Storm clouds over the horizon looked like mountains last week as I came in from a late afternoon paddle in the kayak.
There’s a lot going on, but it feels like we could all use a break.
I’ll be back at it tomorrow.
Up pretty betimes, and awhile to my vyall, and then abroad to several places, to buy things for the furnishing my house and my wife’s closet, and then met my uncle Thomas, by appointment, and he and I to the Prerogative Office in Paternoster Row, and there searched and found my uncle Day’s will, end read it over and advised upon it, and his wife’s after him, and though my aunt Perkins testimony is very good, yet I fear the estate being great, and the rest that are able to inform us in the matter are all possessed of more or less of the estate, it will be hard for us ever to do anything, nor will I adventure anything till I see what part will be given to us by my uncle Thomas of all that is gained. But I had another end of putting my uncle into some doubt, that so I might keep him: yet from going into the country that he may be there against the Court at his own charge, and so I left him and his son at a loss what to do till I see them again. And so I to my Lord Crew’s, thinking to have dined there, but it was too late, and so back and called at my brother’s and Mr. Holden’s about several businesses, and went all alone to the Black Spread Eagle in Bride Lane, and there had a chopp of veale and some bread, cheese, and beer, cost me a shilling to my dinner, and so through Fleet Ally, God forgive me, out of an itch to look upon the sluts there, against which when I saw them my stomach turned, and so to Bartholomew Fayre, where I met with Mr. Pickering, and he and I to see the monkeys at the Dutch house, which is far beyond the other that my wife and I saw the other day; and thence to see the dancing on the ropes, which was very poor and tedious.
But he and I fell in discourse about my Lord Sandwich. He tells me how he is sorry for my Lord at his being at Chelsey, and that his but seeming so to my Lord without speaking one word, had put him clear out of my Lord’s favour, so as that he was fain to leave him before he went into the country, for that he was put to eat with his servants; but I could not fish from him, though I knew it, what was the matter; but am very sorry to see that my Lord hath thus much forgot his honour, but am resolved not to meddle with it.
The play being done, I stole from him and hied home, buying several things at the ironmonger’s — dogs, tongs, and shovels — for my wife’s closett and the rest of my house, and so home, and thence to my office awhile, and so home to supper and to bed. By my letters from Tangier today I hear that it grows very strong by land, and the Mole goes on. They have lately killed two hundred of the Moores, and lost about forty or fifty. I am mightily afeard of laying out too much money in goods upon my house, but it is not money flung away, though I reckon nothing money but when it is in the bank, till I have a good sum beforehand in the world.
Five people were killed on Sunday when a Boeing 767 freighter crashed off the end of a runway in Miami, colliding with several vehicles and catching fire.
Early reports indicate the plane, which had been inbound from San Juan, touched down at an unusually high speed, and roughly halfway down the runway. Why this happened is unknown. Video footage shows ominous-looking clouds and rainstorms off the approach end of the runway. Gusts and possible windshear may have played a role.
Landing speeds vary with weight, flap setting, and weather. Standard procedure is for pilots to abandon any landing should the targeted speed be exceeded by any significant amount. At this point there’s no evidence suggesting the crew attempted a go-around.
Much of the media, meanwhile, is describing the plane as an “Amazon” or “Prime Air” jet. Which it was and wasn’t.
Amazon does not own an airline or fly its own planes. It uses contractors, some of whom paint their jets in an Amazon “Prime Air” livery. (It’s an arrangement not unlike those between the major passenger carriers and their regional jet “Express” and “Connection” partners.) The 767 that crashed in Miami was flown on Amazon’s behalf by a company called 21 Air, which I’d never heard of until today.
Another company that relies on contractors is DHL, the global shipping giant. You’ll see jetliners in DHL’s distinctive red and yellow colors at airports all over the globe. These belong to a multitude of contractors; none are flown by DHL itself.
FedEx and UPS, on the other hand, own and operate their own airlines.
Related Story:
ODE TO THE 767
Photo courtesy of Unsplash
The post Five Dead After 767 Crashes in Miami appeared first on AskThePilot.com.
Instead of Amazon, I spent the past week browsing a new breed of websites known as “dopamine sites,” a trend that emerged in South Korea. These websites — like Dopamine Shop and FoodNeverComes — recreate the entire ritual of online shopping: You search for products, compare reviews, add items to your cart, enter a shipping address, place an order, and even track your delivery.
Then … nothing happens. No money changes hands. No package arrives.
Here is more from Itika Sharma Punit. Via the excellent Samir Varma.
The post South Korean aspirational markets in everything appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
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For some time, I’ve been attracted to the “it’s the phones” explanation of fertility decline. One counterargument is that fertility has been falling since the 19th century. But that fact actually supports the claim that iPhones are causing the recent collapse in fertility. To see why, consider for a moment why smart phones explain declining fertility.
It’s misleading to call smart phones a “phone”. They are a mobile general purpose entertainment center, with phone calls representing just one use among many. They also represent the culmination of a set of changes over the past 200 years that have made life increasingly fun, but also less social. I see four major changes:
1800-1920: Urbanization. City life is more interesting than rural life, leading to smaller families. (In addition, improved health care and sanitation means that fewer children die.) Here’s Noah Smith:
Urbanization disrupts the need to grow your own community, by giving you a community of strangers. Fertility rates have always been much lower in cities than in the countryside, and when countries become more urbanized and wealthy, their birth rates drop.
1920-1930: Movies and radio. Most people are lazy and vastly prefer consuming stories without having to read a book.
1955-1975: Television. TV brings movies into peoples’ living rooms.
2010-today: It’s the phones.
Unfortunately, this Statista graph stops in 2020, and thus understates the recent decline in US fertility, which is now below 1.6:
When you look at the graph, be aware that some of the volatility reflects transitory factors such as the Depression and World War II. Nonetheless, some interesting patterns are worth commenting on. The 1920s saw a particularly rapid decline in fertility, perhaps due to a particularly rapid rise in fun. Here’s AI Overview:
The US general fertility rate (live births per 1,000 women aged 15–44) steadily declined during the 1920s, moving from 117.9 in 1920 down to 89.3 by 1929.
When I read novels from the post-WWI period, they occasionally discuss the rapid cultural change among the young, partly under the influence of Hollywood films. Instead of going right from childhood to adulthood, there emerged a long period of transition, with loosening cultural restrictions on the lifestyle of young people. New forms of entertainment like radio and movies made urban life much more interesting for most people. Even 100-year old silent films are quite entertaining.
Another big fertility decline occurred between the mid-1950s and the mid-1970s, probably due to television. And then fertility in the US leveled off for more than 30 years. The post-2010 decline is global in nature, which points to “the phones” as the most plausible suspect.
For most of us, family life is now just one part of our life. But for most of human history, family life was almost everything. The family unit worked together and played together. Before TV, radio, and film, social life was the main form of entertainment. Larger families were more fun, less lonely.
So, when people say, “it’s the phones”, I think they actually mean “it’s the fun”. Fertility is declining because we’ve invented technologies that we find more fun than traditional family life. It’s not that family life is becoming less fun, it’s that the enjoyment of family life is staying constant as alternative activities become ever more attractive. The opportunity cost (in foregone fun) of family life is increasing.
But that does not mean that higher fertility is a lost cause. People still do place some value on family life. And people who are rich enough to have servants do all the hard parts of raising children tend to have relatively large families. In the US, billionaires have larger families than middle income people
In the future, plentiful AI-enabled robots may contribute to childcare, making us all billionaires. Here’s The Economist, discussing the views of Elon Musk:
Mr Musk predicts that, within five years, artificial-intelligence systems may surpass the sum of all human intelligence. Within ten years, robots in the workplace will help usher in an era of such “amazing abundance” that money will become meaningless.
I can hardly wait! Oddly, Musk worries about fertility. But if Musk is correct about our future limitless wealth, then we may soon resume worrying again about “overpopulation”. Why does Musk not believe that average people would react to great wealth the way he and his fellow billionaires have responded, that is, by having bigger families?
PS. To be clear, I’m not anywhere near as optimistic as Musk about the near future, but I do expect future generations to eventually become quite rich by today’s standards, mostly due to AI.
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1. How are age verification systems going?
3. Are humpback whales policing nature?
4. “Traces of nearly four million coins reveal how Rome achieved economic integration.”
5. Estimating cybersecurity costs (numbers).
6. Great Barrier Reef is doing fine?
7. California Forever meets further setbacks (NYT).
The post Monday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
I’m on the train home after another weekend in Essex sorting out the parental house and I nearly forgot to write this.
We have now just about finished looking through everything and now, thanks to my much-more-diligent-than-me sister, we have dozens of folders of categorised papers of mostly old Labour Party related material, at least some of which we hope to find homes for. We’ll see.
I’m pretty over this whole thing now and even though we’ve cleared this huge hurdle it feels like a never ending task. I’m so ready to move on. Even so it was, as ever, hard to leave the place.
§ This week’s NTS Early Bird Show with Spirit Blue was unusually guitarry and unusually good, ideal for a gentle start or a quiet evening.
§ Before I went to Essex, during a couple of dry days, I finished the final patch of scything. This year, spread leisurely over a couple of months, I’ve scythed 946m2, taking around 13 hours, plus another 5 hours of clearing the cut grass.
§ Having played with Home Assistant enough on my laptop in VirtualBox to decide it was useful, this week we got a Home Assistant Green device to run it on, as the simplest option. A bit of me thought it would make more sense to have a more generic kind of home server, which could be used for other things, but I don’t want to run a server off any kind so. I got most things set up again on the Green but, inevitably, there are many, many things to improve and fiddle with.
§ I had a nice few hours in London on my way over to Essex. I met R for lunch, then popped in to see the installation The Department of Euterpe at the Warburg Institute, which was alright, worth popping in if you’re passing and like that sort of thing.
Then I went to see Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (Jane Schoenbrun, 2026) which was interesting and fun although I’d probably have enjoyed it more if I was more into horror movies (it wasn’t scary but riffs on them) and/or in a larger audience (there were six people there, mid-Friday afternoon).
§ That’ll do.
Neo-Nazis — no point in euphemisms — just won big in the rough equivalent of a state-level election in Germany. America’s leading neo-Nazi — again, no point in euphemisms — congratulated the AfD (in German) on the result, and in return received “thanks for your support” from the AfD’s lead candidate.
In the days and weeks ahead there will be many analyses of the results and its implications from people who, unlike me, know something about German politics. For now, let me do something more parochial, and write about what the Sachsen-Anhalt election might teach us about U.S. political economy.
So, about America: Make America Great Again meant different things to different people — racism, of course, being a key component. But in Donald Trump’s mind it also clearly meant trying to bring back “manly” jobs. He would do this by imposing tariffs to eliminate trade deficits, which, in his garbled version of economics, would end huge U.S. “giveaways” to surplus nations. And this would, in turn, lead to a huge revival of U.S. manufacturing employment.
Why is Germany relevant to this story? Because in terms of both trade balances and manufacturing Germany is, in effect, the anti-America. Where we do indeed run large trade deficits, Germany runs huge surpluses. And while Germany, like every other advanced economy, has seen the manufacturing share of employment decline over time, it remains a more industrial nation than the U.S. has been since the 1980s.
Indeed, relative to the size of its economy, Germany runs trade surpluses and retains large-scale manufacturing employment to an extent that lies far beyond the wildest dreams of Trumponomics.
And none of this appears to make a bit of difference to the resentment that underlies right-wing extremism on both sides of the Atlantic.
Start with trade. Here are balances in trade in goods and services for the two nations, expressed as a percent of GDP:
The U.S., as Trump constantly emphasizes, consistently buys more stuff from other nations than they buy from us. In his mind this means that we are being ripped off (as opposed to attracting large inflows of foreign investment, which as a matter of sheer accounting necessarily implies that we run trade deficits.) In any case, however, the Germans should be feeling pleased with themselves for running big trade surpluses, and hence taking advantage of the rest of the world, right?
Somehow, they aren’t.
America’s large trade deficit in manufactured goods does mean that we have fewer manufacturing jobs than we would if that trade were balanced. Robert Lawrence of the Peterson Institute for International Economics estimates that eliminating the deficit would raise the manufacturing share of employment from 7.9 to 9.7 percent, similar to my own back-of-the-envelope calculations. Correspondingly, Germany, with its large manufacturing surpluses, has relatively higher manufacturing employment as a share of total employment. Here are trends in industrial employment — a bigger category than manufacturing alone, but the trends are similar:
Even Germany has gradually become “deindustrialized,” but even now it is more of an industrial nation, as measured by where the jobs are, than the United States has been for at least 35 years. Has this insulated Germany from the bitterness and political extremism that many U.S. observers attribute to deindustrialization? Apparently not.
So here’s one way to think about the political economy here. The economic component of MAGA might be described as a plan, or maybe a concept of a plan, to make the U.S. economy more like what it was in the 1950s, when we didn’t run trade deficits and had a lot more men working in industry. But this might also be described as a concept of a plan to make America more like Germany. And what the results in Sachsen-Anhalt show is that even if such a plan were to deliver the promised results (which it wouldn’t), it would do little if anything to reduce politically radicalizing resentment.
I should mention one more lesson from the AfD’s victory, one that has me reconsidering some of my own beliefs.
Many U.S. observers, me included, have laid considerable stress on the problem of “left-behind” regions — rural and small-town areas bypassed by the rise of a knowledge economy, which tended to favor large, highly-educated metropolitan areas. These economically stranded regions have been plagued in particular by declining employment among men of prime working age, a decline that in turn is associated both with social problems and with strong support for Trump and hard-right politicians in general.
For many years it has been common to think of the former East Germany, which includes Sachsen-Anhalt, as one of the many European analogues to what Austin, Glaeser and Summers called the Eastern Heartland. Indeed, East Germany, which had near-full-employment among working-age men, went through an extended period of men-not-working after German reunification.
But that story is now long out of date:
Residents of the former DDR still consider themselves economically disadvantaged, and their incomes are somewhat lower than the national average — although not, as far as I can tell, as low in relative terms as poorer U.S. states. But in any case the tale of East Germany as a deeply depressed region no longer fits the facts.
What, then, is the moral of this analysis? Mostly it’s negative: Crude economic factors don’t explain the fascist shift in Germany. And Trumponomics, even if it worked (which it doesn’t) wouldn’t end the resentment feeding our own authoritarian movement.
MUSICAL CODA
Not topical; I just need cheering up
Research acceleration: The view inside OpenAI
Apparently today is RSI day at OpenAI, for Recursive Self-Improvement - I think it's their new AGI. Both this piece and the new essay An Alien Mind (by Chief Scientist Jakub Pachocki) talk about it, and this one doesn't even bother to expand the acronym.Included are details on how OpenAI's own research team are using coding agents. Like pretty much everyone else 2026 has been the year that agentic engineering really took off at OpenAI, best illustrated by this chart:
I'm intrigued at what caused that significant acceleration in AI spend per researcher in late July - my best guess is that's when internal employees gained access to the model later released as GPT-6 Astra.
Tags: ai, openai, generative-ai, chatgpt, llms, coding-agents, november-2025-inflection, recursive-self-improvement
The purpose of DNS is to spread scams
Terence Eden shares some daunting statistics in support of his take that "the Domain Name System's purpose seems to be a vector for criminals to run scams on people at a terrifyingly high rate".On this Interisle report (via Andrew Campling), Terence says:
It says 85 million new registrations of gTLDs were made in 2025. Of those 8.5 million were added to blocklists by May 2025. It reckons that a 10% abuse rate is the likely floor for these numbers and it's probably closer to 20%. One in five newly registered domains with a gTLD are scams. That's a bloody crisis.
I had no idea. Apparently ICANN have been discussing this problem for years.
Tags: dns, scams, terence-eden
My comment on There's No Limit to How Bad Code Can Get — Lobste.rs.
[In reply to a comment about burning it down to start from scratch when technical debt becomes overwhelming]
In my experience it's so rare for that to work.
You announce the old thing is irrecoverably drowning in tech debt. You spin up a team to rewrite it from scratch. Work begins.
Meanwhile the old thing remains a moving target: it's running the core business, so changes are still necessary. The developers working on it know that it's going to be made obsolete by the new thing soon, so they don't have any incentive to go beyond the smallest effort possible to add the new features. Technical debt continues to mount.
Meanwhile, the team working on the new thing are ambitious and probably a little naive. They start out at a great pace - it's greenfield after all - but as time progresses it becomes apparent that nobody fully understands the behavior and scope of the thing they are replacing. If it was well documented and tested it wouldn't need to be replaced, after all...
After months (or even years) without delivering value, the pressure is on to "ship it", so the new system is launched to handle a subset of what the old system handled - or often for some new feature that was too hard to build with the now mostly unmaintained old system.
... so now you have TWO systems in production - the janky old system that nobody wants to touch, and a new system which handles just a few production features and is 80% inactive code that is meant to replace the old system, eventually.
If you're really lucky the company won't have lost patience with the new system and will allow that work to continue. The longer this all takes, and the longer the old system stays in production and stubbornly continues to work, the higher the risk that "priorities have changed" and the new system total replacement work is abandoned, leaving you with two systems where you used to have one.
The best article I've read about completing this process responsibly is Migrations: the sole scalable fix to tech debt by Will Larson.
If I run into a situation like this in the future, my strong recommendation will be to shore up the old system with as much automated testing as possible and then seeing if targeted refactors can get it to the desired shape. My hunch is that in many cases that will have a much higher chance of success than the siren call of a greenfield replacement.
Tags: migrations, technical-debt
Not sure it’s practical, but it’s certainly striking.
It’s Labor Day, so here’s a post about how human labor is alive and well in the age of AI.
I live in San Francisco and hang out with a lot of tech people, both in the AI industry and outside of it. And one thing that almost everyone I know here believes is that AI’s main economic effect is to displace humans from their jobs. Most people don’t have concrete arguments for why this should be true; it’s just an article of faith. The conventional wisdom is pretty well summed up by the first line of this tweet:
In fact, AI companies themselves have spent years talking about how their inventions are going to render large swathes of humanity economically obsolete — an odd marketing pitch, perhaps, but one that seemed to reflect their honest expectations.
A lot of times, San Francisco tech people are out of step with the general public. This time, though, the public seems to agree. A recent Ipsos poll found that most Americans expect AI to compete with human workers more than it complements them. And Pew finds that this belief has even strengthened in recent years:
So basically, most people think AI is a job-killer. And yet somehow, this job-killer keeps stubbornly refusing to kill jobs. In the aggregate, the labor market is about as healthy as it’s ever been. The prime-age employment rate — the single best indicator of how many Americans have jobs — continues to hover near all-time highs:
Of course, there are lots of other things going on in the labor market right now besides AI. But most of those things — tariffs, the Iran war, etc. — are bad for employment. It’s not easy to identify some sort of positive shock that is canceling out the job-killing effects of AI.
Or maybe it is, if the shock is AI itself. Theoretically speaking, automation can create jobs just as easily as it can destroy them. Here are Acemoglu and Restrepo (2019), explaining the various ways that technology can affect the demand for labor:
Automation [can be bad] for labor because of a displacement effect—as capital takes over tasks previously performed by labor…
[A]utomation technology also increases productivity, and via this channel, which we call the productivity effect, it contributes to the demand for labor in non-automated tasks…
[T]he displacement effect of automation has [historically] been counterbalanced by technologies that create new tasks in which labor has a comparative advantage. Such new tasks generate not only a positive productivity effect, but also a reinstatement effect—they reinstate labor into a broader range of tasks and thus change the task content of production in favor of labor. The reinstatement effect is the polar opposite of the displacement effect and directly increases the labor share as well as labor demand. [emphasis mine]
In other words, automation can do three basic things. Yes, it can replace people and take their jobs. It can also make them more productive, which can both create jobs and destroy them.1 And, crucially, automation can create new jobs for people to do. Power looms replaced master weavers, but they created jobs for technicians and engineers to make the power looms work. The internet automated much of the work of travel agents, but created jobs for web designers. And so on.
People who think of AI as a job-killer might not have thought of the second and third of these. Or they may have thought of them, but simply assumed they’re not a big deal. Anecdotally, a lot of tech people think that AI will keep substituting for more and more tasks until A) productivity increases just increase the demand for AI, and B) there are no new tasks left for humans to do. AI detractors, meanwhile — like Daron Acemoglu himself — often simply assume that new tasks created by AI will be “bad tasks” like misinformation and cybercrime that hurt the economy instead of helping it.
But these assumptions simply might not be correct. AI might be creating lots of new tasks for humans to do. For example, software engineers are writing less and less code themselves. Instead, they’re spending more and more time telling AI to write code — that represents a productivity improvement. But they’re also trying to figure out what code to tell AI to write, making sure AI is writing the kind of code they want, integrating that code into products, and so on. Those are all new tasks. There are also a lot of software engineers working on improving AI itself, and on discovering new applications for AI. Those are new tasks as well.
This helps explain why in the age of Codex and Claude Code, software developer jobs have been increasing as a percentage of total employment:
Anecdotally, organizations that thought they could replace lots of their software engineers with AI ended up having to hire many of them back — sometimes at a premium.
In fact, this is a story we see throughout the economy. Alex Tabarrok recently reported on a Census Bureau survey about AI that’s been running since 2023. The Census Bureau calls companies up and asks them A) how AI affected their total employment, and B) how AI affects the tasks that workers do.
Most companies reported no change in overall employment, which could just be due to inertia. But of companies that did report a change, more reported an increase than a decrease!
And here’s the breakdown by sector:
The story was similar for tasks. Tabarrok writes:
Among firms using AI, 44% say it supplemented or enhanced work an employee already does. Ten percent say it performed a task an employee used to do. Eleven percent say it introduced a task no one had been doing.
Here’s the chart:
Rigorous research, meanwhile, sometimes finds negative effects of AI on labor demand at the industry level, and sometimes not. But at the company level, the evidence is clearer — Kharazian, Simon, and Stevens (2026) find that when companies adopt more AI, they tend to hire humans rather than replacing them. Here’s a blog writeup of their findings:
And here’s a chart:
Interestingly, they find the same for entry-level jobs — the jobs that people usually identify as being most under threat from AI.
So despite Acemoglu’s skepticism, it looks like for now, the new tasks being created by AI are probably matching or even slightly exceeding the tasks replaced by AI. Of course this measure is “number of companies” rather than “number of jobs”, but the pattern is pretty clear.
The Economist, meanwhile, has a report on how AI is creating jobs, both through the “new tasks” channel and by boosting demand in areas that AI can’t yet touch — physical jobs like construction and HVAC installation. Here’s what they write about the productivity/demand effect:
The Economist estimates that AI has so far created around 1m new jobs in America. That easily exceeds the roughly 200,000 lay-offs attributed to AI since mid-2023, and appears more than enough to offset weaker hiring in many back-office roles. America’s AI infrastructure splurge has created many of them…The Economist tracked five industries at the heart of the data-centre build-out, from electrical contracting to equipment manufacturing. Since 2023 employment in them has risen by roughly 320,000 more than broader…trends would suggest…LinkedIn, a social network for strivers, estimates that nearly half a million data-centre jobs were created between 2023 and 2025 in America, with data-centre technicians and engineers among the most common recent hires…
The scramble for workers is showing up in pay cheques, too. Indeed finds that installation and maintenance jobs at data centres advertise wages about 40% higher than comparable work elsewhere…In the year to June, average hourly earnings rose more than 13% in electrical-equipment manufacturing and nearly 8% among electrical contractors. [emphasis mine]
And here’s what they write about new tasks:
AI is also creating a new class of white-collar jobs. Engineers build the models, data annotators label their inputs and judge their answers, “forward-deployed” engineers adapt them for customers, and newly minted “heads of AI” decide what companies should do with the technology. Some of these roles barely existed until recently. Many are quickly growing in number. Postings for heads of AI, AI engineers and directors of AI have roughly doubled since 2023-24, according to LinkedIn…
Preliminary research by Gad Levanon, chief economist at the Burning Glass Institute…reckons roughly 1% of professional jobs are now “AI jobs”…[P]rofessional occupations closest to the AI boom—engineers, software developers, mathematicians and data scientists…have added roughly 730,000 jobs above trend in recent years[.] [emphasis mine]
What about specific occupations? Technology has certainly destroyed many specific types of jobs over the centuries — there are (basically) no more elevator operators, human telephone operators, or people who do manual typesetting for printing.
And yet in recent decades, we haven’t seen as much of this sort of occupational destruction. For example, a lot of people thought the internet would kill travel agents. And while the industry was hit hard, there are still plenty of travel agents left:
The reason is probably that the job of “travel agent” is much more flexible and “messy” than older types of jobs like elevator operator; travel agents do a whole lot of different tasks, so they’re harder to replace than people who just stand there and press a button. That makes modern jobs harder to replace entirely.
It’s a good bet that AI will eventually make some occupations obsolete. But so far, despite awe-inspiring progress in model capabilities, it’s extremely hard to find occupations that have seen significant replacement by AI. Top AI researchers who famously predicted the end of human radiologists saw their predictions get confounded. Truckers, too, are doing just fine.
The most impressive example might be translators. It seems pretty obvious how AI could replace human translators, and yet it hasn’t done so yet:
Here’s a chart:
If you could go back to 2022, and tell people that in four years, AI would be solving frontier math problems, but we’d still have the same number of people working as translators, how many would have believed you?
It turns out that it’s very natural for people to overestimate the degree to which AI will take their jobs. Hartley et al. (2026) have a really excellent paper called “Job Loss Fears in the First Years of Generative Artificial Intelligence”. Here’s a thread explaining the paper’s findings.
Basically, the authors find that fear of AI job replacement is extremely common:
And they find that the more people’s jobs are exposed to AI, the more they think their jobs are about to be replaced:
In fact, the more of their day people spend using AI at work, the more they’re afraid of being replaced!
And yet when the authors looked for a correlation between AI exposure and actual job loss, they found…absolutely nothing. People’s fears simply haven’t come true yet.
What’s going on? The authors hypothesize that people who use AI more start to understand its ability to replace the tasks they do at work. But as we keep finding, replacing tasks isn’t the same as replacing jobs. People keep finding new things to do in their roles at work — sometimes things AI can’t do yet, but often things that couldn’t even be done until AI made them possible!
It seems like we’re uncovering a consistent human blind spot here: People don’t actually know how they produce value at their jobs. Modern jobs are much more than a simple collection of tasks — they are pieces of a complex machine that produces value in ways that an individual worker often doesn’t even see.2 So when AI comes along and starts replacing people at various tasks, it just ends up making them more valuable as pieces of their corporate machines.
How long that situation will persist, of course, is an open question. AI leaders are starting to realize that it might take a very long time for the full effect of their inventions to be felt:
This is why the AI companies’ recent messaging pivot — many now say that AI will create jobs rather than destroying them — may be honest, rather than a cynical marketing ploy to calm public outrage.
But then there’s the question: Can this situation persist indefinitely? No one knows, of course. But my bet is that while many occupations will eventually be mostly replaced by AI, humans will still have plenty to do. I’ve argued that in order for AI to start replacing human jobs wholesale, it’ll have to get much more agentic — which will make it inherently more unreliable from a human point of view. So I predict that humans will always have jobs keeping AI agents on track.
Even if I’m wrong, though — even if the AI job apocalypse does eventually come — it doesn’t seem like it’s coming soon, and it certainly isn’t here right now. Everyone keeps thinking that AI is a job killer, and AI keeps on refusing to be what everyone expects.
Happy Labor Day!
Higher task-level productivity can destroy jobs by letting employers do more with less. It can create jobs by creating economic growth, which boosts labor demand. But I think Acemoglu et al. might overlook another source of productivity-driven job creation, which is variety. When carmakers became more productive, they became capable of pumping out more different makes and models of cars. This probably made consumers want cars more, because people enjoy variety — GM famously overtook Ford by offering more models, more frequent model updates, and more colors.
This is why jobs may feel like “bullshit” to the people doing them, even as they command high wages in the market.
An astronaut’s image of Earth from the 2026 lunar flyby reveals not our profound smallness but our growing significance
- by Aeon Video
A century ago, the Pan-American road promised a new era of fraternity between the two continents. Did it succeed?
- by Shawn Miller
I am a heavy user of sidenotes:1 they keep optional content next to the text instead of sending the reader to the bottom of the page and back. Tufte CSS renders them without JavaScript but only accepts inline content. CSS anchor positioning, now supported by recent browsers,2 is an elegant alternative. Sidenotes can hold several blocks, still without JavaScript, and fall back below the paragraph referencing them on narrow viewports and older browsers.
In 2023, Eric Meyer demonstrated this technique in “Nuclear Anchored Sidenotes.” The main improvement over other solutions is that the notes can sit anywhere in the HTML document. You can place them after the paragraph referencing them, as regular block elements for text browsers, screen readers, feed readers, and reader mode to render them properly:
When the viewport is too narrow or the browser does not support CSS anchor positioning, you can style them so the reader can skip them or glance at them without losing their position in the text:
Once the viewport is large enough, they appear in the margin, at the same vertical position as the matching reference mark, unless they would collide with a previous sidenote, as in the example below:3
The gist of CSS anchoring is to position an element relative to another element—the anchor. For the sidenotes, the anchor is the reference mark. I use the following markup, with a data attribute to specify the anchor name:
<sup id="fnref:YYY" data-anchor="--lf-sn-YYY">
<a href="#sidenote-YYY">1</a>
</sup>
The matching note is an <aside> element carrying the same data attribute for
the anchor name. We put it after the paragraph holding the reference mark:
<aside role="note" id="sidenote-YYY" data-anchor="--lf-sn-YYY">
<sup>1</sup>
<p>A first paragraph.</p>
<p>A second paragraph.</p>
</aside>
On a narrow viewport or when the browser is too old for CSS anchoring, we style the sidenote, which stays below its paragraph, with a muted color:
aside[role="note"] {
margin-block: 1rlh;
color: #444;
}
On a wide viewport and when the browser is recent enough, we move the sidenote to the right margin:
@supports (anchor-name: attr(data-anchor type(<custom-ident>))) {
@media (min-width: 72rem) {
main {
position: relative;
sup[data-anchor] {
anchor-name: attr(data-anchor type(<custom-ident>));
/* → anchor-name: --lf-sn-YYY */
}
aside[role="note"][data-anchor] {
anchor-name: --lf-sidenote;
position: absolute;
position-anchor: attr(data-anchor type(<custom-ident>));
/* → position-anchor: --lf-sn-YYY */
top: max(anchor(top), anchor(--lf-sidenote bottom, -1rlh) + 1rlh);
left: 100%;
margin: 0 2rem;
width: 18rem;
color: inherit;
}
}
}
}
attr() extracts the anchor name for the reference mark from the data-anchor
attribute. It returns a string, unless we specify a CSS unit or a type, like
here: the browser parses the data attribute as a custom
identifier, which anchor-name validates as a dashed
identifier, a custom identifier starting with two
dashes.4
The note itself is absolutely positioned past the right edge of the main block.
It selects the matching reference mark as its anchor with position-anchor set
to the value of the data-anchor attribute. Each note is also an anchor named
--lf-sidenote. We use it to keep the next note from colliding with this one.
The anchor() CSS function lets us position the note’s top
edge relative to its anchor: anchor(top) aligns the top edge of the note with
the top edge of the reference mark. It can also take another anchor as a
parameter: anchor(--lf-sidenote bottom) would align the top edge of the note
with the bottom edge of the closest preceding anchor named --lf-sidenote—so
the previous note.5 Like attr(), anchor() accepts a fallback
value as its second parameter and use it when the named anchor does not exist.
The top property handles three cases, illustrated in the following diagram:
anchor(--lf-sidenote bottom, -1rlh) + 1rlh
resolves to 0 and max() returns anchor(top).max() returns anchor(--lf-sidenote bottom) + 1rlh.max() returns anchor(top).Have a look at the complete stylesheet, which also adapts the reference mark to the location of the note: a “↓” arrow when the note sits below the paragraph, a “→” arrow when it moves to the margin. Gwern’s “Sidenotes In Web Design” lists more implementations and their trade-offs.
Some bloggers aim to write a post in 30 minutes. I planned to publish
three web-related articles this weekend. Instead, I spent an inordinate amount
of time elsewhere: about 15 commits on the build system, a pull request to
update CSS highlighting for nested selectors in Pygments, and a
small correction to MDN’s article on the anchor() CSS function. The
SVG illustration took a bit less than an hour and the article itself a handful
of hours. The attr() function came in after I thought “inline style looks
ugly, isn’t there a better way?” But, hey, I still think this is worth it! 🎨
My PhD advisor told me this is unwise. ↩
The first bits of anchor positioning are supported from Chrome 125 (May 2024), Firefox 147 (January 2026), and Safari 26 (September 2025).
Before Safari 26.5, sidenotes may collide due to a bug in how dependency chains are handled. You can detect this situation with some JavaScript. It is, however, not needed in the solution described here as we depend on a more recent feature. ↩
If you noticed the runt in the first note, I share your pain and lament that
Firefox does not implement text-wrap: pretty. ↩
Typed attr() is supported from Chrome 133 (February 2025),
Firefox 155 (September 2026), and Safari 27 (not yet released). Check Una
Kravets’ article for details. To support more
browsers, you can inline the anchor name and the position anchor directly in
the HTML:
<sup id="…" style="anchor-name: --lf-sn-…">
<a href="#sidenote-…">1</a>
</sup>
“Managing Anchor Associations With Data Attributes and Advanced
attr(),” by Daniel Schwarz, explores CSS
anchors and typed attr() in more detail. ↩
The exact rule for the target anchor element is more complex: “if an ancestor of [the note] satisfies the following conditions, return the nearest such element to [the note]. Otherwise, return the last element in tree order that satisfies the conditions.” One of these conditions is that “[the candidate] is an acceptable anchor element for [the note],” which requires that “[the candidate] is laid out strictly before [the note],” where the relevant clause is that “[the candidate] is either not absolutely positioned or occurs earlier in the flat tree order than [the note].” ↩
Standard optimal capital tax theory abstracts from modeling asset prices, making it unsuitable for thinking about capital gains and wealth taxation. We study optimal redistributive taxation in an environment with asset price movements, adopting the modern finance view that asset prices fluctuate not only because of changing cash flows, but also due to other factors (“discount rates”). We show that a combination of realization-based capital gains and cash flow taxes implements the optimal allocation regardless of the source of asset-price fluctuations. Moreover, the capital gains tax avoids distortions in portfolio choice (the socalled lock-in effect) by targeting total net trades rather than gains from selling individual assets. These results stand in contrast to the classic Haig-Simons comprehensive income tax concept as well as recent proposals for wealth or accrual-based capital gains taxes.
Wealth taxes lose the comparison. That is from Econometrica, by Mark Aguiar, Benjamin Moll, and Florian Scheuer.
The post Capital gains vs. wealth taxes appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Today’s Picture of the Week celebrates the intricate design of the Multi Object Optical and Near-infrared Spectrograph, or MOONS, a new instrument at ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) that recently performed its first observations. Shown here, suspended in darkness, are two of MOONS’ infrared cameras. These multi-tiered shiny metal structures, covered in bolts and cables, will be used to probe the construction of our galaxy and those beyond.
The centre of the Milky Way is shrouded in dust, which blocks visible light from inner stars passing through to us. By gathering a different type of light that can pass through this dust, called infrared, MOONS can investigate the properties of millions of these ‘hidden’ stars. This will enable astronomers to produce an accurate 3D map of the centre of our galaxy. MOONS will also be used to study millions of other galaxies, probing how they form and evolve at different ages of the Universe.
How does MOONS’ design enable detailed observations of so many cosmic objects? By using around 1000 fibre-optic cables, each mounted on a robotic positioner that carefully points it to the exact location of an astronomical object, whose light is then fed from the VLT into two spectrographs. Spectrographs work like a prism creating a rainbow, splitting the light they receive into separate ‘colours’ (or wavelengths) to then be detected by cameras, like the ones in this image. The fingerprints of chemical elements encoded in the light can then be analysed in detail, revealing properties of cosmic objects like composition, mass, and velocity. To minimise contamination from sources of infrared light around the instrument, MOONS is kept very cold (between –143 and –233 degrees Celsius) thanks to a cryostat.
MOONS was developed by an international consortium led by the Science and Technology Facilities Council's UK Astronomy Technology Centre. Reflecting on his image of the unique and powerful new instrument, photographer and ESO astronomer Luca Sbordone says: “I find that these objects are beautiful, it’s a beauty that comes from the cleverness, precision, dedication and accumulated knowledge needed to make them”.
A handful of Temu-style knockoffs of games like Flappy Bird, Snake (that’s the one where you round up border-crossing migrants), and, most notably, Tetris (the one where you “build a wall” to keep border-crossing migrants out) — the copyright to which is held by the notoriously litigious The Tetris Company, which tweeted:
At Tetris we believe in the power of connection and bringing people together, not dividing them. To our fans everywhere: we love you, we see you, and we’re grateful to have you in our community.
P.S. The Tetris Company was not involved in the creation of ‘Build the Wall’.
P.P.S. We take copyright infringement very seriously.
Whatever you think of these games, just like with the rebranding of Lake Ontario, Trump Arcade shows American voters that this administration is focused on their problems and concerns.
Mark Gurman, in his weekend Power On column at Bloomberg (gift link):
The Schiller exit is a bit more notable. Unlike Maestri, he still had a real job: The veteran executive ran the App Store and Apple Events. The App Store portion alone is no joke. It generates an estimated $30 billion a year and can be very challenging to manage. Apple’s app marketplace is loved by many consumers, but often criticized by developers and subjected to increasingly onerous regulations. It was a busy, all-encompassing gig and nowhere near a semiretirement. Apple Events, meanwhile, is how the company communicates its new product launches to customers. It’s also nothing close to fun and games.
Now, Schiller is 66 and clearly wanted to have some semblance of retirement. He can focus on philanthropy and spend more time with family. But there’s a bit more to the story, I’m told. Ternus and services chief Eddy Cue want to make even more money from the App Store and figure out ways to raise margins and squeeze additional recurring revenue from the platform. Schiller, on the other hand, seems to believe that such moves will only further irk developers and governments. While there was no internal blowup or anything like that, it’s something he wanted no part of.
I sure hope that’s not true, because that would be awful — making a bad situation worse — and pretty much the exact opposite of what Apple ought to do.
From the archive: Schiller, in a 2011 email to Cue and Steve Jobs:
Just as one thought, once we are making over $1B a year in profit from the App Store, is that enough to then think about a model where we ratchet down from 70/30 to 75/25 or even 80/20 if we can maintain a $1B a year run rate? I know that is controversial, I just tee it up as another way to look at the size of the business, what we want to achieve, and how we stay competitive. Again, just food for thought.
In the wake of Nitter/XCancel’s demise, here’s a delightful new Safari extension from Zhenyi Tan (of And a Dinosaur fame):
But sometimes people still post X content. Maybe you want to see Gruber roast Google Design. Maybe you want to see posts by Federico Viticci who recently returned to X. So I made Litterbox, a Safari extension that opens x.com links in a popup. The idea is you open it, take a look, gag a little, then close the lid. [...]
Litterbox doesn’t send your cookies when you open those popups, because of course. It uses the same API X uses for its website embeds. I don’t think they’ll kill the website embed feature. But if they do, it will be very funny.
I love it. I’ve got it installed even though I don’t avoid visiting X.com. It’s just faster and nicer to view tweets in Litterbox’s popup. And if I do want to proceed to X.com, there’s a link at the bottom of the popup. Perfect.
Here's tomorrow's conference agenda for the opening day of the Redefining Health Care in the Age of A.I. conference in Paris. Philippe Aghion will speak on "Should we fear AI?"
My talk is about "Computational Intelligence and Organ Allocation on a Global Scale."
Zac Hall, writing for 9to5Mac on August 19:
The new Meta AI desktop app is version 1.0 beta at launch and weighs just 16MB once installed. Based on initial inspection, it runs natively on Apple silicon Macs with macOS 15 or later, using an AppKit and SwiftUI shell with WebKit for richer chat content. In other words, this is not an Electron app or a repackaged iPad release.
It includes Mac-specific hooks, making the desktop experience more robust than the Meta AI mobile app. Quick Invoke uses Option-Space to place a compact Meta AI composer over whatever you are doing. A separate dictation feature lets you hold a shortcut, speak, and have the resulting words typed into any app, from Mail and documents to code editors.
Meta AI can also attach another Mac window to a conversation. With Screen Recording and Accessibility permission, the app reads the window’s visible text and captures a screenshot for the next question. This is context gathering rather than computer control for now.
Passes the Settings window sniff test too — it actually has a Settings window.
Meta, institutionally, seems more keen on native Mac apps than they are native Windows apps.
Matt Haughey:
One case in point is the Honda Prologue EV. It’s a partnership between Honda and Chevrolet, where the Prologue is basically a Chevy Blazer EV with Honda badges, slight visual differences in the sheetmetal and interior, but all the underpinnings are straight up Chevy. Even though the keys say Honda on a Prologue, it’s a General Motors key design with a Honda logo over it.
But one big difference the Prologue has from the Blazer it is based on is this: it includes Apple CarPlay and Android Auto integration. [...]
For the years these cars were sold together, the Honda outsold the Blazer by 43%, 73%, and 166% in each time period. Today in 2026, people are buying a Honda Prologue over one and a half times more often than the Chevy Blazer EV the Prologue is based on.
It’s not a perfect test. It’s reasonable to argue that Honda has a better brand and reputation than Chevrolet, and is just plain better at selling cars. But the trendline over the last three years is pretty stark.
Tym Syrytczyk, London, autonomous vehicles in the UK.
Shane Regan, Long Island, 16, AI agents.
Maximilian Kornstein, 15, Atlanta area, agents and general career support.
Irene Chen and Jessica Dai, UC Berkeley, data on peptides use.
Evan Warfel, Bay Area, updated meta-analyses through AI.
Daniel Dominguez Gomez, biomedical think tank for Mexico.
Malhaar Agrawal, U Penn., prediction markets and clinical trials.
Andrei Russel Ismael, Harvard, biomedical start-up.
Benedict Springbett, London, conference on the importance of legal issues for UK growth.
Metin Metin, Izmir, Turkey, 15, AI and brain organoid electrophysiology.
Ben Vyshedskiy, Harvard, biology podcast.
Afra Wang, Bay Area, podcast and study of Chinese AI.
Joe Hazell, LSE, AI and macroeconomics.
Anne Arno, Krakow, writing and biography.
The post Emergent Ventures winners, 59th cohort appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Winter near the Antarctic Circle brings months of frozen darkness, when sea ice chokes ocean waters and many of its denizens hunker down to ride out the harsh conditions. But as winter began to release its icy grip, an uncommonly clear satellite image revealed that part of this remote realm was still very much awake, at least volcanically speaking.
Mount Michael, the stratovolcano at the center of Saunders Island, rises above the ice-filled South Atlantic Ocean in this image, acquired with the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on the NASA-USGS Landsat 8 satellite on August 24, 2026. The natural-color image is overlaid with an infrared signal (OLI bands 7-6-5), shown in red, revealing heat from the persistent lava lake in its summit crater. A puff of a volcanic plume hovering over the peak, along with darkened snow on its northern slopes, also suggests ongoing activity.
Saunders Island is one of the South Sandwich Islands, a string of small volcanic peaks about 350 kilometers (220 miles) long that formed from the South American plate subducting beneath the tiny South Sandwich plate. Regular eruptions, including at Mount Michael, have occurred on these islands in recent centuries.
Because of the volcanoes’ remoteness, scientists rely on satellite data to understand their activity. An analysis of thermal anomalies in Landsat, Sentinel, and ASTER (Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer) observations spanning 30 years led researchers to conclude that Mount Michael hosts a persistent lava lake in its summit crater. Only a handful of other volcanoes on Earth, including Kīlauea, Nyamulagira, and Erta Ale, are known to have similar, frequently active features.
Thermal observations from the MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) and VIIRS (Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite) instruments have also enabled long-term monitoring of Mount Michael. Data provided through MIROVA, a near-real-time volcanic hot spot detection system, indicate that low-intensity activity has been ongoing at the volcano for the past several years. Other observations from NASA’s Aura satellite show that emissions of sulfur dioxide and other gases are common at Mount Michael.
The cloud-free window over Mount Michael would close in short order. One week later, when Landsat 9 passed over the island, a more active atmosphere had returned. But the weather patterns interacted with the island to put on a spectacle of their own. The 843-meter-high (2,766-foot-high) peak jutting from the ocean disturbed passing winds to produce a series of wave clouds resembling the wake of a ship, a familiar phenomenon in this region. False-color imagery captured by NASA’s Aqua satellite indicates that a volcanic track caused by degassing sulfur dioxide was likely present as well.
NASA Earth Observatory images by Michala Garrison, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Story by Lindsey Doermann.
Stay up-to-date with the latest content from NASA as we explore the universe and discover more about our home planet.
The volcano on Indonesia’s Halmahera Island routinely ejects ash, volcanic gases, and volcanic bombs.
Icy, isolated Peter I Island stirred up a show in the atmosphere off the West Antarctic coast.
Beaver Island is one in a string of verdant and scenic jewels in a northern Lake Michigan archipelago.
The post A Bright Spot at Mount Michael appeared first on NASA Science.
I once loved Amazon. I was one of its earliest supporters—because it kept every book in stock.
For the first time in my life, I had easy access to obscure books. And—it’s my curse—I frequently read very obscure books. Before the advent of the worldwide web, I sometimes searched bookstore shelves for years before finding a desired volume. But Amazon made it possible to acquire those hard-to-get books with just the click of a mouse.
I liked this concept so much that I decided to be more than a customer. I also became a shareholder of Amazon, and almost from the start.
The company went public on May 15, 1997. I bought some shares a few weeks later—on July 17, 1997 to be precise. After adjusting for subsequent stock splits, my initial purchase price was eleven cents per share.
Today Amazon shares are trading at $258 per share.
You do the math and tell me the rate of return. I don’t want to make the calculation—if I did, I might start weeping.
That’s because I sold too early.
I didn’t rush things. I held Amazon shares for more than a decade, but that wasn’t long enough, as this chart makes clear.
Isar Aerospace, founded in 2018 by three students at a German university, successfully launched a privately-developed rocket into low-Earth orbit Saturday from a Norwegian spaceport inside the Arctic Circle.
The two-stage rocket, named Spectrum, became the first fully commercial launch vehicle in Europe to reach orbit. With Saturday's success, Isar is the clear leader among a pack of several European launch startups vying to inject some competition into Europe's stagnant launch market.
Isar's 92-foot-tall (28-meter) Spectrum rocket lifted off at 4:12 pm EST (20:12 UTC) Saturday from Andøya Spaceport in northern Norway, where it was 10:12 pm local time as the final bluish hues of daylight faded from the late summer sky. Seven minutes later, the rocket was in orbit.
Links for you. Science:
How The U.S.’s Oldest Natural History Museum Might Meet Its End
How A 170-Year-Old Lizard Finally Came Home To Jamaica
There’s A New Space Telescope On Its Way To Help Answer The Biggest Question In The Universe
Who Needs Life On Mars When It Has Glacial Spiders?
New Covid Vaccines Are Available. Here’s How to Get One.
How Thursday night’s DC storms became so violent — and produced nonstop lightning
RFK Jr. ordered measles deaths deletion; CDC still secretly counts them
Other:
Pause OpenAI, now. Quite simply, they can no longer be trusted. (worth noting this isn’t a ‘tech’ issue, it’s a political and regulatory one)
The Denunciation Demand Is a Trap. Democrats Shouldn’t Fall Into It. The Hasan Piker discourse shows this is a game candidates can’t win.
What Do Booksellers Make Of “The End Of Reading”?
Hoping Someone Else Stops Trump Is Not A Plan. A whistleblower exposed his illegal scheme to cheat in the midterms, and House Democrats turned around and funded his government. It’s a bad omen for 2027.
Kalshi Lawsuit Pits States Against Trump Family’s Corruption Machine
People Who Pay Their Bills Are Suckers
CBS News Now Performing Oafish Racism On Behalf Of Bari Weiss
A humanoid sales robot appeared to turn on a customer.
Tom Dundon Isn’t Acting Alone
Six Things the Federal Film Bill Can’t Live Without
The jig is nearly up. Trump is gonna take the money and run
Steve Ballmer Betrayed His Fellow Billionaires, And They Are Not Pleased
Trump officially plans for civilian federal pay freeze in 2027
Dealing With the AI Productivity Boom: We Do Know How to Share the Wealth
Terror move backfires as ‘loser’ Proud Boys’ socialist hate collides with love for donuts
The U.N. backed a map that shows Africa true to size. The U.S. was sole objector.
(Lord’s day). My pill I took last night worked very well, and I lay long in bed and sweat to get away the itching all about my body from head to foot, which is beginning again as it did the last winter, and I find after I am up that it is abated. I staid at home all day and my wife also, whom, God forgive me, I staid along with me for fear of her seeing of Pembleton. But she and I entertained one another all day long with great pleasure, contriving about my wife’s closet and the bedchamber, whither we intend to go up she and I to-day.
We dined alone and supped also at night, my brother John with us, and so to prayers and to bed.
Last week was the fifteenth week of videos from the 250 to 250 Project that we’re producing to honor the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
Our hope was for the videos to emphasize the agency of Americans—mostly everyday Americans—to change the country. Each falls into a category that defines what it means to be an American, including community, democracy, innovation, mobility, civil rights, education, conservation, and creativity.
Every week, I try to say something new about the week’s videos, but in a way, each week’s production has been the same: a wonderful combination of my own favorite historical events and ones new to me, with narrators who fit their topics perfectly and are themselves part of America’s story. The generous participation of so many people in this project has made it significantly bigger than the sum of its parts, and this week is no exception.
You can follow the project at the sites listed below, or under “videos” at my own YouTube page: Heather Cox Richardson. Or just wait until I send out the week’s roundup.
Follow Along | #WeAreAmerica250
Substack | YouTube | Facebook | Instagram | TikTok | Bluesky | Threads
Heather Booth is an organizer and political strategist who has worked in civil rights and the feminist movement. She was a founder of the underground abortion service provider known as the Jane Collective.
Dr. Andrew J. Huebner is a Professor of History at the University of Alabama who focuses on modern U.S. cultural and military history. He is a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians (OAH), author of the acclaimed books Love and Death in the Great War and The Warrior Image, and co-editor of The Cambridge History of War and Society in America. He is currently finishing a new history of the buffalo soldiers, the first Black regular army units in US history, established by Congress in 1866.
Daniel Lurie is San Francisco’s 46th Mayor. He has focused on public safety, building housing, getting people off the streets and on a path to stability, and San Francisco’s long-term economic recovery. He honors the murals in San Francisco’s Coit Tower, which portray the lives and histories of everyday Americans.
Zohran Mamdani is the 112th Mayor of the City of New York. He previously represented the 36th New York State Assembly District and its neighborhoods of Astoria, Ditmars-Steinway, and Astoria Heights. Here, Mamdani recounts the history of the colony that, in 1665, would become New York.
The Brothers Three—Tyler, Ryan, and Clay Hereth—completed a southbound thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail together July 16 to November 22, 2011. Their history of the Appalachian Trail is a reminder of the importance of volunteerism and environmental stewardship.
Award-winning journalist Amna Nawaz is co-anchor and co-managing editor of the PBS News Hour. Her reporting spans politics, foreign affairs, immigration, culture and sports. Nawaz profiles Roberto Clemente, the Puerto Rican baseball legend whose brilliance on the field was matched by the humanitarianism that led to his tragic death.
Tennessee State Representative Justin Pearson is a prominent progressive American activist and politician best known for being the co-founder of Memphis Community Against Pollution and as a member of the “Tennessee Three.” He is currently a candidate for U.S. Congress. Here he tells the story of the historic labor strike in 1968 that would be the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s final campaign.
Dana Tiger is an award-winning, internationally acclaimed artist known for her watercolors and acrylic paintings depicting the strength and determination of Native American women. Dana’s paintings are exhibited nationwide. She celebrates the legacy of her father, Jerome Tiger, a celebrated and influential Muscogee/Seminole artist.
Kahlil Greene, the “Gen-Z Historian,” is a well known digital educator, Peabody Award winner, and two-time Emmy nominee with an audience of over 50 million views across TikTok, Instagram, and author of History Can’t Hide on Substack. He recounts the history— including the destruction— of Tulsa, Oklahoma’s Greenwood District, a prosperous African American community known as “Black Wall Street.”
Dr. David Erickson, senior vice president at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, leads a team focused on community development, seeking ways to increase investments in low-income communities. Erickson has a PhD in history from UC Berkeley. Alexander Hamilton’s work laid the foundation for central banking in the United States and, eventually, for the Federal Reserve.
Nicholas Stubblefield, a proud former member of the Heather Cox Richardson posse, is a writer and stand-up comedian based in Boston. He’s won awards, though none that you’ve heard of. Idaho is home. He celebrates landscape architect, author, conservationist and public servant, Frederick Law Olmsted, who designed some of America’s most celebrated landmarks, from New York’s Central Park to the U.S. Capitol Grounds and Chicago’s Jackson Park.
Award-winning Senior writer at Slate, Aymann Ismail is an author, and president of the Arab and Middle Eastern Journalists Association. He is one of the hosts of the PBS documentary series American Muslims: A History Revealed. His work has appeared in the New York Times and GQ, and on CNN and NPR. He tells the story of one of the nation’s first mosques, built outside the tiny town of Ross, North Dakota.
Colin Makoto Craig is a fourth generation veteran who served in the US Air Force. With the G.I. Bill, he graduated from Cornell University and is a JD candidate at St. John’s University. Craig examines how the G.I. Bill reshaped postwar America, sending millions of veterans to college and into the middle class.
Dr. Thavolia Glymph is an author and a professor of history and law at Duke University. Her research, writing, and teaching focus on slavery, emancipation, Reconstruction, labor, and women in the U.S South. Signed by Abraham Lincoln on January 1, 1863, the Emancipation Proclamation declared that all enslaved people living in territory controlled by the Confederate States of America were legally free and allowed Black men to join the U.S. Army.
Lina Khan served as chair of the Federal Trade Commission from June 2021 to January 2025. She teaches and writes about antitrust law, infrastructure industries law, the antimonopoly tradition, and law and political economy. Here, she captures the complicated story of America’s first transcontinental railroad.
Chuck Cooper III is President and CEO of the Chuck Cooper Foundation, which honors and carries forward the legacy of his father, Naismith Basketball Hall of Famer Chuck Cooper, the first African American drafted into the NBA. He celebrates the life of activist and athlete, basketball’s Bill Russell.
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made history as the first First Lady elected to the United States Senate, and in her run for president in 2016. A lawyer, an author, and a staunch advocate for women, children, and families, she is an active force for progress and human rights. She recalls Eleanor Roosevelt’s leadership role in creating The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), a milestone document in the history of human rights.
Follow Along | #WeAreAmerica250
Substack | YouTube | Facebook | Instagram | TikTok | Bluesky | Threads
Events of Friday, September 4, showed the Trump administration in a nutshell.
U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani of the District of Massachusetts blocked Trump’s plan to use the United States Postal Service to screen mail-in voters. Referring to the final rule the USPS is trying to put into place, Talwani wrote: “Unauthorized by the Elections Clause, the Final Rule clashes with Congress’s statutory scheme, and is unconstitutional where it intrudes not only on Congress’s Elections Clause powers but also that power left to the States.”
In other words, the plan is both illegal and unconstitutional.
As Jacob Knutson and Jim Saksa of Democracy Docket reported, Talwani was responding to a lawsuit over the plan brought by groups defending the right to vote, including the League of Women Voters of Massachusetts and Democratic attorneys general from 24 states and the District of Columbia. Talwani agreed that the rule threatens the voting rights of millions of American citizens.
Hours after Judge Talwani’s order, the Trump administration asked U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols to permit the rule to go into effect, claiming it simply “imposes modest informational requirements on senders of outbound federal ballot mailings.” Contradicting Talwani, the Department of Justice lawyers claimed: “The Rule does not displace a single State election law. And it need not and should not prevent a single voter from voting by mail.”
Meanwhile, a day after Interior Secretary Doug Burgum announced the administration was starting work on the 250-foot (76-meter) triumphal arch Trump wants in Washington, D.C., U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan ordered the administration to give the court at least 48 hours’ notice before doing anything except dig pits to identify cultural artifacts at the site. She noted that in April the administration agreed to provide 14 days’ notice before any construction started, an agreement ordered by the court.
Burgum’s announcement suggested the administration is pushing the project forward without going through any of the required permitting or obeying the law that requires Congress to pass a law allowing another memorial in the protected area of Washington, D.C., known as Area I.
Questioned about the war in Iran, Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Friday that it is actually not a war but “a military conflict because it’s small potatoes for us.” He compared the Iran war, which is in its sixth month without congressional authorization of any sort and has taken the lives of 18 U.S. service members, to the much longer Vietnam War which he claimed took more than 100,000 service members’ lives (the Department of Defense says the actual number was 58,220).
Trump also denied that military personnel are seeing record long deployments, and insisted that the U.S. controls the Strait of Hormuz. He turned back to the argument that the war was to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, although those discussions now appear to be off the table as the U.S. tries to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.
Jonathan Swan, Adam Entous, Maggie Haberman, and Eric Schmitt of the New York Times reported on Friday that although Trump and members of the administration insist that reports of a shortage of crucial munitions are a lie, government investigators forced about 50 members of the U.S. military’s Joint Staff—about 2,000 officials who coordinate operations and policy with commanders around the world—to take lie detector tests to determine if they had been the source of the leaks to journalists.
The journalists note that such a proceeding is unprecedented and comes as Hegseth works harder and harder to control information coming from the Pentagon. “Mass polygraph tests have never been administered to the top ranks of the U.S. military in modern history,” they write.
Also on Friday, Catie Edmondson and Carolyn Y. Johnson reported in the New York Times that the Defense Department and the National Institutes of Health have signed an agreement providing a framework to collaborate on biodefense and pandemic preparedness. According to officials who spoke with the reporters, the deal could mean moving as much as $2 billion from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases—roughly one-third the budget of the agency Dr. Anthony Fauci used to run—to the Pentagon.
Amidst reports that the Navy has run out of money, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has been trying unsuccessfully to push through Congress a short-term injection of $350 billion on top of the additional $150 billion congressional Republicans gave the Pentagon last year. Senator Patty Murray of Washington, the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, accused the Defense Department of “trying to rob N.I.H. of billions of dollars that Congress provided for medical research so that it can pad the Pentagon’s budget.”
NIH director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya appeared to confirm the agreement when he posted on social media that “far from siphoning money away from research, this partnership between [NIH] and [the Defense Department] focuses on research projects that will drive discoveries to improve the health of American citizens and members of the military.”
In the White House on Friday, Trump appeared to misunderstand not only that since World War II trade has made the United States wealthy, but also the concept of trade itself. “We could do tremendous good for ourselves by just not trading with other countries,” he said. “We lose with Mexico $195 billion a year. They have nothing that we have to have, I mean, hot tamales, tomatoes, a couple of things.”
Aside from the fact the U.S. imports machinery, agricultural products, vehicles, auto parts, electronics, and so on from Mexico, readers on social media noted: “The trade deficit is not a debt, it does not represent losing money to the other country. It means more goods were imported from it than exported to it. Why has to do with many factors, mainly the United States has more highly paid, skilled, and educated service workers.”
On Friday, the White House debuted computer games on the official White House website. The “games” are ripoffs of older games like Snake, this one with a white man in a suit picking up Black, Asian, and Latino men and putting them in orange jumpsuits. There was also apparently one ripping off Tetris, which was apparently about building Trump’s wall, but it disappeared as the real Tetris posted: “At Tetris we believe in the power of connection and bringing people together, not dividing them. To our fans everywhere: we love you, we see you, and we’re grateful to have you in our community.
“P.S. The Tetris Company was not involved in the creation of ‘Build the Wall’.
“P.P.S. We take copyright infringement very seriously.”
On Friday, September 4, the administration also reiterated its determination to roll back environmental protections, proposing a new rule that would end protections against pollution and industrial impacts for a significant number of streams and wetlands. As Zahra Hirji of Bloomberg reported, the Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers proposed redefining which bodies of water would qualify for federal protection.
Also on Friday, the United Nations General Assembly voted 164–1, with six countries abstaining, for a resolution changing the world map to more accurately reflect the sizes of the continents. As Jewel Bright of NPR reports, the commonly-used Mercator projection, created by Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator in 1569, was designed to enable navigators to plot courses on the straight lines of compass bearings. It distorts the size of landmasses, making the ones closest to the poles disproportionately large, while areas close to the Equator—like Africa—are shown as significantly smaller than they really are.
The African Group, made up of 54 African member states, introduced the resolution, which is not binding but will put the weight of the U.N. behind a different map projection that shows the continent sizes much more accurately. The United States was the only country to vote against the measure.
Also on Friday, Joe Sommerlad of the Independent confirmed reporting from the Washington Examiner the day before that, according to a White House official, First Lady Melania Trump will not attend Trump’s novel midterm convention next week in Dallas. She joins at least 45 Republican lawmakers who told Mia McCarthy, Meredith Lee Hill, and Jordain Carney of Politico they are steering clear of participating in an event with the deeply unpopular president for which tickets for Republican lawmakers start at $25,000.
One lawmaker called the event “a waste of time,” explaining: “You shouldn’t be having to rally your base at this point. You should be trying to convince independents. Independents are not attending nor watching the midterm convention.” Republican National Committee press secretary Natalie Baldassarre countered that “the outreach and enthusiasm to attend, participate, and speak at this historic midterm convention has been incredible.”
In an interview with Ben Terris of New York Magazine published Friday, Trump agreed that Senator Jon Ossoff (D-GA) was right to say that he was putting his name on things now because nobody else will when he’s gone. “That’s true,” Trump told Terris. “Nobody will do it once I’m gone. When I leave here, nobody will.”
—
Notes:
https://www.hepburnadvocate.com.au/story/9344385/judge-reinforces-order-barring-work-on-trump-arch/
https://www.npr.org/2026/09/04/nx-s1-5958611/africa-world-map-un-vote
https://dcas.dmdc.osd.mil/dcas/conflictCasualties/vietnam/vietnamSum
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/09/02/gop-midterm-convention-attendance-01061286
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/04/us/politics/pentagon-nih-biodefense-agreement.html
https://www.rawstory.com/trump-trade-2677823349/
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/04/us/politics/pentagon-staff-polygraph-tests.html
https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/trump-admits-putting-name-everything-185941307.html
https://www.newsnationnow.com/politics/epa-clean-water-act-protections-trump/
X:
JenniferJJacobs/status/2095868763803463746
Acyn/status/2095946361749565609
Bluesky:
ronfilipkowski.bsky.social/post/3muq6rdcyuk2m
parkermolloy.com/post/3munppnop3k2z
whstancil.bsky.social/post/3muri4yfo6s2u
parkermolloy.com/post/3mupnscx7is2u
jeremymberg.bsky.social/post/3murhcfwme22v
NYU Stern researcher @NateWitkin questions why cyber insurance rates keep falling if AI cyber risk is accelerating:
“Insurance rates for cyber risk declined by about 4% globally in Q2 of this year, and that’s actually the 12th consecutive quarter in which they’ve declined. This is very valuable signal that implies that at a minimum you shouldn’t overindex on the Hugging Face incident.”
“This is a plea for level headedness, but I think it would be helpful for safety folks to engage with these numbers just ’cause this is an avenue of criticism from folks like me and to an extent folks like Tyler.”
“Why are these numbers not moving? Is it because people are underestimating capabilities? Are they not taking the problem even as close to as seriously as they should or is it something else?”
Here is the link with video. File under “Questions that are all too rarely asked.”
I am happy to admit that the answers here are far from obvious, and that I am myself expecting prices to rise somewhat.
I will continue to note that there are a remarkable number of ways, seen among other places on Twitter, to rephrase and to rationalize the statement: “I have the most remarkable and important and true macro risk story in the world to tell you. Unfortunately, it does not correlate with any observed asset market prices.”
The post Insurance price sentences to ponder appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
1. Vishy now thinks Pragg is number one in the chess world.
2. Do children grow continuously, or grow in fits and starts?
3. It remains my view that Ferrante is the husband and wife team.
5. “US annual interest expense is up to a record 18.5% of federal government revenue. This is officially above the previous record of 18.4% set in 1991. This percentage has more than QUADRUPLED over the last 4 years as interest expenditures on public debt skyrocketed.” Link.
6. Statistical meddling at the Census Bureau.
The post Sunday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
If you continue to add floors and rooms to a building forever, it will collapse. Software faces no such constraint. The code can always get worse. There can always be a new layer of indirection or a reduction in performance.
— Zach Kehs, There's No Limit to How Bad Code Can Get
Tags: technical-debt
Introducing GPT-6 Astra for developers
Blink and you'll miss it, but there's a familiar creature at 1m59s:Across the board, Astra has more attention to detail, better understanding of the user's prompt, and can build more sophisticated outputs. In particular, it excels at building 3D models. I've seen it make incredible renderings of gardens, shipyards, animals, cityscapes, even Dyson spheres.
Astra really does believe in putting a red neckerchief on a pelican riding a bicycle.
Tags: ai, openai, generative-ai, llms, pelican-riding-a-bicycle, gpt-6-astra
On Friday Donald Trump threatened to cut off all trade with nations with which the United States runs a trade deficit. His demand, oddly, was directed at the Federal Reserve: He would impose trade embargoes unless the Fed cuts interest rates. I won’t even try to untangle his logic, if there is any, because today’s primer isn’t about Trump. It is, instead, about how to think about a world in which governments — even the government of the United States, which created the rules-based trading system that prevailed until recently — increasingly use threats to cut off international trade as a tool of coercion.
“Geoeconomics” — the study of the ways governments can use national economic strength in pursuit of geopolitical objectives — is a hot topic right now, both among scholars and at international institutions. The International Monetary Fund made geoeconomics the theme of the June issue of its F&D magazine. Geoeconomics is the theme of the European Central Bank’s annual research conference, taking place next week, at which I’m giving a talk on “economic size and economic power.” Back in August I posted a primer on relevant measures of economic size. Today, continuing my homework for the talk, I’m writing about economic power.
Specifically, I want to talk about “weaponized interdependence,” a term coined in 2019 by the political scientists Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman. Farrell and Newman focused mainly on national governments’ efforts to exploit their control of international networks, such as America’s use of the dollar’s central role in the international monetary system to impose sanctions on nations it considers hostile. At this point, however, weaponized interdependence is everywhere: Iran attempting to force the United States to call off its war by closing the Strait of Hormuz, China threatening the West with a cutoff of rare earths, the Trump administration using the threat of tariffs to pressure Canada to remove cultural protections for French — or become the 51st state?
But how should we think about weaponized interdependence? There is a rapidly burgeoning theoretical and empirical research literature on geoeconomics, surveyed for example by Mohr and Trebesch (2025.) I am not a contributor to this literature, just a consumer! But this rapidly growing field isn’t yet part of the standard way we teach international economics, let alone the way people influential in policy discuss the world. So what I thought I could do today is lay out in a very simple, maybe simplistic way what I believe to be some of the main insights from thinking about international trade as a potential tool of coercion — and what it says about the current global situation.
Beyond the paywall I will address the following:
1. What is weaponized interdependence, and how does it differ from “trade war”?
2. The sources of trade-related power
3. The special case of depression economics
4. Who has economic power in today’s world?
5. Trade in a weaponized world
I'm in Paris, for the conference Redefining Healthcare in the Age of AI
"The Paris Institute for Transplantation and Organ Regeneration (PITOR) is delighted to announce the first Nature Conference in Europe dedicated to artificial intelligence in medicine, taking place in Paris from 8–10 September 2026.
Held under the High Patronage of the President of the French Republic, the conference will bring together 28 leading international experts, including two Nobel Prize laureates, as well as the Editors-in-Chief of Nature, Nature Medicine, Nature Reviews Engineering, Nature Reviews Nephrology, and Nature Health. The meeting will be held in the historic amphitheater of the Sorbonne.
Topics will include:
Medical imaging and diagnostics
Ethics and regulation
Medical robotics and wearable technologies
Agentic AI and clinical decision support
Drug discovery and repurposing
The author is Calvin Korponai, and the subtitle is From Macchu Picchu into Bolivia in search of the Garden of Eden. Bolivia is a fantastic country to visit, more original than most people are expecting, and this is the book to tell you why. Excerpt:
The landscape itself is like noting else in the Americas. The altiplano is flat in the way that only vast geological formations can be flat, not the flatness of a plain that was once a sea, but the flatness of a plateau that was raised bodily by tectonic forces millions of years ago and then scoured by ten thousand years of wind and ice into the extraordinary emptiness it presents today. The horizon in every direction is uninterrupted. The sky is immense, a dome of blue so saturated at this altitude that photographs rarely convey it accurately, because the camera’s sensor cannot process a blue that contains no haze, no moisture, no atmospheric diffffusion between the sun and the surface.
And:
Arriving at El Alto International Airport (which sits on the altiplano above the city at forty-one hundred meters, making it the highest international airport in the world), you step off the plane into air so thin that the simple act of carrying your luggage to the terminal produces a shortness of breath that is mildly alarming if you have never experienced it and completely normal if you have. The airport itself is unremarkable. What happens next is not. You get into a taxi or bus and the driver takes you to the edge of the antiplano, and then the city appears, not gradually but all at once, a cascade of buildings and lights and terracotta roofs pouring down the walls of a canyon so steep and so deep that the bottom is invisible from the rim. La Paz does not reveal itself slowly. It drops away beneath you like a held breath released.
Recommended, and yes Cochabamba is an amazing food city.
The post *Why Not Bolivia?* appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
The Pelican Nebula is slowly being transformed.
My thanks to WorkOS for once again sponsoring Daring Fireball. Give an agent an access token and it spreads: into the context window, into tool call logs, into notes it keeps between steps. Each copy works from anywhere, long after the fact.
Relay keeps the credential at WorkOS. Your agent names the user, WorkOS attaches that token, refreshes it, and releases it only to allowlisted hosts. A hijacked agent session is a live process you can kill.
Learn how it works at WorkOS’s blog.
Market Design
