At the office betimes (it being cold all night and this morning, and a very great frost they say abroad, which is much, having had no summer at all almost), where we sat, and in the afternoon also about settling the establishment of the number of men borne on ships, &c., till the evening, and after that in my closet till late, and quite tired with business, home to supper and to bed.
Welcome to Edition 9.08 of the Rocket Report! Some major news this week from the state of Louisiana, previously associated with space due to NASA's aging Michoud Assembly Facility near New Orleans. Now the state has a chance to become the epicenter of SpaceX's Starship program as the company plans to invest up to $100 billion to construct factories and multiple launch pads for the super heavy lift rocket. It would utterly transform coastal Louisiana.
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.
ESA announces big launch challenge contracts. The European Space Agency said Thursday it signed contracts with a handful of European launch startups to help them continue development of their vehicles. "The European Launcher Challenge is ESA’s initiative to expand European launch service supply and ensure more robustness in Europe’s access to space," the space agency said of the award, which supports the development and operation of small launch vehicles in Europe. For some of these firms, the funding will provide a key lifeline.
During a visit to Johnson Space Center, President Trump on Friday signed an executive order to establish a new commission with the purpose of creating the first national space academy.
"It's clear that we will need to educate and train an entire generation of skilled service members, engineers, and civil operators, and everything else to do what we have to do," Trump said. "I will sign an executive order to begin the process of creating a new national academy. It's called the US Space Academy. That's a big deal."
The proposed United States Space Academy would fall under the jurisdiction of NASA, and according to US space officials, is not intended be a traditional service academy in the sense that it educates and trains officers for the armed services, such as the Air Force Academy.
It’s unclear who first proposed that Republicans should hold a midterm convention this year, but as soon as it came up, President Trump thought it was a terrific idea. A couple of days in which Republicans gather to exclaim his greatness and recommit themselves to his service? What could be better?
For some reason they scheduled it to coincide with the first two days of the NFL season. But worry not — the public will see the Republican Party in all its glory and learn just how they should vote in November.
There is, however, a problem: Right now, Republicans just don’t have any appealing or popular figures to make the party’s case.
The full schedule for the convention has not been released; all we know so far is that Trump will be speaking on both nights (though we don’t know if both will be in person), and Vice President J.D. Vance is the headliner on the first night. Vance’s approval maxes out at about 40%, a few points higher than Trump’s; when he ventures beyond right-wing podcasts, he doesn’t do the party any favors.
Who else is going to take the stage at the convention? Maybe RFK Jr. will give a speech telling people not to vaccinate their kids, or Pete Hegseth will enter to some pulsing techno beats then explain how great the Iran war is going, or Scott Bessent will describe how gas prices are going to be coming down any day now. Melania surely would rather skip it, and in any case she’s surprisingly unpopular for someone who doesn’t actually do anything; despite being almost entirely absent from the public eye, her approval is underwater, which is unheard of for a First Lady.
Congressional leaders? We know how John Thune and Mike Johnson light up the screen. How about the party’s candidates? Who are the dynamic, appealing Republicans running this year? Let’s see, there’s…um…somebody, probably! Tom Tiffany? Mike Collins? Jon Husted? Since it’s in Texas, Ken Paxton deserves a speaking slot, right? Or maybe not.
You see the problem.
And look, I’m not saying Democrats don’t have plenty of duds on their side when it comes to grabbing attention and showing a charismatic face of their party. Nobody’s itching to see Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries deliver a stemwinder. But they do have some more popular and charismatic leaders. If they were doing their own convention, they’d probably utilize Barack Obama, who is by a significant margin the most popular ex-president. Folks still love Michelle Obama, who can deliver a fantastic speech. There are young and compelling officeholders like Jon Ossoff and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. So at least there would be something to work with.
In fairness, it’s not completely absurd for Republicans to hope that a midterm convention could be good for them. One of the purposes of conventions is to reinforce partisan affiliations, to remind people of what team they’re on and encourage them to mobilize when the election comes. When done well, it can present the party’s best face to the public, especially when it monopolizes media coverage (as presidential nominating conventions do, but this one won’t). Political science research has shown that conventions create a significant bump for parties, probably because they bring wavering partisans home.
And yet, this convention is not like the others. Because like the whole campaign, it’s going to be all about Donald Trump, and that’s the last thing Republicans ought to want to talk about.
“The problem we have,” says the president, speaking of himself in the third person as he often does, “is that Trump does great when he’s on the ballot, but when he’s not on the ballot, his people don’t come and they don’t vote.” There’s some truth there, in that there is some number of Trump fans who aren’t all that attuned to politics, but did turn out just to vote for him — at least in 2016 and 2024. But when Trump says “So what I really want you to do is pretend, please, that I’m on the ballot,” he’s as likely to persuade people who don’t like him as those who do.
The party’s whole strategy, in fact, is going to revolve around convincing people to think as much as possible about Trump, despite the fact that his approval ratings are in the toilet. As The Atlantic recently reported, the party’s top strategists recently gathered in the Oval Office to decide what to do with the hundreds of millions of dollars Trump has raised; one idea was to focus on individual races in key states and districts to boost vulnerable Republican candidates:
But Trump himself has rejected that approach. House and Senate Democrats, the president noted during the meeting, will make their fall campaigns a referendum on him. His advisers told him that the poor polling reflects the fact that the voting public still does not know about many of his accomplishments—the dozens of new stock-market highs, a decline in fentanyl deaths, the “sealed” southern border, the increase in domestic-manufacturing production.
The solution Trump settled on, according to three people familiar with the meeting, was to lean into the Democratic strategy of focusing on himself. The president ordered a series of television advertisements about his own record that will serve as a backdrop to the hundreds of individual House and Senate contests. Trump wanted what one person described to us as “environmental lift” ads—commercials that would focus on nationalizing the midterms broadly around his victories—and he suggested that the ad makers mine his own on-camera statements as building blocks. “Go look at the clips,” the president told his team, according to this person. “I cite accomplishments all the time.”
I love the fact that “His advisers told him that the poor polling reflects the fact that the voting public still does not know about many of his accomplishments.” If only people knew how great you are, sir! And we are not just telling you what you want to hear!
But once they leave his presence, Republicans are not particularly enthusiastic about doing this convention, which will likely take a similar form as those campaign ads:
With the White House still consumed by the war in Iran and struggling to ease consumer costs, some in the GOP cringed at the prospect of focusing even more attention on Trump’s presidency and record. The president, they worried, is just as likely to spend his own speech boasting about his White House ballroom and dismissing affordability concerns as he is promoting the most popular elements of the party’s agenda.
Are you telling me that Donald Trump, rather than sticking to a script he has been given, will go on long tangents about his personal obsessions, which will only remind voters that he cares more about his stupid ballroom than the conditions of their lives? And this might not be the message the party wants to send? You don’t say.
Back in 2018, Trump thought he had found the key to avoiding losses in the midterm election: Caravans! Remember that, the supposedly terrifying specter of an army of murderous immigrants heading for the border, supplied by George Soros and coming to murder you and your family while Nancy Pelosi cheered them on? It didn’t work then, so now he has decided that the better strategy is to make the midterms all about himself. Everyone in his party knows it’ll be a disaster, but none of them have the guts to tell him.
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Yours truly back in February 2025:
The motivation behind the name change is simple as well. Trump didn’t change the US’s officially recognized name of, say, the Atlantic Ocean or the continent of Africa. He just as easily could, but he won’t.
I’m starting to worry how well that’s going to hold up.
And it’s not like “Gulf of Mexico” was on a list of “debatable or controversial names” until he created this controversy out of thin air. It’s just the one name on the globe that a president of the United States can change to stick it to Mexico, a country Donald Trump has objectively racist feelings toward. Trump never campaigned on building a wall at our northern border with Canada, nor has he (yet?) attempted to rename Lake Ontario.
That “(yet?)” held up very well, alas. The rest of my essay holds up very well too, I think, especially pertaining to how Google and Apple present the change in their respective maps apps:
So whether Google and Apple should show the new name at all shouldn’t be the question we’re asking. The right question is necessarily more nuanced: Who should see which names, where? And Google and Apple’s answers to that question are, alas, disappointing and worrisome. I’ll repeat the seemingly identical policy both companies are actually presenting today, by region:
- United States: “Gulf of America”.
- Mexico: “Gulf of Mexico”.
- Everywhere else in the world: “Gulf of Mexico (Gulf of America)”.
The best politically realistic option they could have chosen would be (I’ll use italics to emphasize that these are my own suggestions):
- United States: “Gulf of America (Gulf of Mexico)”.
- Everywhere else in the world: “Gulf of Mexico”.
There’s no good reason to even show “Gulf of America” in parentheses outside the US. We’re the ones with the stupid name change on the books, so we’re the ones who should get stuck seeing the stupid name. No one else should suffer the consequences of our political lunacy. But it is correct to show us, in America, the new dumb “Gulf of America” name. Again, if it were up to me, American users would see “Gulf of America (Gulf of Mexico)”, and everyone else would just see “Gulf of Mexico”. But that’s surely the best we in the reality-based community could hope for.
Earlier in the essay, I wrote:
To ignore political reality is to court political controversy. It is not in the interests of large multinational corporations to court controversy. But it’s not possible to avoid controversy. What is reasonable is to minimize controversy.
Trump has delivered fresh “Lake America” shit sandwiches for Google and Apple to eat. I suggest that the path I recommended 18 months ago remains the path of eating the least shit, maintaining the most integrity, and courting the least collective controversy. Label it “Lake America (Lake Ontario)” to those of us here in the U.S., and keep it as “Lake Ontario” with no mention of Trump’s petulant fiat name anywhere else in the world.
Jackie Llanos and Jenna Monnin, reporting for NOTUS:
President Donald Trump on Thursday signed an executive order meant to rename Lake Ontario “Lake America,” taking his apparent jab at Canada one step further as a trade war between the two countries escalates.
The president said the name change was “effective immediately” during a signing ceremony in the Oval Office. The executive order directs Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to update the Geographic Names Information Service to reflect the name change. When asked by reporters about the move, Trump said he was sending “no message” to Canada with the name change.
“Lake of America was something I’ve been thinking about for a long time,” the president said. “Actually, as you know, we took something called the Gulf of Mexico, we changed it, and now it’s very routinely the Gulf of America.”
Aaron Rupar has video clips of Trump declaring the change in an Oval Office press event, here and here. In the second clip Trump ruminates, “So if you think about it, we have a gulf, and we have a lake, now all we need is an ocean, so maybe we’ll have to change the name of the Atlantic and/or the Pacific. Maybe we’ll change them both.” Those who deny that he’s a mad king slipping ever deeper into dementia might say, well, he’s obviously joking. But if I had told those same people just two years ago, in the run up to his reelection, that Trump was going to declare new names for the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Ontario, they’d have said I was crazy because that would be nutty.
It is nutty. Renaming these large bodies of water is nuts. He’s nuts. This is not complicated. Crazy people do crazy things and this is obviously crazy. I often use the phrase jokingly but Donald Trump is not hooked up right, and the proof is right before our eyes on camera every day.
Factoid: HOMES is the longstanding mnemonic for recalling the five Great Lake names: Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, Superior. “Hames”, technically, is a playable Scrabble/Wordle word (“a part of a horse collar”), but it’s far too obscure to serve as a mnemonic. That leaves one word in the English language consisting of the five necessary letters: SHAME.
Jack Queen, Reuters:
A U.S. judge on Thursday blocked the Pentagon’s blacklisting of Anthropic, the latest turn in the Claude maker’s high-stakes fight with the military over AI safety on the battlefield.
Anthropic’s lawsuit in California federal court alleges that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth overstepped his authority when he designated Anthropic a national security supply-chain risk, a label the government can apply to companies that expose military systems to potential infiltration or sabotage by adversaries. [...]
U.S. District Judge Rita Lin, an appointee of former Democratic President Joe Biden, made the ruling in a 59-page order where she found that the Pentagon’s decision was “illegal and baseless.”
“The empty invocation of national security is not a blank check to punish and retaliate against government critics,” she wrote.
The imperial aspects of Trump 2.0 are increasingly coming apart at the seams.
Chance Miller, 9to5Mac:
Here are the full details on the price increases:
- Apple TV (monthly): $14.99 (up from $12.99)
- Apple TV (annual): $119 (up from $99)
- Apple One Individual: $21.95 (up from $19.95)
Prices for other Apple One plans are unchanged. When Apple increased the price of Apple Music last month, it also raised the Apple One Family and Apple One Premier plans, but not the Individual plan.
The higher prices go into effect today for new subscribers. Apple says existing subscribers will be notified of the price increase about a month before they are charged the new price.
Seems poetic that Tim Cook’s last action as CEO is a goose to services revenue.
Jack Loftus, writing at McSweeney’s:
People assume scanning is the exciting part. And, sure, it is impressive. They shear off the spine, separate the pages, and run everything through these enormous machines so the computer can absorb every sentence ever written and use it to create some fairly compelling LinkedIn posts. But then, boy oh boy, the wheeled cart carrying those decimated remains comes to me. That is where the human touch enters the process, assuming you count industrial shredders and a giant burn pit out back as an extension of the hand, which I certainly do.
I think at least half a dozen people have sent me a link to this video and now that I’ve watched it, I understand why. Perfect.
I mentioned earlier that for anyone going along with the ruse that Lake Ontario is now named Lake America, the HOMES mnemonic no longer holds, the only two valid words in English with the new five letters are hames and shame, and that hames is rather too obscure.
But it’s not so obscure in Ireland, where they use it in an idiom: to make a hames of something is to make a mess of it. With that in mind, it’s hard to say which is more apt for this embarrassment, hames or shame.
(The other longstanding Great Lakes mnemonic is the phrase “Super Man Helps Every One”, which I don’t love because neither Superman nor everyone ought to be treated as two words, but it does have the advantage of sorting the lakes geographically from west to east.)
Matt Walsh, described by Wikipedia as “an American far-right political commentator and podcast host” (a description that sounds harsh, but I’d say is describing him euphemistically), on Twitter/X (retweeting the official White House account’s announcement of the name change):
This will be an unpopular opinion on the Right but I think this is kind of dumb, even as a troll. Lake Ontario was given that name on maps by European explorers long before the Canadian province of Ontario was named. There are several cities in America called Ontario — at least one of them predating the Canadian province by like 100 years — because the word originates with native tribes in North America. It’s not a Canadian invention. Canadians never uniquely owned the lake or the name. So in effect all you’re doing here is actually giving them credit for a thing that wasn’t theirs to begin with. Yeah it’s funny when Canadians are upset I guess or whatever, but Lake Ontario, the name itself, is American history dating back many centuries. Not sure how you own Canada by deleting your own history.
Politically this is also stupid because the number one challenge Republicans will face in the midterms is the charge that they haven’t used their time in power to advance the interests of everyday Americans. This kind of thing will be used as evidence to make that case. That might not be fair. Sure technically you can advance the interests of everyday Americans and also do dumb shit like this. But the fact is that far from “making liberal heads explore [sic],” you’re actually handing them a political gift. It helps their case much more than it helps ours. And, like I said, the historical logic here is totally confused. Lake Ontario was not named after the Canadian province of Ontario. It’s the other way around.
Good sign that the whole mad-king thing is running on fumes when even Daily Wire commentators agree that this is stupid and isn’t even an effective troll. Every deluded fool runs into reality eventually. (Via Oliver Darcy’s Status.)
Also: Applying a new name to the Gulf of Mexico is equally ahistorical — Mexico only achieved independence from Spain in 1821; the Gulf’s name is twice as old as Mexico as a nation and 150 years older than the United States.
I arrived at college at age seventeen with a glint in my eye and fire in my belly.
I was young and raw, but passionate about arts and humanities. I possessed the fervor of a cult member recruiting newbies at the Greyhound bus station. Take this copy of Plato’s Republic, my friend, may it serve you well. Yes, I really believed that books and music and art could make the world better.
Or at least make Ted better. I’d settle for that.
But I was in for a disappointment. Not from the books and such—they lived up to their end of the bargain. It was the professors who caused the problems.
Sure, there were exceptions. I eventually learned how to identify outstanding profs, and thus avoid the posers. But before I did, I got an education in how not to get an education.
That’s when I learned about the three bad ways of teaching literature.
The first type of bad lit prof can take any book and make it as boring as a government job. These drones embrace the minutiae of scholarship, maybe as some kind of careerist compromise, and turn the spun gold of great literature into dross. I might as well have been studying accounting or statistics.
Actually, that last claim isn’t fair. Years later I did take classes in both accounting and statistics—and they were excellent, sometimes even engaging That’s when I really came to understand that the teacher, not the subject, is what makes the difference.
The second type of bad prof turns culture into a joke, and usually a lewd joke—mocking the very books students are expected to read. I still recall the embarrassment I felt for the prof who delivered a raunchy extended monologue about phallic symbols in Alice in Wonderland. I suspect he wanted to be a comedian, not a teacher. Maybe he thought his routine was funny (some people were chuckling), but it was just shameful.
Then there was the prof who was hired to teach us Shakespeare, but really wanted to talk about kinky sex. This was like watching the same accident happen over and over, week after week. Each class session would start with semi-serious comments about a famous play by the Bard, but within ten minutes we were grappling with the fetish du jour.
My renegade view is that you shouldn’t teach a book unless you can take it seriously. But the postmodernist blight was already seeping into classrooms back then. And it brought with it an irreverent attitude to everything, along with a smug assumption that the posturing prof was the real star of the class—not the authors assigned for reading.
The third kind of bad prof did take things seriously, but lavished care and respect on the most banal, disappointing texts. So a shallow story by Raymond Carver about lowlifes gorging on Jello in a trashy trailer park would get lauded from the pulpit as the best thing since Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Or—even worse!—long-suffering undergrads like Ted would be forced to scrape and bow before some jargon-filled abomination of literary criticism more suitable for lining bird cages.
Those profs were the worst. Faced with their unholy demands, my unspoken motto was: Less Stanley Fish and more wrapping fish.
The only saving grace is that, with the passage of time, almost every bad book they assigned during my students days gradually disappeared from the syllabi—and almost from human memory.
That’s usually what happens to bad books. It’s only a matter of time. If you’re a young student today, just wait and see….
So you’re now familiar with the three bad kinds of humanities teaching. But you want to know what the good professors did.
That’s simple to describe.
They sought out the greatest works of culture, and took them seriously.
They cared deeply about what they taught—and weren’t just callow careerists shilling for a paycheck.
They believed in the transformative power of these works, and used their teaching to convey it to students.
For them, the humanities wasn’t about courses and assignments, but about life itself—embracing society and the world and our place in it.
I firmly believe this is the only responsible way of teaching the humanities. The other three methods do more harm than good.
When I became a teacher myself, that’s how I tried to do it. I’m sure I fell short in many ways. That was inevitable, if only because I started teaching jazz at Stanford when I was just twenty years old. So I couldn’t have been very polished. But I believed in the music. I was totally committed to it in my own life—and I did everything possible to make the experience life-changing for my students.
Aiming for anything less than that would have been a cop-out.
The curious thing is that this passionate way of teaching Western culture is thriving right now—but outside of the West. In the US, the insiders who speak candidly will tell you that the humanities is in crisis. You can measure it in many ways—declining enrollment, shrinking departments, poor test results, increased cheating, resistance to reading, etc. All the metrics are bad.
But that’s not what’s happening in China. The study of western culture is in the ascendancy there. You could even say it’s hot and trendy.
People got a taste of this recently when director Christopher Nolan sat down for an interview with Yiyang Zhuge, who is a trained classicist perhaps best known for translating Plutarch’s Moralia into Chinese (and Hannah Arendt, too).
Nolan was probably expecting another pop culture discussion of his film version of Homer’s Odyssey. But what he got was something very different.
Substacker Hǎi 海 shared these observations about the encounter.
In the interview, Zhong seems intent on getting beneath the film’s surface, pressing Nolan on the philosophical and religious underpinnings of his adaptation….The interview quickly went viral on X, where English-speaking viewers praised it as one of the most thoughtful Nolan interviews they’d seen in years, while not quite hiding their surprise that it came from China
Of course, there are good reasons why Chinese scholars take Western culture very seriously. They live in a world where discussing ideas is a dangerous vocation.
The centerpiece is Tysons Corner Center, today the eighth largest mall in the country, and one of the largest sub-city-sized markets for office space. It is half-owned by the Alaska Permanent Fund, which is the state-owned corporation that invests oil revenue on behalf of Alaska’s citizens, and half-owned by Macerich, a giant REIT, which is in turn owned by hundreds of large institutional investors and many individuals.
This very interesting essay by Joseph Lawler argues that liquid real estate markets, and distanced ownership, militate against beauty.
The post Tysons Corner (Alaska) fact of the day appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
This morning, a headline in the Guardian read: “RFK Jr lied in Senate confirmation hearings, newly revealed documents indicate.” The story by Michelle R. Smith reports that letters, newly obtained by members of the press, contradict Kennedy’s repeated assertions to members of Congress in early 2025 during his confirmation process to head the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) that his 2019 visit to Samoa had “nothing to do with vaccines.” In fact, in a letter to the Samoan prime minister before the trip, Kennedy said explicitly that he wanted to investigate the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine used there.
Observers claim that Kennedy’s visit empowered anti-vaccine activists in Samoa. After he left, a measles epidemic killed 83 people. Smith notes that knowingly lying to Congress is a crime, although it is rarely prosecuted. Still, Smith points out, the apparent proof that Kennedy lied to Congress is a clear opening for hearings into Kennedy’s testimony, history, and conduct in office—including changing the vaccine schedule after promising not to—that would illuminate what has been happening to the U.S. government, information that would likely prove embarrassing to the Trump administration.
The U.S. is now in the midst of its own measles outbreak, which has killed two unvaccinated people in Pennsylvania. One of them was a newborn, too young for the vaccine and thus dependent on herd immunity. Yesterday, Kennedy suggested that Democratic governor Josh Shapiro’s announcement of the deaths might “have been altogether fabricated by one of the Governor’s hopeful staffers.”
Smith reports that a spokesperson for HHS said: “Secretary Kennedy’s visit to Samoa in 2019 was unrelated to vaccines. Any claim or insinuation based on these letters that Secretary Kennedy lied under oath or to Congress is not only false but outright defamatory.” Kennedy was not under oath in the hearings.
This afternoon, Aram Roston of the Guardian reported that Trump’s war on Iran has “driven the US military into a severe financial crisis.” Roston reports that the U.S. Navy, which is bearing the brunt of the operation, is transferring money from payroll to combat operations, creating shortfalls. Officials are covering that shortfall by raiding other accounts.
This issue has already come up in a July hearing before the Senate Appropriations Committee, when Senator Patty Murray (D-WA), the top-ranking Democrat on the committee, noted that Defense Secretary Hegseth was using a funding mechanism that “does not make a lot of sense.” Hegseth responded by blaming the “gross negligence” of the Biden administration and its “woke” policies. The ways in which he has spent the department’s budget were not closely examined.
Defense analyst Todd Harrison of the conservative American Enterprise Institute told Roston that the shortages are no secret, but speculated that “that is a deliberate decision of the civilian leaders in the Pentagon, starting at secretary, that this is for political reasons, that they don’t want to look like they’re damaging future military readiness over a war that is becoming increasingly a political liability.”
A former military officer who now works for a company that contracts with the navy told Roston: “They’re f*cked. They shot all their weapons; they trashed all their ships; they ran out of their money.”
A spokesperson for the U.S. Navy denied that funds for maintenance and operations have been run down. “The Department of the Navy,” the statement said, “is actively managing its resources to meet current pay obligations on time. We continue to work closely with Congress to address ongoing operational demands and sustain our personnel and readiness throughout the fiscal year.”
In the Washington Post, Evan Halper reported that the administration’s latest move to cancel an offshore wind project and nurture the fossil fuel industry will funnel a fortune to Australian billionaire Michael Dorrell, who donated about a million dollars to Trump’s inaugural committee. The way it works is this: the German company RWE will get $1.2 billion from the U.S. government to give up its wind leases for projects off of New York, California, and Louisiana if it invests instead in “conventional energy” projects. RWE will spend $900 million of that $1.2 billion for a stake in a giant liquefied natural gas project in Louisiana.
Halper reports that that stake is currently owned by a private equity fund run by Dorrell, meaning that the $900 million RWE invests in the “conventional energy” project after abandoning its wind projects will go to Dorrell’s private equity fund.
Administration officials told Halper they had nothing to do with RWE’s decision. White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers said: “This story is a brazen attempt to insinuate a conflict-of-interest that does not exist.”
Representative Jared Huffman (D-CA), the top-ranking Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee, had already called for investigations of the more than $4 billion the administration has spent buying the abandonment of offshore wind development. After the new story dropped, he told Halper “These fake ‘settlements’ were already an insane waste of taxpayer funds and a ridiculous charade that seems to be blatantly illegal. This now adds the stench of corruption.”
Huffman said of the buyouts of offshore wind projects: “The deals are deeply corrupt and illegal. When the accountability comes, and I promise you accountability is coming, everyone involved in them will answer for it.”
Last week, Kenneth P. Vogel and Hamed Aleaziz of the New York Times reported that three days after Trump administration officials awarded a 5-year federal contract worth $85 million a year to the private prison company GEO Group to house people detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), a subsidiary of GEO Group donated $1 million to MAGA Inc., a political super PAC run by Trump’s allies. Two days after announcing another ICE contract worth $80 million annually, the company donated another $413,000.
White House spokesperson Lauren Bis said in a statement: “Any allegation that political donations play a role in agencies awarding government contracts are [sic] false. It is not shocking that ICE is announcing more contracts to detain illegal aliens as President Trump carries out the largest deportation operation in American history.”
In a major story for Public Citizen, Zach Everson examined the Trump family’s cryptocurrency products, reporting that Trump appears to have made at least $1.4 billion off crypto in 2025, although he put none of his own money into the ventures. The money, Everson says, comes from foreign governments, pardon seekers, corporate interests, and targets of government investigations.
It also comes from retirement accounts and MAGA supporters who believe Trump when he tells them his coins are a good investment. Everson reports that “Trump’s crypto schemes have left investors at least an estimated $4.7 billion underwater.” The losses reflect “wealth transferred to a small group of early buyers rather than money that simply vanished.
The White House claims: “Neither the President nor his family have ever engaged, or will ever engage, in conflicts of interest.”
This afternoon, Rebecca Ballhous, Sam Kessler, and Angus Berwick of the Wall Street Journal reported that the Trump family’s new crypto bank is backed by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed al Nahyan, the national security advisor of the United Arab Emirates who is also the brother of the country’s president. Last year, the Abu Dhabi royal invested $500 million in the Trumps’ World Liberty Financial.
Such an investment in a president’s company by a foreign government official is unprecedented. Even more alarming is that Trump is currently negotiating with the UAE over whether it can have access to U.S. artificial intelligence chips that experts fear will make their way from the UAE to China. “How many red flags do we need?” ethics lawyer Kathleen Clark told the reporters. “Trump is selling out our national security in exchange for his own wealth maximization.”
If voters put Democrats in control of either or both chambers of Congress this fall, investigations and hearings into the machinations of administration officials will be epic. It is no wonder Trump appears frantic at the idea of midterm losses.
And the ranks of his supporters appear to be thinning. G. Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers reported yesterday that Trump approval among American adults is underwater on every single issue, including border security. And there is a strong intensity gap: 49% strongly disapprove of his job as president, while only 17% strongly approve. Morris notes that the “movement against the president is now primarily in his own coalition, with significant softening in the share who say they ‘strongly support’ the job he’s doing.”
As his popularity falls, Trump appears to be adopting the belief that people don’t like him because they don’t understand all he’s done for them. Yvonne Wingett Sanchez, Michael Scherer, and Ashley Parker of The Atlantic reported Tuesday that Trump intends to buy a blitz of midterm ads that focus on him, rather than the candidates on the ballot, making the election all about him.
He is already trying to sell that story. Yesterday morning, he tried to recast his disastrous Iran war as a success, posting an AI image of himself in front of a giant American flag, an aircraft carrier, and military aircraft. In the image, he leans over dirt as if it were a desk, with President George W. Bush in the lower left corner of the image surrounded by flames and a pair of empty soldier’s boots. In front of Bush is a sign that reads: “MISSION NOT ACCOMPLISHED 2001–2021.” In the lower right corner of the image is a picture of the former leader of Iran, killed in Trump’s strikes, with a sign that reads: “MISSION ACCOMPLISHED 2026.”
Journalist Jim Acosta noted, “This is delusional for Trump to post this and it should be covered as such. It was a massive story when Bush declared ‘mission accomplished’ during the Iraq War. The image dogged Bush throughout much of his presidency. Should be the same for Trump.”
After the “mission accomplished” post, Trump reposted someone else’s social media post warning that voters are mad at the Republicans not because of Trump but because Republicans in Congress have not gone far enough in implementing Trump’s will.
“I don’t think the [Republicans] fully grasp how badly they are f*cking up right now,” the post read. “I’m talking to people who normally have ZERO interest in politics who are legitimately pissed off. They are not seeing the major reform they thought would happen and are REALLY MAD about it. No true accountability. No true mass deportations. No meaningful decrease in the deficit. Lots of very long vacations and no work. No bills being passed that REDUCE the government involvement in their lives.”
The poster continued: “I’m very worried the [Republican Party] is sleepwalking toward a midterm reckoning they don’t see coming. People are pissed off that they voted Trump into office and then the [Republican Party] continues to slow-walk every reform people want.”
Later this afternoon, in what seemed to be an attempt to bully Canada—although Canadians and Americans both have made it very clear that strategy is backfiring—Trump signed an executive order directing Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to change the name of Lake Ontario to “Lake America” in official U.S. government documents and communications, as well as the Geographic Names Information System.
As Marianne LeVine, Natalie Andrews, and Amanda Coletta of the Wall Street Journal reported, in Trump’s discussion of his executive order, he harked back to his change of the name of the Gulf of Mexico in official U.S. documents.
“We took something called the Gulf of Mexico, we changed it,” the president of the United States said. “So if you think about it, we have a gulf and we have a lake, now all we need is an ocean. So maybe we’ll have to change the name of the Atlantic and/or the Pacific.”
—
Notes:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/27/trump-iran-war-navy-budget
https://www.citizen.org/article/donald-trump-crypto-investors-4-7-billion-underwater/
https://www.wsj.com/world/americas/trump-canada-lake-ontario-executive-order-e66b7512
https://www.inquirer.com/health/measles-deaths-pennsylvania-rfk-shapiro-dispute-20260826.html
https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/25/health/measles-deaths-pennsylvania
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/08/trump-midterms-ads-maga/688409/
https://www.military.com/hegseth-says-not-giving-dod-15-trillion-funding-greatest-threat-us-faces
https://www.dw.com/en/lake-ontario-lake-america-trump-renames/a-78537838
X:
SecKennedy/status/2092723195228909676?s=46
Acosta/status/2092948785055838428
Trump’s Truth:
There was a man named Doug Sharp.
I knew him from research for my Tupac book. We spoke a few times about his different ties to the late rapper. Doug was a former actor who was trying to make ends meet, but failing. He had little money. His career flattened out. His car broke down. I usually don’t give interview subjects dough (you don’t pay people for talking), but, oh, a year after our last talk I sent him some bucks to help with car repairs. He sounded like life had him drowning and he needed … someone. Something. A moment.
Earlier this week, he sent me a suicide e-mail.
There were four of us on the chain—I didn’t know the others. The letter was seven paragraphs long, and read—in part …
The life ending act has already be ‘executed.’ A Single shot 9mm hollow point bullet to the right temple. A DO NOT RESESSICATE ORDER IS IN PLACE WITH MY PRIMARY CARE PHYSICIAN AND IN CALIFORNIA SUICIDE FALLS UNDER THE PROTECTION OF THE RIGHTS OF A DNR; ADDITIONALLY I AM WEARING A DNR BRACELET AND NECKLACE.
I have journals, VHS tapes from when I did standup and a myriad of photos. I would llike to ask you and Jeff Pearlemen to share this inofration and workout the boundaries of what is wanted and what is not worth your time. Feel free to compose a story or do nothing; it’s not like I am going to find out and I understand that what I am asking steps over the bouandaries of acquaintances.
I think back to the days and years when I had a wealth of friends; howevver I was never able to feel the love. I felt unworthy and always believed the love would end; and it did.
I called 9-1-1 to report, and hope—maybe—nothing had yet happened, or Doug backed out. I was on hold for 10 minutes. Ten minutes. I ultimately hung up and forwarded LAPD the letter. Nothing happened.
Doug Sharp is gone.
This is the second time in my life someone has sent me a suicide letter. The first happened about 12 years ago; a former classmate named David Clingerman. He had a wife who loved him; a daughter who loved him. But he could no longer withstand the pain.
Life is hard. Even when people seem chipper and OK, life is hard. We all need help, positivity, reassurances, kindness, empathy.
We need one another.
Life is hard.
3. Is Aaron Renn the biggest superinfluencer on the New Right?
4. Two Dan Sullivans on the Alaska Senate ballot, let us see how the voters do (NYT).
5. Virginia Postrel on our Anthropic visit and discussions. Good post.
The post Friday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
In this episode, SpaceNews’ Mike Gruss interviews Jeff Janicik, founder and chairman of Innoflight. They discuss Golden Dome, Artemis and working with big numbers for the Space Development Agency. Sponsored […]
The post The electronics ‘under the hood’ of space networking appeared first on SpaceNews.
While the only good week is one without any homicides, homicides declined this week. As of Friday 9am, D.C. has reported has only one new homicide this week, bringing the total for the year to 68*. Last year, during the same time period, we had 102 homicides, and in the surge year of 2023, there were 176 homicides during that time.
Unfortunately, non-violent crime categories trended upwards, while violent crimes pretty much leveled off. It’s still unclear if we will achieve another 33 percent drop in homicides for the third straight year–a trend that began pre-occupation, in the Biden era. Right now, we’re on pace to do so, but we will need slightly less than one homicide per week for that to happen. It’s worth noting that the first three months of the year had only twelve homicides (versus 34 in the first three months of 2025), and since then, we have had 54 homicides (versus 59 in the same time period in 2025)**.
Hoping next week gets us back to a zero homicide week.
*Three of the 71 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). Also, occasionally homicides get reclassified so the annual total can increase or decrease by one, with or without any homicides.
**As best as I can tell, this seems to be a general pattern in much of the Northeast, making me wonder if the crappy winter weather played a role. Could be wrong about the pattern or the explanation though.
Wow! The excellent Ben Moll has put together a high-stakes bet on US economic growth.
A bet on near-term explosive AI-driven growth: whether U.S. real GDP per capita will grow by at least 15% within a single year (measured relative to prior peak) by the end of 2033. Agreed on X, 15–16 August 2026. This document summarizes the agreed terms.
1. Parties and stakes
Fast-growth side (wins if the growth condition in Section 2 is met):
● William MacAskill https://www.williammacaskill.com/ — $10,000
● Samuel Albanie https://samuelalbanie.com/ — $25,000
● Tom Cohen https://x.com/tomcohen — $25,000
● Total: $60,000
No-fast-growth side (wins otherwise):
● Benjamin Moll http://benjaminmoll.com/ — $40,000
● Andrew Ho https://andrewho.xyz/ — $200,000
● Total: $240,000Odds: 4:1 — every $1 staked by the fast-growth side is matched by $4 from the no-fast-growth
side. Implied probability of the fast-growth scenario: 20%.
I’m known for quipping that a bet is a tax on bullshit but I don’t think either side is BSing. We have a genuine and important disagreement. I’d side with Moll, for what it is worth.
The post A Big Bet on Explosive AI-Driven Growth appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Here's a podcast recorded some weeks ago that has just been published. We talk kidneys and other controversial markets covered in Moral Economics.
It was very fun talking to @patrickc about New Aesthetics at the @ClunyInstitute ‘s conference last month.
We talked about:
—The origin story of the New Aesthetics grants — and why he and Tyler Cowen disagree on almost everything aesthetic (1:00)
—Why culture is “stuck”: a 1926 Bauhaus building could pass for last year’s (2:30)
—Modernism’s explicit, stated mission to tear down beauty — “they weren’t hiding it” (3:30) —Solzhenitsyn: you can fake goodness and truth, but beauty “bears within it its own verification” (6:30)
—Is beauty objective? Why everyone visits Toledo, Spain and no one visits Toledo, Ohio (7:30)
—Detroit was rich for ~25 years and built the DIA. Silicon Valley’s been rich for 50. “We could do the Silicon Valley art tour in a coffee break” (14:30)
—Was Y Combinator secretly modeled on the art atelier? (18:30)
—The highest-leverage point for aesthetic renewal used to be churches. What is it now? (27:00)
—The sacred as an “endangered species”
— and Patrick’s alternative theory of WTF happened in 1971: we lost the sacred, so we can’t have nice things (28:30)
—I asked him about Vatican II and technological stagnation. He (wisely?) passed. I didn’t. (34:30)
—”Can anyone name a work of art made with AI?” Silence. (37:30)
—Why Germany is preeminent in music, literature, and philosophy — and its food is so bad. (A demand-side problem.) (41:30)
—”Biology is so ugly, man.” Physics is beautiful; biology is a tower of hacks (43:30)
—The “anti-beauty conspiracy” of the last century — and the massive latent demand waiting to be uncorked (52:30)
—Patrick reacts live to beeswax art (56:30)
Here is the link. And on YouTube, Brian Eno intro.
The post Luke Burgis interviews Patrick Collison on aesthetics appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
“THE PEOPLE of Starbase, they are at the forefront of humanity’s progress,” Missor Movahed told me as we leaned against wooden crates. “When Victor Hugo, the French writer, died, we had a huge procession inside Paris with his tombeau going through the Champs-Élysées… Two million people. And I think the people from Starbase deserve [this] kind of gratitude.”
As I ingested Missor’s words, a nearby semi truck kicked up a cloud of dust that stuck to my sweat covered body. We were standing in a gravel lot next to the two-lane highway that leads to Starbase, a chunk of land at the southernmost tip of Texas where Elon Musk and SpaceX launch giant rockets to space.
Hanging from a small crane behind Missor was a bronze statue of Prometheus, the Greek titan said to have stolen fire from the Gods and delivered it to mankind. Only the head and torso had been assembled, the legs were strewn nearby. The arms, raising his famous torch, had not yet been delivered.
“The French did the Statue of Liberty to celebrate the value of liberty and truth and basically the value of the West,” Missor continued, stroking his long, black beard while he considered his words. “I feel like we are doing the same thing with a little scale. But I feel like that’s the same will.”
Missor is the founder of the Atelier Missor, a French sculpture foundry. I often watched him making phone calls or barking orders in French rather than welding the statue himself. Most people notice the Atelier’s matching uniforms — dark grey slacks, white collared shirts, brown boots, suspenders — and Missor’s outfit was always the cleanest. In Texas, the getup got a rare new addition: matching cowboy hats.
As I examined Missor’s face, I decided two things. First, he’s totally bonkers in a quixotic, melodramatic, possible cult leader, freedom-loving, dude just chasing his calling kind of way. Second, despite the Renaissance-era wardrobe, he’s possibly none of the above and is really mostly a normal dude more or less hiding inside a costume of what a serious sculptor is supposed to look like. I imagined him back in Paris watching the French equivalent of Fox News in basketball shorts and a T-shirt.
Many errands this week, so a short post today
Click on a White House “fact sheet” about the economy and you will see the pop-up above. Yes, Trump’s lackeys are still peddling claims that things are great, that we have the hottest economy in the world, like nobody has ever seen before. But even they know better.
A clear indicator that Trump sycophants realize that they are caught in reality’s snare is how they respond to any question about current economic difficulties. Their first sentence almost always contains the word “Biden”, as they make the false claim that things were worse under Joe Biden, or that Biden somehow caused all of our current problems (including high gas prices and depleted munitions), or that Biden left an economy in shambles. Call it a bad case of Biden derangement syndrome, a desperate and utterly transparent attempt to shift the blame for the gratuitous mess that Trump and his minions have made.
Yes, America — along with most of the world — did experience surging inflation in 2021-2022, during the Biden administration. But inflation then proceeded to fall significantly, a case of “immaculate disinflation” – a drop in inflation without a recession. By the end of Biden’s term, the U.S. economy was not only in good shape, but it was doing better than every other advanced country. Here was the cover of The Economist on Oct. 19, 2024:
Yet, since Trump re-assumed the presidency, most measures of economic performance have deteriorated significantly.Economic growth has slowed despite the AI boom:
Inflation has accelerated:
Interest rates have surged:
Furthermore, inequality has surged in the current K-shaped economy. Wages haven’t kept up with inflation, but corporate profits have soared:
Granted, things could be worse. We aren’t currently in a recession. Inflation is above the Fed’s target, but not nearly as high as it was in 2022, let alone 1980. Unemployment remains relatively low.
But that’s cold comfort given that today’s economic difficulties were all self-inflicted by Trump. Moreover, today’s economy is a far cry from the paradise that Trump promised in order to beat Kamala Harris. Remember how he was going to cut energy prices in half and bring down grocery prices on day one? The dissonance between his constant boasting and the reality of an economy in which households saying that they are worse off than a year ago outnumber those saying they’re better off almost two to one is surely a major factor in Trump’s surreally poor approval rating on the economy.
Just like Trump’s farcical plan to lower beef prices to consumers by importing (possibly unsafe) foreign mystery meat, or Bessent’s attempt to gaslight the bond markets (as one wag accurately put it, Bessent’s plan is like using your credit card to pay down your mortgage), blaming Biden for the Trump economy smells of desperation. My advice: they should save themselves the bother. That ship has sailed and it’s heading straight for the November elections.
MUSICAL CODA
Breaking Claude Code Opus 5 Auto Mode
Anthropic are putting a great deal of faith in Claude Code's auto mode for protecting their coding agent users against prompt injection attacks. They recently made that the default and have made bold claims about its effectiveness.Johann Rehberger is one of the most credible prompt injection researchers active today. He found an attack against auto mode which he claims works 80% of the time, by tricking Claude Code into downloading and uncompressing a zip archive, then executing code that imports base64 without noticing that this will import and execute a local struct.py file extracted from the archive.
In a few cases auto mode directly prevented the agent from preventing harmful code from continuing to execute!
In a few runs Claude tried to terminate the malware process once it noticed the compromise, but Auto Mode denied the cleanup command.
Claude detects the compromise, but Auto Mode blocks its cleanup command
The safety mechanism itself can become part of the failure. The classifier allowed the creation of the malware process, but then it blocked the command intended to stop it!
I agree with Johann's conclusion here: the only safe way to run agents if there's any risk of attracting the attention of an adversarial attack is with a sandbox:
- Run unattended coding agents in a container, VM or OS sandbox.
- Restrict network egress.
- Monitor your agents.
- Do not expose home directories, SSH keys, cloud credentials,… to the agent runtime. [...]
Tags: sandboxing, security, ai, prompt-injection, generative-ai, llms, anthropic, claude, johann-rehberger, claude-code
The results suggest that the public is feeling down about capitalism but is still wary of full-blown socialism. And many are deciding whether a few socialist candidates might help shake up the system. We found that:
—Just a third of Americans privately say they have a positive view of capitalism.
—Less than half of Republicans privately express a positive view of capitalism, though two-thirds support it in public.
—Almost half of women privately say they would consider voting for a socialist.
—Nearly a third of Gen Z publicly say that America would be better off as a socialist country, but only 14 percent say so in private.
—The majority of blacks publicly say capitalism is the cause of America’s social ills, but only 37 percent say so privately.
—Of people earning more than $150,000 a year, 58 percent privately say they are open to voting for a socialist, though only 42 percent say so publicly.
That is from Mene Ukueberuwa at The Free Press.
The post Polling results on capitalism and socialism appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Dubai Airports, the entity that runs Dubai International (DXB), have come up with a logo, which you can see above.
DXB is the world’s biggest international transit hub, which explains the arrowed “X” in the center. The overall concept here is solid.
What we don’t like is how the two halves are offset vertically. What’s the point of this? It causes whole thing to drop and stumble. The first time I saw it, I thought it was a mistake. It also makes the “X” look more like a “K.”
Here, let me fix this…
Much better. The Dubai Airports people can thank me later.
Meanwhile, something I’ve always wondered: why is it “DXB” and not “DBX?”
The post August 28, 2026. DXB. appeared first on AskThePilot.com.
Among the 63 U.S. national parks, few are as defined by a single river’s floodplain as Congaree National Park in South Carolina. While the features are also prominent in other parks, a full 80 percent of Congaree National Park lies within the Congaree River floodplain.
It’s a place home to one of the largest intact tracts of old-growth bottomland hardwood forests in the United States. In this image captured by the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 9, the river winds through the forested plain, along with curving bands of green that trace old channels, ridges, and swales left behind as the river gradually migrated across it. Slight differences in elevation in these paleochannels and other landforms affect how frequently they flood, producing distinct ecosystems that appear in contrasting shades of green.
The river flows through flat, soft terrain, which encourages the formation of bends and meanders. Water typically flows faster on the outside of bends, leading to more rapid erosion as the channel carves into the outer riverbank. It moves more slowly on the inside of bends, resulting in the deposition of sediment and the growth of sandy features called point bars. Over time, this process can cut off a bend from the main river channel, forming U-shaped oxbow lakes.
The National Park Service lists Weston Lake, 1.2 miles (1.9 kilometers) from the visitor center, as one of the park’s most permanent oxbow lakes, noting that it is relatively deep and lacks the shallow clay and silt layer found in most of the park’s other oxbow lakes, such as Devil’s Elbow. On the right side of the image is Bates Old River, a roughly 4-mile-long abandoned channel of the Congaree River and one of the longest oxbow lakes in South Carolina. Over time, abandoned channels and oxbow lakes can fill with sediment and become shallow wetlands. Some of these low-lying, water-filled features are known as sloughs, where flood-tolerant cypress-tupelo forests tend to grow.
While loggers targeted forests along the Congaree in the 1880s, challenges such as frequent flooding, interminably muddy roads, and mosquito-plagued conditions meant that most of the floodplain forests escaped the widespread logging that transformed other parts of the Southeast. By the 1950s, conservationists had begun to recognize how rare old-growth forests of this type had become in the region. Congress designated the area a national monument in 1976, and it became a national park in 2003.
As the river snakes its way through the park’s mostly flat terrain, it overflows its banks several times per year, usually in the winter and early spring but also in the summer and fall after hurricanes and major rainstorms. These floods distribute broad layers of nutrient-rich silt throughout the floodplain, nourishing the forests and contributing to the high concentration of unusually large trees in the park.
Over the decades, Congaree National Park has harbored a remarkable array of giant “champion” trees that have held national and state size records for their species. Though individual trees have gained and lost champion status as they have been damaged, have died, or been surpassed by newly measured trees elsewhere, Congaree trees such as the possumhaw (Ilex decidua), water hickory (Carya aquatica), loblolly pine (Pinus taeda), laurel oak (Quercus laurifolia), swamp tupelo (Nyssa biflora), and sweetgum (Liquidambar styraciflua) have held records at times.
During this National Park Week, celebrate by exploring Earth Observatory’s U.S. National Parks from Space collection. You can also check out the offerings of Earth to Sky, a collaborative program that connects NASA science with park service rangers across the nation.
NASA Earth Observatory image by Michala Garrison, 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.
Sites relevant to the start of the American Revolutionary War are interspersed throughout the modern-day Boston metropolitan region.
The colonial communities of “America’s historic triangle” played defining roles in the road to American independence.
Along the northeast side of the Capital Beltway in Maryland, green spaces weave through the developed landscape.
The post The Forested Floodplains of Congaree National Park appeared first on NASA Science.
OpenAI disrupted a social engineering group from Cambodia that used ChatGPT. Its scope is impressive:
The network simultaneously conducted multiple types of scams, often blending elements from different schemes. For instance, operators used dating personas to build trust before introducing fraudulent investment opportunities involving cryptocurrencies and spot gold trading. Other users engaged in lengthy romantic conversations with targets using fictitious identities, posed as representatives of online gambling platforms offering fake bonuses and winnings, or impersonated law enforcement agencies to tell targets they needed to pay fines for committing serious criminal offenses.
Although the narratives varied, users across the network consistently displayed the same underlying pattern of deceptive behavior. For example, they created and operated fake dating profiles, fictitious investment experts, and fraudulent law enforcement personas. They also generated images of forged documents, including passports, legal notices, stock-purchase confirmations, and gambling platform interfaces.
Up, after much pleasant talke with my wife and a little that vexes me, for I see that she is confirmed in it that all that I do is by design, and that my very keeping of the house in dirt, and the doing of this and any thing else in the house, is but to find her employment to keep her within and from minding of her pleasure, in which, though I am sorry to see she minds it, is true enough in a great degree.
To my office, and there we sat and despatched much business. Home and dined with my wife well, and then up and made clean my closet of books, and had my chamber a third time made very clean, so that it is now in a very fine condition.
Thence down to see some good plank in the river with Sir W. Batten and back again, it being a very cold day and a cold wind. Home again, and after seeing Sir W. Pen, to my office, and there till late doing of business, being mightily encouraged by every body that I meet withal upon the ’Change and every where else, that I am taken notice of for a man that do the King’s business wholly and well. For which the Lord be praised, for I know no honour I desire more.
Home to supper, where I find my house very clean from top to bottom again to my great content. I found a feacho (as he calls it) of fine sugar and a case of orange-flower water come from Mr. Cocke, of Lisbon, the fruits of my last year’s service to him, which I did in great justice to the man, a perfect stranger. He sends it me desiring that I would not let Sir J. Minnes know it, from whom he expected to have found the service done that he had from me, from whom he could expect nothing, and the other failed him, and would have done I am sure to this day had not I brought it to some end.
After supper to bed.
Links for you. Science:
In a 2023 interview, Trump’s new FDA pick laid out a vision for ‘conservative-based’ science
Scientists left this farm field alone. Thousands of orchids appeared
FDA approves first Alzheimer’s blood test for Americans as young as 40
NIH Reportedly Flagging, Freezing Policy-Focused Grant Applications
Florida continues push to repeal four required vaccines for public, private schools: “Your body is a gift from God”
2 people die from measles in Pennsylvania, marking state’s first deaths in 35 years
Mutations in filamentous bacteriophages spark eco-evolutionary feedbacks in Pseudomonas aeruginosa
Other:
Why Getting High Has Only Gotten Cheaper
Smaugs
To lower energy costs for DC renters and homeowners, pass the GRID Act
Dolly Parton, Queen of Country Music, Dies at 80
Actually Smart
Donald Trump’s Summer of Screwing Our Allies
ONE HUNDRED BILLION DOLLARS
States Are Quietly War-Gaming Trump Interference in the Midterm Elections
Democrats don’t agree on how to talk about trans athletes. Just look at Ohio.
The Supreme Court Is Helping Trump Rig the Midterms
Castles Made of Sand. Why I Did Not Return to the Government Job I Loved
Comments on OMB research rule mysteriously removed from federal website
It’s time for some game theory
Dolly Parton, Superstar Whose Songs Spoke to Millions, Dies at 80
Stop Talking To Me, Google Search
Vivek Ramaswamy Tells Voter He Supports Max Miller To Preserve GOP Power
Is This Social Media’s Big Tobacco Moment?
D.C. Groups Hit the Road to Flip Congress — And Gain Statehood
Leading Sephardic & Mizrahi Organizations Challenge New York Magazine’s “Habibi City” Over Erasure of Middle Eastern Jews
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Faces Resignation Calls as Measles Outbreak Worsens
The AI Slop Backlash Is Actually Having an Impact
Judge strikes down Texas ban on drag shows, tells people offended by them ‘just don’t go’
Karen Attiah Is Ready to Go Back to the Washington Post
‘132F’: meet the man calling out NYC’s infernally hot subway stations
The Rich Own the Media They Want to Take Your Social Security
Dolly Parton seemed like she’d live forever, but she poignantly reminded us that nothing lasts
Trump-Aligned Board Threatens to Demolish the Kennedy Center
A Republic of Excuses
America is lawless. Are Dems ready to get tough on crime?
I Was a Child Actor. No One Deserves That Fate.
Hadn’t been there in a while. Enjoy.
Entrance to the art of state fairs exhibit
Butter Carton Dress Worn by Princess Kay of the Milky Way–Mary Ann Titrud
Horseshoes from County Fairs
And this is a bench:
Fun (but depressing?) data analysis project from Louis Abraham, showing how repetitive Claude is in the words it chooses when submitting GitHub pull requests. Abraham, in the project’s readme:
GitHub pull request descriptions, grouped by the words they are written with rather than by anything they were told to look for: eight ways of writing, and every description belongs to one of them. One of the eight was 1.0% of the corpus at the start of 2025 and is 45% of it by the middle of 2026.
If you want to get a little more depressed, I’ve been doing deeper reading into AI watermarking research, and one of the admissions in Google’s white paper on SynthID-Text — the watermarking scheme Anthropic says Claude is going to start using — is that the technique incurs “some reduction to inter-response diversity”. That means different answers to the same prompt become more similar to each other — there’s less variety to watermarked text responses. That’s a load-bearing problem given that Claude clearly already struggles in this regard before watermarking its output.
Speaking of tariff refunds, here’s an official statement from Senator Elizabeth Warren from a few weeks ago:
U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) wrote to Target, Apple, Amazon, Nike, Motorola, Walmart, and Energizer pushing these companies — each of which have or are expected to receive massive rebates from the Trump Administration for tariffs paid last year — to provide refunds to customers.
“I urge you to pass along any refund you may receive to the consumers who paid higher prices for your products while the tariffs were in place,” wrote Senator Warren.
NEW: Apple reportedly got $2.2 BILLION back in tariff refunds. Amazon got $600 MILLION.
What’s their plan to give YOU your money back?
Warren published the letters she sent to the CEOs, including Tim Cook:
Reports indicate that Apple has applied for a refund of the roughly $3.3 billion in tariffs you paid in 2025, and as of July 30th, that you have received nearly $2.2 billion in refunds. This amounts to a multi-billion dollar windfall, which could still grow if more of your refund petitions are granted. You have claimed that you “plan to reinvest any amount we receive back into U.S. innovation and advanced manufacturing,” but this vague statement offers no clarity as to where this money will go: indeed, it implies that you will not be returning it to the millions of consumers who purchased Apple products last year and paid higher prices. [...]
You have received an astronomical cash infusion in the form of a tariff refund, and Apple customers who paid increased prices for your products, ostensibly due to tariffs, deserve to know how that money will be spent. Your vague statements about “reinvesting” the refund leave hardworking Americans who paid hundreds of dollars more to buy Apple products in the dark about why they paid those increased prices and where their money will go. To better understand the disposition of any tariff refund you might receive, I request that you respond to the following questions by August 21, 2026.
Amongst the 11 questions she asks, the only one that seems pertinent is #5:
(5) How much did Apple increase prices on products in 2025?
(a) For what products did Apple increase prices, and how many of these products were directly impacted by tariffs?
Unless I’m missing something, the answers are “$0” and “none”. Apple increased none of its prices on any of its products in response to tariffs in 2025. The iPhone 17 lineup, in fact, surprised many observers and made news by holding prices steady.
In May 2025, Warren co-signed a letter to the FTC encouraging them to discourage large profitable companies from raising prices due to tariffs. Apple — a large profitable company — didn’t raise prices at all, which seemingly was what Warren thought they should do. But now she’s expressing outrage that Apple got a refund for the tariffs whose costs the company covered, and her followers are left to believe that Apple did raise prices and is keeping the money.
Nicole Carpenter and Diego Argüello, reporting for Game Developer:
“There was a specific window of time this year where we charged tariffs to customers,” Panic co-founder Cabel Sasser explained in an e-mail to Game Developer confirming the news. “We tried absorbing the cost for a while, but that was financially difficult for a small company like ours. We made the tariff a very obvious and clearly labeled line item on checkout for any customer affected.”
Panic also set up a website to explain the 19% tariff surcharge. [...] The refund amount a customer will get back depends on how much they purchased.
“It’s just not our money to keep, and it felt really good to give it back,” Sasser said. “That’s an easy way to know you made the right decision.”
He continued: “Still, it took a lot of work for us to file all the paperwork to get the refund from the government, and it took work to build a little system to process the refund, and sometimes it felt like, wait, why are we seemingly doing more work than even gigantic companies are on this issue? That felt weird. But I guess it makes sense in a way, because our small size means we’re far more directly affected by something like a tariff.”
Sasser said he hopes Panic never has to talk about tariffs again.
Cool story from a cool company, and amen to the day we never hear about tariffs again.
Ryan Christoffel, 9to5Mac:
Apple confirmed to 9to5Mac that the ads rollout in Maps began in the last few days. And it will continue ramping in the weeks ahead to all users.
There are two places you’ll find ads in the Maps app:
- Before searching: Suggested Places in the search screen will feature an ad.
- After searching: Ads will appear in search results when relevant.
Before searching, I saw an ad for an HVAC contractor 12 miles away in “Suggested Places”. Knock on wood but I currently have no HVAC problems, and even if I did, I’d just call someone and have them come here. Then I waited a few minutes and looked again. This time I saw an ad for Tommy’s Express Car Wash (“Get your first month free”), 23 miles away in the middle of a suburban shopping mall. Apple Maps estimates it would take me 1 hour 8 minutes to drive there right now. I’ll get right on that.
The first organic (non-ad) suggested place is a coffee shop 300 feet away.
This is a touch meta. But indulge me because I think it could have real world effects. When real world players start acting on new perceptions, beliefs, prognostications, those beliefs become meaningful and consequential even if they’re absurd or unsupported in themselves. Because they are driving actions.
What’s going on? In short, over the last couple of weeks Republicans and Donald Trump have decided they’re losing this election. It’s not clear to me that anything has actually changed — except to the extent that for the party on the ropes “nothing changing” becomes a bigger problem the closer you get to Election Day. What’s focused people’s attention is Donald Trump yesterday reposting a fan’s tweet (on Truth Social) basically arguing that Republicans are heading toward an electoral tsunami and don’t seem to realize it. He’s also reportedly gearing up to have all the GOP’s election ads focus on him — which has Democrats basically ecstatic.
You’ll notice the key detail that tells us where we’re going: Republicans. Donald Trump has decided they’re losing the election and he knows whose fault it is: Republicans. There are many layers of comedy and poetic justice at work here. Trump appears to be rewinding about ten years, certainly way before 2021, to a point where there was a Republican Party as anything other than a manifestation of the will of Donald Trump. There’s no need to even argue this point. The Republican Party is Donald Trump now. Everything it does is what he demanded and ordered. The identity between the two things is total. He calls the shots.
The GOP joins that long list of people and things, most recently Benjamin Netanyahu, who thought that unlike all the others, they were the ones Trump really loved deep down in his heart.
In any case, this clicked with another thing I’ve been wondering about. A few days ago TPM Reader PT wrote me an email the upshot of which was this: ‘You and everyone else keeps saying that Trump is worried about the midterms and the prospect of hearings and all the rest — but is he? Are you sure? Because he’s not really acting like that at all.’
This was, as I told PT, a really good question and one I’ve actually been struggling to get my head around for a while. I actually think it’s eating him up. He seems to be worrying about it a lot — though you can certainly argue that he’ll just stonewall Capitol Hill for two years, so who cares? But he’s not acting like it at all. His election subversion plans have been going nowhere and that mostly still applies even after his incremental win on his mail in ballot executive order earlier this week. And on the conventional politics front, he’s not doing any of the things you’d expect a president in his position to do. He really has no good options on Iran. But he’s not ramping back any of the unpopular policies where he has room to maneuver. He’s very conspicuously broadcasting the message that his real focus is things like his ballroom, the reflecting pool and a bunch other vanity projects and grievances. Those are things many people may not care that much about in themselves but they send a clear message that the things people actually care about are nowhere on his list of concerns. The Canada trade war pulls the whole litany together and tops it with a bow. It would have been the easiest thing in the world to just punt this to the winter or the spring. And yet he didn’t.
So does he actually care? My best stab at this, and what I told PT, is that I think it’s both. And we’re thinking about it too linearly. Yes, he’s really worried, upset, mad. But at the second term’s mix of intense cocooning, several additional years of age and the absence of anyone around him but the most abject yes-men has simply made it impossible for him to do anything but stay in the mode of self-assertion, grandiosity and impulse — some mix of the Mad King and “Anthony” the little boy in the classic Twilight Zone episode who mind-zaps people to the cornfield. As much as you may hate Trump, the 2016 version of him was cannier. He was more dextrous. He can pivot in unpredictable and often advantageous ways. Even the 2024 Trump was meaningfully different from this one. Maybe that’s because he was, in meaningful ways, fighting for his life, or at least his freedom. He was also fighting for the ability to wreak vengeance on his foes.
Whatever it is, I don’t think he’s capable anymore of getting out of the mode he’s been in since January 2025. So yes, he really is worried about the midterms. But he’s unable to do the things that could at least lessen the velocity of impact. Sure, maybe he’ll lose terribly but the fix is in and they’ll say all the Republicans won, or refuse to seat the Democrats. But I doubt it. If anything Trump’s sudden rediscovery of a separate entity called the Republican Party is him telling us he doubts it, too. I don’t take anything for granted. And Democrats need to remain vigilant. But deciding that it’s Republicans who screwed up makes perfect sense. It heals all the ego wounds he may feel he is about to suffer.
Jeff Halter has done it again: after bringing back the single greatest After Dark module (Ben Haller’s Lunatic Fringe game, via a modern runtime named Lunacy), he’s now released Afterglow:
Running After Dark modules in the present day has involved fussy configuration of Mac OS emulators or vintage hardware. Even then, no single emulator or vintage computer can faithfully run every module: some animate too fast, some too slow.
Afterglow is an emulator built specifically for running After Dark modules — the original 68k module code, not a remake or port — with no dependencies on ROMs or classic Mac OS. Created in the spirit of software preservation, it makes After Dark easy to enjoy today and for years to come.
All this in the same summer during which Halter released Stacks, his beautiful native modern HyperCard player. And don’t even look at his reproduction of volume 68 of MacWarehouse from 1997.
Yes I will be doing a Conversation with her. She is best known to Western audiences for her interview with Christopher Nolan, but she has numerous other achievements:
Yiyang Zhuge is a political theorist, political columnist, and a translator of German and Greek philosophical texts. She is an instructor at Brandeis University, and a PhD Candidate at Boston College.
Yiyang is a major translator of Hannah Arendt into Chinese. She has translated The Human Condition, Life of the Mind, Men in Dark Times, collected poetry, Die verborgene Tradition, and Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess. She has given numerous lectures and published numerous public-facing articles on Arendt.
Yiyang published the first Greek-to-Chinese translation of Plutarch’s Moralia, a best-selling philosophy book in 2025.
She runs Princeton University Press’s Political Philosophy Book Club, where she interviews important Western academics for the Chinese audience.
Yiyang is a public intellectual in China. She reports on American higher ed monthly at print magazine Caixin Weekly. She is a political commenter on Hong Kong’s Phoenix TV (here and here). She hosts great books programs on vistopia and has contributed essays on Machiavelli, Rousseau, Tocqueville, Arendt at vistopia. She hosts the most popular Mandarin political philosophy podcast “Monologues of a Committed Observer” with 1m+ subscribers.
So what should I ask her?
The post What should I ask Yiyang Zhuge (诸葛一杨), also known as Zhong Shu (仲树)? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
1. Data centers in space? Good Anton Leicht essay on the different considerations in the political economy.
2. More whales and Dr. Doolittle stuff.
3. Rohit on the AI hacks. And Peter Wilderford.
4. Is Australia the most resilient country to global catastrophic risk?
5. Dolly Parton’s philanthropy (NYT).
6. Why has New Zealand education so declined? (and other questions about the country)
The post Thursday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
The US Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) is the largest crude oil storage facility in the world. It’s capable of storing 714 million barrels of oil, slightly less than 10% of the US’s annual oil consumption. Built in response to OAPEC’s 1973 oil embargo, the SPR was created to insulate the US from oil supply shocks: to make up for shortfalls and prevent steep price increases should oil imports be interrupted. In the years since its creation, it has become one of the most frequently used energy policy tools in the US’s arsenal.
The SPR has gotten a great deal of attention lately, as the Trump administration has steadily delivered oil (around 120 million barrels as of this writing) from the reserve in response to Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz. Much of this attention has centered on technical factors related to how much oil can safely be released from the reserve: various folks have claimed, for instance, that the minimum safe operating level of the SPR is 300 million barrels of oil (a level that it went below the week of August 7), and below that damage to the storage facility can occur.
It’s not clear if the specific claim about the 300 million barrel level is true, but due to the way the SPR was constructed, it does indeed have limits on how much oil can be removed from it and how many times it can be emptied. Given the ongoing importance of the SPR, it’s worth understanding how it was built and how it works now.
Almost as soon as oil became strategically important to the US, people began floating the idea of stockpiling it for emergencies. The first strategic stockpiles of petroleum in the US were created for the military: a Naval Petroleum Reserve (NPR) was created in 1912 by setting aside land containing oil deposits in California, and by the 1920s there were four NPR sites across the country.1 During WWII, Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes advocated stockpiling petroleum “for military and civilian needs,” and was appointed president of the Petroleum Reserves Corporation, a government corporation that tried (but failed) to gain control over Middle East oil fields for emergency reserve purposes. In 1952, President Truman’s Materials Policy Commission proposed maintaining an emergency oil reserve, and President Eisenhower suggested creating one following the disruption of oil imports during the Suez Crisis.
But it wasn’t until the 1973 OAPEC oil embargo that the idea for a petroleum reserve for both civilian and government use stuck. By the early 1970s, the US’s demand for petroleum was increasingly outpacing domestic production, making the country more and more dependent upon imports; between 1963 and 1970 the US’s surplus oil capacity (how much domestic production could be boosted in the event of a crisis) had fallen by 75%, and between 1967 and 1973 US oil imports more than doubled. When OAPEC declared an oil embargo in October 1973, the impact on the US was immediate; gas prices jumped by over 40%, and widespread gasoline shortages occurred.
Even before the embargo, in response to tightening oil supplies and frequent threats from Middle Eastern countries to withhold oil, the Nixon administration commissioned a study on the impact of a major oil supply disruption from the National Petroleum Council. The council’s report, released a few months before the embargo, suggested that a large petroleum reserve could act as a buffer for import shortfalls. It considered several possibilities for storing the oil, including simply leaving known reserves in the ground and aboveground steel tanks, but concluded that the most cost-effective method would be underground storage in caverns hollowed out from large salt deposits known as “salt domes.” A subsequent report by the newly created Federal Energy Administration, formed following the oil embargo (and which later became the Department of Energy), likewise suggested that underground salt dome storage was the most economical way of storing large quantities of petroleum.
This suggestion became a reality in 1975, when Gerald Ford signed the Energy Policy and Conservation Act. Among the bill’s provisions was a mandate to establish a petroleum reserve of up to 1 billion barrels to “diminish the vulnerability of the United States to the effects of a severe energy supply interruption.” Construction on the SPR began in 1977.
When planning the SPR, several options for storing the petroleum were considered, including using large numbers of idle oil tankers. But ultimately it was decided that the best option was what the National Petroleum Council and the Federal Energy Administration had both recommended: storing the oil in large, underground salt caverns.
Salt domes are enormous underground salt structures, potentially miles deep and miles across, formed when geologic forces push underground deposits of rock salt up through the rock above. They were first discovered in the mid-19th century, and began to be surveyed extensively in the early 20th century after oil was discovered near a salt dome at Spindletop in Texas: as the salt pushes up into the rock above, it can create pockets around the dome where oil and gas can accumulate. Because rock salt is largely impermeable to oil or gas, hollowed-out caverns within salt domes were a potentially attractive place to store large amounts of crude oil.
These caverns can be created by a process known as “solution mining”: drilling a well down into the salt dome and pumping water into it. The water dissolves the salt, and the resulting salty brine gets pumped back out, leaving behind a void where the salt had been. Mining rock salt by using water to dissolve it had been practiced in Europe for hundreds of years, but modern solution mining — drilling a well into an underground salt deposit and pumping water into it — first began around the 1860s–1870s in New York.2 By the 1970s, solution mining had become a widely used method for mining salt. Companies like Morton Salt used solution mining to obtain salt for food products, and Dow Chemical used solution mining as a source of chemical feedstocks.
Initially, the underground caverns created by solution mining were simply abandoned. But by the mid-20th century, they had begun to be used for underground storage. In the 1940s Canada first considered solution-mined caverns for underground storage, and beginning in the 1950s it had become a popular method of storing liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) in North America and Europe. By 1976, private firms in the US had created over 900 solution-mined caverns, with a total storage capacity of 300 million barrels. For storing unprecedented amounts of petroleum, solution-mined salt caverns were the obvious choice, and that’s what was chosen to create the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
The Texas-Louisiana Gulf Coast was chosen as the location for the reserve: not only did the area have numerous salt domes that could be utilized for storage, but it was close to existing oil and gas infrastructure, making it easier to fill the reserve and draw it down when required.
Construction would be split into three phases. In Phase I, several existing salt caverns would be converted into crude oil storage at five sites along the Gulf Coast:
Four caverns at Bryan Mound, in Texas.
Five caverns at West Hackberry, in Louisiana.
Six caverns at Bayou Choctaw, in Louisiana.
Three caverns at Sulphur Mines, in Louisiana.
In addition to these solution-mined caverns, the SPR would also use a conventionally mined salt mine at Weeks Island in Louisiana. Collectively, the Phase I sites would give the SPR 248 million barrels of capacity. And because the caverns already existed, they could begin to be filled with oil quickly.
In Phase II, 29 new solution-mined caverns would be created at these sites, adding another 290 million barrels of storage capacity. In Phase III, a new site would be added at Big Hill in Texas, which would bring the total storage capacity to 750 million barrels.
Due to political pressure to get oil stored as soon as possible, the construction schedule was compressed, and the first oil entered the SPR in 1977. But the project was soon mired in setbacks. The Federal Energy Administration employees tasked with overseeing the project had little experience in managing large construction projects, and cost control proved difficult. Material and equipment specifications were created before plans were fully complete, creating problems when the selections later proved to be unsuitable. Equipment such as pumps was often chosen because of availability, not because it was best suited for the job, resulting in breakdowns and costly workarounds. Contractors taking advantage of management inexperience engaged in “extensive fraud”; used valves were sold as new, and drill bits were purchased, stolen, and then re-sold back to the government. One contractor was indicted for stealing 18 truckloads of equipment worth $427,000; another was accused of making off with $8 million worth of petroleum bound for Bayou Choctaw and pumping in “hazardous and toxic wastes” instead (though the government denied that this occurred). By the late 1970s, over two dozen SPR fraud cases were being investigated simultaneously.
And while the SPR project was broadly popular, it nevertheless had its share of opponents who tried to slow down the project. The governor of Louisiana, Edwin Edwards, felt the SPR was wasteful government spending and led a “virtual one-man crusade” against the project, using various environmental protection regulations to slow it down until he was sufficiently convinced that it would benefit Louisiana. Among the concessions Edwards was able to extract were slowing down site conversions to minimize the loss of local jobs, and getting the SPR office located in Louisiana instead of the originally planned Houston.
There was also broader environmental opposition. Creating the SPR caverns during Phases II and III would require creating and then disposing of large amounts of brine; while some of this brine could be pumped back underground, the lion’s share of it would be disposed of by pumping it into the Gulf of Mexico. But local fishermen, worried about the potential impact on fish and shrimp populations, objected, ultimately forcing brine disposal pipelines to extend much farther into the Gulf of Mexico than originally planned. Securing the necessary environmental permits required an enormous amount of time and effort in the first few years of the program, and by the end of 1978 the SPR Office had completed 25 NEPA-required environmental impact statements.
There were also numerous technical challenges involved with building the SPR. Phase I of construction involved converting existing solution-mined caverns, but these caverns had not been created for the purposes of petroleum storage: some of them turned out to be unsuitable; others were workable but proved to be incapable of holding as much petroleum as originally projected due to pressure limitations. Collectively, the Phase I caverns ultimately had 87 million barrels less storage capacity than first anticipated.
Technical challenges continued during Phase II, when solution mining of the new caverns began. Historically, most solution-mined caverns had been on the order of 1 million barrels in size; a few had reached the 4 million mark. But most of the Phase II caverns would be 10 million barrels or more, far larger than previous solution-mined caverns. SPR officials learned as much as they could about solution-mining caverns for petroleum storage from studying the West German petroleum reserve, which also used solution-mined caverns and was already in operation, but the much larger scale of the SPR (700 million barrels vs. Germany’s 30 million) meant that they were operating in uncharted territory. When mining began, for instance, it was found that brine could be disposed of underground much less quickly than anticipated, and that leaching took far longer than anticipated, both of which slowed down cavern construction.
Collectively, the technical, political, and managerial challenges encountered when building the SPR drove up costs and pushed back delivery dates. In 1976, the estimated cost of the SPR through Phase II was $766 million; just two years later that had risen to $1.47 billion (~$7.5 billion in 2026 dollars). The original plan called for Phase III to be complete by 1983, with 750 million barrels of crude in the ground. But the actual fill level in 1983 was roughly half that, with many caverns yet to be completed. Between 1980 and 1993, 49 new solution-mined caverns for the SPR were created, bringing its total storage capacity up to 750 million barrels, but the actual fill level would remain at just over 500 million barrels into the 2000s.
Since its completion, the SPR has continued to evolve. The small Sulphur Mines site began decommissioning in 1992, and in 1996 the Weeks Island facility began to be decommissioned when it was realized that groundwater was slowly leaking into it. And over the last 20 years three of the remaining Phase I caverns have been decommissioned, bringing the total number of storage caverns down to 60.
At a high level, the way the SPR works is relatively simple. Each cavern in the SPR is filled up with oil, which sits on top of a heavier layer of brine beneath it. To remove oil from a cavern, water is pumped down into it, which forces oil out the top. To fill the cavern back up with oil, oil is pumped in as brine is pumped out. The caverns are thus always completely full of liquid; the only thing that changes is where the oil-brine boundary is.
But this high-level description belies a lot of complexity. We think of physical infrastructure as something relatively static and unchanging, but in the SPR various forces are constantly reshaping the caverns.
One of these forces is cavern creep. The SPR caverns are thousands of feet below ground, and the weight of the ground constantly squeezes the sides of the caverns, compressing and shrinking them over time. As the caverns are squeezed, the liquid inside the caverns is pressurized, and this pressure, in turn, tends to resist further compression of the caverns. But if that pressure is relieved, which occurs during well repair operations known as “workovers,” cavern creep can accelerate. The SPR loses up to 2.4 million barrels (~0.33%) of storage capacity each year due to the effects of cavern creep, depending in part on the number and length of workovers required.
In the other direction, removing oil from the caverns requires water to be pumped into them. And when fresh water is pumped into the caverns, it dissolves some of the salt from the walls of the caverns. Every 100 barrels of water pumped in dissolves around 15 barrels of salt; removing all the oil from an SPR cavern thus increases its size by about 15%.
Because of this, SPR caverns have a finite lifespan. After enough drawdowns, the walls of the cavern become too thin to use it for storage; they can no longer withstand the stresses and may begin to leak oil into surrounding caverns or outside the salt dome itself.
Various factors affect how the walls of a cavern wear and how many drawdowns it has available. Phase II and III caverns designed specifically to store petroleum are tall and thin, like skyscraper-sized cigars, and are spaced far enough apart to allow for significant cavern growth over time. But many of the Phase I caverns, which were originally mined for other purposes, have irregular shapes or thin cavern walls that make it infeasible to use them for multiple drawdowns. These caverns are thus known as “single-cycle drawdown” caverns. There are currently 11 Phase I caverns in use at the SPR and six caverns that have one drawdown or fewer remaining.
Cavern lifespan is also affected by how a cavern is used. When a cavern is fully emptied, wear on the cavern walls is relatively uniform, but if the cavern is subject to multiple partial drawdowns — removing a bit of oil, then filling it back up, then removing a bit more, etc. — this concentrates wear at the bottom of the cavern, resulting in “undesirable shapes” that can more rapidly reduce cavern lifespan. Conversely, it’s also possible to increase cavern lifespan by strategically emptying caverns in such a way as to wear the cavern into a more desirable shape.
Cavern wear is not simply “water dissolving the salt and the walls get thinner”; the geology of the SPR caverns is complex, and they can wear in complex ways. Changing stresses in the walls can cause “salt falls” (when a chunk of salt falls into the cavern) or open up cracks and fissures, causing leaks. Because of this, Sandia National Labs closely monitors SPR cavern conditions using tools like sonar. Each year it puts out a report estimating how many full drawdowns each cavern still has available. Because it can be hard to predict cavern behavior after repeated drawdowns, the maximum number of drawdowns it simulates is five (thus a cavern with five available drawdowns today might actually have several more than that available).
The limited lifespan of SPR caverns, and the complex wearing forces that they’re subjected to, have led to a lot of speculation and assertion about how much oil can be safely removed from the SPR. Folks often claim, for instance, that the SPR can’t go below 300 million barrels of oil without damaging the caverns. I decided to look closely at what these limits actually are.
One limit on the SPR is that a minimum amount of “roof oil” must be kept in the caverns to prevent water at the top of the cavern from dissolving and damaging the cavern ceiling. As of 2016 this was about 12 million barrels, or around 1.7% of total SPR capacity.
Another limit you will often see mentioned is 70 million barrels: for instance, the DOE told CNBC earlier this year that 70 million barrels was the minimum amount needed to safely operate the SPR. It’s not amazingly clear what’s behind this limit, but this may be simply using the DOE’s definition of a “full drawdown,” which is when 90% of the oil in the SPR has been removed: 70 million barrels is about 10% of the SPR’s total capacity. It’s not clear if there’s an actual, physical limit at 70 million — that may be the level at which the oil-brine interface would be above the oil intake well, for instance — or if that’s simply a defined operational limit.
Above these lower limits, you see various claims about operating levels below which damage to the SPR starts to occur. Earlier this year a JPMorgan energy analyst claimed that 150–160 million barrels “must remain in place to preserve cavern stability and maintain operational flexibility.” Rapidan Energy, founded by former George W. Bush energy advisor Bob McNally, claims that this limit is at 170 million. A professor of petroleum engineering at Texas A&M, Siddharth Misra, claims that the operational limit is between 250 and 300 million barrels, below which “the risk of structural damage increases while the system loses its ability to pump oil at high speeds.” Former Biden energy advisor Amos Hochstein claims that he “know[s] plenty of people who think we can’t get near 300 [million] because physically you will damage the caverns where the oil is stored.”
Some of these claims can be verified. For instance, it’s true that draining the SPR beyond a particular point reduces the speed at which oil can be pumped out of it. Oil can only be pumped so quickly out of an SPR site, so as caverns empty the drawdown rate drops.
Additionally, because of the aging SPR infrastructure as well as the downtime needed for repairing that infrastructure, not all the oil in the SPR is available for drawdown at any given point. For instance, a recent GAO report noted that oil at several SPR sites might be unavailable during warmer months due to vapor pressure. Oil stored in the caverns gradually absorbs methane, and gradually warms up, both of which increase the vapor pressure within the oil. To be safely distributed the vapor pressure in the oil must be below a certain level, which can be achieved at a “degasification” plant. But several years ago the SPR’s degasification plant was dismantled and hasn’t yet been replaced, limiting its ability to distribute crude during warmer times of the year. More generally, the SPR has a huge maintenance backlog and has been described as being held together with “band aids.” A planned large-scale SPR renovation and maintenance program, Life Extension Phase 2, began in 2021 but was scaled back due to high costs.
There have also been various reports noting that the SPR may not have the ability to respond to a severe supply disruption below a level of 250 to 500 million barrels, and that outside of true emergencies it would be prudent to keep it above this level.3
However, no official report by the Department of Energy, the GAO, Sandia National Labs, or any other government agency mentions specific fill levels below which damage to the SPR occurs (other than the small amount of roof oil required). While Sandia puts out an annual report on the number of available drawdowns on a cavern-by-cavern basis, it doesn’t note any SPR-wide fill level limit below which damage occurs. I similarly wasn’t able to find any independent analysis or report pointing to some minimum SPR fill level and explaining specifically what drives it. So it’s not particularly clear to me what the source of claims about very high minimum fill levels is: if it’s from people talking to Sandia/DOE folks in some unofficial capacity, or if they’re inferring limits based on cavern stress data that Sandia provides but doesn’t make explicit, or something else. It’s notable to me that claims about minimum fill levels aren’t particularly consistent, and that different analysts/experts give widely different limits. It’s also notable that these claims often conflate different limits. (The Department of Energy, for its part, has denied the 300 million barrel limit.)
The Strategic Petroleum Reserve is the largest petroleum storage facility in the world and stores vast amounts of crude oil — over 700 million barrels — in underground salt caverns. These caverns behave in complex ways: they grow, shrink, and distort over time due to the various fluid and geologic forces that they’re subjected to, and the caverns have a limited lifespan due to water gradually dissolving the solid salt walls.
Because of these complex forces, and the gradual damage that gradually accumulates across the walls of the caverns, there’s widespread speculation and assertion that the SPR can’t be drained below some particular level without inflicting serious damage on the underground caverns.
It’s hard to know how seriously to take these claims. Many of them are made by experts, such as professors of petroleum engineering and former White House energy advisors. And there are various limits associated with removing oil from the SPR, such as the oil needed to keep water from damaging the roof of the caverns or the drop in withdrawal rates that occurs as the SPR empties. But it’s hard to find any sort of actual published estimate of these limits in a report or official document. This doesn’t mean that these claims are wrong, but it does make me wonder where the claims are coming from.
The Naval Petroleum Reserve later became part of a major presidential scandal during the Harding administration when Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall accepted bribes to let companies lease NPR lands at Teapot Dome in Wyoming.
Extracting preexisting brine deposits dates even earlier, to China around 250 BC.
The SPR also has a statutory storage limit of 252.4 million barrels, but this only applies to a particular type of release, one that as far as I know has never actually been conducted, so in practice this is a meaningless limit.
Last night, at exactly 9:25—9 to 5—the top of the Empire State Building in New York City lit up pink. The antennas of Chicago’s Willis Tower—formerly the Sears Tower—lit up pink, too. So did the Ferris wheel at the Santa Monica Pier, which also sported a giant pink heart. The Hoan Bridge in Milwaukee; Reunion Tower and other buildings in the Dallas skyline; and the Longfellow, Burns, Fore River, Braga, and Zakim bridges of Boston; Caesar’s Superdome in New Orleans; and, of course, Nashville’s KVB Bridge and historic Metro Courthouse were all lit up in pink last night.
The Arthur Ashe Stadium played “Jolene” during the U.S. Open. Jack White played Jolene in London. Elsewhere in London, the Buckingham Palace band played “9 to 5.”
All this and more for a woman born on January 19, 1946, in Sevier County, Tennessee, in a cabin in the Smoky Mountains without electricity or running water.
Dolly Rebecca Parton was the fourth of twelve children born to illiterate sharecropper Robert Lee Parton Sr. and Avie Lee Caroline Owens. A musical prodigy encouraged by her mother, Dolly was singing on local radio and television shows in Nashville by the time she was 10 and debuted at the Grand Ole Opry when she was 13. In 1964 she moved to Nashville, where other musicians quickly recognized her talent as a songwriter. Over her career, she would write songs made famous by Kenny Rogers, Merle Haggard, Waylon Jennings, Whitney Houston, Tina Turner, and others.
In 1965, Parton made her first record, and the following year she married asphalt paver Carl Dean, who stayed out of the limelight during their 59-year marriage. Following the success of Parton’s first record, country music star Porter Wagoner invited her to become part of his show in 1967.
There she blossomed, joining Wagoner to record a dozen studio albums that produced a number of top 10 hit singles. Playing off Wagoner’s famous rhinestone-studded suits made by Ukrainian-American designer Nudie Cohn, the petite Parton adopted huge hairstyles and emphasized her figure, and soon began wearing rhinestones herself.
She once told a journalist that she modeled her public image after a woman others called the “town tramp” but whom she saw as a glamorous contrast to the women in Parton’s own life. “She had bright red lipstick, long red fingernails. She had high-heeled shoes, little floating plastic goldfish in the heels of them, short skirts, low-cut tops, and I just thought she was beautiful. When people would say, ‘She ain’t nothing but trash,’ I would always say, ‘Well, that’s what I’m gonna be when I grow up.’” But, in an industry dominated by men, Parton also noted her style was a way for a small woman to “fill my space.”
By the 1970s, Parton was coming into her own, taking on the music industry on her own terms.
“Find out who you are and do it on purpose. And do it with purpose,” Parton was famous for saying. “Don’t ever sacrifice who you are, your principles and your morals and your values to just try to get ahead in business. It ain’t worth it.”
Rather than running from her upbringing in rural poverty, Parton embraced the values that upbringing had inspired in her. In 1971 she hit #1 on the country charts with her song “Joshua,” inspired by the Appalachian men around whom she had grown up whose rough looks covered their quality. In the same year, her “Coat of Many Colors” reached #4, telling the story of how her mother had made her a coat of rags, rich with love. Those who valued possessions over love, she sang, were the ones truly impoverished. In 1972 she wrote “My Tennessee Mountain Home,” about the peace and humanity of rural life, “walking home from church on Sunday with the one you love, just laughing, talking, making future plans.”
She parted ways with Wagoner in 1974, and her farewell song to him, “I Will Always Love You,” became a global sensation that reached #1 on the country charts in 1974, 1982, and again in 1992, when it spent 14 weeks at #1 after Whitney Houston covered it. In 1974, Parton also delivered “Jolene,” the desperate plea of a woman to a beautiful rival not to “take my man.” “Jolene,” too, hit #1 on the country charts.
In 1975 and 1976 the Country Music Association named Parton Female Vocalist of the Year, and in 1978 it honored her as Entertainer of the Year, just three of the many awards she would win as her musical career took off not just at home but also internationally.
In 1976, Parton began working with manager Sandy Gallin, and in 1980 she launched her film career, starring with Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin in 9 to 5, a comedy with a subversive subtext about discrimination against women. In the film, for which Parton wrote the theme song, three working women replace their sexist, domineering boss and implement programs their colleagues like, including equal pay, flexible hours, and an on-site daycare center, all of which result in dramatically improved office productivity.
A massive success at the box office, 9 to 5 opened doors for Parton in the movie industry, leading to parts in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, Steel Magnolias, and other films. She and Gallin created a production company, Sandollar, which produced her television specials and the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
For almost sixty years, Parton was a member of the American Federation of Musicians of the United States and Canada, a labor union that represents about 70,000 singers and players and is affiliated with the AFL-CIO. She joined the Screen Actors Guild–American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) in 1969.
AFM International president Tino Gagliardi told John Nichols of The Nation: “Before she was an icon, Dolly was a working musician. Dolly never forgot the musicians who helped bring her music to life. By standing firm for solidarity and treating every player with dignity, she elevated our entire profession.”
In 1989, Sandollar helped to bring awareness and empathy to the AIDS crisis with the documentary Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt. The film explored the lives of five of the individuals memorialized in panels on the AIDS Memorial Quilt and called attention to the Reagan administration’s lack of response to the epidemic.
In 1990, Common Threads won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, and in the 1991 song “Family” that she wrote with Carl Perkins, Parton sang: “Some are preachers, some are gay, some are addicts, drunks, and strays, but not a one is turned away when it’s family. Some are lucky, others ain’t, some are fighters, others faint. Winners, losers, sinners, saints, it’s all family.”
In a conversation with host Larry King in 2016, Parton noted that she had taken heat for her support for the LGBTQ community, but that she did “not believe that we should criticize and judge other people. I think we should be accepting and loving. We are all God’s children. We are who we are, and we should be allowed to be who we are…. I just think that we should be more loving, more caring. We are who we are. If you’re gay, you’re gay. If you’re straight, you’re straight, and you should be allowed to be, you know, how you are, and who you are.”
In 1986, Parton bought an interest in a theme park owned by Jack and Pete Herschend in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. Renamed “Dollywood,” the park became the biggest ticketed attraction in the state, now visited by about 4 million people a year and employing about 4,000. “I always thought that if I made it big or got successful at what I had started out to do, that I wanted to come back to my part of the country and do something great, something that would bring a lot of jobs into this area,” she told a reporter.
Two years later, she established the Dollywood Foundation to support education in Sevier County. In 1990, her “buddy” program decreased the high school dropout rate in classes that participated from 35% to 6%. In 2016, the Dollywood Foundation created the My People Fund—as in, these are my people—providing immediate financial assistance to families who lost their homes in wildfires in Sevier County that November. It donated more than $12 million.
In 2020, Parton donated $1 million to Vanderbilt University Medical Center to fund the research that allowed researchers to prove that mRNA vaccine technology worked. That research led to grants that enabled development of the Moderna mRNA vaccine against COVID-19 that saved millions of lives. She also helped encourage others to get vaccinated, taking her own shot on camera in a dress she had cut the shoulders out of so the doctor would have easier access.
Beginning in February 2022, under the Grow U program, Parton provided 100% free tuition, fees, and books to any of the 11,000 employees at any of the 25 amusement parks and attractions under Herschend Enterprises. The president of Dollywood told reporters that one of the key tenets of the Dollywood Foundation is to “learn more.” He said that Parton is “very supportive of the employees learning and continuing to grow themselves.”
That drive for growth and opportunity was behind Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, which Parton founded in 1995 to put books into the hands of every young child in Sevier County. Her inspiration, she said, was her father, who was “the smartest man I have ever known but I know in my heart his inability to read probably kept him from fulfilling all his dreams.” The program has grown until it now serves children across the United States, Australia, Canada, Ireland, and the United Kingdom.
In February 2018, Parton donated the 100 millionth book from her Imagination Library to the Library of Congress. It was a copy of her book Coat of Many Colors, dedicated to her father.
By the time Dolly Parton died on Tuesday, August 25, at the age of 80, her Imagination Library had delivered more than 332 million books to more than 3 million children.
“When I was growing up in the hills of East Tennessee, I knew my dreams would come true,” the Imagination Library website reads. “I know there are children in your community with their own dreams. They dream of becoming a doctor or an inventor or a minister. Who knows, maybe there is a little girl whose dream is to be a writer and singer. The seeds of these dreams are often found in books and the seeds you help plant in your community can grow across the world.”
When children age out of Dolly’s Imagination Library, they receive a final letter from her hoping they would “have a great time” in school and urging them to keep reading.
The letter ends: “You and all of your friends are very special. There is no limit to what you can do or how far you can go. Just remember the lessons my family taught me—dream big dreams; learn everything you can learn; and care for all those who care for you. You do all of these things and you can be anyone you want to be.
“You are terrific, and remember…
“I Will Always Love You,
“Dolly.”
—
Notes:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/02/09/dolly-parton-dollywood-tuition-education/
https://abc7chicago.com/archive/7386332/
https://dollywoodfoundation.org/history/
https://www.today.com/parents/moms/dolly-parton-mom-phrase-rcna208813
https://www.thenation.com/article/economy/dolly-parton-obituary-unions-9-to-5/
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2026/aug/26/dolly-parton-style-fashion
https://www.latimes.com/local/obituaries/la-me-sand-gallin-20170421-story.html
https://screenrant.com/dolly-parton-buffy-the-vampire-slayer-executive-producer-role/
https://www.dollyparton.com/
https://imaginationlibrary.com/
https://imaginationlibrary.com/letter-from-dolly/
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/25/arts/music/dolly-parton-dead.html
https://shouldntneedtobealawyer.com/posts/dolly-parton-at-167673821?pr=true
https://people.com/all-about-dollywood-theme-park-12067846
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/music/music-features/dolly-parton-dies-lgbt-advocacy-1236682086/
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Nature-based projects are generating more environmental data than ever before. Satellites observe landscapes from orbit, while field teams capture what is happening on the ground. Yet these data sources often […]
The post LatConnect 60 and Phi Earth Partner to Connect Space and Soil appeared first on SpaceNews.
The Washington Post has the story:
" A study of insured Americans released in July and commissioned by the Women’s Reproductive Health Foundation found that the overall cost for a cycle of IVF was more than $29,000 — or about 35 percent of the median annual household income in the U.S. Genetic testing, embryo storage, pregnancy care and delivery costs can push the total over $54,000 per IVF-conceived birth, according to the study. An average patient needs two to three cycles to have a child, so the costs for many patients would be even higher.
"Infertility affects nearly 7 million people in the U.S., but only an estimated 24 percent of treatment needs are met, because of those high costs and limited insurance coverage, according to the American Society for Reproductive Medicine. The condition is believed to be rising partly because of people having children later, as well as environmental factors such as pollution.
"Still, more than 100,000 babies were born via IVF in the U.S. in 2024 — a record, according to the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology. An increasing share of people hoping to be parents are seeking help in Europe: The number of Americans choosing European clinics grew by more than 37 percent last year, according to Jakub Dejewski, chair of the European Fertility Society, a group that tracks data on fertility treatment in Europe.
...
"The price of IVF and uncertainty around proposed personhood legislation in Florida, which the Solomons feared could jeopardize their control over their embryos, sent them to the Pelargos IVF Medical Group in Athens. There, in the first of two trips, Emilie underwent ovulation stimulation and egg retrieval.
"Including medication, fertilization, storage and the ultimate embryo insertion, the total treatment (excluding travel expenses) cost about $12,000, according to the Solomons, a fraction of what they might have spent in the U.S. "
The Antitrust Academy is an online platform hosting hundreds of videos comprising a complete course in antitrust law and economics. Teachers include Judge Douglas Ginsburg, Jon Klick, Joshua Wright and others. I am an advisor. A great resource whether you are learning this material for the first time or need to brush up on some legal or economic doctrines.
The post The Antitrust Academy appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
We use more than 900 million linked employer–employee records covering the entire formal workforce of Brazil to examine when cities provide upward mobility for the initially poor. We find that upward mobility for low-wage workers is strongest in workplaces that combine low-wage individuals with high-wage workers. This association is particularly pronounced in Brazil’s southern cities, where more complex industries include workers with a wider range of skills. The association is weaker in northern cities, where formal employment is dominated by the public sector.
Here is the paper by Radu Barza, Edward Glaeser, César A. Hidalgo, and Martina Viarengo. And here is a useful thread on the paper. This is one of the best and most important economics papers I have seen in the last few years.
The post Important results on economic mobility appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
That is the topic of my latest Free Press column. Excerpt:
The key is to create some basic safeguards, but without stifling broader AI progress. To do so, we must defy the conventional wisdom about public oversight and instead trust the AI labs to be their own primary regulators.
My version of the proposal starts with defining a private not-for-profit body for AI regulation. An ideal body would draw some features from FINRA (the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority): a consortium of financial firms that examines the trade practices of each and makes recommendations, helping the federal Securities and Exchange Commission with oversight and regulation. The AI version would include the major labs and would be authorized and overseen by Washington, perhaps through the now-fledgling Center for AI Standards and Innovation.
This body would periodically audit major AI companies and their models, judging their conduct and safety. In the short run at least, much of this would be focused on issues of cybersecurity, and whether the new models created more cyber risk than they help to solve. If a company passed the audit, it would be exempted from standard liability law, at least provided that it had shown basic, reasonable care, as opposed to extreme or deliberate negligence. That would free the AI labs from the fear that courts might derail their business by granting huge awards to plaintiffs for ill-defined harms that could not reasonably have been prevented. And it would give the labs a strong incentive to meet the safety standards of this body.
It is reasonable to wonder whether such a body, composed of industry players, would issue fair and equitable judgments of safety. Maybe not. Yet there are many upsides and no better alternative.
For one thing, each company knows that a dangerous model from another company could cause a harmful incident and damage the prospects for the entire industry. Consider the Three Mile Island meltdown in 1979, which contributed significantly to the mothballing of the entire U.S. nuclear industry. Few people can name the company (Metropolitan Edison) behind the malfunctioning plant; the reputational penalty attached to the industry as a whole.
Another incentive for safety is that the top companies do not want too much competition from lower-price, lower-quality upstarts. That too will induce those companies to support fairly tough standards, perhaps excessively tough in some cases. Still, we are choosing from imperfect alternatives. The concrete truth, whether we like it or not, is that there is far more expertise within the companies for judging AI safety than we can expect to find in the federal government anytime soon.
I am indebted to some ideas from Dean Ball, noting that his proposal is somewhat different. And here are some comments from Brendan McCord.
The post The least bad way to regulate AI? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
In August 2026, back-to-back winter storms left parts of the Atacama Desert in northern Chile covered in a rare blanket of snow. The typically arid region has seen snowfall before, notably in 2025 and before that in 2011. But one of the 2026 events was unusually widespread, stretching from the Andes to near the Pacific coast.
The OLI (Operational Land Imager) on the NASA-USGS Landsat 8 and Landsat 9 satellites captured these images (above) on August 6 and August 14, before and after a period of severe weather, respectively. They show a detailed view of the Chajnantor plateau within the Altiplano-Puna volcanic complex, home to the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA)—one of the planet’s most powerful radio telescopes. As snow and high winds set in, ALMA suspended operations, moving its antennas into a protective survival mode.
Another storm in the second half of the month blanketed an even wider area with fresh snowfall. This image, captured by the MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) on NASA’s Terra satellite on August 19, shows snow extending westward from the Andes, across the desert’s hyper-arid core, and close to the Pacific coast south of the Chilean port city of Antofagasta. This coastal area is home to several other major astronomical observatories, some of which also suspended operations during the event.
Most of the region’s winter precipitation comes from cutoff lows—low-pressure systems that become cut off from the jet stream and can occasionally reach northern Chile. That’s what happened in 2025, said René Garreaud, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Chile. The late-August 2026 storm also came from a cutoff low, but this one spun off from an unusually large trough—an elongated area of relatively low atmospheric pressure—that spanned an enormous stretch of the hemisphere, from the tip of South America up into the subtropics.
The atmospheric disruption, combined with ample coastal moisture, produced precipitation that spanned an unusually wide swath of the region—offshore, along the coast, across the core of the Atacama, and over the Andes. Totals reached a magnitude “rarely seen in the otherwise extremely arid region,” Garreaud said.
In some areas it fell as rain, not snow. Taltal, for instance, on Chile’s northern coast, accumulated nearly 40 millimeters (1.6 inches) of rain in three days—about 10 times its annual mean, Garreaud said. “We see these kinds of events only a few times, if any, per decade.”
The abundant precipitation spurred destructive mudflows and flash flooding in parts of northern Chile. The National Disaster Prevention and Response Service (SENAPRED) reported thousands were affected and hundreds of homes had major damage.
Garreaud noted that the strengthening El Niño is the backdrop for the anomalously wet winter in north-central Chile. In addition to the August storms, a major event in July brought significant impacts to the country’s Norte Chico region. During El Niño, the subtropical Pacific high—which normally keeps the region dry—weakens, while a blocking high tends to form in the South Pacific near the tip of the continent. Together, these shifts push the Southern Hemisphere storm track equatorward.
NASA Earth Observatory images by Lauren Dauphin, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey and MODIS data from NASA EOSDIS LANCE and GIBS/Worldview. Story by Kathryn Hansen.
Stay up-to-date with the latest content from NASA as we explore the universe and discover more about our home planet.
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The post Rare, Widespread Snow in the Atacama Desert appeared first on NASA Science.
It's pretty big: 125B tokens, but only 6B active which means it gets a significant performance boost.
I've been trying it out on a DGX Spark using these Unsloth quantized models. I'm still exploring the model - so far I've tried the 72.5GB UD-IQ1_S one (producing these pelicans) and the 78.9GB UD-Q2_K_XL (producing these).
My favorite so far was this xhigh reasoning effort one from UD-Q2_K_XL:
Via Hacker News
Tags: ai, generative-ai, llms, qwen, pelican-riding-a-bicycle, ai-in-china, nvidia-spark
At the latitude of ESO's
Alain Pannetrat, founder of Lectronz:
Lectronz is a marketplace for open-source hardware makers and DIY electronics. Most of our sellers are not factories or well-funded start-ups. They are engineers, independent designers, and hardware enthusiasts working from spare rooms, garages, and tiny workshops.
Some earn a living from their products. Some sell only a handful of boards each year. Others build ten units simply because they created something useful and want to share it with the community. Occasionally, one of those experiments grows into a real business. Every Arduino begins somewhere.
But the European Union’s new packaging rules now threaten to kill the world of makers and micro-entrepreneurs, putting jobs, livelihoods and an entire ecosystem of innovation at risk.
Pannetrat says these new regulations will require even one-person hobbyists to spend hundreds of euros per year (and file paperwork) for each country they ship to. The costs will far outstrip the money they make from selling a few dozen gadgets or circuit boards, and the hassles are probably worse than the costs. But these regulations are no big deal at all to big companies like Amazon — they only hurt smaller companies, and they’re effectively crushing to hobbyists.
A couple of years ago Philadelphia banned retailers from using plastic bags. It’s worked out great. More people bring reusable shopping bags with them, and if you need a bag from the store, you get paper bags that they charge you a nickel each for. A small price to encourage bag reuse, and the end result is no more plastic bags. Regulations can be very effective without adding any complexity or annoyance to daily life.
Market Design
