A new CSIS report says planned 2027 interceptor buys will test a supply chain still recovering from years of consolidation
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I touched some literal grass today. I don’t think the phrase means what the young people think it does.
I was touching grass not because I particularly wanted to, but because my wife needed some help repotting her tomato plants. Neither of us is particularly interested in gardening. My wife is primarily on a mission to secure better tomatoes for the coming months than are generally available in Seattle. I’m free-riding on her efforts for a ready supply of fresh cilantro. Though to be honest, if she weren’t gardening, I’d just get my cilantro at the store like I used to. I’d probably just let the local forest take over our yard.
Little signal boost: I’m organizing the Protocol Symposium in September, on the theme of New Nature. One day left for talk and workshop proposals (deadline, Sunday 14th June, midnight).
I don’t mind light gardening chores like watering the lawn or a spot of digging around, but it’s not my idea of relaxing fun. The wife though, has been drawn into the ceaseless global war of backyard gardeners against weeds and various critters that try to eat your produce. In our case, local wild bunnies, which she initially thought were cute but has now declared her sworn enemies. She is wishing death-by-coyote on them, but the local coyotes have so far not obliged. It’s nature red green in tooth and root in our backyard.
This essay is not about whatever “touching grass” is a metaphor for. I don’t know, probably some touchingly vulnerable thing like curing loneliness and alienation by seeking more non-parasocial IRL friendships and romance, with maybe a bit of actual outdoor time to regulate sleep better and mitigate the fatigue of too much screen time. Worthwhile life-hygiene things perhaps, but not particularly interesting to me. These are not problems I personally suffer, though I sympathize with those who do.
This essay is a little bit about literally touching grass, but it’s mainly about a complementary activity I’ll call touching time.
To literally touch grass in most parts of the world, especially in the sort of somatic-meditative mode the meme-phrase suggests, somebody probably needs to be fighting a deadly war against not-grass. Grass in a pure, monocultural form is not a natural thing.
I grew up mostly in single-family homes with lawns-equipped gardens and regular gardeners. My mom was an avid gardener, and remains one in her 80s (though now limited to a bunch of balcony plants in my parents retirement apartment). I enjoyed helping out with the lawn watering mainly because you could have fun playing games with the water.
Grass anywhere, in the sense suburbanites everywhere encounter it, is an extraordinarily unnatural thing, but it is particularly so in India. The tropics are not a natural habitat of temperate European lawn grasses, and it’s an uphill struggle against blazing sun alternating with torrential rain to keep lawns going. Tropical monsoon ecologies alternate between dry and dusty and lush and overgrown. Neither mode is lawn-friendly. The natural sort of curated domestic plant ecology is a fruit orchard plus herb garden full of small gods.
Grass is not natural in the Seattle area either, where I live now. The latitude is right, but it’s too wet. The natural ecology here is dense temperate rainforest full of sparkly vampires and werewolves.
But even in the form you might typically encounter it in its native habitat, grass in the sense of a lawn monoculture is a highly unnatural, authoritarian high-modernist Veblen good. The stylized expression of Euro-heritage billionaire atavism, not starving poet soul-salve that heals through touch. What is natural is the meadow, a wild multi-species ecology. And meadows are not that fun to touch, as you’d know if you’ve tried. The one time I tried was when I misguidedly tried to do a spot of orienteering in 2005, with a survey map in hand, on the outskirts of Ithaca. It was not fun.
Meadows harbor many itchy-scratchy-sneezy-creepy-crawly things. Hostility animal, vegetable, and mineral. The mix of grasses and other plants typically grows taller than a lawn (between knee and waist-high). And much of it is not the soft kind.
Laying on your back on a well-manicured suburban lawn, running your fingers through the cool grass, is fun. On a wild meadow, not so much. You’ll probably touch something unpleasantly pokey or bitey.
Between the wild meadow and the authoritarian high-modernist lawn, we have the heavily grazed pasture. That probably has horse and cow manure all over it.
Here is a picture of the grass I touched this morning. We just reseeded it a few weeks ago, and it’s already enduring an assault from some sort of weed species, probably buttercup, according to ChatGPT.
The very idea of a weed, of course, is an authoritarian high-modernist one, but my wife, an authoritarian high-modernist to the core, is planning a battle against it. Our lawn is going to be monoculturally legibilized in war mode whether it likes it or not. Darwin’s tangled bank is not permitted to enter. Wildflower meadow patches are for the weak-minded.
See, that’s the thing about actually, literally touching grass. Unless it’s someone else’s grass you’re free-riding on, you’re actually signing up to participate in a silent, never-ending war against meadowfication or forestification. Tangled-bankification. It is ceaseless, tiring hard work; a specialized kind of farming. If you want five minutes of grass-touching a day, you’ll probably need to spend an hour a day fighting the war to keep it available (or paying someone to fight it for you).
People meditatively posting about “agency” aren’t well-suited to doing it. In the US, this war is mostly waged by immigrant Mexican workers on behalf of people posting online about touching grass.
Grass of the sort that shapes the Western narrative imagination, whether of the naturalistic English garden variety, the formal French garden variety, or the golf-course variety, is fragile monocultural life maintained with grim determination against the encroaching pressures of wilder, more pluralist ecologies.
Yes, it’s pleasant to touch. No, it’s no more a natural experience than touching astroturf. Which actually isn’t bad. I enjoy astroturfed outdoor malls.
Touching meadows would probably be a better prescription for the times, but I doubt it will catch on.
My prefered form of interaction with nature is not ceaseless war-mode agentic striving to maintain authoritarian high-modernist gardens but walking and mild hiking through mildly challenging wilderness areas. Well, “wilderness” in the sense of human-adjacent zones of preservation with some well-maintained easy hiking trails through them. Actual wilderness (as in the deep interiors of national parks, far from well-maintained trails and campsites), which I’ve experienced a few times when I was younger and actively “seeking meaning” myself, is stressful in a whole different you-could-die way. I exhausted what little desire I had to test my wilderness survival instincts by age 22.
The thing about both gardening/farming and being in extreme wilderness is that they’re necessarily zones of inescapable high-intensity agency that you either have to take on yourself or pay someone else to. They are not spectator sports. Light hiking trails, on the other hand, enable more passive experiences. Somebody (preferably not me) still has to labor a bit, but it’s not as intense as farming, gardening, or cutting your way through deep wildernesses with a machete, keeping an eye open for jaguars. It’s not a warzone. It’s a sort of neighborly detente zone of engagement with minimally domesticated wilderness.
Over the past few decades, I’ve been fortunate enough to have nearly always lived near pleasant light-hiking trails. The one exception was a year in Austin, 2000-01. There, I lived in an unpleasant neighborhood next to big-box stores and highways. I don’t know whether there are any areas in Texas I could enjoy living in.
My favorite lightly domesticated wilderness was Ithaca, where my commute from downtown to my office on the Cornell campus was a hike up a trail next to a cascading waterfall.
What was nice about it was not touching grass, but touching time. Deep time. The gorges of Ithaca (the town’s slogan is Ithaca is Gorges) were carved out in the last ice age. Hiking around near Ithaca, you hike through deep time. Tens of thousands of years evident in the landscape. Millennia visible to the literate eye in the strata exposed by the retreating glaciers.
Mine is not a literate eye. I’m no geologist. But I can feel it in my gut when there is in-your-face deep time geology stuff going on, and I like it.
As a kid, my fondest memories of our backyard lawn is not of touching the grass, but of looking up at the stars. In high school, I’d regularly lug my cheap telescope out to the lawn to do a spot of star-gazing.
Now there’s an activity that’s almost entirely about touching time. The skies above offer zero room for human agency. Even trillionaire Musk, with his dreams of Mars colonies, has agency that amounts to a rounding error past zero relative to the cosmos. There’s basically nothing you can do with the heavens besides photograph them.
Not only is it all impossibly far away in space, largely beyond any sort of touching, the vast majority of it is also impossibly far away in time. The nearest star you see is 4.2 years in the past. The Vogons could have demolished it yesterday and we wouldn’t know.
The heavens are a sort of asymptotic zone of non-agency. You have only two choices in relation to them — ignore them entirely and refuse to learn about them (as the very practical Sherlock Holmes did), or treat them as a spectator sport (a very slow one; slower than cricket).
The only available attitude to the heavens demands not agency, but presence.
To a certain contemporary type, mere presence in the cosmos is an anxiety-provoking, even alarming state of being to contemplate. If they’re not aggressively making grand plans to construct Dyson spheres and generation ships headed to Alpha Centauri, they find the spatio-temporally distant read-only universe too distressing to even attend to.
Presence without agency is also the only way we can relate to the past. We can be present in memories, individual and collective. But we cannot alter the phenomenology that induced them. We can endlessly spin revisionist narratives, but we can’t alter the past itself.
This too, is anxiety provoking for the agency-anxious, and so they turn to notions of progress and predestination, trying to go beyond mere revisionist history to what we might call proofs of history: Authoring hoped-for futures in part to “prove” preferred pasts.
When I was younger, I enjoyed reading “Big Histories.” Now I no longer do. They’re all anxiously motivated revisionisms, simply by virtue of being Big. No story at that sort of scale can be told except in the form of a self-soothing fantasy.
Instead, I enjoy reading about specific periods and episodes. Little histories. I like my sense of the Big to emerge not through epic grand narratives, but as a sort of collage of deeper temporal dynamics revealed through many fragments coalescing into a sort of atomized encyclopedia of moments.
Little histories allow you to touch time in ways big histories don’t. That is their main advantage.
This doesn’t mean you have to immerse yourself in the sort of joyless grind of uninspired documentation that is much of scholarly history. There is plenty of little history that combines scholarly attention to detail with a sense of the poetry of time. Our book club is mostly about reading that sort of romantic little history. And if you harbor psychohistorical conceits as my world machines buddies and I do, I think the trick is to get at your Seldon Vault prophecies by touching time through little histories. Not self-indulgence in anxiously revisionist Big Histories.
You do need a certain amount of Big History reading as preparatory orientation for understanding little histories. If you survive the many perils of that kind of reading — historicism, progressology, ideology, theology, exceptionalism — what you end up with is a rough map on which to start placing the little histories you can begin collecting. My idea of Big History now is like an empty stamp album. Stamps are actually ideal motifs of little history. Every stamp usually tells some specific story (though not always the one it is trying to tell). The Big History is implicit in the organization of the collection, rather than explicated in an epic grand narrative.
Touching stamps is a good example of touching time. Touching time is about the physics of stamp collecting.
What I mean by touching time is this: A cognitive-sensory experience that has temporal depth in the frequency domain, with time constants ranging from seconds to millennia available to the attuned awareness to attend to. “Infinity in an hour” as William Blake put it.
Many experiences are temporally shallow. A well-manicured lawn, for example, is largely a war of short time constants between fast-growing grasses and roughly equally fast-growing weeds. Deeper, slower dynamics, as well as faster, shallower ones are present, but harder to become aware of and attend to. Hiking through a gorge with exposed strata, on the other hand, the depth of time is in your face. Time is thick enough to cut with a knife.
I think one undertheorized reason people feel the urge to touch grass is a sense of helplessness in relation to events at larger scales, in an era which urges us to cultivate agency in relation to everything.
To be is to do apparently. The only way our age knows of to merely be is to be somebody, which is a degenerate sort of doing, in the form of personhood performance in theaters of agency.
To merely be, in the sense of existing anonymously and idly in a universe over much of which you have zero agency, without either studiously ignoring it, or striving intensely to try and make it take special notice of you, is widely regarded as a disease.
Touching time is about rejecting that pathologization of banal, non-special presence, and choosing to exist in the cosmos without being somebody or doing something. Not because it’s some enlightened state of being (it just takes some laziness and mediocrity of disposition), but because it’s actually a very pleasant way of being.
I came up with an allegory for this.
Imagine you’re on a vast spaceship traveling in hyperdimensional space. You’re a normal human, so you can only intelligibly sense the regular four: three spatial dimensions plus time. But the ship itself is weaving in and out of many more curled-up dungeon dimensions, as Terry Pratchett dubbed them. Sometimes maneuvering aggressively, at other times cruising along.
You do, however, unintelligibly sense the other dimensions, all of them, in your gut. You are present in all dimensions as a full-dimensioned dungeon-dimensions creature rather than a four-dimensional limited one.
Your experience of the dungeon dimensions of the spaceship’s journey is the familiar one of nausea.
And you can regulate this nausea. Turns out, if you let your mind wander to abstract thoughts and intangible ideas, graspable only through words, the nausea increases. But if you retreat from abstraction and intangibility, the nausea goes down.
So naturally, a division appears between two groups of people on the ship.
The first group, unable to tolerate the nausea, retreats from it. And is so successful at retreating, it begins to doubt that the spaceship is in fact maneuvering in hyperdimensional space. It begins to believe the dungeon dimensions do not exist at all. That the ship in fact merely exists in 4d space and chugging along placidly in it. That the sensible thing to do is to stay grounded in things you can see and touch, such as the astroturf (heh!) covering much of the ship’s built environment.
The second group, with greater tolerance for the nausea, heads deeper into it, to try and experience the dungeon dimensions as fully as possible. To get past mere visceral feelings and vibes to consciously regulated intelligible experience. This group immerses itself in abstractions and intangibles as far as it can tolerate, and begins to make for itself dungeon-dimensional maps, with the spaceship’s estimated trajectories marked on it. Slowly, it begins to convince itself that not only are the dungeon dimensions real, but that its maps are accurate, and that it can reliably orient in and navigate them.
And naturally, a war begins to unfold between the two groups.
The spaceship, of course, is just Buckminster Fuller’s Spaceship Earth. And the two groups of course, are the grass-touchers and the abstract map-makers.
Touching time is how you bridge the divide between the two.
We are living through times when Spaceship Earth is maneuvering extraordinarily aggressively through the dungeon dimensions of hyperdimensional spacetime, even though in the three dimensions we can see, it is continuing its age-old orbit around the Sun, marking time at one year per orbit.
We all feel it in our guts. To retreat to touching grass is to surrender to a sense of the maneuverings of history being unsteerable. To retreat in the other direction to make endless maps is to mistake your comforting fictions for vast and limitless steering authority.
But to touch time is to feel your way into whatever steering authority you do have, without needing to retreat from everywhere you have none.
Some progress made this week.
§ For months, at least, I’ve been putting off updating my three Django websites to use uv to manage their versions of Python and third-party packages.
I’ve been using uv for development for ages, and like it a lot, but have never liked doing things on web servers because I don’t understand a lot of it and have no desire to learn more. Every time I thought, “OK, I’ll finally do this!” it was near the end of the day, or the end of the week, and I’d put it off in case I needed to call on Mythic Beasts’ support to rescue me. So I’d continue generating a requirements.txt every time I updated things with uv so that the live sites could continue using pip-tools.
But last week I updated this site, apparently successfully. It went too easily, with no errors at any point which always makes me uneasy. If a process I’m wary about generates no errors that’s usually a sign the change I was making hasn’t actually happened, and everything is quietly continuing to run as it did before.
So this week I changed the other two sites and, with the experience of the first site, they went even more smoothly. So that was either a fairly simple process I shouldn’t have put off for months or else it will all suddenly go wrong at some future point when a process realises everything has changed to a new, broken set-up.
§ In the garden I did another half hour of sledgehammering and crowbarring concrete from the old, broken pond. Not much left to go now in this initial exhausting stage of that big project.
Although I was relieved at the local builders’ merchant’s service last week, this week I went to collect my order and (a) they hadn’t sawn the timber by Tuesday as firmly promised, and (b) despite the helpful guy suggesting 300mm 2×2″ pegs for securing the timber edging, they don’t actually sell 300mm 2×2″ pegs so I ended up with 450mm 2×2″ pegs instead, which seem a bit over-the-top.
But over one morning and one afternoon I’ve made good progress on the edging, sawing the timber to correct lengths, hammering some of the pegs in, and screwing things together. I’m probably, vaguely, half-way through that part of the process now. I only cursed the extra length of those pegs for the final 50 or so extra whacks of the sledgehammer required to get them far enough in.
§ I had the lowest low point for a while on Friday, perhaps crashing after a couple of busy / slightly stressful days, and I gave up on thoughts of doing anything at all. It’s hard to know, on such a day, when I do nothing, whether I’m lazy, depressed, or “being kind to myself”. But it was the severest case of “what’s the point of doing anything?” I’ve had for a while, a high (or low?) bar to clear.
§ Some quick bits:
Cows are now in the field across the road, which we can see from the garden. Quite late compared to previous years, but always a nice site to occasionally see the black and white shapes move over the hill, and make quite a noise at breakfast and dinner times.
Although I am now retired I find it very hard to say this to strangers who ask what I do, continuing to say I’m a freelance web developer. It was all I could do not to put “retired” in quotes in that previous sentence, because it seems so ridiculous.
Related, this week I told my accountant I’d be going it alone from now on. Having closed my limited company a couple of years back, I figure it’ll now be simple enough for me to do tax returns myself.
Many years ago I made an RSS feed for Doonesbury. Eventually it stopped working and then so did the alternatives. Via Pete Ashton I recently discovered there’s now a working feed (repeats except for Sunday’s new strips) on ComicCaster.
Apart from when commenters are outraged that a cryptic crossword heavily features clues related to Taylor Swift or similar, I find it interesting when solvers haven’t heard of certain familiar-to-me words, while being happy with, say, obscure cricketing terms. So I was amused at Friday’s Cracking the Cryptic when he described “diptych” and “ha-ha” as terms he only knew from crosswords. The science/arts divide in action.
As well as Michael Barrymore my other favourite mature guy providing gentle uplifting TikTok content at the moment is Trevor Horn.
David Hockney passed away. I loved his photo montages when I came across them at university but the paintings never grabbed me until I went to the Tate Britain retrospective in 2017 (that long ago?!). So good. It’s like me not really getting Van Gogh’s work until going to the Van Gogh Museum and being blown away.
On Saturday I stubbed my toe on the bed leg so hard it was bent off to one side. Dislocated? I don’t know. After I’d finished swearing and moaning I clicked it back straight again, which is pretty much the same as a movie action hero re-setting their own broken arm. Today I am hobbling around gently. Idiot.
Years ago I liked taking photos of empty offices through their windows. While these are definitely out front, I guess they now qualify as “backrooms”?
§ I forgot to say last week that I went to my second Weirdshire gig: Dave Nock & Mike Bethel, an improvisatory guitar duo supporting benjin who played the nyckelharpa alongside field recordings and samples. All interesting, and it was nice to listen to all that while looking out at the the summer evening colours fade over the 15th century Wye Bridge and young people sitting outside chatting.
Last night I took Mum to see Emily Portman playing solo. As with the above, I’d never heard of her, and it was nice enough but a bit too “folky” for me.
§ We started The Pitt this week, watching the first two episodes back-to-back. As the credits rolled after the second I had something like a mini panic attack: tears, hard to breathe. I guess it was the accumulated stress of the whole thing alongside the storyline about siblings seeing their elderly dad reach the end of his life. A couple of years on that’s still very tough to think about at times. It’s difficult to see a photo of my familiar smiling Dad and realise that he’s no longer in the present, only the past.
§ We also finished the fourth and final season of My Brilliant Friend. It’s been four years since we saw the previous one and coupled with the new, older, actors, we were always struggling to recall previous events which was a shame. Watching all four series in closer succession would make for a much better experience but it was still good.
§ That’s all. Hold on everyone.
In an interplanetary first, on July 19, 2013
1. Chinese overtake Dominicans as NYC’s most numerous foreign-born group.
2. David Hockney embraced tech (NYT). And do not forget his writings, not to mention his persona and also his role in gay history and liberation. He was truly one of the great Englishmen, as he had been doing first-rate work since what, 1954?
3. Progress against lung cancer.
4. Average German date? And a six-minute video of a non-average German circus artist. And an eleven-year-old German on the handpan, without training.
5. Measuring how New Yorkers responded to their game 4 playoff victory. I have not seen data on game 5, though that was less of a surprise.
6. How The Bulwark is doing, and its economics (WSJ).
7. Become a telescope rancher those new service sector jobs (short video).
8. Bob Dylan (and others) on turning 80 (NYT). Dylan’s answer is clearly the best.
9. Paul Graham on how to become a billionaire.
The post Sunday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
No, I won’t be watching mixed martial arts on the White House lawn, the manmade spectacle ostensibly scheduled to mark the nation’s 250th or Donald Trump’s 80th birthday.
There is nothing about this hyped “special event” to find attractive, despite the recognition that MMA has become the nation’s third most-followed “sport.”
So were the lions eating gladiators at the Coliseum.
But as a unique perversion of what we expect from government and from a White House that is meant to sustain community values, this staged extravaganza has an undeniable lure for understanding just how we have slipped in ethical principles, poor taste, and perhaps even legal violations.
Citing a lack of legal standing, a federal judge declined to hear a late citizen lawsuit filed to halt or limit the events to allow private takeover of the Lincoln Memorial and the While House itself from a branded, private promotion of bloodsport, but it helped detail the many unpleasant truths about where we find ourselves in the seemingly constant need to glorify Trump in our name – as well as provide the Trumps with new money-making opportunities.
For openers, calling this $60-million, partisan and personalized ego-trip a special 250th spectacle for American democracy seems a parody. The official Fourth of July holiday with celebrations, concerts and fireworks specified as nonpartisan, open to the public, and built around an existing holiday meant to honor the country’s independence, is only two weeks away. Why wouldn’t that be the central focus for a 250th celebration?
So, even the premise of a need for a separate White House event, even if largely underwritten by corporations seeking government contracts, is bogus.
Then there was the parade of third-tier performers deserting the effort when they learned that their would-be patriotic appearances for America would be turned into personal partisan hugs for Trump, prompting Trump to offer himself and a wandering campaign-style speech instead.
It turns out that Trump, who invested in the parent company of the for-profit Ultimate Fighting Championship presentation just before announcement of the event, stands to gain personally from its promotion – a birthday present to himself delivered in our name. And the Trump family is issuing a series of commemorative coins with the heads of Trump and CEO Dana White of UFC for between $250 and $12,000 each. Grift is never far away for this White House.
Plus, paying for much, but not all, the costs are corporate donations with labeled banners from companies donating a million bucks a pop for what would pass as payoff tribute anywhere outside this White House. Along with million-dollar viewing packages for corporate buyers, the event has become a celebration of values antithetical to the purpose of government or our appropriate regulation of corporate power.
It’ll be televised only by subscription cable networks run by the same people who have taken over CBS and maybe CNN and have vowed to make editorial changes to satisfy the same Trump who controls whether they get federal approval for pending corporate mergers.
There is the unprecedented access that Trump is giving to the UFC entrepreneurs to run their promotional campaigns through the White House and Lincoln Memorial, and then to control tightly who can attend – including members of the military selected for their adherence to Trump’s idea of an acceptably fit physique, another crazy aspect of the Trump personal agenda that his own body certainly could not fit.
At the center of all this – inside a giant, newly constructed octagonal caged ring – will be seven no-holds barred male fighting couples. What does this have to do with America and its 250 years of democracy? What does it have to do with Trump’s love for bloodsport, so long as someone else is bleeding? What does it say about what he values in America?
A Reuters/Ipsos poll says that only 16% of Americans approve of holding a cage match at the presidential residence. There have always been sporting and arts events at the White House, of course, but nearly all have been low-contact affairs from tennis and softball to Easter egg rolls, and mostly all for kids. In 1926, a prizefight was held to help revive the 150th national birthday between a boxing champion and U.S. Marine veteran — who won.
Young men seem to be drawn to MMA, a highly violent sport whose goal is to physically incapacitate an opponent with fairly broad rules. They say MMA it offers an outlet for stress, a path to physical and mental resilience, and a space for authentic achievement. Politically, it is this “manosphere” that helped fuel Trump’s election.
MMA also appeals to White supremacists and carries a tinge of racism lingering from days in which slaves were required to fight one another in gladiator style.
But beyond the violent aspect of this cage fight, 6 in 10 adults say the country’s best years are behind it, few believe it is exceptional, and the president’s disapproval rating is historically high. Promoter Trump has pitched these matches as a source of national pride, showing once again his detachment from a world much more worried about economics, identity and health care than he recognizes.
“FREEDOM OF THE PRESS IS NOT JUST IMPORTANT TO DEMOCRACY, IT IS DEMOCRACY.” – Walter Cronkite. CLICK HERE to donate in support of our free and independent voice.
The post Caged Heat appeared first on DCReport.org.
…two weeks of Mad Biologist posts:
Nothing Good Happens Without Ending the Filibuster and Court Reform
What Has the Guard Surge Actually Done for D.C.?
Another Great Week for D.C. Crime Stats
It Always Has to Be About Trump
The Political Press Corps Still Does Not Understand What the Epstein Files Mean for MAGA
Coming up this week.
The 2026 Lecture in Memory of Nora Szech (1980-2023) will be given by Klaus Schmidt (Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich).
Nageeb Ali, Penn State University
Mira Frick, Princeton University
Guillaume Haeringer, Baruch College
Ilan Kremer, University of Warwick
Philippos Louis, University of Cyprus
Justus Preusser, Bocconi University
Agathe Pernoud, Chicago Booth
Cyril Rouault, GRANEM, University of Angers and Centre for Economics at Paris-Saclay
Anna Sanktjohanser, Toulouse School of Economics
Klaus Schmidt, Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich
Nikhil Vellodi, Paris School of Economics
Maren Vairo, University of Pennsylvania
Nina Bobkova, Rice University
Olivier Bos, ENS Paris-Saclay, Centre for Economics at Paris-Saclay
Nicolas Fugger, University of Cologne & ZEW Mannheim
Daniil Larionov, University of Munster
Marion Ott, ZEW Mannheim
Xiangyu Qu, Unviersity Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne
Kevin Bryan riffs on on my post The Nationalization of American Science. He is rightfully incensed:
AT is right this is a red tape-filled science policy of “losers”. If you think “cut funds from DEI-driven professors in the small departments no one cares about” is more important than “make sure the world’s strongest fundamental science continues”, you’re an idiot.
And yes, this is also the policy of “right-wing JD-brain” folks. They haven’t worked in a lab. They don’t know how we got AI, and recent cancer breakthroughs, and on and on. It’s all culture war, all the time – just the right-wing equivalent of the worst left-wing habits.
One last thing: I *hate* the term “administration priorities” or “President’s priorities”. Totally Unamerican! The President *executes* the law created by Congress, who represent the people, and who see turnover every two years. Period. “Oh, but Democrats do this too!” Grow up!
Owning the libs may feel good today but please look just one move ahead in the game tree. When AOC controls the executive branch, she will inherit every tool Trump normalized. Look a few moves further and see the damage to American institutions.
The culture war is a civil war. If we don’t end it, American science will be collateral damage.
The post The Cultural War is a Civil War appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Start with the most important number in economics, even though no one on Wall Street talks about it: calories per acre. Human civilization runs on food. Ten billion people will inhabit this planet by 2050. The amount of arable land is not growing. It is shrinking, every year, to urbanization, desertification, salinization, and topsoil erosion. The countries that can grow food at scale will be the most strategically valuable territories on earth. The countries with the best apps and the most PhDs will depend on the countries with the best dirt.
Brazil has more unused arable land than any country on earth. That sentence alone should stop every allocator in their tracks. It means that Brazil can approximately double its total cultivated area, without touching a single hectare of the Amazon, simply by converting degraded pasturelands in the Cerrado and other biomes into productive cropland using technology that already exists.
No other agricultural superpower has this headroom. The United States is fully utilized. China is losing farmland to urbanization at a rate that should terrify its central planners. India’s agricultural productivity gains are hitting diminishing returns against water stress and soil degradation. Europe is hemmed in by geography and regulation. Sub-Saharan Africa has theoretical potential, but lacks the roads, the ports, the legal frameworks, and the capital to exploit it within a generation.
Brazil is already the world’s largest net food exporter. It leads the world in soybeans, coffee, sugar, orange juice, beef, and poultry. It is the second-largest exporter of corn, pork, and ethanol, and recently surpassed the United States as the largest cotton exporter. Agribusiness generates approximately 25% of GDP and more than 40% of export revenue. And the agricultural sector has been growing productivity at 3-4% per year for two decades straight, driven by Embrapa’s tropical soil science, satellite-guided precision agriculture, and the industrialization of protein supply chains that stretch from feedlots in Mato Grosso to dinner tables in Shanghai.
A single farm in Mato Grosso can be more than twice the size of the state of Rhode Island. A literal fact. The Bom Futuro Group cultivates more than 700,000 hectares (roughly 2,700 square miles) of soybeans, corn, and cotton across 35 production units. This is farming at a scale that American and European investors cannot easily conceptualize, operating with GPS-guided machinery, drone monitoring, and soil analytics that rival anything in Iowa, but across an area that dwarfs it.
The post is interesting throughout and offers further points of interest.
The post The bullish case for Brazil appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Major Projects and ODOT’s Financial Crisis
Joe Cortright’s Testimony to the Oregon Transportation Commission
June 11, 2026
Good morning, commissioners. Thank you for the opportunity to testify.
For the record, I’m Joe Cortright, Director of City Observatory. Today, I want to address the major projects item on your agenda.
ODOT’s budget crisis has essentially nothing to do with increasing fuel efficiency, which has a negligible impact on revenue. Instead, the real crisis stems from ODOT’s systemic inability to accurately forecast and manage the costs of major projects. Major ODOT projects routinely run double or triple their original cost estimates, adding costing us billions. Given the massive commitments, ODOT is bordering on financial insolvency.
The department routinely fails to estimate costs accurately, fails to manage those costs once started, and has created an environment where everyone—staff, consultants and contractors know ODOT will simply add more money later. This leads to artificially low initial estimates.
And tragically, this commission makes these problems worse by moving ahead with projects for which it doesn’t have full funding.
The Abernethy Bridge Project: A Case Study in Rewriting History
Look no further than the Abernethy project, where today you are being asked to allocate an additional $130 million to address liquefaction around bridge piers.
ODOT staff recently told the Legislative Oversight Committee that the original I-205 estimate was just a “slapdash” figure that couldn’t be trusted. That is a rewrite of history. As directed by House Bill 2017, the department spent $12.5 million over six months on a cost-to-complete study before the project was approved by this commission. Consultants advanced the design to 15-25%—the exact same stage the Interstate Bridge is in right now—and estimated the cost at $248 million.
As you know the price tag has tripled to more $815 million and project completion will now likely take until 2030—five years behind schedule.
Systemic Failures: The Interstate Bridge Project
The same pattern plagues the Interstate Bridge Project. You have already spent $270 million on consultants. The Environmental Impact Statement took two years longer than promised, and IBR delayed the cost estimate by two years, during which it more than doubled to nearly $15 billion. Now, the plan is to drag construction out into the late 2040s, while building an additional $1.2 billion into the budget just for consultant oversight. The longer the project takes, the more money they make.
A Misleading Staff Report
Finally, your staff’s report on major projects fundamentally understates your actual liabilities. You actually have published cost estimates that show several projects will cost much more than shown here. The 2024 estimate for the I-205 Phase 2, is $800 million and the Newberg Dundee Bypass is $950 million, both are characterized as “greater than $500 million.” Your 2025 cost estimate for the Boone Bridge is $725 million, triple the “greater than $250 million” shown. Alarmingly, the report entirely omits Interstate Bridge project entirely, hiding Oregon’s share of about $10 billion in unfunded costs. This is more evidence of the misleading staff work that is the underlying cause of the major project financial crisis.
What ODOT Staff showed:
The real financial liability is much greater
Conclusion
Commissioners, you cannot solve a problem you refuse to admit you have. ODOT’s primary financial problem is its inability to manage major project costs. You must pivot your energy toward solving this internal management crisis if you hope to address ODOT’s budget problems.
About a month ago, I weighed in on an interesting debate over American vs. European living standards.
On one side, you have people who argue that Europe is much poorer than America, and is falling even further behind. Most of the people making this argument are Europeans themselves — especially economists like Mario Draghi, Philippe Aghion, Luis Garicano, and Antonin Bergeaud. They look with envy on the U.S. tech sector, which Europe has no real equivalent to, and they yearn for liberalizing reforms that would allow Europe to catch up.
On the other side, you have American liberals like Paul Krugman and Brad DeLong. They argue that Europe is not falling behind — that most of the gap in material living standards is due to Americans working more, and that America’s apparently faster productivity growth is an artifact of the way relative growth rates are measured.
This is an interesting debate, and in the end it comes down to some surprisingly technical measurement issues and data mysteries. I’ll have more to say on it in the future. But it’s really just the most recent exchange in a long-running debate over the “varieties of capitalism” — whether Europe’s stronger welfare and regulatory states deliver better outcomes for regular people, or whether America’s more free-market system is superior. I don’t think that debate is close to being settled — and may never be settled, since liberalizing reforms in Europe and expansions of welfare and regulation in America may shrink the differences between the two systems.
But there’s a second debate going on regarding Europe’s economy, with potentially far more devastating consequences. It’s the question of whether Europeans should be rich at all.
Instead of crowing about the superior performance of the European social model, leftist economists are increasingly arguing that Europeans are too rich, and ought to be poorer than they are. This was the upshot of a manifesto by Thomas Piketty and his World Inequality Lab, which I covered in my last roundup post. Piketty argued that “labour hour reductions, growth caps in rich countries, less material consumption, and changes in food habits” will be needed in order to beat climate change:
This is also the argument in a recent Guardian editorial by Piketty, Olivier De Schutter, Joseph Stiglitz, Jayati Ghosh, Kate Raworth, and Jason Hickel:
We live in an age of manufactured scarcity. In a world richer than ever before, roughly one 10th of the world’s population still lives in extreme destitution…
For decades, the recipe was simple: grow the economy, and poverty would gradually disappear. But the promise that economic growth would “lift all boats” has not been kept. While national incomes expanded, wages stagnated, work became more precarious and public services were cut. At the top, fortunes ballooned; at the bottom, families turned to food banks. Growth has become decoupled from shared prosperity…It has also become ecologically unsustainable…That is why we have come together to develop and support the “roadmap for eradicating poverty beyond growth”.
The essay — which was immediately identified by Pangram as being 100% AI-generated — was extremely vague on its plans for transforming the global economy. It often reads like a mishmash of buzzwords and slogans. Here’s a taste:
The real question today is not whether growth continues, but what kind of economies we are building, who they serve and whether they allow everyone to live in dignity within planetary boundaries…[W]e are united in the conviction that our economies must be redesigned around the fulfilment of rights and collective wellbeing within planetary boundaries, rather than maximising output at any cost. Human rights here are not an afterthought; they are the organising principle for how we measure progress, set priorities and resolve trade‑offs…All too often, policies affecting people in poverty are designed without them – and sometimes against them. When welfare systems are built around suspicion, sanctions and humiliating conditions, they deepen stigma and deter people from claiming their entitlements.
…And so on. In fact, this is pretty typical of degrowther writing. If you read their “research” papers, it’s also a bunch of stuff like this. Consider this excerpt from “Exploring degrowth policy proposals: A systematic mapping with thematic synthesis”, by Fitzpatrick et al. (2022), published in the Journal of Cleaner Production:
Degrowth is a multi-layered concept…It combines critiques of capitalism…colonialism…patriarchy…productivism…and utilitarianism…whilst envisioning more caring…just…convivial…happy…and democratic societies…Capturing the essence of degrowth is difficult because it carries at least three denotations…degrowth as decline of environmental pressures…degrowth as emancipation from certain ideologies deemed undesirable, like extractivism, neoliberalism, and consumerism; and...degrowth as a utopian destination, a society grounded in autonomy, sufficiency, and care.
Honestly, whatever AI wrote the Guardian op-ed did a better job than Fitzpatrick et al.
In fact, there’s a reason degrowthers write like this. They see degrowth as a grand project to unify and reinvigorate the political left — a Big Idea to fill the hole left by the collapse of communism in the 20th century. Each buzzword or stock phrase is a shout-out to a particular faction of the European left — “decolonial” leftists angry about colonialism, climate activists, old-line socialists still angry about “neoclassical economics”, unionists who want job guarantees, social democrats who care about housing and education and welfare, and so on. Leftism is famous for factional infighting over differences in doctrine and focus; the degrowthers want everyone on the left to know that they’re building the biggest of big tents.
But in practice, what unites the degrowthers is their conviction that Europeans ought to be poorer. The Guardian op-ed makes it clear that the postwar European social model is not enough:
Social protection and public services are essential, but they cannot indefinitely compensate for economies that by design generate poverty wages, insecure jobs and unaffordable housing.
Why do I say “Europeans ought to be poorer”, instead of “Westerners ought to be poorer”? Obviously, the degrowthers would love it if America also degrew. But in practice, no one in the U.S. is signing on to this agenda. American leftists dream of Green New Deals and government-funded megaprojects like high-speed rail. Progressives are focused on breaking up big companies in order to ensure free-market competition. Liberals like Krugman value living standards intrinsically — they trumpet the European model precisely because they think it makes average Europeans rich.
Degrowth has also notably failed to win much traction in Canada or Australia. Nor have rich countries in Asia shown any interest. Developing countries ignore the idea as well, trusting more in their ability to grow their own economies than in the promise of massive transfers from the Global North.
This is why in practice, the only people who are interested in degrowth are Europeans. The idea’s main proponents — Piketty, Jason Hickel, Kate Raworth, Timothée Parrique, and so on — are all Europeans.1 The degrowth conferences are mostly in Europe. Degrowth literature reviews show that it’s a “predominantly European movement”. The EU is the only government that has shown much interest in degrowth.
In other words, when degrowthers call for the “Global North” to make itself poorer for the sake of the planet — or for the sake of any number of other causes — they’re functionally addressing their message to Europe. Degrowth is a movement for European impoverishment.
It’s important to note how astonishing of a shift this is from the pitch leftists made a hundred years ago. Communism was supposed to be about abundance — the idea that central planning could out-produce the capitalist system, ensuring not just military might, but better material living standards for regular people. In the 1950s, Western leftists praised the growth “miracle” of the Soviet Union (and, occasionally, North Korea). Even back in 2006, Joseph Stiglitz — one of the few American authors of the Guardian article — praised Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela for supposedly promoting “higher growth”.
That famously didn’t work out, of course. The Soviet Union, North Korea, and post-Chavez Venezuela are not exactly places that we associate with widespread material abundance and successful economic development. But in the wake of that colossal failure, the European left is switching its sales pitch. Yes, the new line goes, leftism will make you poorer — but that’s a good thing, because you deserve it for the sins of colonialism, because it’ll be good for the climate, and because you really don’t need all those consumer goods anyway.
Astonishing.
Of course, as anyone following the saga of the degrowth movement knows, it’s pure snake oil — a whirlwind of factual distortions and poor scholarship that would make any serious researcher blush. When economists have read through the degrowth literature, they have found it to mostly be repetitions of the same old buzzwords, empty rhetoric, and unsupported assertions. Savin and van den Bergh (2024) write:
In the last decade many publications have appeared on degrowth as a strategy to confront environmental and social problems. We undertake a systematic review of their content, data and methods…Based on a sample of 561 studies we conclude that: (1) content covers 11 main topics; (2) the large majority (almost 90%) of studies are opinions rather than analysis; (3) few studies use quantitative or qualitative data, and even fewer ones use formal modelling; (4) the first and second type tend to include small samples or focus on non-representative cases; (5) most studies offer ad hoc and subjective policy advice, lacking policy evaluation and integration with insights from the literature on environmental/climate policies; (6) of the few studies on public support, a majority concludes that degrowth strategies and policies are socially-politically infeasible; (7) various studies represent a “reverse causality” confusion, i.e. use the term degrowth not for a deliberate strategy but to denote economic decline (in GDP terms) resulting from exogenous factors or public policies; (8) few studies adopt a system-wide perspective – instead most focus on small, local cases without a clear implication for the economy as a whole. We illustrate each of these findings for concrete studies.
A few economists, like Vincent Geloso, have done yeoman’s work studying and rebutting the claims of Jason Hickel, Kate Raworth, and other degrowthers:
I myself, of course, have written about Hickel’s ideas and reviewed Raworth’s book, and I’ve come to the same conclusions that Geloso has.
This pattern of intellectual sloppiness and utter disregard for the data is evident in the Guardian op-ed. “We’ve done the maths”, the headline proclaims, but neither the article nor the “roadmap” it promotes contain any math. The statement that “growth has become decoupled from shared prosperity” is simply false; the evidence is unequivocal that growth is good for the poor. No matter how you measure poverty, there is no country that has escaped poverty without growth, and there is no country that has substantial amounts of poverty after growth has occurred:
This relationship works in reverse, too. If degrowth gets serious purchase in European policymaking, regular Europeans will suffer. In keeping with degrowth’s mission to unite the entire political left, the Guardian op-ed promises all kinds of middle-class goodies: “investing in children, housing, health, education and transport through universal public provisioning”. As the authors surely know — and as any cursory attempt at actual “maths” would have easily shown — this will be utterly impossible if European countries are forced to degrow.
In other words, even as American conservatives look down their noses at “Europoors”, and liberals try to debunk the “Europoor” notion, European leftists are hard at work trying to make “Europoors” a reality.
But that’s not the only reason the degrowth program is pernicious. Right now, with America having turned inward in a spasm of rightist isolationism, Europe is one of the few remaining champions of the ideals of universal human rights set forth in the post-WW2 global order — a lonely, beleagured bulwark against the likes of Russia and China.
Right now, Europe is facing a dire military threat. Although economically and demographically it overmatches Russia, its militaries do not yet know how to use drones — and Russia’s does. Furthermore, Europe’s supply chains are utterly dependent on Chinese parts and materials; if China decides to cut Europe off during a Russian attack, while continuing to furnish Russia with everything it needs, Russia would have a good chance of triumphing.
In addition, European industry is facing a dire economic threat. Its manufacturers are bearing the brunt of the Second China Shock — the wave of massively subsidized exports that China is using to try to prop up its slowing domestic economy. This comes on top of the cutoff of Russian energy and Trump’s tariffs.
To embrace the poisonous nonsense of degrowth now — to shut down nuclear power plants, to regulate the AI industry out of existence, to forcibly shorten working hours, to bar the construction of houses and factories, etc. — would be to cripple one of the last few remaining economic engines of the free world, at precisely the time when it’s under its greatest external challenge.2
In other words, there has never been a better time to ignore the pronouncements of Thomas Piketty, Joseph Stiglitz, and the other rogue economists who want to turn “Europoor” from a slur into a grim reality.
I’m counting the UK as Europe. Sorry, Brexiteers.
One suspects that degrowthers know this, and that the anti-Westernism that has always animated far-left movements is an unspoken but important motivating force behind the movement.
Today was the deadline set by Judge Christopher R. Cooper of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia for Donald Trump’s name to come off the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts, more commonly known as the Kennedy Center.
In his ruling of May 29, Cooper noted that “Congress gave the Kennedy Center its name, and only Congress can change it,” and Congress stipulated that “no additional memorials or plaques in the nature of memorials shall be designated or installed in the public areas” of the Kennedy Center.
As soon as he took office in early 2025, Trump replaced trustees on the Kennedy Center board and appointed himself a trustee as well. Now weighted with loyalists, the board elected Trump chair and then replaced the president of the Kennedy Center. Then the board voted to change the center’s bylaws to concentrate their own power. Then, in December, the board voted to rename the Kennedy Center the “Trump Kennedy Center,” and the name went up over the Kennedy Center portico the next day.
Representative Joyce Beatty (D-OH), who as an ex officio member of the center’s board had been sidelined, sued to stop the renaming and won. Cooper ordered Trump’s name to be taken off the building, all signage, stationery, merchandise, and so on, before midnight tonight.
At first, the Kennedy Center seemed willing to comply, removing Trump’s name from its website and YouTube page, but that cooperation changed yesterday, when the board voted to launch a last-minute appeal to the removal order. Hours later, the lawyers from the Justice Department filed a notice of appeal. They asked for a stay on the judge’s order to remove Trump’s name from the building, saying the board would be “forced to squander time and money” if the appeals court decides in its favor and that it “would be incredibly confusing for the public” if, in the end, Trump’s name went back up after coming down.
Cooper decided against them, saying they had not shown they would win their appeal on its merits. He said staying the order “would not be in the public interest, which is rarely served by the ‘perpetuation’ of ‘unlawful’ governmental action.”
Late this afternoon, the board of the Kennedy Center filed an emergency appeal to the D.C. Circuit Court, asking for a stay in the order to remove Trump’s name from the Kennedy Center. It was, perhaps, hasty work. Legal analyst Liz Dye called it “bonkity-bonkers, while lawyer Norm Eisen of The Contrarian went for “batsh** crazy” and noted that Trump “clearly wrote big pieces himself.”
For the first time, the board alleged that “The Bylaws of The Trump Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts Foundation state, unequivocally,” that the board must strip all funding from the Kennedy Center unless Trump’s name stays on it. Dye notes: “If the bylaws were amended, they were amended since Judge Cooper issued his order—prob[ably] yesterday. This is the Board choking off funds and saying ‘you have to let us break the law, or we’ll lose all the funds.’”
According to a lawsuit filed yesterday by the Washington National Opera, about $17 million of the money Trump appears to be claiming from the Kennedy Center belongs to the Washington National Opera. For fifteen years, the suit says, the opera and the Kennedy Center had a contractual relationship, in which the center managed donations to the Washington National Opera for the opera’s benefit.
“By the second half of 2025, the Kennedy Center stopped performing many of its obligations under the governing affiliation agreement, including marketing, fundraising, and administrative support, as well as timely reporting on the growth of WNO’s funds,” the suit says. “Despite repeated requests from WNO, the Kennedy Center did not remedy its non-performance. Instead, it proposed that the parties end their long-standing affiliation. That affiliation came to an end in January 2026.”
And then the Kennedy Center refused to return the WNO’s money, instead using it as collateral for its own line of credit.
Yesterday Toni Aguilar Rosenthal of the Revolving Door Project and Alan Zibel of Public Citizen did a deep dive into Trump’s determination to turn other people’s money to his own service.
They note that Trump and his allies seized the funds Congress appropriated for celebrations to honor the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence and have “awarded nearly $103 million in federal contracts and grants…to politicized entities under the control of Trump administration officials and political allies”—nearly 80% of the $126 million of funding for the semiquincentenary celebrations. Private funding, including from corporations with issues in front of the administration, have also poured money into Trump’s events.
Dan Diamond of the Washington Post reported on Wednesday that the administration is hoping to complete Trump’s 250-foot-tall triumphal arch before he leaves office. To do so, they are anticipating keeping work going 20 hours a day. They say they do not need congressional approval. Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) has asked officials from the National Park Service to explain and to justify why they are ignoring normal rules for federal contracting and instead handing out no-bid contracts, saying the project is “urgent.”
Yesterday Ashleigh Fields of The Hill reported that federal agencies and Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) are putting at least $60 million toward the White House cage fight on Trump’s 80th birthday Sunday. That money has paid for the fighting arena on the South Lawn of the White House, as well as paying up to 900 workers since May 20.
A political activist and military veteran from Virginia tried to stop the event from proceeding, calling it a “deeply corrupt” event that uses national monuments to shill for private businesses, in at least one of which—UFC’s parent company TKO Holding Group—Trump owns significant amounts of stock. They noted that although Trump used the 250th anniversary to justify ignoring environmental review and congressional approval, the event is clearly designed not for the nation’s birthday, but for his own.
Today Judge Amit P. Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia rejected the lawsuit, saying that the Virginians did not have standing to challenge the UFC fight and that the time and money invested in the event outweighed any temporary harm they suffered.
On social media today, Trump posted images of the horses statues behind the Lincoln Memorial being freshly gilded, and wrote: “Re-gilding of the massive Arts of War sculptures, located between The Lincoln Memorial and site of The Triumphal Arch, rapidly continues. The sculptures will be fully regilded by July 3. The photos were taken yesterday. The Gilders’ Studio has flown in Gilders from around the Country to perform this work!”
Yesterday Edwin Heathcote of the Financial Times reported on how former prime minister of Hungary Victor Orbán used architecture to reinforce the idea that his government was rebuilding former glories, while new prime minister, Péter Magyar is contrasting the palaces Orbán built to the crumbling hospitals and children’s homes around the country, where there was no money for toilet paper. The contrast between the gilded palaces of Orbán and his cronies and the poverty in which everyday Hungarians lived was key to the popular uprising that toppled Orbán’s government and put Magyar’s in place.
Today Elon Musk, who poured more than $290 million into the 2024 election to elect Trump and other Republicans, became the world’s first trillionaire—on paper, at least—when shares of his rocket company SpaceX were offered to the public.
Tonight the appeals court denied Trump’s emergency motion. Observers waiting at the Kennedy Center noted that a rainbow broke out over the building shortly after the decision. Although the letters for Trump’s name went up in hours, attached by workers on scissor lifts, taking them down involved so much scaffolding and so many hours that the United States government missed the court-imposed deadline.
The Department of Justice said the letters would come down “in the early hours of the morning of June 13,” presumably when there would not be the huge audience that has been watching the removal all day either in person or on livestream, and asked the court for twelve more hours to comply with the court order.
—
Notes:
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.287972/gov.uscourts.dcd.287972.50.0_1.pdf
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5921158-kennedy-center-appeals-trump-name-removal/
https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/5922184-judge-rejects-kennedy-center-trump-name-appeal/
https://www.ms.now/news/judge-denies-kennedy-center-boards-request-to-keep-trumps-name
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/uae-unlock-billions-dollars-iran-sources-say-2026-06-12/
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.uscfc.54456/gov.uscourts.uscfc.54456.1.0.pdf
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/kennedy-center-trump-name-judge/
https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/7319008/2026/05/29/trump-white-house-ufc-fight-stock/
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.293217/gov.uscourts.dcd.293217.11.0.pdf
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/06/12/judge-blocks-ufc-event-lawsuit-00960727
https://www.ft.com/content/5f7d1905-1907-4bf3-a45f-c45aa9618697?syn-25a6b1a6=1
https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/01/politics/elon-musk-2024-election-spending-millions
https://www.npr.org/2025/12/18/nx-s1-5648519/kennedy-center-name-change-trump
Bluesky:
lizdye.bsky.social/post/3mo4ky6pbgk26
normeisen.bsky.social/post/3mo4mrpr5l22k
normeisen.bsky.social/post/3mo4uvouzts2k
macfarlanenews.bsky.social/post/3mo4v2rgvsk2t
chrisgeidner.bsky.social/post/3mo4vbsrwqc2f
atrupar.com/post/3mo44wb6c5c2l
normeisen.bsky.social/post/3mo4xhae3is2o
Up and betimes to Thames Street among the tarr men, to look the price of tarr and so by water to Whitehall thinking to speak with Sir G. Carteret, but he lying in the city all night, and meeting with Mr. Cutler the merchant, I with him in his coach into the city to Sir G. Carteret, but missing him there, he and I walked to find him at Sir Tho. Allen’s in Bread Street, where not finding him he and I walked towards our office, he discoursing well of the business of the Navy, and particularly of the victualling, in which he was once I perceive concerned, and he and I parted and I to the office and there had a difference with Sir W. Batten about Mr. Bowyer’s tarr, which I am resolved to cross, though he sent me last night, as a bribe, a barrel of sturgeon, which, it may be, I shall send back, for I will not have the King abused so abominably in the price of what we buy, by Sir W. Batten’s corruption and underhand dealing. So from the office, Mr. Wayth with me, to the Parliament House, and there I spoke and told Sir G. Carteret all, with which he is well pleased, and do recall his willingness yesterday, it seems, to Sir W. Batten, that we should buy a great quantity of tarr, being abused by him.
Thence with Mr. Wayth after drinking a cupp of ale at the Swan, talking of the corruption of the Navy, by water. I landed him at Whitefriars, and I to the Exchange, and so home to dinner, where I found my wife’s brother, and thence after dinner by water to the Royall Theatre, where I resolved to bid farewell, as shall appear by my oaths tomorrow against all plays either at publique houses or Court till Christmas be over.
Here we saw “The Faithfull Sheepheardesse,” a most simple thing, and yet much thronged after, and often shown, but it is only for the scenes’ sake, which is very fine indeed and worth seeing; but I am quite out of opinion with any of their actings, but Lacy’s, compared with the other house.
Thence to see Mrs. Hunt, which we did and were much made of; and in our way saw my Lady Castlemaine, who, I fear, is not so handsome as I have taken her for, and now she begins to decay something. This is my wife’s opinion also, for which I am sorry. Thence by coach, with a mad coachman, that drove like mad, and down byeways, through Bucklersbury home, everybody through the street cursing him, being ready to run over them. So home, and after writing letters by the post, home to supper and bed.
Yesterday, upon conference with the King in the Banqueting House, the Parliament did agree with much ado, it being carried but by forty-two voices, that they would supply him with a sum of money; but what and how is not yet known, but expected to be done with great disputes the next week. But if done at all, it is well.
From Apple’s Developer site:
To ensure getting started with a large cloud model is as accessible as possible, developers in the App Store Small Business Program with fewer than two million first time App Store downloads will be able to use Apple Foundation Models running on Private Cloud Compute (PCC) with no cloud API cost. The model provides access to frontier level intelligence with unparalleled privacy protections. This makes it easy for small developers to get started building intelligent app experiences without upfront infrastructure costs.
Eligibility requirements
Access to PCC is available to developers who meet the following criteria:
- Are enrolled in the App Store Small Business Program.
- Have fewer than 2 million first-time app downloads from any of their apps on the App Store.
- Have the Private Cloud Compute entitlement assigned to their account.
Where Apple Intelligence is available, eligible developers can use PCC in their apps distributed on the App Store, and test PCC features via TestFlight or ad hoc distribution. Installs during testing are not counted as first-time app downloads.
If any app subsequently exceeds the 2 million first-time downloads threshold, or the developer is no longer enrolled in the App Store Small Business Program, the developer will be notified and must migrate to an alternative solution within 6 months. Information about first-time downloads is available in Analytics in App Store Connect.
These strict limits don’t seem to be getting as much attention as they should. It’s nice that for small developers who meet the above criteria, access to PCC has no cost. But there’s no way (yet?) to buy your way out of these limits. There are no paid API tiers for larger developers who exceed the above limits, or for developers who qualify now but release a hit app that grows to exceed them. (Users who pay for iCloud+ don’t have any extra quotas for PCC usage in third-party apps either.)
The “fewer than 2 million first-time app downloads from any of their apps” restriction is particularly notable. It’s not 2 million installations for apps that are using PCC, but 2 million downloads for any app the developer has ever released. Developer Gui Rambo writes:
So uhhhh… Apple should really rethink the Private Cloud Compute developer access limitation. I do happen to have an app that’s had more than 2 million downloads. That app is ChibiStudio, an app that’s been in the App Store for over 10 years. It’s not like I’m getting a million new users every year nowadays. And I’m also not making any real money with it 🥲
The bottom line is that — for the OS 27 cycle at least — PCC is primarily a feature for Apple itself to use in Siri AI. Granting access to PCC to any third-party developers at all is better than nothing, but this 2-million-download cap cuts off many developers who are in the Small Business Program. Apple should reconsider that. And I know there are a lot of developers who exceed the eligibility for the Small Business Program who would love to have access to the PCC APIs, even if access was paid. The lack of paid tiers says to me that Apple is worried enough about meeting demand from Siri AI users alone.
Recorded in front of a live audience at The California Theatre in San Jose on Tuesday 9 June 2026, special guests Joanna Stern and Nilay Patel join John Gruber to discuss Apple’s announcements at WWDC 2026.
Immersive 3D video with spatial audio: Coming soon, exclusively in Sandwich Vision’s Theater on Vision Pro, available on the App Store. The bandwidth-constrained immersive livestream Tuesday night looked cool; the on-demand version coming in a few days will look amazing.
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Watch on a big screen if you can (real, or virtual). All credit and thanks for the video production go to my friends at Sandwich, who, as ever, are nothing short of a joy to work with.
Jonathan Edwards reporting for The Washington Post:
President Donald Trump’s name is off the Kennedy Center.
Crews at the performing arts venue started removing it from the front of the building around 3 a.m., several hours after the center missed a federal judge’s two-week deadline to do so. The judge had ruled that the decision by the center’s board of trustees to rename it was illegal.
A perfect metaphor for the work ahead of us.
I last spoke with Azeem, the proprietor of Exponential View, 18 months ago — ancient history on this subject. So we revisited the state of AI.
.
TRANSCRIPT:
Paul Krugman in Conversation with Azeem Azhar
(recorded 6/12/26)
Paul Krugman: Hi everyone. Paul Krugman back on my usual schedule of recording interviews. And today I’m talking with Azeem Azhar, who I spoke to in January 2025, basically centuries ago in AI time. And with AI on everybody’s mind, I thought it would be good to revisit. I should say Azeem is an independent researcher and founder of Exponential View, which is one of the top tech Substacks out there.
So hi, welcome to another conversation.
Azeem Azhar: Yeah, thank you, Paul. And it has been eighteen months, also known as one and a half centuries in AI time since we spoke.
Krugman: Yeah. Let me ask sort of the dumbest question: what is this thing called AI? How does it do what it does? I mean, even skeptics have to admit that it’s really impressive how it’s sort of leapt over all of the previous barriers. How is this happening?
Azhar: You know, I think we’re still figuring it out. I think of AI ultimately as a machine that does certain things, and it’s been built by passing first millions, then billions, then tens of billions, hundreds of billions of trillions of words of human output through a neural network to give it some sense of how humans have thought about the world. And because it operates at dimensions well beyond the form of space and time, it seems to be able to find relationships between quite complex concepts. And I think we’ve all had that experience, whether we’ve been using Chat GPT or Claude over the last two or three years, that it seems to be able to recognize things that are quite deeply related that don’t immediately spring to mind.
And in the last year and a half or so, the labs have started to train the AI models not just on words in books, but actually on tasks, like, “what is the set of things that you do to write a piece of code that does something?” “What is a set of things you do to use a piece of software in an enterprise?” And they’ve tried to train those models on those particular tasks. Essentially it’s aping what we do, and they use various mathematical tools like reinforcement learning where the model notionally gets a reward. Of course it’s not a reward the way you and I think of it because it’s a machine.
Paul Krugman: Right.
Azhar: And so that’s what it is. It’s sort of reflecting back, but also I think discovering some really deep relationships in the world that we might not spot, you know, prima facie as humans.
Paul Krugman: Brad Delong calls it “a vast stew of linear algebra,” which makes some sense to me because I think that Pagerank with Google was the last thing I actually understood. And that’s the eigenvector with the largest eigenvalue. Not that anybody needs to know that, but this is like a million times bigger, right?
Azhar: That’s basically it. Yeah.
Krugman: But it’s sort of not what artificial intelligence was supposed to be, right?
Azhar: No, not at all. I mean, I sometimes go back and look at the TV series of the seventies that I grew up with as a child, and they’ll always have an AI in the spaceship. Space 1999 had an AI you could talk to. And it was very precise, it was very clipped, and it did things and got things right. And there was a sense that you could trust it. But you’d never think to say, as I sometimes do now, you know, “Find me five analogies to help make this point.” I use it as a brainstorming partner, or I give it tracts of my book, the book that I’m writing, and say, you know, “How would Paul Krugman criticize this argument?” And I get suggestions that I then work through by hand? I don’t think we really imagined it would look like that.
Krugman: Yeah. In sci-fi it would talk in a monotone and would be relentlessly logical. And in fact these models are unpredictable, they’re sometimes temperamental, they’re not reliable. That’s probably one of the big problems. It’s not at all what we imagined.
Azhar: It’s not at all and this point about reliability is so complex. A couple of months back, one of the versions of Anthropic’s Claude came out and I found it so sycophantic that it became unhelpful because I like these things to help me on hard problems and to challenge me. So I switched back to Chat GPT, which has always been a little bit less friendly. And what’s going on there, Paul, is that because we don’t really have a good theory about how to build these. They are developed almost like in a petri dish and nudged in particular directions so they take the shape that we expect them to take. And to use an economist term, they improve non-monotonically with every release. So you’ll see the latest release of an Anthropic model, and there are maybe twenty or thirty public benchmarks that they’re measured against, like how well they summarize text and how well they write software code. And the next version of the model won’t necessarily be better at everything than the previous version, because you lose something in order to get it. And that’s the complexity that the labs are wrestling with.
Krugman: Wow. Okay. Second naive question. I don’t think I’m a Luddite. I’ve always been happy to adopt technologies, but maybe I’m incurious on some of these things. I tend to pick up things like mathematical techniques, as needed, because I see something that could be useful. Now, I’m using NotebookLM to extract tables from PDFs, that sort of thing. But what should I be doing? I have friends who are using Claude a lot, but I can’t quite figure out what particularly agentic AI should be doing for me.
Azhar: You know, I’m really sympathetic to that because I have the same issue. These tools have been developed by software developers in a really particular part of the world, which is Silicon Valley, where the culture really revolves around the art of the programmer. And so if you have a programmer’s day and you think in coding terms and you have programming workflows, it becomes really obvious what you do with a really advanced AI tool. I do a lot of research, some of it qualitative, some of it quantitative, and in such a world, those workflows don’t match the way that I think through problems. And so the way that I get around this is that I do look at things on Twitter or X as it’s called because people are sharing tips. And I often just ask the models, you know, “What could I do with you given that I’m trying to do this thing? I’m trying to solve this problem.” And it will come back and give me a suggestion.
And I have had some success with agents. So I have an agent called R. Mini Arnold. So R is a play Isaac Asimov’s robots. They’re all called R. Arnold is after the good Terminator in Terminator 2, played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, who protects humanity. And R. Mini Arnold is available on my WhatsApp and it’s available on email.
Krugman: Okay.
Azhar: And it has access to a whole set of resources. It can browse the web, it can access LinkedIn, it can access Twitter, it can look at my library of PDFs of research that I’ve downloaded. And I can throw tasks to it a little bit like I would say a pretty decent but slightly temperamental graduate student. So sometimes it just disappears for six or seven hours at a time. And one of the differences between using an agent like that and using Claude is that R. Mini Arnold has a lot of my life’s context. It knows the music I like, it knows the book I’m working on, it knows the investments I’m making, it knows the essays I’m doing, it’s got the calendar of speeches that I’m about to give. And so when it goes off and does a task, it tries to figure out what in my world is this going to be relevant to and where can I draw threads from? And when it works, it is really sublime and it does feel a little bit like science fiction.
But I would say it’s incredibly brittle. I mean there’s breaks every four or five days.
A specific example was, I was thinking about the Paul David’s research about why electrification took the time it took. And I wanted to understand what were the determinations of determinants of that thirty-five year lag from Pearl Street generation to, you know, productivity growth. What could the levers be? And so I threw that into R. Mini Arnold and it set up a team of sub agents which had personalities of key economists and was able to go off and do research the way the AIs do, but also research on all the academic papers that I have downloaded in the past.
I have access to JSTOR, I’m allowed to download a hundred PDFs a month. It can look at all of those and start to compile an answer in a way that perhaps a Chat GPT can’t. And it knows the context of my book and it knows the context of the essay I wrote. So what then comes back is something a little bit more structured that I can then play with. It’s a marginal improvement on doing this on Chat GPT. I’m sure you could probably figure out how to do it. But it’s quick. I use it on my iPhone. I often do this when I’m walking through the airport and I want to solve this and have this result when I’m sitting on the plane. I’ll fire that query out and it goes back and goes out and sorts that out for me.
Krugman: Okay, I guess I’m getting it. But obviously you and I are not typical. The people who are using AI the most are going to be middle managers, business people, etc. And I find myself thinking about what I think of as the homemade pasta problem.
Azhar: Mm.
Krugman: You’re probably too young for this, but there was a time when I when young and we were using stone axes for computing, and there was a big fad of making your own pasta. Little pasta machines were everywhere. And then at a certain point there was kind of a collective, “What the hell are we doing? You know, store bought pasta is actually better. The Italians don’t do this.” And I have to think that for most tasks, the range of agents can’t be that wide. But why wouldn’t they sell that kind of thing off-the-shelf, as it were?
Azhar: Yeah, well I think it’s different for an independent person or a small business or a middle manager in a big company. I would imagine that you will start to see people selling specific agents that solve your marketing problem. If you have a barber’s shop and you’ve got four chairs and maybe 30 people a day coming through. Right now what you do is, you go to ChatGPT and you help it write your collateral for your website. That feels like it’s an interim step to somebody delivering the actual finished product. Why haven’t we seen it? I think we haven’t seen it yet because the terrain is still big enough.
Beyond Anthropic and OpenAI, there’s a lot of other companies building agents that are these end-to-end workflows for businesses. They still believe that the prize for them is to build the generic platform that is the tool for all tools. Because if you get that right, you have a much, much bigger business than if you’re just a vertical application. And I think we’re only a year or two into these entrepreneurs building such businesses. I think as some of them succeed and some fail, the ones that are not able to succeed in the general space will start to verticalize, which is what we saw in the advent of the internet. We saw it in software as well.
But I think within a big company it’s a different set of questions because you have far fewer degrees of freedom as a marketing manager in a large company than you do if you own your own barbershop. You have all these rules, you have all these other teams you have to interface with, you are held to the priorities and the plans of the company as a whole. And in that instance, I think, it’s much harder to see how you use AI to really change the way you work.
Krugman: Yeah, I mean, again we’re talking about ancient history here, but you know, everybody still uses Excel, even though it has always been horrible. But the constraints of corporate life mean that everybody has to use Excel. So that means maybe we’ll see quite a lot less coding a few years down the pike because the people will just be able to purchase whatever it is they need. I don’t know.
Azhar: I think there’s a balance. You hear people proselytizing heavily, saying, “I think this technology is going to be impressive and have a significant impact.” But when people pitch this, they forget that there are other actors in the market who might respond to what’s going on. Right now, if you’re a large company, you want to be building as much as you can because what you can buy isn’t right for the market. If you think about Henry Ford putting together the Highland Park plant, he couldn’t go to a supply chain and buy what he needed because nobody was thinking in those terms. I think we are slightly at that stage for large corporates now. Whether we’ll be there in five years, I don’t know.
The question we have to consider is where the value will reside: between having your own capabilities to design software for your processes, or handing that over to another company designing software for a hundred businesses like yours. Historically, it has made more sense to hand it over to another company, but the cost curves may have changed sufficiently that you’d rather have the nuance and control to do whatever ‘vibe coding’ becomes in 2030.
Krugman: I know with healthcare software, organizations like the VA that built their own have done much better than the ones who tried to buy it from Microsoft. So yeah, it might be a story that makes sense. And actually, since we’re talking about going for the models versus something much more specific, how do you think about the Chinese versus the big US AI firms?
Azhar: I’ve just spent eight days in China and I was really fortunate. I got to speak to developers and engineers and management from about a dozen of the Chinese labs. In many cases they hosted us in their offices. The main thing the Chinese companies say about the US firms, is that Claude code is brilliant and Claude is the best model that is out there and they really couldn’t get enough of it. The term is, they’re Claude-pilled. They talk about the constraints on getting access to computational power but just in a way that’s a fact of life. I mean there’s no sort of commentary on it other than it’s hard. They have to figure out how to get around that and how to build a culture of efficiency when you don’t have as much [computational power] and I think they have built a culture of efficiency really, really well. I think it’s going to help them over the longer term. They don’t really talk about competition with US labs the way the US talks about competition with China. But they do see themselves competing with each other.
And as you know, that’s what the Chinese economy is. It’s mayors in different cities who almost act as venture capitalists who compete tooth and nail with each other to become the electric vehicle hub or the solar hub or the AI hub of the nation. And what I would say is, the models are really, really capable. They’re very efficient, which is why they’re so cheap to run, which makes them very competitive for a whole range of tasks. But at the margin, it’s instructive to note that everyone was using Claude for coding as opposed to the cheaper Chinese version.
Krugman: That’s interesting. So you can imagine a future where a lot of businesses are actually using these less comprehensive but much cheaper models. I think what I’m gathering from you and from other people is that a lot of entrepreneurs in the US are still dreaming of the uber-model that solves all problems but that probably is not going the way it all goes. That in the end we’re gonna end up with a lot of specialized models, but also the uber-models will still have a role.
Azhar: Yeah, it never made sense to me that you’d have a single model that would do everything because if the single model is going to solve the Riemann hypothesis, it’s gonna require a lot of resources. And if all you need to do is get it to root a bill to the finance department, it seems a bit silly to ask Einstein to come and do that for you. We’ve had segmentation of markets for a long time and it’s like with airlines. There’s a reason why not every seat on an airline is first class. Some passengers don’t want it, don’t need it, won’t want to pay for it. So I do think that the ecology looks like a whole array of much, much cheaper models that are serving by volume lots of corporate needs, and then having more sophisticated, complex models for the more complex tasks. I think you’re already starting to see this.
I don’t see it, by the way, as a shock to the industry. I just think this is what happens as an industry matures. You know, you start with one size fits all, then you start to segment your customer needs and you start to serve them in the most profitable way you possibly can. And that just feels to me like the way that the markets have matured.
Krugman:
Okay. Let’s move to more macro considerations. People have been worrying about a bubble. A lot of us still remember the nineties quite vividly and think about all of that. But you just aren’t seeing the bubble. You wanna talk about that?
Azhar: I remember what it was like in the nineties. I lived through that one and also the housing bubble, which frankly was far, far worse and much more terrifying. I have a really simple mantra here, which is that honest customer revenues tend to be the engine that gets you through this, right? You know, what caused the problems with the US railroads in the 1870s and 1880s? It was that the revenues didn’t materialize because the tracks were being laid in places where there were no towns. That was a problem. The same was true in the dot-com era. My team and I realized last year that it’s very hard to get good quality data on how much was actually being spent by American businesses and consumers on AI. So we’ve spent several months building systems and gathering data to give a deduplicated view of what that number is. And just to give you a sneak preview, is $150 billion per annum, annualized at the end of May 2026, and about 90 billion dollars in the previous 12 months, from May ‘25 to May ‘26. So you can see it’s growing, and those are deduplicated numbers.
So if you spend a dollar with OpenAI, and they have to pay Microsoft 60 cents to run the servers, we only count that as a dollar. We don’t count it as, you know, $1.60. It’s a much faster revenue growth rate than mobile or the internet. It’s also a small number because the US is a $32 trillion economy. And I think the thing is that at that level of spend, you are able to roughly cover the depreciation on the enormous capital expenditures that have gone into AI just this past year. But next year or the year after, you have to double your revenues again and again in order to cover these increasing commitments.
The thing that often pricks a bubble is when financing starts to get a bit smelly. That was clearly the case in the global financial crisis, where synthetic collateralized obligations were magnifying the risk on subprime mortgages—it was all “smelly finance.” In the dot-com bubble, the dot-coms themselves didn’t really have much smell about them. There was a lot of disbelief, but the telecoms clearly had issues with their internal revenue generation.
So the other thing that we look at is how bad, poor, or strong or robust is the funding quality. And that funding quality measure is definitely getting worse. It’s worse now than it was nine months ago. But it doesn’t seem from the numbers to be at the level that it has been historically when these things have imploded. Nor does it seem to be the type of exposure that is really systemic, which is what we saw in the global financial crisis. There are companies like Oracle and Coreweave whose debt looks very risky, and it’s harder and harder for them perhaps to raise money, although Oracle just did. But it doesn’t feel like it’s systemic.
You know, when the the global financial crisis popped, no one knew who was in trouble, whereas now you’d be able to isolate it with a single company or a single firm. So at the moment we feel that this is still a demand-led boom, that funding quality has definitely gotten worse, but not so bad that I would say that there is an imminent problem on the horizon.
Krugman: So at this point, you’re saying that roughly speaking, final demand for this is about half a percent of GDP. What share are AI-related stocks in market value? It has to be substantially larger than that.
Azhar: They’re about forty percent of the S&P 500 right now.
Krugman: That’s a huge mismatch. Revenues are not the same as profits, but you’re talking about what is still a relatively small business relative to this immense economy, yet it dominates the financial markets. That would be at least a possible source of alarm.
Azhar: Let’s dig into that, because a stock price is a reflection of the expected future value aggregated across the market. Forty percent feels high, but if you look at the measure of earnings, these companies actually have a much higher proportion of earnings and earnings growth.
If you look at the US stock market in 1900, after the railway calamities of the mid-to-late 19th century, railroad stocks were sixty percent of the capitalization of the US market. We had worked our way through the busts by that point. There’s a fantastic piece of academic work by an American finance professor named Bessenbinder. He looked at the stock returns of 23,000 US stocks from the 1900s through 2022. Those returns are highly concentrated. About two-thirds are concentrated in roughly 30 companies. Those companies are oil, electricity, or car companies—the general-purpose technologies at the start of the 20th century—or they are the IT companies like Apple and Nvidia. The only exceptions were Walmart, a couple of healthcare businesses like Pfizer, and JP Morgan.
Historically, you get this concentration of a number of winners when you have a new general-purpose technology, and that is showing up today. I don’t feel we’re overly concentrated from the perspective of risk, and the price does not feel totally out of whack compared to where we were during the dot-com era.
Krugman: One last devil’s advocate question. I keep thinking of the California gold rush. If you had looked at the revenue and spending on gold-rush-related businesses as a whole, it probably looked solid. But the trouble is it wasn’t the gold; it was the picks, shovels, blue jeans, women and whiskey that were the revenue streams. Is that a fair question to ask about AI right now?
Azhar: It’s a great question to ask. The question is what determines that $150 billion annualized demand? We see that just under 30% of the S&P 500 have pointed to a generative AI project with a quantifiable result in their earnings calls. They are under pressure to say they do this, so maybe that’s what’s going on. But when I talk to executives, like 30 finance businesses in New York, they all plan to spend more next year, even though not a single one could point to even a 10 basis point improvement in their business from the investments made so far.
Krugman: Right.
Azhar: When we break out that $90 billion, $60 billion of it is in the US. That’s a lot of money for a single company, but spread across thousands of firms, it’s still at the experimental stage. We should consider whether these executives are learning by doing. The messages I get vary from those having success in the tens of millions who want to reach hundreds of millions, to those finding it harder but persisting. We’re slightly beyond pure picks and shovels, but in Paul David’s work, it took 50% of American companies getting electrified before the productivity rise. We’re a long way from that.
Krugman: Headlines flashed about a KPMG study with case studies on the usefulness of AI that turned out to be AI hallucinations. It’s a wonderful thing.
Azhar: It is brilliant. One thing that is quite challenging is that the market has talked a lot about bottlenecks. We saw this with railroads when the US couldn’t make enough steel. There are these bottlenecks, and there’s a lot of emphasis on power and getting electricity to the system.
There’s more demand than supply capacity for AI right now, but there’s a question of whether there’s enough capital. We may see another few trillion dollars of intention from tech companies to build infrastructure to 2030, which starts to rival the new issuance of the US Treasury at $2 trillion a year. I’m wondering if this capital constraint is going to be an issue or if the market knows how to clear it.
Krugman: Ordinarily, we’d expect to see that in prices. Real interest rates are well off their pre-COVID lows. They are higher now, but still substantially lower than at the peak of the nineties tech boom, when they were around four percent. They’re more like two now.
It’s surprising, given the AI boom and massive budget deficits, that rates aren’t even higher. Whether this is an actual constraint, Nvidia is not the US Treasury. They need risk-tolerant capital. The possibility that these firms may not be able to raise enough money is something we need to think about.
Azhar: Yeah. On that Nvidia point, I saw that credit default swaps on five-year Nvidia bonds—the cost of insurance against default—are currently lower than US Treasuries.
Krugman: I saw that, and it strikes me as completely crazy. If you think the US government is not reliable, you shouldn’t be investing in chip stocks; you should be investing in canned goods for your bomb shelter. But anyway.
Azhar: Are you telling me that markets aren’t perfectly rational, Paul?
Krugman: Good heavens, I can’t say that; they’d take away my economist card. We’re recording this on SpaceX Day, and I’ve been wondering if there are limited pools of capital for cutting-edge investments. I wonder whether Elon Musk is diverting capital that AI might need. A whole lot of meme money is pouring into SpaceX right now. Is that something I should be thinking about? I mean, he’s got what everybody tells me is a crud AI product in Grok, and yet…
Azeem: Musk showed his willingness to adapt; his AI product is now being subsidiarized using his capacity to serve customers like Anthropic. He has an incredible following, but people who have worked with him say his ability to relentlessly focus and optimize sets him apart. His first-principles thinking has brought down the cost of space launches faster than anyone in history. He pushes the rate of learning aggressively. For all the challenges and his mercurial behavior elsewhere, that’s generally a good thing because technology has brought down the cost of inputs significantly.
We’re going to be much further ahead in space than we would have been if SpaceX had not been successful. It raises questions about how to govern what used to be a commons, but there is a definite benefit from coming down that learning curve so quickly.
Krugman: That’s fair. The one time I looked at Musk’s activities and thought he was really onto something was when I realized he diagnosed that the cost of space launches is really the rocket, not the fuel, and recovering it makes all the difference. Being able to make it happen is a real productivity thing.
This is all moving so fast that we don’t have time for the technical productivity issues we had in the past. It’s feeling like a Solow moment where people say, “I see the technology everywhere but in the productivity statistics.” Do you want to talk about that?
Azhar: It comes up all the time. I wonder if we need things to happen more quickly than we used to. We aren’t seeing it in the numbers yet. Erik Brynjolfsson at Stanford says he thinks it is showing up in the aggregate numbers. How quickly should we expect a technology like this to show up? At $90 billion a year, that’s not much of US GDP. These are early stages where companies are learning. The first $100 million you might spend on AI is about learning, and we’re in that mistake-making phase.
The model Paul David and William Devine talked about in electricity is helpful. In the first phases, you’re retrofitting your capital stock and processes with the new technology. It’s not until you depreciate existing capital and change processes—like Ford did at Highland Park—that you see productivity benefits. To put numbers to that, what would we expect to see in the Ford equivalent of Highland Park in terms of output?
Krugman: Yeah.
Azhar: I thought we might see what happens to revenues per employee in an AI-native firm. Across high-end companies like McKinsey, it’s about $400,000. For Meta or Google, it’s about two to two and a half million dollars. In AI-native firms like Mercor, that number is closer to seven million dollars per employee. For Anthropic, it’s close to ten million. You can measure the enormous commercial productivity of a single employee if a firm is AI-native. We’re talking about a handful of firms, but we can pick up the shape of what’s possible for the productivity of a single employee. It may be hard, it may take time, but it’s possible.
Krugman: What would those numbers look like per dollar of invested capital? One worry is that this is an enormously capital-intensive business that replaces labor. The oil refineries of New Jersey have enormous revenue per employee because there are no workers, just monstrous capital installations. Is that a factor?
Azhar: Anthropic has raised in the tens of billions rather than hundreds of billions and had a profitable quarter ahead of schedule. What we don’t know is how much of that capital goes into developing the next model versus monetizing previous generations. Their IPO in the next six to nine months will tell us.
Chinese companies are using much less capital to build models that are nearly as good. So I think the harder part of your question is that if every model that OpenAI or Anthropic costs ten times as much to deploy and develop, but lasts only a couple of years before it’s defunct because of competition, what needs to be true for that to be sustainable for more than a year or two? To me, that is a really tricky question as well.
Krugman: You’ve cited intermediate measures. Rather than revenue, we look at generated lines of code, which has exploded, versus actual usable applications, which hasn’t. Does that tell us anything?
Azhar: Lines of code is an odd measure. We’ve made it much cheaper to write code, so less determined people are writing it now. It’s unsurprising the increase hasn’t been met by proportional productivity. Data suggests we’re getting more high-quality code, but also a lot of useless waste. This isn’t the first time a useful input in the economy generated waste. Think of a barrel of oil: we count the whole value in GDP, but two-thirds is thrown away as waste heat. Only one-third is useful energy. Sloppy lines of code are a similar form of waste we’ve been happy to tolerate in other sectors for a century.
Krugman: A weird analogy is when widespread word processing came in. Books started getting longer. It was so easy for authors to turn out hundreds of pages. What might have been a two-volume series became five.
Azhar: On that front, we’re at an enlightenment moment. In 18th-century France, the battle was over who gets to write and express their story. Men and women produced remarkable works with quill pens that encapsulated a world.
Krugman: Right.
Azhar: Is it worse that we allow for more expression? We are worse off when that connects to an algorithmic recommendation system that drives constant slop at us. But we aren’t inevitably worse off because we’re giving access to many more people.
In reducing costs of access, we might find amazing people. In breaking down silos of knowledge, we might find connections—perhaps something in battery chemistry that is useful in cardiology. We don’t know because we’ve never been able to get those experts to talk. I look at each opportunity discreetly.
Krugman: There is a potential book here: The Upside of Slop. This is an unrecognizable scene from eighteen months ago. Wow.
Azhar: We could get ChatGPT to write it.
Krugman: I started my career writing papers longhand on yellow legal pads. Amazing change.
Azhar: I still write everything with a fountain pen. I’m writing my new book longhand and most of my research is too. The computer is turned off because AI does all the boring stuff like PowerPoint and emails, giving me time to apply my brain to things I want to think about.
I’d be happy to continue this conversation in a few months. Thank you for inviting me.
Krugman: Thanks so much. Take care.
Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5
Well this is nuts:The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees. The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance. Access to all other Anthropic models will not be affected.
We received the directive from the government today at 5:21pm (ET). The letter did not provide specific details of its national security concern. Our understanding is that the government believes it has become aware of a method of bypassing, or "jailbreaking" Fable 5. We reviewed a demonstration of this specific technique being used to identify a small number of previously known, minor vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities all appear relatively simple, and we have found that other publicly-available models are able to discover them as well without requiring a bypass. [...]
To date, the government has only given us verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak, which essentially consists of asking the model to read a specific codebase and fix any software flaws. Our understanding is that one potential jailbreak was shared with the government. We have reviewed the report and validated that the level of capability displayed there is widely available from other models (including OpenAI's GPT-5.5), and is used every day by the defenders who keep systems safe. We will share more details over the next 24 hours.
I still have access to Fable via claude.ai and Claude Code now, at 9:01pm ET.
Update: I ran this script against the Anthropic API to spot when claude-fable-5 would stop working. My access was cut off at 6:59pm Pacific (9:59pm ET):
Market Design
[2026-06-12T18:56:50-07:00] attempt 35: running uv run llm -m claude-fable-5 hi
[2026-06-12T18:56:55-07:00] success: Hi there! How can I help you today?
[2026-06-12T18:57:55-07:00] attempt 36: running uv run llm -m claude-fable-5 hi
[2026-06-12T18:57:59-07:00] success: Hi! How can I help you today?
[2026-06-12T18:58:59-07:00] attempt 37: running uv run llm -m claude-fable-5 hi
[2026-06-12T18:59:00-07:00] FAILED after attempt 37 with exit code 1
stderr:
Error: Error code: 404 - {'type': 'error', 'error': {'type': 'not_found_error', 'message': 'Claude Fable 5 is not available. Please use Opus 4.8. Learn more: https://www.anthropic.com/news/fable-mythos-access'}, 'request_id': 'req_011CbzRyirV7KZLHYYdBM9od'}
Via @AnthropicAI
Tags: jailbreaking, ai, generative-ai, llms, anthropic, claude, ai-ethics, claude-mythos
OpenAI WebRTC Audio Session, now with document context
I built the first version of this tool in December 2024 to try out the then-new OpenAI WebRTC API for interacting with their realtime audio models.Last month OpenAI introduced a brand new model to that API called GPT‑Realtime‑2, which they promoted as "our first voice model with GPT‑5‑class reasoning" - with a Sep 30, 2024 knowledge cut-off.
I've been waiting for that model to show up in the ChatGPT iPhone app but it still hasn't, so I revisited my old playground.
You can now pick the better model, and you can also paste in a big chunk of document context so you can have as audio conversation in your browser about whatever information you think would be useful to explore in a conversational way.
Tags: audio, tools, ai, openai, generative-ai, llms, multi-modal-output, webrtc
This fluid pump was inspired by the way squids propel themselves through the water.
As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.
Links for you. Science:
A Response to The National Academies’ Vision for Science: Averting a Path Towards Mediocrity
Flesh-eating screwworm returns to U.S. after 60 years, threatening cattle herd
Meet the ‘superdodgers’: The few who never had COVID
Michigan found a way to reduce school vaccine waivers. until it backfired.
First U.S. screwworm case confirmed in South Texas
Fabricated Citations Found In Over 2,800 Biomedical Journal Articles
Debugging California: Fighting mosquitoes with mosquitoes
Other:
No, Artificial Intelligence Is Not Conscious
The District’s twin housing investment crises
Impeach Bill Pulte. If we saw a scheme like this playing out in any other context, we’d use every tool available to try and stop it.
How Did This Happen
Republicans’ Talarico Trans Taunt Is A Witch Hunt In The Classic Sense
Eric’s Law is vital protection for D.C. residents with disabilities
Hell is other people – so billionaires are using AI to replace them
National Abortion Hotline workers fight against implementing AI
National Guard has done little to reduce violent crime in D.C., a new study finds (my better take here)
US Attorney Corruption — Let’s Take It National!!
Companies Are Using Reddit to Manipulate ChatGPT and Google AI Search
Greg Bovino’s Retirement Plan? Go Full Fascist
Trump’s Chief Nevada Prosecutor Shirks DOJ Orders, Boosts Allies
Sam Altman says OpenAI’s top token spender uses 100 billion tokens a month — and they’re not even the world leader
Autonomous vehicles were supposed to cut traffic—what if they don’t?
Trump’s Corrupt IRS Shakedown Backfires Badly as GOPers Turn on Him
DOJ is investigating former congressman George Santos for insider trading on Kalshi
Why do young US Americans avoid cross-partisan dating? A closer look at mediators and variation by gender and party (I think the strength of the effects should be ignored given how the questions could affect the answers, but each of the effects themselves, and that none of them are extremely dominant is interesting)
Ballroom donors won $50B in contracts after giving to Trump project, watchdog group finds
The Musk SpaceX IPO Scam: How You’re Going to Be Investing in SpaceX Whether You Want To or Not
SpaceX blocked from early U.S. benchmark index entry as S&P reaffirms existing rules
Focus Groups
Millions of Trips, “Waymo” Empty Miles: California’s First Thousand Days of Commercial Robotaxi Service
Senior U.S. Officials Eye Government Shares in AI Giants
My SSN was exposed in a breach at Columbia—a school I have no connection with
The 311 app has been broken for ages. What gives?
The rise of the managed city. Tokyo’s newest megadevelopments aim to redesign urban life for an aging, increasingly diverse society
‘We were attacked as bad Jews’: Columbia faculty who supported Gaza protests file claims with Trump’s antisemitism fund
What Trump Delivered for Amazon
From Bad Brains to Bratmobile: What’s Your Favorite D.C. Punk Album?
Anthropic:
The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees. The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance. Access to all other Anthropic models will not be affected.
We received the directive from the government today at 5:21pm (ET). The letter did not provide specific details of its national security concern. Our understanding is that the government believes it has become aware of a method of bypassing, or “jailbreaking” Fable 5. We reviewed a demonstration of this specific technique being used to identify a small number of previously known, minor vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities all appear relatively simple, and we have found that other publicly-available models are able to discover them as well without requiring a bypass.
Fable 5 and Mythos 5 were announced on Tuesday — that post has detailed comparisons, from Anthropic, on the models’ capabilities.
Having the access ban extend all the way to “foreign national Anthropic employees” is, to say the least, aggressive. Whether that degree of restriction is truly warranted, I don’t think we, on the outside, can say. The Trump administration lacks credibility, to say the least, when it comes to foreign nationals. But it’s Anthropic itself that repeatedly compares the power of frontier models to nuclear weapons. Here’s CEO Dario Amodei, in an essay published just this month:
There may come a time, perhaps relatively soon, when we need to go beyond this, when the most powerful AI systems look less like airplanes or automobiles and more like weaponizable nuclear materials — a threat to humanity rather than “just” a threat to public safety. If that occurs, we may need more aggressive regulatory measures than those I have laid out.
If that occurs — or if it already has occurred — it’s obviously not the place of Anthropic (or OpenAI or Google) to render that judgment. Ben Thompson wrote about this presciently back in March, and linking to his post, I wrote:
Nilay Patel, quoting the same section of Thompson’s column I quoted above, sees it as “Ben Thompson making a full-throated case for fascism”. I see it as the case against corporatocracy. Who sets our defense policies? Our democratically elected leaders, or the CEOs of corporate defense contractors?
1. Soccer and economic growth.
2. The AI scenario for Europe?
3. The smart version of the AI is a bubble argument.
4. Ken Opalo reviews Studwell on Africa.
5. The influence of AI on non-fiction books?
6. The economics behind the San Antonio Spurs.
The post Saturday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
NASA has provided more details about the revised approaches that Blue Origin and SpaceX are taking to accelerate work on Artemis lunar landers.
The post Revised Artemis lunar lander plans take shape appeared first on SpaceNews.
As SpaceX gears up to start launching orbital data center spacecraft as soon as next year, astronomers warn those satellites could cause serious interference with their observations.
The post Astronomers fear orbital data centers will interfere with observations appeared first on SpaceNews.
Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure and industrial technology. This week we look at homes being built on top of libraries, Patriot missile manufacturing, an effort to construct new US coal plants, a tunnel between the US and Russia, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber.
Apparently the hot new trend is to combine housing developments with libraries, either by building housing on the site of an existing library, or building a new library as part of a larger development project. “The projects would be part of a nationwide trend, joining similar efforts in the suburbs of Washington and the cities of Boston, Cleveland and Milwaukee. An October 2025 report from the Urban Institute, a nonprofit research group, found that more than 1,800 apartments had been built across the United States as part of developments combining libraries and housing. A number of such projects have moved forward in New York City, including at the Sunset Park Library in Brooklyn, the Inwood Library in Manhattan and the Grand Concourse Library in the Bronx.” [NYT]
Claims about housing construction in Taiwan. [X]
It apparently takes more than two years(!) to build a Patriot missile. The article is thin on details, but this mostly seems to be due to the time suppliers need to make individual parts and subcomponents. [WSJ]
Claims that on the order of 90% all the semiconductor lithography equipment that’s ever been made is still in use. [X]
Chinese car manufacturer BYD wants to unseat Toyota as the world’s biggest carmaker in five years. [The Guardian] And in spite of the sky-high tariffs on Chinese vehicles, some Chinese car manufacturers have apparently established a small presence in the US in anticipation of future US sales. [Jalopnik]
The US adds a bunch of major Chinese manufacturers, including car manufacturer BYD, robot manufacturer Unitree, and battery manufacturer CALB to its list of “Chinese military suppliers,” which can make it more complicated for US companies to do business with them. [CarNewsChina]
Ford is trying to get more people into the skilled trades. [WSJ]
Google orders 3 million TPUs from Intel. [Tom’s Hardware] And SemiAnalysis thinks that things for Intel are looking up, and the company should raise capital. [SemiAnalysis]
Solar energy supplies more electricity than coal in the US for the first time. “Solar supplied 12.8% of US electricity last month while coal accounted for 12.2%, according to a report Wednesday from the clean energy think tank Ember, which analyzed monthly and hourly data from the US Energy Information Administration.” [Bloomberg] At its peak in the 1980s, coal supplied roughly 55% of US electricity.
But even though coal is in long-term decline, it’s not going down without a fight. The data center boom is keeping coal plants that were slated for closure operating longer. [The Register] And the Trump administration wants to use the Defense Production Act to build two new coal plants in Alaska and West Virginia. [Bloomberg] There hasn’t been a utility-scale coal plant built in the US since 2013.
SpaceX shares rose on the first day of trading as the company went public in a milestone event for both the company and the broader space industry.
The post SpaceX shares rise nearly 20% in historic IPO appeared first on SpaceNews.
TAMPA, Fla. — Avanti Communications is moving to close a chapter on the debt-fueled geostationary expansion that once defined the British satellite operator, with plans to sell the youngest payload […]
The post Avanti trims GEO exposure with Hylas-3 sale appeared first on SpaceNews.
Observed on Logan Circle, NW, D.C.:
Links for you. Science:
Only the Right Tests Can Stop This Ebola Outbreak. Congo Has Hardly Any.
Proposed new US funding rules: We can cancel any grant at any time
HHS is now weighing in on science in NIH grants
‘Out of control’: Doctors on the front line of Ebola outbreak speak out
Science sleuths uncover more than 100 suspicious images in Thermo Fisher antibody catalogue
There’s Something Living Inside Fog, Scientists Find
Engineer builds AI laser defense system that wiped out every mosquito in his home
Other:
Where D.C. mayoral and council candidates stand on key issues
America Broke Something When It Gave Trump a Second Chance (excellent)
Our Pepco Rates Went Up, Thank Kenyan McDuffie and Pepco’s Lobbyists
Why does the media ignore Trump’s madness?
The Men Defending Graham Platner In All The Wrong Ways
Trump Has Given Up. No longer interested in governing, he is filled with rage and obsessed with revenge
Solidarity
A National Security Team of Failing Failures
The Federal Government’s Insect-Defense Agency Is Infested With Bed Bugs
Aftermath: Something Is Going to Snap (I think we’re ok if this wraps up before Aug. 1, but there’s little reason to think that will happen)
Microsoft’s Big New Idea for AI Gadgets Is a Badge With a Camera
‘Great news’: Crowd at Kennedy Center celebrates order to remove Trump’s name
AI Doesn’t Have ROI
Rare Backpedal
Park Service officials raised alarms over Trump administration’s tennis center plan
FOIA Documents Reveal Park Service Concerns on Community Access and Environmental Protections Ignored in Rush to Expand Rock Creek Park Tennis Center
DOGE Whistleblower Had His Brakes Cut Hours After Elon Put Him On Blast, Suit Alleges
Donald Trump is Getting What He Deserves (video)
Trump’s name must come off the Kennedy Center by June 12 (that’s today!)
No girls. No foreigners. No straws. No egg and cheese.
I’m Trained To Know When Someone Is Dying. The White House Needs You To Believe Trump Isn’t.
Google Employees Internally Share Memes About How Its AI Sucks
Shohei Ohtani Is Illogical
MAGA fails to conquer arts and music
Fascists Lie (Even When They Seem To Be Confessing)
How Trump has used the presidency to benefit himself and his allies
Pentagon is censoring military newspaper Stars and Stripes, lawsuit alleges
Several Women Who Dated Graham Platner Recall ‘Unsettling’ Behavior
Microsoft Wants to ‘Make People Addicted’ to its New AI Assistant, Internal Documents Reveal
Essex County Prosecutor’s Office Sergeant Allegedly Steals Injured Journalist’s Camera Bag and Equipment During Delaney Hall Protest, Charged with Theft
Here's a forthcoming review paper on organ allocation and transplantation that focuses on the allocation of deceased-donor organs, particularly kidneys, and goes through the whole supply chain, from donor registration and family consent after death, to patient prioritization, and organ allocation. We also discuss the regulatory and political practices and ethical concerns that keep the availability of transplants far short of their need.
Organ Allocation and Transplantation
by Itai Ashlagi and Alvin E. Roth, Annual Review of Economics
Vol. 18 https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-economics-092425-123425
Review in Advance first posted online on June 08, 2026. (Changes may still occur before final publication.)
Abstract: There is a large shortage of solid organs for transplants. This survey reviews the allocation of organs (particularly kidneys), with an emphasis on how deceased donor organs are obtained and allocated in the United States but with pointers to related issues involving living donors and transplantation around the world. We review some of the key institutional details and theoretical and empirical studies and describe some open questions that we hope will continue to attract attention from researchers interested in the economic and operational aspects of organ allocation.
The paper ends with a set of open questions and research directions, followed by these concluding paragraphs about the future:
"THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW
"Efforts to quickly improve the availability of transplants include recovering more transplantable organs from deceased donors, successfully transplanting more of those recovered organs, and facilitating more living donor organ transplants of kidneys and livers. In the longer term, efforts are under way to reduce the need for human organ transplants by reducing the need for re-transplantation (after graft failure) and by preventing organ failure or curing it by other means.
"It is common to hear that xenotransplantation is tomorrow’s cure for organ failure, and always will be. However, recent developments in transplanting organs from genetically modified pigs into primates and humans suggest that the future possibilities are real, even though (as of this writing) no pig organ transplant to a human has yet survived for as much as a year (although there have now been some pig kidney and heart transplants that worked for months; Tector 2025). Another somewhat related approach involves trying to bioengineer an artificial kidney by removing from a pig kidney the pig cells that would be attacked by the human immune system, leaving a scaffold that could be populated with human kidney cells (Lo et al. 2024). Less developed so far is the hope of regrowing kidneys through some kind of stem cell manipulation, although some kidney cell growth in mice has been achieved (Araoka et al. 2025).
"Each of these lines of research offers the possibility of reducing or ending the need for, and hence the scarcity of, human organs for transplantation. That scarcity would also be reduced by medical progress in reducing the incidence and progression of kidney disease and its precursors and of other kinds of organ failure that now require transplantation. Yet it remains likely that almost everyone whose life could be extended by a human organ transplant today will die without one, and so our attention to the shortage of transplants is still needed."
Probably you all know about this:
The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees. The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance.
According to not yet confirmed but likely true reports, it was shown that model could be jailbroken. The released Mythos already restricted bio and “AI improvement” queries, rather strictly in fact, so now we are back to the model not being available.
Here are a few of the constraints on the U.S. government, not the only ones I might add:
1. It needs for the main companies to stay in business. On top of that, it wants their IPOs to go reasonably well. And it is now much harder for the top companies to recruit foreigners, which is a significant share of their highest quality workforce (Demis, Ilya, Andrej for a start). It is also much harder for the main companies to drum up foreign business in a credible and sustainble manner.
1b. How are American multinationals operating abroad supposed to use top systems, moving forward?
2. It wants to use model access as a tool of both hard and soft power, so model access has to be possible at some level. But it is very hard to control what foreign agents will do with their partial model access, when they get it in the ffuture.
3. The U.S. needs to stay ahead of China in the AI race.
4. The U.S. needs to issue restrictions that are actually enforceable, and “U.S. citizens only” does not fit that bill. Furthermore (markets in everything!) it is easy enough to hire a traitorous American to access tools of wrongdoing, or for matter it is not difficult to fake citizenship in various ways.
5. USG cannot nationalize these companies and then proceed to run them effectively.
6. Chinese and other open source models do in fact improve at some reasonable pace, even if they are right now considerably behind the best proprietary models.
Is the most likely scenario that the government hardens some of its own systems and takes some further precautions, and then allows Mythos to be rereleased? Perhaps with some additional safeguards?
Is there such a thing as a model that cannot be jailbroken at all? I doubt that.
So basically we will be replaying this scenario periodically over time, but with each time the companies and also the government in a weaker and more precarious position.
I am willing to reject the philosophy of “safetyism” and bite various associated bullets. As it stands, these actions will not succeed in making us safer, including for the reasons mentioned above. Our regulatory institutions, attitudes, and approaches simply are not well suited to an era of radical innovation.
In any case these events do not surprise me (they do surprise me in their immediate suddenness however), as this kind of approach is what governments have been about for a long time now, USG included or perhaps USG especially.
Rising in status: Leopold, Aesop, and also Mistral. AI nationalism. Proponents of slow take-off as the likely scenario. Reticent, quiet CEOs. As for China, will they rush into this opportunity, or are they at least as scared as we are?
The post Sometimes it is hard to solve for the equilibrium appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Space Exploration Technologies, better known simply as SpaceX, became a publicly traded company on Friday nearly a quarter of a century after it was founded.
The company began trading on the NASDAQ exchange in New York City at $135 a share, valuing SpaceX at nearly $1.8 trillion. By the end of the trading day the company's shares were selling at $160.95, a respectable increase of more than 19 percent.
On paper, SpaceX founder Elon Musk became the world's first trillionaire, with his personal stake in the company valued at more than $700 billion. Because of the company's stock options plan, thousands of current and former employees became overnight millionaires. Employees at SpaceX have worked remarkably hard over the last 24 years, and now they will be richly compensated for having done so.
Welcome to Edition 8.45 of the Rocket Report! Even though we are now two weeks removed from the catastrophic loss of the New Glenn rocket and its LC-36A launch pad, it continues to dominate discussion in the space community. This week, NASA said it nominally plans to fly Blue Origin's test lander on New Glenn for the Artemis III mission, but officials quietly acknowledged that other launch vehicles, including Vulcan and the Falcon Heavy, could also get the job done. We'll obviously be watching closely.
As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.
Isar raises funding, announces new launch date. German launch startup Isar Aerospace announced this week that it had closed a 270 million euro Series D to "drive global scaling and ramp up serial production," European Spaceflight reports. The company also said the previously delayed second launch attempt of its Spectrum rocket would now take place sometime between June 15 and June 21.
A few weeks ago, I got pushback because of a passing comment I made in the article “My Nine Rules of Criticism.”
“Music has far more objective standards than most people realize,” I wrote. For some readers, these were fighting words. Naysayers came back at me in full Big Lebowski mode—declaring: That’s just, like, your opinion, man.
That’s how they see all evaluations of music—and of other art forms, too. Everybody has an opinion, they tell me, and they’re all equally subjective.
I can see why this is a popular view. It’s a very democratic notion, and a great equalizer. A music critic gets a vote, but so does the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker.
Everybody picks their favorite song, their favorite musician. Whether it’s Beethoven and Bach, or just “Disco Duck,” it’s all good, man.
I wish I could agree with this.
It would burnish my populist (and poptimist) credentials. But I’ve spent too far too many years in music, and in almost every kind of capacity. What I’ve learned from these cumulative experiences permanently banishes me from the ranks of populists and poptimists.
I’ve performed and recorded. I’ve written songs and have my own music publishing company. I’ve raised money from investors and launched various music businesses. I’ve produced albums. I’ve licensed music. I’ve taught music in classrooms and practice rooms. I’ve written thick books of music history, and more than a thousand shorter reviews and articles.
Put simply, I devote hours every day to music—and have been doing this for dog’s years. So I can tell you with total confidence: All musicians are not created equal.
I know this with certainty because there are at least some objective tests and standards.
I was planning to write about this at a future point. But when I saw Rick Beato’s latest upload to YouTube, it spurred me into action—because he conveys the essence of this reality in just a few seconds.
Here Beato revisits his breakout video from ten years ago. It went viral with a vengeance—and for a good reason.
But it’s a very simple video. All he does is test the musical aptitude of his eight-year-old son Dylan.
The test starts by asking his son to identify individual notes, but it soon gets harder—much harder. Rick eventually presents the child with thick, dissonant polychords, and asks him not only to identify the notes, but also describe the sounds in terms of music theory.
Dylan handles it like it’s nothing. And he is just eight years old. It’s really quite stunning.
Go to the 2 minute 30 second mark here, and watch. You will see why this caused a sensation when it was first released—and generated more than four million views on YouTube.
After watching this, do you still think all musicians are created equal—and that there are no objective differences? Is everything just opinion and personal preference?
This debate is more relevant than ever now, given the controversy over the recent ranking of songwriters in the New York Times. Some observers felt that the internal criteria applied in the construction of this list had little to do with musical standards.
In other words, it was a Lebowski kind of list.
And now the Times seems to be nervous about its own list, publishing an alternative one (more on that below).
…GOLEM’s behavior is unpredictable. Sometimes it converses courteously with people, whereas on other occasions any attempt at contact misfires. GOLEM sometimes cracks jokes, too, though its sense of humor is fundamentally different from man’s. Much depends on its interlocutors. In exceptional casese GOLEM will show a certain interest in people who are talented in a particular way; it is intrigued, so to speak, not by mathematical aptitude — not even the greatest — but rather by interdisciplinary forms of talent; on several occasions it has predicted with uncanny accuracy achievements by young, as yet unknown, scientists in a field which it has it self indicated. (After a brief exchange it informed T. Vroedel, age twenty-two and then only a doctoral candidate, “You will become a computer,” which was supposed to mean, more o less, “You will become somebody.”)
That is from Lem’s Imaginary Magnitude, an extraordinary book in parts, most of all see his Golem IV section on how n AGI (our term, not his) is likely to behave.
The post How did Stanislaw Lem imagine advanced computer intelligence? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
It’s deeply odd to me that America is a far less 24/7 hour society today than it was 10, 20, or even 30 years ago. I vividly remember friends from the UK back in 1996 marveling at the fact that in the mid-sized Indiana town where I went college it was possible to buy groceries, clothing, a lawn mower, a snow blower, Lego sets, and bow hunting gear at 3 AM on any given Tuesday of the year. That was peak American Empire, and it’s long gone.
That is from Christopher Kratovil. What are some hypotheses here? I see a few:
1. America is older. True, but this is hardly the main explanation for anything.
2. Due to increasing leisure time, fewer people want to work weird and long hours? Tighter labor markets and the Great Moderation contributed to this.
3. It is stores that are in decline. 24/7 activity has moved into the warehouse, the fulfillment center, the server farm, the delivery network, and the home.
3b. When you can do Doordash at 10:30 p.m., you do not need to go out for snacks at 3 a.m.
4. Shoplifting has become more common? If the drug stores have to lock up their wares in NYC, why should stores try to be open at 3 a.m., when presumably shoplifting risk is higher and the quantity of monitoring labor is lower?
5. Online entertainment is much better, so why go out late at night?
6. More work from home means people are not returning from their jobs at late hours and then wanting to buy things.
I would put most of my money on #3 and #5 — what do you think?
The post Why is America less of a 24/7 society? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
At 8:22 this morning, Trump posted on social media: “The United States will be hitting Iran (Whose Navy, Air Force, Radar, Anti Aircraft, and all other forms of Defense, together with most of its offensive capability, are GONE!), VERY HARD TONIGHT. At some point in the not too distant future, we will be taking Kharg Island, and other oil infrastructure points, and assume total control of their Oil and Gas Markets, much like we have with Venezuela, which is working out brilliantly for both Venezuela and the United States of America.”
Later, he called into the Fox News Channel to say: “Look, my preference has always been take Kharg Island…. I don’t know that America has the stomach for it, to be honest with you. You know, make a fortune, but I don’t know that America has the stomach, I think they’d like to see us come home, but we did it with Venezuela, Venezuela has worked out great for everybody. We’ve taken millions and millions of barrels of oil out of Venezuela. We brought them to Houston and various other places. Louisiana, uh, where, where, you know, refineries that we have that are incredible. They’re going 24 hours a day. Making a fortune, and, um, you know, I like that in this case, too, but I’m not sure that America has a long time, you know, it’s, uh, it’s a little longer process. Something that’s a guarantee if I want to do it…. I am not sure the country has the appetite for it.”
There’s a lot in this statement, even aside from the fact that Trump still has not gotten congressional approval for his actions in Iran, although the 60-day time limit for exercising military action against an “imminent threat” provided by the 1973 War Powers Act expired on May 1.
Aside from that—which is huge—experts assess that taking Kharg Island, an island in the Persian Gulf that acts as the hub of Iran’s oil exporting sector, would require sending in ground troops. That idea is, indeed, extraordinarily unpopular, even for a war that has been unpopular since it began and is becoming more unpopular.
But, as John Knefel of Media Matters noted Tuesday, Fox News hosts are urging Trump to increase U.S. military involvement in Iran, claiming that it will take only two weeks to win a decisive military victory.
In this morning’s conversation with Trump, host Ainsley Earhardt boosted Trump’s claims that he has destroyed Iran’s military, and then told him that when Iran sends missiles at U.S. targets, “we have to fight back. So when you say you don’t think America has the appetite to do what we’re seeing tonight, I think we do.”
Ron Filipkowski of MeidasNews reacted to Trump’s post by noting, “Normally you wouldn’t increase the likelihood of US casualties by announcing something like this ahead of time, unless you are bluffing to use it as a negotiating ploy, you are stupid, you don’t really care about the troops, or all three.”
Meanwhile, Iranian media affiliated with the state says that Iran is now including in its list of potential military targets “all interests associated with the economic holdings managed by Elon Musk in West Asia, including those located in Arab countries and the occupied territories,” in retaliation for the U.S. use of Musk’s Starlink and X to target Iran. It noted that Starlink has ground stations in Israel, Qatar, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman, while Abu Dhabi investment funds support Space X infrastructure.
Trump also told the Fox News Channel hosts that Iran has “no defense…. The only thing they have is fake news…. They’re dying to make a deal. They want to make a deal so badly…. They’re really in submission. They just don’t know it yet.”
Trump’s comparison of Iran to Venezuela is also important. Clearly, he intended his strike on Iran to mimic January’s rapid strike on Venezuela that enabled the U.S. to grab Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, leaving Maduro’s second-in-command Delcy Rodríguez to run the country. Rodríguez has been willing to do what the Trump administration asks, and the Trump administration has eased sanctions against her, allowing her to work with U.S. investors in Venezuela’s oil sector. Late last month, Joshua Goodman, Alanna Durkin Richer, and Jim Mustian of PBS reported that the Trump administration quietly told federal prosecutors in Miami to back off on long-standing criminal investigations of Rodríguez for drug trafficking.
Although Venezuela’s high court ordered that Rodríguez could fill Maduro’s position for only ninety days, there is no sign that elections are happening any time soon.
Instead, as Trump suggested this morning, the U.S. appears to be controlling Venezuela’s oil exports. Sanctions expert Roxanna Vigil of the Council on Foreign Relations reported on June 3 that “almost one hundred million barrels of oil worth an estimated $8 billion have flowed through a process marked by no transparency and minimal oversight.” Vigil notes that the Trump administration maintains this arrangement benefits both countries, but “it has not publicly disclosed how much Venezuelan oil it has sold, how much revenue it has collected, or how it has used those funds.”
In January, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told Congress that the U.S. was using a “short-term” account in Qatar and that the administration would provide an audit of that account, but it has not done so, declining to report “how the funds were spent or what safeguards were in place to prevent corruption and money laundering.” Vigil adds: “The administration has also not released the written agreements it has entered into with the Venezuelan government, traders, buyers, banks, and other entities involved in the process.”
Vigil notes that this hidden arrangement involves not just oil, but also gold and other mineral exports.
Democratic lawmakers have sent a formal request to the Government Accountability Office (GAO) asking for an audit of the system and have also introduced legislation, the Venezuela Oil Proceeds Transparency Act, to require an independent GAO audit, but so far it has not passed in either Republican-dominated chamber of Congress.
Kevin Liptak, Natasha Bertrand, and Alayna Treene of CNN reported today that Trump is furious that the U.S. media and Iranian officials don’t view U.S. military action against Iran as powerful enough, and his threats now are designed to force Iranian leaders into a deal.
Dasha Burns and Adam Wren of Politico reported today that the mood inside the White House is “angry, insular, grievance-driven and increasingly shaped by a group of loyalists with direct access to the president.” Trump’s determination to force Republicans to do his bidding shows not just in his extreme demands last night that the Republicans pass an additional $350 billion for his military buildup and the SAVE America Act to suppress voting, but also in his insistence on making loyalist Bill Pulte acting director of national intelligence for the time period spanning the 2026 midterms.
Pulte has no experience with national intelligence, which the law requires for a director, but he does have a track record of weaponizing the government to attack Trump’s political opponents. Putting him into the DNI position would enable him to use information from the nation’s eighteen intelligence agencies not to protect Americans from foreign threats, but to undermine Trump’s political opposition.
Lawmakers are facing a deadline to renew the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which expires tomorrow, but critics are concerned that the law currently does not have sufficient safeguards to protect American citizens. Putting Pulte in charge of it exacerbated their concerns, and Republicans asked Trump to nominate a permanent DNI rather than try to put Pulte in as an acting DNI. Instead, he doubled down on Pulte.
A MAGA operative close to the White House told Burns and Wren that as opposition to his slush fund, funding for his ballroom, and resistance to his demands for new laws mounts, Trump is “increasingly frustrated with everyone, from his own team to the Senate…. He’s pissed, and people are not recognizing the level of pissed that he is,” the operative said. “He does not like being put in a box,” the operative told Burns and Wren. “When you put him in a box, then Trump’s going to blow the box up.”
Today nineteen Republicans joined all but seven Democrats to reject a measure to extend FISA, suggesting they did not trust Pulte to oversee the program. Under the fast track House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) used, the measure would have required two thirds of Congress to agree to it, but it failed by 218 to 198, not even reaching a simple majority.
Both CNN and the Washington Post reported today that oil executives have warned the White House that U.S. oil reserves, which they have been releasing to keep oil prices down, are running dangerously low, despite Trump’s boast that Venezuelan oil is flowing through the U.S. They say they expect prices to soar just as peak summer travel season kicks in.
This afternoon, Trump’s social media account posted: “Based on the fact that discussions with the Islamic Republic of Iran have been brought to the highest level of Iranian leadership and approved, I have, as President of the United States of America, cancelled the scheduled strikes and bombings against Iran this evening. Discussions and final points have been, in both concept and great detail, approved by all parties involved, including the United States, Israel, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, Turkey, Pakistan, Bahrain, Kuwait, Jordan, Egypt, and others. The Naval Blockade will remain in full force and effect until this Transaction is finalized—Time and place of the signing to be announced shortly.”
Later, Trump told reporters: “The strait is open. But the straits have been open for a number of months already and you just didn’t know about it.” This evening, Boston Globe columnist Renée Graham noted a CNN chyron that read: “TRUMP CANCELS STRIKES, CLAIMING FOR 39TH TIME THAT A DEAL IS NEAR.”
This afternoon, Trump said he would nominate Walter Joseph “Jay” Clayton, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, to become the next director of national intelligence. Like Pulte, Clayton lacks national security experience. But he has another attribute that might be attractive to Trump: he has been part of the slow-walking of the release of the Epstein files.
—
Notes:
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/most-americans-say-the-iran-war-is-bad-for-america/
https://castro.house.gov/imo/media/doc/4172026gaoletteronrequestingauditofvenezuelafund.pdf
https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/3838
https://www.cfr.org/articles/the-u-s-took-over-venezuelas-oil-industry-where-has-all-the-money-gone
https://www.cnn.com/2025/11/15/politics/jay-clayton-sdny-epstein-investigation
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jun/11/jay-clayton-dni-profile
Trumpstruth.org:
X:
EnglishFars/status/2065072319190470762
Bluesky:
atrupar.com/post/3mnzbi5yiec2l
atrupar.com/post/3mnzcn2inbk2l
ronfilipkowski.bsky.social/post/3mnzae4xbgc2c
atrupar.com/post/3mnzbevrgok2l
Up and my office, there conning my measuring Ruler, which I shall grow a master of in a very little time. At noon to the Exchange and so home to dinner, and abroad with my wife by water to the Royall Theatre; and there saw “The Committee,” a merry but indifferent play, only Lacey’s part, an Irish footman, is beyond imagination. Here I saw my Lord Falconbridge, and his Lady, my Lady Mary Cromwell, who looks as well as I have known her, and well clad; but when the House began to fill she put on her vizard, and so kept it on all the play; which of late is become a great fashion among the ladies, which hides their whole face.
So to the Exchange, to buy things with my wife; among others, a vizard for herself. And so by water home and to my office to do a little business, and so to see Sir W. Pen, but being going to bed and not well I could not see him. So home and to supper and bed, being mightily troubled all night and next morning with the palate of my mouth being down from some cold I took to-day sitting sweating in the playhouse, and the wind blowing through the windows upon my head.
Thomas Regnier, spokesperson for the European Commission, in a statement posted to LinkedIn (with edited video, if you’d like to watch him read parts aloud):
What is the true story behind Apple’s decision not to roll out “Siri AI” in the EU?
This decision is Apple’s and Apple’s only.
Because absolutely nothing in the DMA prohibits Apple from rolling out new features in the EU.
Yes, the European Commission and Apple had a few contacts on “Siri AI”.
But instead of offering a compliant solution, Apple asked to be exempted from its interoperability obligations under the DMA — and this for 18 months.
That’s not an option. EU rules are non negotiable.
And it would mean that no AI agent other than “Siri AI” could be chosen by EU consumers.
Apple, like any other gatekeeper, cannot close the market. The DMA is very clear about that.
Our developers have the right to compete. And our consumers the right to choose.
Those who want to keep using Apple products in their current form can of course do it.
But for those who want to use another AI agent, the DMA will give them the possibility to do so.
Why this was posted to LinkedIn and not on the EC’s own press website is as inexplicable as Regnier’s bizarre choice to spread 14 short sentences across 10 paragraphs. I quoted the entirety of the statement nonetheless, to give the EC their full say. I’ll let it speak for itself in this post, but this does not contradict Apple’s position or statements in any way.
This is the second part (I, IIa) of our honestly-who-knows-how-many part series laying out some general guidelines for how pre-modern armies are recruited, raised, equipped and paid. While I hope this will be of great interest to the history nerds out there, I’ve opted to structure this specifically as a service for the worldbuilders out there, making useful rules of thumb for imagining fantastical societies.
Last week, we laid out some basic groundwork questions for our underlying society and then discussed what I’ve called recruitment principles – the social justifications for military service. And as we saw, some of those principles are going to fit some societies a lot better than others: a society’s recruitment principles (remember, they may use different principles for different groups!) are generally going to map fairly directly onto the society’s own peacetime organization.
That said while those principles provide the justification to get and keep fighters under arms, what they do not do is actually organize the process – what we might call the mobilization process. Mobilization processes are often a step in the road to war that are glided over in relative silence in both historical treatments of real events and speculative fiction about made up wars, but it turns out that the process of getting thousands of men from their homes to a muster point, organized and ready to fight is a very complex one. And, as we’ll see the recruitment principle often heavily impacts the mobilization method and both are tied deeply into underlying social structures.
So that’s what we’re going to look at today: how do you get these men from their homes to the army, sort them into units and make sure they have the equipment they need to fight. As we’ll see, the primary problem pre-modern polities (states and non-states alike) face in doing this is managing such a complex process with such a limited administrative apparatus.
Now for both length and time (this post alone is swiftly approaching 6,000 words) I’ve had to split this up, so this week we’re going to look at the shape of the problem and the two most minimalistic approaches to the problem: ‘self-recruitment’ (entitlement-based recruitment where most of the burden is shifted to the men serving) and retinue-of-retinue systems (where recruit is done by Big Men in a non-state system). The next week we’ll look at the three other models I have in mind: brigading households together to provide recruits, shifting the adminsitrative burden onto military contractors and finally professional soldiers of both the volunteer and compelled varieties.
But first, as always, recruiting and maintaining large pre-modern armies is expensive! Much like many of those pre-modern armies, this project is supported by devolving the costs of my ruinous book-buying habit on to recruits readers. You can help by spreading the word to new readers and by supporting this project over at Patreon. If you want updates whenever a new post appears or want to hear my more bite-sized musings on history, security affairs and current events, you can follow me on Bluesky (@bretdevereaux.bsky.social). I am also active on Threads (bretdevereaux) and maintain a de minimis presence on Twitter (@bretdevereaux).
(Bibliography Note: What I am presenting here is a series of models, which is to say simplified classifications of more complex systems. For each model then, I do generally have one or two specific core systems (that is, specific historical mobilization systems) in mind, with the idea that the model in turn encompasses more systems than just those. Nevertheless, I want the reader to recognize the generalization going on here! The ‘core’ systems for each model and some further reading on them are as follows. For the ‘self-recruitment’ model, my core systems here are the Middle Roman Republic and classical Greek poleis armies ; I also reference the late medieval town militias of the low countries and their Schuttersgilde, on which see L. Crombie, Archery and Crossbow Guilds in Medieval Flanders, 1300-1500 (2016). For Big-Men based recruitment, my core models are pre-Roman Gaul and post-Carolingian France (on the latter, see J.F. Verbruggen, The Art of Warfare in Western Europe During the Middle Ages (1954) and C. Rogers, Soldiers’ Lives Through History: The Middle Ages (2007); note also for England D. Simpkin, The English Aristocracy at War: From the Welsh Wars of Edward I to the Battle of Bannockburn (2008). For the brigaded-households-and-local-officials model, I was thinking especially in terms of the Anglo-Saxon fyrd and the Carolingian levy system; on the latter see B. Bachrach, Early Carolingian Warfare: Prelude to Empire (2001) and G. Halsall, Warfare and Society in the Barbarian West 450-900 (2003). For the ‘contractors’ model, I was thinking very much of early modern European armies, on which see inter alia G. Parker, The Army of Flanders and the Spanish Road, 1567-1659: The Logistics of Spanish Victory and Defeat in the Low Countries’ Wars (1972, 2nd ed. 2004) and L. Staiano-Daniels’ The War People: A Social History of Common Soldiers during the Era of the Thirty Years War (2024). For ‘professionals and prisoners’ as a model I was thinking in terms of the Roman army of the early and high imperial period and (especially for the prisoners bit) the army of the Song Dynasty; on the latter see E. Alyagon, Inked: Tattooed Soldiers and the Song Empire’s Penal Military Complex (2023).
I encourage worldbuilders using this series, once they’ve figured out what sort of system their fictional society is likely to have, to read one or more books focused on the details of specific systems in that category to get a sense of how they function at more detail than the generalizations here.)
I want to start by getting a sense of the shape and scale of the coordination problem here. Pre-modern field armies vary in size but they typically start in the high single-digit thousands (e.g. ~8,000 English at Agincourt) and quickly move into the low tens of thousands. At least in the broader Mediterranean world, logistical limits tend to cause armies to ‘cap out’ between 80,000 and 100,000, though such large armies cannot be maintained in once place for very long without riverine or sea-based logistics. And that’s the number of combat effectives; we ought to assume at least something like 1 non-combatant per every 4 combatants (often more). A standard Roman field army in the Middle Republic was right around 20,000 soldiers, with probably 5,000 (or more) non-combatants) and something like 10,000 animals split more-or-less evenly between mules and horses.
Now in a history textbook, the process of gathering such an army is often just glossed over with, ‘so and so raised an army.’ And fair enough – our sources generally treat the raising of an army like that too. Livy, for instance, writing about the years from 218 to 167, generally glosses over the annual raising of Rome’s armies in just a few sentences, noting the total Roman dispositions for that year (though interestingly, Polybius, writing for a non-Roman audience, describes the process in depth). Our sources do this because they assume their readers largely know what the process of raising an army looks like because these societies do that regularly.
Fictional works often do the same: the war begins and the king dramatically declares, “raise the army!” or “call the banners!” and then it mostly just happens. Maybe there is something in there about sending messages.
But consider the complexity of the operation here: you need tens of thousands of men who are currently living in their homes (without access to any kind of modern rapid or mass communication) to find out they have been selected (remember, many of them may not be able to read and you do not have a postal system anyway), then to transit to a muster point, acquire their arms, armor and other equipment (which they may not already have!), divide into workable units for command and organization, have leaders selected and then pitch the army’s first camp.
If you have ever organized so much as a small sports club, MMO guild or RPG group, I imagine you are right now breaking into a cold sweat at the idea of trying to coordinate tens of thousands of people for something like that. Crucially many of whom probably do not want to be there and will thus look for any excuse to be absent or late.
As noted, a lot of speculative fiction just sort of lets this process work ‘off screen’ so to speak. After that, the next most common assumption is to have the process work the way a modern administrative state would do mobilization: either by mass hiring volunteer professionals (we’ll get to how a pre-modern state does that below) or with mass conscription. So you have figures that resemble recruiting officers walking into villages with lists of names of fellows that are to be conscripted, implying – among other things – that the kingdom is keeping a full and accurate name-by-name census of the entire male population. Very few pre-modern states were capable of this – the fact that Rome did this for much of Italy during the Republic was legitimately impressive to later rulers! – and obviously non-state polities (including vassalage based ones) aren’t going to be able to do this. The parish registers that represent the very beginnings of modern European census systems mostly date to the early modern period (though there were older systems, as we’ll see below, that replicated parts of this approach).
That scenario also assumes the state is maintaining conscription officers. As we’ll see, there might be people in that role (though sometimes not!), but large numbers of full-time recruiters distributed evenly across a large kingdom was typically a bureaucratic demand most pre-modern societies simply could not meet. Remember, in societies where upwards of 90% of the population is engaged in subsistence, the supply of highly literate bureaucrats is very limited. Instead pre-modern societies have to use the social structures and officials they have to facilitate mobilization – unlike a modern state, they generally cannot afford to create a parallel bureaucracy for the purpose.
Finally and crucially centralized conscription assumes the state is supplying the weapons. I think many modern readers finds this surprising, but it is worth stressing: it is quite unusual for pre-modern states to directly supply arms and armor for most of their armies. We’ll loop back around to this problem from another direction next week when we talk about paying for all of this, but the financial and more importantly administrative demands of full state supply of equipment exceeds the capability of most pre-modern states (and functionally all pre-modern non-state polities).
Consider, for instance, what it would mean to manage state issue for an army of 40,000 men: 40,000 shields, spears, and swords, along with cuirasses and helmets, the latter two complicated by the fact that they have to fit the fellows in question. Taking something like the Macedonian phalangite’s kit (on the low-end of labor intensity for a heavy infantryman), that’s probably a couple thousand hours of labor time per man (so c. 80 million labor-hours total),1 which then needs to be stored. The sarisae (or if you prefer a smaller weapon, spears) if lined up standing upright in racks might run in a single row some 2000 meters, side to side. In short you’d need enormous centralized storage and production facilities which would need to be built, maintained and guarded. Someone would need to regularly inventory all of that.
It’s clear that some pre-modern states did some of that! During the Imperial period, some Roman equipment was state issued and it seems like Carthage’s North African and citizen troops may have been equipped out of state-run armories. Wealthy European medieval rulers might likewise display their wealth by equipping their retinue in their own livery out of a personal armory, though most soldiers were not so equipped. But such centralized systems tend to be both rare and relatively limited. By and large the only way most pre-modern polities could handle the administrative and financial strain of equipping their armies was to devolve the costs, either to individual soldiers or local communities or smaller aristocrats. They simply lacked either the revenues of the administration to do this centrally.
In short, the kind of full bureaucratic centralization of this process is rarely possible, especially for large states covering a lot of territory. Instead, as we’ll see, the key to effective recruitment is almost always some kind of devolution or fragmentation, pushing the demands of organization and bureaucracy downward away from the central government, where the scope of the problem is more manageable.
So let’s look at some ‘model’ versions of historical systems and see how they work. I should stress these are models, which is to say idealized and simplified. Any kind of ‘general history’ of the sort I am doing here incurs that cost and so I want to note that up front. Now these models are based on something – in each case I typically have a system I know at least reasonably well in mind as the ‘core’ of the conceptual model with a mind towards other systems that also fit. Nevertheless, each of those systems would demand a monograph treatment to fully discuss and the model covers multiple systems. So please keep in mind if you want to understand these systems in full detail, you need to read on them (bibliography above).
At the same time, also note how different models seem to fit more easily into different recruitment principles which in turn fit differently into different kinds of societies and you start to get a sense of how the structure of the underlying society in a lot of cases is going to dictate – or at least heavily influence – what systems are used to raise armies.
In practice, each of these systems is providing an answer to who handles the administrative demands of assembling and equipping large numbers of men: do you have the recruits do it themselves? Do you have local aristocrats do it? Do you have local officials do it? Or do you employ private contractors?
We can start with perhaps the easiest model: what if our soldiers recruited themselves?
We’ve actually discussed one of these sorts of systems in depth: the Roman dilectus. On the one hand, military conscription in the Roman Republic was legally mandatory, with severe punishments for draft dodging. On the other hand, there was very little enforcement capacity and Roman citizens were expected to navigate the system themselves. Readers are invited to read the linked post above for the details, but in short the process went thusly: near the start of every year the Republic raised new armies and refilled old ones (this could also be done mid-year on an emergency basis). Citizens of military age were required to present themselves in Rome for the selection process (called the dilectus), where officials (the military tribunes) would call up each of Rome’s voting tribes one by one and then call out the names of the recruits who would then take the military oath.
Then recruits were told to assemble on another day to be split into units before being sent home to get the weapons their assignment demanded, before finally being expected to present themselves one last time on the appointed muster date when the army pitches its first camp and fully organizes as an army. And that process is based on the Roman census (which lists, by tribe, everyone eligible for service and their age and property (which determines how they serve)), which is self-reported.
So the system largely relies on individual Romans doing most of the world: self-reporting for the census, then proactively showing up to the dilectus, then attending the division into units, then getting their own equipment, then showing up at the final muster.
The Roman system is hardly the only one to work like this: the impression we get, for instance, of polis hoplite armies is that they are relatively similar: when the assembly votes for war, the citizenry (who are both the assembly and the hoplites) are expected to arm themselves, gather by census unit (sometimes tribe (phyle) or neighborhood (deme)) and join the muster largely on their own initiative. In both cases there are draconian penalties for failure to join the muster, but often with very limited enforcement mechanisms: the system can enforce penalties against one or two shirkers, but not against a coordinated wave of draft resistance among the citizenry. That’s what makes the vote in the assembly so important: by having a majority of the citizenry decide for war in the first place, it ensures ample public support for the self-recruitment that needs to follow.
Now naturally, this is a great system if you can use it: minimal bureaucratic overhead, easy to administer (because it administers itself) and you have a lot of flexibility in how to structure the units you recruit, being able to either split them up by neighborhoods to put neighbors next to each other for greater cohesion (the typical Greek approach) or splitting them into units of regular size for tactical convenience (the Roman, but also Macedonian and Spartan approach).
What I want to note of course is that most societies cannot raise armies this way. I focus here of course on Greek and Roman armies raised in this manner, but you also see this sort of self-recruitment in the armies of medieval town and Italian communes. You may immediately notice some commonalities: these are urban societies, generally structured around a single major city center. They’re also relatively small (except for the Roman Republic, which is exceptional in pulling off this kind of system at scale).
That small size matters because this system relies – because it lacks lots of enforcement officers – on social peer pressure to get recruits to show up. Men show up to the muster because they would be ashamed not to, which only works if they know their friends, family and neighbors will notice their absence and that only works in a fairly small community. The larger the community, the less those ties work.
Finally, these fellows can arm themselves, which means they have a certain amount of personal property, wealth and income. Now it isn’t surprising that aristocrats might be able to do that, but we’re talking about recruitment below the level of the aristocracy – aristocrats alone are generally not enough to build an army around. So these societies also need to have a large propertied class below the aristocracy who nevertheless can defend their wealth (defend in the sense that they can keep from having it all taxed away, extracted with rents and so on – they have enough political power to resist the encroachment by the elite). That can mean a large body of freeholding farmers (the bulk of the citizens of the Roman Republic, or Greek poleis), or it can mean an urban population of skilled workers and artisans (the burghers of many medieval towns and communes) or some mix of the two.
But perhaps most importantly these are all entitlement principle recruitment systems. Systems of self-recruitment like this work because military service is tightly bound to membership in the community which comes with political rights one of which is some kind of right to decide on if the community goes to war or not (that may be a counted vote, but it may also be a collective affirmation, the sort of thing where the sources will say, “and then the men of [town] said with one voice, “Yes!”). As you may imagine in many political systems, the authorities (like a king) are not going to be willing to devolve that kind of political power, even if it lets them raise armies really efficiently.
Notice how political power plays two roles here: it provides the entitlement principle incentive to get these guys into the army but it is also how they ‘defend’ their wealth from the aristocrats which gives them the spare surplus income to afford weapons and armor. In short, in these entitlement system regimes, the ‘middle’ of society (it isn’t quite right to call them a middle class) has enough political power to limit extraction which both enables them to serve (because they can afford the gear, typically heavy infantry gear) but also incentivizes service because military service is bound up with that political power: they fight because they vote and they vote because they fight.
It’s worth noting, societies with these forms of militaries generally have few ‘full time’ soldiers hanging around. MMORPGs and fantasy worlds alike love their ‘local village guards,’ but these societies are calling up the citizen-militia to deal with specific problems on an ad hoc basis. There may be some sort of permanent order-keeping force (Classical Athens had its enslaved Scythian bowmen) or part-time volunteer city watch (one of the roles of the Schuttersgilde in the towns of the Low Countries), but for the most part a lot of the ‘law and order’ functions we’d expect police to perform here are going to be performed by the citizens, who after all can become the army at pretty short notice.
So when we’re thinking self-recruitment, we’re thinking generally entitlement based systems which are typically city-states (or the Roman Republic) which can rely on peer pressure to get men to show up to the muster because of their small, tight-knit citizen bodies (or small tight-knit sub-units, like those demes or – for the Romans – the tribes (tribus)) and which devolve a fair amount of political power to the infantry class that makes up the bulk of their armies (which is to say, to the freeholding farmer class below the aristocracy) who are thus able to preserve enough personal wealth to arm themselves. The small community element also makes the necessary record keeping – keeping track of who is a full member of the community and required to serve – more manageable.
Needless to say, these sorts of citizen communities are not the most common type and tend to remain small. The Roman Republic is astoundingly unusual in being a super-duper-jumbo version of this kind of community and there is a whole chapter in Of Arms and Men (forthcoming) on how exactly they managed that. For the most part, this sort of self-organizing system tends to be limited to small, fairly tight-knit urban communities that either have states or are fairly close to developing them.
Another option, particularly for non-state societies – we may include here ‘tribal’ agrarian polities, vassalage-based polities and nomadic pastoralists, inter alia – is to channel recruitment through local aristocrats via their clients and retinues. We’ve discussed forms of this recruitment, both ancient and medieval, in more depth before as well.
The key structure here are the big men. For pastoral societies, someone (or at least, some family) generally owns the largest herds of animals and thus wields outsized wealth and influence in the community. For agrarian societies, the Big Man is a ubiquitous fixture of the countryside – the large landowner with the big farms upon whom the smaller farmers rely for access to farming capital and for assistance in bad years (and who in turn often exploits those small farmers). These big men can organize local production (through taxes and rents), they can enforce laws and social order, they can provide a buffer for local subsistence and – crucially for us – they can wield armed force. In short the Big Man can more or less do many of the things a state would do, on a smaller scale (albeit they’re going to do these things in their own interest, which may not be the outcome you want!).
Put another way: these polities are defined by the fragmentation of force – by the existence of Big Men who can wield substantial legitimate military force on their own – and so are both encouraged and often compelled to raise force through those Big Men. However for a ruler or ruling institution (like an aristocratic council) that lacks a bureaucracy or much administrative capacity, these Big Men offer a substantial advantage in that they are few enough for that central institution to have personal relationships with all of them. In essence, it is possible (and indeed important) for the king or tribal war chief to personally know all of the biggest Big Men in the kingdom and so to be able to call upon them personally in the event that he needs an army. For large polities, that system can nest: the king has his vassals, who have their own vassals, who have their own vassals – essentially the Biggest Man knows all of the Bigger Men who each know their own troupe of Big Men.
In these sorts of societies, the Big Man’s status as a Big Man is in part predicated on his independent ability to wield force – note that Big Men in state societies are generally shorn of this and are often more political-economic figures than military ones – and so he maintains his personal supply of force on his own initiative, making it available to that central ruling institution at minimal cost (which is good, because not being a state, they also have minimal centralized resources).
In practice that personal supply of force likely comes in two parts: retainers and clients (of some form). The Big Man himself is generally a vocational principle warrior, a member of a warrior aristocracy for whom being a warrior is a core part of his identity. In order to function as a Big Man in this kind of society, he often needs to maintain some more-or-less permanent supply of force, his regular retinue. These retainers represent a smaller ‘full time’ force, often a mix of other smaller aristocrats and blue-collar military professionals. Thus in peacetime a Big Man might keep younger members of his family – who will have trained as warrior aristocrats too, since that was the class they were born into – in his household to serve as retainers. Equally, he might take in young men from other aristocratic households in the same capacity (pages, squires, etc), often as means of maintaining horizontal bonds between aristocratic families.
Often alongside these warrior aristocrats of varying levels of ‘bigness,’ there are non-aristocratic warriors maintained on an employment principle – though because non-state societies generally aren’t heavily monetized, these fellows are typically ‘paid’ in status (including valuable prestige goods) and maintenance (food, board, equipment, etc) rather than strictly in money. Because they are non-noble, these fellows tend to be ‘left out’ or rendered somewhat invisible in many sources – for instance, they clearly exist in the retinues of Iberian, Celtiberian and Gallic Big Men but only rarely do our Greek and Roman sources note their presence explicitly, preferring to focus on the aristocrats. In a medieval European aristocrats retinue, these fellows are variously termed sergeants, men-at-arms (though this phrase can includes nobles or knights), coutiliers and so on. Because they’re not aristocrats, in addition to being trained combatants, they can also be made to do non-aristocratic things: breaking down the camp, tending animals, handling food, standing guard and so on (although in some cases these fellows can get fancy enough to have their own servants to do some of that).2
The retinue of a Big Man is often enough for small-scale warfare, but military pressures tend over time to push beyond the ability of the Big Man to match simply with retainers. I’d argue that the 6th through the 4th centuries in much of the western and central Mediterranean, for instance, we can see these pressures rippling through, forcing societies to reach beyond a small warrior aristocrat class and find ways to mobilize broader populations. For the early part of the Middle Ages in much of Europe the process went the other way, moving from mass conscription systems (see below) towards more Big Man oriented systems, yet large-scale warfare still demanded more men than a retinue could supply and so nobles had to reach outside of their households for troops.
We thus shift principle to assemble the rest of the Big Man’s army: no longer recruiting other aristocrats or work-a-day warriors, he now levies his clients, via the clientage principle. For a pastoralist society, these many be the poorer members of the Big Man’s tribe or clan, while for agrarian societies, these are the peasants. In both cases, these decidedly ‘little’ men rely in peacetime on the Big Man for protection (often military, economic and legal protection), in exchange for some kinds of service to the Big Man. That relationship is sometimes formalized (as with serfdom or debt peonage) and sometimes simply a structure of strong social expectations (as with clientage, narrowly construed) but it often includes an expectation that the Big Man can call upon his clients (/serfs/clansmen/tenants, etc) for military service, not as a ‘full time’ occupation (these folks need to be farming and herding, after all), but either on a rolling, time-limited basis or more often for specific ‘big campaigns.’
In terms of the process for all of this, it can generally work quite directly through personal relationships: the king decides to raise an army and so calls up his Big Man vassals (who, as clients to the king (as Biggest Man), owe him a duty of service). Those Big Men in turn set out with their household retinue (who are in pretty much daily contact with them anyway) and if necessary raise up a levy of their clients or peasants from the local villages which they administer and extract from. The system thus ripples through a series of personal peacetime relationships: the king to his Big Man friends to their slightly-smaller Big Man friends to the members of their household and the Big Man’s tenants, serfs and clients (who all interact with the Big Man in socially subordinate ways – perhaps through a steward or other member of the Big Man’s household – on the regular anyway).
In terms of supply equipment, because the prestige and power of the Big Man is often dependent on the effectively of his retinue, he might opt to pay himself for the equipment of his permanent retainers, if he has the resources, though equally having the gear may the ‘price of entry’ for being a retainer in the first place. What the Big Man almost certainly is not doing is maintaining an armory large enough to fully equip his clients: they’re expected to bring their own gear. However, these tend to be the kinds of societies where those ‘little men’ clients do not have the kind of political heft to protect their production and wealth from the Big Man’s extraction – that’s why they’re so subordinate in the first place3 – and so the gear they’re likely to be able to afford is going to be cheap. This can produce kind of a feedback loop where client levies are badly equipped and perform poorly, so the Big Men magnates focus on their more aristocratic retinues by extracting more heavily from the peasants, which further reduces the quality of their client levies.
The army form that results from all of this is what I’ve termed repeatedly a retinue of retinues (a term I did not invent). The advantage of this kind of a system is that it involved very low administrative overhead or direct cost for the king, chieftain or other ruling institution (though equally it does require having a lot of resources soaked up by the Big Man class).
But the disadvantages are numerous: armies recruited this way tend to be of very disparate quality, with enormous gaps between the best-equipped aristocrats and very poorly equipped client-peasant-levymen. Without much in the way of state institutions, it’s quite hard to enforce a meaningful ‘floor’ on levy quality and in some cases the levy gets so poor that it becomes basically useless, leading rulers scrambling to find other (generally more expensive) ways to ‘bulk out’ their armies. Equally, because the army arrives as a series of units structures around a Big Man, his retinue and his client-levy, it is structured as a series of irregular units which cannot be easily recombined or restructured. After all, these peasant spearmen here and those knightly cavalry there are both in this army because of their personal relationship to this specific Big Man, Baron Owns-Some-Land. You cannot simply flip them into the unit of Count Owns-Some-Different-Land, they don’t owe that guy anything. Equally, both Baron Owns-Some-Land and Count Owns-Some-Different-Land are arriving with their private armies and so they expect to lead those units in battle and to exercise some real discretion over how they are used. All of that makes central command by the king, chieftain or whomever an excercise in herding cats: charismatic leaders (William of Normandy, Chinggis Khan, etc) can wield these sorts of armies very adroitly, managing the personalities as they go but less forceful individuals (King Edward II, for instance) struggle fiercely to control their chiefs, counts, earls, barons and so on.
Likewise, militaries formed on this basis tend to have fairly limited peacetime force and what they have is gathered around the household of the Big Man, not scattered like local police through the villages. MMORPGs and fantasy worlds alike love their ‘local village guards,’ but these societies cannot afford many full-time soldiers and the ones they can afford tend to be guarding things like castles and towns (or just, you know, hanging around the Big Man’s person), not villages. The people who will arrest you for robbing the village are the villagers (who, remember, make up the levy in an emergency anyway).
Naturally, as noted, this tends to be the system for non-state polities where power is wielded not centrally, but by the Big Man. It is a substantial and frequent mistake to give such polities more state-based army forms, which they can rarely sustain. By contrast, the process of state formation by definition diminishes these sorts of household armies, merging them into a single military system under the authority of the state.
Now we’ll pause there for now. Next week we’ll start looking at some more adminstratively and overhead intensive approaches (although as we’ll see in some cases the trick is still getting someone else to supply that administrative overhead).
Yesterday I took a short trip. I began with a ride on the local Hyperloop, which ran through a tunnel dug by Boring Company. Then I used my neural implant to summon a fully self-driving Tesla robotaxi. While enroute I read the latest news from the Mars colony.
OK, none of that actually happened, because those products don’t exist. There are no working Hyperloops. The Boring Company has not dug any commercial tunnels. Tesla has a few self-driving — though not fully self-driving — taxis in Austin and nowhere else. (Google’s Waymo driverless taxis are operational in several major hubs.) Neuralink, which is purportedly pioneering brain implants, has tested its products in a handful of patients but done no more than that. And of course there is no Mars colony: there have been no manned flights to Mars, nor the prospect of any for the foreseeable future.
Yet at various points over the past decade Elon Musk promised that each of these services would be available by 2025 if not sooner.
Granted, Musk has had some real successes. Tesla was ahead of the EV curve, and Starlink is a critically important service as well as a viable business.
But these achievements weren’t enough to make Musk the world’s richest man. His wealth has, instead, historically rested mainly on self-fulfilling faith — investors believing in Musk’s genius have piled into stocks in Musk-controlled companies, and the rising value of these companies has enhanced his reputation for genius.
We have a term for enterprises that look successful because they keep drawing in new investors and keep drawing in new investors because they look successful. They’re called Ponzi schemes. And Elon Musk is basically a human Ponzi scheme.
Furthermore, the SpaceX IPO now in progress makes it clearer than ever that Musk’s greatest skill isn’t developing futuristic products. It’s his mastery of financial shell games and his ability to leverage insider influence, especially his influence with the Trump administration.
To see what I mean, consider Musk’s 2022 purchase of Twitter, which he renamed X. To finance the deal, investment banks lent Musk $13 billion, debt they planned to quickly move off their books by selling it on to investors. But Musk proceeded to destroy X’s business model by turning it into an extreme-right, Nazi-friendly cesspool, prompting advertisers to flee. By the summer of 2024, X was valued at less than half of its purchase price. Faced with losses of 40 cents on the dollar if they sold the debt, his bankers were forced to hold the Twitter debt far longer than anticipated, prompting the August 2024 Wall Street Journal headline: “Elon Musk’s Twitter Takeover Is Now the Worst Buyout for Banks Since the Financial Crisis”.
But then two things happened that bailed out the banks along with Musk’s future creditworthiness: the 2024 election of Donald Trump and the advent of AI. After Trump’s election, advertisers began returning to X, citing a need to appease Musk and Trump. And in March 2025, Musk merged his newly-founded AI company xAI with X, playing off the accelerating AI buzz to further prop up X’s valuation and his own personal balance sheet.
Unfortunately for Musk, xAI’s Grok is, by all accounts, much inferior to the AI models offered by Anthropic and OpenAI. It’s also widely considered unsafe and unreliable. At one point it began spewing racist and antisemitic comments, dubbing itself MechaHitler. Trump administration officials have pushed government agencies — including the Pentagon — to use Grok, but with little success.
So Musk, having bailed out X by rolling it into xAI, is now bailing out xAI by rolling it into SpaceX, which has a genuinely successful business in Starlink.
And today SpaceX is going public. Its initial public offering (IPO) debuts today on the Nasdaq at a price that implies a $1.77 trillion valuation for a company that had revenues of only $18.7 billion last year and lost money.
How can this, um, astronomical valuation be justified? The IPO is premised partly on the assumption that retail investors will buy in, not because they have made any rational assessment of SpaceX as a business, but because they believe that they are buying stakes in Elon Musk’s genius.
But the ranks of the faithful may not be enough to keep the shell game going. So Musk’s Wall Street allies are also rigging the game. Some of the major stock indexes, notably the Nasdaq 100 and FTSE Russell, have recently changed their rules in order to admit SpaceX almost immediately.
It’s important to understand that the inclusion of a company’s shares in a major stock index carries enormous financial rewards. A large share of stocks is held in “index funds,” mutual funds that hold portfolios designed to mimic the behavior of major indexes. Thus there is an immediate demand for the shares of a company when its shares are added to a major index because index funds must now add them to their portfolios.
Historically, the major indexes have waited at least a year after a company’s IPO before considering its inclusion in their market measures, to give the stock time to “mature”. The bending of the rules for SpaceX shows that Musk is again exerting his ability to co-opt and corrupt key institutions. (Notably, the S&P 500 has resisted the pressure and will wait a year before including SpaceX.)
Which brings me to my final point. The immense human Ponzi scheme that is Elon Musk will eventually collapse. But traditional Ponzi schemes only exploit investors who choose to participate. This time much of the money propping up Musk’s scam will come from ordinary Americans who have in effect been forced to buy in. Approximately 52% of mutual fund assets are now invested in index or index-based funds, and over 50% of American households are invested in mutual funds. Thanks to the collusion between Musk and Wall Street, enabled by the perception that the Trump administration has Musk’s back, many if not most of these small investors will be dragged, willy-nilly, into fueling the Musk juggernaut.
Should anyone in Trump’s America be surprised?
MUSICAL CODA
Jenny owns a crematorium. John’s propane company gives her a $20 billion investment in return for 5 percent of her operation. Jenny throws $10 billion into the incinerator, then pays John $10 billion to buy propane to burn that money to ashes. John reports that his AI investments have generated $10 billion in revenue this quarter and that he owns 5 percent of a $100 billion business. A reporter from Forbes is assigned to profile John and Jenny, and over the course of his research, he becomes embroiled in a passionate but confusing three-way love affair with them, which eventually turns into a polyamorous common-law marriage. His profile is glowing, but light on financial details.
— Andrew Singleton, AI Economics for Dummies
Tags: ai
After two days of experience with Claude Fable 5 I think the best way to describe it is relentlessly proactive. It knows a whole lot of tricks and it will deploy pretty much any of them to get to its goal.
I'll illustrate this with an example. I was hacking on Datasette Agent today when I noticed a glitch: a horizontal scrollbar that shouldn't be there in the jump menu chat prompt. I snapped this screenshot:
Then I started a fresh claude session in my datasette-agent checkout, dragged in the screenshot and told it:
Look at dependencies to help figure out why there is a horizontal scrollbar here
I had a hunch the cause was in a dependency of Datasette Agent (likely Datasette itself) and I knew Fable was good at digging into dependency code, either by inspecting installed files in its own virtual environment site-packages or by referencing a local checkout on disk. Telling it to start with dependencies felt like a good bet.
I got distracted by a domestic task and wandered away from my computer.
When I came back a few minutes later I saw my machine open a browser window in my regular Firefox and then navigate to the dialog in question. I had not told Claude Code to use any browser automation, and I was pretty sure it wasn't possible for it to trigger mouse movements or keyboard shortcuts within a window, so how was it doing that?
I watched in fascination as it continued with its explorations, then saw it open a Safari window instead of Firefox. I also grabbed this snapshot from the Claude terminal:
What was it doing there with uv run --with pyobjc-framework-Quartz?
It turns out Fable had hacked up its own pattern for taking screenshots of browser windows. It was using Python to iterate through all available windows on my machine, then filtering for Safari windows with expected strings such as "textarea" in the window name. It used that to find their window number - an integer like 153551 - which it could then use with the screencapture CLI tool to grab a PNG.
OK fine, that's a neat way of taking screenshots. But what was it taking screenshots of?
Turns out it had been writing its own scratch HTML pages to try and recreate the bug, then opening Safari and grabbing screenshots.
Here's that /tmp/textarea-scrollbar-test.html page it created, and the screenshot it took with screencapture -x -o -l 153551 /tmp/safari-cases.png:
(I have way too many open tabs!)
OK, so I can see how it's opening test pages and taking screenshots, but how on earth was it triggering the modal dialog that was meant to be under test? That's only available via a click or a keyboard shortcut, and I couldn't see a mechanism for it to run those in Safari.
I eventually figured out what it had done.
Claude was running in a folder that contained the source code for the application. It knows enough about Datasette to be able to run a local development server. It turns out it was editing Datasette's own templates to add JavaScript that would trigger the correct keyboard shortcut as soon as the window opened, adding code like this:
<script>
window.addEventListener("load", function () {
setTimeout(function () {
document.dispatchEvent(new KeyboardEvent("keydown", {key: "/", bubbles: true}));
}, 1200);
});
</script>1.2 seconds after the window opens, this code triggers a simulated / key, which is the keyboard shortcut for opening the modal dialog.
There was one challenge left. In order to understand what was going on, Claude needed to run JavaScript on the page to take measurements for itself.
It wrote its own custom web application to capture information via CORS, then ran that as a local server and opened a page with JavaScript that would POST directly to it!
Here's the Python web app it wrote, using the standard library http.server package:
from http.server import HTTPServer, BaseHTTPRequestHandler class H(BaseHTTPRequestHandler): def do_POST(self): n = int(self.headers.get("Content-Length", 0)) open("/tmp/diag.json", "w").write(self.rfile.read(n).decode()) self.send_response(200) self.send_header("Access-Control-Allow-Origin", "*") self.end_headers() def do_OPTIONS(self): self.send_response(200) self.send_header("Access-Control-Allow-Origin", "*") self.send_header("Access-Control-Allow-Headers", "*") self.end_headers() def log_message(self, *a): # quiet pass HTTPServer(("127.0.0.1", 9999), H).serve_forever()
All this does is accept a POST request full of JSON and write that to the /tmp/diag.json file. It sends Access-Control-Allow-Origin: * headers (including from OPTIONS requests) so that code running on another domain can still communicate back to it.
Then Claude injected this code into the template that it was loading in a browser:
const host = document.querySelector("navigation-search");
const ta = host.shadowRoot.querySelector("textarea");
const cs = getComputedStyle(ta);
fetch("http://127.0.0.1:9999/diag", {
method: "POST",
body: JSON.stringify({
dpr: window.devicePixelRatio,
scrollWidth: ta.scrollWidth, clientWidth: ta.clientWidth,
whiteSpace: cs.whiteSpace, width: cs.width,
}),
});This took measurements of the <textarea> inside the <navigation-search> Web Component and sent them to the server, which wrote them to a file on disk, which Claude could then read.
Having figured out all of these tricks Fable... hit some invisible guardrail and downgraded itself to Opus. Thankfully Opus had access to the full transcript and could continue using the tricks pioneered by Fable, and shortly afterwards found, tested and verified the fix.
I prompted Opus to:
Write a report in /tmp/automation-report.md where you note down all of the tricks you have used in this session to test against real browsers on my computer, include runnable code examples
Which produced this report, which was invaluable for piecing together the details of what had happened for this post.
I've shared the full terminal transcript of the Claude Code session as well.
Based on a screenshot and a one-line prompt, Claude Fable 5 + Claude Code:
defaults write com.google.chrome.for.testing AppleShowScrollBars Always (it turned that off again later)textarea-scrollbar-test.html HTML documentosascript -e 'tell application "System Events" to tell process "firefox" to id of window 1' was blocked because "osascript is not allowed assistive access"uv run --with pyobjc-framework-Quartz python workaround, described above/ keyLike I said, relentlessly proactive!
I'm currently on the $100/month Claude Max plan, which includes a generous allowance for Fable up until June 22nd after which Anthropic say they'll start charging full API prices for it.
I'm using AgentsView to track my spending (see this TIL). Here's what AgentsView says this session would have cost me if I was paying full price for it:
~ % uvx agentsview session usage be8850a7-6119-46a0-b5d6-79c7fff5ae2b
Session: be8850a7-6119-46a0-b5d6-79c7fff5ae2b
Agent: claude
Output: 68606
Peak ctx: 113178
Cost: ~$12.11 (claude-fable-5, claude-opus-4-8)
If you don't keep a close eye on it, Fable will quite happily burn $12 in tokens inventing new ways to debug your CSS.
On the one hand, watching Fable go to extreme lengths to get the information that it needed to debug what was, in the end, a two-line CSS fix, was fascinating.
But on the other hand... this is a robust reminder that coding agents can do anything you can do by typing commands into a terminal - and frontier models know every trick in the book, and evidently a few that nobody has ever written down before.
If Fable had been acting on malicious instructions - a prompt injection attack hidden in code or an issue thread, or something I'd carelessly pasted into my terminal - it's alarming to think quite how far it could go to exfiltrate data or cause other forms of mischief.
Running coding agents outside of a sandbox has always been a bad idea - it's my top contender for a Challenger disaster incident, as described by Johann Rehberger in The Normalization of Deviance in AI.
Fable is arguably smarter and hence more suspicious of potentially malicious instructions. But that smartness is very much a two-edged sword: if it does get subverted by instructions, the amount of damage it can do given its relentless proactivity is terrifying.
Tags: ai, prompt-injection, generative-ai, llms, ai-assisted-programming, coding-agents, claude-code, claude-mythos
If you have questions, you can email me at eryney@corememory.com, DM me on Twitter or Substack. Or put them in the comments below!
Also, none of the below constitutes medical advice. (Seriously. This is not medical advice - Ed.)
And as always, thanks to Kylie Robison for editing. Please check out her directorial debut with Core Memory when it comes out.
Thanks for reading.
Jacob Keeton (@jacobkeeton via substack)
Trying to think of how I could make this question about space.... Maybe something with astrobiology?
How about hyperspectral biology? This is something I learned about from my friend Niko McCarty, a wonderful writer and brilliant biologist. The term captures a broad set of things, but the general idea is to create methods of viewing biological phenomena using satellites. For instance, could you create a system capable of detecting explosives hidden in the soil?
An MIT study showed that it’s possible to engineer bacteria that, when sprayed into soil laden with TNT, would make light that can be visible with satellites in space. You can maybe imagine the use for something like this given the current state of the world, but there are benign use cases too, particularly in agriculture. Such a system of bacterial biosensors can track heavy metal or toxins in water supplies, monitoring fertilizer runoff or even helping farmers know if their soil needs nutrient repletion. I’m not a horticulturist so pardon my lack of imagination, but I’m sure intelligent people trained in those areas can think of some uses.
Also, you should read Niko’s work.
Siddharth Sethia (@siddharthsethia via substack)
Do you think binder generation is still an interesting problem to work on? If so, what types of targets or types of binders are underserved? If not, why do you say so?
I’ll also point at another friend here, Abhi (aka Owl Posting), who convinced me that actual design of protein binders – a field specific term for a protein that has high affinity for something else and that’s how it exerts its effect – is more or less a solved problem. BindCraft out of MIT has sufficiently demonstrated that making novel, functioning binders is no longer a bottleneck. In that sense, yeah it’s probably not an “interesting” problem to work on. However, what do you make binders for?
ML in bio has advanced to the point where generating and selecting proteins that have desired properties (high affinity, increased stability, etc) is quite good with off the shelf tools. When I first started my biology career in 2014, this was not true, but things started to improve with Google’s AlphaFold in 2020. The reason this hasn’t resulted in a tidal wave of new therapies is that design of biological molecules is only one part of the problem. You have a bunch of nails – awesome! What are you going to do with them?
The next wave of biological research orgs are going to focus on improving the loop that is both target discovery and binder design together. So far, I’d say we’re a ways off from solving the discovery part.
Gviv (@gviv on substack)
What are the main physiological mechanisms that the body uses to prioritize and reallocate nutrients when they are in short supply?
So many places I can go with this one.
Let’s maybe just focus on the basics of energy balance. At the highest level, your body can use fat, protein or carbs as energy sources. Carbs get broken down into basic molecules of glucose, which your brain uses a lot of, and your liver can store in the form of glycogen when you have excess. Fat and protein can go a similar way – storage, or use. What happens when you’re fasting?
Your body will break the glycogen down into glucose to meet the most immediate energy needs, but that gets depleted pretty quickly. It’ll then start making new glucose by breaking down either fat or protein. Generally, the body starts with fat, but if you don’t have much of it, there’s no choice but to go for protein. On a long enough time frame protein ends up going, and at that point you’re in trouble. This is all stuff that you can learn in a bio 101 class, but it’s the fundamentals that make up a ton of nutritional and exercise science.
An additional, more biochemically focused framing can be spotted by paying attention to the actual cycles involved in making these things. Each of the processes I described above involve dozens of intermediate steps that involve an input substrate, an enzyme, and oftentimes a co-factor like vitamin B12 or NAD+ and so on. Cells in your body manage the broad pathways by monitoring the build up or absence of individual parts of the cycle. Too much ATP, and the body will slow down glucose use. Too little, and it’ll start making more glucose.
These feedback cycles have so many distant regulation points that it makes much of the discourse around what vitamin or mineral or supplement to take just impossible. Everything is plausible under the sun, but much of it fails to hold up under experimental scrutiny. Here is a map if you’re curious.
This is just metabolism, by the way.
The Middle Aged (via substack)
I’d be curious to know what the best ways are for young educated patients (who are not medically trained) to seek out the latest research advances related to their conditions.
I grew up with a rare blood condition, idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura (ITP). At the time of my diagnosis – age 13 – I knew basically nothing about biology or health. However, the internet is great, and I got to reading about some of the basics of the blood and immune system, which kicked off what would become the last 16 years of my life. Something I used to do was occasionally search up and read trials for my condition. I didn’t really understand much of what was in there, but that’s OK. The first time I actively read a paper I only understood 1%. The next paper, maybe 5%. After the 10th paper in the field, I was following most of the story. Again, I was a dumb teenager, and you could do much better than those numbers starting today.
What I’ve observed in my (limited) clinical experience is that patients who engage with their condition can participate in as much of their care as they’d like. With LLMs, this has become much easier. As an example, once you understand the basics, you can keep up to date on trials by setting PubMed email alerts for keywords. Depending on how invested you are, patient advocates are welcome at many conferences, too, but those tend to be a little pricier.
Sri Nandan Gondi (@srinandgondi2 via substack)
I’ve seen the Bio space, especially ML Bio, heavily focus on better drugs, therapeutics, etc. But how much progress can we make in preventive healthcare (food, lifestyle, environmental chemical exposures, pollution, aging, etc) and how can ML help in these areas?
Medicine and lifestyle tend to be viewed in opposition, but they really aren’t. For instance, we know obesity can by itself cause many different types of cancer, such as with endometrial cancer. Though we now have medication to manage weight in the form of Danish Peptides, clearly diet and exercise are sufficient for many people.
There’s now plenty of evidence that environmental exposures can cause cancer, as was the very unfortunate case of Teflon (and PFAS in general). You don’t need me to tell you that cigarettes aren’t good for you, or that drinking in excess can cause a litany of health problems. The reason we know all of these things is because large retrospective studies analyzed the effects of many now-identified carcinogens on populations and were found to have bad outcomes. These served as the basis for prospective trials, and ultimately cementing the common advice: don’t smoke, drink, or eat red meat.
Where ML can be helpful is making use of all the monitoring data that is cropping up. Millions of people are having their hearts monitored by their Apple Watch or Whoop. Thousands are getting more routine blood testing via various services like Function Health. The UK Bio Bank, which has followed 400,000 citizens for a couple decades and captures a ton of different data modalities, is a great example of what’s possible. Imagine what we learn with an additional order of magnitude worth of data.
Trina Patton (@trinapatton698090 via substack)
I’ve always wondered how doctors figure out what’s going on when multiple illnesses can have the same symptoms. Is it mostly pattern recognition, testing, probability, or something else that guides treatment decisions?
Pattern recognition is a big part of it. Even mediocre doctors are very good at catching the common stuff. As you’re suggesting, the challenge is what to do when there are multiple things going on, or whether someone is a medical zebra.
I will say that medical students actually do learn a tremendous amount about identifying ultra-rare diseases. For the US Medical Licensing Exam we’re expected to know how to differentiate various one-in-a-million immune deficiency disorders (Whiskott-Aldrich Syndrome, Hyper-IgM, IgA deficiency, SCID, CVID and many, many more), down to the exact dysfunctional genes that cause them. As you enter practice, though, you see less of them, and that knowledge atrophies. That’s why generalists rely on experts when they don’t know what’s going on.
For example, if you go to your primary care physician as a 30-something man with recent multiple bouts of diarrhea after trying this year’s mystery meat in the McRib (it’s not back, by the way), they can probably help figure out if you just have a GI bug. If it persists for a few weeks, it’s unlikely to be that, and they are likely to order some blood tests that might help whittle things down. HIV or hyperthyroidism can cause diarrhea, but so can celiac disease. If all of that is negative, you’re off to the GI specialist for a colonoscopy and whatever else they have in mind.
The American healthcare system is actually exceptional at solving problems, despite what you read online. But you do pay for it.
Jennifer Yates Zilliac (@thisisthemountain via substack)
I’ve been trying to solve some issues with sleep and energy for well over a decade, and I keep finding there is one more piece to the puzzle. I’ve been frustrated that my primary care docs have not partnered with me to solve problems. I’ve now found that partner in AI, and the approach is functional medicine, which is not what my primary docs are doing with me. Please tell me what you see in terms of a shift toward functional medicine and AI.
I’m sorry you’ve been dealing with these issues. They seem disruptive, and I hope you’ve arrived at something that is closer to normalcy.
Functional medicine seems like something that feels uniquely resolvable by AI that traditional healthcare isn’t. Continuous monitors capture tons of data; digital food logs keep track of what’s going in your body; and blood testing is becoming more available outside of the usual medical infrastructure. The catch is that the onus is on you, the patient, to provide context.
If you are wearing your Apple Watch, and you experience a period of accelerated heart rate at 11pm, your device can’t really tell you what’s going on. Maybe you went for a late night jog, and it can somewhat intuit that from the accelerometer, but it doesn’t know that what actually happened is you drank a couple cups of green tea with dinner at 9pm. In that instance, AI isn’t providing anything for you. Then again, neither is a doctor. But an invested human is more likely to ask you about your sleep habits generally, which might lead to surfacing of this link.
I used a Whoop for some time to keep track of things, but honestly I found it overwhelming to have to fill out my daily journal of whether I had 1 cup or 1.5 cups of coffee and at what time, whether I flew on a plane, whether I ate dinner within 2 hours of bed, and so on. Figuring out a way to keep track of the granularity in our day seems like the next thing for these companies to do. Maybe something like Meta glasses will help with that. Though I hate the idea of Apple acting as a Big Brother, you can also see a world where Apple can make use of the fact that it has access to your texts, calendar, flight details etc to automatically link to your Watch data. They just gotta get their act together with AI.
In any case, the best solution involving functional health is one where your health data can be understood in the context of you. Whether that’s with AI-integrated devices or by talking to a functional health specialist is up to the individual.
The Trump administration’s unrelenting anti-trans crusade has many familiar Trump II elements: performative cruelty; using the powers of the state to bully a vulnerable, marginalized, disfavored group; and outrageous misconduct in pursuit of poisonous policy objectives.
TPM Editor-at-Large David Kurtz was joined by Chris Geidner, publisher of the Law Dork newsletter and the leading American journalist covering these issues, to talk about this sweeping assault on transgender Americans.
Check out the full video on Substack Live.
Let no one accuse Bernie Sanders of ducking the big questions. Writing in the New York Times last week, the senator asked: “Will the future of humanity be determined by a handful of billionaires who have promoted and developed AI, with virtually no democratic input, who stand to become even richer and more powerful than they are today?”
We agree entirely that this is one of the most potent questions facing global democracy today. Our book, Rewiring Democracy, surveys the emerging uses for and impacts of AI in democracy around the world and reaches the same conclusion: that the most urgent risk posed by AI is the concentration of power, wealth and control among tech oligarchs.
And yet we reached a vastly different conclusion than Sanders on what to do about it.
The senator points to a once radical but increasingly popular solution: creating a US sovereign wealth fund by taking 50% stock in AI companies such as Anthropic, OpenAI and xAI. The argument in favor of this is twofold. One: it would establish democratic control over the AI companies, giving the government “the power, through its voting shares and an equal representation on each company’s board, to block decisions that hurt our citizens and to push for policies that help them”. Two: it would return a big chunk of the economic rewards of soaring AI valuations to the public, ensuring “trillions of dollars potentially generated by AI are used to improve the lives of all of us”.
We laud both these goals unreservedly.
We wholeheartedly agree that there must be public influence over the development and use of AI, just as we demand the government intervene to ensure that automakers, drugmakers, airlines and other industries balance profitability with public safety and the public interest. And we credit the senator with recognizing that there are more levers for the government to pull beyond the promulgation of regulation to achieve this.
And we also agree that the obscene, dangerous accumulation of wealth among AI companies needs to be disrupted. As OpenAI and Anthropic race to be minted as the world’s latest trillion-dollar AI companies, we should recognize that—whether or not it constitutes a bubble—these staggering market capitalizations represent a transfer of wealth. The flow of money goes from the smaller businesses and actual people using AI, and being subjected to it, to the owners of these tech companies.
That includes the world’s 86 AI billionaires “seeking to maximize their power and profit” aiming to decide the “fate of humanity … behind closed doors in Silicon Valley”, as Sanders said.
And yet, while we do not outright oppose the taking of AI company stock, or of a US sovereign wealth fund, there are better ways to achieve Sanders’ stated goals.
Public ownership of these companies entangles corporate profit and valuation with the public interest. It would incentivize the government to clear regulations, permit the exploitation of workers and users, suppress competition, encourage AI adoption regardless of the responsibleness of the implementation or appropriateness of the use case, and otherwise act on behalf of corporate interests.
After all, if growing, say, Nvidia from its first $5tn in value to its next $5tn also represents a doubling in value of this segment of the sovereign wealth fund, then you can expect the fund managers to support chip sales, foreign and domestic, with the same zeal as the company’s private investors.
This is not an effective way to influence corporations to act in the public interest. In fact, it makes corporate influence on the government more likely.
We should be wary of this possibility because we’ve seen it before. Ownership of substantial stakes in oil companies by the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund, the world’s largest, does not seem to have steered those corporations to pro-environmental policies. Instead, the Norwegian government’s dependence on those companies has inhibited them from taking climate action. Here in the US, public employee pension funds merit the same criticism: the fiduciary duty to generate wealth overwhelms any intention to direct their corporate holdings in the public interest.
A better answer is to separate the two goals. The standard way to share private rewards with the broader society that made them possible is taxation. Senator Elizabeth Warren has proposed an excise tax on datacenters’ energy use. Others have proposed an AI token tax, which has much the same effect.
As to the goal of reshaping AI in the public interest, we have proposed an AI Public Option. The concept is for governments, be it federal or state, to establish publicly developed and operated AI models run by public institutions under democratic control. The idea is not to eliminate corporate AI or to seize it as a public asset, but rather for government to provide a competitive baseline that private AI offerings must meet or exceed to win business—just like the notion of a healthcare public option.
The Swiss have trailblazed this approach. Apertus is a large language model built by Swiss public servants, researchers at Swiss universities, using appropriately licensed training data and pre-existing Swiss public supercomputing infrastructure powered by renewable energy.
While Apertus doesn’t seriously compete with the latest OpenAI and Anthropic models on performance benchmarks, it blows them out of the water in transparency, sustainability and compliance with EU regulations including adherence to copyright. It’s a nascent project, but suggestive of how public institutions can apply competitive pressure for corporate actors to behave responsibly.
Don’t confuse public AI with “sovereign AI“, the notion that every country needs to invest in domestic AI infrastructure. Sovereign AI is often invoked as a marketing scheme for big tech companies looking to sell to governments; it demands public investment without guaranteeing public control.
Sanders is a bold and savvy political operator. So why is he pursuing the sovereign wealth fund strategy when he must be aware of these risks? It may be due to another argument he makes in his op-ed: that the Trump administration and the billionaire owners of AI are aligned to the idea.
It’s expedient to capitalize on rare moments of seeming alignment across diverse political factions, but it also behooves us to ask why the AI billionaires are open to this extraordinary intervention. The answer, of course, is that they believe that for every dollar ceded to government stock expropriation, they will get back more in favorable government policies to protect that newfound investment.
Energy taxation is a straightforward way to make AI companies pay for the social disruption of their technologies. Public AI represents a non-monetary mechanism for governments to shape the development of AI, complementary to direct regulation of private actors, one with a far greater chance of influencing corporate behavior towards the public interest. We urge Sanders and other political leaders to consider them.
This essay was written with Nathan E. Sanders, and originally appeared in The Guardian.
LISTEN TO THIS STORY’S SOUNDSCAPE
It was two months after floodwaters swelled by 27 feet along the Swannanoa River that Jill Holtz, an Army National Guard member, stepped onto a debris-strewn football field 600 feet north of the riverbed and made a decision that would change her life.
And the lives of countless victims of tropical storm Helene.
In the middle of the field was a toddler bed displaced by the storm. A Batman comforter was draped across the mattress, trapped in place by the blue metal frame. Two mud-caked stuffed animals, an orange monkey and a gorilla, were tucked into the headboard.
Scattered across the landscape, all around her, were the contents of people’s homes. Whole closets worth of clothes still on their hangers lay atop a puree of grass and mud. Trailer homes sat on their sides in the rubble. Glass dishes and pots, some undamaged by the violence of the rushing river, peeped out from upturned chunks of ground.
Holtz didn’t see piles of unsavageable wreckage. She didn’t consider the task of cleaning and fixing the mountains of momentos to be impossible. Instead, Holtz, 45, knew she had to do everything she could to return the items she found to the people who lost them in the greater Swannanoa area.
“[Imagine], you’ve lost everything, and you’re surrounded by all this stuff that is not yours. You’re surrounded by brand new stuff, sure, you’re surrounded by donations, sure, but you’ve lost a piece of home,” Holtz said. “If I can give that one little thing back to somebody, man, it means the world.”
And so she launched Out the Mud, a volunteer group designed to reunite lost items with their owners. Eighteen months after Helene’s floodwaters rushed through this 5,000-person community about 12 minutes east of Asheville, Holtz is still returning precious items to their owners.
And she is not the only one. Mandy Wallace is the artifact recovery technician for MountainTrue, a non-profit organization that has been working to clean debris from the French Broad and Swannanoa rivers since the storm. Since March 2025, she and her team have returned roughly 120 items through postings on their lost and found Facebook page. “It turns into a Nancy Drew mystery,” Wallace said in early March from her office in Weaverville, North Carolina. “Who’s this belong to? Who’s missing this?…I need to get it back.”
Alice Wright, an associate professor of anthropology at Appalachian State University who studies the relationship between people and material objects, says that returning even a single valued possession can mean everything to someone who has lost everything. “Having that material connection has the potential to provide that tangible, I mean, the literal touchstone to safety, to comfort, to your identity and who you are,” she said. “There’s something so human [about] our connections to these objects that really encourages us to empathize with each other and to extend that neighborliness that the storm brought to the surface.”
Standing at the end of the same field on a sunny March morning more than a year later, Holtz looks over the now-tidy grass and nearby beds of spring daffodils that are just beginning to bloom. There is no trace of the damage the river once wrought. Except only minutes before, Holtz bent down and dug up a pair of earrings and a photograph in the back yard of a nearby abandoned home. She carefully placed them in the back of her trailer, which was filled to the roof with multicolored plastic boxes of found objects, waiting to be returned.
“There is still so much stuff out here,” said Holtz, dressed in a tee shirt and jeans, a silver necklace with “fearless” engraved on it tucked under her collar. She’s not planning to stop looking anytime soon.
As of March, Holtz has returned over 400 possessions to their rightful owners. But roughly 800 items — toy trains, Christmas ornaments, baseball trophies, heaps of photos, a drum set, jewelry, on and on — remain unclaimed in a 6 by 12 foot trailer she transports back and forth from her home in Raleigh, four hours away. What follows is a spotlight on just a few of those worldly possessions — three that have been successfully returned and two that are still lost.
•RETURNED
In December 2024, while searching for lost objects in the area in and around the football field, Holtz and her volunteers found three postcards, still intact and readable. Based on information visible on the cards, each was sent from Switzerland to Houston, Texas, within the same two weeks during the spring of 1998. Holtz cleaned the cards, took photos of them and posted her find online in the hopes of hearing from the owners.
Nine months later in September 2025, Greg Carraux, 67, received a message on his phone from an unknown number with a photo of the postcards and a note asking if they belonged to him. At the time, one of Holtz’s volunteers, Jill Alexander, was going through any items with names on them and trying to find their information via Google.
He showed the images to his wife, Denise Carraux, 66, who immediately recognized what they were.
“People say ‘it’s only material things,’ but when you look at it, it’s like, you lost the light, you lost everything. So basically, at 67 I’m starting over again,” said Greg Carraux, who explained the couple moved to the area only four months before the storm. The floods washed away many of the valuable items they had brought with them from Houston, Texas, valuables collected over years and generations.
The postcards were keepsakes from the very beginning of their relationship. Right after the two met in early May 1998, Greg went away on vacation for 10 days. Each day he wrote a letter to Denise about his travels. From those letters their romance blossomed. To Denise and Greg, the sentimental value and history of the postcards make them irreplaceable.
“Things are very important because they capture your history,” Denise said. “I’m just so happy to have them.”
Luckily, two more postcards were found and returned to the couple this March.
•FOUND – STILL LOST
In March 2025, while cleaning up debris along the French Broad River as a part of her work for MountainTrue, Mandy Wallace, 55, came across a tiny piece of ceramic glass poking out of the mud. She bent over to pull it out, expecting a fragment, and was surprised to see a fully intact ceramic Jim Beam decanter emerge in the shape of a small orange fox.
“It was the very first found item for our organization,” Wallace said. “The beginning of all of this.”
Earlier that month, Wallace along with 10 other full-time workers had been hired by MountainTrue to handle debris cleanup along the rivers after the storm. Including Wallace, all of the new hires had lost their jobs due to damage from the storm. The non-profit had received a small grant from the Land of Sky Regional Council, a multi-county, local government, planning and development organization, to support the cleanup initiative.
Since onboarding what Wallace calls the “OG Debris Team,” 92 workers have been added to the organization’s cleanup crew thanks to another $10 million grant MountainTrue received in July 2025 from North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality.
As their team grew and more items were collected, Wallace was officially given the title of Artifact Recovery Technician in September 2025. She now has her own office in Weaverville, North Carolina, with shelves full of items including quilts, old china, photo albums and a recently found 3-foot-tall handcarved wooden statue of a female form.
The Jim Beam decanter sits on her office windowsill slightly away from the shelves of other objects across the room. It is joined by various other items she has collected, none of which look like they could have survived tumbling through roiling floodwaters.
“My favorite items are the ones that are just so delicate,” Wallace said.
• RETURNED
In April 2025, alongside Wallace, a team of MountainTrue volunteers were working along Sweeten Creek right off the Swannanoa River in Biltmore Village, an historic and flood-prone neighborhood on the southern edge of Asheville. Amid the debris were multiple sleeves of old baseball cards scattered along the riverbank.
In September 2025, Wallace posted the cards along with other found objects — crumpled photographs, military pins, award plaques, vases and CDs — on the group’s Facebook page.
In February 2026, Jack Wright, 43, who is of no relation to Alice Wright, reached out to claim many of the baseball cards. Back in April, his wife, Caitlin Wright, 37, had claimed their daughter’s baby photo album collected from roughly the same location the cards were found.
Even after the album was returned to the couple, however, Jack doubted that any of the other items they lost in the flood would have survived. When the storm hit, Jack’s generational family paint business, which was located roughly a mile away from Sweeten Creek and along the river, had been completely washed away. The cards along with the baby album had been about 30 feet above the ground level in storage when the river water started to rise.
“There were probably 40 to 50 cards, big three-ring binder books up there that had multiple sleeves of cards in them,” Jack said. “They’re just old cardboard from, you know, back in the ’80s and ’90s. I never would have thought they would have survived.”
But when Jack finally decided to look through the Facebook page, he was surprised to see the baseball cards that he grew up with and collected with his father.
• FOUND – STILL LOST
The stuffed monkeys Holtz found at the center of a football field in Swannanoa two Decembers ago were the first objects she recovered after the storm.
“That’s what started it. I saw these stuffed animals, and was like, ‘I’m gonna find the little kid that this belongs to,'” Holtz said.
Despite posting photos of them on Facebook, Holtz still has not been able to connect with the original owner, but she hasn’t given up hope. She has, however, been able to return numerous other stuffed animals to locals around the area.
While cleaning up the field later that December, Holtz found a giant, roughly 2-foot-tall white teddy bear with a red bowtie caked with dirt. It took over a week of multiple scrubbings before it regained its original coloring.
“I think that I found it and I thought I wasn’t going to hold on to it at first because it was just so, so beyond dirty,” Holtz said. “I remember setting it out, and then I just was like, ‘I can’t leave that. I can’t do it.'”
Her perseverance paid off because shortly after posting the bear to Facebook, a woman came to claim it. The bear had been a Valentine’s gift from her husband years ago. “It was so worth it. It was full circle, complete closure,” Holtz said. “I was so thankful that it belonged to her.”
In June 2025, Holtz found another stuffed animal, a medium-sized reindeer wedged between two logs behind a nearby cornfield, where it had been stuck for nearly eight months. After she retrieved and cleaned it, she posted the image to Facebook. Not long after, a mother messaged Holtz saying it belonged to her young daughter and they set up a time to meet. “She met me with her daughter, and I was able to give it back to her,” Holtz said. “It was very emotional.”
• RETURNED
Nearly four weeks after the storm, Ciro Pena, a local water guide and owner of Blue Heron Whitewater Rafting, was hiking alongside the river north of Asheville looking through debris for lost items when he stumbled upon something he recognized.
Five miles north of Marshall, North Carolina, a small town of only 800 residents, he pulled a 4-foot-tall hand-painted tabletop from the mud. The tabletop, he knew, belonged in one of only two nearby coffee shops, Zuma Coffee, owned by Joel Friedman, 65. The business, which has been open for 25 years, was known to have had four tabletops painted and gifted to the establishment by local artist Lois Simbach. When the storm hit, the river filled the shop with more than 9 feet of water, washing away three of the four tables.
Months later, in late April 2025, Friedman had a grand re-opening of Zuma Coffee and Pena showed up with the painted tabletop. Both Friedman and the community were overjoyed.
“At that point, we needed anything to lift us up. Any little victories were big victories,” Friedman said.
Only a few months before, another one of the tabletops had been found by a different local who was hiking in Del Rio, Tennessee, 30 miles downriver from Marshall. “It felt like an old friend had come back to visit. It felt like anything’s possible,” Friedman said.
Today, both of the two lost tabletops remain in the shop. One is used regularly for its original purpose while the other Friedman has slightly different plans for. “We’re gonna hang it on the wall, sort of a symbol of resiliency,” Friedman said. “Things, even if they’re in your memory, are never really lost.”
This article is part of Caught in the Current: Helene Recovery in Asheville and Beyond a project that we have partnered on with the School of Journalism at Northeastern University. Their enterprising students took on the story of Asheville, North Carolina, a community still dealing with the devastation of Hurricane Helene, 18 months later. As part of our mentoring program, we’re amplifying their efforts by sharing the amazing work produced by their students. Visit the official interactive magazine for the project HERE.
The post After Helene: Lost & Found appeared first on DCReport.org.
A few days late (June 3rd, 1926) I wanted to wish a happy 100th birthday to Allen Ginsberg.
We’ve talked a lot about what the Trump White House can and will do to subvert the 2026 midterms. The big picture is that with elections being run by states, based on the clear, black-letter law of the U.S. Constitution, what they can do is quite limited. And, as we’ve also noted, you build autocracies when you’re popular (often by goosing the economy in a smart and concerted way), not when you’re swirling the bowl with approval ratings in the mid-30s and falling. The point of returning to these facts is twofold. First is that a key aim of would-be autocrats is to demoralize the opposition, get people to lose hope and think there’s no point in fighting back. It’s important for democracy-defenders not to, with the best intentions, feed into that kind of psyop campaign. It is also to get people looking for the right things and not thinking in overly binary terms — elections vs. no elections, etc. This week we have news that focuses on the abuses of power we’re actually likely to see.
MS NOW broke the story that yesterday FBI agents fanned out across Ohio in pursuing some kind of investigation against a voting rights and voter registration group called Ohio Organizing Collaborative.
I don’t know anything this group specifically. But that doesn’t mean anything. I don’t know about the big voter advocacy groups in most states. Here’s the original MS NOW article. (Here’s a follow-up piece from TPM alum Ryan Reilly of NBC News, which remember is now a separate company.) The investigation apparently includes subpoenas, going to the homes of people associated with the group. They’re scare tactics and fishing expeditions. Much as the retribution efforts against Jim Comey, Letitia James, and the Broadview Six fell apart, this one likely could too. But that is all part of the game: fear and intimidation, forcing people to pay for lawyers rather than focus on voter registration.
We can’t definitively rule out the possibility that there’s something going on with this group that merits an investigation. But we know who the Trump crew is. They’ve told us. We don’t need to pretend that this is a legitimate investigation. It’s key to assume that this is exactly what it looks like: an effort to conjure marginal corrupt games by making people fear being connected or associated with groups like these and generally stymying their work, which is foundational First Amendment and election advocacy work. These investigations are corrupt and anti-constitutional, all abuses of power. And we’re going to see a lot of this because these are the things that the White House can do.
It’s also important to note how these efforts build on the White House’s other corrupt endeavors. When you purge the FBI and drive off the good people, you’re left with a mix of the bad people and those who will go along with corrupt directives because they don’t think they can leave their jobs. So you can do this in the summer of 2026 because you did the purging in 2025.
We’ll keep an eye on this, and you can help us. Are you in Ohio? Do you know more? Are there similar things going on in your state? Tell us.
About a year ago I wrote on this blog about how coding with LLMs would not work for me, even if there were no ethical or environmental concerns preventing me to use them. I'm not going to repeat the arguments I made that time because my views on the subject haven' t changed. What has changed, however, is that the number of contributions I receive on my open source projects has gone up, and nearly all are now made with LLMs.
The other day I had a very depressing thought regarding this. All these people who submit drive-by pull requests to my projects are pushing me to spend more and more of my time reviewing and merging code that was extruded by machines. Cory Doctorow refers to people that perform this function as reverse centaurs. He calls these "frail and vulnerable people being puppeteered by uncaring, relentless machines." Ouch!
Am I a reverse centaur now? Is my new purpose as a seasoned software engineer and open source developer to spend my days reviewing LLM code, in spite of having decided that I do not need nor want this technology myself? As you can guess from the title, I'm never going to become a reverse centaur. Let me tell you how I resist the forces that want me to be one.
With President Trump’s poll numbers swirling the drain, Democrats are once again asking themselves: How can we appeal to people who voted for Trump, but are unhappy with how that worked out for them? How can we gain a foothold in places that have turned against us?
There are good answers and bad answers to these questions, but even the smarter people trying to answer them tend to focus their attention in the wrong direction. Everyone is asking how to change what persuadable voters think about Democrats, but they hardly ever ask how to change what those voters think about Republicans. Not just in a short-term way or in regard to some policy decision, but in a deep, fundamental way that transcends issues and persists over time.
This is strikingly different from the way Republicans approach their electoral challenges. They work every day to convince voters that they should distrust, resent, and despise Democrats, irrespective of what those voters might think about any policy issue or turn of events. It’s something Democrats need to wise up to — and fortunately, there has seldom been a better opportunity to make persuasive arguments about their opponents.
Let’s take a quick look at some of what’s happening. First, Greg Sargent reports that Democratic group American Bridge plans to spend $50 million on the midterms, targeting “House districts in some pretty pro-Trump areas in rural North Carolina, central Pennsylvania, and Iowa farm country.” Their polling shows that “a lot of voters in these red places blame Trump and the GOP for their economic woes.”
Expanding the map into Republican territory — great idea! After all, Trump has done extraordinary damage to these places. Farmers in particular have been absolutely hammered by Trump’s policy decisions, including disastrous tariffs that resulted in the closing of foreign markets; severe cuts to agricultural and rural development programs; and the misbegotten Iran war that has driven up prices for diesel and fertilizer. While farmers are a small portion of the population even in rural areas, the farm economy is broad and involves many people, which may help explain why races in places like Iowa are much tighter than anyone thought they would be.
You could do a similar analysis of many different voting blocs that Trump won but who have now at least partially turned against him. Here’s one more article that isn’t about voters per se but exhibits the same dynamic, about how the explosion in Trump’s wealth and that of his family since he took office has been built not just on crypto scams, but on crypto scams that depended on fleecing MAGA voters who put their faith in Trump to make them rich, then quickly saw the value of their investments evaporate:
All but three of the 27 individual investors interviewed for this article said they knew of Donald Trump’s history of bankruptcies, unpaid contractors and failed ventures. Still, most said they believed that his position at the apex of American political power and what they perceived as his business acumen ensured lucrative returns on their investments. Many acknowledged doing little or no due diligence. Some said they still hold on to the hope that Trump will make things right. Others expressed regret, anger and embarrassment.
Regret, anger, and embarrassment — lots of voters no doubt feel the same way. That’s what unites these stories, and why it’s important not just to communicate that Trump screwed up, but that he did so — with the enthusiastic help of his party — because of their contempt for ordinary people. It’s not enough to say “Bad stuff happened and it was those guys’ fault.” Democrats have to make an argument that is much more personal and fundamental.
The professional centrists in the Democratic Party look at a moment like this one and say “Now those moderate voters will finally be open to our apology! We can go to them and say ‘We know you think we suck, and you’re right, we do suck, but we’re going to try to do better.’” More progressive Democrats find this message repugnant; in fact, for many of them the first reaction to hearing that Trump voters are realizing that he screwed them is to say “Serves you right, dumbass. Were you actually so clueless you didn’t realize he was lying to you?”
That sentiment is often accompanied by a strategic assessment that rather than wasting more time trying to appeal to Trump voters, it’s far better to devote energy to finding new voters and mobilizing those who only occasionally participate. But that strategic assessment is at least partly an emotional reaction to being told that now, after being proven right, they’re supposed to go hat in hand to the same voters who put the country in this nightmare and ask them — kindly, gently, apologetically — if they might consider voting differently in the future.
It sticks in those progressives’ craws, and it should. Because Democrats have been told the same thing for years, and it has gotten them nowhere.
I’m particularly attuned to how this plays out on the question of Democrats and rural America, but the same dynamic can be seen whenever we talk about Trump voters. The trouble is that Democrats have been lectured endlessly about how they need to apologize and listen to Trump voters so that they might make them feel more warmly toward Democrats, while barely anyone acknowledges how absolutely vital it is that they work to change how these voters feel about Republicans.
Another recent example: this well-meaning piece by Anthony Flaccavento of the Rural Urban Bridge Initiative, an effort to build support for progressive ideas in rural America. It’s all about re-establishing trust among rural folk by showing them that Democrats understand and care about them, and aren’t that different from them after all. And like every such book and article I’ve encountered in the years I’ve been reporting and researching this subject, it says barely a word about Republicans.
I continue to find this omission utterly mind-boggling.
Which is why at least part of the solution has to be for Democrats to say the following to everyone who voted for Trump and is now feeling glimmers of doubt, wherever they live:
Republicans think you’re stupid.
Not “You’re stupid for voting for Republicans,” but “Republicans think you’re stupid.” Which they absolutely do. They tell you that tax cuts for the rich will help you. They tell you when they lose it’s because of voter fraud. Trump tells you rising prices aren’t real, and this is a “golden age,” and that immigrants are the source of your problems, and that liberal protesters are all paid, and that we already won the Iran war, and that he cares about you. They pick your pocket and laugh at you behind your back.
Trump thinks you’re stupid, and so do all the other Republicans you elect, the ones who don’t do a damn thing to improve your community and then come around every four years and say you should be angry about a trans middle schooler playing softball or some other story they came up with so you won’t hold them responsible for what they’ve done. Go to the polls, fix an image of some snooty liberal in your head, shout “You think you’re better’n me?” and pull that lever for the party of tax cuts for the rich and deregulation for corporations. That’s what they want you to do, because they think you’re stupid.
This is a very difficult argument for most Democratic politicians to make. Whenever they talk to Trump voters they quiver with fear, terrified of saying something insulting or unkind. Because they’re thinking only “How can I get these people to like me?” rather than “How can I get these people to focus their anger where it ought to go?” The they-think-you’re-stupid argument is effective because it plays on powerful emotions, and because in this case, it’s true.
Another benefit of putting They think you’re stupid at the center of the appeal Democrats make to Trump voters is that it will help them look like they aren’t so weak. That perception of weakness is the biggest problem the Democratic Party has, and it’s not about whether they support “tough” policies on crime or foreign invasions. It’s about how they don’t seem like they have the courage of their convictions, especially when they try to talk to moderate and conservative voters.
And yes, some Trump voters may be offended when you tell them that Republicans think they’re stupid. It could make them suspect that they are stupid, and they got suckered, which nobody likes to admit. But if you go to a rural area and say “I just want to listen” without saying “You got screwed, and the people you voted for are the ones who did it to you,” you’ll get nowhere.
It may seem like a fantasy that significant numbers of Trump supporters will awaken as if from a long slumber, squint as their eyes adjust to the light, and say “Hold on — Republicans do think we’re stupid!” But one of the reasons it hasn’t happened on any scale is that no one has been making the case to them. No one has had the guts to tell them the truth. This is the best opportunity Democrats have had in years to make that case, and if they let it go by without taking advantage of it, they’d be fools.
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That is the topic of my latest Free Press column, here is one excerpt:
Consider the special nature of Mexican politics. First and foremost, Mexico is still not a mature nation-state. By one estimate, drug gangs may control as much as one-third of its territory. That might sound bizarre, but from the standpoint of Mexican history, it is not new or unusual.
Start with the 19th century. When Mexico won its independence from Spain in 1821, what we now call Central America joined the new country only briefly and then split off, even though that land was under the same Spanish jurisdiction. Those cultures and economies were not sufficiently unified to come along.
After independence, the state of Yucatán rebelled repeatedly, almost claiming its independence. In the 1840s, the U.S. declared war on Mexico and took away about half of its territory. Texas already had seceded to become an independent republic. In 1857, Mexico fought a civil war. The French invaded in 1861, and by 1864 they helped install a Habsburg, Maximilian, as emperor. Yet Maximilian never came close to controlling the entire country, and was quickly deposed and executed. The 1910 Mexican Revolution killed about 10 percent of the population by some estimates.
The rest of the 20th century was more peaceful, but much of Mexico never fell under unitary rule as did the U.S. and Western Europe. The more remote areas were mostly on their own, and they regarded the government as a potential oppressor rather than a savior. So when the drug trade heated up in Mexico in the 1990s as Colombian traffickers were partially thwarted, drug gangs were able to operate in many parts of Mexico with impunity. Eventually, they became the de facto rulers of those territories, supplying public goods such as general protection in addition to running their illegal businesses. All for a high price, of course, as extortion is still the ruling principle in those parts of the country. If you buy avocados from Mexico, for instance, there is a good chance that part of your money is going to pay tribute to drug gangs.
Another significant fact about Mexico is the size and power of its central government. It spends just short of 23 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP), relatively low for a country of its level of development. By contrast, Brazil, which has roughly comparable living standards, has a central government that spends over 32 percent of that country’s GDP. If the Brazilian government is too large, Mexico’s is too weak and too small, most of all because Mexico cannot beat back its drug gangs by brute force or preempt them in the first place.
Mexico as a topic will never become obsolete, not for the United States at least.
The post Safety and nation-building in Mexico appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Photo by Money Knack on Unsplash
Payroll systems sit at the center of nearly every business operation, yet many companies historically treated payroll verification as a background administrative task rather than a major operational priority. As businesses become more digitally connected and workforces grow more flexible, however, payroll oversight has become far more important for preventing errors, reducing fraud risks, and maintaining accurate financial records across departments.
Remote work, temporary staffing, freelance contracts, and multi-location operations have all increased the amount of documentation businesses process every month. Small inconsistencies that once affected only a handful of records can now create wider operational problems if verification systems are weak or outdated. Because of this, many companies are reviewing internal payroll procedures more carefully than before.
One major shift involves companies paying closer attention to how payroll documents are created, stored, and verified internally. Businesses increasingly want systems that reduce inconsistencies between employee records, tax filings, payment histories, and onboarding documentation before mistakes spread across multiple departments.
This has also increased interest in digital payroll tools designed to simplify documentation workflows and record generation. Businesses exploring systems connected to a check stub maker are often focused on improving payroll organization, employee record accessibility, and administrative consistency as staffing structures become more complex. For growing companies especially, organized documentation tends to reduce confusion during audits, employee verification requests, and internal financial reviews.
Businesses operating across several offices, warehouses, or service areas usually process much larger volumes of payroll data than companies working from a single location. Different schedules, overtime rules, staffing structures, and local regulations can all increase the likelihood of payroll inconsistencies if records are not reviewed carefully.
Operational businesses that manage large facilities or commercial properties often deal with additional coordination challenges tied to maintenance scheduling, vendor access, and staffing movement between locations. Companies handling large-scale floor care and facility upkeep sometimes work with equipment from https://www.sweepscrub.com/ while organizing maintenance-heavy environments where accurate scheduling and labor tracking become essential to keeping payroll records consistent across multiple teams and job sites.
Remote and hybrid work environments introduced new payroll complications that many companies had not fully prepared for beforehand. Employees now work across multiple states, countries, or tax jurisdictions while maintaining flexible schedules that may vary significantly week to week.
This has forced businesses to track hours, contractor agreements, reimbursements, and tax classifications more carefully than in traditional office settings. Companies that once relied on simpler in-person oversight often discovered that remote operations require stronger digital documentation systems to maintain payroll accuracy consistently.
Payroll fraud and administrative mistakes can create expensive problems even when they begin as relatively small inconsistencies. Duplicate payments, incorrect tax withholding, inaccurate overtime calculations, and unauthorized account changes may go unnoticed for long periods if verification systems are weak.
Stronger review procedures help businesses identify unusual activity earlier before financial discrepancies grow larger. Many companies now use layered approval systems, automated payroll monitoring, and stricter documentation requirements to reduce the likelihood of preventable administrative issues.
Employees increasingly expect payroll information to remain accessible, accurate, and easy to review without unnecessary delays. Mistakes involving direct deposits, overtime records, or tax forms can quickly affect trust within the workplace if businesses struggle to resolve issues efficiently.
Because of this, companies are placing greater emphasis on systems that improve visibility for both employees and administrative teams. Clear documentation and accessible payroll records usually reduce misunderstandings before they escalate into larger operational frustrations.
As businesses expand, payroll systems often become more difficult to manage than owners initially expect. Growth typically brings additional contractors, more departments, changing schedules, and increasingly complex reporting requirements that place pressure on older administrative systems.
Companies tightening payroll verification processes are often responding to this operational complexity rather than reacting only to isolated mistakes. Organized documentation, consistent review procedures, and reliable payroll oversight increasingly support broader business stability as companies continue scaling across more flexible and distributed work environments.
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The post Why More Companies Are Tightening Internal Payroll Verification Processes appeared first on DCReport.org.
1. Is there too much free parking in NYC? (NYT)
2. New Malcolm Gladwell book forthcoming on violence in America. Ready for pre-order.
3. Manufacturing requirements are killing gene and cell therapy.
5. What went wrong with German trains? (FT)
6. Why do people wander in a counterclockwise direction? (NYT)
7. Seb Krier: “Over the past few months I’ve been working on a very exciting project: a new $10m fund for research on multi-agent multi-principal AGI safety! Instead of focusing on single agent alignment and centralized control, we’re looking to support research focusing on multi-agent settings, mechanism design, cooperative AI, and coordination problems.”
8. And the great David Hockney is gone…
The post Friday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Wet lab.
“Wet lab” was a new term to me, I had to look it up – it’s a laboratory with chemicals where there’s spill risk etc. I have a physics background myself and the closest I came to liquids was liquid nitrogen, and when you spill that it just boils furiously and goes away.
Don’t do this: if you put your open hand into a dewar of liquid nitrogen, you can hold it under the liquid at -196C/-320F because the boiling on the surface of your hand makes an insulating quilt. It’s a fun game. Closing your hand will create traps and you’ll get horrible burns.
Wet market.
The Wuhan wet markets entered the vernacular during Covid right? There are new things you need to refer to in a new context.
Wet-bulb temperature.
"The lowest temperature that can be reached by the evaporation of water" (Wikipedia).
It’s a function of air temperature and humidity and humans can’t survive about a wet-bulb temperature of 35C, equivalent to 40C with a relative humidity of 75%. i.e. sweating is no longer effective so you heat up and your proteins denature.
I first encountered this term in The Ministry for the Future (2020) by Kim Stanley Robinson which traces the worsening climate crisis, and wow, there’s a new term for a new context that it feels like we will be seeing in the news more in the coming years.
Wet pub.
A pub that does not serve food.
Wet signature.
It’s like “landline:” we never needed a word for a phone that was tied to the wall before there were phones that weren’t tied to the wall.
We never needed a term to say that this signature was made by an actual present human before we had photocopies and then computers.
Although somehow a robotic, automated autopen is granted “wet signature” status?
Autopens as previously discussed, which also mentions Margaret Atwood’s Longpen which is not automated and requires her to be syncronously present – but perhaps a 1,000 miles away from where the signature happens.
Wet hire, wet lease.
Equipment hire that includes human operators is wet hire.
As an aircraft operator, leasing a plane that includes staff is a wet lease.
Wet implies humans in both cases.
Wetware.
Hardware, software, wetware.
Back in the 80s, wetware - used somewhat ironically - meant your brain: “thinking” is running a task on the 3lb of wet meat in your skull.
I get the feeling that wetware today means lab-grown neurons? Wetware computers that run on cerebral organoids.
We didn’t really have words that weren’t made by humans until recently. Except for divine words and random words, both exalted.
I suppose we had widely reproduced words, and we call that “copy.”
But from now on, I guess, most words will be words not by humans, and that’s the new default. So we’ll need a name to specifically mean human words.
Wet words?
These are wet words!
One day we’ll have cyborg sleeves that move our arms for us and we’ll need a word for our own movements, and brain-computer interfaces that inject ideas and unearth memories and do reasoning for us, and we’ll need to call out plain old human brain-work: look ma I thunk it all myself.
Wet thoughts.
Japan’s H3 rocket launched June 11 on its first flight since a failure in December, placing six smallsats in orbit.
The post H3 successfully returns to flight appeared first on SpaceNews.
Aerospace executives see AI not as a replacement for workers but as a necessary tool for helping an overstretched industrial base
The post In aerospace, AI isn’t replacing workers. It’s filling a shortage appeared first on SpaceNews.
SAN FRANCISCO – The European Space Agency awarded AAC Clyde Space a 10.9 million euro ($12.6 million) contract to complete development and demonstrate VHF Data Exchange System (VDES) satellites for […]
The post AAC Clyde Space wins ESA contract to complete maritime-monitoring constellation appeared first on SpaceNews.
Unlike last week, there’s no good news. As of 9am today, D.C. had reported five more homicides this week (though one of those occurred several weeks ago), yielding a total for the year of 37*. At this time last year, there had been 72 homicides, and in the surge year of 2023, over the same time period, there had been 103 homicides. Still a vast improvement over last year, but a very bad week.
That said, other categories of crimes nosed down, so that’s some good news. And we are still well on pace for another 33 percent drop in homicides for the third straight year.
Hoping for a better week next week.
*Three of the 40 murders reported this year actually occurred in other years (e.g., a missing persons case from 2023 turned into a homicide case this year with new evidence).
Chris Kemp thinks he could be the last person left working at Astra — but not for the reason most people might think. His company rode the SPAC boom five […]
The post All in on AI at Astra appeared first on SpaceNews.
At one month post-publication of Moral Economics, I continue to get small bits of feedback. Here's one, from the editors of Amazon.
Best Business & Leadership Books of 2026 So Far
Neither first nor last on the list:
And that list is one among many that Amazon compiles:
With so many best books, I asked Microsoft Copilot for an estimate of total numbers of new books annually, and got this table, which notes that the vast majority of new books are self-published. (I wonder how many are written by A.I....):
While I'm on the subject, here's a picture a friend sent me from a bookstore in Chicago's OHare airport. (Maybe Moral Economics is an airport book after all:)
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Afternoon update (this just in, still June 12): It turns out Moral Economics is a Best Book Club book too:)
I have been banging on about FDA delay in approving new sunscreens since 2013. Well it has finally happened. Twenty six years after being approved by the European Union and thirteen years after then-FDA Commissioner Margaret A. Hamburg told lawmakers that sorting out the sunscreen issue was “one of the highest priorities” the FDA has approved a new sunscreeen ingredient.
The US has been slow because it regulates sunscreens under the the more expensive, time consuming and rigorous drug standard rather than the less expensive cosmetic standard. Does this mean that our sunscreens are safer? No.
In fact, American sunscreens may be less safe.
Sunscreens protect by blocking ultraviolet rays from penetrating the skin. Ultraviolet B (UVB) rays, with their shorter wavelength, primarily affect the outer skin layer and are the main cause of sunburn. In contrast, ultraviolet A (UVA) rays have a longer wavelength, penetrate more deeply into the skin and contribute to wrinkling, aging and the development of melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer. In many ways, UVA rays are more dangerous than UVB rays because they are more insidious. UVB rays hit when the sun is bright, and because they burn they come with a natural warning. UVA rays, though, can pass through clouds and cause skin cancer without generating obvious skin damage.
The problem is that American sunscreens work better against UVB rays than against the more dangerous UVA rays. That is, they’re better at preventing sunburn than skin cancer. In fact, many U.S. sunscreens would fail European standards for UVA protection. Precisely because European sunscreens can draw on more ingredients, they can protect better against UVA rays. Thus, instead of being safer, U.S. sunscreens may be riskier.
European sunscreens are also more pleasant to apply, and because they work better with makeup they are probably used more often as part of a skin care regimen, which may reduce the prevalence of skin cancer. Once again, the United States’ slower and seemingly more risk-averse approach actually increases risk.
The lesson, for those who are listening, is general.
The post Here Comes the Sun(screen) appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
The household is a community, as much as the state, and ancient philosophy had much more to say about it than we think
- by Sandrine Bergès
‘Recently, I came across a paper co-authored by 37 authors from Stanford, CMU, Michigan, and elsewhere: *The Last Human-Written Paper*.
The core argument is pretty brutal: the paper format we’ve been using for centuries might already be obsolete in the AI era.
The authors point out two “invisible taxes” that we’ve long overlooked:
One is the narrative tax. To tell a compelling story, we delete failed experiments, dead ends, and overturned hypotheses. What AI reads is a “walkthrough guide” to beating the game, but it misses the truly valuable “pitfall logs.”
The other is the engineering tax. The implementation details in papers are usually enough to convince reviewers, but not enough for an Agent to directly reproduce. Many key tricks are still buried in the authors’ heads, code comments, and Slack threads.
So the authors propose ARA, transforming papers directly into “research packages” that Agents can read and execute: not just telling you the conclusions, but packaging in how they were reached, how the code runs, where the evidence chain is, and which paths led nowhere.
I think the most intriguing part of this paper is that it’s not discussing how AI can help humans write papers—it’s asking:
When AI also becomes a reader and executor of papers, should papers still look like they do today?
In the future, the core of research output might no longer be “how much it resembles a paper,” but whether it can be understood, reproduced, traced, and iteratively extended by AI.
Humans have been writing papers for centuries—next, we might start writing research packages for Agents to execute.
Here is my earlier post on whether the research paper will die out. By the way, as a side point has anyone mentioned that, due to writing detection abilities of AI models, anonymous referee reports are now a thing of the past?
The post Again, the research paper format will be dying out appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
What is more striking, in a seemingly ‘progressive’ radical, is that he is not mechanically minded. He shows no interest either in the details of machinery or in the things machinery can do. As Gissing remarks, Dickens nowhere describes a railway journey with anything like the enthusiasm he shows in describing journeys by stage-coach. In nearly all of his books one has a curious feeling that one is living in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, and in fact, he does tend to return to this period. Little Dorrit, written in the middle fifties, deals with the late twenties; Great Expectations (1861) is not dated, but evidently deals with the twenties and thirties. Several of the inventions and discoveries which have made the modern world possible (the electric telegraph, the breech-loading gun, India-rubber, coal gas, wood-pulp paper) first appeared in Dickens’s lifetime, but he scarcely notes them in his books. Nothing is queerer than the vagueness with which he speaks of Doyce’s ‘invention’ in Little Dorrit. It is represented as something extremely ingenious and revolutionary, ‘of great importance to his country and his fellow-creatures’, and it is also an important minor link in the book; yet we are never told what the ‘invention’ is! On the other hand, Doyce’s physical appearance is hit off with the typical Dickens touch; he has a peculiar way of moving his thumb, a way characteristic of engineers. After that, Doyce is firmly anchored in one’s memory; but, as usual, Dickens has done it by fastening on something external.
There are people (Tennyson is an example) who lack the mechanical faculty but can see the social possibilities of machinery. Dickens has not this stamp of mind. He shows very little consciousness of the future. When he speaks of human progress it is usually in terms of moral progress men growing better; probably he would never admit that men are only as good as their technical development allows them to be. At this point the gap between Dickens and his modern analogue, H.G. Wells, is at its widest. Wells wears the future round his neck like a mill-stone, but Dickens’s unscientific cast of mind is just as damaging in a different way. What it does is to make any positive attitude more difficult for him. He is hostile to the feudal, agricultural past and not in real touch with the industrial present. Well, then, all that remains is the future (meaning Science, ‘progress’, and so forth), which hardly enters into his thoughts. Therefore, while attacking everything in sight, he has no definable standard of comparison. As I have pointed out already, he attacks the current educational system with perfect justice, and yet, after all, he has no remedy to offer except kindlier schoolmasters. Why did he not indicate what a school might have been? Why did he not have his own sons educated according to some plan of his own, instead of sending them to public schools to be stuffed with Greek? Because he lacked that kind of imagination. He has an infallible moral sense, but very little intellectual curiosity. And here one comes upon something which really is an enormous deficiency in Dickens, something, that really does make the nineteenth century seem remote from us — that he has no idea of work.
Here is the full essay, excellent throughout.
The post Orwell on Dickens and progress appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
April 13, 1986 – April 27, 2026
Guadalajara, Mexico, was quite a different place when it last hosted World Cup games 40 years ago. The city welcomed matches in June 1986 and did so again in 2026, when South Korea faced Czechia at Guadalajara Stadium in the opening round of the 2026 FIFA World Cup.
In 1986, Guadalajara Stadium had not yet been built in Zapopan, the fast-growing municipality just northwest of Guadalajara. Many of that year’s World Cup matches were held instead at Jalisco Stadium in northeastern Guadalajara. It was in that stadium that France defeated Brazil in a penalty shootout in the 1986 quarterfinals, in what is widely regarded as one of the most memorable World Cup games of all time.
As seen in the Landsat images above, the land where Guadalajara Stadium (also called Estadio Akron) now sits was farmland in 1986. The new stadium, built in 2010 to host Mexico’s Club Deportivo Guadalajara, or Chivas, lies near the Sierra la Primavera volcanic complex, a rugged landscape full of lava flows, volcanic domes, steam vents, and hot springs. The architects who designed the stadium took inspiration from the nearby volcanic terrain, creating a structure that rises from a grassy earthen berm meant to resemble the flanks of a volcano, topped with a white roof reminiscent of a volcanic cloud.
About 95,000 years ago, the volcanic system underneath Sierra la Primavera produced a massive eruption that caused a caldera 11 kilometers (7 miles) in diameter to slump downward. Water filled the depression for tens of thousands of years, but tectonic uplift and the accumulation of sediment eventually led to the demise of the lake. Erosion wore away the softer surrounding rock over time, leaving harder, erosion-resistant volcanic rocks within the circular feature that now stand high above the surrounding terrain.
Starting about 60,000 years ago, several lava domes erupted along the southern edge of the caldera. The youngest of them, Cerro del Colli, formed about 30,000 years ago, leaving the dome-shaped feature just south of the stadium and contributing to a broader landscape dotted with other volcanic domes and cinder cones.
Today, much of the original caldera has been preserved as a forested area known as La Primavera Biosphere Reserve, even as development has partially encircled it during the past 40 years. The population of the Guadalajara metro area has grown from about 2.7 million in 1986 to more than 5.5 million now, with particularly rapid growth in Zapopan, a burgeoning tech hub sometimes billed as “Mexico’s Silicon Valley.” A prominent development visible in Landsat images is Guadalajara Technology Park, one of several new industrial parks in Zapopan. New greenhouses have also come to the area en masse, including south of the reserve, where they are mostly used to grow fruits and vegetables.
World Cup fever runs particularly high in Guadalajara, which is hosting World Cup matches for the third time. During Brazil’s legendary title run in 1970, when Pelé led the team, Jalisco Stadium was the venue for Brazil’s first-round, quarterfinal, and semifinal matches. To commemorate him, the city in May 2026 erected a 9.5-meter (31-foot) bronze statue of the iconic football (soccer) player.
Even the animals at Guadalajara Zoo are taking part in the festivities, with elephants, gorillas, giraffes, capybaras, pumas, and macaws “predicting” match winners by choosing between food, shirts, boxes, soccer balls, and other items. A puma named Muluk predicted South Korea would beat Czechia by sniffing and moving a ball, one newspaper reported.
Guadalajara will host four first-round matches: South Korea vs. Czechia on June 12, Mexico vs. South Korea on June 18, Colombia vs. Democratic Republic of the Congo on June 23, and Uruguay vs. Spain on June 26.
NASA Earth Observatory images by Lauren Dauphin, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Story by Adam Voiland.
Stay up-to-date with the latest content from NASA as we explore the universe and discover more about our home planet.
A massive, old caldera and more recently formed craters shape the landscape in the eastern Sierra Nevada.
The hill-shaped features are a sign of explosive volcanic activity—a rarity on the Red Planet.
Episode 43 of the Hawaiian volcano’s current eruption was marked by high lava fountains and widespread ash dispersal.
The post World Cup Fever in Guadalajara appeared first on NASA Science.
Update June 12, 9:53 a.m. EDT (1353 UTC): SpaceX confirmed satellite deployment.
SpaceX marked its historic launch on the stock market Friday morning with a Falcon 9 rocket launch from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.
This was the 650th flight of SpaceX’s workhorse launcher to date and the 68th Falcon 9 launch so far in 2026. SpaceX flew the Starlink 10-54 mission, which sent 29 Starlink V2 Mini Optimized satellites into low Earth orbit.
Liftoff from Space Launch Complex 40 happened at 8:37 a.m. EDT (1237 UTC), less than an hour before the trading day starts on the Nasdaq Stock Market. The rocket flew on a north-easterly trajectory upon leaving the pad.
“Today we make history again. We have a history of making history,” said SpaceX Chief Operating Officer Gwynne Shotwell ahead of ringing the opening bell in New York. “We did open this morning in a rather exciting way. We launched a Falcon 9 and Starlink satellites to orbit. So what company would do such a thing on the day they open in the public market? SpaceX would.”
The 45th Weather Squadron forecast an 80 percent chance for favorable liftoff at the opening of the window, which drops slightly down to 70 percent as the window progresses. Meteorologists are watching for interference from cumulus clouds.
SpaceX flew the Starlink 10-54 mission using the Falcon 9 first stage booster with the tail number B1080. This was its 27th mission to date, including two crewed flights to the International Space Station for Axiom Space, two cargo missions to the ISS, and the European Space Agency’s Euclid observatory.
A little more than eight minutes after liftoff, B1080 landed on the drone ship, ‘A Shortfall of Gravitas’, off the coast of South Carolina. This was the 155th landing on this vessel and the 623rd booster landing to date for SpaceX.
This was also the 55th dedicated launch of Starlink satellites so far this year and the 56th overall mission featuring the spacecraft. SpaceX has more than 10,500 Starlink satellites in orbit.
The Starlink 10-54 mission marked a turning point for SpaceX as it became a publicly traded company more than 24 years after its founding in March 2002. It’s valuation is $1.77 trillion.
SpaceX announced on Thursday that it would be selling 555.6 million shares of its Class A common stock at $135 each, raising $75 billion for the company.
The Starlink portion of SpaceX is a key driver of its business. In its financial disclosures to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), SpaceX said its income from its connectivity business was about $2 billion in 2024 and $4.4 billion in 2025.
SpaceX is betting on its Starship-Super Heavy rocket to launch not only its Starship V3 satellites, but also orbiting data centers to help power the company’s artificial intelligence division, xAI.
SpaceX also hopes Starship can help unlock currently non-existent markets, like point-to-point rocket travel on Earth, asteroid mining, and large-scale infrastructure on Mars.
The company completed its 12th Starship test flight in May and is working towards a 13th flight on a yet to be disclosed date. It’s unclear exactly when the first orbital launch attempt of Starship will take place, but SpaceX has stated its intention to begin deploying Starlink V3 satellites in the back half of 2026.
“Starship is designed to enable a step-function change in our launch capability across reusability, payload capacity, and launch cadence, and is the key enabler of our long-term growth strategy by unlocking entirely new categories of missions,” SpaceX wrote in its prospectus document.
SpaceX said it spent about $3 billion in research and development on Starship in 2025 and $930 million in the first three months of 2026.
Apple’s Developer app lets you download local copies of every session, including the State of the Union, except the keynote. Why this is I don’t know. But if you want a local copy, you can grab it from YouTube.
Speaking of the State of the Union, the full version runs just over an hour, but Apple cut together a 4.5-minute recap. If you haven’t watched the full thing you should at least watch that recap.
