Up and to my office, and then walked to Woolwich, reading Bacon’s“Faber fortunae,”1 which the oftener I read the more I admire. There found Captain Cocke, and up and down to many places to look after matters, and so walked back again with him to his house, and there dined very finely. With much ado obtained an excuse from drinking of wine, and did only taste a drop of Sack which he had for his lady, who is, he fears, a little consumptive, and her beauty begins to want its colour. It was Malago Sack, which, he says, is certainly 30 years old, and I tasted a drop of it, and it was excellent wine, like a spirit rather than wine.
Thence by water to the office, and taking some papers by water to White Hall and St. James’s, but there being no meeting with the Duke to-day, I returned by water and down to Greenwich, to look after some blocks that I saw a load carried off by a cart from Woolwich, the King’s Yard. But I could not find them, and so returned, and being heartily weary I made haste to bed, and being in bed made Will read and construe three or four Latin verses in the Bible, and chide him for forgetting his grammar. So to sleep, and sleep ill all the night, being so weary, and feverish with it.
Brazil introduced Pix, a digital payment system, almost 6 years ago. The system — which allows people to make payments on their phones, not very differently from Apple Pay or Google Pay, except that Pix payments are official currency rather than transfers from private companies — has been highly successful. The vast majority of Brazilians use it regularly, and by all accounts Pix — which is free for individuals, and cheap for businesses — is hugely popular.
On Wednesday — as it happens, on the first anniversary of an article I posted praising Pix and suggesting that it may represent the future of money — the Trump administration will try to punish Brazil for this success. It will do so by imposing tariffs on Brazilian exports under Section 301 of the 1974 Trade Act, which permits such tariffs to counter “unfair trade practices.”
Why is it unfair for a nation to offer its own citizens a better way to make purchases and pay bills? To some extent the Trump administration is still trying to punish Brazil for being a real democracy. Unlike the United States, Brazil put its former president, Jair Bolsonaro, on trial for trying to foment an insurrection when he lost the last election
Trump’s hostility towards Brazil’s Pix system is also an illustration of the same phenomenon we see in his energy policy: this administration is hostile to progress whenever that progress works against the interests and ideology of the oligarchs who have poured money into Trump’s campaigns and his pockets.
Pix is essentially a digital version of the real, Brazil’s currency. As a Federal Reserve report from 2022 said, a central bank digital currency — which is what Pix is — “is analogous to a digital form of paper money.” Brazilian banks are required to offer Pix, which the Trumpists claim gives it an unfair advantage over debit cards and other payment methods. But this requirement is similar, at a fundamental level, to the requirement that all U.S. banks accept dollar notes as deposits and disburse dollar notes on demand, which few people would consider unfair.
Who is hurt by the advent of Pix? Brazilians’ ability to cheaply make instantaneous payments from their phones certainly hurts the business of Visa and Mastercard, which are both U.S. companies. But since when is it unfair business practice when companies lose business to a competitor that offers a better, cheaper product? For example, should we shut down the U.S. postal service because it offers better and cheaper mail delivery than UPS or FedEx? Should we shut down PayPal and Venmo because they compete with Mastercard and Visa?
Beyond concerns about Visa and Mastercard profits, Trump officials are reportedly concerned that Pix and similar payment systems elsewhere might challenge the international dominance of the dollar. In reality, Brazil is too small a player to make much of a dent in the world payments system. The dollar may, however, face a real challenge if the European Central Bank is able, as it hopes, to introduce a digital euro in 2029. If that happens, it’s not hard to imagine that a significant number of transactions that would otherwise have been made in dollars will be made in digital euros instead.
But let’s be clear: the reason people might switch to digital euros will be because the US won’t be offering an equally good means of payment. Why won’t there be a digital dollar? Not because it’s a bad idea — as Brazil has shown, it would be a very good idea. But there are powerful special interests that oppose any such move.
Last year Republicans in the House passed a bill that didn’t just forbid the creation of a U.S. central bank digital currency; it prohibited any study of the issue by the Federal Reserve. “Don’t even think about parking here creating a digital dollar.”
Proponents of this ban claimed to have concerns about how a central bank digital currency would work. But it’s obvious that their real concern is that it would work too well. Crypto interests, in particular, are very worried that consumers who had access to digital dollars would lose interest in stablecoins and other cryptocurrency products, because these products, being risky and awkward to use, would not be competitive with a system that simply lets people make electronic payments in dollars.
Brazil’s success is especially galling to crypto promoters because it’s in such stark contrast to the results of another Latin American monetary experiment: El Salvador’s attempt to make Bitcoin a major means of payment. The government of President Nayib Bukele made Bitcoin legal tender and spent large sums trying to promote its use. Yet the effort failed: cryptocurrency never caught on as a means of payment, and the plunge in Bitcoin’s price since last fall has inflicted large losses on El Salvador’s government.
Beyond special-interest opposition, Brazil’s digital currency clearly raises the ire of right-wingers who hate the idea of a government providing a service that could have been offered by the private sector, even — or rather especially — if the government can do it better. If we can have a digital dollar, why not a public option for health insurance?
Finally, the furious opposition to central bank digital currencies reminds me of the Trump administration’s all-out efforts to block development of wind and solar power. In both cases we see political players beholden to special interests — crypto when it comes to money, fossil fuels when it comes to energy — who claim to favor technological progress, but scream “not like that” when a superior technology doesn’t take the economy where they want it to go.
Now, using tariffs to punish Brazil for its monetary achievements won’t succeed. Politically, the move will only strengthen Brazil’s President Lula. Economically, the reach of the tariffs will be limited by Trump administration fears about driving the prices of coffee, orange juice, beef and other goods even higher. And as Monica de Bolle at the Peterson Institute for International Economics argues, Trump’s tariffs have on balance strengthened Brazil’s position: “Trade diversion around the globe as a reaction to US tariffs has turned Brazil into an export powerhouse,” with Brazil, for example, capturing much of the Chinese soybean market.
But the obvious folly of these new tariffs won’t stop them from happening. The Trump administration has declared war on the future — and one thing we know about Trump is that he never admits it when his wars of choice fail.
I keep hearing anecdotes from people who used coding agents to reverse-engineer and automate devices in their homes.
I think this is an interesting illustration of the impact of the reduced cost of writing code.
Prior to agents, it was entirely possible to reverse-engineer home devices. The problem was the ROI - was it really worth all of that effort? More importantly, any experienced programmer knows that undocumented, unstable APIs like that may well change or break in the future. Is that initial work worth the effort if you're committing yourself to a frustrating cycle of maintenance in the future?
Coding agents change that equation entirely. The effort to get a simple automation working has dropped, as has the cost of trying and failing to get it to work. Since the code is so cheap, the idea of having to maintain it in the future - or throw it away and start again - carries way less psychological baggage.
Interesting proposal from Ben Thompson that both addresses the hypocrisy of labs outlawing distillation against their models despite training on unlicensed data, and could help US open models compete more effectively with their Chinese counterparts:
The U.S. should pass a law that (1) makes explicit that collecting data for training models is fair use, and (2) bars terms of service that forbid distillation, for U.S. companies at a minimum. Stopping distillation — which is literally just querying the API — is nearly impossible; the U.S. should go the other way and lean into a new copyright policy that both indemnifies the labs and also guarantees that what they learned fuels further innovation for everyone else.
Ben also theorizes that Alibaba's decision to release Qwen 3.8 Max as open weights - a reversal from their decision not to release Qwen 3.7 Max in May - may have been influenced by a recent speech by Xi Jinping, who said:
We should seize this rare, historic opportunity to encourage open source, openness, collaboration and sharing.
And on the subject of Qwen 3.8 Max - a new 2.4T parameter model (nearly as large as the 2.8T Kimi K3) - here's a pelican it drew:
I particularly enjoyed seeing these notes in the (extensive) reasoning trace: "Could add helmet? No." and "Maybe add small bell? no." and "Need maybe add small fish in basket? Not necessary."
We have been having extensive discussions around open source strategy. We will discuss it more at our next board meeting, but one thing we’d like to do soon is to create a language model with the approximate capability of GPT-3 that can run locally on consumer hardware and release that. We’d like to do it soon, before Stability or someone else does. In general, we think this helps discourage others from releasing similarly-powerful models, and makes it harder for new efforts to get funded.
— Sam Altman, Email to OpenAI's board, October 1, 2022 - exposed in Musk v. Altman (2026)
Decades of absolute victory against the screwworm ended on June 3rd, 2026 when a farmer in Zavala County, Texas (pop. 9,600) notified the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) that he discovered a calf infested by these agricultural pests. An additional 30 cases have since been reported throughout America’s cattle herding heartland across Texas, and now we have reports of infected dogs in neighboring New Mexico. Just like that, America lost our war against an insect that once ravaged the nation. Happy Anniversary, America!
The screwworm is responsible for the disease known as obligate traumatic myiasis, which leads to the consumption of living somatic tissue in warm-blooded hosts. The flesh gets eaten. The wounds smell and hurt. Animals suffer and then meet their demise. Over the decades, this severe pathology has caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of livestock, including 180,000 cattle during a single localized 1935 Texas outbreak. Until their eradication from the North American continent in mid-century, the screwworm inflicted the equivalent of billions of dollars of losses upon the American agricultural sector.
It’s a big deal that these pests are back, and now there is a race to figure out what to do about them. Luckily, an entirely new tech tree - based on CRISPR - developed since we last battled these pests. The multi-billion dollar is - will it be enough to save us?
This Year’s SheLeads from the Tokarev Foundation and uBoost Come to an End
The season is coming to an end, and the SheLeads educational program has already announced its winners. Each season, hundreds of young women participate in this initiative to turn their ideas into reality. The program guides participants through the journey from idea to product.
The program was launched through a collaboration between uBoost and the Tokarev Foundation, founded by impact investor Serhii Tokarev. This season, more than 300 young women took on the role of founders, and each pursued her own idea and approach.
What Made SheLeads Stand Out: Highlights and Results
Every year, the number of participants in the educational program grows, and this time it reached more than 300. Of these, 220 completed the full course, while 120 were assigned mentors to help bring their dream products to life. According to the jury’s decision, first place was awarded to three projects that are ready to change the world right now:
Energy Efficiency – a project presented by Sofia Kedria, who worked on it under the mentorship of Oleksandr Marchenko. The goal is to increase the efficiency of solar panels using lensing technology.
Physical Health – a project presented by Solomiya Andriychuk. The product turns workouts on gym equipment into an engaging game.
Environment – the ReGrow project, presented by Iryna Terekhova. The project’s goal is to restore damaged soil by planting microseeds. The key product is special packaging made from straw. As it decomposes, it releases the seeds into the soil, helping reduce waste while restoring damaged soil.
Each project addressed a major real-world challenge, and according to Serhii Tokarev, these young innovators represent Ukraine’s future. “SheLeads isn’t a competition. It’s proof. Ukraine will answer the question of who will rebuild the country – and SheLeads is shaping the very cohort of people who will do just that. Not someday. But right now – through a prototype, a pitch, and a first internship,” emphasized Serhii Tokarev.
How SheLeads Is Shaping the Future
Every year, the number of young women joining the educational program grows. This clearly shows that many of these participants will go on to become founders, developers, and innovators. “We see how participants come in with an idea and leave with a product, a team, and their first industry contacts. This is exactly the infrastructure of opportunities we want to create,” concludes Anastasia Deeva, CEO of the Tokarev Foundation.
The program’s impact doesn’t end with the finals, as participants gain valuable experience and make their first meaningful connections in the industry. Many participants go on to apply what they have learned in other programs. This season, for example, seven girls applied to the Technovation Girls competition, and two team projects made it to the quarterfinals.
The Project’s Roots
SheLeads would not have been possible without the fruitful collaboration between uBoost and the Tokarev Foundation. The program was created to provide young women with not only the opportunity but also the necessary resources to build their own product. Each stage is both an experience and a challenge, with experienced mentors and industry experts supporting each participant. The program concludes with projects being evaluated by a panel of judges, as well as internship offers from teams at tech giants. This season’s partners include Sigma Software Labs, Ukrainian Startup Fund, Healthy Mind, and AI HOUSE.
The Tokarev Foundation is an organization dedicated to investing in the development of a successful, sustainable, and technologically advanced Ukraine through innovative projects. The foundation’s founder, Serhii Tokarev, is a Ukrainian impact investor, tech entrepreneur, founder of SET University, and the driving force behind AI HOUSE.
Specialty healthcare often begins after a diagnosis has already disrupted sleep, work, mobility, or family routines. Patients may undergo infusions, lab monitoring, infection precautions, and insurance review, and may experience side effects that require quick judgment. Strong care begins with accurate prescribing, then continues through teaching, timely follow-up, and respectful coordination. Each contact should reduce confusion. When support feels steady, people can use more strength for recovery.
Coordinated Care Matters
Specialty infusion brings together prescribers, nurses, pharmacists, benefits teams, payors, and manufacturers around a single treatment plan. For people managing immune, neurologic, inflammatory, or bleeding disorders, Acelpa belongs in a care model where medication handling, authorization, nursing oversight, outcome reporting, and family education must align before therapy feels dependable.
Clear Communication
Patients rarely absorb every instruction during a stressful visit, especially with pain, fatigue, or a new diagnosis. Teaching should use clear words, written steps, and teach-back checks. Nurses can review dose timing, storage temperature, possible reactions, and warning signs before leaving the home. A call within several days can catch uncertainty early, prevent skipped doses, and protect trust.
Access Without Friction
Access means more than geographic distance from a clinic. It includes referral intake, benefit verification, medicine shipment, nurse scheduling, and quick answers when symptoms change. One missed handoff can postpone the first dose. Specialty teams should monitor referral age, authorization status, delivery accuracy, and start timing. These measures reveal where people wait, worry, or repeat personal details.
Personal Support
Personal support should be clinical and practical. A patient with a weak grip may struggle to open supplies. Another person may need translation, caregiver teaching, or refrigerator reminders. Home layout, mobility limits, infection risk, allergy history, and previous reactions all matter. Strong teams record these details once, then apply them during every call, delivery, and nursing visit.
Home-Based Confidence
Home infusion can preserve comfort, privacy, and routine, yet preparation must be exact. Nurses need enough time to review vascular access, clean technique, infusion steps, and emergency symptoms. Families benefit from knowing which concerns require urgent attention. Medication arrival, supply counts, and visit timing should match the prescribed schedule. Predictability lowers anxiety before treatment starts.
Better Reporting
Data has value only when it drives action. Specialty providers can monitor adherence, adverse reactions, start dates, refill timing, emergency visits, and therapy response. Physicians need clear reports that separate routine updates from clinical risk. Payors need evidence that services reduce avoidable utilization. When a missed refill is identified, outreach should occur quickly, with notes shared across the care team.
Insurance Guidance
Coverage problems can feel as heavy as physical symptoms. Prior authorization, benefit limits, site-of-care rules, and copay questions often appear before treatment begins. Administrative staff should explain the status in direct language. Patients need to know who owns the task, which record is missing, and when an update should arrive. Clear financial guidance protects treatment momentum and personal dignity.
Staff Training
Every role shapes the care experience. Intake specialists, pharmacists, nurses, drivers, and billing staff influence whether patients feel heard. Training should cover medication safety, privacy, escalation rules, empathy, and precise documentation. Leaders can review service recovery cases, call notes, and satisfaction comments to find weak points. Consistent coaching turns good intentions into reliable practice across the organization.
Measuring What Works
Patient surveys help, but they cannot tell the full story alone. Specialty programs should pair feedback with clinical and operational measures. Beneficial indicators include time to therapy, education completion, on-time delivery, adverse event follow-up, readmission rates, and treatment persistence. Regular review helps leaders adjust staffing, refine workflows, and direct attention where delays place health at risk.
Conclusion
Redefining specialty healthcare means treating the experience around treatment as part of treatment itself. Patients need accurate medication, skilled nursing, responsive insurance support, and instructions they can follow under stress. Families need steady communication and a home plan that feels reliable. When clinical data, compassionate service, and disciplined coordination work together, patients gain confidence, and care teams can pursue better outcomes.
Our new paper, Aurora DSQL: Scalable, Multi-Region OLTP, is now available on Arxiv. I’m excited about this one: it’s a fully end-to-end look at how Aurora DSQL works, from query processing, to transactions, to replication, to the control plane. We’ve shared most of this content before in other forms, on this blog, on Marc Bowes’ Blog, Werner’s Blog, in talks, and on the AWS blog. But this version covers all the ground, all in one place.
Our overall goal was to build a relational database system that simplifies the work of application building and operations, freeing builders from worrying about scale, reliability, durability, and even multi-region fault tolerance. A database of first resort, which is simple and easy to adopt at low scale, and grows with the application, without adding complexity.
I’ve written about this argument before (in DSQL: Simplifying Architectures), and it remains the thing that excites me most about the Aurora DSQL product. I believe we’ve made it much easier (and, in many cases, cheaper) to build and operate resilient, highly available, cloud applications at all scales. That applies to systems built by humans and agents, with the benefits magnified for agentic builders. Agents are great at building, but not (yet?) so great at long-horizon tasks like database operations. A database designed to simplify operations really helps.
DSQL’s architecture is disaggregated. Multiple independent services, each focused on a small number of well-defined concerns.
DSQL isn’t the first disaggregated OLTP database. Many, including Aurora and DynamoDB, came before. What’s interesting here is how we learned from those systems, and the lessons that came from operating them at scale: avoiding large caches (they make failovers and read scale tricky), offering strongly consistent scalable reads (avoiding whole classes of hot key and partition problems), and pushing expensive operations like scans down to storage where they run right next to local SSD.
We’ve also taken the approach further than others, especially in completely disaggregating replication from transaction isolation and storage.
Packing multiple workloads reduces the peak-to-average ratio of load on each physical machine (approximately at the rate of √loads). Given that resource cost typically scales with peak, and revenue scales with average, the economic benefit is obvious.
Here we’re cheekily replicating a point we also made in the Firecracker paper.
Another practical advantage of OCC is preventing clients from ever being able to block other clients. At scale, we have found that performance cross talk between clients is a significant contributor to tail latency in apps backed by pessimistic relational databases (for example clients which pause for garbage collection while holding a write lock). Operational experience at Amazon has shown that contention on locks, and retries on failure to acquire locks, are frequent contributors to system outages, and metastable failures which drive long recovery times …
I’ve written about metastable failures (have you tried Stability Sim?) many times, and this is a key part of how we designed DSQL to help applications avoid them. It also helps avoid a large class of other, more mundane, failures cause by misbehaving clients and client code.
And figure 6, another big advantage of the architecture, showing fast SELECTs and UPDATEs, even in the multi-region setting (faster than the speed of light!):
The 2007 Amazon Dynamo paper’s embrace of eventual consistency [12], and Werner Vogels 2009 article Eventually Consistent [36], reflected the thinking at the time that cloud-scale systems needed to embrace eventual consistency to achieve their availability and latency goals. Since then, advancements in time distribution, data-center networks, power and cooling infrastructure, and distributed protocols have changed the trade-offs.
A perfect illustration of ongoing benefits to databases and software systems coming from hardware, datacenter design, and networking innovations. It’s hard to overstate the power of this trend (and the opportunity still available). I continue to believe that strong consistency is the right default, and the right choice for nearly all applications.
In 1988 I bought my first Toyota Tacoma 4X4 and started taking 2-3-week trips each spring in search of hot springs, wide open spaces, and adventure — getting out of precious Marin County into the comparatively wild west and shooting photos along the way. On two of these trips I put together hand-made books. I shot photos (here with an Olympus OM-1 and a Minox GT-E pocket camera) and had 4” by 6” prints made of selected shots.
I’ve done a bunch of one-off books, of no commercial value — each with the idea of taking you, dear reader, along riding shotgun with me.
With this one, working mostly at night, I then put together 11” by 17” pages, gluing down selected photos and hand-written text. I did panoramas of pasted-together (50 mm lens) shots (inspired by a black-and-white panorama I saw on the wall of Robert Frank’s house in Nova Scotia in the ‘70s).
I painted on some of the photos with water color pens.
I think hand lettering is more friendly than type, more conversational.
When I finished (took a few months of spare time work), I had two copies of each page printed on a Canon Lasercolor copier at Krishna Copy in San Francisco. (This was the first good quality 11” by 17” color copy machine, 37 years ago, which sold for about $70,000.)
Bookbinder Sandy Good glued the pages back-to-back and bound them together into two books — all-time small print run! I would send the book to friends in a plywood box and they’d return it after a while. Like a lot of my varied forms of communication, no commercial viability.
We did a digital short-run of about 25 copies (8-1/2” by 14”), which I gave to friends, but I can’t charge enough to sell them. Plus I don’t want to go back into the mail-order book business, so figure the best form is Substack.
This is the first of three posts on the book. Does displaying a book like this on Substack work for you? (-Communicator in search of appropriate venue)
Qualification: this was 1989…
Saddle up (passenger seat) and ride with me through the deserts and canyons and hot springs of the Southwest.
Bit of a bummer update: a bunch of later trips through Austin led me to conclude there’s something wrong with this town. Bad vibes, sorry to say — as contrasted with the other major town on Hwy. 50, Eureka, which has decidedly good vibes.. Go figure.
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This is one of the cross-over spreads in the book. Below are individual pages, at larger scale.
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The strategy for China is obvious: commoditize your complements. Note that Xi explicitly ties openness to AI “moving from the digital world into the physical world”; the physical world is the world dominated by China, and the country’s lead in areas like robotics is going to massively benefit from widely available AI models.
Along the same lines, China does not want the U.S. to gain an asymmetric advantage in AI; to the extent that China can weaken the U.S. frontier labs while strengthening any and all potential U.S. adversaries so much the better, and it can benefit from the innovation that will attach itself to an open ecosystem.
And in sum:
The better course is clear: first, loosen Fable and Sol restrictions on cybersecurity, and second, ensure that U.S. open weight model makers are on an equal playing field with China. Yes, the frontier labs will kick and scream about this, but the Administration should realize that listening to their histrionics has led the U.S. to a position where U.S. companies are dependent on China for their defenses. Let the frontier labs win by being better; don’t let them define safety or security, or pull up the ladder of humanity’s collective knowledge. China is already hard enough to compete with; letting them carry the standard for openness and innovation is simply giving away our biggest advantage.
This would throttle DC’s ability to self-govern. The $1b hole in DC‘s budget was caused by Congress, not the District, which has balanced its budget 31 years in a row. We should have the right to implement sound tax policy like any other jurisdiction.
In other words, D.C. is having to raise taxes on its residents and business because Republicans in Congress, in 2025, refused to let D.C. use $1 billion in taxes D.C. had already collected. What Republicans actually want to do is inflict a backdoor cut on the District’s ability to provide services by limiting the tax revenue that can be raised.
I realize most people think of D.C. statehood in terms of two additional Democratic senators, but for the residents of the mainland colony, it is about our ability to govern ourselves. If Comey’s shit ass state of Kentucky ever had to put up with the kind of meddling in their state governance that D.C. does, D.C. statehood would be a sacrament.
I really hope, if Democrats hold the House, the Senate, and the presidency, that they pass a statehood bill, but, at this point, I have such a low opinion of Senate Democrats, I have no idea if they would*.
D.C. statehood now.
*In reality, the issue would be if senate Democrats would be willing to either end the filibuster or create a D.C. statehood carve out for statehood. I’m not optimistic.
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Democrats in the Senate have developed a ritual they enact whenever a Trump administration nominee comes before their committees for confirmation hearings. One senator on the committee is chosen to ask this question: “Who won the 2020 election?” The nominee — every single time — responds with something like, “Joe Biden was certified as the winner.” The senator then says “That’s not what I asked.” They go back and forth a bit, with the senator trying to pin the nominee down and the nominee refusing to say that Biden won.
If you’re the kind of sicko who watches a lot of C-SPAN, you might be tired of this by now, since it has been repeated dozens if not hundreds of times. But I want to argue that it’s important for Democrats to keep doing it, and not just for the viral moments. Among other things, it’s a vital component of their strategy to win back control of the government in 2028.
Ossoff shows how it’s done
Though this ritual has been repeated too many times to count by now, one recent iteration went somewhat viral, when Sen. Jon Ossoff asked the question of Jay Clayton, Trump’s nominee for Director of National Intelligence. There are a few reasons it got a lot of attention: 1) Democrats just love them some Jon Ossoff, and many are hoping he runs for president in 2028; 2) Ossoff is particularly good at this kind of questioning; and 3) he put a very important bow on the exchange. Have a look:
I’ve watched many of these episodes, and in the hands of a less skillful questioner, they often wind up losing their impact. After a few rounds back and forth, the senator ends it by saying something like “Well, I’m just shocked you can’t admit the truth. Anyhow, moving on…” Ossoff, on the other hand, not only doesn’t let Clayton get away with saying he answered the question, he frames the whole exchange at the end, so anyone watching understands what’s going on:
“Isn’t it humiliating to be unable to answer this question? To have to indulge the president’s delusions? We know, you know, everybody in this room knows the truthful answer to this question. Why can you not give it?”
By the standards of this administration, Clayton is a serious and accomplished person; he isn’t qualified for the job he’s being appointed to (he has no intelligence experience), but he was a white-shoe lawyer, chair of the SEC, and a U.S. Attorney. What’s important here is that joining the administration requires him to humiliate himself, to perform a public act of debasement required of anyone who would work for Donald Trump.
Ossoff might have gone further and said that not only does everyone know that Joe Biden won the 2020 election, Clayton himself knows it too, which makes his performance even more pathetic and repugnant. This flamboyant display of dishonesty and lickspittlery is required of everyone who works for Trump: You will have to not just indulge the president’s delusions but repeat his lies and act on his pettiest impulses, making yourself complicit in all of it.
Trump wants to prosecute his critics? Justice Department officials leap to do it, knowing the cases will get tossed out of court. Trump says the screwup of the no-bid contractor hired to seal the Reflecting Pool is actually the fault of “vandals”? Officials go on TV to insist it’s true. Trump says the Iran war is a spectacular victory? Every Republican has to agree.
And this is where we get to the next presidential election.
Why this matters for 2028
When a presidency comes to an end and someone from the same party as the outgoing president gets nominated, they often struggle to explain how they’ll be distinct — they don’t get much credit for the president’s accomplishments, but they get tarred with his shortcomings. It even happens when the outgoing president is popular; Al Gore struggled to explain how he would be his own man after serving as Bill Clinton’s VP for eight years, as did George H.W. Bush twelve years before. In 2024, Kamala Harris somehow didn’t anticipate that she’d get asked what she would have done differently over the prior four years (“There is not a thing that comes to mind”), which got her in a bunch of trouble. The more successful recent candidates — Trump, Barack Obama, George W. Bush — were able to define themselves as distinct from their parties, and didn’t carry the baggage of a prior presidency.
This problem will be even harder for Republicans to solve in 2028 because of the way Donald Trump has turned the GOP into a personality cult. There isn’t something called Bidenism or Obamaism, but Trumpism is absolutely a thing — and not a popular one. All the Republicans who will run in 2028 are tainted by it — especially J.D. Vance and Marco Rubio, but the rest of them too.
Being a Republican in the Trump era has meant many things, but one of the most important is that it has shown everyone involved to be weak. No one with any strength of character could succeed in Republican politics in this era. Not only did you have to lie, you had to tell lies when everyone knew you were lying, and communicate your approval of all Trump’s misdeeds.
When the 2028 election starts, no Republican is going to be able to escape the anchor of Trumpism. Not only will they need to pander to the MAGA base, Trump himself will still be around, and will demand that all the candidates offer him praise and fealty. If they don’t, he will unleash his wrath upon them — and because they’re all cowards, they won’t want to risk that.
To Ossoff’s question — Isn’t it humiliating? — the answer is, yes, it is humiliating. They all humiliated themselves again and again. They had to justify corruption, defend stupidity, echo bigotry, and applaud when America was damaged and degraded. They showed themselves to be spineless toadies, no matter how much they try to overcompensate by strutting around with their guts sucked in and their chests puffed out while they call their opponents gay.
This is the point that Democrats have to keep hammering for the next two years: These people — all of them — are weak and pathetic. The more voters understand that, the harder it will be for any Republican to win the White House in 2028.
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Safe housing is more than a personal concern. It is a public issue that affects health, education, economic opportunity, and neighborhood stability. When rental properties are properly maintained, communities become stronger and more resilient. When serious maintenance problems are ignored, the effects often extend beyond individual households. In situations where tenants face unsafe living conditions that remain unresolved, speaking with a slumlord attorney may help them better understand the legal protections available under applicable law. At the same time, prevention, accountability, and responsible property management remain the most effective ways to create safe housing.
Housing Conditions Affect Entire Communities
The condition of rental housing influences much more than the people who live inside a single building. Well-maintained properties contribute to healthier neighborhoods, stronger local businesses, and greater community confidence.
When buildings receive regular maintenance, residents are more likely to remain in their homes, businesses benefit from a stable workforce, and neighborhoods experience greater long-term investment. Safe housing also supports public confidence in local communities and encourages continued economic development.
By comparison, neglected properties can create challenges that affect nearby residents, property values, and public resources.
Safe Homes Support Public Health
Housing conditions play an important role in public health. Problems such as persistent moisture, mold, pest infestations, poor ventilation, damaged plumbing, or unsafe electrical systems may create concerns that affect residents over time if they are not addressed promptly.
Routine inspections and timely repairs help reduce these risks while creating healthier living environments. Property owners who respond quickly to maintenance concerns often prevent small problems from becoming more significant issues.
Healthy housing benefits not only individual families but also schools, employers, healthcare providers, and the wider community.
Property Maintenance Is an Ongoing Responsibility
Maintaining rental housing requires consistent attention rather than occasional repairs. Regular inspections allow property owners and managers to identify maintenance concerns before they become expensive or difficult to resolve.
Addressing roof leaks, plumbing problems, damaged flooring, broken windows, heating systems, and structural issues promptly helps preserve the property while protecting residents.
Preventive maintenance also reduces the likelihood of emergency repairs, limits long-term costs, and demonstrates responsible property management.
Communication Helps Resolve Problems Early
Many housing concerns can be addressed through timely communication between tenants and property owners.
Residents should report maintenance issues as soon as they become aware of them, while property managers should acknowledge reports, schedule inspections, and provide updates throughout the repair process. Written communication creates a reliable record that helps everyone understand what has been reported and what actions have been taken.
Clear communication often prevents misunderstandings and encourages cooperation before disputes become more difficult to resolve.
Housing Standards Promote Accountability
Building codes and housing standards exist to encourage safe living conditions and establish clear expectations for property maintenance. Although requirements vary by jurisdiction, these standards generally promote regular upkeep, timely repairs, and responsible property management.
Housing inspections, maintenance records, and repair documentation all contribute to greater accountability. They also help property owners demonstrate that reasonable steps have been taken to maintain safe conditions.
For tenants, understanding basic housing standards can make it easier to recognize when maintenance concerns should be reported.
Stable Housing Strengthens Local Economies
Communities benefit when residents have access to safe and dependable housing. Stable housing allows people to maintain employment, support local businesses, and participate in neighborhood life.
Employers also benefit from workers who are not facing repeated housing disruptions. Schools experience greater continuity when families remain in their communities, while local businesses often benefit from long-term residents who invest in the local economy.
These broader economic effects illustrate why housing quality is not only a private concern but also an important public policy issue.
Education Encourages Better Outcomes
Many housing disputes begin with uncertainty rather than intentional wrongdoing. Tenants may not know when to report maintenance concerns, while property owners may underestimate the importance of prompt repairs or clear communication.
Educational resources help both parties understand their responsibilities and encourage practical solutions before problems grow. Reading lease agreements carefully, documenting maintenance requests, and keeping organized records all contribute to better decision making.
When expectations are clearly understood, many housing concerns can be resolved more efficiently.
Building Healthier Communities Through Safe Housing
Safe housing depends on cooperation among tenants, property owners, property managers, inspectors, and local agencies. Each plays a role in maintaining residential properties and protecting the people who live in them.
Although some disputes require outside assistance, many can be avoided through preventive maintenance, open communication, and consistent attention to property conditions. These practices support stronger neighborhoods, healthier residents, and more stable local economies.
Communities thrive when housing is treated as a shared responsibility rather than a short-term obligation. Investing in safe rental properties, responding promptly to maintenance concerns, and encouraging accountability benefit everyone involved. Strong housing standards ultimately support healthier communities, greater public confidence, and a more sustainable future for both residents and property owners.
3. Jacobian conjecture proved false. Fable found a counterexample that fits inside a tweet. From the strawberry guy: “in the areas that the labs are targeting, we’ve achieved artificial super intelligence. no single human and perhaps all of humanity could compete with this intelligence. once the model gets good enough at training future models this level of intelligence will spread to all domains.”
Phones Failed After Helene, But Amateur Radio Operators Summoned Help and Supplies.
Tropical storm Helene created a massive communications blackout in Western North Carolina, killing internet and cell service for most of the 400,000+ people who live in the greater Asheville area. Even 911 was down. But for Thomas Witherspoon, 53, of Swannanoa, his ability to communicate during the storm was relatively unaffected.
There are a few reasons for that. Earlier that year, the Witherspoon family had upgraded to satellite internet. They’d also gotten solar panels, installed with a whole-house battery system that allowed them to keep their electricity and live completely off-grid. In the weeks after the storm, their house became an impromptu internet cafe for the neighborhood. They shared provisions, too, cooking for each other before the food went bad. “Our neighborhood was very self-sufficient,” Witherspoon said with a glimmer of pride.
But it was his amateur “ham” radio that provided a critical connection to the outside world. One day, after a post-storm meeting with his neighbors, Witherspoon called the Mount Mitchell radio “repeater” — a mountain-based station that extends the range of two-way radios by re-transmitting them at a higher power — and requested the supplies the neighborhood needed from the local fire department. The next day they received a delivery of chainsaw chains, coffee and other essentials.
“Even though I had internet at the house,” Witherspoon said, “who would you email for that? So having this was like having a direct connection to an entire emergency infrastructure.”
Thomas Witherspoon shows off his equipment at the Asheville Radio Museum. Photo credit: Sydney Woogerd
Many Western North Carolinians were well-connected before the storm, though Census data shows that over 14% of Asheville residents still lacked access to broadband internet pre-Helene. But even those who had reliable connectivity faced a near-total blackout in the storm’s immediate aftermath. According to North Carolina’s Statewide Interoperability Coordinator Greg Hauser, who spoke at a Federal Communications Commission roundtable on July 7, 2025, over 1,700 miles of fiber optic cable was lost or destroyed during Hurricane Helene, and many of the region’s cell towers were knocked over. Even three weeks after the storm, thousands of people still hadn’t gotten their electricity back.
With power lines down and wifi cables damaged, it was the folks with a much older method of communicating – the amateur radio operators – who were able to bridge gaps and connect those in need of life-sustaining services.
“Radio is not something I thought much about until this storm,” said Sara Nichols, energy and economic development manager at the Land of Sky Council, a multi-county local government organization based in Asheville, but it “was a saving grace for a lot of people.” Those who had knowledge of and access to that technology were in a far better position than those who didn’t. Plus, “having life skills is like an Appalachian dream, you know?” she said.
History of ‘ham’
“Ham radios” are handheld, two-way radio devices with a speaker, microphone and antenna. They look similar to a walkie-talkie, but they allow for the use of repeaters. Since ham radios operate on high frequencies, which travel in straight lines and are easily stopped by obstacles, radio repeaters are usually placed on a mountain peak or atop a tower.
There’s a finite amount of radio frequencies available with existing technologies, so it’s licensed and regulated by the Federal Communications Commission. That means amateur users need to take a test and pay a fee to legally be allowed to use it. Ham radios operate on a vast spectrum of different bands, including HF (high frequency), VHF (very high frequency) and UHF (ultra high frequency).
Thomas Witherspoon draws a diagram of how a repeater allows radio traffic to traverse mountains. Photo credit: Sydney Woogerd
Amateur radio was born in the early 20th century, as advancements in wireless communication technology attracted scientists and hobbyists alike to experiment with it. During both world wars, radio usage for amateurs was banned or restricted, and hobbyists were sometimes called to apply those skills in service of the nation. As cellphones and the internet became more popular over the years, radio’s popularity dwindled, and many municipal governments stopped investing in it.
“When decisions about investments were being made,” Nichols explained, “they often were not made with the radio as the priority, because it wasn’t where things were headed.”
Another transmission method whose advantages were highlighted during Helene, called general mobile radio service or GMRS, operates on a more limited range of UHF bands but still allows the use of the repeater.
For Justin Hamel, a 41-year-old father and longtime amateur radio enthusiast based in Fairview, GMRS is a more accessible alternative to ham radio, which has a more intensive licensing process and a slightly less welcoming culture.
“There’s a lot of typically older gentlemen in ham radio,” Hamel said, “and they practice a lot of gatekeeping.” But with GMRS, he said, it’s “easy for normal people to use. I say normal in comparison to nerds like me.”
Helene turned Hamel from a radio enthusiast to an evangelist. When the storm hit his neighborhood in a mountain cove of Fairview, he lost cell service, power and internet. The cell towers “were just kind of dropping like flies one by one,” he said, “when either they were damaged, or they ran out of what I assume to be diesel generator backup.” A landslide had also blocked his family’s exit path, so they were trapped and otherwise cut off.
Justin Hamel with his radio. Photo courtesy of Justin Hamel.
Hamel’s mother lives in Houston, and he needed to find a way to let her know his family was OK. Luckily, he’s had his ham radio license for over a decade. He called the Mount Mitchell repeater — the same one Witherspoon contacted — and they were able to contact his mother. “They said, ‘no problem, we’ll get back to you in about 5 minutes. Just stand by,'” Hamel said. A few minutes later, they called him back and let him know his mother was crying with joy.
“She was so thankful to hear that we were OK,” he said, “because from her perspective, seeing it on the news right after the storm, it was just all doom and gloom. There were no other positive stories yet, and nobody really knew what was going on on the ground other than it was just really bad.”
Once he took care of his own family, he turned his attention outward to others who needed help. Hamel is vice president of his homeowner’s association, and he stayed behind with a “skeleton crew” of neighbors to help clear debris. One of Hamel’s other neighbors had fled to his second home and offered to bring supplies for them, asking what they needed.
“Please bring radios,” Hamel told him. The neighbor brought a bunch of family radio service (FRS) radios, which Hamel said are the same kind you can buy at Walmart. They’re low power and low range, and while they were better than nothing, they were far from ideal. The houses in Hamel’s mountain cove are spaced far apart, so the lower power of the FRS devices couldn’t connect everyone in the neighborhood.
“On a mountainside, with all that rough terrain, and just the distances we were trying to talk, it didn’t work well,” he recalled. “But it did get the neighbors interested in radio. They saw it as being a viable backup.”
And that’s all he needed to start thinking big about what he could next.
Hamel building a radio repeater. Photo courtesy of Justin Hamel.
Minding the Gaps
The rise in amateur radio interest is especially significant, given that public communications resiliency has been so patchworked. There have been many improvements since the storm, but it’s hard to get a sense of what is still down, said Nichols, of the Land of Sky Council.
Since Helene, Nichols has been attempting to map areas where broadband internet is still down, which is harder than one might think. “Broadband companies do not have to — nor will they — essentially show you the map of where the infrastructure is,” she said. On top of that, “I am anecdotally aware that there are places that these providers did not build back because the infrastructure they had to those homes was never profitable.” Without those clear maps about what communities are still not getting internet service, Nichols has had to find workarounds to get the data she needs.
In a draft communications resiliency plan Nichols wrote, which she hopes to present before the end of June, she writes that although public officials had thought systems were redundant — or had ample backup in case of disaster — many of them actually shared the same infrastructure. So when specific fiber routes or power dependencies went down in a “cascade” of failures, whole swaths of communication went dark. The plan lauds radio as the “primary reliable method” of communication during Helene.
It also calls for “Physical Resilience Hubs,” or sites equipped with satellite internet, radio technology and solar panels for reliable power. Nichols said she got a $500,000 grant from Dogwood Health Trust, a local nonprofit, to start building these resilience hubs for 18 counties in Western North Carolina including Buncombe, Rutherford and Madison. Also, Nichols shared that a technology company expressed interest in potentially partnering with the council on these hubs. She declined to share the name of the company, but said that in the next couple of months, they plan to use that company’s tech product and that the company also plans to contribute funding to the project.
In the meantime, Hamel has been working hard to increase amateur radio use as well. After Helene, he founded the WNC Radio Project, an all-volunteer organization that works to maintain and grow the network of repeaters in the region. WNC Radio Project’s nonprofit status was approved on March 5.
He’s also been raising funds to keep the new repeaters updated to prevent wear and tear. Recently, Hamel installed a heat exchanger to help the structure shed heat during the summer. And he’s currently fundraising to get a plaque made to highlight the over 50 names of people who helped with or donated to the project.
Finally, Hamel started offering GMRS fundamentals classes to help familiarize people with the technology and licensing process. The key, he said, is that teachers hold students’ hands throughout the entire license application. “It’s amazing how cheap and expansive that GMRS license is,” he said, but “the FCC does not make it a linear or easy process” to get it.
“It really spread like wildfire to some degree,” he said. People are driving up to an hour to get to his classes. As of March, he had taught about 15 sessions on GMRS, each of which had approximately 20-40 people in attendance.
“There’s truly a need,” Hamel said, “and we’re trying to meet that need.”
A Radio ‘Renaissance’
In fact, across the Western North Carolina area, GMRS license applications have ballooned since the storm. In the year after Helene, the number of GMRS licenses approved in North Carolina increased by 36.34%, according to license data from the FCC. The increase in Western North Carolina has been more dramatic: From late September 2024 to 2025, GMRS licenses increased 575% in Fairview, 600% in Swannanoa and 517% in Black Mountain.
Repeater infrastructure has gotten more robust, too: The WNC Radio Project has successfully launched two new repeaters so far, and Hamel said he was aware of four other repeaters that have come online since the storm, including one in Yancey County that just went live in April.
But this is all at the grassroots level. “There’s no government push to do anything,” Witherspoon said. “It’s mainly just the community that pushes to do it.” It’s part of a greater pressure — to be prepared for a disaster — that people have felt since the storm.
Chloe Button, a 14-year-old freshman at A. C. Reynolds High School, is turning her Girl Scouts project into a beacon of disaster communication preparedness. Button lost her 20-year-old brother Nathan just days before Helene came. He was hit in a collision with a drunk driver. Nathan was an organ donor, and amid the storm’s chaos, Button’s mother Michelle Yates flew him out in a helicopter to Charlotte to facilitate the donation process. That left Button alone during Helene with her stepfather and unable to communicate with friends until the wifi returned.
After school came back — over a month after the storm — Button remembered the school sending a form to all students, asking whether they knew anyone who was hurt or had died from Helene. “It was pretty scary,” she said.
The experience of a communications blackout stuck with her. Later, to achieve her Girl Scout Gold Award, Button decided to create disaster communication packs for local churches and her local fire station, which included radios and instructions about how to use them. Button’s brother was also a ham radio enthusiast, and the packs have a memorial card commemorating him.
Button will donate the packs to all fire stations in Fairview and several churches and other organizations. She’ll present on her project and be given her Gold Award at a ceremony in May.
The contents of Button’s radio kit. Photo credit: Mia Filler
“I like the idea that, like, you can just communicate with people so far away,” Button said. It also connects Button to her grandfather, Craig Tyler, who passed away in 2023. He was a radio and model train enthusiast and had a collection in his basement.
Meanwhile, Witherspoon continues to give keynotes and other speeches about disaster communication, preparedness and what his Helene experience taught him. He’s given almost 20 public presentations on this so far, and he’ll also be speaking at an American Radio Relay League (ARRL) convention in May.
The more robust the network of radio repeaters gets, the more accessible it is to the entire area — since generally a GMRS radio needs to be within 10 to 25 miles of a repeater to work, depending on the terrain. Similarly, Hamel continues the work to maintain the two repeaters he helped install and potentially build new ones. Most recently, he’s been meeting with community leaders in the Broad River Valley near the hard-hit community of Bat Cave, about an hour west of Asheville, to try and get a repeater installed there.
“Even in the modern day,” Hamel said, “there are still some tools like radio that we still fall back on when our modern technology or modern conveniences fail. When your furnace goes out in the dead of winter, and nobody’s getting to you, what do you do? You light a fire. We go back to lighting a fire. And that’s how I feel about radio: it’s just one of those core technologies that we can always fall back on when we need to.”
Chloe Button shows off the radio kit she made for local churches. Photo credit: Mia Filler
Frequently Asked Questions About Radio Communications During Tropical Storm Helene
What Is Ham radio?
Broad frequency access; requires FCC exam and license fee; supports long-distance communication via HF, VHF and UHF bands.
What Is GMRS?
General Mobile Radio Service; simpler license process; supports repeater use on UHF; considered more accessible for everyday users.
What Is FRS
Family Radio Service (e.g., Walmart walkie-talkies); no license required; low power, short range; does not support repeaters.
How did ham radio help during Hurricane Helene?
Amateur radio operators provided emergency communication when cell service, internet and even 911 systems failed, helping residents request supplies, contact family members and coordinate relief efforts.
Why did communications fail during Hurricane Helene?
The storm destroyed fiber optic lines, damaged cell towers and caused widespread power outages, leaving much of Western North Carolina without internet, phone service or emergency communications.
What lessons did communities learn after Helene?
The storm highlighted the importance of redundant communication systems, community preparedness, resilience hubs powered by solar energy and satellite internet, and expanding access to amateur and GMRS radio networks.
This article is part of Caught in the Current: Helene Recovery in Asheville and Beyond a project that we have partnered on with the School of Journalism at Northeastern University. Their enterprising students took on the story of Asheville, North Carolina, a community still dealing with the devastation of Hurricane Helene, 18 months later. As part of our mentoring program, we’re amplifying their efforts by sharing the amazing work produced by their students. Visit the official interactive magazine for the project HERE.
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A recent story of a writer who was mistakenly identified, tracked, and arrested using data from Flock cameras has gone viral.
The New Jersey plates that were allegedly stolen from the LA dealer were 34 03 DTM, not 34 10 DTM. But when the police report was created and the plate was entered into Flock’s system, it was just recorded as 34 DTM. Just the five large characters, no little number in the middle. And Flock’s AI tech wasn’t registering that non-standard little number when it began picking up the Range Rover around town. It just saw 34 DTM in large type and started alerting the local police.
As we all stood there shaking our heads, including my wife, who was finally allowed to join me, I connected the final dot. A lot of vehicles in JLR’s media fleet have a New Jersey manufacturer plate with the same alphanumeric structure34 ## DTMand Officer Ganshyn observed that meant it was now a nationwide issue. Anywhere a police department has a partnership with Flock, any other JLR-owned car with the same plate structure is going to get flagged as stolen. In fact, four other 34 ## DTM cars were being tracked around Minnesota that week, according to Officer Ganshyn. I was just the first one to get nabbed. The only way to stop it would be for the LAPD to correct their initial report and update Flock’s system, which Jaguar Land Rover was now racing to make happen following the phone call.
Flock has responded to the bad press. First, they affirmed that their systems were working correctly, and blamed the police:
The obvious question was that Flock cameras were looking for 34 DTM, and the plate on the car I was driving was 34 10 DTM. Why was that flagged as a match?
“The way that the ML [machine learning] works is it correctly read what it was supposed to read. It was fed those characters that you said, 34 DTM, and it spit back out [a result] with the characters, 34 DTM,” Thomas said. “It was asked, can you find this? And it did find that. It just didn’t say if there’s more here, then don’t do it. It just simply said, is it there? And the answer was yes.”
He explained that even if the 10 was normal size, Flock would still have flagged it as a match, because that’s how they’ve set it up according to law enforcement’s requests. Sometimes partial plates are all they have to go on at first.
“The way that law enforcement likes to use these tools is, if any of the characters that they have put into these hot lists get read, they want to get those alerts,” he said. “Now, what we try to train officers to do is to do what you said, which is to verify that 34 DTM is what I’m looking for, and what I’m seeing is 34 10 DTM.”
Second, Flock’s CEO has apologized for calling privacy advocates terrorists:
The CEO of Flock Safety, the company that runs an enormous network of cameras used by police departments across the U.S., hasn’t been shy about taking on Flock’s critics. Last year, he even called one group that tracks the location of Flock cameras “terrorists.” But he’s had a change of heart. Or, at the very least, a change in PR strategy.
Meanwhile, the police are using (alternate source) the Flock camera network to track people in addition to cars:
Police departments around the country have used Flock cameras at least hundreds of times to search for specific people, not cars, using searches such as “heavy-set male with a black and white hat,” “person on skateboard,” and “person wearing orange vest and construction hat,” according to data reviewed by 404 Media. Sometimes searches reference a target’s race or signs of their political affiliation.
And, like all police surveillance technologies, there are abuses.
Last time Electromagnetic Field was on, two years ago, I felt a bit bad that I didn’t go given that I would love there to be more events near here that interest me, and this was fairly close. But I don’t like camping and also don’t like driving far (the site is about an hour away from us), so I didn’t go then and, again, this year I didn’t try to get tickets.
But at the beginning of this week I saw a post saying there were some people who couldn’t make it selling spare tickets and, this catching me at a good moment, I ended up thinking, “I can drive there and back for a couple of days, no problem!” and so I bought a ticket.
So, while I felt like a bit of a tourist – only being on site for 10 hours on Saturday and 6 on Sunday – I did go and I had a good time.
I wasn’t sure what to expect but it was bigger, with more structures, and even nicer than I expected. It felt very chill, everyone friendly, and full of people who appeared comfortable dressing and being however they wanted. In this, and a few other respects, it was like the best aspects of Burning Man (from my memory of over two decades ago).
While it’s kind of a “tech” festival it was very, very much not “tech bro”, and I can imagine some awful MAGA politician or influencer having some kind of breakdown if they were transported there, faced with the lack of manly testosterone or whatever. I might be very straight, cis, white, male, middle-aged, and “conventionally”-dressed but it’s great to be somewhere that others can be whoever they are, and everyone is chill about it (as far as I can tell).
I hardly took any photos. Apparently there were several C5s there. Of course.
All-in-all it was amazingly well organised, curated, hosted, planned, run, etc., very good, top marks Jonty, Russ, and co.
I ignored the advice I got from a couple of people about skipping the talks and watching the videos later, because going to talks is a great way to fill the time and (rightly or wrongly) to avoid the stress of making too much conversation. Here are videos of the good ones I went to:
Some others I went to were very information-dense, rather than entertaining, so unless you already knew something about the topic, or were otherwise really into the details of it, they were a bit hard going for me. But there are plenty more videos to browse through.
I also bumped into several people I haven’t seen for years, or even decades, which was very nice, and put quite a few new faces to avatars (sorry kids, I mean pfps). As I may have said before at some point, I’m not sure if my ability to make conversation in groups has atrophied over recent years or, more likely, was already pretty poor and has had no chance to improve. But, still, lovely to have quick chats.
And I’m glad I didn’t camp because I was already pretty tired by the time I ducked out on Sunday afternoon, even having missed the hottest of the recent hot days. And the driving was, it turned out, as good as it could get – mostly fairly traffic-free A-roads twirling through the countryside, and I knew enough to avoid the tiny, steep road Apple Maps insists on directing you onto through Ludlow. Still, it was a relief to get there and back without serious mishap.
§Current state of what remains of our lawn/meadow. Only did a little scything this week.
§ We went to see The Odyssey and it was fine I guess. Everyone else loves it apparently and I do find myself agreeing with most of the things people like about it. Apart from the casting of Matt Damon who, on returning to Ithaca, seems more like someone who got distracted for a bit too long on the way home from the gym, rather than a man who’s been lost for twenty years. I didn’t like The Return (2024, Uberto Pasolini) that much but Ralph Fiennes was much more convincing.
It all looked good, told the story well (I assume; my knowledger is sketchy), had some good performances (Samantha Morton especially good), and really didn’t feel like 3 hours.
But there was a lot of exposition that everyone had to struggle to deliver convincingly. And the hammering home of “Zeus’ Law” felt like such a clunky, repetitive, Hollywood simplification of something. And it turns out it was (an invention, anyway).
And, as a non-American, almost all the accents being American is something I found oddly off-putting. I couldn’t help seeing all the people as stock American movie and TV characters, bringing all the baggage of gangsters, cops, marines, divorced dads, incels, MAGA bros, whatever, into it all. Had everyone been British I might not have thought about this side of things, so I’m not saying any of it is wrong, just how it felt to me as an “outsider”.
This also meant that the movie seemed like an allegory of the USA’s behaviour: over-confidently invading and pillaging countries, bursting into homes with weapons drawn, all while expecting to be warmly welcomed and wondering why they’re not. I now expect US soldiers in foreign countries to cry, “Zeus’ Law! Zeus’ Law!” whenever they meet opposition, whether from governments or individuals.
But, you know, most people can just enjoy it as a good action pic.
§ We also watched Mission: Impossible III and, at last, after the so-so first movie and the bad second one, this was good! Lots of fun, pretty non-stop, everything Aanand’s review says. See, I can like a fun action movie!
§ That’s all, a bit late. I am quite tired a lot these days. Not sure if it’s one or many causes, but I just want to hide and sleep for a few weeks.
Obviously, testosterone doesn’t make us smarter or savvier, more capable to handle complex situations quickly or to adjust to an opponent.
Otherwise, War/Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth would be getting calls from Mensa’s brain crowd about instant membership.
Hegseth, a constant advocate for muscularity over empathy, now is ordering testosterone deficiency testing for all military members over 30 and the standing order to undergo shots for any perceived low-T result. He sees eliminating testosterone deficiency as a way of “restoring and optimizing your natural capabilities” and retaining our military’s “leading edge of lethality” for the individual Warfighter.
That’s unless you happen to be a woman, whom Hegseth would prefer to avoid combat altogether — or the commander in chief, who seems to have plenty of unharnessed testosterone but not much physical agility.
By contrast, Hegseth has dropped shots for flu or Covid, apparently out of the mistaken belief that masculine toughness is naturally resistant to, say, contagious virus. Just for the record, flu , measles and other respiratory infections have turned out to be concerns for the military stationed near Iran because of high density living aboard ships or in camps.
Hegseth prides himself on his own tip-top physical conditioning now that he apparently turned away from consuming lots of alcohol, complete with public pushup contests with Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., delight at White House martial arts demos, and fat-shaming for overweight generals. He firmly believes that a muscular soldier is a more dangerous warfighter and thinks he has the power and position to force testosterone treatments to assure that lethal edge.
The War on Nature
Maybe this is what Hegseth believes passes as military intelligence, partly explaining why he constantly sees bombing in Iran separate from achieving an overall strategic objective.
Only, it turns out that Hegseth, um, may not quite understand what he is talking about.
Let’s start with testosterone, a primary steroid hormone essential for male reproductive development, muscle mass maintenance, bone density and sex drive. Not lethality. What Hegseth probably wants is more male soldiers who accept his socialized view of toughness or masculinity, not a specific steroid count.
The medical research is clear: There is no “normal” level of testosterone.
In fact, blood levels of testosterone can “vary dramatically over time and even during the course of a day,” according to a Harvard Medical School study, making a snapshot less than definitive. Add in a large study by the National Institutes of Health that concluded in young to middle-aged males, “testosterone levels are positively associated with muscle massbut not with muscle strength” – or presumably lethality. The Food and Drug Administration warns that testosterone-boosting drugs of the sort that Hegseth is ordering can produce high blood pressure, blood clots and mood changes.
A decade ago, I underwent prostate cancer surgery, radiation and hormone treatments to halt the testosterone that fed the cancer. It left me hairless and more fatigue but did not seem to touch either quickness of thought or any killer instinct I may have been harboring.
Apart from all else, the Pentagon is in court on a case about dropping flu shots arguing that it cannot manage widespread vaccinations. T-shots could involve hundreds of thousands of military members, a seemingly at odds with what is being argued in court.
The Nature of War
In its recruiting materials, the Army itself says it wants soldiers who blend physical resilience with strong character and mental discipline. Desirable traits include the capacity to endure stress, ethical integrity, the ability to function seamlessly in a team, and an unyielding commitment to the mission.
Where does it say manly men and testosterone? Or the desire to kill people? The Army’s materials say what is valued are loyalty, duty, respect, selfless service, honor, integrity and personal courage. It seems like a good list, requiring commitments that don’t include testosterone-building drugs.
Hmm. I’d like to know the testosterone level of those Navy Blue Angel pilots who thought it an perfectly reasonable idea to dive to just above beachgoers in Florida, sending umbrella spikes flying dangerously through the crowd – all to the plaudits from Hegseth and the acting Secretary of the Navy, Hung Cao. Sure, the action could have been lethal, but where was the judgment?
As columnist Fred Kaplan argues in Slate.com, the bigger fallacy here is that even if Hegseth’s assumptions about testosterone are correct, they may have little to do with the nature of modern warfare or the talents, abilities, or “lethality” of a modern “warfighter” who launches missiles or directs drones from over the horizon.
Obviously, some combat centers on individual heroics and physicality. It is possible that a low testosterone level may affect endurance of special ops teams, for example.
But daily, we are redefining a new era in warfare as the need to understand robotics and artificial intelligence, computer programming and the links among economic, diplomatic and military concerns. We are valuing quickness of mind over quickness of fists.
The modern army, navy and air services are as dependent on understanding cultural issues, language and communication skills, and the coordination of international intelligence findings as they are on brute force, regardless of gender, political outlook or obedience.
These all reflect skills that Hegseth has discouraged, barred, cut or eliminated for our military enlisted and officers alike.
If Hegseth could interrupt his pushups long enough, perhaps he could think more clearly.
“FREEDOM OF THE PRESS IS NOT JUST IMPORTANT TO DEMOCRACY, IT IS DEMOCRACY.” – Walter Cronkite. CLICK HERE to donate in support of our free and independent voice.
Are some children more gifted than others, and can they be identified in ways that aren't irreparably confounded with socioeconomic status? Those questions are part of what lies behind long-standing controversies about public schools that require entrance exams (typically high schools), and interventions for gifted children at earlier ages.
Below are two recent stories that tackle those questions from different parts of the life cycle, i.e. from exam-school admissions to adult achievements.
"About 62 percent of the students in the city’s public schools are Black or Hispanic. But at its eight most prestigious high schools, about 10 percent of the students in the incoming freshman class are expected to be Black or Hispanic, roughly the same as last year. About 80 percent of the seats went to Asian and white students.
"At Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, often considered the most selective of the city’s specialized high schools, three of the 777 offers were made to Black students, and 21 were for Hispanic students, together representing a nearly one-third decline from the previous freshman class. One Black student was admitted to Staten Island Technical High School.
"While only 5 percent of high school students attend a specialized school, the annual release of the admission results has stirred debate and scrutiny for decades, especially as the profile of students in those schools stands in stark contrast to the rest of the school system, the nation’s largest. Gaining entrance to the schools has been perceived as a path out of poverty and a gateway to the nation’s top colleges and, perhaps, a flourishing career.
...
"Critics have called the one-day, high-stakes test racially discriminatory, saying it does not capture a student’s intelligence or capabilities. Supporters say it is a fair, rigorous and meritocratic assessment." ...
"“It’s not how we do admissions for colleges, for law school, for business school, for medical school,” Mr. Restler said. “How on earth do we do it for these specialized high schools?”
"Yiatin Chu, a public school parent and the co-founder of Parent Leaders for Accelerated Curriculum and Education, a group that has supported gifted and talented programs, said that the entrance exam was a “race-blind, income-blind test."
###########
And here's an article from New Scientist on adult achievement:
" a spate of studies is providing answers and revealing the fascinating lifelong impacts of being marked as exceptional at a young age.
"Far from growing into troubled adults, many gifted individuals appear to flourish later in life. Long-term studies suggest they are more likely than average to achieve professional success and, contrary to popular stereotypes, often enjoy better mental health. Scientists are also starting to understand what makes gifted brains so exceptional, finding that they are better integrated and can process information more efficiently, which raises the question of whether we should view giftedness as another form of neurodiversity. While that is still an open debate, what is becoming increasingly clear is that many of our assumptions about extraordinary minds – and the lives of those who possess them – may need revising.
...
“Despite their exceptional talent, identifying gifted children is challenging, especially when accounting for differences in socioeconomic backgrounds. Even though genetics play a large role in intellectual development, family circumstances heavily influence performance on traditional intelligence tests, particularly in early childhood. Children growing up in working-class families tend to develop a smaller vocabulary in their first years, for instance, which may increase the likelihood that teachers or psychologists ignore their learning potential.”
The nine Merlin engines on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket ignite briefly before shutting down during a rare, post-ignition abort on Monday, July 20, 2026. Image: SpaceX.
Update July 20, 11:18 a.m. EDT (1518 UTC): SpaceX aborts the mission after ignition.
SpaceX suffered its second launch scrub in less than a week after its Falcon 9 rocket failed to launch from Vandenberg Space Force Base on Monday.
On-screen telemetry graphics showed all nine Merlin engines briefly ignited before quickly shutting down. SpaceX ended its broadcast prior to offering an explanation and didn’t immediately share further details on social media.
“Standing down from today’s Starlink launch; vehicle and payload remain safe,” SpaceX wrote in a brief post on X.
The Starlink 17-39 mission was set to add another two dozen of SpaceX’s Starlink V2 Mini broadband internet satellites to its massive low Earth orbit constellation. Liftoff from Space Launch Complex 4 East was timed for 7:49 a.m. PDT (10:49 a.m. EDT / 1449 UTC). The company’s website now lists the next launch opportunity as being Tuesday during a window that opens at 7 a.m. PDT (10 a.m. EDT / 1400 UTC)
The Starlink 17-39 mission was using the Falcon 9 first stage booster B1082. This was going to be its 23rd flight after launching the NROL-145, USSF-62, and OneWeb Launch 20 missions, plus 19 Starlink deliveries.
Rare setbacks
The Monday morning mission was scheduled to be the 85th Falcon 9 rocket launch of the year and the 667th to date.
The last time a Falcon 9 launch encountered an abort after engine ignition was June 14, 2024 during the Starlink 10-2 mission launch attempt. That mission ultimately launched on June 23, but using a different first stage booster.
This launch abort came just days after a similar post-ignition abort of SpaceX’s Starship-Super Heavy rocket from down at its Starbase facilities in southern Texas. The company had to scrub the Flight 13 launch attempt and founder Elon Musk announced that at least two Raptor engines would need to be “removed and replaced.”
SpaceX is currently targeting Thursday, July 23, for its next attempt to launch the Starship Flight 13 mission, but a tropical disturbance in the Gulf of Mexico might be another obstacle for the test flight.
Starship and the Super Heavy booster both use Raptor engines, fueled by liquid methane, while the Falcon 9 rocket is powered by kerosene-fueled Merlin engines.
It is fun to watch/rewatch this 1990 movie circa 2026. It is about New York City debutantes (CT and the Hamptons too), and how they interact with each other. The movie is set a bit earlier in time, perhaps in the mid-1980s, though some scenes hearken back to the 1970s. Of course there is no social media and no cell phones. So the characters do look at each other, and talk to each other, the whole time. People dress up, and social smoking is “a thing.” There is no hook-up culture, as even casual sex has some sort of social implication. Women are seen as vulnerable, and the men occasionally punch each other. People drink. Throughout various scenes, characters debate Jane Austen, Lionel Trilling, and Buñuel (it was not yet recognized that Mansfield Park is an excellent novel). But do they read actual novels, or just the literary criticism? Women can be branded as “sluts.” Nerds had not yet taken over the world, and there is no Jane Street, though toward the end there is one odd scene where the neon lights rather obviously spell out “ELON” in the upper right side of the screen. Coincidence rather than time travel, I am sure. There are no Asians in the group, it seems no Jews, and if anyone is gay he or she remains in the closet. People of modest income had big apartments, and the so-called wealthy were not very rich at all, though they could afford black tie and white tie attire.
Was everyone happier and better off back then? Did they have deeper understandings of the world? Did they treat each other like heartless beasts? Would you eschew one of their parties and stay at home and scroll Twitter? You can watch this film and ponder those questions to your heart’s content. Alternatively, you could go to a debutante ball, which it turns out still exists. Which of those has been your choice?
HELSINKI — A six-month-old Chinese startup aiming to use artificial intelligence to compress rocket engine development cycles has raised $29.5 million in angel funding. LegendSpace, full name Linjie Hangtian (Beijing) […]
Brazilian users browsing the App Store rankings in categories
such as Navigation, Travel, and Weather have noticed a growing
number of poorly made games appearing among the top results, many
of them featuring AI-generated illustrations of animals as their
app icons.
As it turns out, these are so-called jacket apps, which are just a
front for hidden betting and gambling apps. A 9to5Mac
investigation has uncovered more than 60 apps that behave exactly
as depicted in their App Store screenshots when accessed from
virtually anywhere in the world, except Brazil.
When opened from a Brazilian IP address, the same apps instead
reveal online betting platforms, as shown in the example below,
which is currently the top app in the Weather category.
Obviously the main problem is that these apps disguise themselves Trojan Horse-style, and slip through App Store review undetected. I don’t think it’s reasonable to think App Store review could catch every attempt at this sort of thing though — if the horses are disguised well-enough, some of them are going to slip through. That’s actually fine.
But the first example 9to5Mac cites isn’t well disguised at all. What sense does it make that “PotatoPlot Puzzle” — a game featuring a rabbit potato farmer — is a weather app? How is that not a red flag right there?
Also, this app rose to become not just popular, but the number one weather app in Brazil, a nation with over 200 million citizens. In my yearslong argument that Apple should commission an internal bunco squad dedicated to hunting down scammers in the App Store, I always mention that the point of such a squad shouldn’t be to make the App Store 100 percent scammer-free — which I believe is an impossible goal that would set the team up for failure. The point should be only to make the App Store free of successful scams. Focus on the most popular apps and the most lucrative apps. There’s simply no feasible excuse for PotatoPlot Puzzle to have become the most popular “weather app” in Brazil.
First, thank you again to everyone who has contributed to keep us moving forward toward our goal in this year’s Annual TPM Journalism Fund Drive. We have a chance to hit $300,000 tonight. If you’ve been considering joining us by making a contribution this afternoon and evening are great times for it. Just click right here. And thank you for supporting our work.
This was the eighth week of videos from the 250 to 250 Project that we’re producing to honor the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
We designed the videos to emphasize the agency of Americans—mostly everyday Americans—to change the country. Each falls into a category that defines what it means to be an American, including community, democracy, innovation, mobility, civil rights, education, conservation, and creativity.
You can follow the project at the sites listed below, or under “videos” at my own YouTube page: Heather Cox Richardson. Or just wait until I send out the week’s roundup.
Dr. is a Nobel Prize–winning economist and former New York Times columnist of 25 years, recognized worldwide for his groundbreaking work on international trade and his influential voice on the economic issues of our time. Krugman recounts the 1929 stock market crash that plunged America into the Great Depression and ushered in President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.
Barney Ford, Narrated by Representative Joe Neguse
United States Representative Joe Neguse of Colorado is a member of the Natural Resources, Judiciary and Rules Committees, and is the Ranking Member on the House Subcommittee on Federal Lands. He’s also served as the House Assistant Minority Leader since 2024. Representative Neguse recalls the life of Barney Ford, a pioneering Black entrepreneur in Colorado who fought for the 15th Amendment.
Advent of Bebop, Narrated by Rick Perlstein
is an American historian, journalist, and author known for his in-depth chronicles of post-World War II conservatism. Here Perlstein explores the birth of bebop, the revolutionary jazz style forged by Black musicians in the 1940s that transformed the music into sophisticated high art.
Presidential Election of 1980, Narrated by Ben Rhodes
is an influential writer, political commentator, former deputy national security advisor, and author of All We Say: The Battle for American Identity. Rhodes examines Ronald Reagan’s 1980 election and the conservative agenda that reshaped American government and echoes in politics today.
1868 Iowa School Desegregation, Narrated by Connie Ryan
Connie Ryan has served as Executive Director of Interfaith Alliance of Iowa since 2002. With her leadership, the organization challenges religious extremism, defends democracy, protects religious freedom, and safeguards the rights of all Iowans. Connie is a registered lobbyist at the Iowa Legislature whose advocacy focuses on civil rights, religious liberty, strong public schools, and judicial independence. Ryan tells how 12-year-old Susan Clark integrated an Iowa school in 1868, winning a desegregation case decades before Brown v. Board of Education.
Homestead Act, Narrated by Todd Arrington
Dr. Todd Arrington is an American historian, Army veteran, author, and Executive Director of the Jamestown Rediscovery Foundation. Here Arrington examines the Homestead Act of 1862, which offered 160 acres of land—taken from Indigenous tribes—to settlers seeking opportunity in the American West.
10th Mountain Division, Narrated by Representative Jason Crow
United States Representative Jason Crow of Colorado is a former paratrooper and Army Ranger who earned a Bronze Star during the invasion of Iraq. Crow explains how the 10th Mountain Division fought heroically in World War II and then helped to develop the American commercial skiing industry.
“Don’t Give Up the Ship,” Narrated by Representative Chris Deluzio
is an Iraq War veteran, voting rights attorney, and union organizer who serves as the U.S. Representative for Pennsylvania’s 17th congressional district. Deluzio tells how a dying captain’s final order became the battle flag Oliver Hazard Perry flew to victory at Lake Erie, and an enduring symbol of American perseverance.
Los Alamos, Narrated by Todd Nickols
Todd Nickols is the Executive Director of Los Alamos Historical Society (LAHS) and former manager of the Bandelier Trading Company, where he worked on several Federal National Park Service initiatives. Nickols tells the story of Los Alamos, where J. Robert Oppenheimer and thousands of scientists built the atomic bomb that would forever change warfare.
The “Great Society” Speech, Narrated by Governor Gretchen Whitmer
is the 49th Governor of Michigan, an educator, former prosecutor and lifelong Michigander. Governor Whitmer revisits Lyndon Johnson's 1964 Great Society speech, in which he called on Americans to end poverty and racial injustice and shape the civilization they wanted.
Roger Sherman, Narrated by Governor Ned Lamont
Ned Lamont is an American policy innovator, entrepreneur, and the 89th Governor of Connecticut. Governor Lamont profiles Roger Sherman, the tireless Connecticut founder who signed all three of America's founding documents and whose Connecticut Compromise—adopted July 16, 1787—shaped the Congress we know today.
54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment, Narrated by Kevin M. Levin
is an award-winning historian and educator, and the author of four books on the history and memory of the Civil War era, including his forthcoming biography, A Glorious Fate: The Life and Legacy of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw. He writes the popular newsletter Civil War Memory. Levin tells the story of the 54th Massachusetts and its hesitant young colonel, whose 1863 assault on Battery Wagner moved the nation closer to emancipation and equal rights.
Citizens United, Narrated by Steve Bullock
Former Montana Governor and Attorney General Steve Bullock led the states’ efforts challenging the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United v. FEC decision. His case, ATP v. Bullock, remains the only case to reach the Supreme Court directly challenging Citizens United. He remains a prominent figure in the national conversation surrounding money in politics.
Palmer Raids, Narrated by Allison Gill
hosts and executive produces the GLAAD-nominated and Webby-award-winning podcasts The Daily Beans, Cleanup on Aisle 45, and UnJustified, and is the founder of the MSW Media podcast network. Gill recounts the Palmer Raids of 1919–1920, when thousands of Americans were arrested without warrants during the nation's first Red Scare.
We estimate the extent of workplace political segregation in the United States by merging data covering over 45 million workers. We present four main findings. First, partisans are segregated by workplace. The average Democrat’s coworkers are 11.7 percentage points (pp; 95% confidence interval (CI) [10.6, 12.8]) more Democratic than the average Republican’s. After controlling for geography, industry and occupation, segregation is 2.9 pp [2.7, 3.1], comparable to analogously estimated gender segregation (2.8 pp [2.6, 3.0]). Second, segregation is largest among the politically active (political donors: 14.8 pp [13.2, 16.4] versus non-donors: 11.6 pp [10.5, 12.7]) and those with more market power (senior executives: 14.7 pp [13.4, 16.1]). Third, Republicans experience higher exposure to Democrats than vice versa: the average Republican’s coworkers are 50% Democratic versus 32% Republican for the average Democrat. Fourth, political segregation has changed little over time (2012: 11.1 pp [10.0, 12.2] versus 2024: 11.0 pp [10.0, 12.0]).
That is from a recent paper by Justin Frake, Reuben Hurst, and Max Kagan. Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Today’s Picture of the Week shows around a year and a half in the life of ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) in Chile’s Atacama Desert. The telescope’s construction saw a lot of progress and important milestones during this time. The entire project is more than 75% complete and closer than ever to helping us understand more of the secrets of our Universe.
The ELT’s dome, still partially uncovered and showing its steel skeleton in the beginning of this video, has mostly finished receiving its layer of protective insulated cladding, designed to protect the telescope and its instruments from the harsh desert environment, including very rare but heavy rains. When the massive doors were installed the dome reached its highest point of 80 meters in April of 2025, with a topping-out ceremony that featured the raising of ESO and Chile flags on top of the dome. Later in the year, the dome’s doors were moved for the first time.
Meanwhile, inside the dome, the main structure of the ELT, that will hold its mirrors and instruments, is progressing fast. This structure, currently weighing around 3500 tonnes, was recently rotated around its vertical axis for the first time.
This video doesn’t capture the advances carried out off-site, such as testing the ELT’s deformable mirror, key to correct atmospheric turbulence and obtain sharp images. The construction of MICADO and METIS, the first instruments to be installed at the ELT, is also progressing well. An agreement for MOSAIC, another ELT instrument, was signed in the end of 2025. With the telescope components and instruments coming together, the ELT is well on its way to start observing the cosmos later this decade.
Indian space officials celebrated the debut flight of Skyroot Aerospace's Vikram-1 rocket, India's first fully commercial satellite launcher, as a "grand success" Saturday after an on-target climb into a 280-mile-high orbit following liftoff from an island spaceport in the Bay of Bengal.
The Vikram-1 lifted off from India's primary spaceport on Sriharikota Island at 1:35 am EDT (06:35 UTC) Saturday, around midday at the launch base along India's southeast coast. The launch was delayed more than a half-hour to resolve a last-minute technical problem. The countdown resumed, culminating in the command to ignite Vikram-1's solid-fueled first stage booster to propel the rocket off the launch pad.
Vikram-1 is modest in size compared to India's larger workhorse rockets. Skyroot's rocket stands about 72 feet (22 meters) tall, with the capability to place payloads of up to 770 pounds (350 kilograms) into low-Earth orbit. This makes Vikram-1 somewhat larger than the Electron launch vehicle developed by Rocket Lab, the world's most successful dedicated small satellite launcher.
Seattle, Washington—sometimes known as the “Emerald City”—was glimmering in the morning sunlight when an astronaut aboard the International Space Station took this photo on June 16, 2026. The city’s parks and tree-filled neighborhoods lend a lush, green look to the metropolis, while tall buildings downtown cast long shadows and ships navigate surrounding waterways.
The broad contours of the city’s landscape and the water around it owe their shape to the advance and retreat of glaciers during the last ice age. Between roughly 18,000 and 16,000 years ago, the Puget lobe of the Cordilleran ice sheet covered the area in a mass of ice up to 3,300 feet (1,000 meters) thick. The glacier scoured the basins now occupied by Puget Sound and the region’s lakes.
The glacier left its mark above water, too. Several of Seattle’s notorious hills (of which there are seven or more, depending on who’s counting) are drumlins. These elongated mounds of glacial debris run north-south, parallel to the direction of the ice’s movement. East-west travelers in the city, facing challenging ups and downs, may attest to this topographic trend.
The ice also transported large boulders called glacial erratics from more northerly locations and deposited them around the region. A particularly large erratic, the Wedgwood Rock, stands about 20 feet (6 meters) tall and draws its name from the North Seattle neighborhood in which it rests.
June 16, 2026
In more recent times, humans have undertaken projects to rework the topography. Notable alterations include leveling Denny Hill north of downtown and filling in tideflats at the mouth of the Duwamish River south of downtown, which created around 1,300 acres of new land. Seattle’s professional sports stadiums sit atop this fill.
This photo was acquired after several development projects to update waterfront infrastructure downtown, initiated in 2010, were completed. These include a new ferry dock and terminal, a rebuilt seawall, and a tunnel to replace an above-ground highway and create more inviting public access to the waterfront.
Some replumbing of the region’s waterways is apparent from the astronaut’s perspective, as well. In the 1910s, the Army Corps of Engineers built canals on either side of Lake Union to connect Puget Sound (an inlet of the Pacific Ocean) with Lake Washington. Starting in 1916, the Montlake Cut connected Lake Washington to Lake Union, and the Ballard Locks, northwest of Lake Union, began raising and lowering watercraft between the freshwater lakes and tidal Puget Sound. As a result of this project, Lake Washington’s water level dropped about 9 feet (3 meters) and ceased draining from its natural outlet at its southern end.
Today, the waters in and around Seattle support many uses: container ships, cruise ships, car and passenger ferries, floatplanes, and recreational craft ply the sound and lakes. And as for Seattle’s emerald nickname, pockets of old-growth forest still exist within city limits, containing centuries-old trees such as Douglas fir, Western red cedar, and Western hemlock. Seattleites often spot wildlife such as bald eagles, coyotes, and sea lions in the city’s various habitats.
Astronaut photograph ISS074-E-723719 was acquired on June 16, 2026, with a Nikon Z9 digital camera using a focal length of 560 millimeters. It is provided by the ISS Crew Earth Observations Facility and the Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit at NASA Johnson Space Center. The image was taken by a member of the Expedition 74 crew. The image has been cropped and enhanced to improve contrast, and lens artifacts have been removed. The International Space Station Program supports the laboratory as part of the ISS National Lab to help astronauts take pictures of Earth that will be of the greatest value to scientists and the public, and to make those images freely available on the Internet. Additional images taken by astronauts and cosmonauts can be viewed at the NASA/JSC Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth. Story by Lindsey Doermann.
(Lord’s day). Lay very long in pleasant dreams till Church time, and so up, and it being foul weather so that I cannot walk as I intended to meet my Cozen Roger at Thomas Pepys’s house (whither he rode last night), to Hatcham, I went to church, where a sober Doctor made a good sermon. So home to dinner alone, and then to read a little, and so to church again, where the Scot made an ordinary sermon, and so home to my office, and there read over my vows and increased them by a vow against all strong drink till November next of any sort or quantity, by which I shall try how I can forbear it. God send it may not prejudice my health, and then I care not. Then I fell to read over a silly play writ by a person of honour (which is, I find, as much as to say a coxcomb), called “Love a la Mode”.
And that being ended, home, and played on my lute and sung psalms till bedtime, then to prayers and to bed.
Today’s post is the first in a series on the economics of oligarchy in the United States, where wealth and power are increasingly concentrated in the hands of a small group at the top, and government policies have reinforced that concentration of wealth and power.
Saying that America is experiencing the creation and entrenchment of a tiny oligarchy of hyper-wealthy individuals is no longer controversial. The truth is that this process has been proceeding for several decades, largely via a concerted effort by extremely wealthy right-wing families such as the Koch Brothers. Until recently, however, the undermining of America’s republican vision largely flew under the radar of observers other than those tracking the changing landscape of campaign finance and the Supreme Court nomination process.
However, under the second presidency of Donald Trump, the rise of the tech billionaire broligarchs, who openly and lavishly supported Trump while enriching his family members, has put the dynamics of American oligarchy in the spotlight.
Moreover, today’s billionaire class is far more tightly linked in its interests and interactions than the earlier generation of hyper-wealthy – such as the Koch Brothers (fossil fuel), the Adelsons (Las Vegas casinos) and the Walton family (Walmart). AsHenry Farrell notes, right-wing tech billionaires like Peter Thiel themselves
depict the tech industry as a place where everyone who counts knows everyone else. Venture capitalists are closely interconnected. Founders and CEO’s look at each other with a mixture of respect and jealousy.
Thiel describes how you want to build your company around a ‘mafia,’ and Silicon Valley is organized in ways that are not entirely unlike its Sicilian predecessor in its golden era. There is no central organization, but there are central cliques. You need to be connected to get things done.
A few hundred billionaires, around 0.0002% of the adult population, have a combined wealth equivalent to approximately 20 percent of GDP. This tiny set of hyper-wealthy individuals also accounts for approximately 20 percent of total campaign contributions and thereby exerts huge influence over public policy – a state of affairs that is a direct result of the Koch-created Roberts Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling. The hyper-wealthy use their influence to push policies that are in their class’s interest, such as corporate tax cuts.
And because these policies are almost always highly unpopular, they also use their influence to undermine accountability and democracy in America. If that doesn’tmake America significantly oligarchic, I don’t know what would qualify. Moreover, the self-reinforcing nature of oligarchic influence creates what I have called a “downward spiral of oligarchy” —extreme wealth leads to extreme political influence, which leads to greater benefits for the hyper-wealthy, and thus even more extreme wealth.
Some may ask: wasn’t it always thus? No, it wasn’t.
Granted, market economies always generate significant income and wealth inequality, and economic inequality always leads to some inequality in effective political power. But even a quarter century ago the wealth and power of the economic elite were far more limited than they had been during the Gilded Age — and far more limited than they are today.
A few days ago I argued, based on economic research, that the soaring concentration of wealth at the top since the 1970s largely reflects a decline in the progressivity of the tax system — the end of high taxes on the elite, which when in effect both limited the ability of the very wealthy to accumulate ever larger fortunes and limited their political influence. Today’s primer will do a deeper dive into the rise and fall of progressive taxation in America since the early 20th century.
This post will notengage in the debate over direct taxes on wealth. Such an important policy debate deserves a post of its own, which I will write soon. In addition, I will discuss in future posts other ways to limit oligarchy, such as anti-trust policy, consumer protection policies, and measures to limit political corruption
In this first post of the series, I will address the following beyond the paywall:
Here's an entertaining perspective from Nik Suresh on the AI mania that is overwhelming the large companies that he consults with. It's crammed with spicy anecdotes from anonymous sources.
In one extreme case, I have seen an executive confess that they had never even used ChatGPT or any AI tool in their life, immediately after producing a technical strategy for an organisation with $2B+ in revenue which was entirely centered around AI.
Here's a report from an engineer at a company with a token leaderboard:
Checking out a parallel copy of our Go repository and telling the AI to rewrite the whole thing in Zig while I work on something else just so I can keep my job.
I particularly enjoyed this conversation with a skeptical executive at an over-enthusiastic company:
I asked why this was being repeated without opposition. Was it just sales fluff?
The answer was a lot more interesting. It was partially ridiculous sales material being delivered to an easily excitable audience, but this was not the dominant factor constraining honesty. Executives at their customers were saying absurd things about achieving 100x productivity, and this meant that if any executive at the vendor said that these gains were not plausible, it would undermine the credibility of the customer’s executive, be perceived as an attack (or heresy), and possibly result in an enterprise contract cancellation. And getting enterprise contracts cancelled because you wanted to opine on something that doesn’t really matter to your organisation’s mission is a great way to get fired.
Claude Code v2.1.181 (released June 17th) and later use the Rust port of Bun. Startup got 10% faster on Linux but otherwise, barely anyone noticed. Boring is good.
I decided to have a poke at my own Claude Code installation to see if I could find evidence that it was using Bun written in Rust.
I found these two commands convincing:
strings ~/.local/bin/claude | grep -m1 'Bun v1'
For me this outputs Bun v1.4.0 (macOS arm64). The most recent release of Bun on GitHub is currently v1.3.14 from May 12th, so that v1.4.0 version number in Claude supports them shipping a preview of a not-yet-released Bun version.
(Update: The Rust version has been released as Bun canary - running bun upgrade --canary will install this release.)
Here's the commit from May 17th that updated the version in package.json to 1.4.0. That version hasn't been changed since then, but also hasn't yet made it into a tagged release outside of canary.
Peter Brook‘s five-hour-plus film adaptation of “The Mahabharata” is set for a BFI Blu-ray release on Aug. 10, presented in high definition from a new 4K restoration of the 1989 production.
The release centres on the triptych version of the film, running 332 minutes, which sits between Brook’s three-hour cinema cut and the six-hour television version he shot concurrently. Based on the ancient Hindu epic, the film was originally produced by Brook with screenwriters Jean-Claude Carrière and Marie-Hélène Estienne, and features an international cast drawn from 16 nationalities.
Here is the Variety article, but will there be a version suitable for U.S. players? The work is highly recommended, real genius. For the pointer I thank Sam Mendelsohn.
3. Those new service sector jobs — “One nanny isn’t cutting it anymore. Some parents are spending upward of $250,000 on teams for their children. Luxury services offer potty-training, baby chefs and bike-riding lessons.” (WSJ).
I've written about the determination of death prior to deceased-donor organ donation, but it turns out that there are other hard cases. Submersion in icy water is one, hence the rule "they aren't dead till they're warm and dead."
" Hypothermia -- especially in children rescued from drowning -- can deliver us patients in a state of suspended animation, all their metabolic systems so slowed by cold that advanced cardiovascular life support and emergency medicine training teaches that "they aren't dead till they're warm and dead." Get that patient warmed to normal human body temperature, then check again for signs of life."
…high-end developments unlock long housing chains. As higher-income households move into newly built units, they free up older properties, raising supply and slashing prices for middle- and lower-end housing through a process known as filtering. Numerous international studies underscore this positive ripple effect.
One published last year tracked households that moved into a newly built 512-unit condominium tower in Honolulu, Hawaii. It found that the building created at least 557 vacancies in older and cheaper apartments across the city in just three years, with market-rate units more likely to release the largest chains.
Filtering can also be widespread. A 2021 study in Helsinki using geo-coded population data found that every 100 new market-rate units in the city centre led to around 60 units becoming available in the city’s bottom half of neighbourhoods by income. An analysis across all homes in Sweden over several decades concluded that “new homes, even those initially primarily inhabited by rich people, lead to substantial trickle-down effects that also benefit the poor”.
Other US studies highlight how market-rate developments benefit less well-to-do local residents by lowering housing costs. In San Francisco, a 2021 paper found new developments lowered the risk of eviction notices for residents in rent-stabilised housing. Even “luxury” developments in New York City — which Mamdani has criticised — have been shown to contribute to lower local rents and sales prices.
I got a fun email from former Apple executive, Nest founder, and
one-time Stratechery Interview subject Tony Fadell in response to
yesterday’s Update about Apple suing OpenAI (published with
permission):
Good article as always… This is Apple’s typical tactic to scare
Apple employees — either former or current. I heard this lawsuit
was driven by the Apple board.
Steve threatened to file a lawsuit against Nest for poaching
80-100 Apple employees. He called me, screamed for a while with
lots of accusations. Then I said, “Steve, it’s Apple’s job to
retain its talent, not mine.” He stopped his rant and then we
went on to talk about our families and vacation plans. We kept
hiring…
This sounds about right — and in terms of the Steve Jobs angle,
John Gruber made a compelling case on Dithering that this
lawsuit may very well have been driven by John Ternus channeling
his inner Jobs.
Fadell, of course, is correct that it’s Apple’s job to retain its talent. Recent reporting from Mark Gurman suggests that John Ternus is keenly aware of this, at least as it pertains to Apple’s industrial design team, which has been ground zero for the Apple-to-OpenAI recruitment pipeline. (And the Dithering episode Thompson references is the one we made free-to-listen this week.)
Playing hardball when it comes to poaching is deeply embedded in Apple’s DNA. Steve Jobs hated Apple employees getting poached. In 2005 he sent this email to Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen:
From: Steve Jobs
To: Bruce Chizen
Date: Thursday, May 26, 2005 9:36 AM
Subject: Recruiting
Bruce,
Adobe is recruiting from Apple. They have hired one person already
and are calling lots more. I have a standing policy with our
recruiters that we don’t recruit from Adobe. It seems you have a
different policy. One of us must change our policy. Please let me
know who.
Steve
After one back-and-forth exchange with Jobs, Chizen agreed Adobe would change its policy.
A more contentious example came in August 2007, when Jobs sent an email to Palm CEO Ed Colligan that read:
From: Steve Jobs
To: Ed Colligan
Date: Sunday, August 26, 2007 11:42 am
Subject: Fwd: Your proposal
Ed,
This is not satisfactory to Apple. It is not just a matter of our
employees deciding they want to join Palm. They are being actively
recruited using knowledge supplied by Jon Rubenstein [sic] and Fred
Anderson, with Jon personally participating in the recruiting
process. We must do whatever we can to stop this. I’m sure you
realize the asymmetry in the financial resources of our respective
companies when you say: “We will both just end up paying a lot of
lawyers a lot of money.”
Just for the record, when Siemens sold their handset business to
BenQ they didn’t sell them their essential patents but rather just
gave them a license. The patents they did sell to BenQ are not
that great. We looked at them ourselves when they were for sale. I
guess you guys felt differently and bought them. We are not
concerned about them at all. My advice is to take a look at our
patent portfolio before you make a final decision here.
Steve
That’s a good email. Information dense. My favorite part isn’t the “I’m sure you realize the asymmetry in the financial resources of our respective companies”, although that’s good. It’s the “I guess you guys felt differently and bought them.” Stone cold.
Jon Rubinstein1 was a hardware engineering executive at Apple, overseeing Mac hardware during the comeback years after Steve Jobs returned, then switching to oversee the newly-created iPod division in 2004. (Mac hardware then went under the supervision of a then-little-known operations executive referred to in the announcement as “Timothy Cook”.) Rubinstein left Apple in early 2006, citing exhaustion.2 His departure was announced six months earlier, alongside the promotion of Cook to COO. By 2007 Rubinstein was involved with Palm, by way of Elevation Partners, an investment firm that took a 25 percent stake in Palm. He became CEO of Palm in 2009, tried to turn it around, and then wasted a few years as an executive at HP after HP bought Palm’s carcass thinking it was still alive.
Fred Anderson was Apple’s CFO from March 1996 (almost a year before the NeXT reunification) to June 2004 — the nail-biting, at-times-near-bankruptcy turnaround years. Anderson took the fall, perhaps unfairly, for the stock options backdating scandal under Steve Jobs and, after leaving Apple, paid a $3.5 million fine in a settlement with the SEC. Needless to say, in the summer of 2007, there was bad blood between Anderson and Apple. Anderson, post-Apple, was a co-founder of Elevation Partners and had recruited Rubinstein to join.
Some bad blood. Some former high-level Apple executives putting a team of ex-Apple engineers and designers together to take on the iPhone. History doesn’t repeat, but it often rhymes.
If in addition to thinking that this sounds familiar, you also think these emails sound illegal, you may recall that in 2015, Apple (along with Google, Adobe, Intel, and other companies) paid a collective $415 million penalty to settle a class-action anti-poaching lawsuit. That they settled doesn’t mean they regret playing hardball. Rules are only followed by those who fear the penalties.
Jobs liked to fight, and wasn’t afraid to let his temper show. Tim Cook has a fierce temper and steel nerves, but he arguably only once, ever, showed it in public. I do not think he relishes a fight. He’s a diplomat, not a general. I suspect there’s no undiscovered tranche of Jobs-style stone-cold threatening emails from Cook to competing CEOs.
Steve Jobs’s oft-cited parting advice to Tim Cook was “Don’t ask what I would do. Just do the right thing.” Cook has largely lived by that mantra. But maybe — maybe — by taking that advice to heart, he has at times deliberately steered the company in ways Jobs would not have, just for the sake of steering it in a different way. I think maybe John Ternus is more of a “Hey, what would Steve have done here?” kind of guy.
On the one hand, this lawsuit is a bad look for Apple. It could be perceived that Apple does not think their employees are free to leave and compete against them. On the other hand, Apple could use a booster shot of Steve Jobs’s “us against the world” attitude. It might be wrong to start a war, but it’s never wrong to finish one after being attacked.
What would Steve Jobs do with this OpenAI situation? He’d go to war.3
‘This Is Not Satisfactory to Apple’
The early history of the Macintosh GUI went something like this: When the Macintosh debuted in 1984 it didn’t hit like Apple had hoped it would. (That’s when Steve Jobs was run out of the company.) But by the late 1980s it had caught on, especially in markets like design and desktop publishing. It was the only GUI game in town — command-line DOS PCs were popular, but Windows 1.0 was almost too primitive to believe and Windows 2 wasn’t much better. Apple was certain that the WIMP GUI was the future of computing, and because the Macintosh was the only credible GUI then on the market, Apple owned the future of computing. They were correct about one of those things. Because then came Windows 3, which still sucked — still was ugly, still was terribly designed, still severely limited compared to the Mac in its UI grace and vocabulary of actions — but, it didn’t suck as much. It wasn’t good but it was good enough for the corporate IT market, and the corporate IT market drove the industry at the time.
In the early 1990s John Sculley filed and pushed the infamous “look and feel” lawsuit against Microsoft. One year out from the launch of Windows 95 — which at least looked pretty good4 — Apple’s response was to try to argue in court that they owned the copyright and patent rights to the very concepts of the GUI and the desktop metaphor. The court handed Apple its ass. Apple soon found itself 90 days away from bankruptcy and in desperate need of a new modern operating system, which they themselves had proven incapable of creating. Windows 95 launched with such anticipation that customers lined up overnight outside retail stores to buy it the morning it launched.
That lawsuit was the low point in the entirety of Apple’s history. It was incoherent and, worse, pathetic. Incoherent because Apple was simultaneously arguing in marketing that the Mac remained vastly superior to Windows (“C:\ONGRTLNS.W95”), while arguing in court that Windows was a feature-for-feature clone. It couldn’t be both. I would argue that the former was true — the Mac remained superior in many ways — but actions speak louder than words and Apple’s action was to sue Microsoft and lose. It was pathetic because you know who loses? Losers.
The correct response to the competitive threat of Windows wasn’t to futilely attempt to argue that Windows should not be allowed to exist. It was to make the Macintosh so much better than it already was — to inject so much new innovative insane greatness — that customers would line up overnight to buy Mac software (and watch Apple keynotes). What Microsoft had in 1995 that Apple could not muster was vast customer enthusiasm. That cannot be bought. It cannot be faked. It can only be earned. And you sure as shit cannot stop it with a lawsuit.
Earning that sort of consumer enthusiasm — in spades — is exactly how Steve Jobs pulled Apple out of its nosedive. It took the better part of a decade.
When Apple announced this new lawsuit last week against OpenAI, I wondered, at first, whether it had a whiff of that 1994 look-and-feel loser desperation. Is it Apple’s position that the only way to stop its talent exodus to OpenAI is in court? Upon consideration, I think not. First, it’s not incoherent. There’s no conflict between what Apple is saying about its products or itself as a company that is at odds with this lawsuit. They’re just saying, “Fuck you, you goddamn traitors. You want to fuck with us? We’ll fuck with you.” When you poke a bear — 400 times — you better be ready for the bear to eventually react.
Further, while Apple can only have one CEO at a time, and that CEO remains Tim Cook until September 1, there’s no way that John Ternus doesn’t fully approve of this lawsuit. Cook has gone out of his way to leave Ternus with a clean plate. It would be insane to file this suit six weeks ahead of Ternus taking the helm if Ternus is anything short of fully on board.
I’m not saying it’s a good look for Apple. I’m certainly passing no judgment on the merits of the case, which OpenAI hasn’t yet responded to legally. But it is a very different and much more emotional reaction than we’ve seen under Tim Cook. Those anti-poaching emails Steve Jobs sent to Adobe, Palm, and Google weren’t good looks for Apple either. But that doesn’t mean they were bad for Apple. A bad look can be a good thing. Passion is powerful, and in and of itself, inspiring. This is a passion-fueled lawsuit. I saw some commentators speculate that, already hemorrhaging cash on a daily basis, OpenAI will surely spew some of that in the direction of Cupertino and just settle it. But Apple doesn’t need cash. This is a lawsuit that I believe OpenAI cannot settle, because there is no settlement Apple would accept short of a dissolution of their entire hardware division.
Apple claims in their complaint that the trade-secret chicanery they’ve already documented “is the tip of the iceberg”. If Apple is wrong, and OpenAI has recruited above the board and hired 400 former Apple employees fair and square (or even just mostly fair and mostly square), they have nothing to fear, and John Ternus will look like a petty little jealous bitch, and a feckless one at that. If Apple is right, however, all bets are off. I said earlier that rules are only followed by those who fear the penalties. But some never consider the penalties in the first place because they believe the rules don’t apply to them. Sometimes they find out otherwise.
I’m not saying OpenAI cannot win. I’m saying they can’t get Apple to settle — at least not until Apple is satisfied the whole iceberg has been revealed through discovery. Until then, John Ternus’s offer to Sam Altman is nothing — not even the fee for the gaming license, which he would like Altman to put up.
Jobs might be forgiven for misspelling Rubinstein’s surname in his email to Colligan. Everyone called him “Ruby”. Perhaps akin to misspelling Greg Joswiak’s name as “Jozwiak” because everyone just calls him “Joz”. ↩︎
I think it’s more likely that Rubinstein wore out his welcome at Apple. Here, I turn to Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs, which has some remarkable reporting on the situation. Quoting from Chapter 35, “Round One” (which chapter title refers to Jobs’s first bout with the cancer that eventually did him in), pp. 459–460 in the print edition:
In the fall of 2005, after returning from his medical leave, Jobs
tapped Cook to become Apple’s chief operating officer. They were
flying together to Japan. Jobs didn’t really ask Cook; he simply
turned to him and said, “I’ve decided to make you COO.”
Around that time, Jobs’s old friends Jon Rubinstein and Avie
Tevanian, the hardware and software lieutenants who had been
recruited during the 1997 restoration, decided to leave. In
Tevanian’s case, he had made a lot of money and was ready to quit
working. “Avie is a brilliant guy and a nice guy, much more
grounded than Ruby and doesn’t carry the big ego,” said Jobs. “It
was a huge loss for us when Avie left. He’s a one-of-a-kind person — a genius.”
Rubinstein’s case was a little more contentious. He was upset by
Cook’s ascendency and frazzled after working for nine years under
Jobs. Their shouting matches became more frequent. There was also
a substantive issue: Rubinstein was repeatedly clashing with Jony
Ive, who used to work for him and now reported directly to Jobs.
Ive was always pushing the envelope with designs that dazzled but
were difficult to engineer. It was Rubinstein’s job to get the
hardware built in a practical way, so he often balked. He was by
nature cautious. “In the end, Ruby’s from HP,” said Jobs. “And he
never delved deep, he wasn’t aggressive.”
There was, for example, the case of the screws that held the
handles on the Power Mac G4. Ive decided that they should have a
certain polish and shape. But Rubinstein thought that would be
“astronomically” costly and delay the project for weeks, so he
vetoed the idea. His job was to deliver products, which meant
making trade-offs. Ive viewed that approach as inimical to
innovation, so he would go both above him to Jobs and also around
him to the midlevel engineers. “Ruby would say, ‘You can’t do
this, it will delay,’ and I would say, ‘I think we can,” Ive
recalled. “And I would know, because I had worked behind his back
with the product teams.” In this and other cases, Jobs came down
on Ive’s side.
At times Ive and Rubinstein got into arguments that almost led to
blows. Finally Ive told Jobs, “It’s him or me.” Jobs chose Ive. By
that point Rubinstein was ready to leave.
There’s a strong whiff of “You can’t fire me, I’m retiring” in the air when someone claims they were ready to leave after Jony Ive issued a “him or me” ultimatum. That’s like saying you’re ready to leave the pub after the bartender rings the bell for last call.
I’d end this footnote here, but the very next passage is too apt to omit:
He and his wife had bought property in Mexico, and he wanted time
off to build a home there. He eventually went to work for Palm,
which was trying to match Apple’s iPhone. Jobs was so furious that
Palm was hiring some of his former employees that he complained to
Bono, who was a cofounder of a private equity group, led by the
former Apple CFO Fred Anderson, that had bought a controlling
stake in Palm. Bono sent Jobs a note back saying, “You should
chill out about this. This is like the Beatles ringing up because
Herman and the Hermits have taken one of their road crew.” Jobs
later admitted that he had overreacted. “The fact that they
completely failed salves that wound,” he said.
One can argue that this whole situation never would have happened if Steve Jobs were still alive, because if he were, Jony Ive, Tang Tan, Evans Hankey, et al. would still be at Apple, and there would be no io. But that’s like saying maybe if someone in the 1910s had given Hitler more encouragement as a painter, none of this would have happened either. I enjoy fictional alternative histories as much as the next guy, but I’m more interested in the question of how Jobs would respond, right now, to the actual current situation. ↩︎︎
A small irony is that the look-and-feel of Windows 95 borrowed much more from NeXTStep than it did from System 7. The look and layout of windows themselves; the use of gray, not white, as the default background color for the UI chrome; the chiseled 3D look — it’s almost inarguable that the Windows 95 look was ripped off from NeXT. Microsoft even copied from NeXT the window-close button going in the top right, not top left, and marking it with an “×” glyph, which the Mac never did. ↩︎︎
I complained about the casting of The Odyssey per se (the blind beggar was best), but in general I do not mind cross-ethnic casting. I am glad Elizabeth Taylor played Cleopatra, Dev Patel played David Copperfield, Denzel Washington played Macbeth, black and Latino actors play white parts in Hamilton, and that Morgan Freeman can play God well (God himself would not be “white,” but God as black is nonetheless a conscious choice), and there was Jessye Norman (among others) singing and playing many traditionally white roles on the opera stage.
Recently in a private conversation I suggested that Nabeel Qureshi be cast as the next James Bond. He has a British accent, was born in (northern!) England, is tall and is good-looking. He does not remind anyone of Roger Moore. He is old enough where you could believe he has some experience as a spy, and at the baccarat table, but young enough where he could do those stunts without it seeming ridiculous.
I recall the talk of a black Bond, a notion which likely would end up dull and cliched. But a Bond of Pakistani ethnic origin? Now that would occasion some debate.
I am not saying it always works. I likely would object to a remake of Zulu with an all-Chinese cast. Or there can be major cultural mistakes which are not cross-ethnic, such as casting a Liverpudlian in the role of a London elite. Everyone in The Sopranos should at least be pretending to fit their roles, and indeed Tony himself grew up in New Jersey. I would have done fine in a cameo role.
I would not trust the results of this (or any) paper on this topic very much, but it is good to see some inquiry along different dimensions than the usual:
Past research explored the beneficial and harmful effects of social media (SM), but no study has investigated how SM might change people’s identities. Authors suggest that SM is a catalyst for a shift in two individual values, achievement and conformity, transforming the fabric of our societies. A difference-in-differences analysis found that countries with higher SM adoption compared to their culturally similar country show an increase in achievement and conformity orientation. Next, authors manipulated SM use and established a causal link between SM use and the activation of achievement and conformity values in Facebook users. These findings were replicated with objective SM usage data, and the pertinent mechanism was explored: people’s SM use increases achievement and conformity orientation through an increased need for approval, particularly for those who self-ruminate. Findings suggest that SM use contributes to the emergence of a societal culture that places an emphasis on achievement-seeking and conformity.
On July 18, 1863, at dusk, the Black soldiers of the Massachusetts 54th Volunteer Infantry of the U.S. Army charged the walls of Fort Wagner, a fortification on Morris Island off Charleston Harbor in South Carolina. Because Fort Wagner covered the southern entrance to the harbor, it was key to enabling the U.S. government to take the city.
The 600 soldiers of the 54th made up one of the first Black regiments for the Union, organized after the Emancipation Proclamation called for the enlistment of African American soldiers. The 54th’s leader was a Boston abolitionist from a leading family: Colonel Robert Gould Shaw.
Shaw and his men had shipped out of Boston at the end of May 1863 for Beaufort, South Carolina, where the Union had gained an early foothold in its war to prevent the Confederates from dismembering the country. The men of the 54th knew they were not like other soldiers: they were symbols of how well Black men would fight for their country. This, in turn, would be a statement of whether Black men could truly be equal to white men under the country’s laws, once and for all, for in this era, fighting for the country gave men a key claim to citizenship.
The whole country was watching…and the soldiers knew it.
In the dark at Fort Wagner, the Massachusetts 54th proved that Black men were equal to any white men in the field. They fought with the determination that caused African American regiments during the Civil War to sustain losses higher than those of white regiments. The assault on the fort killed, wounded, or lost more than 250 of the 600 men and made the formerly enslaved Sergeant William Harvey Carney the first African American to be awarded a Medal of Honor. Badly wounded, Carney nonetheless defended the United States flag and carried it back to Union lines. United States soldiers did not take the fort that night, but no one could miss that Black men had proved themselves equal to their white comrades.
The Battle of Fort Wagner left 30 men of the 54th dead on the field—including Colonel Shaw—and 24 more so badly injured that they would later die from their wounds. Fifteen were captured; 52 were missing and presumed dead. Another 149 were wounded. Confederates intended to dishonor Colonel Shaw when they buried him in a mass grave with his men; instead, his family found it fitting.
In 2017 I had the opportunity to spend an evening in the house where the wounded soldiers of the 54th were taken after the battle.
It was a humbling thing to stand in that house that still looks so much as it did in 1863 and to realize that the men, carried hot and exhausted and bleeding and scared into it a century and a half before were just people like you and me, who did what they felt they had to in front of Fort Wagner, and then endured the boat ride back to Beaufort, and got carried up a flight of steps, and then lay on cots in small, crowded rooms and hoped that what they had done was worth the horrific cost.
I am not one for ghosts, but I swear you could feel the blood in the floors.
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