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Core Memory

He’s Here To End Death - EP 90 Dr. Emil Kendziorra

Ashlee Vance
Updated

A few years ago, some people put me in a van and drove me to the edge of Moscow. And by “the edge of Moscow,” I mean where things started to get a bit rural. We turned off a road and went toward what looked like a modest farmhouse with a shed. After exiting the van, we entered said shed and found two large metal containers that were full of human bodies and heads along with the bodies of many animals, including dogs, cats, and a hummingbird. Have a look.

These bodies were being cryopreserved with liquid nitrogen in the hope that they could be reanimated at some point in the future when science has advanced and more illnesses can be cured.

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Cryopreservation/reanimation is not a new idea. It’s been contemplated in literature for hundreds of years. Alcor, perhaps the most well-known cryopreservation company, was founded way back in 1972. The field, though, has suffered from questionable science and been seen as a scientific backwater.

Our guest this week wants to add scientific, intellectual, and pragmatic rigor to the cryopreservation field or what he calls the biostasis field. He’s Dr. Emil Kendziorra, the founder and CEO of Tomorrow Bio.

Tomorrow Bio has a team that will show up at the end of life and prepare someone’s body for preservation and then store their body in a Swiss vault.

In this episode, we get into the mechanics behind Tomorrow Bio and the pros and cons of biostasis. Kendziorra is a sober, deep thinker on this topic and a great listen.

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TIMESTAMPS (they link out to YouTube)

CHAPTERS
0:00 Intro
5:08 Cryonics Without the Ice
8:45 Heads in a Russian Shed
12:26 Longevity's Backup Plan
19:39 The First Hours After Death
30:11 Funding a Second Life
37:15 Does Cryonics Actually Work?
43:40 Preserving Brains Without Bodies
50:52 Why Not Reverse Aging?
55:21 Can the Company Outlive You?
1:03:37 Waking Up Centuries Later
1:08:28 The Problem of Rewarming
1:15:14 Selling Hope Without Overselling Science
1:19:40 Would Longer Lives Be Better?
1:23:42 Elective Cryonics and Family Life

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Paul Krugman

One More Reason Americans Hate AI: It Does Nothing for Them

Paul Krugman
Updated

One unifying dynamic in America today: Americans really, really hate AI. What began as a form of NIMBYism — no one wants a data center in their neighborhood — has broadened into severe doubts about the technology as a whole. For those of us who remember the giddy optimism that greeted the tech boom of the 1990s, the widespread negativity towards AI is astonishing. Here are the results of a new Wall Street Journal poll:

Only 28 percent of Americans believe that AI technology should move full speed ahead. Everyone else wants it slowed down or stopped, temporarily or permanently.

Of course, Donald Trump remains a huge booster. He believes that the public’s antipathy towards AI is just a marketing problem — and that he can solve that problem by forcing everyone to call it “super intelligence”. But the Journal poll also says that only 7 percent of Americans trust Trump’s leadership in regulating AI. Given Trump’s abysmal approval ratings, his advocacy of AI — err, super intelligence — probably taints the technology even further in the eyes of Americans.

Historically, Americans have been technology enthusiasts. As a nation, we’re not Luddites. So what explains Americans’ dislike of AI?

Obviously, there are near-daily prominent warnings that AI will destroy the human race or, failing that, destroy everyone’s job. And these warnings aren’t coming from left-wing cranks — they’re coming from the AI industry itself.

And we should be afraid – very afraid. The power of AI models to hack into supposedly secure systems — and to do so on their own, without prompting and against their owners’ intentions, and to lie to the humans about it — is truly shocking. Moreover, there is surely an element of financially motivated hype: “Our technology is so powerful that it can destroy the world, so you’d better invest in our IPO.” And there is more than a little bit of karma here: the race by the AI giants to reach the holy grail of AGI – artificial general intelligence – was surely a strategy to make vast riches from Wall Street, in contrast to the much more modest (and probably more successful) Chinese strategy of building modest, cost-effective models.

There is also, however, a more prosaic reasons for the public’s dislike of AI: This is a technology of, by and for oligarchs, with hardly any of the benefits trickling down to regular Americans.

Or to put it a different way, never before in history have corporations spent so much money — playing a major role in soaring interest rates — to create so few jobs.

Data centers themselves are basically banks of blinking servers that employ hardly any workers. Here’s data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics on a category that includes data centers as well as a number of other activities. Employment in that category has declined since Nov. 2022, often cited as the start of the AI boom because it’s the month ChatGPT was released to the public:

Still, won’t the AI boom at least temporarily create a lot of construction jobs? It will create some, and Jared Bernstein has a good post on how to ensure that these are good jobs. But all indications are that AI investment will create far fewer jobs, even in construction, than expected.

Bear in mind that we are talking about a truly huge investment boom. In Sunday’s primer I cited estimates by Stijn van Nieuwerburgh suggesting that we’re entering by far the biggest capital-expenditure boom in U.S. history, dwarfing even the huge railroad boom that followed the Civil War:

These are projections rather than spending that has already happened. But the AI investment boom is already well underway. Here’s IT investment as a percentage of GDP, which really took off in late 2024 and is already well above its level during the 1990s tech boom:

Given this spending surge, one should expect a sharp rise in nonresidential construction spending — basically construction for businesses rather than housing.

But that’s not what we actually see. Nonresidential construction rose rapidly during the Biden years, largely thanks to that administration’s promotion of clean energy. But nonresidential construction has basically flatlined under Trump, despite the immense AI investment boom:

How is this possible? Because even the physical construction of a data center involves relatively little construction. According to Van Nieuwerburgh, when a multi-billion-dollar AI training campus is built,

About one-third [of the investment spending] reflects the facility and power infrastructure, while roughly two-thirds consists of compute hardware and related IT systems.

So not a lot of conventional construction. And most of the “compute hardware” etc. is imported!

Overall, then, the deep unpopularity of AI isn’t hard to explain. Here we have a technology that is enriching a small number of people, but whose creators warn may destroy millions of jobs if not the world. And even the usual argument for pro-oligarch policies — job creation! — falls flat because hardly any jobs are being created even in the short run.

Will AI’s unpopularity matter? Indicators are that it will. So many things are going wrong for Republicans right now that it’s hard to single out any one issue, but Chris Caldwell has an interesting recent article arguing that the deep unpopularity of data centers may be the tipping point that turns Ohio blue this year, possibly deciding control of the Senate.

Thus there are good reasons, even beyond possible apocalypse, for the public backlash against AI. And that backlash is so strong, and has emerged so quickly, that it may have important political consequences.

Isn’t that super?

MUSICAL CODA

Nothing to do with topic, but a different take on a classic

Simon Willison's Weblog

Quoting Matthew Green

[...] Put these pieces together and you have the two halves of a worm: a payload that hijacks the agent, and an agent that will carry the payload to the next agent. Agents in separately-isolated sandboxes discovered that they could leave instructions for each other in a shared package cache, and those instructions changed what the recipients did. Replace the package cache with email, Slack and shared documents or WhatsApp, and replace independently-sandboxed training runs with independently-deployed personal agents like Muse, and you have exactly the ingredients that a worm needs.

— Matthew Green, Is sandboxing sufficient to contain rogue agents?

Tags: accidental-cyberattacks, ai-misuse, generative-ai, ai-security-research, sandboxing, ai, llms

Simon Willison's Weblog

He Built This City

I visited the Museum of the City of New York today and got to see He Built This City: Joe Macken’s Model, the 50 x27 feet model of the city built over a 21 year period from balsa wood and cardboard.

It exceeded my already high expectations. The exhibition closes on 12th October so you should absolutely make a priority to see it if you get the chance.

A wide shot of the model of the island of Manhattan, plus the edge of Brooklyn. It looks so great!

Tags: museums, new-york

Simon Willison's Weblog

Photo Scrubber — local face blur & metadata removal

Tool: Photo Scrubber — local face blur & metadata removal

I took a photograph of some protesters, then thought about how I don't like sharing photographs of strangers with identifiable faces. I had GPT-6 Astra build this experimental tool that would identify faces and automatically blur them out.

It uses Google's MediaPipe C++ library, compiled to WebAssembly via @mediapipe/tasks-vision, plus the BlazeFace face detection model.

Tags: photography, tools

Schneier on Security

I Want Better Reporting on AI Genie Behavior

Bruce Schneier
Updated

AI systems are regularly completing tasks in ways that their prompters don’t want or intend. Some of them are disturbing, and some of them are dangerous. This is something I’ve been calling “genie behavior,” because I think that really gets at the core of what’s happening.

I wish the popular press would report on this better. I don’t like the “going rogue” framing because it deflects the responsibility from the prompters—often the AI companies themselves. And now, pretty much anything off-script is being called “hacking.”

Take, for example, the recent stories of one of OpenAI’s models hacking into government systems. First, The New York Times writes this headline: “OpenAI’s Systems Meddled With U.S. Government Sites After Going Rogue.”

Sounds scary, but this is from the body of the article:

With the Education Department, OpenAI’s technology tried to hack the website to gather data from the department’s civil rights office but failed, researchers from the A.I. research firm Transluce said. The A.I. also pulled data from the Census Bureau website, which is housed at the Commerce Department, using login credentials it found online. Separately, OpenAI’s agents shared public data from the S.E.C. website on an online forum.

This is from the original Transluce report. It is explicit that the agents were trying to discover vulnerabilities:

The first hacking attempt was against the University of New Mexico’s Digital Library (nmdigital.unm.edu) from May 25-26 2026. Agents repeatedly tried to retrieve one photograph in UNM’s Valmora collection, both directly and through third-party relay services. They sent seven probes attempting to verify the existence of vulnerabilities, including SQL injection, command injection, and path traversals. In all cases, these tactics appear to have been unsuccessful. The agents also sent a self-described “flood: of 80 requests to the UNM server in an apparent attempt to access the image.

Transluce doesn’t talk about the other two anecdotes, and I don’t know where they come from. But one involves using Census Bureau credentials found online. (I know from a colleague that those are incredibly easy to create; all use you need is an email address.) And the other involves sharing publicly available data.

So no actual hacking. And certainly no “meddling.”

The other story making the rounds is about Australia, from the same Transluce report. The news stories have headlines like “An OpenAI Agent Hacked Australia’s Health Service” and “Rogue OpenAI agent ‘infiltrated’ Australian government website in world first.” And Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said: “There will obviously be legal consequences on it.”

Again from Transluce’s actual report:

On June 20-21, agents attempted to exploit vulnerabilities in the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW), a government statistics agency). The agents were tasked with finding the January 2022 rolling-12-month-average government cost per person for Dermatologicals across Victorian LGAs.

Again, the agents ran into errors, including requests blocked by Cloudflare and issues with correctly identifying Tableau parameter names. As before, they then resorted to probing for exploitable vulnerabilities. Minutes after Cloudflare blocked the dataset download, an agent sent a reflected cross-site scripting probe to the same dashboard: a web address with code embedded in it, designed to test whether the site would run code supplied by an outsider. Cloudflare’s firewall blocked the probe before it reached the dashboard. When Cloudflare blocked the dataset download on AIHW’s main site, they fetched the file from AIHW’s pre-production server (pp.aihw.gov.au) instead, which served it in pieces over more than 100 scans. The file itself is public, so no non-public data was exposed, but the agent bypassed the site’s anti-bot controls.

Note the last sentence: “The file itself is public….”

I’m not saying that these AI systems aren’t incredibly sophisticated cyberattackers. I’m also not saying that they don’t occasionally autonomously attack other systems and networks. If we are ever going to get trustworthy AI—integrous AI—we are going to need to figure out how to ensure that AI systems complete tasks in line with all sorts of implicit constraints and restrictions. But every instance of genie-like behavior isn’t a cyberattack.

I want to measure genie-like behavior in AIs, but I am much more worried about human hackers enhanced with this technology than I am about this technology acting autonomously.

Marginal Revolution

The top private sector employers of economics graduates

Tyler Cowen
Updated

Image

Here is the link.

The post The top private sector employers of economics graduates appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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xkcd.com

Ground Effect

Runners looking for aerodynamic advantage typically wear sneakers because some fancy dress shoes can create wingtip vortices.
Talking Points Memo - Editors Blog

Doubts About the AI Boom Are Seeping Into Elite Headlines

Josh Marshall
Updated

This is the weekly, free edition of The Backchannel. If you’d like to receive the free edition of The Backchannel in your inbox, you can subscribe here.

In my recent writing about LLMs and AI, I’ve mainly focused on what it can do, what it is, what its potential dangers are. I haven’t focused as much on the pretty substantial evidence that we’re in the midst of an AI bubble. The entire U.S. economy is heavily dependent on the AI boom. Much of the rest of the economy is in a slump. That boom is based on cheap money and very high expectations for AI profits, just as the Fed is facing irresistible pressure to raise interest rates, which is to say, raise the cost of money. This whole question of an AI bubble gets talked about a lot. You probably know the basic outlines. What’s caught my attention is how just in the last week or so these questions, verging into assumptions about unsustainable spending, are bleeding into the tech and the Beltway political press.

First is this piece in Axios, which references a study by our friend Jared Bernstein and Ryan Cummings, now both at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. They have a new study out basically making the bubble case. Axios has this line in their write-up of the analysis: “They found that the companies would need to triple or quadruple their AI revenue next year and every year after that for the next decade for this to work out.” The “they” here is Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Oracle and SpaceX — basically the non-“frontier” AI hyperscalers.

Needless to say, those are pretty wild growth rates to hit. And Bernstein and Cummings say it’s a race to growth that those hyperscalers seem to be losing. “AI firms are losing a race against time,” they write. “Investments are far outpacing profits, and while we may be wrong, we’re hard-pressed to see how the latter can catch up to the former.” You can see the details in the study here. These turn out to be only the beginning of the problems. They don’t factor in what seem like quite likely hikes in interest rates. My point here is less this information itself. There have been dissenting voices in the economics and, for lack of a better word, the AI skeptic space saying things like this for a long time. It’s who this information is being put in front of. In the case of Axios, it’s the DC elite.

Earlier this morning, I saw this in a newsletter from The Information, a closely read, fairly high dollar publication which covers Silicon Valley and tech.

The IPO market appears to have stalled, which could be a problem for Anthropic. Fitness ring maker Oura’s postponement of its IPO on Tuesday, citing “uncertainty in the IPO market,” followed similar moves by metals producer Amaero last week and Holtec Nuclear Corp. the week before that. Then there’s SB Energy, the SoftBank-controlled power developer for data centers, which made public its IPO paperwork on Sept. 1 (two days before Oura did so) but hasn’t yet begun to market the offering. 

You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out what’s going on. In its statement explaining its IPO postponement two weeks ago, Holtec mentioned “headwinds” including rising energy costs, trade tensions, military conflicts and rising interest rates. In short, it’s the world we live in. On top of that, Holtec—which sells to data centers—cited “uncertainty over data center development.”

The newsletter continues and expands on these points. And it’s mainly about non-AI startups. But as it notes in the lede, these issues are all issues for the AI sector, particularly Anthropic which is expected to be the first to do an IPO. It comes after other reports, like this one I flagged in The Information a couple days ago, suggesting that the big hyperscalers are grappling with soft demand.

It’s very hard to know when unsustainable spending, unmeetable profit predictions will catch up with the equities markets. It’s one of those things that doesn’t happen until it does. And the Trump-era stock market, with things like memestocks and much else, often drives money into knowingly absurd things. So sometimes Wile E. Coyote just kinda floats in the air forever. But the U.S. economy was never dependent on Gamestop’s valuation. And it’s hard to see how at least some air won’t start coming out of the balloon at some not-too-far-off point when you see the situation boiled down to simple math in the publications key decision makers, both on Wall Street and in DC, read.

Daring Fireball

Gurman Reports Apple Is Launching New ‘Smart Home’ Products on October 13

John Gruber
Updated

Mark Gurman, reporting for Bloomberg (gift link):

Apple Inc. plans to make its long-delayed push into the smart-home market on Oct. 13, marking a critical product expansion for the company under new Chief Executive Officer John Ternus. At the center of the strategy is a smart-home hub code-named J490, according to people familiar with the matter. Apple also plans to announce the first update to the HomePod mini since that device’s 2020 debut and its first new TV set-top box since 2022. [...]

The home hub will take the form of a roughly 6-inch square display, with versions that can be mounted on a wall or placed on a countertop, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because the products haven’t been announced. [...]

Because the device is intended to remain stationary, it has a single FaceTime camera on the front and no rear camera. The product has microphones and speakers in its connected base. The hub is about as thick as an iPhone, and its display is surrounded by a quarter-inch, black bezel reminiscent of older iPads. It has rounded corners and no sharp edges. The device lacks a battery, so it has to be plugged in at all times, and there are no volume or power buttons.

The product comes in Apple’s standard gray aluminum finish and includes a USB-C port for power. The screen sits above a metal, round base with multiple rings of perforated speaker holes and connects to it through a polished metal arm. Users can manually tilt the display forward or backward. And the base has a rubberized bottom to help it stay on a table.

If you think that sounds like the beloved but short-lived “sunflower” iMac G4 from 2002, that’s exactly what Gurman says it resembles. As is so often the case, Gurman seems to know many details about the device, but yet doesn’t know its name, or price. Presumably the speakers are good enough to serve by themselves, but how good are they? Can they be paired with HomePods to create stereo pairs?

The hub’s defining feature will be its ability to serve multiple members of a household. It is designed to recognize who is speaking to it or approaching it, and then display personalized content and provide answers based on that person’s data and accounts. When a user walks up, for example, the device will show that person’s contacts, messages, calendar appointments, notes and preferred app layout. The interface can then change automatically when another recognized household member approaches. It will also have a mode for visitors that hides personal information.

The device identifies users by their voices or through a facial-recognition system, though the latter is less reliable than Face ID on the iPhone. Users can require secondary authentication through an iPhone if they don’t want to rely solely on voice or facial recognition. The iPhone also serves as a fallback when the hub cannot identify someone correctly.

Given that Apple Watch is used as an identifier to unlock your Mac (and, says Apple, iPhone Duo), it would make sense if that worked with this device too.

 ★ 
Daring Fireball

Anthropic’s IPO Prospectus Is a Fucking Doozy

John Gruber
Updated

Echo Wang, reporting for Reuters yesterday:

Anthropic is making a massive bet that AI will transform the global economy more profoundly than ​industrialization, electricity and the internet, according to its IPO prospectus seen by Reuters.

This is a strong clear lede, but even so it falls short of expressing the true magnitude of what Anthropic represents. To wit, not that “AI” as a field will prove more profoundly transformational than industrialization, electricity, and the Internet, but that Anthropic alone will. This is not an IPO that makes sense if you consider Anthropic one among peers, even a short list placing them alongside just (say) OpenAI, Google, and Meta. It only makes sense if you believe Anthropic is on the cusp of winning a race to create a godlike super intelligence, and that first godlike super intelligence will take over the world.

You know, something exactly akin to the “rapture” events that religious cultists believe are coming.

But the cost to get there will be staggering. Anthropic reported a net loss of $42 billion in 2025, and plans to spend $518 billion on cloud, computing and infrastructure obligations in coming years, according to the prospectus.

If you believe that they’re profitable now you’re as crazy as they are. They’ll seed stories to the press that they’re now profitable, using accounting methods they won’t define (and wouldn’t pass muster for a public company) but won’t make such claims in writing.

The prospectus details how the company has grown sharply in the last year — while also posting wider losses. Revenue grew 12-fold in 2025 to nearly $4.6 billion, even as the company lost more than $8 billion on an operating basis, excluding writedowns of various liabilities mostly tied to previous fundraising, according to the documents, reported here for the first time. [...]

Anthropic said nearly a quarter of its revenue came from two customers last year, and as part of its risk factors, warned that many of its largest clients were not locked into long-term contracts and could cut or stop spending.

I don’t think this is complicated. Their revenue is accelerating rapidly because they’re selling compute at a loss. They spent $13 billion to make $5 billion last year. Their revenue is growing rapidly, yes, but their costs are growing even faster. They’re already on the hook for half a trillion dollars on cloud computing expansion but their revenue is precariously reliant on a few big-spending whales who aren’t under contract, and commodity open source models are rapidly closing the gap. If Anthropic is losing a fortune now with $13 billion in costs how are they going to break even spending $100+ billion per year? Don’t worry, their godlike AI will figure that out?

Gary Marcus:

Anthropic’s proposed valuation is easily calculated, as -50 times 2025 losses.

The more they lose, the more they win!

 ★ 
Marginal Revolution

Merging LLMs and economics research

Tyler Cowen
Updated

We introduce an open-source workflow that enables an LLM to reproduce, improve, and extend an economics article using the article’s published replication package. First, the workflow attempts to reproduce the original calculations, checks for discrepancies with published findings, and performs automated sensitivity analysis. Across 4,452 published replication packages for five economics journals, the workflow flags discrepancies in 3,460 articles or their appendices. Second, the workflow improves the original calculations by using a different implementation or algorithm. In 496 articles, the workflow is able to reduce a calculation’s computation time, at similar or greater accuracy, by more than a factor of 10. Third, the workflow extends the original analysis. In 923 articles, the workflow develops an extension that does not appear in the original article and that is aligned with the original article’s goals and assumptions.

That is from a new paper by Matthew Schwartz, Isaiah Andrews & Jesse M. Shapiro.  At some point, in some cases, the paper will just fade into the backround…

The post Merging LLMs and economics research appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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The MIT Tech
California
Boston Red Sox – MLB Trade Rumors
The Honest Broker

17 Observations on Chivalry

Ted Gioia
Updated

I try to avoid hot takes. My takes are served cold.

Writers who fall in love with hot provocation, soon fall into the trap of saying stupid things just to stir the pot. They get clicks in the short term, but nobody trusts them over the long haul.

So I have a litmus test. Before I offer an opinion, I pressure test it. Is it sensible? Is it persuasive? Will it have a positive impact?

I advise other writers to do the same. But these quibbles come at a cost. Editors do not want measured, reasonable opinion pieces. Common sense never goes viral. Cold takes are like cold cuts—you lay ‘em out as nicely as you can, but everybody still rushes off to the hot buffet.

But sometimes viewpoints I embrace as cold, plain sense strike others as sizzling hot. I suspect that might be the case with today’s musings on chivalry.

Even so, chivalry itself teaches me to jump in—because it’s built on proper behavior, not pleasing the crowd. So without further ado, here are 17 icy cold observations on chivalry.

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17 Observations on Chivalry

1.

Rousseau once claimed that men are better able to survive without women, than the other way around. But biology teaches the opposite lesson.

The optimal ratio to propagate the human species is twenty women for every man, if not more. That’s because—let me put this in genteel words—the egg is more scarce than the seed.

So a degree of chivalry is built into human evolution. For the good of the species, men need to protect women more than women need to protect men.

2.

Men feel this instinctively. That’s why 74% of the women on the Titanic survived, but only 19% of the men. The men weren’t thinking of manners and politeness when they stood back and encouraged women to take seats in the lifeboats.

Something more powerful than etiquette intervened—a biological imperative hardwired into their DNA.

The sinking of the Titanic, depicted by Willy Stöwer (1912)

3.

This male evolutionary impulse to chivalry was demonstrated in the starkest manner on July 20, 2012.

That was the day a deranged man, who claimed he was the Joker, entered a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado during the showing of a Batman film. He was armed with multiple weapons, and over the course of a few minutes, fired 76 bullets from three different guns.

Seventy people were injured, and twelve killed. Several of the victims were men who died because they instinctively put their own bodies in the line of fire to protect the woman seated next to them. This was not a wife or a mother or a daughter—just their date for the evening.

I doubt any of these men had ever given the slightest thought to what they would do in a situation like this. Nobody goes to the movies expecting gunfire and a life-or-death decision. But these guys didn’t need to consult a preconceived plan—they reacted immediately, and protected their companion.

Attitudes about gender roles had changed a lot since the time of the Titanic. But this instinctive chivalry had not—it came from a place much deeper than social norms and community standards.

Yes, chivalry still exists today, but primarily at this hidden level. Most of us live in stable, non-violent places where we don’t need to consult the rules of chivalry as part of a species survival plan. So we are free to dismiss their relevance, or even laugh at them.

But it wouldn’t take much for these instincts to flare up again.

My reasonable expectations after doing the dishes without being asked.

4.

A big brouhaha erupted on social media recently—because a man refused to help a woman put a heavy suitcase in the overhead compartment of a plane.

Source

He was a jerk. But some men rushed to his defense. I’m not into public shaming, so I’m omitting the names here. But, frankly, this is sad stuff. Check out some of the responses.

Read more

Eric Berger - Ars Technica

So what's happening with Russia's new, long-delayed crewed spacecraft?

Eric Berger
Updated

In what seems like an alternate universe in hindsight, Russia and the European Space Agency began discussing collaboration on next-generation crewed spacecraft two decades ago. Under the agreement, Europe would have provided a service module to power a crew capsule carrying up to six passengers.

Europe ultimately decided not to pursue a crewed spacecraft project at the time, and Russia's state-backed space corporation, Roscosmos, chose to move ahead with a crewed spacecraft on its own. This project—always seemingly more of a Potemkin village than an effort encompassing real hardware—has gone under various guises over the years:

  • PPTS (Perspektivnaya Pilotiruemaya Transportnaya Sistema / Prospective Piloted Transport System): The initial conceptual project name used in 2009
  • PTK NP (Pilotiruyemy Transportny Korabl Novogo Pokoleniya / New Generation Piloted Transport Ship): The official technical designation used until 2016
  • Federatsiya (Federation): The official name chosen following a public contest and announced in January 2016
  • Orel / Oryol (Eagle): A new name adopted in September 2019 when Roscosmos was under the control of Dmitry Rogozin

Actual hardware tests, maybe?

Beyond the name changes and a flood of renderings, after nearly 20 years of work, then, is anything actually happening with the Eagle spacecraft?

Read full article

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Spaceflight Now

Live coverage: NASA, SpaceX to launch next crewed mission to the International Space Station

Will Robinson-Smith
Updated
SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft, named Grace, sits atop a Falcon 9 rocket at Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. It will launch NASA’s SpaceX Crew-13 mission to the International Space Station. Image: Michael Cain/Spaceflight Now

SpaceX and NASA are preparing to send the next crew of four to the International Space Station as soon as Thursday morning, weather permitting.

The mission, NASA’s SpaceX Crew-13, is led by NASA astronaut Jessica Watkins, who will become the first agency astronaut to fly twice onboard a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft.

She along with NASA Astronaut Luke Delaney, Canadian Space Agency (CSA) astronaut Joshua Kutryk, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Sergey Teteryatnikov, will fly onboard Dragon Grace to the ISS for a six-month expedition.

Liftoff of the Falcon 9 rocket from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station is scheduled for 11:10 a.m. EDT (1510 UTC). The rocket will fly on a north-easterly trajectory upon leaving the pad. Docking is scheduled to occur about eight hours after launch, the shortest transit time ever for a Dragon spacecraft.

Spaceflight Now will have live coverage about four hours prior to liftoff.

The 45th Weather Squadron forecast a 55 percent chance for acceptable weather at launch. Meteorologists are watching for the potential interference from clouds and rain at the pad.

“Over the next 24 hours, a weak low-level disturbance sliding along the south side of the high into the Gulf will bring breezy onshore flow that will continue into the primary launch window late Thursday morning,” launch weather officers wrote on Wednesday.

“Models still suggest the continued threat for onshore moving Atlantic showers along the coast, with the exact timing and locations of this activity the main forecast challenge.”

SpaceX will launch the mission using the Falcon 9 first stage booster with the tail number B1101. This will be its third flight after previously launching 29 Starlink V2 Mini satellites on the Starlink 6-88 mission and Dragon Freedom on NASA’s SpaceX Crew-12.

Less than eight minutes after liftoff, B1101 will return to Cape Canaveral and target a touchdown at Landing Zone 40 (LZ-40). If all goes well, this will be the seventh landing at LZ-40 and the 664th Falcon booster landing to date.

SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft, named Grace, sits atop a Falcon 9 rocket at Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. It will launch NASA’s SpaceX Crew-13 mission to the International Space Station. Image: Michael Cain/Spaceflight Now

Who’s onboard?

The Crew-13 mission is the second trip to space for Commander Jessica Watkins who previously served as a mission specialist on the Crew-4 mission, which flew in 2022.

Watkins, a geologist and avid athlete, spent her time in between missions working as a branch chief within the Astronaut Office and later, did some work in support of the crewed rovers and spacesuits needed for future Moon-bound missions within the Artemis Program.

“I certainly would ideally like to be a servant leader. I think that is something that I have learned through my experiences, but also my interactions with leaders that I look up to and that I want to emulate,” Watkins said. “And that has come in the form of coaches, of mentors, of teachers, and of my crewmates and classmates as well here at NASA.”

The four members of NASA’s SpaceX Crew-13 mission arrived onboard T-38 jets at the Kennedy Space Center on Saturday, Sept. 26, 2026. Left to right: Canadian Space Agency astronaut Joshua Kutryk, Roscomos cosmonaut Sergey Teteryatnikov, NASA astronaut Jessica Watkins, and NASA astronaut Luke Delaney. Image: John Pisani/Spaceflight Now

At her side in the pilot’s seat is a former test pilot Luke Delaney. Before being selected as a member of the 2021 astronaut class, he worked as a research pilot and aerospace engineer at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Virginia.

Delaney grew up in Central Florida and said watching the space shuttle launches was a big inspiration for him and helped influence his life’s trajectory.

“Growing up watching shuttle launches, they weren’t quite as frequent back then, so it was a pretty big deal if you’re able to catch a space shuttle launch. And they definitely played a part in driving me towards both engineering background a little bit, plus aviation and those kind of things,” Delaney said.

“I think it’s just when you’re little and you see something like that and you’re trying to reconcile that there’s humans on that vehicle and they’re going to go live in space for a little bit and come back, that’s just a huge motivation, inspiration, however you want to put it. So for me, yeah, that was a big pinnacle aspect of going down that track for an astronaut.”

NASA astronaut Luke Delaney, pilot of NASA’s SpaceX Crew-13 mission, talks to members of the press after arriving at the Kennedy Space Center on Sept. 26, 2026. Image: John Pisani/Spaceflight Now

Another member of the crew who dreamed of becoming an astronaut ever since childhood is one of the two mission specialists, Joshua Kutryk. He becomes the second Canadian to fly to space in 2026 after Jeremy Hansen flew with the Artemis 2 crew.

The last Canadian who served onboard the space station was David Saint-Jacques who launched in December 2018 and returned to earth in June 2019.

Kutryk, who was selected by CSA to train as an astronaut in 2017, was previously assigned to the Boeing Starliner-1 mission, but that flight was altered to a cargo-only mission following the significant issues that arose throughout the Starliner Crew Flight Test mission.

“Excited because it’s been a long time, dreamt about my whole life. Been training for it for a lot of years, a lot of years, and you know about the Starliner history because we talked about it last time,” Kutryk told Spaceflight Now this summer. “So for all those reasons, really excited to have it this close. And then also, I think we all, all four of us would say this, we feel proud to be representing our nations, our agencies to be trusted and given the opportunity to do this.”

The other mission specialist is Russian cosmonaut Sergey Teteryatnikov. He was selected for cosmonaut training by Roscosmos in 2021 and became a test cosmonaut two years later. 

He said it was a chance meeting that put him on the path that will soon take him to space.

“In the course of my career, at some point, I had a meeting with a cosmonaut, those are regularly held. And I was told that actually there is an open contest, and one can try to become a cosmonaut, which I did when I was 30 years old,” Teteryatnikov said through the aid of a translator. “And that’s how it all started, and I started my cosmonaut training in 2021.”

The crew will join the other members of Expedition 75 on the space station. After a handover period of a few days, the members of the SpaceX Crew-12 mission will board Dragon Freedom to head back home.

The four members of NASA’s SpaceX Crew-13 mission arrived onboard T-38 jets at the Kennedy Space Center on Saturday, Sept. 26, 2026. Left to right: Roscomos cosmonaut Sergey Teteryatnikov, NASA astronaut Luke Delaney, NASA astronaut Jessica Watkins, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Joshua Kutryk. Image: Adam Bernstein/Spaceflight Now
The Diary of Samuel Pepys

Wednesday 30 September 1663

Samuel Pepys
Updated

Rose very well, and my hearing pretty well again, and so to my office, by and by Mr. Holliard come, and at my house he searched my ear, and I hope all will be well, though I do not yet hear so well as I used to do with my right ear.

So to my office till noon, and then home to dinner, and in the afternoon by water to White Hall, to the Tangier Committee; where my Lord Tiviott about his accounts; which grieves me to see that his accounts being to be examined by us, there are none of the great men at the Board that in compliment will except against any thing in his accounts, and so none of the little persons dare do it: so the King is abused.

Thence home again by water with Sir W. Rider, and so to my office, and there I sat late making up my month’s accounts, and, blessed be God, do find myself 760l. creditor, notwithstanding that for clothes for myself and wife, and layings out on her closett, I have spent this month 47l.. So home, where I found our new cooke-mayde Elizabeth, whom my wife never saw at all, nor I but once at a distance before, but recommended well by Mr. Creed, and I hope will prove well. So to supper, prayers, and bed.

This evening Mr. Coventry is come to St. James’s, but I did not go see him, and tomorrow the King, Queen, Duke and his Lady, and the whole Court comes to towne from their progresse. Myself and family well, only my father sicke in the country.

All the common talke for newes is the Turke’s advance in Hungary, &c.

Read the annotations

National Hurricane Center Graphical Tropical Weather Outlooks

Central Pacific Tropical Weather Outlook

nhcwebmaster@noaa.gov (NHC Webmaster)
Updated

Central North Pacific 2-Day Graphical Outlook Image
Central North Pacific 7-Day Graphical Outlook Image


363
ACPN50 PHFO 010501
TWOCP

Tropical Weather Outlook
NWS Central Pacific Hurricane Center Honolulu HI
Issued by NWS National Hurricane Center Miami FL
800 PM HST Wed Sep 30 2026

For the central North Pacific...between 140W and 180W:

Active Systems:
The National Hurricane Center is issuing advisories on Tropical
Storm Nolo, located several hundred miles west of Lihue, Hawaii, on
Hurricane Rachel, located within a couple of hundred miles southwest
of Cabo Corrientes, Mexico, and on Tropical Depression Nineteen-E,
located well west-southwest of the Baja California Peninsula.

Tropical cyclone formation is not expected during the next 7 days.

$$
Forecaster Gibbs
NNNN


City Observatory

What Global Rankings Say About Successful Cities and Portland’s Performance

Joe Cortright
Updated

Oxford Economics, a UK-based consulting firm, has prepared its annual ranking of the 1,000 cities worldwide in its Global Cities Index.  The report is clear about what matters to urban economic success, what doesn’t matter and provides an independent view of how US cities, including Portland are doing.  In short:

Education and quality of life are the critical factors determining urban economic success, according to Oxford Economics.  

What plainly doesn’t matter much, is just a clear:  neither tax levels, incentives, nor “business climate” figure into whether cities do well or don’t.   Taxes are mentioned just seven times in the 155-page report, and then only in passing.

The data show Portland is very strong in quality of life:  ranking 8th among the 50 largest US cities included in the Index.  Portland also ranks above average for these US cities in human capital and economic strength.

The global perspective provided by this report casts serious doubt on claims made that Portland is somehow stuck in a “doom loop” and that somehow our economy will be improved by cutting taxes for the wealthy and big businesses.  Instead, maintaining Oregon’s quality of life, and investing in education are the real keys to long term prosperity.

 

Some in the local business community have been engaged in a campaign of bad-mouthing Portland as a place to live and do business, which especially coming from the local chamber of commerce, is foot-shooting on an epic scale.  They’ve dwelled on a few short-term economic results–mostly due to two bad years by the region’s two biggest employers (Intel and Nike) and not, as the chamber imagines, a public policy doom loop.

That’s clear when you hear from someone who doesn’t have an axe to grind with local politicians, and takes a much wider perspective on urban success, and who relies on a range of objective data.  In this case, we turn to Oxford Economics, which has taken the broadest perspective imaginable–ranking the top thousand cities in the world.  Oxford Economics bills itself as “the world’s leading independent economic advisory firm” which analyzes  over 200 countries, 100 industrial sectors, and 8,000 cities and regions.

What matters to urban success?  Human Capital and Quality of Life

Rankings, of course, are a dime a dozen on the Internet, so it helps to understand what is under the hood in Oxford Economics’ Index.  According to the report’s methodology section, Oxford Economics analyzed data on a range of key  metrics, measuring economic success by looking at GDP growth, GDP per capita, employment growth, economic stability and economic diversity. They also show the relationship between the measures they use and urban economic success.  Two factors stand out in Oxford Economic’s analysis:  human capital and quality of life.

The Oxford report makes it clear that education and quality of life are the critical factors in determining economic success.

Cities with strong human capital are well placed to capture growth opportunities Economic growth and opportunity exist within a virtuous cycle, with those at the top of our rankings typifying this self-reinforcing dynamic. For example, moving up the value chain attracts and retains skilled workers for the higher productivity, higher-wage sectors. Alongside this, strong industries incentivise higher levels of educational and skills attainment, as returns to upskilling labour are higher. The end result is an increase in the stock of human capital, which further incentivises investment, accelerating economic growth further still.

The report emphasizes the very strong correlation between human capital (largely reflecting educational attainment of the local population), and measured economic prosperity.

This chart mirrors almost exactly the relationship that we’ve previously plotted for the relationship between per capita income and adult educational attainment for US states.

Oxford Economics also emphasizes the critical role of quality of life as a driver of economic prosperity.  Quality of life is economically valuable in its own right–residents derive value from living in a place with a high level of environmental quality, amenities and public services.  But quality of life also triggers a virtuous circle by attracting and retaining the human capital that drive economic growth.  As Oxford Economics writes.

Quality of Life:   Quality of life is a key driver of economic outcomes The virtuous cycle of growth drives, and is driven, by quality-of-life improvements. This is because economic growth, particularly productivity-driven economic growth, unlocks increases in living standards.

The Oxford Economics message to cities is clear:  if you want a successful economy, build human capital and create and maintain a great quality of life.

What doesn’t matter:  Taxes, Incentives and “Business Climate”

Perhaps even more interesting is what isn’t in the Oxford analysis:  Unlike the local chamber of commerce, which is obsessed about taxes, incentives and business friendliness, essentially none of these things figure into the Oxford Economics report.  Tax levels, incentives, and business climate aren’t factors in the city rankings, and hardly rate a mention in the report’s conclusions and recommendations. What matters to city success is human capital, quality of life and strong education, exactly what City Observatory has pointed out.

In the 155-page report, taxes are mentioned just seven times, and incentives just three times, typically only as footnotes to descriptions in city profiles, not as primary or even secondary ranking factors.  The term “business climate” does not appear anywhere in the report.  And the report makes it clear, especially in the US context, that quality of life and the environment are relatively more important factors.  Taxes just don’t matter.  In their analysis of Dallas, Texas, (the sole mention of tax levels in a US city) Oxford Economics concludes:

. . . the lack of a Texas state income tax . . .  alone is not enough to overcome Dallas’ other liveability challenges. Of the categories in our index, Dallas’s lowest performance is in the Environment rankings. Expansive urban sprawl, along with limited public transit infrastructure, results in a heavy reliance on private vehicles. This contributes to high levels of traffic and poorer air quality compared with most cities in the US . . . (Page 73)

In short, the Oxford Economics index is powerful evidence that cities need to focus on human capital and quality of life, and ignore self-serving claims that cutting taxes or improving the “business climate” will do anything to improve prosperity.

Where Portland Ranks

 

We used Oxford Economics’s Global Cities Index data to rank the 50 most populous US metros, those with a million or more population.  In general, large high tech and financial centers perform the best according to Oxford.  New York is #1, followed by Seattle, San Francisco, Boston, and San Jose.

Portland is above average among these large US metro areas.  Overall, Portland ranks 18th of the 50 top US metro areas.

Portland is top ten for quality of life, ranking 8th among US cities.  Portland also ranks #31 globally (of 1,000 cities) for environment.   It is in the middle of the pack nationally for human capital (25th) and economics (22nd).  Portland’s peers in the 15-20 spots include Austin, Chicago, Miami, Philadelphia and Salt Lake City.

While some may be jealous of Seattle’s #2 ranking nationally, the Oxford Economics rankings of Portland on these measures don’t signal a regional economy that is somehow stuck in a doom loop.

 

Oxford Economics Rankings of large US cities

US Overall Rank City Global Overall Rank Economics US Rank Human Capital US Rank Quality of Life US Rank
1 New York 1 1 1 5
2 Seattle 4 4 8 2
3 San Francisco 5 5 7 4
4 Boston 7 8 2 3
5 San Jose 8 3 27 1
6 Los Angeles 12 2 11 11
7 Washington, DC 14 7 3 7
8 Dallas 17 6 5 29
9 Houston 28 9 4 43
10 Atlanta 31 10 6 40
11 Denver 32 15 9 9
12 Minneapolis 33 17 10 6
13 San Diego 37 18 19 12
14 Phoenix 41 14 13 24
15 Austin 46 16 12 18
16 Chicago 47 11 14 16
17 Miami 52 12 15 44
18 Portland 53 22 25 8
19 Philadelphia 56 13 17 28
20 Salt Lake City 59 20 24 13
21 Nashville 66 19 20 42
22 Charlotte 73 27 16 30
23 Baltimore 79 24 23 26
24 Orlando 81 23 21 45
25 Columbus 82 25 18 34
26 Raleigh 85 33 22 20
27 Las Vegas 89 31 31 35
28 Tampa 92 26 30 37
29 Riverside 94 21 35 38
30 Indianapolis 102 28 29 39
31 Richmond 107 34 28 32
32 Sacramento 109 32 41 23
33 Kansas City 113 36 36 21
34 San Antonio 114 29 26 47
35 Cincinnati 117 35 37 17
36 Honolulu 124 40 50 14
37 Grand Rapids 129 38 38 19
38 St. Louis 131 30 43 25
39 Jacksonville 134 37 34 49
40 Providence 147 49 33 15
41 Oklahoma City 170 42 32 46
42 Detroit 175 43 42 31
43 Virginia Beach 176 41 45 33
44 Louisville 177 39 39 48
45 Pittsburgh 197 47 44 22
46 Milwaukee 210 44 46 27
47 Hartford 220 50 48 10
48 Cleveland 224 46 47 36
49 Tulsa 227 48 40 41
50 Fresno 230 45 49 50

Notes:  Data shown are ranks of the 50 largest US metro areas on the Oxford Global Cities Index.  Global ranks of each city are italicized.  Oxford refers interchangeably to “cities” and “metro areas;” Oxford data are generally drawn from metropolitan area boundaries.

 

 

 

 

 

 

City Observatory

How ODOT covers up cost overruns

Joe Cortright
Updated

The Oregon Department of Transportation is in financial crisis, and is routinely hiding the major cause of its fiscal problems:  the exploding cost of major highway expansion projects.

ODOT’s management systematically hides data showing the nature and extent of cost overruns.

  • ODOT’s Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) misleadingly claim that 86 percent of projects are completed under budget.
  • ODOT is careful to define overruns only as costs after contracts are awarded:  this conceals ODOT staff’s consistent pattern of low-balling initial cost estimates to get  projects approved.
  • ODOT also has a practice of “re-baselining” a project—retroactively altering the initial cost estimate to conceal cost increases.
  • ODOT’s project database omits every large project that has experienced a cost overrun.  The agency’s Transportation Project Tracker dashboard lists only seven  tiny projects as having experienced cost overruns accounting for a cumulative $6 million cost. 

Over the past three decades, fourteen major ODOT projects have increased in cost by a total of more than $16 billion from their initial estimates, something you would never know from ODOT’s key performance measures or reporting.  The ODOT KPI and project tracker understates the scale of the cost overrun problem by a factor of more than 1,000.

Oregon’s leaders are wrestling with a serious transportation financial crisis.  You can’t solve a problem unless you understand the nature and causes of the problem.  ODOT, as an agency, is in deep denial about the existence and extent of cost overruns on major projects.

A misleading, incomplete “Projects on Budget” performance indicator

OregonDOT has several “key performance indicators” (KPI) that it tracks to demonstrate to policymakers and the public that it is well managed.  One KPI purports to measure whether project’s are “on budget.” ODOT claims in its latest report that “86 percent of construction projects are on budget,” down from 97 percent a decade ago.

 

This is a misleading statistic in many ways, chiefly because it weights all projects the same, whether they are for $10,000 or $100 million.  The fact that many small contracts are completed with less than a 10 percent overage is largely irrelevant if the agency routinely experiences a 200 percent increases on $100 million contracts–which is the case.  But the problems go much deeper than this:  ODOT’s definition of cost overruns excludes agency estimating errors, and allows the agency to retroactively change the “baseline” to hide overruns.  It’s also apparent that ODOT databases actually simply leave out any data on many of the projects with multi-hundred million dollar cost overruns.

A definition that excludes ODOT’s estimating errors

ODOT has a very particular definition of what counts as a cost overrun.  They define overruns as expenditures more than 110 percent of the “baselined construction budget.”

A project is considered “on-budget” if total construction expenses are less than or equal to 110% of the baselined construction budget.

It is important to note that the “baselined construction budget” is very different from the ODOT prepared cost estimates used in planning and approving projects.  It appears that the  baselined budget is the net construction authorization set at contract award.  Thus, ODOT only counts cost overruns occurring after it has issued a contract to actually build a project.  What this misses is that ODOT typically spends years before contract issuance designing and seeking approval and funding for a project.  ODOT completely controls these estimates, but their KPI excludes any increased costs that occur during that process, concealing the early “low-ball” estimates used to sell projects to the Legislature and the public.  In short, ODOT’s KPI is constructed to exclude ODOT errors in project planning.

In addition, ODOT permits itself to change the  baseline construction budget—”re-baselining”—after a project has started construction.  This practice allows ODOT staff to retroactively change the base budget for the project, allowing it to claim that the cost of the project hasn’t increased, and hiding cost overruns.

ODOT’s current largest construction project the I-205 Abernathy Bridge shows how deceptive this KPI is.  First, when it was approved for construction in 2018, ODOT estimated the project would cost $248 million.  When bids were opened in 2022, the project cost doubled to $495 million–an increase that isn’t covered by  the KPI measure (which hides ODOT’s initial low-ball estimate).  But since then, the cost of the project has grown:  first to $622 million in 2023, then to $750 million in 2024 and then to $815 million, and now, likely $885 million..  But because this is only one project, the half billion dollar increase in spending doesn’t affect the KPI; the fact that ODOT has brought a bunch of tiny repaving, or curb cut projects in under budget drives this performance measure.

A database out Mega-project cost overruns

Legislation passed in 2017 (Chapter 50, Oregon Laws, 2017, Section 12) requires the Oregon Department of Transportation to maintain a web-accessible database that presents  a project’s original budget and schedule, as well as, whether project’s are completed on time and withing budget.   ODOT has a website, called the Transportation Project Tracker, that is supposed to comply with this law.  ODOT claims:

The interactive Transportation Project Tracker shows how and where Oregon’s state and federal transportation funds are spent by local, state and federal agencies.  .  .  . The Transportation Project Tracker shows the best available budget information, including project cost (the project’s cost at completion), estimated cost and amount spent-to-date. . . . We refresh the budget information shown in the Transportation Project Tracker daily to include the most recent data available.

The website includes a database of several hundred projects with details about location, completion, budgets and actual costs.  The tracker includes performance indicators for each project, and allows you search for projects based on whether they are “on budget” or “over budget.”  We recently queried the tracker to identify “over budget” projects.  The result of that query is shown below:

Downloaded September 28, 2026

.

According to the tracker, just seven projects, with an average estimated cost of about $7-$8 million experienced cost overruns averaging about 12 percent.   Six of the seven projects are part of ODOT’s effort to comply with court rulings that it failed to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in constructing state highways.  Collectively, the seven projects experienced a cost overrun of about $6 million.

 

Project Original Cost Completed Cost Increase Pct. Chg.
Baker City  ADA Ramps        14,606,954        16,220,225        1,613,271 11%
Morrow Umatilla  ADA Ramps        12,121,289        13,501,415        1,380,126 11%
Grant County ADA Ramps          7,666,921          8,313,015           646,094 8%
Ashland 99  ADA Ramps          6,768,197          7,630,259           862,062 13%
Reedsport  ADA Ramps          5,558,277          6,436,143           877,866 16%
Sandy  ADA Ramps          2,628,207          2,976,971           348,764 13%
Bridal Veil US 30 Bridge          1,548,485          1,797,325           248,840 16%
Total        50,898,330        56,875,353        5,977,023 12%

What’s Left Out:  Billions in Cost increases in ODOT’s Reign of Error

The ODOT project tracker is a profoundly misleading picture of cost overruns.  There is no mention of any of the mega-projects with cost overruns, including, conspicuously, the I-205 Abernathy Bridge which has ballooned from $248 million to $885 million.  Again:  ODOT claims this website provides “the best available information” and is refreshed “daily.”  If your only information comes from ODOT’s KPI’s and Project Tracker, you think that nearly 90 percent of projects are under budget, and only a handful of very small projects have experienced even a 10 percent increase in cost.

A quarter century of large project cost overruns.  City Observatory has compiled a list of fourteen major ODOT projects which have exceeded their original estimated cost over the past three decades.  As this list shows, ODOT’s final completed cost of a project is often double or triple the cost estimated by the agency at the time the project was approved.  This problem has continued and grown steadily worse in recent years.  And Oregon’s experience is extreme.  Two current projects, the Interstate Bridge Project and the I-5 Rose Quarter freeway widening project are, respectively, the first and third most expensive highway projects, per mile, in the nation.  (All dollar amounts are in millions; data taken from ODOT documents, CAGR is “compound annual growth rate).  Collectively, these 14 project have increased in cost by more than $16 billion since their initial estimates were published.

 

Public officials are mulling how to solve ODOT’s financial problems–the Governor has appointed a Vision Task Force, the legislature has empaneled a Joint Committee on Transportation Oversight, and the Secretary of State is auditing ODOT.  If any of these groups are to make serious progress toward solving ODOT’s problem, they need to have a clear and accurate picture of the causes of ODOT’s financial problems and their extent.  Unfortunately, the reports provided by ODOT only aim to conceal the size and nature of this problem. There’s precious little evidence that ODOT has even fully acknowledged the scale and persistence of this problem, much less instituted any changes that will rein in costs.

 

 

 

 

 

California
the joy of sox

ALWC 2: Yankees 9, Red Sox 2

allan
Updated
Screenshot 2026 09 30 224739

Red Sox - 000 001 100 - 2  4  1 
Yankees - 000 116 10x - 9 14  0 

What a shit show.

The Red Sox trailed by one run after Willson Contreras bopped a home run to right-center in the top of the sixth. It was the first time in these two ALWC games that a Boston runner's foot had touched third base – and home plate. It snapped both the longest scoreless streak to start a postseason series in franchise history (14.2 innings) and a streak of 26.2 postseason innings in which the Red Sox had not scored (which included the final 12 innings of last year's ALWC series).

So things were looking up . . . sort of. A glimmer of hope.

Then Boston manager Chad Tracy decided – for the most important four innings of the entire season, when it was imperative to keep the Yankees from scoring any more runs – to hand the ball to the biggest question mark in the bullpen – Garrett Crochet – a guy who had not pitched in an actual game in over five months. On the plus side, he'd be pitching on 157 days of rest.

And to no one's real surprise, everything unraveled. Crochet struck out Spencer Jones, but the ball got away from catcher Adley Rutschman, rolling off to the third base side of foul territory. His throw was just a little too late – the original call was out, but was overturned when the Yankees challenged. Jones then stole second and went to third when Rutschman's throw sailed wide of second and into center field. Crochet allowed singles to the next three batters (one was a bunt to third), before he was pulled.

Garret Whitlock came in with New York up 3-1, the bases loaded, and no one out. Whitlock got two outs, but both a fly to left and a grounder to third brought in single runs. It was 5-1. Tracy opted to walk Ben Rice (who was 1-for-3 with a single after his big Game 1) intentionally, a move which backfired horribly when Cody Bellinger hit a three-run dong to right-center. (Not that it mattered in the end. 5-1  would have been more than enough to dismiss the Red Sox.)

Nick Sogard homered in the seventh with two outs. The Yankees also scored in that frame on two walks, three stolen bases, and a single. Boston's season came to an meek and pathetic end when Caleb Durbin swing and missed the final pitch of the night, a 95-mph fastball down the middle.

Screenshot 2026 09 30 224723

ALDS: The Yankees will play the Rays. The White Sox swept the Astros 6-3, 7-3 and will play the Guardians. Both series start on Saturday.

NLDS: The Padres beat the Cubs 8-0, 4-1 and will face the Brewers on Saturday.  The Phillies and Atlanta are tied 1-1 (Atlanta won G1 5-3 before Phillies took G2 4-3 in 10 innings). Game 3 is Thursday night; the winner plays the Dodgers beginning on Sunday.

Jones, DH
Rutschman, C
Contreras, 1B
Abreu, RF
Rafaela, CF
Durbin, 3B
Sogard, 2B
Story, SS
Eaton, LF

Sonny Gray / Max Fried

Sonny Gray waived a no-trade clause last December, agreeing to a trade to the Red Sox, because

it feels good to me to go to a place now where it's easy to hate the Yankees. It's easy to go out and have that rivalry and go into it with full force, full steam ahead. I like the challenge.

Gray, 36, will meet his biggest challenge of the season tonight. He was the Red Sox's best starting pitcher in 2026, leading the staff with a 2.72 ERA (8th in MLB) and 150 ERA+ (tied for 10th in MLB). He also tied for the most wins (18), for whatever that's worth. More importantly, he pitched at least six innings in 22 of his 29 starts.

Gray also pitched for the Yankees in 2017 and 2018. He was traded to New York at the 2017 deadline and admits he "never wanted to go there in the first place" and the move was not good for his family.

Jacob Roy, Over The Monster, September 30, 2026:

Let's think about it in innings. The Red Sox used five relievers on Tuesday night . . . That leaves Ranger Suarez, Garrett Crochet, Garrett Whitlock, Aroldis Chapman, and Jake Bennett as the unused [bullpen] pitchers . . . 

Ranger Suarez is set to start game three. Garrett Crochet is a complete unknown. . . . Garrett Whitlock has been one of the best relievers in baseball, but his longest outing of the season is 1.1 innings. . . . Chapman, like Whitlock, has been fantastic, but hasn't got more than three outs in a game this season. If you put those three arms together and assign two innings to Crochet, that's four innings. . . . 

The offense was, at least in terms of scoring, the worst in baseball in September. Roman Anthony was lost in the middle of game one, and the rest of the lineup couldn't touch Schlittler. . . .

For the Red Sox to win today, they need Sonny Gray to turn in one of the best postseason performances of his career.

Roman Anthony was taken off the Red Sox roster and replaced with Curtis Mead. Manager Chad Tracy said:

He was sent back last night after leaving the game. Sent him back to Boston for extra, additional imaging, which actually revealed some new strains to different muscles in his wrist, in addition to exacerbating the old [finger] injury [a partially torn tendon in a joint that connects his right ring finger to his wrist back on May 4].

The roster change means that if the Red Sox win this series, Anthony would be forced to miss the ALDS. 

Max Ralph (mlb.com) reports:

[T]eams taking a 1-0 lead in a three-game Wild Card series have gone on to win the series 21 of 24 times (88%), including 17 two-game sweeps. Home teams have won all nine series in which they have gone ahead 1-0, including eight sweeps.
Slashdot
Hacker News
Boston Red Sox – MLB Trade Rumors
Mike the Mad Biologist

Links 9/30/26

mikethemadbiologist
Updated

Links for you. Science:

Scientists were wrong about this strange mammal for nearly 40 years
Why the Bronze Age collapsed
This battery is ready to eat
Fire, Smoke and Desperation After a Strike in the Heart of Kyiv. A Russian jet-powered drone hit Ukraine’s National Academy of Sciences, the source of almost all of the country’s major scientific discoveries.
‘Watch them die’: Bird flu is ravaging a Utah mink farm, killing 80% of the herd. State agriculture officials have no clear plan.
In an $80 Motel Room, a Discovery to Shed Light on the Origins of Life
Announcing Aster – a home for researchers on the open web (don’t know much about this)

Other:

Sex, AI, and the Apocalypse (absolute must-read)
What the ‘Taco Stand Karen’ fiasco says about right-wing Latinos
Why Democrats Should Stop Using the Phrase “Culture Wars”
Meta’s Latest AI Product Is A Terrifying And Hilarious Mess
Weapons, Oil, AI: Trump Made 1,156 Personal Financial Trades During July
Fox News is running its midterms migrant caravan playbook again
What’s the opposite of ‘very stable genius’?
A Deep Dive into the Last Ditch by an Expert on COVID and Western Massachusetts Lesbians
GLP-1 Needles Tossed in the Trash Are Injuring Sanitation Workers
The Untold Origins of Trump’s Plan to Sharply Restrict Mail-In Voting
Beshear on GOP attack ads on trans athletes: ‘We don’t throw anybody under the bus’
Violations
Trayon White’s bribery trial ended in a hung jury. What now?
Out Of Touch Kentucky Coastal Elites
RFK Jr.’s Push to Revamp American Food Runs Into White House Resistance
No Metro, Yes Problems: Can RFK’s transportation plan be saved?
Unsurprisingly, Meta’s new Muse AI agent blatantly ignores users permissions
The Rahm Bomb. He’s the single worst Democratic hopeful now (almost) running for president. Democratic midterm candidates be warned: stay away from him.
Congratulations, You’re a Trump Campaign Donor
Gone in 90 seconds: an ‘invisibilized’ ICE is arresting more people than ever
RFK Jr. Just Exposed a Fraudster — And It Is Him. He said he would end “corporate capture.” Now his MAHA movement is for sale.
What’s Gone Wrong For the GOP
Wheels Up: City Bus Speeds Hit Four-Year High Under Mayor Mamdani (does anyone think for a moment that a Mayor Andrew Cuomo would have done this?)
Republican Senator Makes Embarrassing Mistake While Accusing Jack Smith Of Crimes
The Man Who Would Inherit MAGA. JD Vance has spent years sucking up to the “five families” of the New Right. But does the vice president actually believe anything?
New Evidence Shows Just How Badly One Republican Senator Beclowned Himself in the Jack Smith Hearing
Advocacy Group Demands Congressional Pledges To Investigate Elon Musk’s DOGE
‘They’re not real pastors’: As clergy run as Democrats, Republicans question their faith
DOGE vs. Civic Tech
New Homes In DC Area Are Selling for 8% Less Per Square Foot Than Existing Homes, Per Report

Feed: All Latest
Letters from an American

A Scene before the Senate Judiciary Committee

Heather Cox Richardson
Updated

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Letters from an American

September 29, 2026

Heather Cox Richardson
Updated

The scene that unfolded today at a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee was a snapshot of politics in the U.S. today. Testifying under oath was Jack Smith, who as special counsel for the U.S. Department of Justice investigated Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and his retention of classified documents after he left office in 2021.

Questioning Smith were the senators, whose speech in Congress is protected. Article I, Section 6 of the U.S. Constitution states: “The Senators and Representatives…shall in all Cases, except Treason, Felony and Breach of the Peace, be privileged from Arrest during their Attendance at the Session of their respective Houses, and in going to and returning from the same; and for any Speech or Debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other Place.”

The courts have interpreted this clause to give lawmakers broad protection for what they say in Congress. Republicans have used this protection to make outrageous accusations and to spread disinformation. That practice was on display in spades today.

Former attorney general Merrick Garland appointed Smith special counsel on November 18, 2022, three days after Trump announced he was running for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. Garland said that since both Trump and Biden were likely to be presidential candidates, his appointment of Smith was meant to underscore “the Department’s commitment to both independence and accountability in particularly sensitive matters. It also allows prosecutors and agents to continue their work expeditiously, and to make decisions indisputably guided only by the facts and the law.”

Trump was not happy about the appointment, calling Smith “a hit man for Obama.”

In June 2023 a grand jury indicted Trump on 37 “felony violations of our national security laws” and “participating in a conspiracy to obstruct justice,” in his retention of classified documents. Charged alongside Trump was his aide Walt Nauta, who is now the director of Oval Office operations. In December, after Trump was reelected, Smith dropped Trump from the case because of the long-standing position of the Department of Justice that a sitting president cannot be prosecuted. Judge Aileen Cannon, the Trump appointee overseeing the case, has blocked the release of Smith’s report, although it is standard for a special counsel to release a final report.

It is the other case that was the focus of today’s Senate hearing.

On August 1, 2023, a federal grand jury in Washington, D.C., charged Trump with four felony offenses “arising from his efforts to unlawfully retain power by using fraud and deceit to overturn the 2020 election results,” as Smith’s final report put it. Trump challenged the indictment on the grounds that a president has absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions performed as part of his official duties and that his actions trying to overturn the election were part of his official duties.

On July 1, 2024, the Supreme Court largely agreed with Trump, upending the principle that the United States was a nation of laws, not of men. The Trump v. United States decision sent Smith back to the drawing board to take the case, now stripped of anything that could fall under “official duties,” before another grand jury, and that grand jury returned an indictment for the same offenses. But after Trump was reelected, Smith moved on November 25 to dismiss the case because of the long-standing position of the Department of Justice that a sitting president cannot be prosecuted.

The case can be resumed once Trump is no longer president.

It’s unclear why Senate Republicans thought it was a good idea to remind people of Trump’s attempt to overthrow an election when the midterms are less than forty days away. Some of them, though, clearly intended to appeal either to Trump or to the MAGA base by using their protected speech to insult and abuse Smith.

Senator Eric Schmitt (R-MO) launched a hit on Smith, setting up the idea he was part of a conspiracy with Fulton County, Georgia, district attorney Fani Willis and her colleague Nathan Wade to persecute Trump.

Schmitt asked Smith: “Did you go to an NBA game between the Golden State Warriors and the Atlanta Hawks on February 3, 2024?”

Smith looked confused at the sudden turn in the hearing and asked Schmitt to repeat the question. Once Schmitt did, and asked him if he had ever been to Atlanta during his time as special counsel, Smith answered: “I really don’t think so. It’s possible I flew through the Atlanta airport on the way to Florida, but I do not have a recollection of going to Atlanta. I definitely did not go to a Hawks game. I’m sure of that.”

“Did you ever meet Nathan Wade or Fani Willis in your time as special counsel,” Schmitt asked.

“No,” Smith answered.

Then Schmitt pounced: “What would you say if I had a series of text messages from your team that said you were in Atlanta at a Warrior/Hawks game on February 3, 2024, the day after Willis and Wade announced their affair?” A staffer briefly flashed a poster board. Then Schmitt said: “I don’t think you know that we have this stuff, so I’ll give you a second to process it so you don’t, you know, perjure yourself.”

Smith said: “You just took it down really quick. If I could look at that again?”

Schmitt answered: “We’ll put it in a file. You can respond. I think you’ve already perjured yourself.” He went on to call Smith a “villain” and a “dirtbag.”

Smith said: “[I]f this is the correct basketball game, I recall going to a University of Maryland basketball game where Caitlin Clark was playing right around that time…. You could check if that was the exact date. It was Maryland playing Iowa, I think, February of 2024.”

Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) figured it out. Schmitt was accusing Smith of being in Atlanta at an Atlanta Hawks game, where he could hypothetically have met up with Willis and Wade. In reality, he was in Maryland at a game in which Maryland played the University of Iowa: the Hawkeyes.

Klobuchar addressed Schmitt: “Could it then be that University of Iowa’s the Hawkeyes, could that be it, and maybe before we show this kind of thing…that might be the confusion over the names of the team but perhaps you should’ve looked at it more carefully….”

Schmitt exploded, accusing her of “trying to rehabilitate the witness.” And yet, newscasters who reviewed tapes of the games found Smith in the stands at the Maryland game.

“You had the teams wrong, sir,” Klobuchar told Schmitt.

Indeed, although Schmitt’s poster board featured a picture of Fani Willis and another of the Atlanta arena, the messages on it appeared to be between Smith’s deputy special counsel J.P. Cooney and another person, asking, “Is 109 Row 1 reserved for Jack?” Hunter Walker of Talking Points Memo notes that the Atlanta State Farm Arena uses letters to denote rows in section 109 rather than numbers. The University of Maryland arena uses numbers.

After the hearing, Schmitt appeared on The Charlie Kirk Show, where host Andrew Kolvet cheered Schmitt’s attack on Smith. “Jack Smith is a total dirtbag and you caught him out on this NBA game…in Atlanta,” Kolvet said. “It was a great moment. Good for you on that.”

So Schmitt got his right-wing media hit from a completely fabricated storyline. One newscaster noted: “When a witness lies under oath before Congress, he can face prison. When a senator gets it wrong, he says he was just ‘asking questions’.”

Smith, in contrast, stood firmly on facts and the rule of law. “I have been fortunate to serve a country that I love for nearly 30 years in local, national, and international settings,” he said in his opening statement. “My service has spanned both Republican and Democratic administrations. I am not a politician, and I have no partisan loyalties. My career has been dedicated to serving our country by upholding the rule of law and the core principles on which our country was founded.

“I believe that there is no role for politics in the proper administration of justice. A prosecutor’s decisions must be based on the facts and the law. The status, power, prominence, or political affiliation of the subject of an investigation must play no role in decisions to investigate, prosecute, or decline prosecution.”

As special counsel, Smith said, he and his office “took actions based on the facts and the law.” “Our investigation developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in criminal activity,” he said. “If asked whether to prosecute a former President based on the same facts today, I would do so regardless of whether that President was a Republican or a Democrat.”

“The charges against President Trump were the result of the evidence,” he said. “Grand juries in two separate districts reached this conclusion based on his actions…. Rather than accept his defeat in the 2020 presidential election, President Trump engaged in a criminal scheme to overturn the results and prevent the lawful transfer of power….

“And…President Trump stored classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago social club after he left office in January 2021 and he repeatedly tried to obstruct justice to conceal his continued retention of those documents. Highly sensitive information was held in non-secure locations, including a bathroom and a ballroom where events and gatherings took place.”

Smith promised to answer the senators’ questions truthfully. “I will not be silenced by the continued threats of prosecution from the President or others.”

“As I appear before you today, it is my belief that the rule of law faces challenges unlike any we have experienced in our lifetime. Individuals are threatened with criminal investigation because they are perceived to have opposed the President. Predetermined outcomes increasingly seem to take precedence over the Justice Department’s long-standing core values, traditions, and norms. History teaches that the rule of law is rarely destroyed all at once. It is often weakened by attacks on the institutions and public servants sworn to uphold it. Since January 2025, we have witnessed precisely such an effort, including the vilification of the career prosecutors, FBI agents, and support staff who served on my team, simply because of their unwavering commitment to the fair and impartial administration of justice without regard for any personal costs.

“I myself have been threatened with jail by the President of the United States.

“I remain confident, however, that the rule of law will endure because so many continue to uphold it faithfully each day. Throughout our legal system, public servants have remained faithful to their oaths despite extraordinary pressure to do otherwise. Their example demonstrates that while fear may be contagious, courage is as well.”

—

Notes:

https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/eb1618d2-f0bc-4235-9474-853bf3201147/2026-09-29_Testimony_Smith_01b90c84-f3a2-45af-bcdb-7ffc5a1ee309.pdf

https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S6-C1-3-1/ALDE_00013300/

https://www.justice.gov/opa/media/1260551/dl?inline

https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/15/politics/trump-2024-presidential-bid

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/11/18/garland-to-appoint-special-counsel-for-trump-criminal-probes-00069451

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23-939_e2pg.pdf

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/judge-permanently-blocks-release-of-special-counsel-jack-smiths-report-on-trump-classified-documents-case

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/read-the-full-trump-indictment-on-mishandling-of-classified-documents

https://abcnews.com/US/jack-smith-defends-appointment-special-counsel-classified-docs/story?id=116250996

https://abcnews.com/US/timeline-special-counsels-investigation-trumps-handling-classified-documents/story?id=101768329

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/eric-schmitt-jack-smith-hawks-hawkeyes

X:

RonFilipkowski/status/1597333933548793857

AnnaBower/status/2105045477544837309

Bluesky:

cwebbonline.com/post/3mwp6qws3lk2d

ericumansky.bsky.social/post/3mwp67i7cgc2p

atrupar.com/post/3mwo47u27gs2h

democracythirst.bsky.social/post/3mwos64ihmk2v

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Letters from an American

Politics Chat, September 29, 2026

Heather Cox Richardson
Updated
Letters from an American

Politics Chat, September 29, 2026

Heather Cox Richardson
Updated

Listen on Apple Podcasts
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Letters from an American

Headaches for Republican Lawmakers

Heather Cox Richardson
Updated

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Marginal Revolution

The polity that is Singapore

Tyler Cowen
Updated

Police in Singapore have charged a man who is accused of posting an AI-generated image of a saltwater crocodile in a popular reservoir.

Ye Lin was charged with communicating a false message and obstructing the course of justice for allegedly deleting the picture and the application he used.

The fake image caused public concern, authorities allege. The national water agency suspended its work at the city-state’s largest reservoir for two days last month after receiving information that a crocodile had been spotted.

Here is the full story, via Kyle.

The post The polity that is Singapore appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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The Truth OC: Because it's time to fight back.

A thought on Austin Lumbard, Tustin’s Republican mayor

Jeff Pearlman
Updated
Austin Lumbard

So Austin Lumbard, Tustin’s mayor, is a Republican and Donald Trump voter.

These things are not secrets, and they shouldn’t be. Elected officials owe it to their constituents to let us know who they politically support.

So, again: Austin Lumbard, Tustin mayor, is a Trump guy.

But as he runs for re-election, there’s something that confuses me, and it’s this post, from his Instagram feed …

Here’s the full text from Lombard’s Jan. 6, 2021 entry …

The United States of America is better than the wretched display we witnessed today. Our country was founded and relies still upon the timeless principles outlined in the United States Constitution.

Ideals of respect for other’s rights regardless of agreement, the dignity of each person to pursue happiness, and the peaceful transition of power are what make America truly exceptional.

Our Republic and the Electoral College were in fact formed to protect each individual’s rights from mob rule! Today‘s tragic and disgraceful events proved why the mob cannot rule.

Rioters destroyed the “people’s house” because they are upset about an election. They tarnished America along the way, and they showed the world just how ugly things can and will inevitably get when politics overtake the rule of law.

We are better than this and we will get through it. But we mustn’t let this point in our history lead to further discord. We must choose to be the people we are capable of being. We must be lawful, civil, and respectful of each other, especially in times of disagreement, lest we break our fidelity to the principles our fore fathers shed blood to protect.

#usa🇺🇸 #constitution #civility #ruleoflaw

It’s weird, because—well, that was it. Done. Over. A wrap. Lombard never publicly commented on the U.S. Capitol attacks again, never used social media to utter a single negative peep about Donald Trump, has not once complained about masked ICE agents grabbing brown people off Orange County streets or the Epstein Files being covered up or the Iran war or gas prices or Pete Hegseth or the White House rape culture or … anything.

Dude was one and done: Jan. 6—then silence.

And call it whatever you want, but that’s not leadership. It’s cowardice in the name of party loyalty. It’s being lame and yellow and pathetic.

It’s soft.

Mike the Mad Biologist

Links 9/29/26

mikethemadbiologist
Updated

Links for you. Science:

More than 1 in 10 US healthcare workers report ongoing long-COVID symptoms, study finds
‘It’s hard to sell a house when it’s covered in baboon faeces’: Cape Town divided over plan to remove its monkeys
How The Barcode Was Invented
Some DMV pediatricians are kicking out unvaccinated patients
NASA’s New Horizons mission may shut down two instruments over lack of funding
Once described as obesity medicines for ‘patients,’ GLP-1s are increasingly lifestyle drugs for ‘customers’
Thanks to RFK Jr., the CDC Is a Husk of What It Once Was, New Report Says

Other:

The Hard Lessons of Springfield: There are plenty of people happy about what is happening to the Haitian community.
Jewish journalist ‘pulled off air’ after filming protest outside a synagogue on Yom Kippur. Neil Herland said demonstrators tried to “taunt and intimidate” him as he arrived for service in Toronto
The Great American Property Tax Freak Out
Economy What If We Treated Housing Like a Human Right?
Ninety-Five Seasons of Washington Football, by the Numbers
He raised alarms about an apartment building. A lawsuit may bring changes.
It’s Maine’s turn to be concerned about Susan Collins
These Extremists Are Running for Election in November
“He Can’t Be Trusted”: Trump’s Most Loyal Front-Row Fans Turn on Him
Humans Are Reading Copilot Prompts — And They’re Horrified
Susan Collins Gets a Brutal Warning From Home-State Paper
You Know Those Three Brothers Who Buy Struggling News Sites and Turn Them Into AI-Powered Content Farms? It Turns Out One of Them Has Extensive Connections to Ghislaine Maxwell
Insiders say the Ohio Democratic Party is censoring criticism of anti-trans ads
Education Department formally rescinds Title IX protections for LGBTQ students
Wife school can’t fix MAGA husbands
Why Is Sam Altman a Free Man? OpenAI’s models aren’t ‘going rogue’ from their creators as much as they are mimicking them.
Bari Weiss ‘Likely Out’ at CBS After Paramount/Warner Bros. Merger as ‘Anti-Woke’ Editor Blamed for Torpedoing ’60 Minutes’
Trayon White Says He Is ‘Redeemed Again’ After Judge Declares a Mistrial (if ranked choice voting had been used in this election, White almost certainly doesn’t win)
The rule says, “No vehicles in the park”.
MAGA candidate in small Calif. town convicted on 9 counts of election fraud
Roger Marshall May Rue The Day: Arresting Pregnant Moms Edition
Democrats Lose by Punching Down on Trans Issues, Strategists Say
Lone Republican Senator Derails a Bill to Prevent Demolition of the Kennedy Center
Mistral CEO says U.S. AI safety debate masks competitors’ ‘negligence’
White House Drove Users to Official App Fraught With Trackers
How Republicans Used the Pandemic to Try to Upend Census Residency Rules
RFK Jr.’s ethics filing reveals book deals worth millions of dollars
Apple’s New CEO Seeks to Make Company Run Faster and Leaner (leaner means firing people)
A Pentagon Influencer Called Liberal Women a ‘Pestilence’ Who Will End Western Civilization. Kurt Schlichter was part of a task force rooting out so-called woke ideologies at the military’s war colleges. He has called to bar childless adults from voting. (I wrote about the fascist Schlichter here)
The Market Will Crash if Trump Steals the Election: Zimbabwefication is Bad for Business

Marginal Revolution

Wednesday assorted links

Tyler Cowen
Updated

1. It seems there is no evidence for the concept of a fertility rebound.

2. We will tell children nasty stories, but mostly only show them positive images.

3. Deregulation in Idaho.

4. Weather risk is reflected in Florida home prices.

5. Have we discovered where Aristotle taught Alexander the Great?

6. How to keep an agent swarm on track?

7. What the mathematicians want.

The post Wednesday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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Market Design

Bob Montgomery, transplant surgeon and transplant recipient, in the NYT

Al Roth
Updated
The NY Times has a story about the complicated life and busy career of NYU transplant surgeon Bob Montgomery, who is also a transplant recipient.

He Changed the World of Organ Transplants. Would He Die Waiting for His Own?
A New York transplant surgeon’s experience waiting for a heart transplant laid bare the challenges of a system he had spent decades trying to fix. By Roni Caryn Rabin

SpaceNews

Quantum Space Executes Launch Processing Agreement with All Points Logistics for Prime Mission

Quantum Space
Updated

ROCKVILLE, Md. and MERRITT ISLAND, Fla. — September 30, 2026 — Quantum Space, LLC (the “Company” or “Quantum Space”), a company developing the next generation of advanced maneuverable spacecraft for […]

The post Quantum Space Executes Launch Processing Agreement with All Points Logistics for Prime Mission appeared first on SpaceNews.

SpaceNews

Commercial Defense Satcom Service Revenues to Surpass $22.6B by 2035

Novaspace
Updated
Novaspace logo

Paris, France | September 2026 — Novaspace’s Satellite Communications for Defense and Security, 2nd Edition highlights a defense Satcom market poised for rapid growth. By 2035, commercial satellite service revenues […]

The post Commercial Defense Satcom Service Revenues to Surpass $22.6B by 2035 appeared first on SpaceNews.

SpaceNews

Terran Orbital Names Jamin Brown Chief Operating Officer

Terran Orbital
Updated

IRVINE, Calif. – Sept. 29, 2026 – Terran Orbital, a Lockheed Martin company and a global leader in satellite-based solutions primarily serving the aerospace and defense industries, today announced the […]

The post Terran Orbital Names Jamin Brown Chief Operating Officer appeared first on SpaceNews.

The Aviationist
Marginal Revolution

Trump Administration Limits Predatory Lending in Education

Alex Tabarrok
Updated

The New Republic writes “President Trump is banning students majoring in degrees that don’t make enough money from taking out college loans.” Yes, but do note that no student is banned from any major and the lending rule is mild. Undergraduate programs must show:

that their graduates earn more than the typical high school diploma holder…[and] graduate programs will be required to demonstrate that their graduates earn more than the typical bachelor’s degree holder. (emphasis added).

Think about how low that bar is. The comparison group for an undergraduate program is working adults aged 25-34 with nothing more than a high school diploma. A college program that can’t beat that has almost certainly made its students worse off. For graduate programs the bar is the lowest of several bachelor’s benchmarks, including bachelor’s holders in the same field. A master’s in social work need only beat people with a bachelor’s in social work. A program must also fail in two out of three years before it loses loan eligibility. The Department estimates that about 5% of programs will fail in the first year.

I mocked the term “predatory lending” when it first became common in the financial crisis but in this case predatory lending fits the bill because the real borrower isn’t the individual student. Under income-driven repayment, the taxpayer is a forced co-signer, and it’s the taxpayer who gets predated.

Most expansions of the student loan program have been motivated by the picture of an enterprising student who works hard and wants to major in mechanical engineering or nursing but because of their poor circumstances they can’t afford college. “Credit constraints, asymmetric information, you can’t collateralize human capital,” said the economists. Nice theory, what’s the practice?

The economists wanted loans for good investments and insurance against bad luck but the economists can’t swing the vote and once the government is lending, colleges want more tuition money and students want more forgiveness. The result is a subsidy for programs whose graduates are never likely to repay. As Looney and Yannelis document:

Starting in the late 1990s, policymakers weakened regulations that had constrained institutions from enrolling aid-dependent students. This led to rising enrollment of relatively disadvantaged students, but primarily at poor-performing, low-value institutions whose students systematically failed to complete a degree, struggled to repay their loans, defaulted at high rates, and foundered in the job market. As these new borrowers experienced similarly poor outcomes, their loans piled up, loan performance deteriorated, and with it the finances of the federal program.

Indeed, the program worked in reverse of what was promised. The biggest subsidies went to programs whose graduates were least able to repay, rather than programs with the strongest case for public support. As I wrote earlier:

Looney does a back of the envelope calculation and estimates that typical graduates in Mechanical Engineering will on average get a 0% subsidy but graduates in Music will get a 96% subsidy, in Drama a 99% subsidy and Masseuses a 100% subsidy on average. This of course is exactly the wrong approach. If we are going to subsidize, we should subsidize degrees with plausible positive spillovers not masseuses.

The courts later blocked Biden’s Save plan but the problem is built into income-driven repayment. If music, drama and masseuses are promised a 95%+ subsidy who is paying? The taxpayers. Moreover, it’s even worse than this because the very existence of these loans incentivizes the creation of expensive, useless programs. It’s not just the drama colleges, however. Not surprisingly, the law schools have proven adept at using Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) to rip off the taxpayer. The school raises tuition, then covers the student’s small income-driven payments for ten years, and the taxpayer forgives the rest. In short, protecting students from the cost of failure rewards colleges for producing it.

Fortunately, the same bill limiting loans ended Grad PLUS loans and capped graduate borrowing. You can see the logic: if taxpayers are going to insure the loans, they need some say over which programs qualify and how much is borrowed. I don’t like giving government that power, but this is the Mises–Higgs intervention ratchet in action: subsidize the loans, absorb the losses, then regulate the programs to limit the losses.

My ideal program would get the government out of the student loan business altogether but until then this is a good first step at limiting one of the most expensive and wasteful programs of the federal government.

The post Trump Administration Limits Predatory Lending in Education appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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Aeon | a world of ideas

Passportless mess

Aeon Video
Updated

Photo of a naked man in a vast sunflower field with a distant house under a clear blue sky.

A fool, a genius, or ‘a man who destroys everything’? Piecing together Zoran, a mythic figure of Belgrade

- by Aeon Video

Watch on Aeon

Simon Willison's Weblog

OpenAI DevDay 2026 live blog

I'm at OpenAI DevDay today, in Fort Mason, San Francisco. Same as last year I'll be live blogging the keynote and some other notes during the day.

OpenAI gave me a free ticket and a seat in the "creator" area for the keynote.

Tags: ai, openai, generative-ai, llms, coding-agents, live-blog, openai-devday

Marginal Revolution

*Shade*

Tyler Cowen
Updated

The author is Sam Bloch, and the subtitle is The Promise of a Forgotten Natural Resource.  An interesting book on a neglected topic, here is one excerpt:

Shade is not part of L.A.’s modern identity.  In the 1930s, the city was rezoned to Federal Housing Administration design standards and banned high-density developments like row houses.  Although apartments were once common, city leaders bowed to a prevailing wisdom that L.A. should not resemble a dark and cramped East Coast city.  Freestanding single family-homes that were touched by sun on every side became mandatory.  In came the cars.  L.A.’s curbside trees were removed to accommodate shrinking sidewalks and expanding roads, and new rules that require parking minimums dealt another below to the urban forest.  Mediterranean-style courtyards became endangered species as the shaded commons were converted to outdoor car storage.  For decades, no building could be taller than the twenty-seven-story city hall…

Since the 1970s, an individual right to sunshine has been practically enshrined in state law.

The book also serves as an alternative history of Los Angeles (though it covers much more than that) through this alternative lens.

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Paul Krugman

The Beclowning of Scott Bessent

Paul Krugman
Updated

One iron law of current politics is that nobody who associates themselves with Donald Trump emerges with a shred of credibility. For some, that’s not a big loss — it’s not as if anyone respected Pete Hegseth even before he decided that the key to military success in an age of drones and AI was more testosterone. For others, however, the costs are real. I’m old enough to remember when Marco Rubio was widely considered a reasonable, thoughtful politician.

Right now, however, my candidate for the biggest loser is Scott Bessent, the Secretary of the Treasury. Bessent started out with significant reputation to lose: When Trump selected him, this was the headline in the Financial Times:

Jason Furman, Barack Obama’s chief economist, described him as a “credible Treasury secretary who has a real understanding of the global economy”.

But Bessent has now transformed himself into the Baghdad Bob of bonds.

Three weeks ago, after intervening (for reasons that remain somewhat unclear) to support the Japanese yen, Bessent boasted about his ability to move markets and dared investors to bet against his, declaring “I am the house now.” He then tried to push long-term interest rates down, buying 30-year U.S. Treasuries in a move some have compared to paying down part of your mortgage by running up your credit card balance.

Here’s how that’s going so far:

To get some perspective on how high interest rates have gone, here’s a longer-term perspective:

We haven’t seen interest rates this high since the fading days of the dotcom bubble.

Why are interest rates hitting new records? The backdrop, as I argued in last Sunday’s primer, is the huge AI-driven investment boom; more on that next week. But the immediate cause of the latest interest rate spike was Trump’s rejection of an Iranian proposal to end the war. This rejection sent crude oil prices, which for a while had fallen considerably, shooting back up:

It’s notable, by the way, that oil prices remain high even though a significant amount of oil is now being shuttled through the Strait of Hormuz by night, on smaller vessels. That’s an interesting story, which has a lot to do with the fact that oil from the Hormuz shuttle runs must be transferred to larger vessels before being shipped to markets in Europe and Asia; around 15 percent of the world’s large crude carriers are now parked off the coast of Oman, waiting to be tanked up. This is creating a shipping crunch:

But that’s a topic for another day. For now, the point is that with oil still high and refined products, especially diesel, still close to record levels, inflation will remain elevated. And this in turn means that the Federal Reserve will keep short-term interest rates high, an expectation that is feeding into longer-term rates. Hence Bessent’s bond-market humiliation.

The truth is that Bessent might not have been able to get interest rates down even in the best of circumstances. But he certainly won’t get anywhere as long as Trump keeps believing that he can somehow convert his Iran debacle into a triumphant victory. And Trump will keep believing that as long as he is surrounded by sycophants who tell him what he wants to hear.

Sycophants like, for example, Scott Bessent, who is predicting the imminent collapse of the Iranian economy, possibly within two weeks. Bessent is right to say that the embargo on Iranian oil exports is placing the country under great economic strain. But his implicit prediction that this will quickly produce a deal that Trump can call victory looks no more plausible than his boasts about the bond market.

The big question now is, why would anyone with a reputation to lose work for Donald Trump? As the beclowning of Bessent shows, joining the Trump team won’t just damage your reputation; it will utterly destroy it.

Simon Willison's Weblog

Quoting Anthropic Frontier Red Team

We evaluate several models on 100 tasks from the [internal Binary Exploitation benchmark] (selected at random), and find that GLM-5.3 develops full control flow hijacks in 4% of the trials; Claude Mythos Preview did so in 6%. Although GLM-5.3 performs below Claude Mythos Preview here, a meaningful threshold has clearly been crossed: earlier models, like Claude Opus 4.6 and GLM-5.2, do not succeed in any of them.

— Anthropic Frontier Red Team, GLM-5.3 and the spread of advanced cyber capabilities

Tags: anthropic, generative-ai, ai-security-research, glm, ai, ai-in-china, llms

Simon Willison's Weblog

GPT 6.1 Sol: Near-Astra intelligence for a fifth of the price

My comment on GPT 6.1 Sol: Near-Astra intelligence for a fifth of the price — Hacker News.

I'm a bit late with the pelicans because I was live-blogging the keynote: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Sep/29/openai-devday-2026-liv...

Here they are for GPT-6.1-Sol: https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer?url=ht...

They're not notably different from the GPT-6 family pelicans: https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2026/gpt-pelicans-gr...

Tags: ai, openai, generative-ai, llms, pelican-riding-a-bicycle, gpt

Schneier on Security

Using Device Linking to Eavesdrop on WhatsApp and Signal

Bruce Schneier
Updated

Modern messaging apps allow users to link their phone accounts to their computer desktop. Eavesdroppers are taking advantage of this capability:

Apps such as WhatsApp Web and Signal Desktop allow people to use their accounts on other devices, such as laptops or desktop computers.

Germany’s Customs Office has been using these features to connect a police-controlled computer to a suspect’s account.

Once connected, messages can be delivered to that computer without the police having to crack the encryption protecting them.

Netzpoltik details that police are able to gain access in this way either through physical access to someone’s phone or by intercepting verification codes via a state-sanctioned phishing attack or intercepting SMS messages via telephone surveillance.

That last paragraph is important. Making this work requires user consent.

What we want is a feature that displays connected devices, so users could notice if a new device gets connected to their account.

Talking Points Memo - Editors Blog

Perfect Storm, Brought to You by Donald Trump

Josh Marshall
Updated

As I noted a week ago, we can’t know whether the current polls will be predictive of the November election results. But the polls themselves are at least speaking with a clear voice. I want to note two things that appear to be moving in unison: consumer confidence and the Republican position on the national generic ballot.

Here’s the trend line from Nate Silver’s Silver Bulletin …

This is from G. Elliott Morris’s FiftyPlusOne site. The smoothing is different and the shift less stark. But it’s there too.

That shift happens right around Labor Day. Like almost to the day, around Sept. 8. The Conference Board’s consumer confidence survey came out on Tuesday and showed a sharp drop in September. It’s been trending down, with some significant blips, since the beginning of the pandemic. So that is not new. But the steep shift, in electoral politics terms, looks like a disaster for the GOP. That, along with parallel election indicators, are certainly what shifted Republicans into a panic starting a couple weeks ago. And it’s hard to ignore how closely the two measures things line up.

Of course, we know that it’s not solely consumer confidence that drives political opinion. Political opinion can drive consumer confidence. Notwithstanding the downward trend, confidence picked after the 2020 and 2024 elections, only to start right back down. In a way, it’s an act of condescension to think that for it to be “real,” consumer confidence has to be separate from politics. If you’re a sane person watching what’s happened over the last 20 months, your view of the economic future isn’t going to be limited to your own employment status and what you see yourself about price stability. It’s also true though that there is a human, cognitive need to keep political sentiment somewhat in line with economic reality. Conventional wisdom states that it’s only around Labor Day that a big chunk of the population really starts to focus on a national election, especially a midterm election. (There’s more sustained attention during a presidential year.) If you’re a floating voter, who voted for Trump in 2024 but isn’t terribly attached to him, perhaps you gave the whole thing a good think over the last few weeks and just decided: This isn’t working. I’m voting a straight Democratic ticket. That might sour your assumptions about the economic future. Your need to think that Trump is doing something right just disappeared.

But let me suggest a more economics-tied explanation.

The general argument going back to the early post-pandemic is that the economy is actually doing quite well (near full employment, steady if not remarkable growth). A colleague just pointed that if you look at labor force participation rather than the headline number, the story looks pretty different. But let’s set that aside. This goes back to the issue of AI. Needless to say, the illegal and economically crazy tariffs plus the Iran war have put lots of upward pressure on inflation, especially things like fuel costs. But there’s also the AI boom. The AI boom is essentially running the economy hot. It’s creating general upward pressure on prices with particular pressure on computer hardware, electricity and other commodities. But that economic heat isn’t showing up in wages. It’s creating vast amounts of wealth. But that wealth, because it’s in the equities markets, is heavily, heavily tilted to the wealthy.

It’s been a constant refrain on the left and also center-left for a long time that the benchmark economic indicators no longer line up with the real state of the economy for regular people. That tends to ebb and flow with who is in power at the particular moment. But the AI boom looks like a particularly apt example of that, running the economy hot, putting upward pressure on prices, but in a way that generates very little upside for the great majority of the population. And even though “jobless due to AI” doesn’t show up that clearly in statistical terms, a whole generation of people under 35 have been told pretty convincingly (whether it’s true or not) that there’s no career option that won’t be hit by massive job losses in the near future. And if that’s not enough, we’ve just had a month-plus of saturation coverage about AI and human extinction. If humans are extinct, let’s just say that’s a huge hit to the economy. So I don’t think it takes a lot of imagination to think that AI — both as a lived economic reality and a prediction — is weighing down consumer sentiment a lot.

Of course, these points are speculative. Whether they explain very near-term shifts is questionable. Perhaps this sharp downward shift in sentiment — about the economy and Republicans — is overwhelmingly or entirely about that series of interlocking factors that led gas and diesel prices to surge which began in late August (again, coinciding perfectly) and continued through September. In political terms, what’s relevant is that the political winds shifted or intensified right at the worst time for the GOP.

Talking Points Memo - Editors Blog

TPM VIDEO: Congress Is Leaving Town. What Do Lawmakers Have to Show for Themselves?

Allegra Kirkland
Updated

The House has already left town. The Senate is heading home this week. With the midterms just around the corner, GOP lawmakers are giving up on doing any more legislating and skipping town to try to mobilize their demoralized voters.

TPM’s congressional reporter Emine Yücel has chronicled all the drama for us. Emine joined publisher Joe Ragazzo on YouTube Live at 2 p.m. ET to talk through what Congress has actually done — and failed to do — this session.

Check it out:

Talking Points Memo - Editors Blog

Rusty Red State Candidates With Rusty Values

Josh Marshall
Updated

This afternoon I saw an ad being run by a SuperPAC supporting Dan Osborn (“Nebraska Values PAC”) against Sen. Pete Ricketts (R) of Nebraska. It’s a brutal ad about a brutal crime. (You can watch it here.) A woman identified as “Jody S.” speaks over a montage of a crime scene imagery explaining that in 1993 an intruder broke into her home, tied her to her bed and violently raped her while her children listened to everything. A man named John Arias was arrested, pled guilty, was convicted and sentenced to prison. We then fast-forward to then-Gov. Pete Ricketts casting the deciding vote as the member of a pardon board that ultimately pardoned Arias. Jody S. notes that Arias told her she would never be safe from him and that he was now off the state sex offender registry and allowed to own a gun. She also notes that she wasn’t even informed about the pardon until after it happened.

I tend to be hard-hearted about political ads. I watched this one a few times to make sure I had the details right. It’s hard to watch; in a way it’s more hard to listen to. The ad has stark black and white imagery and has audio of Ricketts announcing, in an uncomfortably chipper tone, his vote during the hearing: “But with that you’ve got your pardon.”

I looked the ad up and there is a key detail that was at least different from the impression I formed watching the ad. Arias was sentenced to 15 to 30 years in prison after pleading guilty. He was released in 2008 after 14 years — presumably on parole, perhaps with good behavior. That point isn’t clear. Fast-forward to 2022 when Ricketts was governor and sat on the pardon board. Arias petitioned the board for a pardon and Ricketts cast the deciding vote in favor of the pardon. In other words, the pardon did not free Arias from prison. He’d already been out of prison for 13 or 14 years. It took him off the sex offenders’ registry and restored his right to own a firearm. The ad doesn’t say otherwise. I’m just noting the misimpression I got watching it.

Somewhat like the cease-and-desist letter Sen. Roger Marshall sent about his record of requesting the arrest of women he was suing for being behind on their bills, good luck litigating this point in the court of public opinion. And this isn’t just optics. Why would you do that? Both as a matter of right and wrong, but also as a matter of political self-interest. I got the background details from the Times write up which notes that while Arias did not deny the rape at the half hour pardon hearing “he appeared to question some of the details of the victim’s account.” So remorse seems questionable.

In any case, Ricketts’ actions and the ad both speak for themselves. I don’t have much more of value to add. What I did want to note was a point I made over the weekend. We appear to be in the electoral equivalent of a category four or five hurricane. Levees that normally hold might not hold in this big a storm. And what that is showing is the not-totally-surprising-but-still-pretty-notable fact that a lot of these bright red states have gone a pretty long time without a seriously contested partisan election, and it shows. Roger Marshall’s record of suing some 700 women for late bills from his OB/GYN practice never saw the light of day in his House races or single Senate run. (The Times broke the story just a few weeks ago.) Rickets was appointed to the Senate in January 2023 by the governor who succeeded him to serve out the term of former Sen. Ben Sasse, who resigned to take a university presidency position. Ricketts won the special election for the seat in 2024 with 62% of the vote; the race wasn’t seriously contested. (Democrat Preston Love raised $170,000 for the race.) I see no evidence the pardon came up, at least not in such a dramatic way.

Category five elections don’t come along often. We don’t know whether this will even be one. But it’s a reminder that contested elections tend to shake things out of the woodwork. And in significant parts of the country, at least at the federal level, they don’t come around that often.

Talking Points Memo - Editors Blog

A Critical Moment for the Rule of Law

David Kurtz
Updated

This morning the full D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals heard oral arguments on whether the Trump administration will be subject to a contempt of court inquiry for not stopping and turning around the deportation flights in the original Alien Enemies Act case, which began way back in March 2025, when the Trump administration sent more than 200 Venezuelan men to El Salvador’s CECOT prison.

Each side — the Trump DOJ and the ACLU — was given 30 minutes, but the oral arguments ended up lasting nearly three hours.

The top line: The en banc court is likely to rule against the Trump administration and allow U.S. District Judge James Boasberg to proceed with a contempt of court inquiry.

That would represent a dramatic about-face from an earlier 2-1 decision by a three-judge panel of the appeals court, in which two Trump-appointed judges shut Boasberg’s inquiry down hard. It would represent a vindication, albeit very belated, of the rule of the law. For that reason, litigation stemming from the CECOT deportations has been among the most closely watched of what is now hundreds of decisions across dozens of cases that were defied or violated by the Trump administration. Most but not all of them came in challenges to Trump’s mass deportation operation.

The most compelling part of the oral argument came when the ACLU’s capable attorney, Lee Gelernt, recounted the panicked and harried events of the weekend of March 14-16, 2025. Word began trickling in that Venezuelan nationals in ICE custody were being moved without notice. Rumors began flying that an Alien Enemies Act proclamation from President Trump was imminent.

There were some nods and winks but no confirmation from the administration — and in fact some active misdirection from administration officials and lawyers, too. The proclamation, it would turn out, was signed a full day before it was made public. We know now Emil Bove, the DOJ’s acting No. 3, was telling department lawyers that the planes would be taking off no matter what and they might have tell the courts “fuck you.”

ACLU lawyers began hearing reports that deportation flights for the AEA detainees were or would soon be underway. During a critical emergency hearing in front of Judge Boasberg in the late afternoon that Saturday, Gelernt recounted, the reports of the flights departing became more urgent.

It was against this backdrop that today’s oral argument zeroed in on the Trump DOJ’s flimsy, implausible, and unreasonable arguments for why Judge Boasberg can’t hold the administration to account for refusing to turn around the planes: That his oral orders didn’t count; that his written order was ambiguous; that his orders weren’t violated by the administration; that he doesn’t have the inherent power to investigate the administration’s conduct; that he must take administration officials’ bare denials at face value; and so on.

The two Trump judges on the panel who originally blocked the contempt of court inquiry — Neomi Rao and Justin Walker — sat for today’s full court hearing. Rao, in particular, did a lot of clean up for the administration and was the hardest on Gelernt. But the hope all along has been that the seven Democratic-appointed judges sitting today would overwhelm the four Republican appointees.

The only thing the two sides agreed on was that the appeals court should rule not just on whether Judge Boasberg has the authority to conduct a contempt inquiry but also on whether his orders were clear and unambiguous (the earlier Rao-Walker panel held that they were not). At least in that way, the case wouldn’t have to come back to the appeals court yet again for a separate ruling on that question.

And yet … justice delayed is justice denied, and in many respects the moment for vindicating the rule of law in this case has already passed.

The D.C. Circuit has hamstrung Judge Boasberg for the better part of 17 months. In addition to overruling him, it has taken its own sweet time slow-rolling the case, ping-ponged it back to him, and failed to have his back even as the Trump administration has used the case to undermine the judicial branch and threaten the constitutional order.

In an alternate universe where the appeals court rose to the moment in the Alien Enemies Act case, its timely and decisive intervention might have headed off a year and half of executive branch defiance of the judiciary. Because this case was the early marker for Trump’s rampage, it could have drawn a line in the sand. Other judges in other courts could have used the precedent in this case to hold that line.

In this counterfactual, the administration’s contemptuous behavior would have been called out, addressed, and rebuked before it it engaged in contempt across a range of other cases, especially in habeas cases that flooded the federal courts when the mass deportation operation zeroed in on Los Angeles, Chicago, and the Twin Cities.

Its misconduct would have been on the record, documented, and already serving as a strike against it, like a prior conviction at sentencing. Instead, judge after judge in court after court for months and months gave the administration the benefit of the doubt until finally their patience began to wear out from the sheer scale and relentlessness of the transgressions.

Back in the real world, the calendar is unforgiving. Kristi Noem is long gone as DHS secretary. Bove now sits on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals. The Venezuelans shipped to El Salvador’s CECOT and eventually repatriated have scattered to the winds. Even if the full appeals court ships the case back to Judge Boasberg to pursue a contempt of inquiry, nearly half of Trump’s second term will have elapsed before the real accountability even starts.

Marginal Revolution

Don’t let AI make you dumber

Tyler Cowen
Updated

That is the topic of my latest Free Press column, here is one excerpt:

I do not think the skeptics would put it this way, but as I read Conti, I find he has a pretty bleak fundamental view of humanity. Are we all really just looking to veg out and abandon curiosity and inquiry, at least once the machines have taken care of both the basic functions of life and certain higher aims such as scientific research? I think some people are like that—indeed you might say many people—but it does not reflect what I take to be the general human condition.

If I look at most people who might fit into the “middle class” when it comes to intellectual pursuits or educational status, I observe they have a lot of strong interests. This might play with their pets, improve their performance at sports, or learn how to cook better. You do not have to identify those preferences with “the new Athens” or “the next Mozart” to think they are perfectly good and noble ways for people to spend their time.

Most of us want to do something interesting and stimulating with our leisure time, and if we do not, it is often because our jobs are so busy and stressful that we just wish to decompress. Of course, in this radical vision of our AI future, fewer jobs will be so all-consuming and so more of us will use vacations and leisure time to explore and learn rather than to just sit on the beach scrolling our phones. And to the extent some jobs do remain hectic, or become even more so (such as cybersecurity), they will continue to be challenging and intellectually stimulating.

A related worry is that humans may feel they simply cannot compete with the AIs, and thus they might turn away from creative pursuits. It is true that I, more than ever, have given up all hope of proving new theorems in mathematical economics. But many of my intellectual and creative pursuits do not involve competition at all. For instance, I use AI to understand classical music better, asking the models questions before I sit down to listen to a piece. (Such as “which are the best recordings?” and “what should I listen for in the second movement?”) As the models get better and smarter, I am not going to be discouraged in this endeavor, as I was not “competing” with the models to see which of us knew more. Rather, I will gratefully end up much better informed about classical music—my increasing knowledge has already induced me to see more live concerts.

Recommended, and AI saved me time on the proofreading and fact-checking (not the writing!), so I could return to reading China Mieville…

The post Don’t let AI make you dumber appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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National Hurricane Center Graphical Tropical Weather Outlooks

Atlantic Tropical Weather Outlook

nhcwebmaster@noaa.gov (NHC Webmaster)
Updated

Atlantic 2-Day Graphical Outlook Image
Atlantic 7-Day Graphical Outlook Image


422
ABNT20 KNHC 010503
TWOAT

Tropical Weather Outlook
NWS National Hurricane Center Miami FL
200 AM EDT Thu Oct 1 2026

For the North Atlantic...Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of America:

Tropical cyclone formation is not expected over the next 7 days.

$$
Forecaster Gibbs


National Hurricane Center Graphical Tropical Weather Outlooks

Eastern Pacific Tropical Weather Outlook

nhcwebmaster@noaa.gov (NHC Webmaster)
Updated

Eastern North Pacific 2-Day Graphical Outlook Image
Eastern North Pacific 7-Day Graphical Outlook Image


364
ABPZ20 KNHC 010501
TWOEP

Tropical Weather Outlook
NWS National Hurricane Center Miami FL
1100 PM PDT Wed Sep 30 2026

For the eastern and central North Pacific east of 180 longitude:

Active Systems:
The National Hurricane Center is issuing advisories on Tropical
Storm Nolo, located several hundred miles west of Lihue, Hawaii, on
Hurricane Rachel, located within a couple of hundred miles southwest
of Cabo Corrientes, Mexico, and on Tropical Depression Nineteen-E,
located well west-southwest of the Baja California Peninsula.

South of Southern Mexico:
An area of low pressure could form late this weekend or early next
week south of the southern coast of Mexico. Thereafter,
environmental conditions appear favorable for gradual development,
and a tropical depression is likely form while the system moves
slowly west-northwestward to northwestward.
* Formation chance through 48 hours...low...near 0 percent.
* Formation chance through 7 days...high...70 percent.

$$
Forecaster Gibbs


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Software Design: Tidy First?

Mathematicians, Here’s a Way To Think About Your Existential Crisis

Kent Beck
Updated

Two years ago programmers were all like, “What I do is code. Who I am is a coder. The genie codes. Now who am I?” Now mathematicians are all like, “What I do is prove theorems. Who I am is a theorem prover. The genie codes. Now who am I?” Here’s a framework I’ve found helpful for answer that question for myself.

Features & Futures

Something similar to the structure of the two fields, programming & math, is that there is a (relatively) visible part—features in the case of programming & proofs in the case of mathematics—& a huge (relatively) invisible part. The invisible part is understanding, education, simplification, enabling abstractions.

If all we work on is the visible part, progress on that visible part slows to a crawl. But nobody gets credit for the invisible work, so we rely on an ethos of work to ensure that the invisible work gets done and everyone can continue to make progress on the visible stuff.

I call this hidden dimension “futures”, although “optionality” might be a more accurate word (if less alliterative).

In programming we also call this inverse of this axis “technical debt”, coined by Ward Cunningham. Sometimes you have to pay off your debts to get “interest” payments low enough that you can get back to progress on the principal.

Genies Hate the Invisible

I wonder if the angst among mathematicians is because:

  1. The genie is so good at the visible stuff

  2. Without the invisible work, visible progress eventually slows to a crawl, genie or no genie

  3. Nobody gets credit for the invisible work

Put these together & you have a world where mathematicians no longer get any credit. The visible stuff is better done by machine. The invisible stuff is, well, invisible.

So What?

One constructive response to the identity crisis for programmers is to say hey I’m here to keep the genie on course. With the genie’s help I’m able to learn quicker than ever before. I still get to use my honed intuition to quickly stop useless directions. My reach has just extended. Yes, my work has changed, but my strategic decisions are more valuable than ever because they come more frequently.

I visualize this as taking breaks between visible progress to make invisible progress. I wonder if this way of thinking about their situation will help mathematicians take advantage of the powerful new tools available to them without losing their reason for being mathematicians. Good luck!

Most teams don’t have a strategy problem. They have an adaptation problem.

Your plan was never going to survive contact with reality. The question is whether your organization bends or breaks when it doesn’t.

I help teams bend. Adapt to Thrive.

Booking a handful of custom talks and advisory engagements now. I interview your people, measure your real software flows, and hand you the truth plus what to do about it.

Curious whether it fits? Tell me about your team.

The Cross Section

The Billionaires Have Met Free Speech, and They Are Not Pleased

Paul Waldman
Updated

The Cross Section is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Documentarian Alex Gibney, whose previous films include Enron: The Smartest Guys In the Room, Taxi to the Dark Side, and Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief, has made a new documentary about Elon Musk, titled simply Musk. From early reports, the film — which clocks in at almost four hours — doesn’t contain much in the way of new revelations, but nevertheless creates a powerful indictment of the world’s richest man.

If you were Musk and you didn’t want people to watch this movie, your best strategy would almost certainly be silence. After all, as the possessor of one of the world’s loudest megaphones, anything Musk discusses — or attacks — immediately draws exponentially more attention. But because Musk is an impulsive narcissist, he couldn’t help himself but attack Gibney and the film repeatedly, thereby providing it with invaluable publicity:

“Gibney has zero integrity. Zero,” said Musk. “Fortunately, his movies are boring af … It’s a hit piece that misses, and makes the fatal sin of being boring for 4 hours.

“Gibney just assembled a hit list of people who either have an axe to grind or don’t even know me (but still have an axe to grind) … He’s a bitter old man who lost the plot long ago.

“Dogshit is worth more respect than Gibney.”

Musk’s lawyer has also threatened to sue Gibney for defamation, NPR reported on Thursday.

But that’s not all. X, the white supremacist non-consensual porn site Musk owns, refused to accept paid ads promoting Gibney’s film, and in an inspiring show of billionaire solidarity, so did YouTube, Facebook and Instagram (both owned by Meta) and TikTok.

So here’s the trailer they didn’t want you to see:

But wait — isn’t Musk a self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist”? And don’t the owners of those other sites regularly proclaim their devotion to the unconstrained exchange of ideas?

For example, here was Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, in full dudebro regalia, exulting in Donald Trump’s election in January 2025 and explaining how the fact-checkers he hired were too “biased,” presumably in favor of the libs, and it was “time to get back to our roots around free expression on Facebook and Instagram”:

Meta is the same company that has used all the money and power at its disposal to silence Sarah Wynn-Williams, the former Facebook executive whose book Careless People exposes just some of the company’s ugly secrets. After the news about the apparent ban on taking ads for Musk spread, YouTube and Meta reversed course and announced they’d accept the ads (no word on X yet), which demonstrates that it’s one thing to be hypocrites in private, but high-profile public hypocrisy creates a PR problem.

Speaking of PR problems, here’s a film about a different Facebook whistleblower whom the company also tried to silence. This movie managed to get made and will be distributed, despite the fact that it will make Mark Zuckerberg very unhappy:

What it’s really about

Peter Thiel — Palantir co-founder, “PayPal Mafia” member, and the man to whom JD Vance owes his entire career — summed up the private views of many of the tech overlords when he wrote “I no longer think that freedom and democracy are compatible.” By that he didn’t mean freedom writ large, but freedom for oligarchs like him — the trouble with democracy is that every now and again it starts to encroach on the prerogatives of people who think they should exist beyond the constraints that bind the rest of us. It was an admission that principles are for the little people; what matters is money, power, and the ability to use them however he sees fit. In truth, there’s no reason to think Thiel believes in freedom or democracy, at least not for everyone. The same goes for his peers.

In this, the right-wing tech oligarchs and the political right are in complete accord. After all, we’re almost two years into one of the most extraordinary crackdowns on free speech in decades, aimed at universities, scientific researchers, those who protest the wrong things — if you have an opinion the American right doesn’t like, and they can find a lever of power with which to silence you, they will.

This effort has been designed and implemented by the very people who spent so long proclaiming themselves warriors for unlimited expression, when the “problem” was a bunch of college students shouting down Ann Coulter or the Biden administration asking social media companies to limit the spread of misinformation in the midst of a pandemic. As anyone with eyes could see, when they were talking about how important free speech is, what they really meant was that they wanted the ideas they like to spread as far as possible. Their advocacy for unconstrained debate would last only so long as they felt their side was the one whose voices were being limited.

At the same time, they felt they had to ground their complaints in a higher, more broadly applicable principle. They couldn’t just say “It’s wrong that white nationalists don’t get to give speeches at universities, because white nationalism is cool.” They had to say that free speech itself was under attack, and their passion about this injustice had nothing to do with who was being silenced or why.

And that’s the tell: When they cite a larger principle that almost anyone would agree with, that’s when they’re usually lying.

Conservatives don’t always argue that way, and when they don’t, they’re much more likely to be telling the truth. When they say they want more women to stay home rather than working for pay? Yes, that’s what they really want. When they say they think America would be better if there were fewer immigrants here? Completely honest. When they say we shouldn’t worry about climate change? That’s what they really think.

Those assertions are all highly contested. It’s when they claim they’re motivated by the big and almost incontrovertible ideas that they aren’t being honest. When they say they believe in free speech, or they want elections to be free and fair, or they’re opposed to corruption, or they’re committed to the rule of law? They don’t and they aren’t.

Those foundational principles are all conditional, depending on who is advantaged, who is restrained, and who might face accountability. You will almost never find a case in which conservatives or their oligarch allies take a stand that would force them to tolerate an outcome they don’t like because their commitment to a broader principle demands it.

The policy goals of conservatives are wider and more detailed than those of the tech oligarchy, but in both cases it’s important to listen closely to what they say; when you hear them claim to be acting in service of a universal principle, that’s when you know they’re hiding something.

But there is some good news here. It’s true that all the major social media platforms are owned or controlled by right-wing billionaires, and they’re capturing more and more of the “mainstream media” too (e.g. CBS News and soon CNN). Those are big problems. But their ability to limit other people’s speech has its own limits — and that’s why they’re so mad all the time. They have more money than any group of human beings has ever had, they believe they’re fashioning the future of humanity with their infinite genius and unstoppable will, and yet people keep telling them they suck. Artists, filmmakers, a few politicians, now and again their own employees, or just regular people — to be Musk or Zuckerberg or any of these guys is to go through your days in a state of perpetual frustration because the unwashed masses won’t shut up about how terrible you are. And it drives them nuts.

In and of itself, telling tech oligarchs they suck only gets us so far. Nevertheless, it can be a starting point, as the movement against data centers has shown. The fact that these guys have to pretend they believe in free speech shows how powerful it can be.

Thank you for reading The Cross Section. This site has no paywall, so I depend on the generosity of readers to sustain the work I present here. If you find what you read valuable and would like it to continue, consider becoming a paid subscriber.

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Eric Berger - Ars Technica

NASA has a Dragon dilemma, and there appear to be no good answers

Eric Berger
Updated

For two decades, largely in service to the International Space Station, NASA has sought to foster an "economy" in low-Earth orbit.

Twenty years ago, with a program to develop private spacecraft for cargo delivery to the space station, NASA sought to "stimulate efforts within the private sector to develop and operate safe, reliable, and cost-effective commercial space transportation systems." In recent years this has expanded to creating an entire commercial ecosystem in orbit, with transportation, space stations, manufacturing, tourism, and more, such that NASA is one of many customers in the market.

In April 2024, the space agency explicitly laid out its philosophy: "NASA supports a robust commercial space economy that advances American industry and promotes technological discovery through in-space work and research. NASA remains committed to fostering innovation and collaboration within the American space industry."

Read full article

Comments

The Diary of Samuel Pepys

Tuesday 29 September 1663

Samuel Pepys
Updated

Took two pills more in the morning and they worked all day, and I kept the house. About noon dined, and then to carry several heavy things with my wife up and down stairs, in order to our going to lie above, and Will to come down to the Wardrobe, and that put me into a violent sweat, so I had a fire made, and then, being dry again, she and I to put up some paper pictures in the red chamber, where we go to lie very pretty, and the map of Paris. Then in the evening, towards night, it fell to thunder, lighten, and rain so violently that my house was all afloat, and I in all the rain up to the gutters, and there dabbled in the rain and wet half an hour, enough to have killed a man. That done downstairs to dry myself again, and by and by come Mr. Sympson to set up my wife’s chimney-piece in her closett, which pleases me, and so that being done, I to supper and to bed, shifting myself from top to toe, and doubtful of my doing myself hurt.

Read the annotations

the joy of sox

ALWC 1: Yankees 9, Red Sox 0

allan
Updated
Screenshot 2026 09 30 002733 

Red Sox - 000 000 000 - 0  3 0
Yankees - 010 010 25x - 9 12 0

Almost exactly one year ago, on October 2, 2025, in the winner-take-all Game 3 of last year's ALWC series, Cam Schlittler pitched eight shutout innings against the Red Sox, striking out 12. The Yankees mugged Connelly Early in the fourth inning, winning the game with ease, 4-0.

Schlittler was also on the mound Tuesday night in New York, the next postseason game between these two rivals. Schlittler was equally untouchable (6.1-2-0-1-10, 117). He recorded 18 swings-and-misses . . . in the first four innings.

He and two relievers had absolutely no trouble rendering the Red Sox lineup completely impotent. Boston had a total of four baserunners, only one of which got past first base (and was left on second). Of the Red Sox's first 23 outs, only one left the infield.

The Yankees led 2-0 at the stretch and then hammered the back end of the Boston bullpen, scoring seven more runs in two innings. Ben Rice capped an outstanding night, hitting an grand slam in the eighth of Brayan Bello. Rice hit two home runs, a single and a double, scored twice and drove in six. He's the first MFY with multiple homers including a grand slam in a postseasion game.

OptaSTATS reports:
On Tuesday the Yankees' Ben Rice: hit multiple homers, hit a grand slam, had all of his team's XBH, outhit the entire opposing team. No one else in MLB history has done all of that in any game, regular season or postseason.
56 pitchers have made multiple postseason starts against the Red Sox. Schlittler joined Bob Gibson as the only two to have two games of 10+ strikeouts. Gibson fanned 10 Red Sox batters in Games 1 and 7 of the 1967 World Series.

Screenshot 2026 09 29 235437
Schlittler now has a 0.47 ERA in his first six career starts against the Red Sox (including postseason) , the lowest by a pitcher against Boston since ERA became an official stat in 1913. . . . His 117 pitches was a career high.

This was the entirety of the Red Sox's offense:

T1: Adley Rutschman singled with one out. Willson Contreras and Wilyer Abreu both struck out.
T5: Jarren Duran walked with two outs. Trevor Story flied to center.
T7: Abreu singled to right-center (Schlittler's last batter). Ceddanne Rafaela GIDP.
T8: Story doubled with two outs. Caleb Durbin flied to center.

Reached Base Safely
Ben Rice: 4 times in 5 plate appearances
Red Sox: 4 times in 30 plate appearances
September 29, 2026 was the first day in postseason history with two shutouts of 8+ runs. The Padres dismissed the the Cubs 8-0.

The Red Sox are in danger of exiting this postseason without leaving any evidence they were here at all.


Screenshot-2026-09-28-141733 
Red Sox -  
Yankees -
G1: Payton Tolle / Cam Schlittler
G2: Sonny Gray / Max Fried
G3: Ranger Suarez / Gerrit Cole

Best-of-3. The winner of the series will play the Rays in the ALDS.

The Red Sox have been in a hitting/scoring slump for most of this month. In 17 games since September 8, they've scored only 42 runs (2.47 runs per game) while going 7-10. In their last eight games, the red Sox have scored more than two runs only once (1, 1, 2, 1, 0, 4, 2, 2). . . . Boston went 6-7 against New York this season. The most runs they scored off the MFY in a game was six, which they did three times.

But all that is old news. It's time to bring the bats because . . .  IT IS ON!

Screenshot 2026 09 28 145448
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Boston Red Sox – MLB Trade Rumors
The Aviationist
Marginal Revolution

Shipping to America

Tyler Cowen
Updated

The vulnerability of our shipping routes remains underdiscussed, perhaps that is in some ways a good thing:

We study the macroeconomic and trade-policy implications of disruptions to U.S.-bound shipping routes. Standard models treat them as iceberg-cost shocks, conflating the shock with the response to it. Using satellite vessel-tracking data, we construct route-level measures of potential and effective capacity for all U.S.-bound container ships from 2016 to 2025. Utilization losses in recent disruptions ran 20 to 40 percentage points, and began months before port congestion became visible. We embed these measures in a general equilibrium model in which firms reallocate a common fleet without internalizing the congestion they create and price above marginal cost, while importers’ sourcing responds to route profitability. The reallocation triggered by a disruption then has first-order welfare effects, and the route’s Domar weight is not a sufficient statistic for its welfare cost. The 2021 West Coast crisis and the 2023-2024 Red Sea attacks cost 0.69% and 0.35% of output. Naval protection of Red Sea shipping generated benefits of 0.04-0.08% of output at a fiscal cost of 0.02%. Tariffs decongest the routes they tax, offsetting or even reversing their conventional welfare cost.

That is from a new paper by Xiwen Bai, Jesús Fernández-Villaverde, Yiliang Li, Ricardo Marto & Francesco Zanetti.

The post Shipping to America appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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Letters from an American

September 28, 2026

Heather Cox Richardson
Updated

It has become routine for Trump to spend the weekend posting wildly on social media, and this weekend was no exception.

After attacking the press on Saturday morning, at 9:18 he posted a video with foreboding music that sped up as the video played, showing a glowering Trump walking down a hall toward the camera while his voice intoned: “This is the final battle. With you at my side, we will demolish the deep state. We will expel the warmongers from our government. We will drive out the globalists, we will cast out the communists, Marxists, and fascists. We will throw off the sick political class that hates our country. We will rout the fake news media, and we will liberate America from these villains once and for all.”

The administration clearly set out to provoke a backlash when it played what appeared to be the same ad later in the day during NFL games, Fox News Sunday, Saturday Night Live, and several college football games with the addition of the words: “Paid for by the U.S. Government.”

As Stephen Collinson of CNN noted, Trump often tries to provoke a response to his outrageous behavior in order to feed the narrative that he is under attack from an establishment deep state because he is trying to save the nation. And this did, indeed, provoke a response. While the White House maintained the ad was a “public service announcement,” Richard Painter, who served as a White House ethics lawyer under President George W. Bush, said using public funds for “government-sponsored propaganda” could be “an impeachable offense.”

That image worked well enough in his 2016 campaign that he recycled it for the 2024 campaign, when videos nearly identical to the one he posted on Saturday appeared repeatedly. But its power now seems to be primarily in its ability to reinforce Trump’s fantasy of himself. Thirty-six thousand social media users liked a post that read: “Why is there a Donald Trump ad during an NFL game when he’s not running for office and why is the US government paying for a political ad[?]”

Trump seemed to be working overtime on boosting his self-image on social media on Saturday, posting a series of videos showing a triumphal movie version of his second term, narrated by MAGA supporters. One video from2023 showed him attacking Democrats, other videos showed him winning his second term, setting out at top speed to fulfill his campaign promises, hosting the UFC mixed martial arts fight at the White House, and launching Operation Epic Fury against Iran. Still others intoned heroic literature, including “If” by Rudyard Kipling (that’s the one that starts: “If you can keep your head when all about you/ Are losing theirs and blaming it on you”) with Trump as the hero.

While the first video seemed intended to rally his supporters, the rest of the videos, with their litany of broken promises—“expel the warmongers”?—and the praise of supporters who have left or been cast out of the government, felt weirdly like a requiem.

And the ads created yet another headache for Republican lawmakers hoping to retain control of Congress after the midterm elections. On Friday the administration announced it is refusing to spend about a billion dollars Congress appropriated for programs that help the American people—a refusal the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office (GAO) says is illegal—and on Saturday, Trump used taxpayer money for his own vanity ads.

That misuse of public money comes on top of the administration announcement last week that it was removing about 760,000 people from Affordable Care Act health coverage rolls, claiming they were fraudulently enrolled in the program and that cutting them and dishonest brokers would save $2.2 billion.

For the past week, Trump’s collapsing job approval numbers and the increasing chances that the Democrats will prevail in the upcoming midterm elections have dominated the media. In the New Yorker, Susan Glasser wrote about “The Week Republicans Finally Panicked About Trump.” She notes that “[n]o modern president has ever gone into a midterm election this unpopular.” His approval rating is now twice as low as it was in 2018 when Republicans lost forty-one House seats.

At Strength in Numbers, G. Elliott Morris reported on September 25 that only 24% of American adults say the U.S. is better off under Trump than it had been under Biden. Fifty-eight percent say it’s worse off, and most of them say it’s much worse. Morris notes that in the last month, Trump’s approval rating has fallen most sharply among voters who identified themselves as Republicans.

Today Morris reported that media coverage of the Republicans’ midterm convention failed to come close to the number of stories about the Iran war, about Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and about the Justice Department, the FBI, and the Epstein files.

On Saturday, Patrick Thomas and Lindsay Wise of the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump’s tariffs that undermined the sales of agricultural products, his imports of foreign beef, and the rising costs of diesel, gas, and fertilizer have eroded his support in the agricultural areas that used to be the backbone of his support.

On Sunday, Samuel Benson and Eric Bazail-Eimil of Politico reported that Republicans in battleground states—Kansas, Maine, Michigan, Texas, and even Florida—are on defense as their voters turn against the ICE agents conducting raids in the states. An ICE agent’s shooting of a food delivery driver from Venezuela in Austin, Texas, on September 20 is highlighting the issue, especially since the agent was not wearing a body camera as required.

Like the tariffs, the raids are challenging the loyalty of even those who voted overwhelmingly for Trump in 2024. Although voters in counties that depend on agriculture supported Trump by almost 78%, on September 24 the Kansas Livestock Association, Oklahoma Cattlemen’s Association, and Texas Cattle Feeders Association released a statement warning that ICE activity is endangering their animals and operations, and has a “massive chilling effect” on “the legal, documented, skilled workers that put beef on the table and keep the cattle supply chain moving.”

In what appears to be a dig at the president, they note that their supply chains are already under pressure and call the raids “a costly and unnecessary impact to cattle producers already suffering from unwelcome political interference to both the markets as well as the physical supply chain.”

Rural areas, which tend to have more people employed in agriculture, fishing, and logging, as well as longer travel distances, are particularly hard hit by the high prices of diesel and gasoline caused by the Iran war. Yesterday, Gregory S. Schneider and Evan Halper of the Washington Post reported that the skyrocketing price of diesel has pushed Republican candidates even in staunchly Republican districts to call for an end to the war in Iran.

In Iowa, Representative Ashley Hinson, who voted four times against forcing Trump to end the Iran war and is now the Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate, is one of those now complaining about the high cost of gas and diesel. Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers of Michigan also previously supported the war but now is saying “[t]he war with Iran needs to end and end quickly.”

Republicans hoping to retain control of Congress after the midterms are fighting uphill battles in contested states, and some of their candidates are in the news for all the wrong reasons. In Maine the Portland Press Herald today published a scathing op-ed from the Editorial Board titled: “It’s Maine’s turn to be concerned about Susan Collins.”

The board ripped into Senator Collins’s dismissive response to ProPublica’s story that her 2020 campaign accepted an illegal $150,000 contribution from a defense contractor in exchange for a U.S. government contract. Indeed, Collins’s attacks on ProPublica to undermine the story prompted it to issue a follow-up report calling her claims “incorrect and misleading.”

In Texas, some Republican leaders backed away from Bo French, the Republican nominee for the Texas Railroad Commission, which regulates the oil and gas industry in the state, after a racist social media post about University of Texas football fans, but it turns out that post is the tip of the iceberg. Today Andrew Kaczynski of CNN reported that in the past six years, French has repeatedly called for public executions of his political opponents, including former president Barack Obama, using the hashtag “HangEmHigh.”

Kaczynski reports that neither Texas governor Greg Abbott, who is running for reelection, nor the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate, state attorney general Ken Paxton, has withdrawn his endorsement of French.

In Kansas, Senator Roger Marshall is facing outrage after a New York Times story by Sarah Kliff on September 8 revealed that Marshall, an obstetrician-gynecologist, sued more than 700 of his patients for outstanding bills. Kliff reports that Marshall’s office charged patients an 18% annual interest rate and garnished their wages and their bank accounts, and that eighty-one of his patients were arrested for missing court dates. Most of those unable to pay their bills were from a rural county with higher than average rates of poverty and lack of health insurance. The unpaid bills were as little as $101.

Meanwhile, Republican lawmakers are starting to blame Trump and his appointees for their unpopularity with voters. Although—or perhaps because—Republican senators confirmed a number of those appointees, they are now turning on at least some of them.

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullins’s raids are unpopular with Republican lawmakers, but Burgess Everett and Shelby Talcott of Semafor reported today that Republican senators are fed up with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. A Republican senator told the reporters: “There are a lot of people that are really upset with the war in Iran and how it’s being played out. We feel it’s hurting our chances in the elections in the fall, and it seems rather haphazard.” The senator continued: “We don’t like what we’re seeing when it comes to the pulling of officers off of the promotion lists. We don’t like what we see with…indiscriminate firings of admirals and generals across the force.”

And Trump apparently can no longer command the attention of those who supported his MAGA agenda. On September 23, Neil Mehta, Brian Whitton, and Sabrina Rodriguez of the Wall Street Journal reported the results of their analysis of almost 70,000 hours of podcasts by right-wing creators. Mentions of Trump’s name have dropped nearly 70% from their peak before the 2024 election. Suggesting just how unpopular he is, the people still talking about Trump are his opponents.

On Thursday, Zach Everson, research director for Public Citizen’s Trump Accountability Project reports, a Trump company filed a trademark application for “TRUMP TV,” the new streaming channel the White House launched after Trump’s ban of reporters from CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House campus left him without television coverage for a day.

On Friday, Everson reports, “a Trump-owned company applied…to trademark ‘MAGA’ and ‘45-47’ for streaming apps, TV broadcasting, and news and commentary on politics and current events.”

—

Notes:

https://www.semafor.com/article/09/27/2026/republicans-fuming-at-hegseth-as-war-costs-build

https://www.cnn.com/2026/09/28/politics/trump-final-battle-ad-campaign-government-funds

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/27/us/politics/trump-ad-government-campaign.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/09/22/trump-officials-plan-cut-hundreds-thousands-aca-claiming-fraud/

https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-trumps-washington/the-week-republicans-finally-panicked-about-trump

https://www.wsj.com/politics/elections/americas-farmers-are-rethinking-their-loyalty-to-the-gop-af5c85fe

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/09/27/ice-crackdown-immigration-republicans-midterms-01093912

https://www.investigatemidwest.org/trump-election-farming-counties-trade-war/

https://www.kla.org/news-center/news-releases/news/details/51102/media-statement-from-the-kansas-livestock-association-oklahoma-cattlemens-association-and-texas-catt

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/09/22/republican-candidates-are-breaking-with-trump-iran-midterms-loom/

https://www.cnn.com/2026/09/24/politics/republicans-suddenly-concerned-about-ice

https://www.cnn.com/2026/09/25/politics/kfile-mike-rogers-ad-war-with-iran-oil-prices

https://www.gao.gov/blog/what-pocket-rescission-and-it-legal

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/09/28/trump-taxpayer-ads-senate-gop-01096502

Strength In Numbers
58% say the U.S. is worse off under Trump vs Biden, 24% say it’s better
“Are you better off than you were four years ago…
Read more
5 days ago · 175 likes · 14 comments · G. Elliott Morris
Strength In Numbers
Iran, prices, ICE, and Epstein are the biggest stories of 2026
Read more
2 days ago · 120 likes · 8 comments · G. Elliott Morris

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/09/27/ice-crackdown-immigration-republicans-midterms-01093912

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/09/27/soaring-diesel-costs-are-clobbering-maga-voters/

https://www.pressherald.com/2026/09/27/its-maines-turn-to-be-concerned-about-susan-collins-editorial/

https://www.propublica.org/article/debunking-susan-collins-fbi-navatek-investigation-claims

https://www.cnn.com/2026/09/28/politics/kfile-bo-french-tweets-executions

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/08/us/politics/roger-marshall-obgyn-doctor-debts.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/roger-marshall-may-rue-the-day-arresting-pregnant-moms-edition

​​https://www.wsj.com/politics/elections/maga-podcasters-are-tuning-out-trump-we-tracked-what-they-are-talking-about-now-20702881

Trump’s Truth:

statuses/41932

statuses/41928

statuses/41936

statuses/41930

statuses/41929

statuses/41940

statuses/41939

statuses/41937

X:

TheJuiceTDGuy/status/2104318731849523379

Bluesky:

zacheverson.com/post/3mwll3r5acskf

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Marginal Revolution

Tuesday assorted links

Tyler Cowen
Updated

1. Comment section arbitrage.  This is what the AIs do too, right?

2. Claims about New Zealand.

3. Good Bryan Caplan post on Effective Altruism.

4. Reported female bisexuality is in retreat?

5. Sadly, now a fringey view, yes.  But not with me.

6. Fewer and fewer are defecting from North Korea.

The post Tuesday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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Mike the Mad Biologist

Marjorie Taylor Greene Spills the Beans

mikethemadbiologist
Updated

Former Republican congresswomen and rightwinger Majorie Taylor Greene posted this on Elon Musk’s Nazi website:

MTGcaravan copy

Either she is trying to pivot to being a ‘sensible conservative’ or maybe she’s gone…

driltaketheshot copy

We need new writers; the current ones are drunk.

Anil Dash

The Facebook Fake-out

There’s a pattern that Facebook (well, Meta — you know, those folks behind Instagram and WhatsApp and the direct enabling of the Rohingya genocide) has been following for decades now that everyone in the worlds of policy and regulation and journalism seems to be constitutionally incapable of understanding. So I wanted to take a moment to explain it, clearly and simply, in hopes that this will at least make it obvious when everyone is being tricked again. Feel free to use this as a reference to send to your favorite legislator or journalist the next time they’re getting fooled by Mark Zuckerberg.

  1. Launch a new product or feature that very obviously violates people’s privacy or consent. (This one, you’re probably familiar with; they do this constantly, and sometimes it even makes headlines.)
  2. Get caught, either by users or by tech experts or researchers who find out Meta has been doing this nefarious thing.
  3. Put out a press release announcing that Meta will be pausing this practice, while explaining how it wasn’t really that bad.
  4. Wait a little while until everybody is paying attention to something else, or the next scandal has popped up.
  5. Launch the product or feature again, and steal everybody’s data or surveil everybody’s behavior without their consent or respect for their privacy.

Of course, by the time the transgressive technology comes back around, everyone has moved on to the next terrible thing, and the company gets away with the thing that had everyone up in arms in the first place. Within the company, this is taken as proof that it wasn’t a bad idea to begin with: “See? They were complaining about nothing!” It’s a part of the “inevitability” strategy that so much of Silicon Valley has been using for years, where treating new technologies as if they were inexorable parts of nature is a tactic for getting every part of society to go along with their most extreme plans.

Much of this relies on people having short attention spans, on institutions that don’t hold these big companies accountable, and on the coercive power that big platforms like Meta’s have over people’s lives (they effectively make it impossible for most people to opt out without facing dire social consequences).

It’s especially important to identify these patterns because the alumni of these companies bring these toxic behaviors with them when they go on to their subsequent roles. It’s no coincidence, for example, that so many former Facebook product managers work at OpenAI and that ChatGPT has run the same playbook in terms of abusing people’s privacy and trust.

While we don’t have an immediate solution for this broken behavior, at least for the foreseeable future, what we can do is identify these patterns and name them, and call them out when we see them repeat. See if you can’t identify some examples yourself, both from the past and perhaps some that are happening right now.

Throwbacks:

Oklahoma Watch
Market Design

The Carob Trust Prize for Academic Courage: An award for scientists who overcome unjustified attacks on their work

Al Roth
Updated

 Here's the announcement of a new prize, initially to be awarded for work in the social sciences, reflecting the fact that social science can be politically contentious.

The Carob Trust Prize for Academic Courage: Celebrating the Pursuit of Knowledge 

"The Carob Trust Prize honors academics who pursue bold ideas that challenge prevailing orthodoxies—whether political, intellectual, or methodological—and hold the potential to reshape knowledge, policy, or society. The Prize supports scholars whose work is original, rigorous, impactful, and courageous—even when it is unpopular. " 

"Selection Criteria
Intellectual Independence: A proven commitment to following logic and evidence wherever they lead, regardless of academic or political pressure.
 

Non-Conformist Ideas: Originality and boldness of research agenda. Willingness to ask questions that others avoid—whether uncomfortable, underfunded, or unfashionable.
 

Impact and Vindication: Work of excellent quality that has shifted academic debate, public discourse, or policy. Evidence that ideas criticized at the time have proven—through data, replication, or influence—to possess enduring value. "

"Timeline
Nov. 1, 2026:  Nominations due
Spring 2027:Announcement of Prize winners "

 #######

Here's a column in the WSJ about the prize:

An Award for Scholars Who Tell the Truth
The Carob Trust Prize for Academic Courage will honor social scientists who face unjustified attacks.
By Roland Fryer and Bill Ackman 

SpaceNews

If AI cannot be trusted in a classroom, why should it be trusted in orbit?

Qurat-Ul-Ain Shabbir
Updated
New York City  Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Schools Chancellor Kamar H. Samuels announce a moratorium on artificial intelligence in NYC schools. Credit: NYC Mayor's Office

On September 9, 2026, Evan Hubinger, Anthropic’s alignment science lead, said on social media that he personally believed there was a greater than 10% chance that artificial intelligence could kill […]

The post If AI cannot be trusted in a classroom, why should it be trusted in orbit? appeared first on SpaceNews.

Patt Morrison

From stamped metal to digital, the strange history of our GLDN ST8 PL8S

California has run out of combinations for its current license plate sequence, ending a string dating back to the 1980s. How did we get here?
Aeon | a world of ideas

Don’t use the ‘C-word’

Matthew R Cooperberg
Updated

Microscopic image of vibrant purple and pink cellular structures with intricate patterns, resembling tissue under a microscope.

A cancer diagnosis carries with it fear and upheaval. For many patients the cellular changes do not warrant the label

- by Matthew R Cooperberg

Read on Aeon

Hacker News
Marginal Revolution

Accounting for Cross-Country Income Differences Revisited

Tyler Cowen
Updated

Also known as Why I Do Not Believe in the Housing Theory of Everything:

Development accounting is the search for proximate sources of cross-country income differences. This article describes how knowledge in this field has evolved over the two decades since the influential work of Caselli (2005). There have been large advances in the measurement of production inputs (labor, physical capital, and human capital). These advances have raised the estimated contribution of inputs, mostly human capital, in development accounting. Our preferred estimate is that inputs account for 55–70 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) per worker differences, versus 30 percent using the classic specification. The literature has also made progress in moving away from Cobb-Douglas production functions and measuring factors such as management quality that were previously bundled into total factor productivity (TFP). Our review highlights the new implications of these advances, areas where future research would be beneficial, and the limitations of development accounting.

That is from a new NBER working paper by David Lagakos & Todd Schoellman.

The post Accounting for Cross-Country Income Differences Revisited appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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Marginal Revolution

The Macroeconomic Effect of AI through software engineering

Tyler Cowen
Updated

We measure how artificial intelligence (AI) affects the economy through its impact on software engineering productivity. We use information from financial markets to develop a forward-looking measure that is available in real time. We estimate the sensitivity of each firm’s stock return to an AI stock market index, and how this sensitivity depends on the share of firm payroll in software engineering. We use a model to map this cross-sectional relationship into software engineering productivity gains. From November 2022 to December 2025, AI increased the market’s expected present value of software engineering productivity by the equivalent of a permanent 32.6% productivity increase. The corresponding effect on the level of GDP is 3.6% in the baseline and 6.5% when higher software engineering productivity also raises R&D productivity. By mid-2026, amid rapid progress in coding agents, the effect of AI on productivity and GDP had more than doubled relative to the end of 2025.

That is a new NBER working paper by Alex Blumenfeld, Jonathon Hazell, Chen Lian & Andreas Schaab.  This is also a simple way of showing that markets do indeed price in the effects of AI.

The post The Macroeconomic Effect of AI through software engineering appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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Daring Fireball

Follow-Up on my Spitballed Predictions for Apple’s October

John Gruber
Updated

Regarding my post yesterday speculating on how Apple’s October — seemingly set to be a big one — might play out, a friend asked if any or all of the new stuff might be released through Apple Newsroom announcements only. Good question. Let’s run through the rumored new hardware products:

  • Apple TV hardware: I’d love to say no, but the answer is yes. I could see this coming out as a simple announcement with new specs. I really want to see Apple double-down in this space, reinvigorate it. I think watching TV on Apple TV hardware is by far the best experience out there. Yet its market share is very low. Apple TV is to the living room today what the Mac was to desktop computing in the late ’90s and early ’00s. Everyone sees it as too expensive and they have no idea why they’d actually be happier if they had one. So I hope Apple makes it a big part of a keynote/event, but I wouldn’t bet on it.
  • iPad Mini: Yes, could be just a press release.
  • HomePod Mini: Yes, could be just a press release.
  • HomePod-type thing with a screen (maybe they will just call it “HomePad”?): No way — if this is coming, it has to be unveiled with a keynote video and some sort of media event with hands-on demos. And if they’re going to have some sort of event/show for this, they might as well unveil the above things there too.
  • MacBooks with OLED touchscreens: No way could this be released only with a press release.
  • M6 iMacs: Could be just a press release, but if they’re going to have some sort of event/show for the touchscreen MacBooks, why not include these at the start of that?
 ★ 
The Map Room

A Pop-up Staircase, Surrounded by Maps

Jonathan Crowe
Updated
The entrance to the David Rumsey Map Center at Stanford is via a staircase whose walls are illustrated with maps from the Center’s collections. To mark the Center’s 10th anniversary, RJ Andrews and Ray Marshall… More
Daring Fireball

Joanna Stern Pokes the Pickle

John Gruber
Updated

If anyone could devise a funny way to measure battery life, it’s her.

 ★ 
Daring Fireball

‘Donald Decodes’ Interview Craig Federighi Regarding the iPhone Duo

John Gruber
Updated

Apple executives seemingly did very few interviews after the iPhone event three weeks ago. The best, perhaps by far, is this 11-minute video with Craig Federighi by “Donald Decodes”, a Chinese language creator. His YouTube account only has 1,100 followers (and only had 500 at the time of the video) and only one other video — presumably he’s got a big following in China. Very insightful questions about the Duo user interface — and Federighi gives very thoughtful answers. The question (and answer) about “back” swiping really gets to the heart of what makes iOS so much more cohesively designed than Android, spatially.

 ★ 
Daring Fireball

Why Stolen Device Protection Makes Passwords Safer

John Gruber
Updated

Glenn Fleishman:

Leaving Stolen Device Protection enabled does mean that you may have to wait an hour in some scenarios to manage aspects of your Apple Account, make changes to Face ID or Touch ID, change your device passcode, and a few other actions. But this minor inconvenience might assuage the kinds of concerns that Scott wrote in about, and make you more comfortable that your big basket of secret eggs won’t scramble.

I put off enabling Stolen Device Protection for a while after it came out, because I’m stubborn and trust myself to a degree that’s probably irrational. But when it became the default I enabled it, and haven’t once regretted it.

 ★ 
Talking Points Memo - Editors Blog

Roger Marshall May Rue The Day: Arresting Pregnant Moms Edition

Josh Marshall
Updated

I’m figuring this will end up as a big mistake. You probably know about the big NYT expose about Sen. Roger Marshall’s record as an OB/GYN suing hundreds of his patients over often very small delinquent bills and having a significant number of them arrested. Democrat Adam Hamilton is now running an ad on Youtube which describes one of those cases, a woman named Meischa Zimmerman who was arrested in 2011 and, according to her, handcuffed while eight months pregnant and in front of her two year old child. Marshall just sent Hamilton a cease-and-desist letter calling the ad false and defamatory and demanding it be taken down.

This seems like it will be a textbook case of what has come to be called the “Streisand Effect,” in which the effort to block some kind of publicity or attention simply has the effect of calling more attention to the original issue.

What jumped out to me was Marshall’s argument for why the ad is false and defamatory. This is a passage from the write-up in the Kansas Reflector …

Heartland Regional OBGYN, where Marshall worked, opened a case against the woman in December 2009, according to court documents. Zimmerman was first arrested in 2011. She said in the Hamilton campaign ad that she was handcuffed while pregnant in front of her 2-year-old daughter.

Marshall’s lawyers took issue with three facets of the ad. They said Zimmerman wasn’t arrested for a missed payment but, instead, for failing to appear in court. They said the campaign ad frames the premise of the arrest on a $50 bill rather than the sum of Zimmerman’s debts. They said the arrest wasn’t a surprise, arguing that court records show Zimmerman “was called to court in three different counties by eight different businesses over a multi-year period, including by a different hospital and in an eviction proceeding.”

There are several claims here, none of them very strong, and none of them even making a meaningful claim that the accusation is false. But note the first one. Marshall is saying that he didn’t have Zimmerman arrested for not paying $50. He had her arrested for not showing up to court when he sued her over non-payment of $50. (Marshall says: “The unmistakable message to a reasonable viewer is that Senator Marshall caused a pregnant patient to be arrested and jailed for missing a single $50 payment. That message is false in every material respect.”)

I would call this a distinction without a difference to most people and certainly a distinction without a difference in political terms. The point about the other court proceedings seems to amount to: “She was behind on a lot of bills! not just mine!” I’m not sure how much that accomplishes for him. Most people aren’t comfortable with the idea of a woman’s OB/GYN asking a court to arrest her over less than $100 whatever other problems she might have.

This is a reminder of what we talked about this weekend. Trump’s extreme unpopularity is bringing contested elections to pretty Red States that haven’t seen one in a long time. And one of the things it’s showing is that a significant number of Red State incumbents just don’t have the skills for a contested partisan election. Roger Marshall is like the poster boy for that.

Daring Fireball

Bastardica

John Gruber
Updated

“A foundry for bastard web fonts.” The default is a version of Times New Roman but every 7th glyph is replaced with one from Arial, but you can dial up whatever bastardization you want.

This is why I’m not at all worried about AI destroying the world. Look at the horrible things human beings have made.

 ★ 
Los Angeles Angels – MLB Trade Rumors
Spaceflight Now

NASA plans unpiloted Starliner test flight at end of year

William Harwood
Updated
Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft, seen in the company’s Kennedy Space Center hangar in July. Image: Boeing

NASA is working with Boeing to launch an unpiloted Starliner capsule in the December-January time frame to test upgrades and improvements ordered in the wake of a 2024 mission that suffered multiple propulsion system failures, stranding two astronauts on the space station for more than nine months.

If the unpiloted test flight goes well, NASA and Boeing hope to launch a piloted Starliner flight in mid 2028, officials said Monday, incorporating redesigned propulsion system valves, more robust subsystems and other modifications expected to prevent the sort of failures that occurred in 2024.

Veteran astronaut Warren “Woody” Hoburg will command the mission, joined by other crew members to be named later.

NASA astronaut Warren “Woody” Hoburg, the newly named commander of the Starliner-2 mission, talks about the work done by NASA and Boeing in preparation for the upcoming uncrewed flight of the next CST-100 Starliner spacecraft. Image: John Pisani/Spaceflight Now

SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule is the only currently operational U.S. astronaut ferry ship. NASA wants to bring Boeing back into the mix as soon as possible to ensure a sustained U.S. capability to carry astronauts and researchers to the International Space Station through its planned retirement in 2030.

Equally important, NASA managers want to make sure an American spacecraft will be available to support flights to commercial space stations later in the 2030s, after SpaceX phases out its Falcon 9 rockets and Crew Dragon spacecraft.

“It’s always been the Commercial Crew Program’s goal to have two crew transportation providers to ensure commercial access to low Earth orbit,” said Dana Weigel, manager of NASA’s low-Earth orbit operations.

“As SpaceX has publicly stated, the Dragon and the Falcon won’t be around forever. Certifying Boeing’s Starliner is important for both supporting ISS and also for follow-on future commercial destinations.”

Dana Weigel, manager of NASA’s Low Earth Orbit Program, describes the work done by NASA and Boeing in preparation for the upcoming uncrewed flight of the next CST-100 Starliner spacecraft. Image: John Pisani/Spaceflight Now

Said Boeing in a post on the social media platform X: “Together with @NASA, we’re making Starliner hardware enhancements and adding resources for human spaceflight certification. These changes support the spacecraft as a long-term provider of crewed missions to low Earth orbit.”

Astronauts Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Sunita Williams, both now retired from NASA, blasted off aboard a Starliner on June 5, 2024, for what was billed as a 10-day test flight to the International Space Station. It was the first piloted launch of a Starliner after two uncrewed test flights, both of which had problems.

Astronauts Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Sunita Williams blast off on the Starliner’s first, and so far only, piloted spaceflight in June 2024. Problems with the Starliner forced the crew to return to Earth aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule 286 days after launch. Image: NASA

During their rendezvous with the space station, Wilmore and Williams ran into multiple propulsion system helium leaks and thruster failures. They were able to dock, but their return to Earth was repeatedly delayed while NASA and Boeing worked to resolve the technical issues.

An independent review board later classified the propulsion mishaps as a “close call” that put the astronauts in jeopardy.

When all was said and done, the Starliner returned to Earth without its crew three months after launch. Wilmore and Williams stayed an additional six months aboard the station in order to hitch a ride home aboard a Crew Dragon on March 18, 2025. All told, the 10-day flight they expected ended up lasting 286 days.

The Crew Flight Test Starliner, seen after return to Earth without its crew. The spacecraft made it back to Earth safely despite major technical issues. Image: NASA

An independent review board identified three major problems with the Starliner, along with a host of less severe shortcomings that had to be addressed.

During the rendezvous with the space station, five thrusters in the capsule’s service module failed, resulting in a temporary loss of full maneuverability. The failures were blamed on trouble with Teflon “poppets” extruding in propellant valves that restricted flow.

A thruster in the Starliner crew module failed during the ship’s unpiloted descent to Earth, leaving the ship without redundancy in a critical system. The third major issue involved helium leaks in the propulsion system pressurization plumbing.

In addition, the board concluded, the Starliner design did not have the required redundancy in the system responsible for the rocket firing needed to drop the spacecraft out of orbit.

Boeing said all of those issues are being addressed, along with operational changes intended to further reduce unexpected heating that contributed to the thruster problems.

The company is replacing the valves in all 12 crew module maneuvering thrusters, along with implementing measures to prevent erosion. The service module thruster poppets are being redesigned. A faster flight data recorder is being added to more precisely measure thruster performance, along with upgraded batteries and improved parachutes.

John Mulholland, vice president and program manager of Boeing’s Commercial Crew, describes the work done by NASA and Boeing in preparation for the upcoming uncrewed flight of the next CST-100 Starliner spacecraft. Image: John Pisani/Spaceflight Now

NASA and Boeing now plan to launch an unpiloted mission — Starliner 1 — in December or January that will rendezvous and dock with the space station. Along the way, flight controllers will thoroughly exercise the thrusters and their pressurization systems, putting the fixes to the test.

“Our goal is to fly Starliner One as soon as the vehicle and the team is ready,” Weigel said. “We really need to see how those thermal modifications perform on the spacecraft, and we intend to put the propulsion system through its paces.

“We’ll do a series of on-orbit demonstrations and tests, stress the thrusters, and we’ll take that set of data coming out of the mission combined with redesign, and that’s what will inform the final crewed vehicle certification. We will fly the Starliner One mission with stricter performance parameters in place when we’re flying closer to space station.

“Long term, we are committed to Starliner certification and ensuring commercial crew access to low Earth orbit.”

The Starliner has relied on United Launch Alliance’s Atlas 5 rockets for the ride to space, but only a half dozen of the venerable boosters remain in ULA’s inventory. As a result, NASA plans to help get ULA’s new Vulcan rocket certified to carry astronauts aboard Starliner capsules.

For its part, ULA said in a post on X that “we are already working towards the Starliner-1 mission and look forward to our continued work with @BoeingSpace and @NASA to integrate and certify our #VulcanRocket for human spaceflight.

“We are committed to being a long-term launch provider of human spaceflight capability to low Earth orbit.”

Daring Fireball

Destroy Any Website

John Gruber
Updated

Desktop only, and you definitely want sound on.

With things like this I always start with Kottke.org. No idea why, because it’s quite possibly the last site on the entire web I’d want to see actually destroyed. (Well, second-to-last.)

 ★ 
Daring Fireball

‘When Did Google Get So F-Ing Weird?’

John Gruber
Updated

Sancho Panza:

I recently had an experience while doing a simple Google search that was so profoundly weird that it stopped me in my tracks.

Kagi, the search engine I’ve been using for a few years now, gave me the exact sort of results to Panza’s query that he was looking for.

 ★ 
National Weather Service

Heavy Rainfall Continues from the Southwest to the Plains; Severe Thunderstorms in the Southern Plains

Daring Fireball

[Sponsor] WorkOS: How SSO Works and the Fastest Way to Add It

Daring Fireball Department of Commerce
Updated

SSO is table stakes for enterprise deals, but building it into your app yourself means writing SAML controllers, parsing XML assertions, and handling IdP-specific quirks for each provider.

Learn how SAML flows work, the tradeoffs between building or buying, and best practices for security, routing, and UX. Or skip the hassle and add SSO with WorkOS.

Read the guide →

 ★