When I started at AWS in 2008, we ran the EC2 control plane on a tree of MySQL databases: a primary to handle writes, a secondary to take over from the primary, a handful of read replicas to scale reads, and some extra replicas for doing latency-insensitive reporting stuff. All of thing was linked together with MySQL’s statement-based replication. It worked pretty well day to day, but two major areas of pain have stuck with me ever since: operations were costly, and eventual consistency made things weird.
Since then, managed databases like Aurora MySQL have made relational database operations orders of magnitude easier. Which is great. But eventual consistency is still a feature of most database architectures that try scale reads. Today, I want to talk about why eventual consistency is a pain, and why we invested heavily in making all reads strongly consistent in Aurora DSQL.
Eventual Consistency is a Pain for Customers
Consider the following piece of code, running against an API exposed by a database-backed service:
id = create_resource(...)
get_resource_state(id, ...)
In the world of read replicas, the latter statement can do something a little baffling: reply ‘id does not exist’. The reason for this is simple: get_resource_state is a read-only call, likely routed to a read replica, and is racing the write from create_resource. If replication wins, this code works as expected. If the client wins, it has to handle to weird sensation of time moving backwards.
Application programmers don’t really have a principled way to work around this, so they end up writing code like this:
id = create_resource(...)
while True:
try:
get_resource_state(id, ...)
return
except ResourceDoesNotExist:
sleep(100)
Which fixes the problem. Sometimes. Other times, especially if ResourceDoesNotExist can be thrown if id is deleted, it causes an infinite loop. It also creates more work for client and server, adds latency, and requires the programmer to choose a magic number for sleep that balances between the two. Ugly.
Strong consistency avoids this whole problem1, ensuring that the first code snippet works as expected.
Eventual Consistency is a Pain for Application Builders
The folks building the service behind that API run into exactly the same problems. To get the benefits of read replicas, application builders need to route as much read traffic as possible to those read replicas. But consider the following code:
block_attachment_changes(id, ...)
for attachment in get_attachments_to_thing(id):
remove_attachment(id, attachment)
assert_is_empty(get_attachments_to_thing(id))
This is a fairly common code pattern inside microservices. A kind a little workflow that cleans something up. But, in the wild world of eventual consistency, it has at least three possible bugs:
assert could trigger because the second get_attachments_to_thing hasn’t heard the news of all the remove_attachments.remove_attachment could fail because it hasn’t heard of one of the attachments listed by get_attachments_to_thing.get_attachments_to_thing could have an incomplete list because it read stale data, leading to incomplete clean up.And there are a couple more. The application builder has to avoid these problems by making sure that all reads that are used to trigger later writes are sent to the primary. This requires more logic around routing (a simple “this API is read-only” is not sufficient), and reduces the effectiveness of scaling by reducing traffic that can be sent to replicas.
Eventual Consistency Makes Scaling Harder
Which brings us to our third point: read-modify-write is the canonical transactional workload. That applies to explicit transactions (anything that does an UPDATE or SELECT followed by a write in a transaction), but also things that do implicit transactions (like the example above). Eventual consistency makes read replicas less effective, because the reads used for read-modify-write can’t, in general, be used for writes without having weird effects.
Consider the following code:
UPDATE dogs SET goodness = goodness + 1 WHERE name = 'sophie'
If the read for that read-modify-write is read from a read replica, then the value of goodness may not be changed in the way you expect. Now, the database could internally do something like this:
SELECT goodness AS g, version AS v FROM dogs WHERE name = 'sophie'; -- To read replica
UPDATE sophie SET goodness = g + 1, version = v + 1 WHERE name = 'sophie' AND version = v; -- To primary
And then checking it actually updated a row2, but that adds a ton of work.
The nice thing about making scale-out reads strongly consistent is that the query processor can read from any replica, even in read-write transactions. It also doesn’t need to know up-front whether a transaction is read-write or read-only to pick a replica.
How Aurora DSQL Does Consistent Reads with Read Scaling
As I said above, in Aurora DSQL all reads are strongly consistent. DSQL can also scale out reads by adding additional replicas of any hot shards. So how does it ensure that all reads are strongly consistent? Let’s remind ourselves about the basics of the DSQL architecture.
Each storage replica gets its updates from one or more journals. Writes on each journal are strictly monotonic, so once a storage node has seen an update from time $\tau$ it knows it has seen all updates for times $t \leq \tau$. Once it has seen $t \geq \tau$ from all the journals it has subscribed to, it knows that it can return data for time $\tau$ without missing any updates. When a query processor starts a transaction, it picks a time stamp $\tau_{start}$, and every time it does a read from a replica it says to the replica “give me data as of $\tau_{start}$”. If the replica has seen higher timestamps from all journals, its good to go. If it hasn’t yet, it blocks the read until the write streams catch up.
I go into some detail on how $\tau_{start}$ is picked here:
Conclusion
Strong consistency sounds like a complex topic for distributed systems nerds, but is a real thing that applications built on traditional database replication architectures need to start dealing with at modest scale - or even at very small scale if they’re trying to offer high availability. DSQL goes to some internal lengths to make all reads consistent - with the aim of saving application builders and end users from having to deal with this complexity.
I don’t mean to say that eventual consistency is always bad. Latency and connectivity trade-offs do exist (although the choose-two framing of CAP is bunk), and eventual consistency has its place. However, that place is probably not in your services or API.
Footnotes
Note: Mortgage rates are from MortgageNewsDaily.com and are for top tier scenarios.
Click on graph for larger image.
On a rolling 12-month basis, inbound traffic decreased 1.2% in September compared to the rolling 12 months ending the previous month. Links for you. Science:
This ‘spider megacity’ may be the largest web ever found. But what’s inside is even more extraordinary (one of the weirdest ecological communities I’ve ever heard of)
Intracellular Salmonella hijacks the mitochondrial citrate carrier to evade host oxidative defenses
Landscape-wide cosmogram built by the early community of Aguada Fénix in southeastern Mesoamerica
A confidential manifesto lays out Isaacman’s sweeping new vision for NASA
Appeals court judges seem skeptical of Trump administration’s defense of capping NIH overhead payments
Robert Kennedy Jr. Must Go
Other:
Chuck Schumer Is Not Fit to Lead the Democratic Party
Why America’s Government Shutdowns Exist and How to End Them
The GOP War Over Which Jews to Hate
Federal Judge Blasts Border Patrol Boss For Lying, Extends Order Restricting Use Of Force
The Roman empire built 300,000 kilometres of roads
‘The use of force shocks the conscience’: Judge issues sweeping injunction on Chicago tactics of immigration agents
This Virginia Election Was a Warning for Data Centers
The Democratic Tea Party Is Here: The party’s base is energized and mad as hell. And their rage isn’t just aimed at Donald Trump.
DHS Gives Local Cops a Facial Recognition App To Find Immigrants
OpenAI Is Maneuvering for a Government Bailout
America Begins Clapping Back at Donald Trump
The 2024 Trump “realignment” is already over
DOJ Admits to Republicans That Epstein Files Are Even Worse for Trump
Voters report aggressive behavior at polls over petition to ban trans students from girls sports
Zohran Mamdani’s Next Big Battle Is in Albany
Is your electric bill going up? AI is partly to blame
Traditional Media Never Took the Christian Right Seriously
To Preserve Records, Homeland Security Now Relies on Officials to Take Screenshots
Meta is earning a fortune on a deluge of fraudulent ads, documents show
Iowa doesn’t have enough OB-GYNs. Is the state’s abortion ban part of the problem?
What Really Happened in Portland Before Trump Deployed the National Guard
The Nonprofit Doing the AI Industry’s Dirty Work
Washington DC, America’s bluest city, is building more homes per capita than Houston—not with bottom-up zoning reform but with top-down government action. (most YIMBYs I know want this too; seems a bit of a straw man)
In Indiana, a vaunted Jewish studies program is upended by red-state politics over Israel and speech
Feds Tell Faith Leaders ‘No More Prayer’ Outside Broadview Facility
Fascists Don’t Get To Claim Whatever Symbols They Want
‘They destroyed us’: East Chicago woman with schizophrenia who opted for deportation now missing in Mexico
OpenAI’s Sora 2 Floods Social Media With Videos of Women Being Strangled
Trump Says U.S. Visas Can Be Denied to Fat People From Now On
Air Traffic Controllers Are Resigning Due To Shutdown Stress, Union President Warns
What has happened to Comet Lemmon's tail?
What do the people want? It’s a question that consumes everyone in politics all the time, yet one of the clearest answers is usually ignored. As we begin another round of arguing about our atrocious health care system, Democrats in particular need a reminder. This applies to a whole range of issues, not just health care, but here’s the fundamental truth:
People want simple things, and they want things to be simple.
To explain what I mean, let’s start with one Donald Trump, who is feeling pressured by the fact that health insurance premiums are rising for pretty much everyone, and especially for the tens of millions of people who receive subsidies to purchase insurance on the Affordable Care Act exchanges. Because he doesn’t actually understand how insurance works — a strange thing to say, but it’s pretty clearly the case — he blasted this out on his social media platform:
So…that means there’s no more insurance? The government gives you some money and you pay for your own checkup or knee surgery in cash? That of course is bonkers, so Trump then changed the pitch to say something slightly different but equally moronic, that the government will give everyone money and then they’ll “go out and negotiate their own health insurance,” which will make everyone “feel like entrepreneurs.”
If “negotiating your own health insurance” sounds nightmarish to you, you’re starting to get the picture. But we’re not done. Once Trump says something, no matter how stupid, everyone in the administration has to pretend it’s a real proposal and then scramble to defend it, so you get things like this:
Dr. Oz says that rather than the current exchange system, in which you choose an insurance plan, then a subsidy for your insurance goes from the government to the insurer, we could insert an extra step, in which the government writes you a check, then you write a check to the insurer, making things more complicated for no reason whatsoever. Terrific!
Nobody likes insurance companies, but in these discussions, conservatives tend to fall back on the idea that what people want is more choice. They want more options, more ways to be entrepreneurial and consumeristic when getting their health care. But the thing is: They don’t.
You know what people actually want? They want health care that’s reliable and affordable. They don’t want to spend endless hours picking from competing plans and competing providers, so they can feel like empowered consumers. They want it to be simple.
This is one of the reasons that every industrialized country in the world has a better health care system than ours. It’s not just that they’re less expensive and cover everyone. It’s also that, even though those systems work in different ways, they’re all simpler than ours is. That’s not to say they don’t have their problems, but for most people most of the time in other developed countries, it’s pretty straightforward: You have a problem, you go to the doctor, you get treated, you go home.
This is the magical future that could await us.
This doesn’t mean that making change is easy or uncomplicated in both political and policy terms, especially when you’re dealing with a system that is already complicated. This was the dilemma that Democrats faced when they set about to create the ACA: They had to confront an impossibly complex system full of entrenched and powerful interests who would resist any meaningful change, including doctors, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, medical device companies, and insurers. So the decision was made to co-opt them rather than fight them, and rather than a wholesale reimagining of the system, the ACA took the already complex system and layered even more complexity on top of it.
The ACA was, in short, a giant kludge, a term that gained wider use back in 2013 after political scientist Steven Teles published an influential article on our “kludgeocracy”:
The term comes out of the world of computer programming, where a kludge is an inelegant patch put in place to solve an unexpected problem and designed to be backward-compatible with the rest of an existing system. When you add up enough kludges, you get a very complicated program that has no clear organizing principle, is exceedingly difficult to understand, and is subject to crashes. Any user of Microsoft Windows will immediately grasp the concept.
“Clumsy but temporarily effective” also describes much of American public policy today. To see policy kludges in action, one need look no further than the mind-numbing complexity of the health-care system (which even Obamacare’s champions must admit has only grown more complicated under the new law, even if in their view the system is now also more just), or our byzantine system of funding higher education, or our bewildering federal-state system of governing everything from welfare to education to environmental regulation. America has chosen to govern itself through more indirect and incoherent policy mechanisms than can be found in any comparable country.
As Obama said in 2009, “If I were starting a system from scratch, then I think that the idea of moving towards a single-payer system could very well make sense…The only problem is that we’re not starting from scratch.” Getting the ACA passed (without a vote to spare) was an extraordinary political accomplishment, but we’re still living with the consequence of its kludginess. Unfortunately, Democrats’ policy solutions often make things more complicated, since they tend to be both cautious and attuned to the complexity of the problems they’re trying to solve, pushing them in the direction of more and more complex policy designs that are often impossible to explain to the average person.
Republicans don’t have that problem. Notwithstanding their idiocy about forcing people to devote more time to finding health coverage, their approach to policymaking is usually much simpler. That’s partly because most of them don’t particularly care about policy, and partly because a lot of the time they just want to destroy government agencies and capabilities, and destruction is far simpler than construction. If you want, say, an agency that will police the finance industry to make sure people aren’t victimized by scams, there are a lot of questions you have to answer about monitoring, reporting, enforcement, compensation, and more. But if you want the government to stop protecting people, you can just shut down everything the agency is doing, fire everybody, and declare that it never should have existed in the first place. Simple.
This relates to a larger dilemma Democrats face, that at a time of deep skepticism about established institutions, they find themselves defending those institutions, as imperfect as they may be, because the alternative of their destruction is so much worse. But that doesn’t mean progressives can’t think more about at least starting from the simple things people want, and using that to create the political support they need to get to the point where they can deal with the complexity.
Those on both the center and left ought to be able to support an agenda that begins with simple goals. The “abundance” debate, for instance, has wound up pitting the left against the center, but at its most fundamental level it starts from a place that everyone in the Democratic coalition should be able to support: We ought to build more. More housing, more public transportation, more parks, more good stuff that makes life good. Of course it gets complicated when you have to start addressing the inevitable tradeoffs, but if you don’t start in the appealing, simple place, you won’t even have the chance to get to the difficult part.
This was a key element of Zohran Mamdani’s success in New York. He started his campaign by asking people what was important to them, and the answer he got was that the city is unaffordable. That led to the main theme of his campaign: The city should be affordable for everyone. A very simple idea. He then followed that with more simple ideas. How about we make buses free? Simple. What if everyone could have child care? Simple. Make a halal plate $8 instead of $10 by fixing the food truck permit process. Simple.
Are those things going to be hard to do, because they’re actually pretty complicated? Sure. But the goals are simple and understandable. And that’s the place Democrats have to start from. They need to prepare and be ready to handle the complexity of policymaking so they don’t just fail when they actually gain power. But they have to begin by identifying the simple things people want in order to make their lives better, then show that they’ll fight for those things. At least the first step is pretty simple.
Thank you for reading The Cross Section. This site has no paywall, so I depend on the generosity of readers to sustain the work I present here. If you find what you read valuable and would like it to continue, consider becoming a paid subscriber.
From the California Association of Realtors® (C.A.R.): California home sales hit highest level since February, C.A.R. reportsThere is much more in the article.California home sales rose in October from both the prior month and a year ago to reach the highest level since February, the CALIFORNIA ASSOCIATION OF REALTORS® (C.A.R.) said today.
Closed escrow sales of existing, single-family detached homes in California totaled a seasonally adjusted annualized rate of 282,590 in October, according to information collected by C.A.R. from more than 90 local REALTOR® associations and MLSs statewide. The statewide annualized sales figure represents what would be the total number of homes sold during 2025 if sales maintained the October pace throughout the year. It is adjusted to account for seasonal factors that typically influence home sales.
October home sales edged up 1.9 percent from 277,410 in September to 282,590 in October. Home sales improved 4.1 percent from a revised 271,370 recorded a year earlier.
Jimmy Wales, interviewed in the Guardian:
‘People thought I was a communist doing this as a non-profit’: is Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales the last decent tech baron? by David Shariatmadari
"Musk’s hostility aside, does Wales see artificial intelligence in general as a threat? If people are increasingly relying on AI summaries, might Wikipedia’s dominance turn out to have been a blip? “I don’t think so,” he says, “but, I mean, that’s obviously on a lot of people’s minds these days.” It would be ironic, given that the site’s free licensing model means it can be used by anyone for anything – including as training data for large language models. “There are definitely threats to the web, but they’re not necessarily coming from AI,” he says. “I think the bigger threat is the rise of authoritarianism, governments, regulations, which make it harder to have a truly open global web where people are free to share ideas.” It’s true that Wikipedia is blocked in China, and faces sporadic censorship in Russia and elsewhere. Wales’s stance on this is not to give an inch – he has said: “We have a very firm policy, never breached, to never cooperate with government censorship in any region of the world.”
SpaceX launched of a batch of Starlink satellites on Tuesday, its first early-evening flight since the FAA lifted restrictions on commercial launches prompted by the government shutdown.
The Starlink 6-94 mission lifted off from pad 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, at 7:12 p.m. EST (0012 UTC), carrying 29 satellites for SpaceX’s Starlink internet service. It was the 99th launch from the Florida spaceport this year.
At one point, this mission was slated to fly after 10 p.m. EST due to the daytime curfew on commercial launches imposed by the FAA as it struggled to maintain air traffic control during the recent government shutdown. Those restrictions, which did not affect government missions, were lifted Monday.
The launch times for the previous two Starlink missions on November 14/15 from the Florida spaceport were shifted until after 10 p.m. EST to accommodate the restrictions.
Meteorologists with the 45th Weather Squadron based at Cape Canaveral issued a forecast Monday predicting a 95-percent chance of acceptable conditions for launch.
Upon liftoff, the Falcon 9 pitched onto a south-easterly trajectory. Falcon 9 booster B1085, making its 12th flight, landed on the drone ship ‘A Shortfall of Gravitas,’ stationed in the Atlantic east of the Bahamas.
In a social media post, SpaceX confirmed successful deployment of the 29 Starlink satellites the Falcon 9 second stage about one hour, five minutes after launch.
NASA’s Orion spacecraft is built around a single, uncompromising principle—crew must return home safely. From the millisecond‑response launch abort system (LAS) perched atop the capsule to the autonomous flight software that […]
The post Orion: Safeguarding Humanity’s Return to the Moon and the Journey Beyond appeared first on SpaceNews.
STRASBOURG, November 17th, 2025 – Leanspace, a European satellite operations technology provider, today announced it has raised €10 million in Series A funding. The financing round includes new strategic investors: […]
The post Leanspace raises €10 million Series A round to bring software-defined satellite operations to enterprise and institutional space programs appeared first on SpaceNews.
Bipartisan commission report says China is moving fast, and the United States must decide whether to match the pace
The post China’s space ambitions hit a new gear appeared first on SpaceNews.
Bangalore, November 18, 2025 — Novaspace, the global consulting and market-intelligence firm dedicated to the space sector, announces the opening of its new office in India, marking a strategic milestone […]
The post Novaspace Expands to India — Accelerating the Growth of the Nation’s Space Economy appeared first on SpaceNews.
German satellite component company Dcubed is moving into in-space manufacturing with a series of missions to demonstrate production of large solar arrays in orbit.
The post Dcubed to demonstrate in-space manufacturing of solar arrays appeared first on SpaceNews.
SEOPS, an American mission services provider, has purchased a Spectrum launch from Isar Aerospace to broaden launch options for its customers.
The post SEOPS buys Spectrum launch from Isar Aerospace appeared first on SpaceNews.
The satellite manufacturer files for IPO as defense-driven demand lures investors
The post York Space Systems files to go public appeared first on SpaceNews.
OpenAI:
To start a group chat tap the people icon in the top right corner of any new or existing chat. When you add someone to an existing chat, ChatGPT creates a copy of your conversation as a new group chat so your original conversation stays separate. You can invite others directly by sharing a link with one to twenty people, and anyone in the group can share that link to bring others in. When you join or create your first group chat, you’ll be asked to set up a short profile with your name, username, and photo so everyone knows who’s in the conversation. Group chats can be found in a new clearly-labeled section of the sidebar for easy access. [...]
Group chats are separate from your private conversations. Your personal ChatGPT memory is not used in group chats, and ChatGPT does not create new memories from these conversations. We’re exploring offering more granular controls in the future so you can choose if and how ChatGPT uses memory with group chats.
Currently rolling out in Japan, New Zealand, South Korea, and Taiwan. Rate limits and advanced model usage depend on the group member to whom ChatGPT replies. Pretty clever, and I can imaging a lot of ways this would be useful, both for family/friends and for work collaboration. I like the idea that this is built into ChatGPT, not an AI bot in a regular messaging app. This way, you know with certainty which of your chats are being seen and read by an AI bot.
We’ve also taught ChatGPT new social behaviors for group chats. It follows the flow of the conversation and decides when to respond and when to stay quiet based on the context of the group conversation. You can always mention “ChatGPT” in a message when you want it to respond. We’ve also given ChatGPT the ability to react to messages with emojis, and reference profile photos — so it can, for example, use group members’ photos when asked to create fun personalized images within that group conversation.
This is a really hard problem to solve. Wavelength, the late great private group messaging app whose team I advised from 2023 to 2024 (when the app shuttered), added AI chatbots (with customizable personalities) in June 2023. Wavelength’s AI bots only responded when mentioned explicitly.
As someone deeply involved in the space sector, I’ve seen firsthand how low Earth orbit (LEO) is becoming increasingly congested. Satellite operators, space agencies and aerospace companies are all facing a growing threat from orbital debris. With more than 10,000 active satellites already in orbit and millions of smaller fragments accumulating, the risk of collision […]
The post The next generation of radar needed to detect micro-debris and enable a safer LEO appeared first on SpaceNews.
As shown by the recent SpaceNews editorials by Mustafa Bilal and Stirling Forbes, there is currently much talk of a coming lunar “gold rush,” with nations and companies seemingly in a mad scramble to access the moon for its alleged resources. But how realistic is this vision, and could the pursuit of it do more harm […]
The post Avoiding a harmful lunar ‘gold rush’ appeared first on SpaceNews.
London Centric:
Sam was walking past a Royal Mail depot in south London in January when his path was blocked by a group of eight men.
“I tried to move to let them pass, but the last guy blocked the path,” the 32-year-old told London Centric. “They started pushing me and hitting me, telling me to give them everything.”
The thieves took Sam’s phone, his camera and even the beanie hat off his head. After checking Sam had nothing else on him, they started to run off.
What happened next was a surprise. With most of the gang already heading down the Old Kent Road, one turned around and handed Sam back his Android phone.
The thief bluntly told him why: “Don’t want no Samsung.”
This, despite the fact that the iPhone-Android market share split is around 50-50 in the UK. It’s that the iPhone overwhelmingly attracts people who care about their phone. Android attracts the people who don’t care. It’s the same reason why the Mac has, for decades now, dominated the profit share of the PC industry while garnering only about 10 percent unit-sale share. It’s also why it’s major news that Tesla is testing CarPlay support, and not news at all that they’re not testing Android Auto support. “Don’t want no Samsung” indeed.
Apple Newsroom, last week:
Apple today announced the launch of Digital ID, a new way for users to create an ID in Apple Wallet using information from their U.S. passport, and present it with the security and privacy of iPhone or Apple Watch. At launch, Digital ID acceptance will roll out first in beta at TSA checkpoints at more than 250 airports in the U.S. for in-person identity verification during domestic travel, with additional Digital ID acceptance use cases to come in the future.
Digital ID gives more people a way to create and present an ID in Apple Wallet even if they do not have a REAL ID-compliant driver’s license or state ID. Digital ID is not a replacement for a physical passport, and cannot be used for international travel and border crossing in lieu of a U.S. passport.
I set this up over the weekend and it was about as easy and seamless as you could hope. More information from Apple here, and an overview of the feature, as implemented by Apple and Google (for Android) from The New York Times here (gift link).
Ryan Christoffel, reporting for 9to5Mac a month ago:
Meta has published a support doc that states its Messenger app for Mac is being discontinued. New users won’t be able to download the app at all, and existing users have about 60 more days of use before it stops working altogether. Why the change? Unfortunately, no reason has been given. But users are being pushed to the Facebook website for all their Messenger needs instead.
There’s a nearly identical support document for the native Messenger app for Windows too. They’re not even replacing them with web-app wrappers, like they just did with the Windows WhatsApp client. Just telling users to use the website.
Clerk makes authentication for iOS apps effortless — just drop in prebuilt SwiftUI components for sign-in, MFA, and profile management. Fully customizable, always in sync with Apple’s design system, and packed with features devs love: social sign-in, user roles, and organization management. Launch faster, stay secure, and scale confidently, whether you’re building the next big thing or a startup MVP. See how Clerk makes complete user management easy for modern iOS teams.
Jay Yagnik, VP of AI innovation and research, on Google’s The Keyword blog:
Private AI Compute is built on a multi-layered system that is designed from the ground up around core security and privacy principles:
- One integrated Google tech stack: Private AI Compute runs on one seamless Google stack powered by our own custom Tensor Processing Units (TPUs). World-class privacy and security is integrated into this architecture with Titanium Intelligence Enclaves (TIE). This design enables Google AI features to use our most capable and intelligent Gemini models in the cloud, with our high standards for privacy and the same in-house computing infrastructure you already rely on for Gmail and Search.
- No access: Remote attestation and encryption are used to connect your device to the hardware-secured sealed cloud environment, allowing Gemini models to securely process your data within a specialized, protected space. This ensures sensitive data processed by Private AI Compute remains accessible only to you and no one else, not even Google.
Sounds a lot like Apple’s Private Cloud Compute, which raises the question of whether this Google project is related to the Gurman scoop that Apple and Google are on the cusp of a deal for a white-label version of Google Gemini to run on Apple’s Private Cloud Compute servers to power the next-generation versions of Siri and Apple Intelligence.
I strongly suspect this is something Google has been working on for a while. Apple, I think it’s fair to say, places a higher priority on privacy than does Google, but Google does value privacy. But perhaps the deal with Apple accelerated the project within Google.
UPDATE: The wider issue seems resolved, and we’ve restored member services.
Original post: An internet-wide Cloudflare issue has made access to TPM a bit shaky this morning. While the wider issue is being resolved and to ensure you can access TPM, we’ve disabled member services temporarily. Don’t be alarmed if you can’t sign in to TPM; you should still be able to read TPM. We’ll restore member services as soon as the underlying issue, which is outside of our control, is resolved.
I try not to share ideas or theories that I suspect, by the odds, are not likely true. But sometimes I’m curious enough about one that I want to share it with that proviso. Here’s one. Like almost everyone else, I’ve being trying to make sense of Marjorie Taylor Greene’s recent arc. Mostly I’ve come up totally dry. I can’t make sense of it. I’ve seen various theories, that she’s making a long play for the future leadership of the post-Trump MAGA movement or other cunning and ambition-driven theories. But none of them really explain what I’ve seen.
Here’s an idea.
On a recent appearance on “The View,” one of the hosts asked Greene what she has to say for herself or how she explains her long history of spouting conspiracy theories. Greene isn’t the most articulate person. But what I think she said was that she was yet another victim of online misinformation. That’s quite a statement — to put it mildly. Clever too, since it whisks the whole history aside with an appeal to a totem of the Trump opposition. But it made me think of the apparent role of the Epstein story in her slow-rolling Trump apostasy. Is it possible this is actually how she sees her story?
As far as I can tell, the first real sign of her defying Trump was when she, along with Reps. Nancy Mace and Lauren Boebert, signed on to the Epstein discharge petition. That’s the technical term for the petition which can force the Speaker to hold a vote. As we’ve discussed many times, the Epstein story is a kind of ur-myth of the modern far right and the MAGA movement. Indeed, it was a very big deal even before most people had any real idea who Epstein was. The idea that the Democrats, liberals, Globalists, elite, etc. are not only controlling the world and selling out America but in fact running a pedophile ring lavish with the gruesome sexual exploitation of children goes all the way back to the PizzaGate conspiracy theory. From there it got swept into the elaborate con known as the QAnon movement. There’s this pre-Epstein version of what became the Epstein story that long predates most people ever having heard of Jeff Epstein. Once the Epstein story became a national obsession in 2019, it looked close enough to the far-right ur-myth of an elite pedophile cabal that the two stories melded together seamlessly and permanently. PizzaGate/QAnon snapped together with the Epstein story like a magnet rushing to a piece of iron.
So here’s my thought. If Greene was really a true believer in the whole QAnon world, which transmigrated pretty seamlessly into the Epstein story, maybe seeing Trump turn on his heels and insist that the world move on and never talk about it again simply shook her at a basic level that most of us can’t quite imagine. If you recall, when we first heard of Greene as a candidate, she was as the first actual QAnon supporter running for Congress.
Here’s where I want to remind you that this all seems a bit too novelistic, a bit too just-right. But why exactly? For most of us, Trump is a serial liar and abuser of women. He has a very public history of “dating” women who were 19 or 20 years old when he was well into middle age. Trump’s audacity in doing his epic record scratch moment, shifting from the man who would clean the stables of Epsteinian elite corruption to the guy who closed the stables, might take us aback a bit. But the idea that he might have something to hide is hardly shocking. But again, if you’re a true believer, it might be pretty shocking. In fact, it could be the kind of thing that upends your whole worldview in pretty dramatic and unpredictable ways.
In any case, I’m not making a strong argument for this theory, as I said. I share it because I really don’t know what’s going on with Greene. And the twelve-dimensional chess, crazy-like-a-Fox explanations I’ve seen actually don’t make a great deal of sense. So … maybe.
One of my instrument panel watchwords for understanding politics is that all power is unitary. In the case of presidents, you don’t have one bundle of power in one area and a siloed, distinct and unaffected bundle in another. A president’s power is a uniform commodity wherever he reaches. What boosts it or drags it down in one area affects it everywhere else. That’s the best way to understand President Trump’s position 10 months into his second term. It’s hard to know whether it was the five-week government shutdown which focused public attention on draconian cuts to health care, the election night shellacking, the first signs of MAGA diehards defecting from the president, the grotesque and absurd Epstein cat-and-mouse game or a dozen other comparable examples. What makes it both hard to pick apart the different drivers of a president’s decline and perilous for the president himself is that the different drivers feed on themselves. They become both cause and effect in a mounting spiral.
At some point in the next several months the Supreme Court will render a verdict on President Trump’s manifestly illegal tariffs which have not only roiled consumers in the United States but upended the entire global financial system. There have always been signs that this power grab may have finally been a step too far, even for this Supreme Court. To the extent one can map the facts of the tariff case onto the Court’s pet doctrines — ‘major question’, ‘non-delegation’ — the Court should be hot to reject Trump’s claims. A question of such gravity shouldn’t rest on what is at best an ambiguous text and even if Congress had wanted to entirely cede its constitutional power over tariffs, they shouldn’t have been allowed to. Obviously, jurisprudential consistency doesn’t count for much amidst the Court’s corruption. More significant is that the tariffs themselves probably aren’t terribly welcome to a six person Republican majority. There’s also Federalist Society architect Leonard Leo’s conspicuous role in the legal challenge to the tariffs. But there’s another factor. The Court is not immune from the factor that is weighing Trump down on so many other fronts. Indeed, their corruption likely makes them even more liable to it. No one likes to back the weak horse. No one wants to back the loser. Right now, Trump looks increasingly like a loser, a president whose formal powers will likely last another three years but whose actual power is ebbing.
Again, these things become both cause and effect. Having his signature policy exploded in an instant will only add to the stench of haplessness, impotence and failure. People are just less and less afraid of this president. You can see it in their actions. Trump is now threatening primaries against the Republicans who didn’t bend to his will on gerrymandering their state. He shouldn’t have to do that.
When did it start? Was it the Jimmy Kimmel brouhaha? Keep an eye out for leaks. They appear to be coming more easily now. We hear it short order when investigators are fired for getting too close to sharks and hucksters like Bill Pulte. The GOP Senate’s attempt to cut $1 million checks to 10 of its members demonstrated both the invulnerability Team Trump now feels but also quickly ebbing public patience. MSNBC reports this morning that Kash Patel’s girlfriend, country music performer Alexis Wilkins, now has a round-the-clock security detail of FBI SWAT team agents. Someone leaked that. Just like someone leaked Patel’s use of his FBI jet to squire her around the country on their weekends out. You can imagine Patel’s furious ire at the leakers. He must want them run to ground at the earliest opportunity. But remember that they’re seasoned law enforcement and/or counter-intelligence professionals. Patel is a one time junior line prosecutor-turned podcaster. He may not stand a chance.
Garrett Graff argues convincingly here that for all the terror he has spread, Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino and his terror brigades are now pulling out of Chicago in defeat, not victory. The antibodies created in LA aided Chicago and both will likely aid North Carolina, onto which Bovino now descends.
One question I have in this unfolding of events is the role of the Epstein story. Whatever inherent importance it has, it has had the effect of not only making Trump look guilty but — I would argue more importantly — impotent and absurd. Strongmen aren’t good guys. Their power is to a real degree built on not appearing to be. But they can’t ever afford to appear hapless or dominated. Trump’s evasions, cover stories, OJ-like pledges to find the “real killers” and other increasingly comic excuses look weak and ridiculous. Above all else, a strongman can’t look weak and ridiculous. To what extent has that sheen of impotence and absurdity added to the weight of all the other things weighing him down? I suspect quite a bit.
Market uncertainty exacerbated by the government shutdown along with economic uncertainty stemming from tariffs and rising construction costs kept builder confidence firmly in negative territory in November.
Builder confidence in the market for newly built single-family homes rose one point to 38 in November, according to the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB)/Wells Fargo Housing Market Index (HMI) released today.
“While lower mortgage rates are a positive development for affordability conditions, many buyers remain hesitant because of the recent record-long government shutdown and concerns over job security and inflation,” said NAHB Chairman Buddy Hughes, a home builder and developer from Lexington, N.C. “More builders are using incentives to get deals closed, including lowering prices, but many potential buyers still remain on the fence.”
“We continue to see demand-side weakness as a softening labor market and stretched consumer finances are contributing to a difficult sales environment,” said NAHB Chief Economist Robert Dietz. “After a decline for single-family housing starts in 2025, NAHB is forecasting a slight gain in 2026 as builders continue to report future sales conditions in marginally positive territory.”
In a further sign of ongoing challenges for the housing market, the latest HMI survey also revealed that 41% of builders reported cutting prices in November, a record high in the post-Covid period and the first time this measure has passed 40%. Meanwhile, the average price reduction was 6% in November, the same rate as the previous month. The use of sales incentives was 65% in November, tying the share in September and October.
...
The HMI index gauging current sales conditions increased two points to 41, the index measuring future sales fell three points to 51 and the gauge charting traffic of prospective buyers posted a one-point gain to 26.
Looking at the three-month moving averages for regional HMI scores, the Northeast rose two points to 48, the Midwest fell one point to 41, the South increased three points to 34 and the West gained two points to 30.
emphasis added
Click on graph for larger image.One exit poll result from Virginia’s gubernatorial race–and early exit polling data should always be taken with a grain of salt–was the massive support for the Democratic candidate (and victor) Spanberger among women aged 18-29:
(it’s worth noting that very similar patterns were observed in New Jersey’s gubernatorial race too)
While the support among young women is extraordinary*, the other dramatic difference is the gender gap, which appears in every age cohort (and, again, similar numbers occur in New Jersey). The gender gap, depending on age, ranges between thirteen and twenty-four percent. For context, the gender gap in presidential elections typically ranges between seven to twelve percent.
Clearly, men are too emotional to be trusted with politics and voting
One thing worth noting is that, according to the exit polls, crime was not a very salient issue. That helps Democrats, since, not only can’t Democrats figure out how to deal with the issue, but women seem more interested in the issue than men, blunting the gender gap advantage.
Just something to think about for 2026.
Social media has been a familiar, even mundane, part of life for nearly two decades. It can be easy to forget it was not always that way.
In 2008, social media was just emerging into the mainstream. Facebook reached 100 million users that summer. And a singular candidate was integrating social media into his political campaign: Barack Obama. His campaign’s use of social media was so bracingly innovative, so impactful, that it was viewed by journalist David Talbot and others as the strategy that enabled the first term Senator to win the White House.
Over the past few years, a new technology has become mainstream: AI. But still, no candidate has unlocked AI’s potential to revolutionize political campaigns. Americans have three more years to wait before casting their ballots in another Presidential election, but we can look at the 2026 midterms and examples from around the globe for signs of how that breakthrough might occur.
Rereading the contemporaneous reflections of the New York Times’ late media critic, David Carr, on Obama’s campaign reminds us of just how new social media felt in 2008. Carr positions it within a now-familiar lineage of revolutionary communications technologies from newspapers to radio to television to the internet.
The Obama campaign and administration demonstrated that social media was different from those earlier communications technologies, including the pre-social internet. Yes, increasing numbers of voters were getting their news from the internet, and content about the then-Senator sometimes made a splash by going viral. But those were still broadcast communications: one voice reaching many. Obama found ways to connect voters to each other.
In describing what social media revolutionized in campaigning, Carr quotes campaign vendor Blue State Digital’s Thomas Gensemer: “People will continue to expect a conversation, a two-way relationship that is a give and take.”
The Obama team made some earnest efforts to realize this vision. His transition team launched change.gov, the website where the campaign collected a “Citizen’s Briefing Book” of public comment. Later, his administration built We the People, an online petitioning platform.
But the lasting legacy of Obama’s 2008 campaign, as political scientists Hahrie Han and Elizabeth McKenna chronicled, was pioneering online “relational organizing.” This technique enlisted individuals as organizers to activate their friends in a self-perpetuating web of relationships.
Perhaps because of the Obama campaign’s close association with the method, relational organizing has been touted repeatedly as the linchpin of Democratic campaigns: in 2020, 2024, and today. But research by non-partisan groups like Turnout Nation and right-aligned groups like the Center for Campaign Innovation has also empirically validated the effectiveness of the technique for inspiring voter turnout within connected groups.
The Facebook of 2008 worked well for relational organizing. It gave users tools to connect and promote ideas to the people they know: college classmates, neighbors, friends from work or church. But the nature of social networking has changed since then.
For the past decade, according to Pew Research, Facebook use has stalled and lagged behind YouTube, while Reddit and TikTok have surged. These platforms are less useful for relational organizing, at least in the traditional sense. YouTube is organized more like broadcast television, where content creators produce content disseminated on their own channels in a largely one-way communication to their fans. Reddit gathers users worldwide in forums (subreddits) organized primarily on topical interest. The endless feed of TikTok’s “For You” page disseminates engaging content with little ideological or social commonality. None of these platforms shares the essential feature of Facebook c. 2008: an organizational structure that emphasizes direct connection to people that users have direct social influence over.
Ideas and messages might spread virally through modern social channels, but they are not where you convince your friends to show up at a campaign rally. Today’s platforms are spaces for political hobbyism, where you express your political feelings and see others express theirs.
Relational organizing works when one person’s action inspires others to do this same. That’s inherently a chain of human-to-human connection. If my AI assistant inspires your AI assistant, no human notices and one’s vote changes. But key steps in the human chain can be assisted by AI. Tell your phone’s AI assistant to craft a personal message to one friend—or a hundred—and it can do it.
So if a campaign hits you at the right time with the right message, they might persuade you to task your AI assistant to ask your friends to donate or volunteer. The result can be something more than a form letter; it could be automatically drafted based on the entirety of your email or text correspondence with that friend. It could include references to your discussions of recent events, or past campaigns, or shared personal experiences. It could sound as authentic as if you’d written it from the heart, but scaled to everyone in your address book.
Research suggests that AI can generate and perform written political messaging about as well as humans. AI will surely play a tactical role in the 2026 midterm campaigns, and some candidates may even use it for relational organizing in this way.
For AI to be truly transformative of politics, it must change the way campaigns work. And we are starting to see that in the US.
The earliest uses of AI in American political campaigns are, to be polite, uninspiring. Candidates viewed them as just another tool to optimize an endless stream of email and text message appeals, to ramp up political vitriol, to harvest data on voters and donors, or merely as a stunt.
Of course, we have seen the rampant production and spread of AI-powered deepfakes and misinformation. This is already impacting the key 2026 Senate races, which are likely to attract hundreds of millions of dollars in financing. Roy Cooper, Democratic candidate for US Senate from North Carolina, and Abdul El-Sayed, Democratic candidate for Senate from Michigan, were both targeted by viral deepfake attacks in recent months. This may reflect a growing trend in Donald Trump’s Republican party in the use of AI-generated imagery to build up GOP candidates and assail the opposition.
And yet, in the global elections of 2024, AI was used more memetically than deceptively. So far, conservative and far right parties seem to have adopted this most aggressively. The ongoing rise of Germany’s far-right populist AfD party has been credited to its use of AI to generate nostalgic and evocative (and, to many, offensive) campaign images, videos, and music and, seemingly as a result, they have dominated TikTok. Because most social platforms’ algorithms are tuned to reward media that generates an emotional response, this counts as a double use of AI: to generate content and to manipulate its distribution.
AI can also be used to generate politically useful, though artificial, identities. These identities can fulfill different roles than humans in campaigning and governance because they have differentiated traits. They can’t be imprisoned for speaking out against the state, can be positioned (legitimately or not) as unsusceptible to bribery, and can be forced to show up when humans will not.
In Venezuela, journalists have turned to AI avatars—artificial newsreaders—to report anonymously on issues that would otherwise elicit government retaliation. Albania recently “appointed” an AI to a ministerial post responsible for procurement, claiming that it would be less vulnerable to bribery than a human. In Virginia, both in 2024 and again this year, candidates have used AI avatars as artificial stand-ins for opponents that refused to debate them.
And yet, none of these examples, whether positive or negative, pursue the promise of the Obama campaign: to make voter engagement a “two-way conversation” on a massive scale.
The closest so far to fulfilling that vision anywhere in the world may be Japan’s new political party, Team Mirai. It started in 2024, when an independent Tokyo gubernatorial candidate, Anno Takahiro, used an AI avatar on YouTube to respond to 8,600 constituent questions over a seventeen-day continuous livestream. He collated hundreds of comments on his campaign manifesto into a revised policy platform. While he didn’t win his race, he shot up to a fifth place finish among a record 56 candidates.
Anno was RECENTLY elected to the upper house of the federal legislature as the founder of a new party with a 100 day plan to bring his vision of a “public listening AI” to the whole country. In the early stages of that plan, they’ve invested their share of Japan’s 32 billion yen in party grants—public subsidies for political parties—to hire engineers building digital civic infrastructure for Japan. They’ve already created platforms to provide transparency for party expenditures, and to use AI to make legislation in the Diet easy, and are meeting with engineers from US-based Jigsaw Labs (a Google company) to learn from international examples of how AI can be used to power participatory democracy.
Team Mirai has yet to prove that it can get a second member elected to the Japanese Diet, let alone to win substantial power, but they’re innovating and demonstrating new ways of using AI to give people a way to participate in politics that we believe is likely to spread.
AI could be used in the US in similar ways. Following American federalism’s longstanding model of “laboratories of democracy,” we expect the most aggressive campaign innovation to happen at the state and local level.
D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser is partnering with MIT and Stanford labs to use the AI-based tool deliberation.io to capture wide scale public feedback in city policymaking about AI. Her administration said that using AI in this process allows “the District to better solicit public input to ensure a broad range of perspectives, identify common ground, and cultivate solutions that align with the public interest.”
It remains to be seen how central this will become to Bowser’s expected re-election campaign in 2026, but the technology has legitimate potential to be a prominent part of a broader program to rebuild trust in government. This is a trail blazed by Taiwan a decade ago. The vTaiwan initiative showed how digital tools like Pol.is, which uses machine learning to make sense of real time constituent feedback, can scale participation in democratic processes and radically improve trust in government. Similar AI listening processes have been used in Kentucky, France, and Germany.
Even if campaigns like Bowser’s don’t adopt this kind of AI-facilitated listening and dialog, expect it to be an increasingly prominent part of American public debate. Through a partnership with Jigsaw, Scott Rasmussen’s Napolitan Institute will use AI to elicit and synthesize the views of at least five Americans from every Congressional district in a project called “We the People.” Timed to coincide with the country’s 250th anniversary in 2026, expect the results to be promoted during the heat of the midterm campaign and to stoke interest in this kind of AI-assisted political sensemaking.
In the year where we celebrate the American republic’s semiquincentennial and continue a decade-long debate about whether or not Donald Trump and the Republican party remade in his image is fighting for the interests of the working class, representation will be on the ballot in 2026. Midterm election candidates will look for any way they can get an edge. For all the risks it poses to democracy, AI presents a real opportunity, too, for politicians to engage voters en masse while factoring their input into their platform and message. Technology isn’t going to turn an uninspiring candidate into Barack Obama, but it gives any aspirant to office the capability to try to realize the promise that swept him into office.
This essay was written with Nathan E. Sanders, and originally appeared in The Fulcrum.
The next three in this series on online events highlighting interesting uses of AI in cybersecurity are online: #4, #5, and #6. Well worth watching.
Acute inflammation helps the body heal. But chronic inflammation is different and could provoke a medical paradigm shift
- by Amy K McLennan
The industrial production indexes that are published in the G.17 Statistical Release on Industrial Production and Capacity Utilization incorporate a range of data from other government agencies, the publication of which has been delayed as a result of the federal government shutdown. Consequently, the G.17 monthly release will not be published as scheduled on November 18, 2025.
Note: Mortgage rates are from MortgageNewsDaily.com and are for top tier scenarios.Links for you. Science:
Who benefits from the MAHA anti-science push?
‘Dangerous’ mosquitoes that can spread fatal diseases invade Bay Area tech hub
Foreign Food Safety Inspections Hit Historic Low After Trump Cuts
Bacteria sense virus-induced genome degradation via methylated mononucleotides
NIH under Trump wanted to slash indirect research costs to 15%. Pitt just signed an agreement at 59%
How long does covid booster protection last? A new study offers answers.
Other:
HOW ELON MUSK IS BOOSTING THE BRITISH RIGHT: For nine months, Sky News’ Data and Forensics team has been investigating whether X’s algorithm amplifies right-wing and extreme content. It does. (anyone who is using Twitter/X to get a handle on ‘what people think’ is stewing in rightwing propaganda)
I tried Elon Musk’s Wikipedia clone and boy is it racist
OpenAI probably can’t make ends meet. That’s where you come in.
AI Is Supercharging the War on Libraries, Education, and Human Knowledge
Wilson Building Bulletin: Foie gras — on the ballot and off the menu?
Uh-oh, the GOP’s Texas gerrymander suddenly looking shakier
With another extension, debate continues on youth curfew
Tech Billionaire Marc Andreessen Bet Big on Trump. It’s Paying Off for Silicon Valley.
D.C.’s new streatery rules are a costly miscalculation. The city’s streatery guidelines are punishing small businesses and vibrant neighborhoods. We need a permanent solution to keep these staples of the city’s dining scene.
Trump Humiliation Worsens as Fresh Info Reveals Scale of GOP Losses
Hack Exposes Kansas City’s Secret Police Misconduct List
Democrats’ big election wins showed they don’t need to hide their support for trans rights
Let’s Check In With People Who Threatened To Leave Zohran Mamdani’s NYC
A Crisis Of Confidence Solved
‘He was bragging about it’: GOP insiders flag moment Trump lost key contest ‘out of spite’
Colorado voters approve boost to free school meals program
Zohran Mamdani’s Muted Climate Politics
‘Hell on Earth’: Texas Airports Are Slammed With Hours-Long TSA Lines and 1,000 Flight Delays
America’s Dumbest Billionaires Fail to Stop Zohran Mamdani
Remember When
Good Night and Good Luck, Andrew Cuomo
Democrats Can’t Blame Trans People for Their Own Failures
Stephen A. Smith And Other ESPNers Partner With Obscenely Scuzzy Mobile Casino
One of the Greatest Wall Street Investors of All Time Announces Retirement
Judge blasts Trump’s Chicago border ‘Blitz,’ extends curbs on use of force that ‘shocks the conscience’
Why Are Republicans So Irrelevant In Big City Politics?
Hey, Republicans: Blame Trump. Exit polls show Tuesday’s election was a referendum on the president and his policies.
Federal Judge Imposes Strict Restrictions on Immigration Agents’ Use of Force Against Protesters, Media, Clergy
Paramount Has Blacklist for Stars Deemed “Overtly Antisemitic”
Social Security Employees Grill Management During Tense Shutdown Meeting
One of the ridiculous complaints Republicans have ginned up is that Biden’s pardons and commutations aren’t legitimate because they were signed with an autopen–the implication is that Biden had no idea he signed these, and thus they are not valid. Well, guess who else signed pardons with autopens? No, the answer is not Hitler (boldface mine):
The Justice Department posted pardons online bearing identical copies of President Donald Trump’s signature before quietly correcting them this week after what the agency called a “technical error.”
The replacements came after online commenters seized on striking similarities in the president’s signature across a series of pardons dated Nov. 7, including those granted to former New York Mets player Darryl Strawberry, former Tennessee House speaker Glen Casada and former New York police sergeant Michael McMahon. In fact, the signatures on several pardons initially uploaded to the Justice Department’s website were identical, two forensic document experts confirmed to The Associated Press.
Within hours of the online speculation, the administration replaced copies of the pardons with new ones that did not feature identical signatures. It insisted Trump, who mercilessly mocked his predecessor’s use of an autopen, had originally signed all the Nov. 7 pardons himself and blamed “technical” and staffing issues for the error, which has no bearing on the validity of the clemency actions.
It’s a very minor thing, but it really is assholes all the way down for this administration.
For decades—yes, literally decades—it has been easy to dismiss Blue Origin as a company brimming with potential but rarely producing much of consequence.
But last week the company took a tremendous stride forward, not just launching its second orbital rocket, but subsequently landing the booster on a barge named Jacklyn. It now seems clear that Blue Origin is in the midst of a transition from sleeping giant to force to be reckoned with.
To get a sense of where the company goes from here, Ars spoke with the company’s chief executive, Dave Limp, on the eve of last week’s launch. The first thing he emphasized is how much the company learned about New Glenn, and the process of rolling the vehicle out and standing it up for launch, from the vehicle’s first attempt in January.
I joined McKinsey at age 29, and had to undergo a strange initiation ritual.
No, they didn’t make me give a client presentation dressed in my skivvies. Or calculate CAGRs with a slide rule. Or drink a shot of whiskey every time somebody said value added.
My initiation ritual was more profound than any of those frat-like pranks. I had to fly across the country to meet an old man. A very old man.
His name was Marvin Bower, and he was born in Cincinnati in the year 1903. He insisted on meeting every new hire at McKinsey—a firm he had built from almost nothing. And because he was so important, I traveled three thousand miles to hear what he had to say.
As it turned out, Mr. Bower had quite a lot to say.
He was a wise man—an oracle for leaders over the course of decades. And now I would meet the oracle face-to-face, getting my chance to tap into his wisdom.
If I were a hero in a Star Wars movie, this would be the moment when young Ted meets his guru Yoda—and gets valuable lessons he wasn’t expecting.
They were riveting lessons—important ones that, I fear, the world (especially the corporate world) has forgotten. So I want to share them with you.
Lada Nuzhna is impatient.
At 21, she co-founded Impetus Grants. This non-profit, backed by wealthy pro-science philanthropists like James Fickel, Jed McCaleb, Juan Benet and Vitalik Buterin, sought to speed up longevity research. Starting in 2021, it awarded grants to high-risk, high-potential research with the promise of cutting checks quickly and little bureaucratic overhead. About 150 efforts were fired up with the money going to new tools, new science and clinical trials at a time when neither the U.S. government nor typical investors were backing much in the way of aging technology. “We raised money to back crazy science, knowing that most of the projects would fail,” Nuzhna says. “But we also knew the ones that succeeded would be a big deal.”
Now, at 26, Nuzhna has her next act. It’s a biotech start-up called General Control. The company, backed by age1 and Fifty Years to the tune of $5.5 million, has been operating in secret since its founding in 2024, and it arrives with some lofty aspirations. General Control seeks to develop compounds that can alter numerous genes in the human body to create lasting effects such as increased muscle mass or better liver function. If the company can do what it hopes, General Control would produce aging therapies far more potent than anything available today.
The work General Control is chasing falls into the category of epigenetic editing, where scientists try to adjust the cellular instructions that tell our genes how active to be. The basic idea is to find compounds that can dial a gene’s activity up or down, depending on what the body needs. If, for example, the genes involved in building and repairing muscle get quieter as we age, a targeted epigenetic edit might turn them back up.
Researchers and companies have worked on these techniques for decades. For the most part, we’ve seen some success at silencing individual genes but have struggled to “activate” or turn up individual genes. There’s also been little success at trying to uplevel the function of multiple genes at once. General Control has arrived with the very bold ambition of trying to do what others haven’t by altering multiple genes and turning them up and having those effects last for a long time.
TO DATE, much of the most serious epigenetic editing work has centered on rare diseases triggered by a single gene gone wrong. Scientists have focused on trying to quiet or correct the lone, misbehaving gene.
Nuzhna’s thesis is that advancements in the underlying science have now made it feasible to be broader and more ambitious with epigenetic alterations. Instead of tackling a rare disease, General Control wants to go after conditions that afflict huge numbers of people. “We’re certainly not the first company to try and do this type of editing,” she says, in an exclusive interview with Core Memory. “Our contrarian bet is that epigenetic editing is now safe enough to test on bigger populations.”
The advance that General Control hopes to play off revolves around CRISPR, which is best known for its ability to edit genes by cutting out and replacing hunks of DNA. In this case, however, General Control isn’t using CRISPR to cut DNA at all. Instead, they use it as a kind of GPS system that delivers helpful proteins to exact spots in the genome. Once there, those proteins can switch genes on or off by making the surrounding DNA easier or harder for the cell to read.
“One of the interesting things about these epigenetic editing tools is that you can target more than one gene – not a hundred, but, say, two or three – at a time,” says Jacob Kimmel, the co-founder and president of NewLimit, which competes in the longevity arena. “Instead of making two, totally distinct drugs that go after two genes, I can target genes A and B with one, common editing enzyme that delivers two guide RNA sequences which tell the CRISPR enzyme where to bind in the genome.”
Scientists have been excited about the prospects of this technology for decades, but the results have not always lived up to the hopes. Start-ups chasing these types of editors have faced financial pressures, as investing in therapies based on this technology has dried up in recent years. Nonetheless, companies like Tune Therapeutics and nChroma Bio have pushed forward with the techniques, although, again, often with an early focus on silencing single genes.
Both Nuzhna and her investors contend that the biotech market has been missing out on a bigger opportunity. “It’s a space that was very soured by the market downturn over the past few years, but it’s now much more apparent for which applications this technology is practical and ready for primetime,” says Alex Colville, the co-founder of age1. “We think there’s a mismatch between the state of the science and the dearth of efforts devoted towards therapies based on that science.”
General Control has three initial programs that it’s ready to discuss. It’s going after obesity, liver fibrosis and muscle loss.
On the obesity front, the company thinks it can silence a gene responsible for fat distribution and that its therapy would have benefits beyond GLP-1s like Wegovy. People often regain the weight they’ve lost via GLP-1s after stopping the medication. With General Control, the approach would be more of a one-and-done where the therapy lasts a lifetime. “You want this to be durable,” says Nuzhna. “You silence the gene and never show up to the doctor again.”
The liver therapy also hinges on silencing a gene, while the muscle loss therapy would be General Control’s first stab at activating a gene. Across all three programs, General Control sees opportunities to tweak multiple genes at once to, say, help people lose weight and manage their cholesterol at the same time.
There are a multitude of reasons to temper excitement around General Control for the moment. The company has been operating in stealth mode and has not published data or results from its work. So far, its trials have also only been taking place in mice. And it’s largely starting with the silencing of genes, like most of its existing competitors. The notion of activating multiple genes remains shrouded in uncertainty.
“The best scientists in the world have worked really hard on trying to get the durable epigenetic activation of genes,” says Kimmel. “It’s the kind of thing where, if you did have solid data on this, it would be of global interest.”
The thought that a newly formed, small research team has already surpassed these top scientists thus arrives with healthy skepticism until proven otherwise.
General Control’s head of research is Giovanni Carosso, a geneticist and molecular biologist, who most recently worked at Epic Bio. He’s published extensively in the epigenetic editing field.
The company is also announcing a partnership with Novo Nordisk to apply its technology at a pair of undisclosed gene targets.
The team Nuzhna has assembled along with some of their early research successes have the company’s investors enthused. They’re also hoping that Nuzhna and her background make her a special entrepreneur.
Nuzhna grew up in a small town in Ukraine and came to the U.S. on her own at 18 to attend Northwestern University. A couple of years later, Nuzhna got a Thiel Fellowship, dropped out of school and began working on the Impetus Grants program where she helped raise $34 million. “She raised more money for philanthropy in the aging space than most workers in the philanthropy industry raise in their life,” Colville says.
General Control’s goal, as Nuzhna sees it, is to apply the epigenetic editing as broadly as possible and to go after the aging-related diseases that will be most common. “We’re not the only ones looking at this technology,” she says, speaking from the company’s lab in San Francisco. “What makes us unique is our pursuit of chronic disease as opposed to small, isolated disorders.”
Tracking local data gives an early look at what happened the previous month and also reveals regional differences in both sales and inventory.There is much more in the article.
October sales will be mostly for contracts signed in August and September, and mortgage rates averaged 6.59% in August and 6.35% in September (lower than for closed sales in September).
In October, sales in these markets were down 0.3% YoY. Last month, in September, these same markets were up 8.0% year-over-year Not Seasonally Adjusted (NSA).
Important: There were the same number of working days in October 2025 (22) as in October 2024 (22). So, the year-over-year change in the headline SA data will be similar to the change in NSA data (there are other seasonal factors).
...
More local markets to come!
Construction spending during August 2025 was estimated at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of $2,169.5 billion, 0.2 percent above the revised July estimate of $2,165.0 billion. The August figure is 1.6 percent below the August 2024 estimate of $2,205.3 billion.Private spending increased and public spending was unchanged:
emphasis added
Spending on private construction was at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of $1,652.1 billion, 0.3 percent above the revised July estimate of $1,647.5 billion. ...
n August, the estimated seasonally adjusted annual rate of public construction spending was $517.3 billion, virtually unchanged from the revised July estimate of $517.5 billion.
Click on graph for larger image.
The second graph shows the year-over-year change in construction spending.
Click on graph for larger image.
This second inventory graph is courtesy of Altos Research.
For nearly 80 years, the specter of nuclear war has haunted humankind, shaping foreign policy, military strategy, and international relations. The principle of “mutually assured destruction” (MAD) has been the cornerstone of global stability since the dawn of the atomic age. Yet, this fragile equilibrium has always depended on one terrifying certainty: No defense is […]
The post How Golden Dome could make nuclear weapons irrelevant appeared first on SpaceNews.
China is set to launch an uncrewed Shenzhou spacecraft to the Tiangong space station to provide the Shenzhou-21 astronauts with a means of returning home.
The post China to launch Shenzhou-22 spacecraft Nov. 25 to provide lifeboat for astronauts appeared first on SpaceNews.
The FAA has ended restrictions on the timing of commercial launches that were triggered by the government shutdown’s effects on airspace management.
The post FAA ends commercial launch curfew appeared first on SpaceNews.
A Falcon 9 launched a joint U.S.-European satellite to monitor sea levels Nov. 17, extending a record of measurements that dates back more than three decades.
The post Falcon 9 launches Sentinel-6B satellite to monitor global sea level appeared first on SpaceNews.
Medpage Today has the story:
Medical Societies Are Facing an Existential Crisis
— It's time to adapt to the employed physician era
by Hemant Kalia MD, MPH, Mark Adams, MD, MBA, and David Jakubowicz, MD
"According to the American Medical Association (AMA), 2020 marked the first time that fewer than half (49.1%) of physicians worked in doctor-owned practices since their tracking began. By 2022, that number had fallen further to 46.7%, down from 60% a decade earlier. Meanwhile, the share of physicians employed by hospitals and health systems has expanded sharply -- from about 29% of physicians in 2012 to more than 40% in 2022. Private equity ownership, virtually absent in previous decades, now accounts for roughly 5% of physician employment.
...
" this employment transformation has disrupted the very institutions meant to represent physicians. Nationally, AMA membership has plunged from about 75% of U.S. physicians in the 1950s to just 15% today. State and county medical societies mirror this pattern, facing shrinking memberships, aging leadership, and limited engagement among younger doctors.
"Specialty societies have filled much of that vacuum. Groups like the American College of Physicians, the American College of Surgeons, and the American Academy of Family Physicians have seen significant growth over the past few decades.
Exoplanet discoveries have reshaped astronomy. Are exomoons next? Brian Greene in conversation with David Kipping
- by Aeon Video
Our cursed age of self-monitoring and optimisation didn’t start with big tech: as so often, the Victorians are to blame
- by Elena Mary
SpaceX launched a joint NASA-European environmental research satellite early Monday, the second in an ongoing billion-dollar project to measure long-term changes in sea level, a key indicator of climate change.
The first satellite, known as Sentinel-6 and named in honor of NASA climate researcher Michael Freilich, was launched in November 2020. The follow-on spacecraft, Sentinel-6B, was launched from California atop a Falcon 9 rocket at 12:21 a.m. EST.
Both satellites are equipped with a sophisticated cloud-penetrating radar. By timing how long it takes beams to bounce back from the ocean 830 miles below, the Sentinel-6 satellites can track sea levels to an accuracy of about one inch while also measuring wave height and wind speeds.
The project builds on earlier missions dating back to the early 1990s that have provided an uninterrupted stream of sea level data.
That data indicates sea levels are slowly but surely rising, widely interpreted as evidence of global warming caused in large part by human industrial activity.
But in keeping with recent Trump administration policies aimed at scaling back climate research and the interpretation of such data, NASA did not directly refer to “climate change” or “global warming” in a Sentinel-6B pre-launch briefing Saturday.
In the press kit released by NASA for the first Sentinel 6 mission in 2020, the first item in a “need to know list” said the satellite would “provide information that will help researchers understand how climate change is reshaping Earth’s coastlines – and how fast this is happening.”
In the press kit for the Sentinel 6B mission launched Monday, NASA’s first “need to know” item said simply that “Sentinel-6B will contribute to a multi-decade dataset that is … key to helping improve public safety, city planning and protecting commercial and defense interests.”
Karen St. Germain, director of NASA’s Earth Science Division, did not directly mention climate change in the Saturday briefing, focusing instead on the practical importance of monitoring sea levels.
“Sentinel 6B is the latest in a line of missions stretching over three decades, keeping an uninterrupted watch over our planet’s sea surface height, finding patterns and advancing our understanding of planet Earth,” she said.
She said the data provided by the Sentinel-6 satellites “underpins navigation, search and rescue and industries like commercial fishing and shipping. These measurements form the basis for U.S. flood predictions for coastal infrastructure, real estate, energy storage sites and other assets along our shoreline.”
The data, she continued, will help scientists “understand and predict coastal erosion and salt water encroachment into inland supplies of water that are used for agriculture, irrigation as well as municipal drinking water.”
Regardless of interpretation, the launch of Sentinel-6B went off without a hitch.
After blasting off from launch complex 4E at the Vandenberg Space Force Base, the Falcon 9 rocket’s first stage powered the vehicle out of the dense lower atmosphere, separated and flew itself back to a landing pad at the California launch site.
The upper stage then carried out two firings of its single engine before releasing the 2,600-pound Sentinel-6B into an 830-mile-high orbit tilted 66 degrees to the equator, the same orbit used by Sentinel-6A and earlier sea level-monitoring spacecraft.
Taking 112 minutes to complete one orbit, the solar-powered satellite will fly over locations between 66 degrees north and south latitude, covering 90 percent of the world’s oceans.
Along with measuring sea levels, the new satellite also will monitor temperature and humidity in the lower atmosphere as well as the higher-altitude stratosphere using an instrument that measures atmospheric effects on signals broadcast by navigation satellites.
But the primary mission is monitoring Earth’s changing sea levels.
“The dynamic balance that persisted before the industrial revolution has been upset by the almost instantaneous combustion of huge reserves of carbon as our society has developed,” Craig Donlon, a European Space Agency project scientist, said before the first Sentinel-6 launch in 2020.
“We see evidence of this dramatic change in many different measurements … but they all point the same direction: the Earth is warming. And the greatest indicator of this Earth system imbalance is sea level rise.”
The Sentinel-6 satellites are the result of a collaboration between NASA, the European Space Agency, the European Organization for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
St. Germain said NASA’s share of the cost for both Sentinel-6 satellites came to about $500 million. The Europeans contributed a similar amount.
Update: Launch occurred on time and Sentinel-6B was successfully deployed. Read launch story.
The second spacecraft in a billion-dollar international mission to keep watch rising sea levels is scheduled to launch from California Sunday night, local time, weather permitting.
The Sentinel-6B satellite will liftoff atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Space Launch Complex-4E at Vandenberg Space Force Base at 9:21:42 p.m. PST (12:21:42 a.m. EST / 0521:42 UTC), almost exactly five years after its twin, the Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich, launched from the same pad.
Spaceflight Now will have live coverage starting about one hour prior to launch.
Meteorologists with the U.S. Space Force’s Space Launch Delta 30, based at Vandenberg, said they were optimistic the weather would cooperate, despite a series of low pressure weather systems bringing heavy rainfall to the West Coast. The probability of a weather rule violation for Sunday’s launch attempt was put at 60 percent.
“California has been one of the wettest places in the United States this weekend, even wetter than, say, the Midwest, which is really abnormal for Southern California,” Launch Weather Officer 1st Lt,. William F. Harbin told a pre-launch news conference Saturday.
Weather conditions are forecast to improve on Monday, Harbin said, with the chance of breaking the weather rules falling to 40 percent in the event of a 24-hour delay.
The Falcon 9 first stage, serial number B1097, is making its third flight. If everything goes as planned, B1097 will return to the launch site, landing approximately 1,400 feet west of the pad from which it took off. The mission will mark the 500th flight of a previously flown Falcon 9 booster.
The Sentinel-6B spacecraft, built by Airbus Defence and Space in Germany, will be deployed from the Falcon 9’s second stage 57 minutes into the flight after two burns by the Falcon 9’s second stage.
Sentinel-6B and its predecessor are part of a $1 billion international collaboration to continue a decades-long effort to accurately measure sea heights from orbit. The costs of the project were split evenly between the United States and Europe.
Partnering for the mission are NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA), the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (Eumetsat), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the European Commission and the French space agency CNES.
From its circular orbit, 830 miles (1,336 km) high, inclined at 66 degrees to the Equator, Sentinel-6B will use cloud-penetrating radar to measure sea level heights down to roughly an inch across 90 percent of the world’s oceans.
“This information lets us monitor significant ocean features like ocean currents, sea level and wave height, and gives us a view into the inner workings of the ocean,” said Karen St. Germain, NASA’s director of Earth science. “This information underpins navigation, search and rescue and industries like commercial fishing and shipping, and these measurements form the basis for us, flood predictions for coastal infrastructure, real estate, energy storage, sites and other assets along our shoreline.”
In line with Trump Administration policies, mission officials have made no mention of climate change, which scientists say is a major factor driving rising sea levels.
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What does the Milky Way look like in radio waves?
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