 million over the course of three years for engineering services.
“This is a bold transformational deal for Firefly, for AST SpaceMobile, and for the space industry,” said Jason Kim, CEO of Firefly Aerospace. “When a company sets out to build its own rocket, the engine is the hardest, highest-stakes decision they make, and AST SpaceMobile chose to partner with Firefly for its most powerful rocket engines.
“It’s a true win-win for both companies: AST SpaceMobile gets control of its own launch schedule, and Firefly gets added funds to rapidly expand our rocket production and reinforce the supply of launch vehicles to address record demand from the industry.”
Firefly said it has performed more than 175 hot fire tests of its Miranda engines, lasting more than 4,200 seconds. The Vira engine is still in development, but takes heritage from the Lightning engine, which powers the upper stages of Firefly’s Alpha rockets.
Neither engine has made its debut on an orbital flight. Firefly’s current public estimate of an inaugural launch with its Eclipse rocket is 2027.
Firefly plans to speak more about the deal with AST SpaceMobile during its third quarter earnings call, which is scheduled for Tuesday, Nov. 10, at 5 p.m. EST (2200 UTC).
