1. Florida drivers speed up after a close NFL home team loss. No such comparable effect for the NBA.
3. Ezra Klein and Chris Rufo (NYT).
4. Generating human eggs from stem cells?
5. AI to predict human chess moves?
7. Anthropic on the reconstruction of Fable 5. And Alex Stamos comments.
The post Wednesday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
India, which performs the third most kidney transplants in the world (after only the U.S. and China) is a natural location for international kidney exchange on a global scale. Here's a brief outline of the legal, administrative and procedural obstacles that need to be overcome on the way.
Kashiv, Pranjal MD, DM1; Balwani, Manish Ramesh MD2; Kute, Vivek B.3. International Kidney Paired Donation: Implications for India and Other Low- and Middle-income Countries. Transplantation ():10.1097/TP.0000000000005807, June 26, 2026. | DOI: 10.1097/TP.0000000000005807
An old friend recently wrote to me, telling me that I needed to write a blog post about bears on bicycles. He wrote: “The internet needs a large, apex predator trying its best to navigate a two-wheeled vehicle through the complexities of global supply chains and geopolitical shifts.” Wise words indeed. AI-generated words, to be sure, but full of wisdom nonetheless.
Writing a Noahpinion post about bears on bikes sounded challenging, but I’m never one to shrink from a challenge. So I’ve tried to include bears on bikes as a thematic throughline in today’s roundup.
But first, a podcast. I went on Sam Harris’ podcast to talk about the state of the macroeconomy! His podcast is paywalled, but you can listen to the first quarter of the discussion here:
Here’s a YouTube preview, if you like video.
Anyway, on to the roundup!
For years now, we’ve been wondering why Americans are in the dumps about the economy even though inflation is still relatively low and the employment rate is historically high. This “vibecession” is still happening, and it’s reaching absurd levels. The University of Michigan’s Index of Consumer Sentiment has hit its lowest level on record — lower than the inflation of the 70s, lower than the Great Recession, and lower than Covid:
Potential explanations have included:
Americans expressing unhappiness about political and social conflict by claiming the economy is bad
Increased partisanship making either Democrats or Republicans loath to admit that the economy is good, depending on which party has the presidency
High interest rates making it unaffordable to buy a home
A delayed reaction from years of rising service costs or other long-simmering economic difficulties
Now, over at Nate Silver’s blog, Joel Wertheimer has another potential explanation: Maybe the consumer sentiment data is just bad!
He writes:
The University of Michigan ICS [Survey of Consumers] is the gold standard sentiment survey measuring consumer sentiment. The survey has historically shown a very strong correlation with “hard” economic data such as inflation and unemployment. But…As with election polls, the ICS has struggled amid a shift away from telephone polling…So the problems with the ICS are these:
The switch to online polling made responses more negative and,
There are too many Democrats in the sample.
Thus, ICS data since mid-2024 is not comparable to past periods…Democrats right now say they hate the economy with Trump in charge…
When adjusted for these issues, the ICS should be substantially higher than the Great Recession lows we have witnessed over the past year. Weighting the survey to Pew’s National Public Opinion Reference Survey…would place the ICS at a level more like that in 2013…This adjustment would bring the survey in line with other measures of consumer confidence, such as those from the Conference Board, Gallup, and YouGov.
This seems like an important point. The Conference Board’s survey shows consumer confidence down from 2019, but still pretty good:
Gallup and YouGov don’t have data from before 2020, so I’m not sure how to use those as bases for comparison, but the disparity between the Conference Board’s survey and the University of Michigan’s survey seems important. And notice that the Conference Board doesn’t even show a “vibecession” during Biden’s term in office!
And although I missed it at the time, Ryan Cummings and Ernie Tedeschi did show that the University of Michigan’s index of consumer sentiment fell by 9 points when they shifted from telephone polling to online polling in 2024:
In other words, the notion that American consumers are ultra-bearish might be perched upon a flimsy bicycle of bad data.
So it might be that Americans are simply a lot less angry about the economy than we thought. That would be heartening from a “people are rational after all” standpoint, though perhaps disappointing for those who are hoping for a Democratic electoral sweep this fall.
Back in March, I wrote a hopeful post about how AI might de-radicalize our politics:
The basic idea was twofold:
AI can inject lots of information into debates in real time, in order to bring them back to reality and correct misinformation.
AI is trained on a sample of writing from Democrats AND Republicans, so it tends to be more moderate than the typical human being in a polarized society.
I called depolarizing AI “Digital Cronkite”, because it could be a modern version of Walter Cronkite’s moderate voice of authority on broadcast television in the mid 20th century.
My post cited some papers in support of the thesis. Here’s one more. Conlon and Schwardmann (2026) set out to study the phenomenon of “AI sycophancy” — i.e., AI telling people what they want to hear. Sycophancy is a well-documented phenomenon — if you tell AI that bears ride bikes, it’s disturbingly likely to agree. Some people are naturally afraid that sycophancy will increase political polarization, by reinforcing people’s political beliefs. If AI tells Democrats “Yes, Republicans are bad and you’re right about everything,” and if it tells Republicans “Yes, Democrats are bad and you’re right about everything,” that could seemingly entrench polarization by turning every human-AI conversation into a little echo chamber.
But Conlon and Schwardmann found that AI does the exact opposite of this! From their abstract:
Our experiment involves 1,500 participants in 30 decision environments spanning core domains in economics and the social sciences…[W]e find that AI advice depolarizes choices on average, moving participants away from their initial leanings. This depolarization arises despite the LLM being measurably sycophantic: it disproportionately offers considerations that support users’ initial leanings and uses agreeable and flattering language. Depolarization occurs across moral and non-moral, objective and subjective, strategic and non-strategic, and complex and simple tasks. Increasing sycophancy weakens depolarization, showing that sycophancy is behaviorally relevant, even if it is generally outweighed by the informativeness of AI advice. [emphasis mine]
The authors go with the “substantive information” theory of AI depolarization, and they find some evidence to support it:
Why then does our baseline LLM depolarize choices, despite being sycophantic? One hypothesis is that it combines its agreeable framing with enough substantive information to counteract sycophancy’s polarizing force. Several facts corroborate this interpretation. First, in objective tasks, interacting with the baseline AI improves accuracy by 0.12 standard deviations (p < 0.05)…In contrast, we find no evidence that extra deliberation time, reactance, noise, or ceiling effects drive our results.
Interestingly, Conlon and Schwardmann don’t think about what seems to me to be the most obvious reason for AI depolarization — i.e., that AI is trained on the average of society, and thus is the ultimate Moderate Normie. That’s something worth following up on.
But whatever the reason, this is another piece of evidence in favor of the Digital Cronkite thesis. You should probably be a little more optimistic about AI’s effect on human politics.
Anthropic recently hired Chad Jones, my favorite growth theorist. That’s great news, both for Chad and for Anthropic! But a Financial Times article about the hire catches Chad saying some highly questionable things about existential AI risk in a working paper back in 2023:
What is the price of this amazing change in living standards? Recall that we would face a flow probability of existential risk of 1% per year for 40 years, so the probability we survive this A.I. explosion is exp(−.01 × 40) ≈ 0.67. In other words, with log utility it is optimal to take a 1 in 3 chance of ending human existence in exchange for a 2/3 chance of dramatically raising living standards by a factor of 55.
Chad’s point here is not that we should be blasé about the existential risk from AI. His purpose in the paper is to compare different utility functions and show how our attitude toward existential risk can change a lot depending on risk aversion. But I still don’t like his calculation here.
The main reason is that Chad sets the utility of human extinction equal to zero. This isn’t actually log utility. Log utility is just u(c) = ln(c), where c is consumption. If you consume nothing at all, then ln(c) = ln(0) = -∞. In other words, if you take log utility seriously, then death is infinitely bad.
That presents a problem for economic models, since it means that even the slightest chance of death is so scary — scarier even than a bear on a bicycle — that humans would do basically anything to avoid it. That obviously isn’t realistic. So instead, economists using log utility typically model it with a fudge factor. One option is to just set u=0. This is the assumption that if you’re dead, you’re not getting any utility from anything, so your utility should just be zero forever.
That’s what Chad Jones is doing in this paper, and it’s that choice that drives his result. But it’s a highly dubious assumption. Recall that ln(1) = 0. So this means that if you assume u(extinction) = 0, you’re saying that “humanity going extinct” is no worse than “humanity existing for all eternity at some baseline level of consumption”. That doesn’t sound realistic to me.
A better choice — which is what some economists do — is to set the utility of death equal to some constant, and then try to calibrate that constant against data on risky behavior. The constant wouldn’t be zero, and it would greatly alter Chad’s calculations on how much benefit we’d need from AI in order to accept existential risk.
But even here, we have to be cautious. Human extinction is not the same as an individual’s death. A lot of people would probably accept a lot less risk if they knew they were risking the lives of their families, friends, countrymen, and fellow human beings, than if they were only risking their own life. So you have to be very careful when looking at how much people care about the risk of the whole species dying.
Chad was not being careful here. I know this was 2023, before existential risk seemed like a serious thing to people outside the AI industry. But now that he’s at Anthropic, he should be more circumspect about these things.
During the 2010s, there was a pretty common narrative that economic progress had stalled in America, and that the Millennial generation had been screwed over. You still hear a few progressives argue this, but in general this narrative has been in retreat as new data has come in. As the Millennials have eased into middle age, it has become apparent that like every generation before them, they have experienced substantial economic progress. I first blogged about this shifting narrative back in 2023:
But I was a bit late to the party here — bloggers like Jeremy Horpedahl had been pushing back on the “generational stagnation” thesis for years.
Anyway, as we get more data, Millennials’ advancement becomes even clearer. Tyler Cowen points us to Corinth and Larrimore (2026), who measure the income of each generation after all taxes and government transfers are accounted for. You can basically see the results in one chart, which I’ve helpfully labeled:
These are income distributions — they measure how many people in each generation are living at each level of income at an equivalent age, after adjusting for inflation (i.e., after adjusting for changes in the cost of living). What you can see here is:
There are a lot fewer Millennials making less than $30,000 (in 2019 dollars) than any other generation did at age 36-40.
There are more Millennials making over $40,000 than any other generation, and Millennials dominate other generations at every income level above $40,000.
It’s hard to observe incomes above $140,000, so these are left off the graph.
It looks like there are a few more Millennials making exactly zero income than other generations. This could reflect people who are still being supported by their parents, or people who somehow fall through the cracks in the data gathering process.
The Millennial income distribution is more spread-out — as Millennials have done better overall, some have seen bigger gains than others, resulting in increased inequality within the Millennial generation.
This is a pretty reasonable description of the reality that we’ve all seen over the course of our lives — most Millennials are more comfortable than their parents were, just as most Boomers are more comfortable than their parents were.
This doesn’t mean government redistribution is unnecessary — indeed, Corinth and Larrimore explicitly calculate income after redistribution has taken place. And America has become more redistributionary. So government is helping produce upward mobility for the poor. This is a big government success story.
But the narrative that Millennials are falling behind, and that the Boomers screwed their children over, just doesn’t hold up in the income data.
As countries get richer, manufacturing tends to become a less important part of their economies. You can just look at the declining trends for manufacturing as a percent of GDP in rich nations over the years:
A lot of people think that this happened because we outsourced our manufacturing to China. Other people think it’s because our demand for manufactured goods topped out over time, and we started to want to consume more services.
In fact, it was both of these! Richard Baldwin has a post decomposing each rich country’s deindustrialization into three factors:
How much demand shifted away from manufactured goods
How much final goods production shifted from domestic production toward imports
How much intermediate goods production shifted from domestic production toward imports
He finds that the rich countries have very different stories, even if their overall numbers look similar. Here’s the key chart:
America did actually outsource a fair amount of its final goods production, but this was almost balanced out by onshoring of intermediate goods production (at least, in terms of monetary value). Almost all of America’s deindustrialization since 1995 came from Americans spending a smaller % of their money on manufactured goods.
For other countries, it’s a different story. Germany and Japan actually spent more on manufactured goods, but lost tons of market share in the intermediate goods sector. For France, Canada, and the UK, all three factors contributed to deindustrialization.
This is very interesting. It implies that the simple, common story of “we outsourced everything to China” holds true for other rich countries — at least, in a generalized sort of way — a lot more than for the United States. For the U.S., the main reason we make less stuff is that we want less stuff — at least, relative to how many “experiences” we want to consume.1
The wheels are falling off the bicycle for the Russian bear. Ukraine is taking far fewer casualties, as it switches to a drone-intensive way of war that Russia has so far been unable to match. Russia is losing over a thousand men a day in futile assaults. Meanwhile, Ukrainian long-range strike drones are wreaking havoc on Russia’s logistics, strangling occupied Crimea, destroying Russian refineries, and causing fuel shortages throughout Russia. Meanwhile, the strain of war production is starting to cause cracks in Russia’s government finances.
Russians had hoped that Donald Trump would ride to their rescue, pressuring the Ukrainians into ceding territory. He certainly tried, but was ultimately unable to bully the stubborn Ukrainians into backing down. But some believed that Trump would help Russia in a more indirect, accidental way — by launching a war against Iran, the hapless U.S. President would cause oil prices to spike and flood the coffers of Russia’s government with much-needed cash.
Indeed, when Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz — which ultimately decided the war in its favor — it caused oil prices to soar:
But at least by April — the most recent month we have data for — the benefits to Russia had been a lot smaller than Putin supporters hoped. Matt C. Klein had a good post about this:
Here’s the key chart:
Why has Russia only reaped a small windfall? One reason is the strengthening ruble, which means fewer rubles of revenue for every dollar of crude oil sales. Another reason is that Russia has been paying its refiners to keep fuel prices down in the face of Ukrainian attacks; because they handle these payments as tax deductions rather than as expenditures, it reduces the total amount of oil and gas revenue.
But there’s a third reason, which is a lot scarier for the Russians. The country’s crude oil production is falling:
Ultimately, it’s production declines that doom a petrostate — just look at what happened to Venezuela when Hugo Chavez starved the state oil company of funds for reinvestment.
Russia needs to invest huge amounts of money to expand production in Siberia, where the easily accessible oil is gone and only harder-to-get supplies remain. War spending may be starving the oil industry. And Western export controls may be successfully starving the Russian oil industry of the technology it needs to build and maintain its extraction infrastructure.
If this is true, then Russia is in big trouble. Crude oil exports are the big prop holding up Russia’s whole economy — no amount of macroeconomic policy or war mobilization can compensate for its loss. Putin’s Russia is a classic petro-empire that uses wealth extracted from the land to fund imperial conquests; when the oil runs out, such empires collapse.
Usually, when you see eye-poppingly large estimates for the effect of some sort of policy or medicine or whatever, you should immediately distrust the methodology of the paper. But Rebecca Diamond is one of the most serious and respected empirical microeconomists in the business, so when she says that GLP-1 drugs have almost magical effects on women’s lives, we should at least sit up and listen.
Diamond’s paper compares people who go on GLP-1 drugs to A) those who say they want to go on the drugs but don’t, and B) those who go on the drugs a bit later. For men, she finds relatively few life changes beyond weight loss itself. But for women, she finds some pretty big effects! According to Diamond’s estimates, single women who go on the weight-loss drugs are 29% more likely to get married or cohabit over the next three years, and women without jobs are 27% more likely to get jobs, relative to the women who didn’t go on the drugs.
That’s a pretty dramatic result! It gives us one more reason — beyond the obvious health benefits — to treat weight loss as a technological problem, and just get on with it by any means necessary. The “fat acceptance” movement has gone too far — we should treat excess weight not as a piece of who we are, but simply as a physical impediment to be managed or removed. Fat is basically just a fat suit, and you can take it off if you want.
That said, there are some reasons why you shouldn’t put too much faith in this one empirical result. Although Diamond of course does an incredibly thorough job in trying to compare the GLP-1 users with the non-users in an apples-to-apples way, there’s still the possibility that people who actually go ahead and use the drugs are just different than people who don’t, or who use them only with a lag. They might be more purposeful, more motivated, etc. And that could explain at least part of their greater likelihood of getting a partner and getting a job.
What we really need here is a natural experiment — some policy that affects how easy it is for people to get GLP-1 drugs, preferably with different timing in different places. If we find similarly positive effects from that sort of study, we can be even more certain that these drugs are wonder drugs.
(Of course, drugs aren’t the only thing you should do to lose weight. You should also go for a bike ride! Especially if you’re a bear.)
Everyone’s favorite subject (except for bears on bikes, of course) is AI taking jobs from humans. I’ve tried to use these roundups to keep abreast of the most recent evidence in this area. This week, we have a study by Kharazian, Simon, and Stevens using private data to examine what happens when companies start using generative AI.
The authors find that when companies start using generative AI, they hire more humans, not less:
It’s not just total headcount, though. Entry-level headcount rose too!
This flies in the face of the typical story that the current “no-hire, no-fire” economy is due to companies adopting AI instead of hiring entry-level workers.
That doesn’t mean that AI isn’t reducing job churn, of course. Uncertainty about how to use AI, or uncertainty about how AI might affect their industries, might be keeping companies from hiring new workers, even if they don’t adopt AI. That’s a research direction worth looking into, and basically no one’s talking about it.
Anyway, Kharazian wrote a blog post about the new findings:
The simplest story here is that AI is still mostly a complement to human labor rather than a substitute. That could change, of course, as the technology advances further. But for now, AI is behaving pretty much like a normal technology.
Basically, we want fewer bicycles, and more vertical short-form videos of bears riding bicycles.
Links for you. Science:
Ex-NOAA employees re-create a valuable climate data site shut down by Trump
Why were Covid vaccine trials so fast?
What the CDC Emails Show: Scientists Quietly Building a Paper Trail. Flu ads pulled mid-season, a vaccine panel marked for replacement, a database the Secretary wanted to buy, and career staff documenting all of it on the record.
A federal proposal puts Maine’s scientific research in peril
Scratching that bug bite might feel good but science explains why it’s a bad idea
Mona Khalil, Who Devoted Her Life To Protecting Turtles, Killed By Israeli Airstrike
Vast ‘Structures’ In Space Reveal the Universe Isn’t What We Thought
Other:
Sanders releases trove of internal HHS emails showing RFK Jr. pressured CDC over vaccine messaging
Fulfilling His Promise, Mamdani’s Rent Board Votes Through Stabilized Rent Freeze
The Reflecting Pool and the Killer Rabbit
Dobbs Didn’t End Abortion. It Ignited a Movement.
Greenspan Was the Creator of His Own Disaster
Funding for Trump’s Construction Spree Is Murky. Here’s What We Found Out.
Poll: 53% of Americans see grounds to impeach Trump
Trump is planning white nationalist goodie bags for Afrikaner refugees
NC court hopeful says she ‘didn’t even know’ sex offender. But records show ties
New evidence casts doubt on RFK Jr testimony before Senate
Knicks Star Humiliates Trump Over White House Visit (“If they do accept Trump’s invitation to the White House, the Knicks would become the first NBA team to visit Trump after winning a championship; every NBA team boycotted the customary visit during Trump’s first term.”)
Trump administration orders US health programs to move away from overdose prevention
Federal agents track down Syracuse woman, demand she remove Instagram post about ICE
‘This is injustice’: how leftist zines were used to sentence anti-ICE protesters to decades in prison
Political Identity Beyond Politics: The Messi-Ronaldo Preference Across 26 Countries
How the Reflecting Pool Turned Green: Missing ‘Bubblers’ and a Rush Job
The Court That Will Believe Absolutely Anything Is ‘Race-Neutral’
Primary Lessons: Primaries shape our politics more profoundly than we often notice.
Clarifying Choices for Democratic Voters — Fight & Ideology Edition
Why Israelis Should Stop Being Afraid of Mamdani-backed Brad Lander
Samuel Alito Can Only Identify Bigotry When It Affects Him
‘Do They Expect Us to Wave the LGBT Flag?’: Arab World Erupts Over Egypt–Iran ‘Pride Match’ in Seattle
Maine’s Wabanaki Nations want sovereignty. They got iGaming instead.
Guess Who Was Actually Being Cavalier With Jewish Lives
New York City’s elections were a family feud. All the rest is vibes
Bad Fascist Party
Trump is 80, sleepy and (maybe) on experimental drugs. Yet the media doesn’t see an old man
Krugman on Trump Mental Breakdown and a Nation in Decline
You Can Now Be Arrested For Sticking Your Hand In Donald Trump’s Disgusting Reflecting Pool
Settlers Tried to Torch Palestinian Homes. They Messed With the Wrong Village
Sam Tabahriti, reporting for Reuters:
Britain’s competition regulator on Tuesday proposed allowing app developers to steer users to alternative payment options outside Apple and Alphabet’s Google app stores to cut fees and boost competition. The Competition and Markets Authority said the proposals would remove restrictions that currently prevent UK developers from directing users to off-platform payment options, which are banned by Apple and restricted by Google.
The watchdog said any fees charged by two of the world’s largest technology companies for allowing such “steering” would need to be fair and reasonable, and should be lower than current app store commissions, with savings passed on to consumers or reinvested in innovation.
How does one mandate that the savings be passed on to consumers? You may recall that last year Apple published a study — that it commissioned itself — suggesting otherwise. I wrote in December:
This all comes back to the argument that Apple’s App Store commission inflates prices. A recent Apple-funded (and Apple-promoted) study suggests this is not true — that with lower commissions mandated by the DMA, prices paid by consumers stayed the same and the difference went to the developers. That’s good if you’re a developer, but it’s not the argument being made by these consumer advocate groups.
That said, I pointed out just the other day that Tiimo, a to-do app that Apple just named as the iPhone app of the year in the 2025 App Awards, charges about 20 percent less for subscriptions on its website compared to its in-app subscriptions. An Apple-funded, Apple-promoted study showing that the App Store’s commissions don’t raise prices ought to be taken with a few grains of salt.
Requiring Apple to allow apps to steer users to the web to make payments is, I’ve long argued, sensible regulation. I’ve also long argued that Apple has been obstinate in disallowing it. If in-app payments — through Apple’s system — can’t compete with out-of-app payments on the web, something is wrong with IAP. But it’s wrong to assume that payments outside IAP will result in lower prices and better policies for users. IAP subscriptions are easy to cancel and listed all in one place. Web subscriptions are often notoriously difficult to cancel and manage.
Back to Reuters:
The CMA said it was also considering requiring Apple to open up access to its near-field communication technology, which is used for contactless payments, potentially allowing developers to offer payment services within their own iOS apps. This could enable UK fintech companies to build alternatives to Apple’s wallet, including account-to-account payments and emerging technologies such as digital currencies, the CMA said.
Even more so than opening up third-party in-app payment processing, this seems like something only “fintech” companies are asking for. For users I think the only result will be a loss of interoperability and increase in confusion. Users get one Wallet app today, with all their credit, debit, and loyalty cards, and all their tickets for things like events and travel. A scenario where each credit card company, airline, and event/ticketing company can mandate the installation of their own app, with access to the iPhone’s NFC, does not strike me as a good outcome.
Josh Marshall, writing at TPM (gift link):
As you’ve seen, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of birthright citizenship by a 6 — or perhaps 5½ — vote margin. See Kate Riga’s report on the majority decision and Josh Kovensky’s piece on the dissenters’ goal of doing away with birthright citizenship. I repeat my point from yesterday which is that the occasional non-corrupt decision doesn’t make the Court any less corrupt or in need of reform. In this case, in a sane world, the dissents from Neil Gorsuch, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas would on their own be sufficient basis for impeachment and removal from office. One might as well believe or pretend to believe that the federal senate is unconstitutional despite its being unambiguously written into the structure of the document itself. The level of abuse of power that is the basis of these dissents can only be seen as criminal in nature and grows from the culture of corruption and impunity that now reigns on the Court.
The 14th Amendment starts:
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.
The idea that the plain meaning of the birthright citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment was even debatable would have been laughable just 15 years ago. And, hopefully, soon, will be laughable again. It’s like arguing that the clear language of the 19th Amendment doesn’t guarantee women the right to vote. It’s a farce that this case even went to the Supreme Court, let alone that these three mooks dissented. (Alito and Thomas are lost causes; they’d vote for a Fourth Reich. Gorsuch I’m a little surprised by.) Needless to say, it’s rather unnerving that the majority required two — or one-and-a-half, depending on how you view Kavanaugh’s odd partial concurrence — votes from justices Trump put on the Court.
Marshall wrote a great explainer about this back in April (also a gift link):
Birthright citizenship is the unambiguous and certain law of the land. It is also good policy. What is less appreciated is that it undergirds the entire citizenship system in the United States, a country that keeps very, very little record of who is and isn’t a citizen in the first place. The only people who really have any clear record of their citizenship are naturalized citizens. You or I who were born in the U.S. might appear to have those. We have a passport or maybe some other document that you can only have as a citizen. But that is almost always because we said we were a citizen or we provided some document that only had any significance on the basis of birthright citizenship. Usually, of course, that’s a birth certificate. That’s where the factual conversation ends. It is the lynchpin that makes the entire U.S. citizenship system work in the absence of really any record keeping. [...]
Quite apart from the constitutional and civic merits, the whole fabric of U.S. citizenship falls apart without the anchor of birthright citizenship.
The only proof that I’m a U.S. citizen is that I was born here. My birth certificate names my parents but doesn’t say anything about their citizenship. Likewise with their birth certificates. That’s how citizenship in this most remarkable of nations works.
Amy Howe, writing at the ever-excellent SCOTUSblog:
The Supreme Court on Monday ruled that when law enforcement officials used a “geofence warrant” — a warrant that instructed Google to provide location data for cellphone users who were near a particular place during a specific time period — to obtain evidence used to convict a Virginia man of a 2019 bank robbery, they conducted a “search” for purposes of the Fourth Amendment. By a vote of 6-3, the justices sent Okello Chatrie’s case back to the lower court for it to consider whether, as the Fourth Amendment requires, the search was “reasonable.”
Writing for the majority, Justice Elena Kagan emphasized that “[a]n individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy in records about his cell phone’s location, and police intrude on that constitutionally protected interest when they demand the information — even though for only a limited time, and from a third-party tech company.” [...]
The issue at the center of Chatrie v. United States arose after a man armed with a gun entered a federal credit union outside Richmond, Virginia, and gave the teller a note demanding money. He made off with nearly $200,000, but law enforcement officials did not have any leads until they served Google with a geofence warrant, which directed the tech company to provide location data for cellphone users who were near the bank at the time of the robbery.
I agree, wholeheartedly, with the decision. Howe’s coverage, being at SCOTUSblog, is unsurprisingly concerned with the legal aspects. But I’m also fascinated by the technical aspects. It’s remarkable — and regrettable — that Google had this geofence information in the first place. The data was part of a grossly invasive and ill-conceived feature Google called “Location History”, and was used to power a feature called “Timeline” in Google Maps. The data was stored unencrypted by Google in the cloud, tied to your Google account, thus making it available to these geofence warrants.
Back in December 2023 Google announced that it was changing the way it stored this data, defaulting instead to on-device storage and using end-to-end encryption (that Google itself cannot decrypt) for location data it holds online. This change had long been advocated by the EFF, which celebrated Google’s policy change. (Notably, Chatrie robbed that credit union in 2019.)
Most people have an unshakeable belief in the widely-held misconception that “everything” we do — everywhere we go, even everything we say — in the presence of our phones is tracked and recorded, and traceable back to us individually. It’s not at all ridiculous that this belief is so common, given that it is technically feasible. Our phones are precise GPS devices, they do have good microphones, and they are (almost) always connected to cellular and/or Wi-Fi networks. And the surveillance advertising industrial complex — primarily Meta and Google — is so uncannily good at serving ads based on our recent personal interests that the most obvious explanation for how they do it is “they listen to us and track us and record everything we do”. That’s not how they do it. But “they listen to us and track us and record everything we do” is an explanation that everyone can easily understand. If that were how Meta and Google served targeted ads to us, everyone could understand how the ads are so often so uncannily and creepily accurate. The way it actually works is complex and complicated, and thus in the realm of Arthur C. Clarke’s maxim that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. Incorrect explanations that people understand resonate and take hold and become entrenched beliefs; correct explanations that people don’t understand are dismissed and are not believed. (Exhibit A: evolution.) This is why it is such a precious gift to be able to explain complex technical and scientific subject matter in ways that many people can understand.1
And lo, now here’s a Supreme Court case showing that when the police asked for a list of people whose phones were near a particular bank at a particular time on a particular day, Google had that information and handed it over. Chatrie v. United States is not a particularly celebrated case, but this will only contribute to the entrenching of superstitious incorrect conspiracy theories about the data that “they” — big tech companies — collect about us.
But Google no longer collects this information in a way that is susceptible to geofence warrants, and, more importantly, Apple never did. From my own December 2023 post on Google’s decision to change how it collects this data to ensure privacy:
The reason these overly broad geofence warrants “almost always” were specific to Google is that Apple never collected location data that could be collected in the aggregate like this. From Apple’s most recent government transparency report (PDF), covering the first half of 2022:
Apple may also receive requests from government agencies seeking customer data related to specific latitude and longitudes coordinates (geofence) for a specified time period. Apple does not have any data to provide in response to geofence requests.
I checked with a source at Apple, and they believe they have never collected or stored geolocation data in a manner that can be linked to groups of individuals in a certain area or areas.
So the whole question of geofence-warrant fishing expeditions may have been obviated two years ago by Google for Android users, and was never an issue for iPhone users. Unless, perhaps, they used the Google Maps app on their iPhones and granted it the “always on” location access that it asks for. I suspect, but do not know, that iPhone users who granted “always on” location access to Google Maps (or any other Google iOS app that asked for it? — all of their iOS apps seem to ask for location permissions, but I don’t know how many other than Google Maps ask for always-on access) were just as susceptible to these geofence warrants as Android users.
This decision should still serve as good precedent for location data held by other companies, and I hope the decision serves as good precedent for any searchable Personally Identifiable Information susceptible to fishing-expedition warrants in general.
But the bottom line is: Apple has never held data tracking your location, and while Google did, they no longer do.
It’s good for the expert, too, to prove that they can explain complex subject matter at the level of a freshman lecture — which is the only way to prove that they truly understand it themselves. ↩︎
I know there’s been a lot of exciting World Cup action this week, but this 2018 clip from Japan is the best soccer video I’ve seen a long while.
The UK Competition and Markets Authority:
‘Steering’ — the ability for developers to engage with customers about off‑platform options — is currently banned by Apple and restricted by Google in the UK. Lifting these constraints would allow developers to bypass mandatory fees set by platforms.
The CMA’s consultation includes principles to ensure that the fees Apple and Google charge for steering are fair and reasonable. Using an evidence-based framework, the CMA would expect steering fees to be lower than current app store charges, with savings passed onto UK customers or invested back into the developers’ businesses to support future innovation.
Japan’s MSCA is a good model for this.
One of the most encouraging things I have seen recently are complaints from the right, as well as what we might call the supercilious center, bewailing, whining about, or just generally objecting to adding new Justices to the Court. They’re talking because they see it coming. I’m not saying it’s a certainty. Obviously they want to forestall it. But this isn’t just something folks like me, or others, are talking about. We have their attention. We clearly have the Justices’ attention. That shows we are moving in the right direction.
I’m writing today because I want to address one of the most common and one of the best (although still insufficient) opposing arguments. That is this: if you expand the Court, won’t Republicans come right back and expand it even more? And then don’t you just have an on-going war of tit-for-tat expansions?
My short answer is, yes. And that’s okay.
Let me give you the slightly longer answer.
I’m enough of an institutionalist that I very much want to get back to a stable, non-corrupt structure for the federal judiciary. I think, or at least hope, that we can get back to that over time. But “over time” is key. What we want to have, as a long term plan, is for both sides to understand that you’re not going to dominate or destroy the other half of the country. We’ve gotten to this point because only one side is playing constitutional hardball. If one side is committed to avoiding extreme measures, the incentives are simply too great for the other side to do it with impunity and without limit. There are also ways that I think you can structure reform that make that outcome more likely over time. This isn’t the place I want to get into those details. But it’s important to have structural reforms in addition to expanding the number of justices.
But yes, to get to the point, there’s a very good chance that Republicans will do the exact same thing as soon as they get a trifecta. But this is largely a self-correcting problem. Because successive expansions will have the effect both of reducing the centrality of the Court in our politics, as well as the importance of any single Justice. And that’s good. We want the Supreme Court to be more limited in its interventions into our politics and we want to reduce the perceived advantages of stacking or corrupting it again. One of the most salutary impacts of expanding the Court will simply be to send the message you spent half a century building the machinery for stacking the Court with corrupt ideologues, then you did it and now it’s gone. Poof.
You need to reduce the incentives for these kinds of efforts.
There are so many other issues concerning the details of reform that are important for people to think through, to answer, to game out. Those are all for other posts. We should remember more broadly that there is no possible argument for not expanding the Court when it has made clear it will manufacture fraudulent constitutional doctrines at will and not allow Democrats to exercise political power when they are elected. To accept that is simply to cash in your chips on democratic self-governance and accept that we have what is often called a ‘managed democracy’ in which you have elections but only the favored party is allowed to exercise power. In this post I want to make this one simple but fairly central point: Yes, the other side will probably do it too. And that’s okay. Because it’s a self-correcting problem. We want to reduce the centrality of the Court, it’s overweening dominance over our politics, as well as that of any individual Justice. As we strive to supersize its head count we are very much trying to downsize its role in American political life.
As you’ve seen, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of birthright citizenship by a 6 — or perhaps 5 1/2 — vote margin. See Kate Riga’s report on the majority decision and Josh Kovensky’s piece on the dissenters’ goal of doing away with birthright citizenship. I repeat my point from yesterday which is that the occasional non-corrupt decision doesn’t make the Court any less corrupt or in need of reform. In this case, in a sane world, the dissents from Neil Gorsuch, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas would on their own be sufficient basis for impeachment and removal from office. One might as well believe or pretend to believe that the federal senate is unconstitutional despite its being unambiguously written into the structure of the document itself. The level of abuse of power that is the basis of these dissents can only be seen as criminal in nature and grows from the culture of corruption and impunity that now reigns on the Court.
The landmark case on this question is United States v. Wong Kim Ark from 1898. In many ways it is itself the most powerful validator of the argument. That is not because it has been the guiding precedent from over a century but the simple fact that it was decided the way that it was. It is very difficult to grasp how deeply racist a country the United States was at the tale end of the 19th century, in both a “hard” biological sense as well as a looser cultural one. It is not that anti-Asian racism was worth or more virulent than other forms of racism, though that’s arguable. But it had a particular character. For most white Americans, it would simply have been obvious that of course Chinese people could have no place in America, perhaps even more than Black Americans, though of course plenty thought the same about Black Americans. They were simply from this totally different part of the world and had no connection or place in a country that still saw itself — and to a great extent remained — a cultural outpost of Western Europe.
The problem was that the simple language of the Constitution was simply too clear-cut. There was no avoiding its meaning. Many of the authors of the 14th Amendment were also still alive, though that same Court was in the process of gutting the Civil War amendments. Plessy was two years earlier. The language is simply too clear. There’s no getting around the plain meaning, the obvious intent, the specific meanings of the phrases used to craft it. It’s safe to say that some or all of the justices didn’t want it to mean what it did. But again, the simple text was too clear-cut to leave any doubt. Indeed, the two dissenters struggled to say anything really different. They were reduced to arguments that amounted to … well, this would be super weird, or most of our history says otherwise. In other words, they half argued that even if the 14th amendment did say what it said, there were just too many other factors saying otherwise. If I recall correctly, they even argued that statute law might trump the Constitution. In other words, they had no good arguments.
It is no deliverance that this decision came down as it did. It is a reminder of the profound corruption at the heart of this Court and the absolute necessity of reform if democratic self-government has any future in the United States.
Joseph Cox, reporting for 404 Media:
404 Media is not revealing the exact details of the vulnerability because it can still be exploited as of Monday, when 404 Media verified the issue with one of our own hidden email addresses.
“Apple Hide My Email is leaking email addresses that are supposed to be hidden. We reported the issue and replication instructions to Apple over a year ago. We don’t know why it hasn’t been fixed, but we don’t feel comfortable waiting any longer. Hide My Email users deserve to know that it may be possible for attackers to discover their hidden email addresses,” Tyler Murphy, the co-founder of EasyOptOuts, which discovered and reported the issue to Apple, told 404 Media. [...]
To test the issue I generated a new Hide My Email address and provided it to Murphy. Around five minutes later, he replied with my real email address linked to my Apple account which was supposed to be hidden.
“We don’t know the full scope of the issue, but in our limited tests with volunteers, 100% of Hide My Email addresses were exploitable,” Murphy said.
Not good. Especially the “We reported the issue and replication instructions to Apple over a year ago” part. (Is this possibly related to the WWDC news that Apple is merging the domain names used for Sign In With Apple and Hide My Email? I can’t see why, but who knows?)
Gnome is a deceptively clever animated GIF app by Lex Friedman:
The truest thing about animated GIFs is that they are a critical pillar of modern human communication, and yet getting one into a Slack message or an iMessage thread or an email reply usually requires opening a browser, navigating to a website, searching, right-clicking, copying, switching back, pasting, and apologizing for the delay. By then the moment has passed, and the joke is dead, and what was the point of any of this, really?
Gnome lives in your Mac’s menubar. You hit a keyboard shortcut. A little search window appears. You type what you’re looking for — weird al, shrug, nailed it, that’s a paddlin’ — and a grid of GIFs appears. Click the one you want. It’s now on your clipboard. Paste it wherever you were typing. Joke saved. World improved.
That’s really the whole app. It does exactly that, and it gets out of the way. No account. No sign-in. No newsletter. Just GIFs, faster.
When Friedman launched Gnome last month, it was Mac-only. Since then he’s already added an iOS version, and they sync/coordinate nicely. And if you have a local folder of GIFs, you can connect that to Gnome and it’ll show results from your personal curated library before those from Gnome’s online partner Klipy. You share the same local library on Mac and iOS, provided you choose a folder in iCloud Drive, Dropbox, or similar. The iOS version of Gnome offers an extension for Apple’s Messages app and an optional system-wide keyboard. On the Mac, you can disable the menu bar icon and just run Gnome like a regular app (if, like me, the last thing you need is another status icon in your menu bar).
It’s a really simple app with a deceptive amount of craft and attention to detail. I can’t say I send all that many animated GIFs, but Gnome is so nice it makes me want to send more. I dig it. $7 one-time payment on the web, or $8 in the App Store, and if you buy it on the web you can unlock it on iOS, and vice-versa.
Speaking of the Supreme Court’s end-of-term rulings, they today agreed to grant certiorari to Apple’s petition from last month, ordering:
APPLE INC. V. EPIC GAMES, INC.
The petition for a writ of certiorari is granted limited to Question 1 presented by the petition.
Question 1 regarded the civil contempt finding — basically, whether Apple could be held in contempt for violating the spirit of the injunction by charging a commission on external payments when the letter of the injunction said nothing forbidding commissions on payments. Question 2 raised by Apple regarded the scope of the injunction — arguing that even if the contempt finding were upheld, that it should apply only to Epic, not to all developers in the U.S. App Store.
(I decided against mentioning it in my article last month, “The Fonts of the U.S. Federal Courts”, but in stark contrast to the handsomeness and dignity with which their decisions are typeset (in Century Schoolbook), the Court’s daily orders are, inexplicably, set in Lucida Sans Typewriter.)
Obviously, there’s a lot going on. TPM’s staff spent yesterday reporting on and analyzing the last batch of Supreme Court decisions this term. Meanwhile, we’re hurdling toward midterm elections so consequential, President Trump can’t talk about anything else but the SAVE Act or he gets sad. Progressives exceeded expectations in several key Colorado races last night, winning primaries for governor and several congressional seats.
So, we think it’s time we get together to have a chat. We’re partnering with our friend Marisa Kabas for an evening of conversation, trivia, and drinks. (Yes, trivia. new thing we’re trying out. Don’t miss it.) Get your tickets today and join us Wednesday July 29 at Crystal Lake in Brooklyn. More details here.
10:39 p.m.: Kiros now appears to be pulling ahead with Election Day votes. Currently only up five points with 73% in but this looks like it’s going to keep going in Kiros’ direction. Too early to call but the direction looks clear.
9:47 p.m.: Hickenlooper survives, various network calls. By ordinary standards it’s a healthy margin — 57%. But for someone so established in Colorado Democratic politics, Gonzales’ 43% is very impressive. Bennet looks like he’s toast but no calls yet. DeGette-Kiros still neck and neck.
9:35 p.m.: It seems like John Hickenlooper is probably going to pull through. 50% of the votes in and he’s at 58% to Julie Gonzales’ 42%. That’s a big margin. But it’s still a pretty big showing for a challenger. Sen. Michael Bennet looks to be in the process of losing by a similar margin to Phil Weiser, whose candidacy is almost all based on “fight.” Kiros-DeGette is neck-and-neck. Kiros 47% to DeGette’s 45% with about 2/3rds of the votes in. The people I talked to in Colorado broadly predicted these results. Hickenlooper survives, Bennet loses and probably DeGette too. That’s about where we are, though the DeGette race is far too close to call. I’m trying to get a read now on where remaining votes are.
From TPM Reader LD …
Decades-long reader/member, and I wanted to say that Josh’s take on Hickenlooper’s run is spot-on. I have voted for Hickenlooper (and Dianne Degette, the incumbent House member for Denver who is in a tight race as well), but I’m more than ready for those who will push for top-to-bottom reform. My husband and I actually ran into Hick in our neighborhood on Saturday night and we told him to fight the good fight. He thought we meant the primary, not the fight for our democracy.
From TPM Reader EH …
I’ve really enjoyed your recent posts (and reader emails) processing the recent New York primary elections. I strongly agree with the point you’ve emphasized that “left/right” is less salient than “fighter/non-fighter” in the current roiling within the broad left-of-center coalition. And I’d take it a step further and argue that anyone coded as “establishment” carries a strong presumption of belonging to the “non-fighter” camp.
Colorado’s Democratic primary for governor (tomorrow!) illustrates this dynamic as well as any current race I’m aware of. There’s very little policy daylight between current U.S. Senator Michael Bennet and state Attorney General Phil Weiser. Both are pretty conventional Democrats, they’re close to the same age, neither has been endorsed by DSA, neither has really bucked orthodoxy on the U.S.-Israel relationship. Bennet was the presumptive favorite at the beginning of the race because of his greater name recognition, fundraising ability, and clear support of the state party establishment.
But Bennet is struggling (losing, according to some polling) and it seems that his quasi-encumbent status and his association with the party establishment are actually hurting his campaign. Because there are so few policy disagreements, the race has largely been a proxy fight about how Bennet (and Hickenloooper, who’s also facing a stronger than expected primary challenge) voted to confirm too many of Trump’s nominees and Weiser brought lawsuits against the Trump administration.
My read on the mood of Colorado Democratic voters is that they’re furious at the party establishment about 2 things: losing to Trump twice and the flaccid response to the first 6 months or so of Trump’s second term. And those failures are sticking to Bennet, while Weiser is both more removed from those failures and has the stronger claim of having fought Trump instead of rolling over at the beginning of his second term.
This race will be one to watch tomorrow night.
We’ll know these results a bit later this evening. But I wanted to share a couple emails from TPM Readers. I was struck that most or all of the emails we received on these primaries were from longtime supporters of the incumbents in danger tonight, sometimes knowing them personally. They almost uniformly want them booted.
From TPM Reader DC …
Super interested to read your thoughts on the “earthquake” of the potential that Sen. Hickenlooper could lose his primary.
I’m a longtime Denver resident. I live a block away from Sen. Hickenlooper. I have hosted fundraisers for him for Mayor and Governor. But I voted against him in the primary. I thought of it as a “protest” vote—i.e., he’s likely to win, but I need to send the message anyway that just being a Democrat with huge name recognition is not enough.
By the way, I’m strongly in the camp of Phil Weiser’s campaign for Governor, over our other Senator, Michael Bennet, who still has two+ more years left in his Senate term, but wants to be Governor instead. And I’m also voting for our 30-year incumbent of Congressional District 1, Diana Degette.
Why?
Not a single one of these incumbents has proven themselves equal to the moment. Diana Degette is the easiest. Other than a reliable Democratic vote, I literally cannot think of a single accomplishment she has racked up in her 30 years in office. I can’t think of a single bill/law she has written, championed, and pushed through the House. Yes, she is a reliable supporter of reproductive rights, and a reliable Democratic vote. But seriously, does anyone think her challenger, from the left, will vote against reproductive rights? Or throw in with the Republicans now and then when the chips are down? Come on, man.
Bennet? A fine, but undistinguished Senator, whose main claim to fame was being part of the Group of Eight (along with the pathetic and debased Marco Rubio, and the even more pathetic and debased Lyndsey Graham), who made a real effort to solve the immigration problem. That was 13 years ago. What has Bennet done in the face of a fascist and autocratic takeover of our government? Invested his time and energy as a U.S. Senator running for Governor. Also, most of his war chest is PAC money, and he went negative against Phil Weiser pretty early. Coloradoans do not love negative campaigns. It demeans everyone.
Hickenlooper? Same, except his tenure as Senator has been desultory, at best. No major accomplishments. No effort to wield the power of a U.S. Senator to any meaningful effect, even in the face of fascism.
What about their opponents?
Phil Weiser is a generational talent. His credentials are unmatched—he clerked on the Supreme Court twice, once for Justice Byron White, and once for RBG. He has been a constant presence in his office as AG, and has been the face of Colorado’s resistance to federal overreach. He has energy galore, and has actually used the office of AG to do things, instead of just sit there and collect a paycheck, which was common for the Colorado AG.
The opponents of DeGette and Hickenlooper? Here’s the crux of your thesis. They are younger, way more energetic, and champing at the bit to use all the tools at their disposal.
Voila. We do not need “incumbents of distinction.” We need people who will use their wits and wiles to defeat fascism any way they can. Get in the trenches. Pull on the levers of power, even if sometimes the levers seem small and hard to find. Stand up and be counted. Inspire the rest of us to resist and get involved.
I’d rather have one of these untested fighters right now than John Hickenlooper, whose approach to everything is to “bring Democrats and Republicans together.” Sorry, Senator, that approach died in the aughts, if not the 90s. We need a new approach. Stat.
Anyway, I think your thoughts and analysis are spot-on. We need change, not accommodation, and we need it right now. Now. Before it is too late.
NASA selected three companies to fly four lunar lander missions worth nearly $600 million as part of its lunar base ambitions, as it weighs also launching a spare Mars rover.
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TechnoMile, the leading AI solution that unifies growth, contracts, compliance, and security workflows, today announced it has been included in Forrester’s report, The Contract Lifecycle Management Platforms Landscape, Q2 2026. […]
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The system known as Meadowlands is transitioning to operational use as the military places greater emphasis on electronic warfare
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June 30, 2026 – Washington, D.C. — The Commercial Space Federation (CSF) announced today that Matthew Williams, a former Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense and Chief of Staff to […]
The post Matthew Williams Joins the Commercial Space Federation as Senior Advisor, National Security appeared first on SpaceNews.
Commercial space station developer Vast named the former president and chief executive of The Aerospace Corp. as an adviser while the company awaits the next phase of a NASA program.
The post Vast names Isakowitz as a senior adviser appeared first on SpaceNews.
SAN FRANCISCO – Vantor, the company previously known as Maxar Intelligence, unveiled WorldView 3D July 1, to provide customers with updated and high-definition imagery. “WorldView 3D is driving towards currency,” […]
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EchoStar subsidiaries tied to its satellite TV and abandoned 5G network businesses have filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, advancing a prepackaged restructuring plan to repay debt early after selling spectrum to SpaceX and AT&T.
The post EchoStar’s satellite TV and wireless subsidiaries file for bankruptcy appeared first on SpaceNews.
French startup Latitude intends to perform the first launch of its small launch vehicle from a spaceport in Oman in late 2027.
The post Latitude plans to conduct first launch from Oman appeared first on SpaceNews.
A month after a devastating pad explosion, Blue Origin reiterated plans to return its New Glenn vehicle to flight from a rebuilt launch pad by the end of the year.
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When SpaceX publicly listed, the coverage focused on the rockets, the valuation, and the personalities. That’s understandable. But the more important story is what the IPO signals about where the […]
The post The SpaceX IPO tells one story. Here is the more important one. appeared first on SpaceNews.
One small, errant drone can scrub a space launch at the cost of millions of dollars in delays, with further repercussions spanning across multiple commercial and government launch service providers. […]
The post Unseen threats overhead: Drones endanger U.S. rocket launch sites appeared first on SpaceNews.
Received an e-mail from Ben Shapiro the other day. He said he knows our politics differ, but he enjoys my books. Told me he discussed it briefly on his show.
Which, he did …
I responded politely, and asked about his love of sports. I then posted something (warm-ish) about the exchange on Instagram, which resulted in a slew of hostile comments about me playing footsie with a MAGA-informed asswipe.
I Googled Shapiro for greater details, and AI (blech) intervened …
And … I dunno. I really dunno.
Like, if someone whose politics you abhor says something nice about you, are we supposed to … ignore? Refute? Fight back? Say, “That’s fine, but, man, I really find your viewpoints disgraceful”? Are we supposed to be nice, friendly, engaging? Do we hope to open dialogue, or do we hope to avoid dialogue?
I honestly, truly, sincerely don’t know.
Sometimes, I hate 2026 more than I hate cottage cheese.
I detest cottage cheese.
On January 20, 2025, the day he took the oath of office a second time, President Donald J. Trump signed an executive order titled “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship.” Fulfilling a campaign promise, the order declared that, contrary to the Fourteenth Amendment, individuals born in the United States are not citizens if their parents do not have legal permanent status.
With the help of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and other partners, three families who represented the many people endangered by this order sued the administration. Barbara, for whom the case of Trump v. Barbara is named, is an applicant for asylum from Honduras whose baby was due after the order was set to go into effect.
Trump has called for ending birthright citizenship since his first term as part of his appeal to his racist supporters who want to end Black and Brown equality in the United States. But his argument would overturn the central idea of the United States articulated in the Declaration of Independence, that we are all created equal.
The Fourteenth Amendment that established birthright citizenship came out of a very specific moment and addressed a specific problem. After the Civil War ended in 1865, former Confederates in the American South denied their Black neighbors basic rights. To remedy the problem, the Republican Congress passed a civil rights bill in 1866 establishing “[t]hat all persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign power, excluding Indians, not taxed, are hereby declared to be citizens of the United States; and such citizens of every race and color…shall have the same right[s] in every State and Territory in the United States.”
But President Andrew Johnson, who was a southern Democrat elected in 1864 on a union ticket with President Abraham Lincoln, a Republican, vetoed the 1866 Civil Rights Bill. While the Republican Party organized in the 1850s to fight the idea that there should be different classes of Americans based on race, Democrats tended to support racial discrimination. In that era, not only Black Americans, but also Irish, Chinese, Mexican, and Indigenous Americans, faced discriminatory state laws.
In contrast to the Democrats, Republicans stated explicitly in their 1860 platform that they were “opposed to any change in our naturalization laws or any state legislation by which the rights of citizens hitherto accorded to immigrants from foreign lands shall be abridged or impaired; and in favor of giving a full and efficient protection to the rights of all classes of citizens, whether native or naturalized, both at home and abroad.”
When Republicans tried to enshrine civil rights into federal law in 1866, Johnson objected that the proposed law “comprehends the Chinese of the Pacific States, Indians subject to taxation, the people called Gipsies, as well as the entire race designated as blacks” as citizens, and he noted that if “all persons who are native-born already are, by virtue of the Constitution, citizens of the United States, the passage of the pending bill cannot be necessary to make them such.” And if they weren’t already citizens, he wrote, Congress should not pass a law “to make our entire colored population and all other excepted classes citizens of the United States” when eleven southern states were not represented in Congress.
When Congress wrote the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, it took Johnson’s admonition to heart. It did not confer citizenship on the groups Johnson outlined; it simply acknowledged that the Constitution had already established their citizenship. The first sentence of the Fourteenth Amendment reads: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”
The Fourteenth Amendment became part of the U.S. Constitution in 1868. Then, in 1882, during a period of racist hysteria, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act agreeing that Chinese immigrants could not become citizens. Nonetheless, even then the Supreme Court upheld the citizenship of their children.
Wong Kim Ark was born around 1873, the child of Chinese parents who were merchants in San Francisco. In 1889 he traveled with his parents when they repatriated to China, where he married. He then returned to the U.S., leaving his wife behind, and was readmitted. After another trip to China in 1894, though, customs officials denied him reentry to the U.S. in 1895, claiming he was a Chinese subject because his parents were Chinese.
Wong sued, and his lawsuit was the first to climb all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, thanks to the government’s recognition that with the U.S. in the middle of an immigration boom, the question of birthright citizenship must be addressed. In the 1898 U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark decision, the court held by a vote of 6–2 that Wong was a citizen because he was born in the United States.
Immigration scholar Hidetaka Hirota of the University of California, Berkeley, explains that the government went even further to protect children born in the U.S. In 1889 the Treasury Department—which then oversaw immigration—decided that a native-born child could not be sent out of the country with her foreign-born mother. Nor did the government want to hurt the U.S. citizen by expelling her mother and leaving her without a guardian. So it admitted the foreign-born mother to take care of the citizen child.
The Treasury concluded that it was not “the intention of Congress to sever the sacred ties existing between parent and child, or forcibly banish and expatriate a native-born child for the reason that its parent is a pauper.”
It seemed the law was settled.
Then, in May 2023, then–presidential candidate Donald J. Trump released a video promising that on “Day One” of a new presidential term, he would issue an executive order that would end birthright citizenship. He claimed that the understanding that anyone born in the United States is automatically a citizen is “based on an historical myth, and a willful misinterpretation of the law by the open borders advocates.” His assertion came from recent writings by right-wing operatives claiming that the accepted understanding of the Fourteenth Amendment is wrong.
As soon as he took office, he issued the executive order saying that individuals born in the United States are not citizens if their parents do not have legal permanent status.
One judge after another has sided against Trump on this issue, and on April 1, 2026, when the Supreme Court held oral arguments on the case, Trump became the first president ever to attend such arguments, breaking precedent to take a seat in the front row of the Supreme Court’s public seating area alongside then–attorney general Pam Bondi and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. He apparently showed up at the Supreme Court to try to intimidate the three judges who owe their seats on the bench to him, pressuring them into supporting his own radical reworking of one of the key principles of our nation. He left after an hour and a half, before Cecillia Wang, the ACLU lawyer arguing for the plaintiffs, began to speak.
Today the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts upheld birthright citizenship. But, as Jonathan V. Last of The Bulwark notes, the Supreme Court should never have taken this case. The lower court judges who heard the case were appalled that the administration was attacking the clear terms of the Constitution. Judge John Coughenour, who was appointed by President Ronald Reagan, called Trump’s executive order “blatantly unconstitutional” and said: “I’ve been on the bench for over four decades. I can’t remember another case where the question presented was as clear as this one is. This is a blatantly unconstitutional order.”
And yet the vote to uphold the Fourteenth Amendment was not unanimous; it was 6 to 3. And one of those six justices upholding birthright citizenship, Brett Kavanaugh, wrote that his objection to Trump’s attack on birthright citizenship was based not in the Constitution, but rather in his belief that Trump’s executive order violates a law. If Congress rewrote that law, he wrote, he would be willing to overturn birthright citizenship.
Four of nine Supreme Court justices are willing to rewrite the Constitution by fiat.
Although the court’s decision simply upheld the conditions that have been in place for more than a century, MAGA is treating it as a dramatic and dangerous change. “Now that [the Supreme Court] has opened the floodgates for foreign invaders to flock across our borders and spawn, the only choice we have is to triple down on immigration enforcement,” wrote right-wing podcast host Matt Walsh. “Militarize the border. Mass deportations. Round every illegal up. Don’t pull back when the lesbian activists start screeching about it. Use whatever force is necessary. There is no other option.”
—
Notes:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/04/01/trump-supreme-court-birthright-citizenship/
https://www.factcheck.org/2023/06/trumps-dubious-promise-to-end-birthright-citizenship/
https://www.oyez.org/cases/2025/25-365
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/republican-party-platform-1860
Edward McPherson, The Political History of the United States of America during the Period of Reconstruction (Washington: Solomons & Chapman, 1875), pp. 74–75, 78, at https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Political_History_of_the_United_Stat/x7HmnHL1OvQC
https://werehistory.org/immigrant-parents/
https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/169/649/
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/25-365_4hdj.pdf
Bluesky:
sifill.bsky.social/post/3mihywa5sms2q
mattgertz.bsky.social/post/3mpjhou2mts2a
The Financial Times has a good article on how AI is changing the capabilities of video surveillance, with information from both Israel/Iran and Russia.
I wrote about this sort of thing a few years ago, how AI enables mass spying in the way that computers and networks enabled mass surveillance. The interesting development in the article is that AI allows people to ask natural language questions about video footage to AIs—and AIs can answer them.
In contrast with older tools restricted to a few dozen preset searches, these new tools allow an almost unlimited range of enquiries by enabling language-based searches on video.
That lets intelligence officers hunt through massive streams of videos using simple search terms, such as two men handing a bag to each other; a person who has changed their appearance, or has changed clothes multiple times in a day; or a vehicle that has recently been painted over, or has driven past the same spot several times in a short period.
“This is the holy grail of surveillance,” said a European official whose country uses the technology on its cities. “We are able to look for behaviour, not objects it has created a world of new possibilities.”
Bets on a particular player's performance open the door to sinister influences in sports.
The WSJ has the story:
Another NBA Player Charged With Rigging Games for Gamblers
According to a federal indictment, Malik Beasley was in debt to a former teammate when he agreed to help gamblers by manipulating his own performance. By Jared Diamond and Robert O’Connell
"The government’s indictment identifies four games during the 2023-24 season where it said Beasley agreed to participate in the scam. Beasley had allegedly accumulated millions of dollars in gambling losses and, at times, owed money to Davis, a retired forward who played with Beasley on the Minnesota Timberwolves during the 2020-21 campaign. In return for fixing his games, Beasley would have his bill to Davis reduced or eliminated, according to the indictment.
"The charges against the 29-year-old Beasley are yet another example of a prominent NBA player swept up in illegal gambling activities—and the implications for the league are chilling. On Jan. 26, 2024, the day Jontay Porter removed himself from a Toronto Raptors game with a fake injury so his conspirators would win bets, there was another game on the take 500 miles away. (Porter has since pleaded guilty to federal charges and is awaiting sentencing.)
...
"Once Beasley was on board, the next question was which games to target. The government says the gamblers specifically looked for non-marquee games—far from the NBA’s nationally televised showcases on ESPN and TNT—where Beasley could manipulate his performance.
“It’s better not to be on tv for us,” one defendant wrote in a group chat.
"There was also infighting among the group, with some bettors chasing big paydays while others settled for more modest wins. At one point, one defendant accused another of betting so much that he single-handedly altered the lines, which risked drawing suspicions from authorities. "
For too long, outdated rules based on old technology held back American aerospace innovation. Now, we are updating those rules for the first time since the 1970s. Today @USDOT announced a new proposal to enable civil supersonic flight by replacing speed limits with noise limits, ushering in a new era of safer, quieter, and faster air travel for all Americans.
That is from Michael Kratsios. Here is how the 1973 ban first came about. More details will be forthcoming, here is one concern from Eli.
The post Civilian supersonic flights are being legalized in the U.S. appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
In case you missed it, earlier today Donald Trump dropped this jewel on his social media platform, Douche Social …
And I am here to say—in the midst of the wild success of the Great American State Fair—”Yes! Please do this! Please hold a midterm convention in Dallas! Please have all the Republicans running for office show up! Please have them stand beside a president with a 26-percent approval rating! Please have them shuffle awkwardly as the president makes rape jokes, sex noises and two-steps to YMCA! Please have them rave about how great Donald Trump is! Please have him give one of his standard two-hour speeches about how elections are fixed and boys shouldn’t play girl sports! Please have him tell stories about folks calling him ‘Sir.’ Please have him hype up the candidates running for election and re-election. Have him marvel about their looks. Have him forget their names. Have him fall asleep. Then fall asleep again. And again.”
Do it! Dear God, please do it!
And, what I love more than guava and New Edition, is the Republicans will follow through with this craziness, because no one has the guts to stand up to Wanna-Be Hitler. They’ll complain in private, then arrive one by one to kiss his ring and rub his belly and tell him how this nation has never been stronger. “Thank you, sir, for letting me stand within 100 feet of your glow. Oh, thank you …”
I am here for it.
I am 100 percent here for it.
Papa Johns is spying on people’s buying activities to predict when they are low on food:
The pizza chain recently tapped NBCUniversal, Instacart and the dentsu-owned media agency Carat for help reaching consumers when they’re low on groceries—and thus more likely to be swayed by a mouth-watering ad. The idea is to reach hungry consumers by “knowing what is in their fridge without being too creepy,” said Carrie Drinkwater, chief investment officer at Carat.
To achieve that goal, NBCU and Instacart created a custom audience of shoppers who regularly purchase grocery staples on Instacart, such as eggs, milk, meat and produce. Based on that data, Papa Johns can determine which days of the week certain consumers are likely to run out of groceries and serve them an ad on NBCU streaming content accordingly. The brand served custom creatives to consumers based on their food preferences—such as whether they buy meat regularly—with QR codes and calls to action such as, “Light on groceries?” or “Empty fridge?”
Back in 2012, we learned (from Target and its campaign that detects when someone is pregnant) that the trick is to hide the knowledge in other, wrong, information. So the way for Papa John’s to not be “too creepy” is to deliberately get it wrong sometimes.
But still, ugh.
Hand-painted animations bring to life Isamu Noguchi’s ideas for playgrounds that could integrate art with everyday life
- by Aeon Video
Anthropic say of Sonnet 5 that "its performance is close to that of Opus 4.8, but at lower prices". The system card helps explain how they were able to release the model without being blocked by the US government:
Sonnet 5 is significantly less capable at cyber tasks than Mythos 5: its safeguards are thus similar to those we apply to Opus 4.7 and Opus 4.8 (models that are more capable than Sonnet 5 but much less capable than Mythos 5).
Of note from the "what's new" API changes:
Market Design
temperature, top_p, top_k are no longer supported."thinking": {type: "disabled"}.I used my Claude Token Counter tool to try out the new tokenizer. Here are my results for several larger documents:
| Document | Sonnet 4.6 | Opus 4.7 | Sonnet 5 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Universal Declaration of Human Rights (English) | 2,356 | 3,347 1.42x |
3,341 1.42x |
| Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Spanish) | 3,572 | 4,753 1.33x |
4,747 1.33x |
| Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Chinese, Mandarin Simplified) | 3,334 | 3,366 1.01x |
3,360 1.01x |
| sqlite_utils/db.py (4,279 lines of Python) | 44,014 | 56,118 1.28x |
56,113 1.27x |
So the new token is roughly 1.4x times more expensive for English, 1.33x for Spanish, 1.28x for Python code and effectively the same cost for Simplified Mandarin.
Here's the pelican. It's nothing to write home about. Sonnet 5 thinks it looks like a goose.
Via Hacker News
Tags: ai, generative-ai, llms, anthropic, claude, llm-pricing, pelican-riding-a-bicycle, llm-release
I'm impressed that my answers on my first time through the quiz categorized me as "The Garage Tinkerer", patron saint myself!
It's implemented as a single page React app using the <script type="text/babel"> trick to avoid the necessary build step. Here's the code.
Via @erisianrite.com
Tags: ai, generative-ai, llms, ai-ethics
shot-scraper video is a new command introduced in today's shot-scraper 1.10 release which accepts a storyboard.yml file defining a routine to run against a web application and uses Playwright to record a video of that routine. I've written before about the importance of having coding agents produce demos of their work; this is my latest attempt at enabling them to do that.
Here's an example video created using shot-scraper video, exercising a still in development feature adding the ability to create new tables in Datasette from pasted CSV, TSV or JSON data:
That video was created by running this command:
shot-scraper video datasette-bulk-insert-storyboard.yml \
--auth datasette-demo-auth.json --mp4(That --auth JSON file contains a cookie, as described here in the documentation.)
Here's the datasette-bulk-insert-storyboard.yml file:
output: /tmp/datasette-bulk-insert-demo.webm
server:
- uv
- --directory
- /Users/simon/Dropbox/dev/datasette
- run
- datasette
- -p
- 6419
- --root
- --secret
- "1"
- /tmp/demo.db
url: http://127.0.0.1:6419/demo/tasks
viewport:
width: 1280
height: 720
cursor: true
wait_for: 'button[data-table-action="insert-row"]'
javascript: |
(() => {
let clipboardText = "";
Object.defineProperty(navigator, "clipboard", {
configurable: true,
get: () => ({
writeText: async (text) => {
clipboardText = String(text);
},
readText: async () => clipboardText,
}),
});
})();
scenes:
- name: Bulk insert existing table rows
do:
- pause: 0.8
- click: 'button[data-table-action="insert-row"]'
- wait_for: "#row-edit-dialog[open]"
- pause: 0.5
- click: ".row-edit-bulk-insert"
- wait_for: ".row-edit-bulk-textarea"
- pause: 0.5
- click: ".row-edit-copy-template"
- wait_for: "text=Copied"
- pause: 0.8
- fill:
into: ".row-edit-bulk-textarea"
text: |
title,owner,status,priority,notes
Prepare release video,Ana,doing,1,Recorded with shot-scraper
Check pasted CSV import,Ben,review,3,Previewed before inserting
Share the branch demo,Chen,queued,2,Bulk insert creates three rows
- pause: 0.8
- click: ".row-edit-save"
- wait_for: "text=Previewing 3 rows."
- pause: 1.2
- click: ".row-edit-save"
- wait_for: "text=3 rows inserted."
- pause: 1.0
- click: ".row-edit-cancel"
- wait_for: "text=Prepare release video"
- pause: 1.0
- name: Create a table from pasted CSV
open: http://127.0.0.1:6419/demo
wait_for: 'details.actions-menu-links summary'
do:
- pause: 0.8
- click: 'details.actions-menu-links summary'
- click: 'button[data-database-action="create-table"]'
- wait_for: "#table-create-dialog[open]"
- pause: 0.5
- fill:
into: ".table-create-table-name"
text: "launch_metrics"
- click: ".table-create-from-data"
- wait_for: ".table-create-data-textarea"
- pause: 0.5
- fill:
into: ".table-create-data-textarea"
text: |
metric_id,name,score,recorded_on
m001,Activation rate,87.5,2026-06-29
m002,Retention check,72.25,2026-06-30
m003,CSV import health,95,2026-07-01
- pause: 0.8
- click: ".table-create-save"
- wait_for: "text=Previewing 3 rows."
- pause: 1.2
- click: ".table-create-save"
- wait_for_url: "**/demo/launch_metrics"
- wait_for: "text=Activation rate"
- pause: 1.2The video command documentation includes simpler examples, but for the purpose of this post I thought I'd go with something more comprehensive.
That demo YAML storyboard was constructed entirely by GPT-5.5 xhigh running in Codex Desktop, using the following prompt run inside my ~/dev/datasette checkout of this branch:
Review the changes on this branch.
cd to ~/dev/shot-scraper and run the command "uv run shot-scraper video --help"
Now use that new video command to record a video demo of the new features from this branch, including running a "uv run datasette -p 6419 --root --secret 1 /tmp/demo.db" development server so you can record the video against a demo DB that you first create.
Now that I've released the feature the prompt could say "run uvx shot-scraper video --help" instead and it should achieve the same result.
I really like this pattern where the --help output for a command provides enough detail that a coding agent can use it - it works kind of like bundling a SKILL.md file directly inside the tool. I used the same pattern for showboat and rodney.
shot-scraper video started as an experimental prototype. shot-scraper is built on top of Playwright, and the key feature it needed was for Playwright to be able to record video of browser sessions with enough control to create the desired demo.
I first tried this a few years ago and found that the Playwright-produced videos included additional chrome that was useful for debugging a test failure but unwanted for a product demo.
They fixed that a while ago, but there were still some minor blockers. In particular I was getting a few white frames at the start of the videos, since the recording mechanism kicked in before the first URL was loaded by the browser.
Playwright 1.59 added a new screencast mechanism providing much more finely grained control over video recording. This was very nearly what I needed, but the resulting videos were fixed at 800px wide.
I found a landed PR fixing that but it wasn't yet in a release. Then yesterday they shipped it in playwright-python 1.61.0 and I was finally unblocked to finish implementing the feature!
The code itself was all written by GPT-5.5 xhigh in Codex Desktop. I had it write the documentation as well which gave me a very useful frame for reviewing the design - much of the iteration on the feature came from reviewing that documentation, spotting things that were redundant, inconsistent or confusing, and requesting (or dictating) a better design.
The YAML format itself was mostly defined by the coding agent. I had it use Pydantic to both define and validate the format, partly to make the design easier to review.
This is a great example of the kind of feature that I almost certainly wouldn't have taken on without coding agent support. I filed the original issue in February 2024, and had difficulty finding the necessary time to solve this in amongst all of my other projects.
Tags: projects, python, yaml, ai, datasette, playwright, shot-scraper, generative-ai, llms, pydantic, coding-agents, agentic-engineering
Release: shot-scraper 1.10
The big new feature is shot-scraper video storyboard.yml, described in detail in Have your agent record video demos of its work with shot-scraper video.
Tags: shot-scraper
The International Space Station is Old AF.
It has been orbiting the Earth for 27 years and has been bombarded by a constant stream of space debris. The ISS leaks and requires much repair. As NASA alum…
For all my interviews and more, subscribe on YouTube.
Lisa Graves is the author of Without Precedent, a history and analysis of the Roberts Court and the expert on how the Federalist Society has been working to undermine democracy. Yesterday this happened:
So I managed to arrange a conversation with Lisa about what is happening:
. . .
TRANSCRIPT:
Paul Krugman in Conversation with Lisa Graves
(recorded 6/29/26)
Paul Krugman: Hi everyone. This is a bit of an emergency recording and podcast because today, which is Monday as we’re recording this, the Supreme Court has just handed down several decisions, of which one was really alarming. And I had talked earlier with Lisa Graves, head of True North Research, and Court Accountability who had been warning about all this stuff when I talked with her previously and on other occasions. And I wanted to get somebody who’s actually following this to weigh in. So, hi Lisa.
Lisa Graves: Paul, thank you so much for inviting me back on. I really appreciate it.
Krugman: Yeah. So, there were obviously several decisions that came down, but Humphrey’s Executor… This is absolutely mind-boggling. So why don’t you talk about Humphrey’s Executor and then we’ll talk about the background and what this says about the Roberts Court?
Graves: Yes. Today’s Slaughter case involving the FTC, is a case where the Roberts Court has overruled nearly a century of legal precedent which prohibited presidents from firing commissioners, specifically on the Federal Trade Commission, the case that you mentioned, Paul. Humphrey’s Executor was specifically about the FTC. It was about this provision that barred FDR, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, from firing someone whom Hoover appointed to that commission. When Congress created the FTC, it set a standard that required that you would have to have cause to fire someone outside of their term.
The way the FTC is set up is that it has five commissioners by statute. Three of those commissioners are appointed by the president, two from the president’s party, and two are not from the president’s party. What’s happened over the past year is since Donald Trump became president again, he fired the Democratic commissioners on that commission. And so for the last 15 months, that commission has had only two commissioners, two Republican appointees, which has meant there hasn’t been a Democrat even in the room to consider these cases that are brought to the FTC, which relate to the power of huge corporations to merge with one another or not. And so, in essence, the FTC investigates proposed mergers and other things that might be considered a restraint on trade or affect the ability of consumers to get a fair price on things, for example. And what Trump has done is that he’s basically dominated that board in defiance of the plain language of the statute.
So any legal action by Donald Trump that has been countenanced by this Supreme Court, which allowed that firing to stand, in essence, did not allow the lower courts to reinstall Rebecca Slaughter to that post while the case was pending, and then just today ruled that, in fact, under their new approach to the Constitution, Donald Trump has the power to fire anyone at any independent agency—other than the Fed, it seems—no matter what Congress has said. And this is the result of an invention of a theory from the Reagan revolutionaries back in the day to try to aggrandize presidential power through what they describe as “the unitary executive theory.”
So the bottom line is that this ruling by the Roberts Court will allow more of the corruption that we’ve seen going on by this administration in terms of people who may be donors to Trump seemingly getting out of investigations or having their mergers go through, and we will not have a commission at the FTC that has any independence—just loyalists for Donald Trump for the foreseeable future.
Krugman: And it applies obviously not just to the FTC but to any agency except not the Federal Reserve. But the FDA—if there’s an FDA official who is viewed as being too hostile to RFK Jr’s vaccine doctrine or something, then Trump can fire him. And the Supreme Court has said, “Well, yes, the president has that power. Congress cannot set any ground rules that can’t be overruled by presidential edict.” Is that a correct interpretation?
Graves: Well, that’s the broad strokes of it, but just to add a little bit of gloss to that, which is that Roberts has been pursuing this agenda for years now. And he accomplished part of it through a case called the Seila Law LLC case, where he allowed Trump to remove the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. And the CFPB also had restrictions on whether that person could be fired without cause, and Roberts already moved the ball forward on that. And that has had a cascading effect along with the terrible, unprecedented immunity decision, where the Roberts Court gave Donald Trump immunity from criminal prosecution for any of his so-called official acts, which included directing agencies like the Justice Department to do his bidding.
And so, up until now, what was left was this notion that if Congress created a board that specifically had limits on how a person could be removed from that board because of its regulatory function to implement congressional will to act in a legislative way, boards like the Federal Trade Commission or the National Labor Relations Board could not be swept of their members. But before this decision, through the machinations of John Roberts, in essence, Donald J. Trump was already exerting a power to fire anyone within the executive branch, whether they were on an independent board or not.
Krugman: The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau felt like it was a little bit different. It was basically Elizabeth Warren’s creation. It was a relatively new agency. But this now generalizes it to everything, and it goes back to the FTC, which is a very, very old institution and is where this whole Humphrey’s Executor comes from. So now that’s everything.
Graves: Yes, except for the Fed. That is correct. And I think, as you were describing it at the outset, Paul, this has enormous implications for the American people and American consumers, because, in essence, consolidating power in this way in a president is not required by the Constitution. Although Roberts is somehow claiming it is, it’s not. This is part of this invention of this so-called “structural Constitution” under this very rigid notion of separation of powers, which basically guts some of the core powers of Congress and vests those powers, in the views of this court, in the hands of the president and the president alone.
And this ignores the reality of what’s happening, which is that you have a president who’s not actually executing the laws passed by Congress; who’s thwarting those laws. When you look at Article One and Article Two of the Constitution, what you see is that the president’s primary job is “to faithfully execute the laws of the United States.” And what’s happening here is that the president is circumventing those laws, thwarting those laws, and doing so in ways that raise serious questions of corruption or potential corruption or undue influence.
And the area of trade and mergers is one of the most, you know, potentially profitable areas for people trying to curry favor with Donald Trump. And what we’ve seen over the past fifteen months is that the FTC under the control of two Trump loyalists has dismissed more than thirty-three investigations into mergers that were begun before Donald Trump took over.
Krugman: This is basically a Federalist Society thing, and when they began pushing this, they probably had in mind that we would be pursuing an ideological agenda, that this would be something that would allow a right wing president to essentially just overrule Congress when it was doing things that weren’t sufficiently right-wing, or weren’t sufficiently “Reaganesque,” since this goes way back to the 1980s. But now it’s very much personalist. We’re talking about this as what one guy gets to do, which might not even be ideological. As you say, it might just be corruption.
Graves: Yeah. I think it’s both, right? So there is this throughline from the Federalist Society that helped get these judges on the court. These six members were all either active members or noted to be members of the Federalist Society. They were part of the pipeline to power that the Federalist Society was created to accomplish. Roberts and Alito and the three Trump appointees, they were all appointed in the aftermath of the “No More Souter” campaign by Federalist Society activists who said they didn’t want judges who were going to follow the precedent. They wanted people who were going to basically be ringers and change the law to reverse the progress of the 20th century.
And this attack on what they call the administrative state is really an attack on expertise. It’s an attack on the ability of agencies to do the job Congress has entrusted them to do, which is to faithfully implement those laws in defense and in pursuit of the public interests of the American people. So you now have this convergence between a president who is so determined to take cash, in many ways, out of other people’s pockets, including the pockets of the taxpayers, in order to advance himself, to aggrandize himself. And this has come to a head at a time when the court has the majority. So this captured court has the majority it needs to accomplish its long-term ideological agenda.
And what a lot of people don’t realize is that when you look at the Supreme Court, this nine-member court, and the six members in the Republican-appointed majority, five of those six members were executive branch attorneys. They were people who cut their teeth for years in advancing presidential power, in trying to expand presidential power. And they’ve acted, I think, with a real arrogance toward congressional power, hostility toward congressional power, and with a bias toward their own long-standing agenda as lawyers, as Republican lawyers in this cause. And they’re moving forward even at a time when we have a president at the helm who is abusing his power almost on a daily basis in terms of asserting extraordinary king-like powers to do almost anything he wants.
Krugman: I would actually disagree with that. I don’t think it’s almost on a daily basis. I think it’s at least several times a day.
Graves: It’s an hourly basis, right? Yes. I’ll take that correction.
Krugman: But yeah. You say that these cases were not brought to try and stop corporations from doing stuff, but the ability to exercise the function of the FTC as a guardian of the public interest. But it’s also a negative power. You can imagine that a merger that the FTC would normally have blocked is allowed, but also one that it would normally have approved could be blocked if, you know, the corporation in question has not cut Jared Kushner in on the deal, basically.
Graves: Well, right. You know, I looked into those instances where you can see the list of the various mergers that the FTC has stepped away from investigating. And one of the things I saw was that before Trump’s appointees took office, there was a Joe Biden appointee—her name is Lina Khan. She’d been a vocal critic of Google and Amazon’s market powers. And what happened in one of these cases was that the FTC terminated the examination of one of Google’s acquisitions.
You had Google’s CEO at the inauguration last year, you had Google Alphabet giving like a million dollars to the inauguration committee. You have a tie-in on underwriting the Trump ballroom, and then you have an FTC that is not pursuing a further examination of that acquisition. Maybe it would have been approved with the full commission, maybe it wouldn’t have—we don’t know. But what we do know is that there are other ongoing investigations, perhaps around Facebook, for example. Maybe in their view or in someone’s view, Facebook hasn’t ponied up enough cash to get that dismissed. It creates this real environment of coercion and shakedowns, the perception that if you’re not playing ball with Trump, you’re going to be treated unfavorably. And in fact, he’s routinely threatened companies that he thinks aren’t sufficiently loyal to him.
Krugman: Yeah, I mean, it’s so raw and out in the open now. And by the way, Lina Khan is impressive as hell. I had a dialogue with her at the Graduate Center a few months ago, and she’s now advising Mamdani in New York. It’s just worth saying that a lot of the players in this have been around for a while and keep on showing up in different venues.
But the power to do favors is also the power to withhold favors. So this is, as you say, an enormous source of potential corruption. You also have to wonder, if you’re a business, do you even know what the ground rules are? That’s what I’m wondering about a lot now.
Graves: Well, you know, I think that that is a really good question. And it reminds me of this historical episode from that robber baron era when Teddy Roosevelt was president and the big companies—Standard Oil, for example, the mega-millionaires who would be billionaires today—were exerting such power over Congress that the smaller companies, the median-sized and smaller companies, were being shut out of the ability to really influence legislation. And that resulted in the Tillman Act, which is still on the books, that bars direct corporate contributions to a candidate. They get around that through PAC donations that are allowed, or through giving now to these C4 nonprofit groups.
But you know, since about 110 or 115 years ago, it has been banned for there to be direct corporate contributions because, at that time, other businesses who weren’t the super-bigs were feeling like they were getting the raw end of the deal. And so I think that’s probably repeating now, where there are smaller companies that can’t afford to make million-dollar donations to the inaugural committee or make tens of millions of dollars of secret donations to this ballroom boondoggle, who are going to be disadvantaged because they can’t potentially buy their way in to favorable treatment.
Krugman: Yeah. I mean, even big corporations who happen, for whatever reason, to be not sort of buddies. You know, it definitely looks like this administration has it in for Anthropic. I’m sure that they’re not angels, but this is still pretty amazing that this is one of the best AI out there, but they are not friends with the president and so they’re…
Graves: Right. And look what happened at TikTok. For quite a while there we were hearing all of these attacks on TikTok, concerns about security or security access through that app. And with the visit of one billionaire, Jeff Yass of Pennsylvania, who’s one of the fifteen richest billionaires in the world—who made part of his fortune on super-rapid trading, but another part of his fortune on an early investment in ByteDance, the owner of TikTok—with one visit to Mar-a-Lago by Jeff Yass, suddenly Donald Trump was singing a different tune about TikTok, and then ultimately intervened in a way that ended up giving some of his allies ownership in TikTok.
And so you have this real... I would say the most generous thing I could say would be it’s unseemly. I mean, it’s outrageous, actually, to have a president engaging in sort of corporate manipulation in this way to reward his friends and punish his enemies, as we’ve seen with Trump going after law firms, Trump going after universities, Trump assailing different corporations whom he dislikes or whom he considers not to have donated to him or advanced him. This is extraordinary in American history. I think it’s unprecedented, actually. Even with the corruption that was unfolding during that robber baron era, I think we’ve never seen anything like this kind of grift and graft.
And this corruption is inherently destabilizing to American society, to American business, to investments in the United States. If the U.S. becomes, as it is becoming, a society in which basically you have to engage in these sorts of legalized bribes—although I’m not sure how legal some of them may ultimately be—that changes the U.S. as a stable economic superpower.
Regardless of what a particular policy preference may or may not be at a given time, this is an extraordinary devolution of Americans’ role in both the U.S. economy and our role in the world—to have a situation where companies and countries have to pay up to a president or cut a deal with the president’s son-in-law or Howard Lutnick on minerals or what have you, or where someone can make a call to the Pentagon to get a special contract approved for Donald Trump’s sons. As you said, this is not just corruption on a daily basis. Whether it’s legally actionable—some of them may be, some of them may not be—but on a moral level, it’s corrupt on an hourly basis.
Krugman: Yeah, on average every hour now. So, you mentioned devaluing expertise. The role of experts in a lot of this stuff—I think part of the issue is whether there are sort of procedures for consulting experts on things that will now be by the chopping block. Is that right?
Graves: Yeah, I mean, that is part of a broader trend. It transcends the Slaughter case. But what we’ve seen is a real war on expertise. Certainly part of that was through the DOGE efforts of Musk, but those efforts, those firings of so many people, so many experts across the board in all these agencies, that has really decimated, not just the baseline of our skilled workforce in the federal government, but also demoralized the people who remain. And that’s across the board. That’s in areas of vaccines, it’s in public health, it’s in climate science, it’s in earth science, it’s in trade. It’s in all areas where we’ve probably cumulatively lost I don’t know how many thousands of years of expertise that the people actually invested in through paying these civil servants who were hired on a non-political basis, who were hired for their expertise to serve the American public. Whether it’s through the National Institutes of Health, or the FDA, or the U.S. Department of Agriculture, we’ve lost an enormous amount of expertise.
And we’ve also seen the ways in which this Roberts Court has not intervened to protect against those firings. You’ve had people who should never have been fired, and months and months later, some of them are reinstated. Meanwhile, they may have moved on to other jobs, they may not want to come back into the government. This loss of expertise is a disadvantage for we, the people of the United States, in terms of having people who are looking out for our interests based on years of work, as well as scientists who’ve been reliant at the universities on these grants and more.
This also is a real disadvantage for our national security, because it’s not just in U.S. civil society that we’ve seen these firings. We’ve seen people fired from the Pentagon who were, leading lights, people who had records of impeccable service to our country. We’ve seen that happening in the national security arena, in the intelligence community, where people who have deep expertise have been fired. We’ve seen that at the Justice Department where people who had expertise in anti-corruption, in enforcing DOJ’s rules to make sure that prosecutions weren’t politicized. We’ve seen the FBI firing people for just the act of doing their job to protect and investigate those who committed violent acts against our Capital Police officers. So this war on expertise, this war on civil servants, is deep and wide, and it is going to take a lot to repair.
Krugman: Yeah, my experience in dealing with higher-level civil servants has always been that we had far better people in those positions, in a sense, than we deserved. You had all of these people at Treasury or at agencies that I would deal with, who could have made two or three times as much money in the private sector, but they did what they did because they thought they were doing something meaningful. They felt that it was a better use of their lives. And now, even if you haven’t fired them, if you’re disrespecting them, we’re going to lose that.
Graves: Yeah, I mean, I have a bias on this because I was a career hire for the Justice Department and ultimately became Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Policy Development, the Office of Legal Policy. And I was there with other attorneys who could have been making three, four, five, six times as much in the private sector, but we were honored to be able to serve the American people.
And I felt, every time I walked into the Justice Department back then—this was in the Clinton administration with Ms. Reno as the attorney general—there was this engraving that said, “The place of justice is a hallowed place.” And I thought about it as a place where people set aside their partisan political views or their personal religion to do the work of the American people. And almost in every instance where I had the chance to work with someone across that agency and other agencies, I was so impressed with the devotion and intellect and wisdom of the people who had chosen public service as their career.
Krugman: Yeah. I mean, this was the Clinton administration, but you know, I had my year in government in the Reagan administration at sub-political level. But you know, the kind of deputy assistant secretary and office director level were astonishingly good people. Once in a while, you would get to see one of them lay down the law to the political appointee above them and say, “No, that’s not how it works.”
So, this is a long-term project, as you said—the unitary executive, the stripping away. Presumably, when John Roberts and his friends began this, they didn’t imagine that “the unitary executive” to whom they would give all this power would be—to use the technical term—a fuck-up like Donald Trump. I mean, I’m a little surprised that didn’t at least give them some pause here.
Graves: Yeah, it’s interesting. You’d think that they could slow things down for a moment given how reckless and destructive Donald Trump is, but they haven’t, right? This is not necessarily something they’re compelled to do. So, for example, Humphrey’s Executor has been on the books since the 1930s. They could easily have just said, “We affirm the lower court in Slaughter’s case and we affirm Humphrey’s Executor as still good law,” and just been done with the case. She would have been back on the commission months and months ago, maybe last summer. For Lisa Cook, you know, they sort of held that for a moment, held out this notion that they were going to allow her to remain, that they weren’t going to intervene on the Fed, but everything else was fair game.
This court is taking cases where it could easily just either affirm the ruling below or reverse it based on a citation of long-standing legal precedents, but it’s not. And what most people don’t know is that this Roberts Court is only hearing 60 to 70 cases a year. A couple of years back, the Supreme Court was hearing up to a hundred or more cases. In the 1980s, there were changes to the court’s jurisdiction to basically leave most of its jurisdiction discretionary. The court only has to take cases basically where there’s like a fight between Arizona and Colorado over the Colorado River—when there’s a fight between two states. Otherwise, every case they take is discretionary. They are choosing this docket.
They’re choosing, in Donald Trump’s term, to take up cases on the shadow docket where they ruled for him almost all the time—more than 90% of the time—and on the main docket, the docket that we’re seeing the decisions coming from now. Those are all cases where the Roberts Court has decided to have an oral argument and issue a decision, even where the long-standing precedent is against Trump’s actions.
And so I wish that they had some heartburn over it. They don’t seem to, though, because they could easily, in the Slaughter case, have said, “No, she has to go back on that commission under the long-standing precedent of Humphrey’s Executor.” And they chose not to do so. And they chose not to do so even as the Musk operation, the DOGE operation and more were decimating our agencies; as they were decimating—not the FTC in that particular sense because it was hitting all the agencies,—but they did so knowing who Trump is and knowing what he’s doing.
Krugman: And now they have to know him even more, right? In some sense, we are all in the reflecting pool, and yet they are giving him unbridled power. Just amazing.
Suppose that we actually do manage to have a genuine election in 2028 and the next president is a Democrat. What do you think this court does then?
Graves: Well, if the court were principled, and I don’t think it is, then it would, in essence, allow a Democratic Senate to confirm only Democratic appointees to those agencies and let them revise the rules and restore the statutory actions, the regulations that were stripped away by Trump. The reason I’m reluctant to believe that they will allow this to happen is how this court behaved toward Joe Biden and toward Barack Obama.
During the Biden administration, there was a very modest student debt relief proposal. It was, I think, about $10,000 for people who made just about the average income in the United States, and that was based on a law that allowed emergency debt relief. It was expressly allowed for emergency debt relief; we were in an emergency under COVID. People were losing their jobs or weren’t working as the economy was cascading, and that was the basis, the statutory basis, for Biden doing so.
But this Roberts Court asserted that Biden couldn’t do that, that this was a so-called “major questions doctrine,” and things like that had to go through Congress—that a president couldn’t just implement this through a regulation. And yet Donald Trump has done something far broader and deeper than that small, modest debt relief on a daily, if not weekly basis, and the court has barely breathed the words “major questions doctrine.”
And that so-called doctrine, which is really a theory, was invented to gut our power to mitigate climate change through the EPA. That was in a case that Charles Koch and his billionaire-funded groups brought—or basically aided—in the West Virginia v. EPA case, where the Roberts Court invented the notion that the EPA could not regulate carbon without specific congressional approval under the so-called major questions doctrine. And so, in that instance, what you had was again what I consider to be a modest effort to mitigate climate change by way of requiring utilities to invest more in solar and wind energy to help address the climate changes underway—not a radical cutting off of fossil fuels or anything, but just a transition.
Krugman: Right.
Graves: And that was blocked by the Roberts Court. So when it comes to a Democratic president, they seem very eager to block actions that are ameliorating or compromises. But when it comes to a Republican president, they seem very eager to do the opposite—to allow even some of the most radical actions to take hold and proceed while litigation goes forward, or even to authorize and give a blessing to those actions.
But there’s hope. Should I say there’s hope? There is hope. Can I tell you why I think that?
Krugman: Well, sure. What is the hope, actually? What does “Supreme Court Project 2029” look like? What do we do?
Graves: Look, this is a situation where we have not just executive branch aggrandizement, but we have judicial supremacy happening. We have a Roberts Court that is deciding that it is the decider—basically being the kingmaker for Donald Trump—but also the decider on almost any issue that they want to take up and issue a decree on. And that is disempowering to the American people, to representative government, to our democracy.
And so what we need to have is a really robust Congress. In my personal view, we need to elect people to Congress who are going to clean house, who are going to deal with this corruption in the near term, who are going to investigate this corruption and engage in oversight in ways that make it crystal clear to as many people as possible how this is not a tenable way to run a democracy, and then build on that to hopefully sweep into power real reformers in 2029. Like what happened with Franklin Delano Roosevelt, where you have a real surge in demand by the American people to clean things up and create policies that actually help the American people.
If we can move forward despite the threats this president is making with the aid of this court in terms of intervening in this midterm election with the map drawing, if the will of the people can prevail as you see it in the polls, then we have a real chance not just at a rebuke of this corruption, but actually of creating new ways to protect our interests and having an even more vigorous federal government that can help serve our needs. But that’s going to also require court reform to be part of it, because this court will strike down the same thing if it’s passed again unless we reform this court.
Krugman: Okay, but what does reform look like? Is it court packing? Is it something like that?
Graves: I think it’s all of the above. I think we have to have a real conversation about how we contain this out-of-control court. It could be expanding the court; there’s no number set in the Constitution. Nine isn’t the magic number. The Republicans were willing to have eight as long as it served them, you know, when they were blocking Barack Obama’s nominee.
I think we have to look at jurisdictional reform. Article III of the Constitution specifically allows Congress to set the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court—it’s in plain language there.
We certainly need ethics reform because the court has also been enveloped in a cloud of scandal over trips and kissing up to billionaires by Clarence Thomas and other members of that court.
And we also need to have a real sense of our power in the 21st century, the American people’s power, to have a people’s Congress that actually represents our interests and not just the interests of the richest few. Because of this Roberts Court in the Citizens United ruling, because of the concentration of wealth as Ronald Reagan sought to take down the progressive taxation of billionaires, we now have these billionaires who have so much money they can invest millions, hundreds of millions, in elections without missing a beat.
I did a calculation once, by the way, on Jeff Yass in terms of his spending in the Pennsylvania Supreme Court race. His spending, which was in the millions, was the equivalent of an ordinary Pennsylvanian buying a coffee and a bagel once a week. And that’s not just because they’re lucky and they’ve got money to invest in risk; it’s because the tax rate is so out of whack and has to be fixed as well.
Krugman: Okay, well, let’s hope for the best. But my god, that’s among the reasons not to celebrate the 250th anniversary as wholeheartedly as one might have liked. Thanks for talking to me, and especially on such short notice.
Graves: Gosh. Well, I will just say, you know, there still is a lot to celebrate, and we can set the course of the next 250 years if we don’t give up and we don’t give in.
Krugman: Okay. On that note, let’s press on with the fight we are in, as Lincoln would have said.
We’ve received notice that the Department of Commerce has lifted export controls on Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5.
We'll begin restoring access tomorrow, and will share an update soon.
— Anthropic, on Twitter
Tags: anthropic, claude, generative-ai, claude-mythos, ai, llms
gemini-3.1-flash-lite-image in their API), this is the "fastest and cheapest Gemini image model, engineered for velocity and scale".
I used AI studio to run this prompt:
Do a where's Waldo style image but it's where is the raccoon holding a ham radio
I like that one better than the results I got from the other Nano Banana models when I tried this back in April. It spelled Forest Festival wrong in two different ways though.
Via Hacker News
Tags: google, ai, generative-ai, llms, gemini, text-to-image, llm-release, nano-banana
Why are parts of this asteroid's surface so smooth?
The post Fables of the Reconstruction/Reconstruction of the Fables appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
1. Elizabeth Buchanan, So You Want to Own Greenland? A useful and dispassionate overview of the relevant history and issues. The author is from Australia. I had not known that Norway unilaterally claimed parts of eastern Greenland in the early 1930s, though gave it back to Denmark following a Hague adjudication and ruling.
2. Andrea Wulf, The Traveler: One Man’s Epic Quest for Discover Our Shared Humanity. This book meets her usual high standards. In this case the traveler is George Foster, who sailed with Cook to the South Seas and had relatively sympathetic attitudes toward the indigenous peoples there.
3. James Hawes, The Shortest History of Ireland. From a useful series, even if some of the claims are wrong and the judgments intemperate. Such books force you to think through your own views and interpretations, they serve as refreshers for the basic history, and they do give you conceptual frameworks of a sort. You are more likely to remember the core histories when you read books like this, but caution typically is in order as well.
4. Simon Warrack, Monumental: Great Buildings of the World Through the Hands and Eyes of a Stonemason. An engaging book about the beauties of stonemasonry, with case studies of Venice, Angkor Wat, Lalibela, Zimbabwe and other locales.
5. Roger Zelazny, Lord of Light. Yup. “Earth is long since dead. On a colony planet, a band of men has gained control of technology, made themselves immortal, and now rule their world as gods of the Hindu pantheon.” First published in 1967.
The post What I’ve been reading appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
A specter is haunting America — the specter of socialism. Or as President Trump would like people to believe: Commies! Rotten stinkin’ Reds, I tell ya!
Here’s what Trump said at the latest Faith & Freedom Coalition conference:
Communism is very easy to sell. It destroys everything, but it’s very easy. I’ll be honest, I think I’d be the greatest communist in history. I’d give free rent. Ladies and gentlemen, from now on, you don’t have to pay any rent. From now on, anybody wants a house, don’t worry about it. Just pick the house you want. Everybody gets free food. Everything is free from this point forward. Everyone is going to vote for me.
The problem is, after two or three years, the country is a disaster area. The country fails. They always do. It always does. So easy to sell. That first year, boy, you’re the most popular. It’s happening right now in New York and California. But you’ll start living in squalor. You’ll live in squalor. There will be no food. There will be no housing. There will be no military. There will be no law and order. There will be no nothing. You’ll be a third-world inhabitant in every way, and everyone will suffer or die. You’ll suffer or die. That’s what happens. For thousands of years, it’s been happening, by different names. Thousands of years.
Thousands of years of communism! Marx would be so proud.
The president is not a subtle man, nor is he a particularly skilled propagandist, so he often substitutes his own impulses and prejudices where a smarter politician would have a better grasp on what might be persuasive. In this case, Trump is trapped in his favorite decade, the 1980s. Back then he was already famous but still young, and Ronald Reagan’s Cold War — which was more fun and entertaining than the darker version of earlier years — was the dominant political conflict of the era.
Trump is of course conflating communism, which no one in mainstream American politics advocates, with socialism. But how successful can Republicans be at making Americans terrified of the socialist tide sweeping the country?
As I’ve often argued, politics is all about timing, and the socialists are definitely having their moment. A number of candidates who either call themselves democratic socialists, are members of the Democratic Socialists of America, or are mostly in agreement with the DSA on both issues and tactics have won Democratic primaries recently. That starts with two current mayors (Zohran Mamdani in New York and Katie Wilson in Seattle) and one mayor-to-be (Janeese Lewis-George in Washington), then goes through the successful congressional candidates Mamdani endorsed, and will keep on going as the primary season proceeds. (As Michael Tomasky points out, these people are really more social democrats than democratic socialists, but that distinction will be lost on most everyone.)
The next notable upset could be in Tuesday’s primary in Colorado, where Rep. Diana DeGette, who has been in Congress for three decades, is facing a surprisingly strong challenge from 29-year-old Melat Kiros, a lawyer and grad student. As you’d expect, this trend has produced both consternation from centrist Democrats and some over-the-top rhetoric from Republicans.
The Democrats waving their hands in panic at all these democratic socialists with the temerity to threaten politicians with previously secure sinecures, and the Republicans who are just spitting the word “socialist” at every opportunity, share some assumptions about how the American electorate will greet this new development.
First, they assume that if there are some democratic socialists about, voters will extrapolate their impressions of those socialists to all Democrats. Second, they assume that the average voter knows what socialism is. And third, they assume those voters despise socialism and will recoil from it in horror.
Those three assumptions might be valid. But there isn’t actually much evidence for them. And most importantly, how Americans react to the new socialism is not predetermined.
As I said, Trump is stuck in the 1980s in a whole lot of ways. But what’s most important about that era is that it predates the consciousness of most Americans. The Soviet bloc began its collapse in 1989, bringing an end to the Cold War. In order to have vivid, emotionally weighted memories of what it was like to live in fear of communism, you’d have to be older than 50 at the very least. That’s a little over a third of the population; many people that old couldn’t care less, and for the rest it’s a weird idea out of ancient history. Just saying “That guy’s a communist” not only doesn’t immediately create fear and hatred toward the target, it barely makes any sense.
But what about socialism, which means many different things but is more alive in the present? The current renaissance of the DSA is being drive mostly by young people, mostly in cities. As Harold Meyerson pointed out when discussing Nithya Raman’s challenge to incumbent Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, ideologically the two are barely distinguishable; “the only real reason why Raman is a DSA member and Bass is not is generational. Raman is 44; Bass is 72. When Bass was young, there was no viable socialist movement in the United States and most of the New Deal’s guardrails against capitalism running amok were still in place.”
But Republicans seem to think it’s enough to say “Yuck, socialism,” just as they have been saying forever. In fact, they’ve always called literally everything Democrats want to do “socialism,” no matter how far from socialism it actually was.
The short-term strategy was to discredit whatever Republicans were arguing against, but over the long term it may have had the opposite effect. It made them look silly, like Ronald Reagan warning in 1961 that if the bill creating Medicare passed, “We are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it once was like in America when men were free.” Not only do they come to sound like the boy who cried wolf, but if everything from improving schools to providing health care to investing in infrastructure is “socialism,” at least some voters may conclude that socialism doesn’t sound so bad.
The two best-known democratic socialists in America today are the charming old curmudgeon Bernie Sanders, and the happy and charismatic Zohran Mamdani, neither of whom are as threatening as Fox News personalities would like them to be. Mamdani in particular has been aggressively pursuing what we used to call “sewer socialism,” improving constituents’ quality of life by providing basic services. Here’s how he described it last Sunday to ABC’s “This Week”:
JONATHAN KARL: Republicans are going to make you the poster child for the Democratic Party.
MAMDANI: Let them. We don’t have to ask ourselves what life looks like if a socialist wins. I won last November, and over the course of these last six months, what we’ve delivered for working people are the very things we were told were impossible.
We’ve delivered free childcare for two-year-olds for the first time in New York City history. We’ve delivered tens of millions of dollars back to tenants who were taken advantage of by bad landlords. We’ve delivered 165,000 potholes being paved. And we’ve done all of these things while also delivering the lowest recorded crime in our city’s history. That’s what it looks like to have Democratic socialism. And what you’re seeing is that New Yorkers experienced this for six months and made the decision that they wanted to see more of it on the national stage as well.
But how do people really feel about socialism? Given how hard Republicans work to make people afraid of it, the answer is, not so bad. Here’s a Gallup poll from last September:
And here’s how feel about capitalism:
Capitalism is more popular than socialism overall, though not among Democrats, and barely among independents. This is the important context. Even if most Americans aren’t willing to throw out capitalism entirely, millions feel that it isn’t really working for them. And unlike in the 1950s or 1980s, there are actually prominent people in public debate now making an affirmative case for some version of socialism. And who is making the case for capitalism? Tech oligarchs, Wall Street vultures, and slimy Republican congresscritters. Meanwhile, the most visible face of capitalism is an utterly corrupt one (Trump’s), the scam economy has ballooned, and people feel not only that they’re struggling to get by but that capitalism as it is organized today is making their future prospects gloomy.
Because most of them are very bad at politics, centrist Democrats have been freaking out about the new socialist momentum, and rushing to reporters to say how awful it is that their party has been infected by this virus. Some of them even put out a little manifesto (“We are capitalist, not socialist”). They’re obviously terrified that someone will say “You’re just like those New York socialists!” and they’ll have to answer for what some candidate in another state tweeted ten years ago. Republicans want to make everyone afraid of socialism; centrist Democrats are more afraid than anyone.
Yes, Republicans will say that socialism is horrible and if there are three or four elected Democrats who call themselves socialists, that means every Democrat is a socialist. But I would caution against a temptation Democrats often succumb to, which is to conclude that if Republicans say something a lot, voters must be persuaded by it. They believe this even when there’s no evidence to support the idea.
How voters think about socialism, furthermore, is not static. If the socialists aren’t going away, what should a centrist Democrat hope the average voter concludes about socialism? That it is a dangerous, radical ideology and anyone with even the remotest connection to it (like being in the same party as someone who says they’re a socialist) should be shunned and defeated?
Of course not. What centrist Democrats ought to hope is that the average voter concludes that socialism is a somewhat leftier version of what most Democrats believe in, and therefore not something to be all that afraid of.
Here’s the good news: Centrist Democrats can help convince voters to make that conclusion! When they’re asked about some DSA member, they shouldn’t say “I renounce and denounce that despicable radical! Begone, foul demon!” Instead, they can say “I don’t agree with her on everything, but that’s okay — this party is a big tent. When she comes to Congress I’ll work with her where we agree, and try to persuade her where we don’t. But here’s what we do agree on: Donald Trump is a catastrophe, democracy needs to be restored, and government should work to help people lead a better life rather than just being a trough that corrupt politicians and their oligarch friends feed at. That’s what’s important.”
It’s not a hard argument to make. You just have to show a little spine.
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Editor’s note: In honor of America’s 250th birthday, Earth Observatory is revisiting stories about the landscapes that helped shape U.S. history. The images and text on this page were originally published on July 4, 2016. Explore the full collection here.
The Greater Boston area, encompassing the eastern third of Massachusetts, is a playground for the American history enthusiast. Sites important to the American Revolutionary War are interspersed throughout the modern-day metropolitan region; the view from space shows how preserved historic landscapes coexist with the new.
The top image shows a wide view of the area, from Boston Harbor to Minute Man National Historical Park. The natural-color image was acquired on October 15, 2015, with the Operational Land Imager (OLI) on the Landsat 8 satellite.
In December 1773, American colonists protested British taxation and regulation by dumping hundreds of chests of tea overboard from merchant ships into Boston Harbor. The series of events that followed—including the march of British troops westward to confiscate a cache of weapons—culminated in battles in the towns of Lexington and Concord. The battles marked the start of the Revolutionary War in April 1775.
The conflicts near Concord and Lexington are memorialized at Minute Man National Historical Park, shown in detail in the second image. By the 1950s, the area grew crowded with roads and suburban growth. Gas stations, restaurants, and an airfield all cropped up in an area that was once farmland and open fields. The park was established in 1959 in part to protect the historic landscape from further development.
Route 2A cuts through the park, and Hanscom Field still stands as a nearby reminder of 20th-century modernization. In 2003, the National Trust for Historic Preservation listed Minute Man National Historical Park and nearby historic sites as one of the 11 most endangered historical places in the United States.
Steps have been taken to restore historic structures and to return the landscape to one that more closely resembles the look and feel of the 18th century. For example, many power lines have been removed; stone walls have been rebuilt; and agricultural fields have been opened up. In 2009, the park boundaries grew to include the now-restored Barrett House and its surrounding farm, an important landmark of the war.
NASA Earth Observatory image by Jesse Allen, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Story by Kathryn Hansen.
Stay up-to-date with the latest content from NASA as we explore the universe and discover more about our home planet.
Along the northeast side of the Capital Beltway in Maryland, green spaces weave through the developed landscape.
In a precursor to Memorial Day, people in Charleston, South Carolina, honored fallen Civil War troops with flowers, songs, and…
Two hundred years ago, a battle in the port city of Baltimore inspired the writing of America’s national anthem.
The post Minute Man National Historical Park appeared first on NASA Science.
I was sitting at dinner with dear friends, and we made a list of questions we love to ask.
NASA officials said Tuesday that they are seriously considering sending the full-scale engineering model of the Perseverance rover, which is currently housed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, to the Moon to expedite their efforts to explore the south pole region.
The car-sized rover nicknamed "Promise," which serves as a testbed for Perseverance and was not otherwise planned for a launch, would land equipped with a multi-mission radioisotope thermoelectric generator (MMRTG) to power it across difficult terrain and through the lunar night. NASA's other rovers primarily operate on solar power.
"We are thinking very hard right now about sending Promise to the Moon," NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said Tuesday during a monthly update on the agency's plans to build a Moon base.
Up betimes yesterday and to-day, the sun rising very bright and glorious; and yet yesterday, as it hath been these two months and more, was a foul day the most part of the day.
By and by by water to White Hall, and there to my Lord’s lodgings by appointment, whither Mr. Creed comes to me, having been at Chelsey this morning to fetch my Lord to St. James’s. So he and I to the Park, where we understand that the King and Duke are gone out betimes this morning on board the East India ships lately come in, and so our meeting appointed is lost. But he and I walked at the further end of the Park, not to be observed, whither by and by comes my Lord Sandwich, and he and we walked two hours and more in the Park and then in White Hall Gallery, and lastly in White Hall garden, discoursing of Mr. Creed’s accounts, and how to answer the Treasurer’s objections. I find that the business is 500l. deep, the advantage of Creed, and why my Lord and I should be concerned to promote his profit with so much dishonour and trouble to us I know not, but however we shall do what we can, though he deserves it not, for there is nothing even to his own advantage that can be got out of him, but by mere force. So full of policy he is in the smallest matters, that I perceive him to be made up of nothing but design. I left him here, being in my mind vexed at the trouble that this business gets me, and the distance that it makes between Sir G. Carteret and myself, which I ought to avoyd. Thence by water home and to dinner, and afterwards to the office, and there sat till evening, and then I by water to Deptford to see Sir W. Pen, who lies ill at Captain Rooth’s, but in a way to be well again this weather, this day being the only fair day we have had these two or three months. Among other discourse I did tell him plainly some of my thoughts concerning Sir W. Batten. and the office in general, upon design for him to understand that I do mind things and will not balk to take notice of them, that when he comes to be well again he may know how to look upon me.
Thence homeward walked, and in my way met Creed coming to meet me, and then turned back and walk a while, and so to boat and home by water, I being not very forward to talk of his business, and he by design the same, to see how I would speak of it, but I did not, but in general terms, and so after supper with general discourse to bed and sleep.
Thus, by God’s blessing, ends this book of two years; I being in all points in good health and a good way to thrive and do well. Some money I do and can lay up, but not much, being worth now above 700l., besides goods of all sorts. My wife in the country with Ashwell, her woman, with my father; myself at home with W. Hewer and my cooke-maid Hannah, my boy Wayneman being lately run away from me.
In my office, my repute and understanding good, especially with the Duke and Mr. Coventry; only the rest of the officers do rather envy than love me, I standing in most of their lights, specially Sir W. Batten, whose cheats I do daily oppose to his great trouble, though he appears mighty kind and willing to keep friendship with me, while Sir J. Minnes, like a dotard, is led by the nose by him. My wife and I, by my late jealousy, for which I am truly to be blamed, have not the kindness between us which we used and ought to have, and I fear will be lost hereafter if I do not take course to oblige her and yet preserve my authority. Publique matters are in an ill condition; Parliament sitting and raising four subsidys for the King, which is but a little, considering his wants; and yet that parted withal with great hardness. They being offended to see so much money go, and no debts of the publique’s paid, but all swallowed by a luxurious Court: which the King it is believed and hoped will retrench in a little time, when he comes to see the utmost of the revenue which shall be settled on him: he expecting to have his 1,200,000l. made good to him, which is not yet done by above 150,000l., as he himself reports to the House.
My differences with my uncle Thomas at a good quiett, blessed be God! and other matters.
The town full of the great overthrow lately given to the Spaniards by the Portugalls, they being advanced into the very middle of Portugall.
The weather wet for two or three months together beyond belief, almost not one fair day coming between till this day, which has been a very pleasant [day] and the first pleasant [day] this summer.
The charge of the Navy intended to be limited to 200,000l. per annum, the ordinary charge of it, and that to be settled upon the Customs.
The King yet greatly taken up with Madam Castlemaine and Mrs. Stewart, which God of Heaven put an end to!
Myself very studious to learn what I can of all things necessary for my place as an officer of the Navy, reading lately what concerns measuring of timber and knowledge of the tides.
I have of late spent much time with Creed, being led to it by his business of his accounts, but I find him a fellow of those designs and tricks, that there is no degree of true friendship to be made with him, and therefore I must cast him off, though he be a very understanding man, and one that much may be learned of as to cunning and judging of other men. Besides, too, I do perceive more and more that my time of pleasure and idleness of any sort must be flung off to attend to getting of some money and the keeping of my family in order, which I fear by my wife’s liberty may be otherwise lost.
Two NASA astronauts floating outside the International Space Station carried out a bit of orbital surgery Tuesday, successfully replacing a broken 200-pound “wrist” joint near the end of the lab’s 58-foot-long robot arm.
“That is a good install, you guys. I know that was tough. Wonderful work,” Canadian astronaut Jenni Gibbons called up from mission control toward the end of the seven-hour 20-minute excursion.
On May 27, flight controllers at the Johnson Space Center in Houston noticed one of the Canadian-built arm’s seven joints was drawing more current than expected and not moving properly.
After a detailed review of telemetry, NASA managers and experts with the Canadian Space Agency, which supplied the station arm, concluded the joint had failed and needed to be replaced with a spare, one of two mounted on an external stowage platform.
“Systems like Canadarm2 were designed from the beginning with replaceable components and were planned with maintenance in mind,” said ISS operations and integration manager Bill Spetch. “This is no exception.”
Floating in the Quest airlock, astronaut Jessica Meir, making her fifth spacewalk, and crewmate Chris Williams, making his second, switched their spacesuits to battery power at 8:20 a.m. EDT, officially kicking off the year’s third ISS spacewalk and the 280th overall.
After setting up foot restraints near the stowage platform and positioning the spare joint for installation, Williams and Meir detached the arm’s “hand,” known as the latching end effector, or LEE, along with two other healthy joints.
The 900-pound assembly was temporarily mounted on a nearby shelf, clearing the way for removal of joint No. 5, the 200-pound wrist joint that failed. The replacement joint was successfully installed four-and-a-half hours into the spacewalk.
“We’ll remove the failed joint 5, replace it with the spare joint and then once that’s back on the arm, our last major task will be to get that LEE cluster that we temporarily stowed and put it back onto the robotic arm so that we have a fully assembled arm at the end of the spacewalk,” said flight director Fiona Antkowiak.
Five-and-a-half hours after beginning the spacewalk, Williams and Meir were able to re-attach the LEE cluster as planned. Shortly after, flight controllers powered up the arm and verified good electrical connections through the newly installed joint.
“Today we did hear good confirmation that … Canadarm 2 has two good strings of power and data to the arm,” said NASA commentator Sandra Jones. “So today’s wrist surgery was successful.”
Williams and Mier, meanwhile, collected their tools and headed back to the airlock to close out the spacewalk.
Williams also brought the failed joint back into the airlock so it can eventually be returned to Earth for repairs. Once that work is complete, the refurbished joint and one other will be relaunched to the space station for future use as needed.
The robot arm is critical to normal station operations. It is used to capture Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus cargo ships, pulling them in for berthing, while moving other components — and spacewalkers — from point to point during maintenance operations.
NASA plans to retire the space station by the end of 2030, but Spetch said the agency will continue to maintain the arm throughout because it is vital to ISS operations.
“There’s not a time where we say hey, we’re just done repairing the arm,” he said. “Overall, the arm is critical for station operations and continued maintenance of it throughout to the end of life.”
Blue Origin continues to analyze the explosion of its New Glenn rocket a little more than a month ago, but on Tuesday, CEO Dave Limp shared the company’s plan for resuming pad operations later this year.
“We continue to actively investigate the cause of the anomaly. The vehicle is highly instrumented with extensive data from multiple camera angles and sensors, giving us confidence in our ability to identify and correct the root cause,” Limp wrote. “Early analysis points to the aft section of the first stage.”
Spaceflight Now reached out to Blue Origin to inquire into whether this description indicated an issue with one or more of the Blue Origin-built BE-4 engines on the first stage. A response wasn’t provided prior to publication.
A couple days prior on June 28, Limp shared a short video to social media that showed the assembly of a large crane that will be used for the disassembly of the vehicle access tower that was left standing following the explosion, but was damaged. A few days before that, Limp noted that “wreckage recovery from start to finish was completed in nine days and all debris has been cleared from Launch Complex 36.”
The rocket was slated to launch the company’s first Blue Moon Mark 1 cargo lander, named Endurance, to the Moon as soon as late summer. It will carry some NASA science payloads onboard and was designated Moon Base 1 during an agency event on May 26.
But the damage to the pad and the mishap investigation are pushing that timeline to early 2027, according to Limp.
During the second Moon Base event on Tuesday, Carlos García-Galán, NASA’s Moon Base Program Executive, said the agency was “working with Blue Origin very closely to understand their timelines to recovery and also looking at all our options in case it doesn’t meet our timeline.”
“We’re paying a lot of attention, again, putting the entire NASA capability at the service of making this vendor successful,” García-Galán said.
He explained that for the NASA-led Moon Base, the agency wants multiple landers available for the program to keep a flow of infrastructure heading to the lunar surface to bolster learning for future, permanent infrastructure.
“We’ve been focused on helping Blue Origin with the determination of the root cause, we will help with building the infrastructure, but then we’re looking at options, like can we fly the Mark 1 lander — which is in tact and was not associated with the anomaly — can we fly that on a different rocket or then we’ll look at all the options for the payloads, depending on the timeline of the rocket getting back,” García-Galán said.
Sitting beside García-Galán, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman added to that by stating that Blue Origin was “very committed” to resuming launches by the end of calendar year 2026. He said their recovery progress so far was “almost beyond impressive.”
“We’ve got time beyond that point, into 2027, before we’re getting nervous,” Isaacman said.
Concerning the path to launching the Blue Moon Mk.1 landers, he added, “Plan A was always New Glenn and Plan A is looking a lot better today than it was weeks ago, just based on the progress that the Blue Origin team is making.”
Beyond its first Blue Moon Mk.1 demonstration mission funded by Blue Origin, the cargo lander is also relying on New Glenn to launch NASA’s VIPER mission as well as lunar terrain vehicles developed by Lunar Outpost and Astrolab. The Blue Moon Mk.2 will be used on future crewed missions as part of the Artemis Program.
As part of the company’s effort to return to flight before the end of the calendar year, Limp said Blue Origin would shift from an entirely horizontal integration model that relied on the now destroyed transporter-erector to one that utilizes some vertical integration elements as well.
“We’re going straight to a horizontal/vertical hybrid CONOPS we had already been developing for our 9×4 New Glenn launch vehicle, using existing infrastructure, skipping a new transporter-erector, and creating a common CONOPS across two pads,” Limp wrote.
In a break down on its website, Blue Origin said for future New Glenn launches, it would integrate the first and second stages inside the horizontal integration facility adjacent to LC-36A. It would then be transported to the pad where a crane would hoist the rocket into a vertical orientation.
Blue Origin said this is “the reverse of the operation already used to offload the booster from Jacklyn.” The rocket is then placed “onto a refurbished launch table, where it mates to the launch vehicle hold-down ring. Umbilical connections are made between the main tower and the rocket.”
Renderings and an animation show that a platform fits around the upper part of the Glenn Stage 2 (GS2) upper stage as teams prepare the payload inside the fairing to be transported to the pad. That is then hoisted onto the rocket by the same crane the lifted the rocket.
The crane is cleared from the pad prior to a launch attempt. While not stated explicitly in the update, the crane may also be cleared from the pad prior to a static fire test of the booster.
We live in a digital age, where billions of people engage in dialogue within topic-bound communities and threads. In an archival analysis of over 2 billion Reddit comments and an experiment, we show that this dialogue becomes more negative over time. Further analyses suggest that negativity rises over time because social media users seek to make unique comments on the same topic, and it is easier to differentiate oneself through negative comments than through positive comments. As threads and communities evolve, and it becomes more difficult to make unique observations, users turn to negativity. Our studies show how basic human motives interact with the structure of social media platforms, posing an acute challenge for sustaining healthy online dialogue.
Here is the article by Hongkai Mao, et.al. Via the excellent Kevin Lewis. For some of you commenters, how does it feel to be a puppet in the unfolding of this game?
The post Differentiation drives the erosion of positivity on social media appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Editor’s note: In honor of America’s 250th birthday, Earth Observatory is revisiting stories about the landscapes that helped shape U.S. history. The images and text on this page were originally published on February 17, 2025. Explore the full collection here.
George Washington was born in 1732 on his family’s tobacco plantation at Popes Creek in Westmoreland County, Virginia. Three years later, he moved up the Potomac River to Little Hunting Creek Plantation, a property later renamed Mount Vernon. The riverside property, approximately 15 miles (24 kilometers) south of Washington, D.C., was central to the man who became the first U.S. president.
Though the family soon moved to Fredericksburg, Virginia, and resided there for much of his youth, Washington began managing the Mount Vernon property in 1759, soon after his marriage to Martha Dandridge. Washington’s letters make clear that he cherished and longed for this place during his long absences as a surveyor, military commander, and politician—a location he called the most “pleasantly situated” estate in the United States. It was where he helped raise two stepchildren, four step-grandchildren, and an array of crops and livestock. It was also where he was laid to rest in 1799 at the age of 67.
The OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 8 captured this image of Mount Vernon and its surroundings on August 25, 2024. While much of the land surrounding the estate has been developed into things like suburban neighborhoods, shopping areas, and military bases, fragments of the pristine forests, farmland, and riverscapes that Washington would recognize remain.
In a 1793 letter to Arthur Young, an English agricultural expert and reformer, Washington expounded on the virtues of Mount Vernon’s land.
Toward the end of his life, Washington’s land holdings extended across five farms centered on Mount Vernon. The map below, based on one of Washington’s drawings, shows their layout. The Mansion House Farm encompassed Mount Vernon, with Union Farm and Dogue Run Farm to the west. Muddy Hole Farm lay to the north and River Farm to the east.
Washington was known as an innovative landowner who, with the labor of hundreds of enslaved people, took unusual care to manage his crops sustainably. For instance, he shifted much of his production to wheat and corn and started experimenting with a seven-year crop rotation system and cover crops to better preserve the health of his soil after realizing that growing tobacco depleted its fertility.
While most crops were raised at the outlying farms, Mount Vernon’s gardens were showcases for visitors and laboratories for experimentation. The showy upper garden was a formal garden near the mansion with carefully trimmed dwarf boxwood hedges and a heated greenhouse with lemons, oranges, and rare plants.
Closer to the river was the lower garden, a kitchen garden brimming with vegetables, and a small garden that Washington called “my botanick garden,” where he spent much of his time experimenting with new varieties. Even closer to the river was the fruit garden, an experimental orchard where the estate raised pears, cherries, peaches, and apples. This may have been the source of the centuries-old preserved cherries that archaeologists unearthed in Mount Vernon’s cellar in 2024.
The lands connecting the five farms—his “wilderness,” Washington called it—were a forested area where he often spent time hunting and fishing. Species such as oak, hickory, and heath shrubs dominated the forests in Washington’s time. Dozens of the same plant species from that period are still found on the estate’s forests in modern times, though large numbers of non-native species have established themselves as well.
One of the larger open spaces visible in the Landsat image above is Fort Hunt Park. Once part of Washington’s River Farm, Fort Hunt was constructed in 1897 to bolster Washington D.C.’s defenses during a period of heightened tensions with Spain. Across the Potomac River stands Fort Washington Park, home to ruins of a fort that was used to defend the city during the Mexican-American War and the American Civil War.
Across the river in Maryland lies another property with a connection to George and Martha Washington. National Colonial Farm in Piscataway Park was established in 1958 to preserve the couple’s beloved views across the Potomac. Today, National Colonial Farm is a living farm museum and features several 18th-century heirloom varieties of herbs, flowers, and vegetables, including “Orinoco” tobacco, red May wheat, and Virginia white gourdseed corn.
NASA Earth Observatory images by Michala Garrison, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Map of Washington’s farm courtesy of the Library of Congress. Story by Adam Voiland.
Stay up-to-date with the latest content from NASA as we explore the universe and discover more about our home planet.
Along the northeast side of the Capital Beltway in Maryland, green spaces weave through the developed landscape.
Two hundred years ago, a battle in the port city of Baltimore inspired the writing of America’s national anthem.
Sites relevant to the start of the American Revolutionary War are interspersed throughout the modern-day Boston metropolitan region.
The post A Most “Pleasantly Situated” Estate appeared first on NASA Science.
1. Korinek, Autor, and Gimbel on AI and jobs (WSJ).
2. New economics job at OpenAI.
3. State capacity as an organizational problem.
4. Alex Ross is stepping down as music critic for The New Yorker.
5. More on the depolarizing effects of current AI.
6. The end of landlines in Finland is pending.
The post Tuesday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Tragedy double whammy. Caught up in commemorating the downing of Air India flight 182 (see post below), I’d forgotten that the very next day was the anniversary of the crash of Eastern flight 66.
On June 24th, 1975, the Boeing 727 went down while attempting to land at Kennedy Airport, splattering across Rockaway Boulevard at the foot of runway 22L. The crash killed 113 of the 124 passengers and crew.
This was a watershed accident, as it ushered in a more intensive study of windshear — particularly low-level microbursts. The work of a meteorologist named Ted Fajita became instrumental in better understanding the phenomenon.
Still, accidents would occur again. In 1985, Delta flight 191 crashed in Dallas after encountering a microburst on approach, killing 136 people. Three years earlier, Pan Am flight 759 went down seconds after takeoff from New Orleans killing 153 — the deadliest windshear-related crash in history.
If you can track down a copy, there’s a riveting account of the flight 66 disaster in James Kaplan’s book, The Airport.
The post June 24, 2026. Flight 66. appeared first on AskThePilot.com.
Munsif Vengattil, Aditya Kalra, and Stephen Nellis, reporting for Reuters:
Sensitive lists of components and suppliers, and photos of Apple’s upcoming iPhone 18 Pro models are part of files posted on the dark web by the ransomware group that stole data from the U.S. firm’s Indian supplier Tata Electronics, according to documents and a source.
The exposure threatens the carefully negotiated business of building the iPhone, which Apple assembles from a thicket of suppliers worldwide. It could also upset Apple and its relationship with Tata given most of the supplier arrangements are fiercely protected by Apple, and could also hand rivals, counterfeiters and its own vendors a view of who makes what. [...]
Apple considers this detail sensitive and is concerned about the documents being shared on the dark web as they relate to unreleased models, according to the person familiar with the matter. The data maps suppliers to iPhone parts, which Apple does not disclose in its public database of suppliers, the person added.
In all, the documents detail hundreds of parts to be on the upcoming iPhone 18 Pro models. The records also show where Apple draws a part from several suppliers and where it relies on just a few, laying bare both its bargaining leverage and its vulnerabilities.
I’m going to say that describing Apple as “concerned” about this data breach might be the biggest euphemism I’ve heard this year. I’m sure they’re furious. Someone at Apple is responsible for putting this trust in Tata, and executives at Tata are surely panicked that they’ve lost future business with Apple.
Day One recognizes that many people struggle with journaling not because they can’t write, but because they don’t know how to begin or what a “good” journal entry about their day looks like. That’s why we built Daily Chat, a guided reflection experience that helps you talk through your day, organize your thoughts, and shape them into a journal entry.
Early testers commented: “Day One’s new Daily Chat is a true game changer for my daily journaling. The AI-powered chat makes capturing thoughts effortless and inspires creativity like never before. Writing my diary has never been this intuitive and fun!”
Try it for yourself, it will change the way you think about journalling.
While there has been wailing and gnashing of teeth over how Mamdani-backed candidates seized all three branches of governmentwon three Democratic primaries, what these elections show is how bad Democratic moderates are at turning out their supporters. In the most publicized Democratic primary race, the Chevalier-Espaillat race in NY-13, the DSA-backed candidate Chevalier received ~9.7% of eligible Democratic primary votes, while the moderate Democrat, Espillat, received around nine percent of eligible Democratic primary votes (the Democratic primaries are the de facto election).
Regardless of what one thinks about Chevalier (I have some serious doubts), all Espaillat needed to do was to convince one percent of eligible Democratic primary voters to vote for him. It’s not like there was high turnout or a huge margin of defeat, which would have forced him to ‘convert’ over Chevalier voters, he should have been able to do that. Considering eighty percent of eligible voters didn’t vote at all, getting one out of eighty stay-at-home voters to show up and vote should be easy for someone who has held the seat for a decade. Yet he couldn’t do that.
That’s not even the worst case: in a NY state assembly race in New York City, the DSA candidate won with seven percent of the eligible vote (to the non-DSA candidate’s five percent). When the overwhelming majority of voters stay home, it should not be hard to find votes.
Higher primary turnout would be preferable for democracy as a whole–and D.C.’s Democratic primaries had 38.7% turnout (good job everyone, but let’s do even better next time!). By the way, in D.C., the democratic socialist still won the mayor’s race, even with that level of turnout. But when moderates with the advantages of incumbency lose low turnout primaries, that’s not a problem of party takeovers or voter foolishness, that’s a failure by establishment candidates to turnout their own voters.
We’ve got more primaries coming up tomorrow night, specifically in the state of Colorado. I must confess that it was only in the last couple days that I realized that incumbent Senator John Hickenlooper (D), the former mayor of Denver and governor of Colorado, stands a real chance of going down to defeat. Needless to say that would be a very big deal since incumbent senators, or at least incumbent Democratic senators, all but never have that happen.
Sen. Michael Bennet (D), who is trying to become the nominee for governor, as well as Dem Rep. Diana DeGette, might also be toast. But it’s Hickenlooper who I want to focus on here. Bennet is running against State Attorney General Phil Weiser, whose politics aren’t that distinguishable from Bennet’s; he’s challenging Bennet on the “fight” front. DeGette is being challenging by Melat Kiros, a more questionable figure. But that’s the House and it’s an overwhelmingly Democratic district. Again, I want to focus on Hickenlooper because that has more properly national implications. (To get a detailed rundown of all the races in Colorado, here’s a good piece at The Downballot.)
I had not heard much about this primary. And I was a bit taken aback when I heard that Hickenlooper is in real trouble. It’s certainly possible he’ll cruise to renomination. But a mid-May poll showed him ahead of state Sen. Julie Gonzales 41% to 34%. That’s a non-trivial margin. But for a longtime incumbent in a volatile political year that’s a big warning sign, not simply because of the relatively small margin but because of the vast numbers of undecided in a race featuring perhaps the biggest Democratic institution in Colorado politics. Meanwhile, Politico reports today that a Democratic strategist they interviewed had seen a private poll that shows the two in a dead heat.
As I said, these numbers are certainly compatible with Hickenlooper winning. But the energy this year is all on the “fight” side and strongly anti-incumbent. So I would not be shocked to see Gonzales win and for it not even to be that close.
My own reaction to this news was interesting to me. When I hear about an incumbent in trouble like this my own first instinct is wariness or apprehension. That’s not because I’m so crazy about incumbents in general. It’s mostly because I go in with a concern that an insurgent from the left may not be able to win the general. At a certain level it’s probably just reflex, and then I remind myself, well … you’re concerned that the new person might not be able to win the general. Here, though, it’s probably fair to say that Colorado is no longer really a purple state. It’s swung about as hard to the left as … say, Iowa has to the right. So I think you’d have to be a pretty bad candidate and/or a pretty big extremist as a Democrat to lose a general election this year. And Gonzales doesn’t seem like either.
As I was thinking this, and examining the bases of my own reflexes, however, it occurred to me: what will it take for you, Josh, to embrace your own advocacy? Let me explain. Hickenlooper is 74 and says this new term he’s running for will be his last. He’s been in office almost continuously since he was elected mayor of Denver in 2003. He served two terms as mayor and as governor. He seems like a very solid guy. I’m sure I’d like him. But it’s my strong impression that he is very much in the camp of Democratic senators who don’t want to do any of the big necessary things: abolish the filibuster, reform the Supreme Court, fight against encroaching autocracy as opposed to preserve decorum and regular order. In other words, he’s approaching the senate gig as though we were still in the 1990s or perhaps the W. era. To listen to my own oft-repeated arguments, he is the problem. And as I argued a few days ago, this is the kind of thing that has Democratic primary voters on fire now. They want fight.
Gonzales mostly but not entirely fits the mold of other progressive insurgents around the country. I’ve just been reading up on her now and she appears to have worked in Democratic politics and immigration legal work for most of her adult life before being elected to the state senate from a district in Denver in 2018. She’s currently the senate majority whip and she’s had various positions in the state Democratic Party. So while she has the standard Bernie Sanders/progressive list of positions: Medicare for All, Abolish ICE, etc. you can’t say she’s some kind of outsider wrecking ball. She’s part of the Democratic Party establishment in the state, albeit clearly on its left wing. Notably, she was a member of the Democratic Socialists of America from 2018 until last year, when she appears to have allowed her membership to lapse, seemingly (though she doesn’t say this explicitly) to remove a potential complication for her run against Hickenlooper, or at least for some higher office.
As I said, we’ll see what happens tomorrow night. But if Gonzales wins, it will be a true earthquake in the nation’s politics, far more than a House race in the outer boroughs of New York or Washington Heights. As I was hitting “publish” on this post I noticed a New York Times email flagging a new article about the Colorado primaries with the subject line “Will left-wing energy keep rising in Colorado?” As I argued on Friday, I think this mischaracterizes or misunderstandings the dynamic. This isn’t mostly about ideology or policy (at least in the senate and governor’s races; the DeGette-Kiros race may be slightly different). It’s about fight. That’s certainly the case in the gubernatorial primary and I think largely in the senate one as well. But it’s on the left of the party — in Gonzales’s case — where voters are finding it. So that’s where they’re going.
This likely goes without saying. But I’ll say it anyway and add a few points. The occasional non-terribly ruling by the corrupt Supreme Court doesn’t reduce the necessity of reform one iota. I’m not as wound up as I might have been by the anti-constitutional and frankly absurd independent agency ruling only because it was telegraphed so long in advance. (ICYMI, the Court ruled that the president has the authority to fire civil servants, unless they work for the Federal Reserve. More from Kate Riga on that here). I call the ruling absurd only because of what I guess we need to call the as-yet-tact “sound money” doctrine which makes the Fed somehow different from every other independent agency because of the more general “because” doctrine.
What I want to note here is what is semi-taken for granted even by many who despise the Court’s corruption. And that is the way it is more or less assumed now that any law, prohibition, or imperative assumed or embraced by Democrats goes up for review by the Court as though it were some kind of Guardian Council or perhaps more aptly an upper legislative house like the House of Lords. Of course judicial review is not new. That goes back 225 years. Key pieces of New Deal legislation were overruled by the pre-Carolene Products Court. And you have the entire Lochner era in which the Court held that most of what we would now call garden-variety regulation was unconstitutional.
That history certainly anticipates the Court’s current corruption. But I would argue they are qualitatively different. The idea that contract rights largely, if not entirely, trumped state regulation was not a novel doctrine. And the Court at least generally did not oppose the partisan interests of one party over the other, which is certainly the case today. What we have today as part of the openly partisan nature of the Court is that really every major exercise of power by Democrats comes up for review, in many cases where there is not even an existing Federalist Society/conservative legal movement doctrine in play. I would argue that this begins with the Obamacare decision in 2012. It followed a model which has now become entirely familiar. It generally begins with mouthing off and brainstorming on social media — comments that then gets picked up by a few generally obscure law professors who fashion it into an argument. This argument is initially treated as absurd before rapidly gaining traction on the right and then rapidly getting taken up by the Court.
At the time, the “surprise” decision to uphold the Obamacare individual mandate, largely the decision of John Roberts, was seen as a near miss or evidence of Roberts’ institutionalism. In retrospect, it is perhaps better seen as a latter-day version of Marbury v Madison, in which Chief Justice John Marshall cleverly rendered a decision that was of immediate benefit to his partisan opposition in order to entrench the general and empowering principle of judicial review. In the Obamacare case, Roberts allowed the individual mandate to remain (while striking down, on the basis of essentially nothing, Medicaid expansion) in order to lull constitutionalists into accept and even celebrating the purported institutionalism of a Court that would now sit in review of every law passed by Democrats. It is a classic case where the benefit of hindsight provides much greater clarity into what actually happened.
In today’s decisions, it’s certainly good that the Court didn’t reject states’ ability to accept mail ballots dated by Election Day. But the idea that it was even reviewed is absurd. There’s no possible constitutional deficiency in these laws. There’s not even any basis for it in the fraudulent menagerie of Federalist Society jurisprudence. It is purely the product of the short-term partisan interests of the Republican Party and far more so the whims of Donald Trump. All of these states’ laws require absolute evidence that a vote is cast by Election Day. The constitution doesn’t speak to the speed of counting (nor does existing federal law) and the long tail of counting has lasted past election day literally for centuries. Congress might pass a law banning accepting post-dated votes after Election Day. (Even in that case, I think there’d need to be at least some rational basis question for why such a law would exist given that the primary responsibility for election administration rests with states, subject to regulation by congressional statute). In any case, that’s a question on which reasonable people can differ. There is simply no basis on which this can be considered unconstitutional or in violation of existing statutes. At least with the anti-constitutional destruction of independent agencies, which is a war on the legislative branch, the conservative legal movement has obsessed and hungered for for decades. So you can at least grant them that it merely aligns with Trump’s demands rather than being the child of them.
There’s simply no future for real democratic self-government in the United States with this corrupt Court in place. That seems like a vast statement. But it’s accurate. What you have at the moment is a system somewhat — yes — on par with Iran in which you have the structure of democratic self-government but with a Guardian Council that assures that the bad people (i.e. non-Republicans) aren’t actually allowed to exercise power. This is not how even a maximalist judicial review system is supposed to work, and Democrats must break the Court’s corruption at the first possible moment. With some luck, that will come in January 2029.
I was recently interviewed at the gambling hyper-site Covers.com about the growth of sports gambling both on dedicated sites and on prediction markets.
A Nobel Laureate Talks Sports Betting, Prediction Markets, and ‘Repugnant Transactions’ by Geoff Zochodne - "Nobel Prize-winning economist Alvin E. Roth has published a new book that can help put the raging debates about sports betting into a very relatable context."
"It’s not often, or ever, you see a Nobel Laureate writing about his ties to match-fixing.
That is until you see Nobel Prize-winning economist Alvin E. Roth writing in his new book that he feels “a certain connection” to point-shaving. It's just for reasons that have less to do with economics or match-manipulation and more because of a shared name.
Another Alvin Roth, nicknamed "Fats," was banned from the NBA because of a college basketball point-shaving scandal that came to light in the early 1950s.
“He (Fats) was also sentenced to jail, but a judge permitted him to join the army instead,” Roth writes in his recently released book “Moral Economics: From Prostitution to Organ Sales, What Controversial Transactions Reveal About How Markets Work.”
...
Roth spoke to Covers over the phone recently about his book and his framework for approaching “repugnant transactions,” which, yes, can include sports betting.
“Remember that when I say something is repugnant, I don't mean that I don't like it or that you shouldn't like it,” Roth said. “I mean that some people don't like it, and I think that gambling falls squarely into that category. Lots of people like to gamble, and lots of people, other people, think they shouldn't be allowed to, so it's a repugnant transaction, and there have been laws of all sorts allowing or banning it. And we've gone back and forth with the United States on lotteries, and more recently on sports betting.”
...
“I fear that online gambling will have much to teach us about addiction,” Roth writes.
...
Again, gambling is not the focus of Roth’s work. Nor are prediction markets, which critics often describe as a new form of gambling. Yet Roth says one of the things he writes about is that it is hard to ban something in a given jurisdiction when it’s legally available and within reach in another jurisdiction.
“And, of course, the internet makes everybody a neighbor to everybody else,” Roth says.
In other words, the fact that prediction markets have popped up offering de facto sports wagering in states that have yet to legalize sports betting is not some new phenomenon. It’s all in keeping with society’s ongoing tug-of-war with morally contested markets. You can ban, you can regulate, but somebody will probably be unhappy in the end with what you’ve done and may still seek out what you’ve forbidden or restricted.
HELSINKI — SSC Space and Firefly have set a 2028 target for the first orbital launch from Esrange, with key infrastructure and regulatory pieces falling into place. The companies announced […]
The post SSC Space, Firefly set 2028 target for first orbital launch from Sweden’s Esrange appeared first on SpaceNews.
Five-month-old startup Orbital has asked the Federal Communications Commission for permission to deploy up to 100,000 data center satellites, aiming to bring 10 gigawatts of computing power from space to meet rising artificial intelligence demand.
The post Orbital files plans for 100,000 orbital data centers appeared first on SpaceNews.
By Claire Cho
Special to The Truth OC
The world is closer to a “point of no return” than previously thought. Once the estimated “point of no return” is reached, scientists believe that global warming will be unable to be stopped. It is forecasted that continued global heating will trigger a cascade of tipping points and feedback loops which would lock the planet into a rapid and unstoppable escalation of heat and climate-triggered events.
On a similarly threatening note, the “Doomsday Clock”—a clock counting down to humanity’s destruction—was recently set to 85 seconds till midnight, the closest it has ever been since its conception in 1947. The Doomsday Clock’s three primary drivers include: nuclear threats, climate change and disruptive technologies which have begun to be realized in the form of artificial intelligence.
Technology has historically represented growth, innovation, and prosperity. Launching major events of economic upturn and rising quality of life, technology has always signaled improving times. Throughout these events, the environment has frequently borne the utility cost. Yet, until recently, humanity has not been affected by damage to the environment and therefore put very little research into the possible negative side effects of technology. Now that growing climate events have begun to threaten lives and livelihoods, climate science research has surged and begun to show the growing cause for concern for humanity’s environmental impacts.
Paradoxically, many scientists have begun to posit that technology may be the only way to reverse the effects of the climate crisis. The same technologies that pushed humanity towards the brink of collapse are expected to peel us back. The concept of using technology to fix the climate crisis has become known as geoengineering: the deliberate, large-scale modification of Earth’s natural systems to counteract climate change.
Geoengineering has become one of the most controversial topics of conversation in the climate science world. Critics have accused geoengineering of “playing god” with fanatical, borderline absurd and untested technologies. Just a couple of examples include Stratospheric Aerosol Injection (SAI), Ocean Fertilization, and—get ready—space mirrors. SAI has been heavily explored in India which has recently faced rising heat-caused deaths. SAI entails the release of tiny, reflective particles such as sulfur dioxide or calcium carbonate dust into the upper atmosphere to mimic a cooling effect often caused by volcanic eruptions. Ocean fertilization involves the dumping of nutrients into the ocean to stimulate rapid blooms of carbon-absorbing phytoplankton. Then, finally, space mirrors are almost exactly as it sounds: the launching of giant, reflective mirrors or sunshades into orbit to block solar radiation.
There must be a forewarning before entertaining such a radical reimagining of the natural world. As Rachel Carson once famously said in her book Silent Springs, “In nature, nothing exists alone.” While geoengineering advocates claim that consequences have been thoroughly researched, modern humanity still knows very little about the inner-workings of the biosphere and its intricate web of relationships. Brute force efforts to manipulate the natural world have historically resulted in cascading, disastrous consequences for the broader world. So to zealously advocate for under-tested technology is not just foolish, but possibly deadly.
Following four years at UC Berkeley, a university full of tech start-up hopefuls and Silicon Valley followers, I have often heard the word “inevitable” when referring to technology. Following a presentation on the negative impacts of AI, a classmate told me, “If you don’t start embracing AI, you will be left behind”.
“Inevitable” has become my least favorite word, and in my opinion, overused. We live in a humanity of free will (unless you are a follower of Determinism, then disregard). There is nothing inevitable about AI and technology, the only inevitability is the pursuit of power and profit. While it may prove to be true that technology is the only way to solve the climate crisis, there must be an emphasis on prevention as opposed to mitigation. Life on earth has existed for many millenniums and will continue to exist long after the human race is gone. Without a more timely and cognizant approach to preventative efforts, mitigation will not be enough to escape the ever-approaching climate crisis.
Claire Cho is a recent graduate from the University of California, Berkeley where she studied environmental policy and law. Following Berkeley, Claire intends to attend law school and pursue environmental law. You can follow her on Instagram here.
“To show the importance of the Slaughter Case, 90 years of precedent has been COMPLETELY AND UNEQUIVOCALLY OVERRULED, greatly increasing Presidential Power at a time when it is most needed!” President Donald J. Trump wrote this afternoon. He continued: “Today’s Historic Slaughter Decision by the Supreme Court is the Greatest Increase in Presidential Power in the last 100 years. Such a Monumental Ruling at such an important time!”
Political theorist Jacob T. Levy posted in response: “No, see, ‘overruled 90 years of precedent in order to expand presidential power’ is the way *critics* describe it. *Your* side says: resisting intrusion into core executive functions, protecting the sanctity of the separation of powers, and acknowledging that the precedent has been whittled away.”
But Greg Sargent of The New Republic countered that “Trump constantly and explicitly holds up his naked corruption *as a badge of honor* that his supporters are supposed to thrill to (and see benefit for themselves in). He thinks corruption is the highest form of winning.”
The case of Slaughter v. Trump began in March 2025, when Trump fired the last remaining Democratic member of the Federal Trade Commission, Rebecca Slaughter. Since 1935 the Supreme Court has said the president does not have the power to fire members of independent agencies created by Congress except for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.”
Although Trump himself initially appointed Slaughter, he claimed he fired her because her continued service on the independent commission was “inconsistent with [the] Administration’s priorities” and that he had the right to do so under the authority granted to him by Article II of the Constitution despite the fact Congress set up the position in such a way that it would be shielded from presidential politics.
This argument is an attempt to establish the idea of the “unitary executive,” a theory the right wing has pushed since the 1980s, when it began to distrust the will of voters as they expressed it through Congress and thus tried to find ways to assert the power of the president and reduce the power of Congress.
The theory of the unitary executive says that since the president is the head of one of the three independent branches of government—those are the legislative branch, the executive branch, and the judicial branch—he has sole authority over the executive branch and cannot be reined in by the other two branches. Trump has leaned into this idea since 2019, when he told attendees at the Turning Point USA Teen Student Action Summit being held in Washington, D.C., “I have an Article II, where I have…the right to do whatever I want as president.”
The Supreme Court’s 2024 Donald J. Trump v. United States decision supported Trump’s reading of the powers of the president when it took the radical position that a president could not be prosecuted for crimes committed in the course of official presidential duties. In his second term, Trump has worked to fit his power grabs within the contours of that decision. Now the Supreme Court has given him another win by finding the president has complete control over the officers in the executive branch, including the independent agencies established by Congress but which Congress has been placing in the executive branch since the administration of President George Washington.
Representing the government, Solicitor General John Sauer told the court that the president must be able to remove officials in the agencies because “the President must have the power to control and…the one who has the power to remove is the one who…is the person that they have to fear and obey.”
In hearings on the case last December, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson suggested that this political destruction of the independent agencies Congress had established to provide nonpartisan expertise on issues like how to regulate pollutants would hurt the country. “[H]aving a president come in and fire all the scientists, and the doctors, and the economists and the PhDs, and replacing them with loyalists and people who don’t know anything is actually not in the best interest of the citizens of the United States,” she said.
Today, in a 6–3 vote, the Supreme Court decided the case in Trump’s favor. Now, even if the American people elect members of Congress who create agencies to protect our interests, the president can gut them and turn them to his own purposes.
Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented. They noted that throughout our history, both Congress and the president have agreed that some of government’s functions should operate outside of party politics. Financial management, workplace safety, consumer safety, addressing environmental hazards, and managing nuclear energy, for example, should not depend “on who is in office—much less on who is disfavored or owed a favor by those in office—but also on judgment, expertise, and the public good.”
“Since the founding, Congress has created agencies that in various ways have embodied this goal of independence. Over the last 140 years especially, the political branches have done so by establishing agencies like the Federal Trade Commission (FTC): bipartisan, multimember bodies with “for-cause” removal protections. This structure allows the agencies to address complex problems while enjoying some independence from Presidential removal and thus absolute partisan control.”
“Today,” though, they write, “this Court undoes centuries of political practice and concludes that all three branches of Government have been acting in open defiance of the Constitution all this time. Its conclusion is wrong…. [T]he Court gives the President a power unknown even to the English Crown against which the Founders revolted, elevating him above his once-coequal branches by transforming a duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed into a license to act in defiance of those very laws.”
Senator Andy Kim (D-NJ) explains: “The FTC, or the Federal Trade Commission, is an independent government agency that is supposed to protect you, the American consumer. They fight fraud, ensure businesses are making accurate claims in their advertising, and enforce data privacy and security. The independence of the agency ensures that the FTC doesn’t make decisions at a whim of any one president or political party, but instead acts in your best interest. For example, the FTC put more money back into the pockets of Americans by banning junk fees for short-term lodging and live event activity.”
Kim notes that we’ve seen Trump “target, fire, prosecute civil servants, perceived as political enemies. We’ve seen him install members of his inner circle, including his own family, campaign donors, and people with personal loyalties to him. And we’ve seen him attack federal agencies and federal employees, gutting critical programs and firing the people who run them.”
With the Supreme Court’s decision, Trump now has “unchecked power to remove any head of any independent agency. Get the agencies to bend to his will, to play by his rules.”
As legal analyst Barb McQuade notes, Trump’s new powers will let him fire commissioners at agencies including the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Consumer Product Safety Board, the Federal Communications Commission, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Nuclear Safety Board. Federal employees have been free from political interference for 150 years, but now, she writes,“The spoils system is back, baby!”
The court’s decision in Trump v. Slaughter gives Trump power he clearly has no inclination to give up. When asked today if he would sign the popular bipartisan housing bill that passed Congress with overwhelming support, Trump said he hadn’t decided and called the bill “a yawn.” He wants Congress to pass the voter ID law that will essentially guarantee that voters cannot turn Republicans out of office, making the United States a one-party state in which Congress simply rubber-stamps the actions of the president. It appears he is willing to hold the housing bill hostage until he gets it.
“To me,” he said, “compared to the Save America Act, just about everything is a big yawn.”
—
Notes:
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3e073pglvzo
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/25-332_qn12.pdf
https://www.c-span.org/program/public-affairs-event/trump-v-slaughter-oral-argument/669488
Bluesky:
jacobtlevy.bsky.social/post/3mph6n2467s2q
gregsargent.bsky.social/post/3mphaskezfk2v
kim.senate.gov/post/3mpgsjce63k2k
barbmcquade.bsky.social/post/3mpgwai6fnk2j
Imagine this: The US military begins tracking a mysterious spacecraft maneuvering near one of the Space Force's missile-warning satellites more than 22,000 miles over the equator.
This US satellite cost several billion dollars to build and launch. It's one of a handful of sentinels keeping constant watch for ballistic missile launches that might threaten the US homeland or US military bases overseas. Suddenly, this missile warning satellite goes dark. Ground controllers at a military base just outside of Denver scramble to figure out what went wrong.
There are two possibilities. Perhaps the mystery spacecraft lurking nearby somehow disabled or destroyed it, or as sometimes happens in the unforgiving environment of space, something important broke on the satellite, rendering it unresponsive. If the former, was it an intentional attack or an accident? Who carried it out and why? If the latter, how might controllers reactivate the satellite?
Interesting research on a new class of weak RSA keys: keys with lots of zeros. It turns out that these keys are out in the wild.
The badkeys project is an open-source service that checks public keys for known vulnerabilities. While developing this tool, Hanno collected a massive number of real-world keys from public sources, including Certificate Transparency logs, internet-wide TLS and SSH scans, PGP keys, and many others. By searching this dataset for unexpectedly sparse RSA moduli, we uncovered a large number of keys in the wild with the patterns in Figure 1.
Both patterns include several regularly spaced blocks of all zeros interleaved with seemingly random data. Pattern 1 appears in CT logs for certificates issued to several large organizations, including Yahoo and Verizon, and on some devices running NetApp software. Fortunately, these certificates have already expired, but we still shared our findings with these companies. We wanted to learn more about which product could be responsible for generating these keys, but we did not hear back. Pattern 2 appears on SSH hosts running the CompleteFTP software from EnterpriseDT. The underlying vulnerability affects RSA keys generated using versions 10.0.012.0.0 (Dec 2016Mar 2019) and DSA keys generated with v10.0.023.0.4 (Dec 2016Dec 2023).
These vulnerabilities affect a small minority of hosts on the internet, but the more interesting takeaway is that independent cryptographic implementations failed in similar ways. More implementations may include the same bugs, and so it’s worth tailoring cryptanalytic algorithms for this particular type of failure.
The article doesn’t speculate, but I will. This could be a deliberately designed backdoor, of the sort I wrote about back in 2013. I could imagine some government agency figuring out how to break this class of RSA keys, and then convincing different providers to hand them out to users.
The costs of transformative innovations are immediately clear: it’s the longterm gains that are hardest to understand
- by Carlo Cordasco
Rocket Lab is acquiring satellite telecommunications company Iridium for $8 billion as part of its effort to become an end-to-end space company.
The post Rocket Lab to acquire Iridium appeared first on SpaceNews.
British thermal imaging startup SatVu announced the start of commercial services June 29 for HotSat-2, marking a return to revenue-generating operations after its debut satellite failed in low Earth orbit in 2023.
The post SatVu restarts commercial operations with HotSat-2 appeared first on SpaceNews.
Yes, I will be doing a Conversation with him. Obviously Acemoglu has published plenty, but likely this chat will focus on his recent writings and pronouncements on AI, and most of all his forthcoming book What Happened to Liberal Democracy? Remaking a Politics of Shared Prosperity. So what should I ask him?
The post What should I ask Daron Acemoglu? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
As SpaceX and others pursue the development of very large launch vehicles, a new study suggests that there may be such a thing as a rocket that is too large.
The post Study argues bigger launch vehicles may not always be better appeared first on SpaceNews.
MILAN — The European Space Agency will rely on external lunar topographic data during the design phase of its Argonaut lunar lander, and possibly for its first mission, while working […]
The post ESA to seek lunar mapping capability for Argonaut lander appeared first on SpaceNews.
Rocket Lab’s chief executive says the company’s acquisition of Iridium was the “logical next step” in his ambitions to tap into the lucrative space services market.
The post Beck: Iridium acquisition the “logical next step” for Rocket Lab appeared first on SpaceNews.
From observing distant galaxies to exploring exoplanets and their atmospheres, BAE Systems enables cutting-edge technology to expand our knowledge of the universe. As a major partner in each of NASA’s […]
The post Discovering the Universe – Astrophysics Flagship Space Observatories Offer Insights to Key Questions appeared first on SpaceNews.
Quantum computing is advancing fast, and nations are racing to field the first machines powerful enough to break modern encryption. This race has direct consequences for the commercial space industry, […]
The post Quantum computing is about to become a national security problem in orbit appeared first on SpaceNews.
Tiniest TIL, using AppleScript to count the number of open browser tabs in Safari:
osascript -e 'tell application "Safari" to count tabs of every window'
Tags: safari, til, applescript
Ornith-1.0: Self-Scaffolding LLMs for Agentic Coding
This is an interesting new open weights (MIT licensed) model, the first model release from DeepReinforce.[...] with variants including 9B Dense, 31B Dense, 35B MoE, and 397B MoE. Built on top of pretrained Gemma 4 and Qwen 3.5, it achieves state-of-the-art performance among open-source models of comparable size on coding benchmarks.
As far as I can tell the licenses of those underlying models is compatible with being used in this way - Gemma 4 is Apache 2.0 licensed (and not bound by the janky additional Gemma Terms of Use that afflicted the previous Gemma models) and Qwen 3.5 is Apache 2.0 licensed as well.
I've been running the model using LM Studio and the ornith-1.0-35b-Q4_K_M.gguf (20GB) GGUF, hooked up to Pi. Initial impressions are very good - it seems to be able to run the agent harness over many tool calls in a proficient way.
Here's a terminal session where I asked it to "find the code that decodes the actor cookie" and then "find the code that opens the insert dialog when thebutton is clicked" against a Datasette checkout, which it handled with ease.
I also had it draw this pelican, which came out at 103 tokens/second:
It's a little bit mangled but the pelican is clearly a pelican.
I couldn't find much information about DeepReinforce themselves. The earliest paper I could find from the was CUDA-L1: Improving CUDA Optimization via Contrastive Reinforcement Learning from June 2025.
Tags: ai, generative-ai, local-llms, llms, qwen, pelican-riding-a-bicycle, gemma, llm-release, lm-studio
A couple of months ago, we went to Nevada and invaded the Tesla Semi factory. It was early days in the factory’s march toward full production. We made a beautiful video about the experience, and it w…
Sorry, Bucky fans, but hear me out. This is one of the only places where you’re likely to hear the true but sad extent of (some of) Fuller’s misrepresentations and flawed designs. It seems that 99% of what you read about him is positive.
I was a fan for years. I believed what he said about geodesic domes and in fact, spent five years building them and published the seminal book on the subject, Domebook 2 (which sold 160,000 copies). After 5 years of dome building, I realized they didn’t work as homes and took Domebook 2 out of print.
See my post:
Bucky took out a patent for what he called “geodesic domes” in 1955. The domes were based on a subdivided icosahedron, the most complex of the five Platonic solids.
I did some investigative journalism in 1972 in writing the lead article for what we called Domebook 3, a subdivision of our 1973 book Shelter.
It turned out that a German dome, hailed as “The Wonder of Jena,” was built in 1922 on the roof of the Carl Zeiss optical works in Jena, Germany. It was of icosahedral design.
Zeiss had invented a planetarium projector with an icosahedral pattern of 31 lenses, meant to project the stars and planets on the interior of a dome. The dome was built with the same icosahedral geometry as the projector.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/planetarium-history
It’s a long story, which you can see on pp. 110-119 of Shelter. It includes my correspondence with scientists at the Zeiss Works, who wrote ”…at that time it was the principle of our firm, that such basic findings should be made available to the whole scientific world, so it may well be that nothing was patented in Germany.”
Dome nuts (as I once was): See Refried Domes, my reassessment of polyhedral home design. Just sayin…
Once I learned of this scam of Fuller’s, I started re-assessing his more well-known designs. A few are listed below.
A poorly-desighed rip-off of the 1913 Alfa Romeo Castagna Aerodinamica, below.
Note: See the Zoox, Amazon’s new self-driving vehicles (which are now operating in San Francisco) for similarities to the above, 113 years later!
On October 27, 1933, one of the Dymaxion cars rolled over, killing the driver and seriously injuring two passengers. A year or so later, Fuller crashed one of these with his daughter Alexandra aboard.
Fuller did not invent the tensegrity sphere nor the tensegrity mast, both of which he claimed credit for. They were invented by a student of his at Black Mountain College, artist Kenneth Snelson.”
I visited Snelson in his New York studio in the early 70s and he confirmed that Fuller had misrepresented his designs as his own.
What Fuller did do here was clever though, coining the term “tensegrity” from “tension” and “structural integrity.”
I was driving across Canada in 1967, delivering a school bus (that had a governor allowing it to go only 55 mph) from Toronto to Nova Scotia, where I was heading to help Stewart Brand build the foundation for a new home.
I had my son Peter, 12 years old, with me and we stopped in at the Expo. I’d seen pictures of the dome, and it looked spectacular.
Surprise! It was a pretty total disaster. The shades never worked and the only reason it wasn’t boiling hot inside was a 650 hp diesel generator in the basement providing air conditioning — the irony of a building hailed as “environmental” burning huge quantities of oil to compensate for faulty design.
It leaked. I took pictures of algae growing around the base.
And about the final fire that destroyed it in 1976:
“…one of architecture’s most dramatic disasters — and it exposed a critical design flaw baked into the structure from the start."
“The original dome was sheathed in a geometric tessellation of clear acrylic panels fitted over the steel trusses, giving it the appearance of a giant glittering jewel. Acrylic (polymethyl methacrylate) is notoriously flammable — it ignites readily, burns hot, and spreads flame rapidly across connected surfaces. On a structure the size of a 20-story sphere, a single ignition point from a welding torch essentially became a fuse for the entire skin. The interconnected panel geometry, while visually spectacular, meant there was no firebreak anywhere across the vast surface.”
“…acrylic is a petroleum-derived plastic whose combustion released considerable toxic smoke over Île Sainte-Hélène.”
https://www.perplexity.ai/search/give-me-any-info-on-fire-destr-3IPsUosgR3.fhATiaqwgTQ
Lastly, Fuller’s idea for a dome over NYC. Are you kidding? Keeping in all the smog and exhaust, keeping out rain and snow and wind?
“Spaceship earth?” Don’t get me started!
So there you have it. I just felt these flaws had to be pointed out in view of Fuller’s canonization.
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Note: It’s Lisa Cook, not Lisa Graves. Talking to Lisa Graves shortly.
Earlier today, the Supreme Court declared war on U.S. democracy. It also declared war, basically, on modern society, on everything it takes to function in the 21st century. And I’m not sure that people understand that yet.
Hi, Paul Krugman with a quick video update. I’ll have more on this tomorrow.
Really shocking decisions handed down by the Supreme Court. There were a couple that were not awful. Lisa Cook gets to stay at the Federal Reserve, although that in itself is a huge contradiction to the important stuff that the court did. I mean, Lisa is important and the Fed is important, but much more important is Humphrey’s Executor, which is the generations-long precedent that says that when Congress creates an independent agency, it is independent. It’s able to make decisions.
Of course, the president has some role. Typically, the president can choose the agency’s head subject to congressional approval, but the president can’t just go and fire officials that he doesn’t like for whatever reason or for no reason, because the agencies that operate the U.S. government and basically run our society are supposed to be professional. They’re supposed to be following their legal mandate. They’re not supposed to be personal tools of a dictator in the White House.
Well, the court just scrapped that. Now, lawyers, people who are legal experts, can do a better job of explaining just what went down. But what I think is important to understand is not only does this give essentially dictatorial powers to the occupant of the White House, but it also makes it extremely difficult for the economy to function. It makes it extremely difficult for society to function.
We live in a complicated world, a world of technology, where there are all kinds of spillovers, all kinds of ways in which it’s important that there be well-established ground rules. If you’re a business, take the example of medicines and foodstuffs, where we have an FDA, Federal Drug Administration, that is charged with ensuring that products that people consume are safe. We do that for very good reason. We know that not just that that there have been examples, historically, of products that were foods, medicines that were not at all safe, but also that people want some assurance.
The fact that something has been FDA approved is a bit of a warranty, that it might turn out to be very harmful, but probably not. Businesses that want to invest in developing stuff need to know that there are some ground rules that determine what they can and cannot sell.
Now imagine that all these decisions are made by political appointees who are loyalists to the president, who basically do whatever the president wants, whatever the people around the president want.
Do you want to invest in something where you have absolutely no idea what the ground rules will be, whether it will be approved or not? Do you want to invest in a whole business line when, for all you know, the White House will abruptly decide that your product isn’t safe and that a competitor’s product is, based on spurious grounds?
And what would cause those decisions to happen? Well, how about the fact that some businesses are better at the business of bribing the president and his family than others. And if you think that this is outlandish — you know, a few years ago you might have said this was outlandish, things like that wouldn’t really happen — well, as we speak, these things are happening all the time.
So you are setting up a situation in which, you know, it’s a little bit like traffic laws. Traffic laws, yeah, they can be annoying, but aren’t we all kind of glad that there are in fact rules about when you can turn and when you can go through an intersection? In order to function, in order to drive your car around you need to have a set of stable traffic rules, not a situation in which a police officer can decide you broke the law and the other guy did not because I say what the law is. And especially not where the police officer does that based upon who’s been paying him off or who he expects to be paid off.
The real world is far more complex than traffic rules but we need those rules and we need some stability and those rules cannot be specified with every letter, every punctuation mark set by Congress. The world is too complicated and changes too much. You need to have standing ethos, standing doctrine at the agencies that make modern life possible.
Now all of that is gone.
Now, it just adds to it that all of this is being done to empower a president who is the worst possible person for this job. This is not somebody you want supervising anything, everything that Trump touches turns to crud because he doesn’t care and he doesn’t actually understand or recognize that there’s such a thing as expertise as knowing what you’re doing.
So this would be terrible even if we had a temporarily competent administration. But now you’re doing all of this, the Supreme Court is doing all of this to empower the guy who brought you the Reflecting Pool, who brought you the Iran war. Utter nightmare.
Now, what will happen, hopefully, we emerge at the other end having fended off dictatorship. Then, I mean, as everybody knows, this Supreme Court is not actually empowering the presidency. It is empowering this president. And as soon as there’s a Democrat in the White House, suddenly there will be all kinds of restrictions on what that person can do.
Well, this cannot go on. This is a clear argument that says we have to one way or another disempower the Supreme Court. I don’t know enough to tell you what is the best route to do that but court packing or something else is going to have to happen. Because this has been the clearest signal yet that we have six people (there are three who are not part of it, but we have six people) who are fundamentally hostile to democracy, fundamentally hostile to the modern world and determined to put the catastrophically bad leader that we currently have sitting in the White House in charge of everything, which is a nightmare scenario on every level.
Take care, I guess.
Donald Trump’s stunning failure in Iran has weakened America on many fronts. The world now perceives us as neither a reliable ally nor an invincible enemy, with an extortionately expensive military that is losing its best and brightest to Pete Hegseth’s prejudice and incompetence. We are now four months into a war that was supposed to last a couple of weeks.There is no end in sight as strikes and counter-strikes continue despite Trump’s farcical proclamations of American victory and Iranian surrender. Sixteen months into his presidency, Trump has squandered all of America’s credibility with the rest of the world.
So let me add one more item to the tally of destruction: The supremacy of the dollar, the pre-eminent tool in America’s toolbox of global financial power, has been seriously damaged by the rise of alternative payment systems – a rise that was greatly hastened by the Iran war.
Let me be clear that I don’t mean that the dollar is close to losing its dominant role in global business. And I am definitely not claiming that the dollar’s weakened status will make the United States substantially poorer.
Instead, what I am talking about is the loss of a non-military tool of coercion — the power to punish that the dominant role of the dollar in international financial transactions gave the United States. That power is now greatly diminished because Trump’s Iran war demonstrated to other nations that they can bypass the dollar-centered world payments system — largely thanks to China.
Let me provide context by talking about the dollar’s global role.
The dollar’s importance in international financial transactions far outweighs the U.S. economy’s global importance. America is by no means a dominant force in world trade or world GDP. There are, in fact, three roughly comparable-sized economic superpowers in today’s world: China, the United States, and the European Union. However, the U.S. dollar does play a dominant role in world finance. There are multiple aspects to this role, which I discussed at length in April. But one number makes the point: Last year 89 percent of foreign exchange transactions — transactions in which one nation’s currency is exchanged for another — involved U.S. dollars.
How is this possible, when the U.S. share of world exports is only around 10 percent? The answer is that the dollar is the world’s “vehicle currency” — the currency businesses use to make transits between other currencies. A bank that wants to exchange, say, Indian rupees for British pounds generally won’t try to find a counterparty who wants to make the reverse trade. It will, instead, sell rupees for dollars and then use the dollars to buy pounds.
Why does everyone use dollars? Because so many other people and businesses use dollars, which makes markets in dollars far more liquid and efficient than markets in any other currency. As a classic old paper by Charles Kindleberger pointed out, the dollar’s role as a global currency is similar to the role of English as a global business language: Everyone speaks English because everyone else does. When people warn that the dollar is at imminent risk of losing its status to, say, the Chinese yuan, my response is to ask how long they think it will be before businesspeople around the world begin making deals in Mandarin.
Furthermore, the economic advantage to the U.S. of owning the premier global currency — our “exorbitant privilege,” a term coined by Valéry Giscard d’Estaing in the 1960s — is not, despite what one sometimes hears, essential to U.S. prosperity. Our overall economic strength rests not on the role of the dollar but on our productivity and our leadership in science and technology. (The Trump administration is doing its best to destroy the latter, but that’s another story.)
What dollar dominance does do, however, is give America a powerful economic weapon against other nations. Transactions that involve dollar payments normally require transferring money between U.S. banks — which means that they are visible to and can be blocked by U.S. authorities. In the words of Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman, authors of Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy, the dollar’s role gives the U.S. government a “panopticon” — it can see everything — and a “chokepoint” — it can cut nations off from the world economy, a power it demonstrated most notably by imposing sanctions on Iran over the years. These sanctions played a key role in getting Iran to sign President Obama’s 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, in which Iran agreed to limit its nuclear program in return for a relaxation of sanctions.
Donald Trump ripped up the JCPOA, which he derided as a terrible deal. Now the Iranian regime is in a much stronger position than it was under the JCPOA. Yet we should also recognize that while the U.S. has suffered a military failure, it has also suffered a financial power failure. China has used the war to strengthen an alternative global payments system that bypasses the dollar — and hence allows governments that are at odds with America to evade both U.S. surveillance and U.S. sanctions.
As the Wall Street Journal recently explained, Iran was able to continue selling oil (until the U.S. temporarily imposed a military blockade) and buying essential imports, despite U.S. financial sanctions, by taking payment in yuan and using those yuan to buy Chinese goods. Ships that paid Iran for safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz also paid in yuan (or in cryptocurrency, whose only real use case remains criminal activity.) The details are complicated, but using yuan essentially allows those designated by the U.S. government as rogue actors to fly under our financial radar.
It’s true that Iran and Russia had significantly increased their yuan-based transactions before the war began. But the war offered an object lesson in the usefulness of the yuan as an alternative currency. Other nations, including the United Arab Emirates, are now considering accepting payment in yuan. And the war has also given a boost to China’s Cross-Border Interbank Payment System (CIPS), an alternative to SWIFT, the Belgium-based but effectively U.S.-controlled system that still settles the great bulk of international transactions.
I don’t want to overstate the case here. The dollar’s role as the dominant currency for ordinary business is not under threat. A new article in Foreign Policy by Agathe Demarais is titled “China’s de-dollarization drive has hit a wall.” It points out that overall use both of CIPS and of yuan remain quite modest compared with the SWIFT/dollar system. Doing business in dollars remains easier and cheaper than using any other currency, and will remain so unless U.S. policy becomes even more self-destructive.
Yet something important has happened. The Iran debacle has demonstrated that using dollars and retaining access to the U.S. banking system, while convenient, aren’t necessary. Iran’s ability to withstand American pressure has demonstrated that U.S. sanctions are a lot less effective than in the past given that rogue actors can use the yuan and CIPS as a work-around. And as the Gulf States’ actions show, even countries that are U.S. allies are now considering signing onto the Chinese payment system.
As I wrote a few weeks ago, recent events — not just the failed war on Iran but the limited effects of Trump’s tariffs and, in a different way, Ukraine’s survival without U.S. aid — have shown that America is now an inessential nation. Trump thought that throwing America’s weight around would show the world how powerful he is. Instead, he made us weaker and the world knows it.
MUSICAL CODA
Working for the Yankee dollar? Not so much, now.
Tool: HTML table extractor
Yet another in my growing collection of paste-conversion tools. This one accepts pasted rich text from browsers (with embedded HTML tables) and converts every detected table into HTML, Markdown, CSV, TSV, or JSON.
Try it out by selecting everything on the Wikipedia List of cities and towns in the San Francisco Bay Area page and pasting it directly into the tool:
On a similar note, I recently rebuilt my Rich text to markdown tool to add support for tables and generally improve the UI.
Update: It turns out Wikipedia has an open CORS API for retrieving the full rendered HTML content of any page - demo here - so I had Codex add the ability to search Wikipedia for a page and then automatically import and display any tables from that page.
The oracle is an elaborate Web 3.0 contraption that combines cryptocurrency, voting and game theory in its goal to produce fair judgments. It’s billed by its creators, a company based in Manhattan called Risk Labs, as a “decentralized truth machine.”
But for all its brainiac complexity, the oracle has proved exploitable. Dozens of livid bettors claim the system has been gamed, the handiwork of a budding tech entrepreneur named Lancelot Chardonnet (his name at birth, he says). A look at the Donk debate, which unfolded over nine rancorous days, illustrates how he did it, and the messy, fractious challenge of divining something as nuanced as truth.
When the Bucharest video was first broadcast on April 11, nobody heard “Donk,” and this bet seemed destined to be won by those who bet “no.” Then someone noticed that the caster, who through sheer phonetic coincidence is known as Dinko, had botched “don’t.”
Dinko might have known about the Donk bet, so it’s at least possible that he said the fateful syllable on purpose. It’s even possible he placed money on the outcome. He might have made what linguistics fans would call a voiceless velar stop slip.
Here is more from the NYT.
The post Prediction markets paragraphs to ponder appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Why is the Cigar Galaxy billowing red smoke?
Filmed at home, this ran about two hours, and yes that is Nabeel Qureshi, with a cameo from Spinoza toward the very end. From Jackson:
From the episode summary:
Tyler and Nabeel are good friends, and given how prolific Tyler is, I decided to use Nabeel as an entry point and interview them together. We discuss sacred commitments, AI acceleration, mentorship, friendship, and more, but I focused the majority of the conversation on art and aesthetics. Tyler and Nabeel are unlikely aesthetes given their day jobs, but in fact take art deeply seriously. They have a shared love for and similar tastes in art, music, and film, in particular. We discuss strange and beautiful art, aesthetic stagnation, and a wide range of favorites: The Beatles, Mozart, Mondrian, Springsteen, Lana Del Rey, Kanye West, Cassavetes, The Sopranos, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and more.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?si=wC78q_BeD27XDnLN&v=qPHV-BezoIc&feature=youtu.be
Excerpt:
Tyler: (18:31) I think I’m very mundane in many ways. When Marc Andreessen had that famous tweet about not being too introspective, I know he got slammed for that, but I sympathize with that in many ways. I have my work. I focus on it. I want to go see places I haven’t seen before. That really drives me. I feel pretty well motivated. I do think all kinds of deep thoughts, but to me those deep thoughts feel more superficial than my so-called superficial urges to go around doing things. And I’m fine with that.
…Jackson: (23:25) Do you experience art primarily by thinking or by feeling?
Tyler: (23:29) I don’t even know what those words mean. I experience it by looking at it. I don’t think I have very deep emotional responses. I think it’s pleasure and I feel I learn a lot from it. When I go out and look at other works of art or just the world, I see a lot more than people who don’t live with art. I don’t think I feel that much. I’ve never cried in front of a painting. When I read these accounts of someone seeing a Madonna and weeping, it makes no sense to me. It’s like people who do sports gambling. Why do you do that? There are positive-sum gambles for you. Here are a few.
There is much more of interest, self-recommending!
The post Jackson Dahl podcasts with me and Nabeel on aesthetics appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Rocket Lab announced on Monday that it is acquiring the satellite communications company Iridium. The deal, made for cash and shares of Rocket Lab stock, values Iridium at about $8 billion.
The deal pairs the launch company, founded and led by Peter Beck, with a decades-old profitable satellite company whose network of 80 satellites in low-Earth orbit provides telecommunications services.
"We believe this will be one of the most transformative deals in the space industry," Beck said in a short promotional video announcing the deal. "It's the ultimate combination for growth."
Up betimes and to my office, and by and by to the Temple, and there appointed to meet in the evening about my business, and thence I walked home, and up and down the streets is cried mightily the great victory got by the Portugalls against the Spaniards, where 10,000 slain, 3 or 4,000 taken prisoners, with all the artillery, baggage, money, &c., and Don John of Austria forced to flee with a man or two with him, which is very great news.
Thence home and at my office all the morning, and then by water to St. James’s, but no meeting to-day being holy day, but met Mr. Creed in the Park, and after a walk or two, discoursing his business, took leave of him in Westminster Hall, whither we walked, and then came again to the Hall and fell to talk with Mrs. Lane, and after great talk that she never went abroad with any man as she used heretofore to do, I with one word got her to go with me and to meet me at the further Rhenish wine-house, where I did give her a Lobster and do so touse her and feel her all over, making her believe how fair and good a skin she has, and indeed she has a very white thigh and leg, but monstrous fat. When weary I did give over and somebody, having seen some of our dalliance, called aloud in the street, “Sir! why do you kiss the gentlewoman so?” and flung a stone at the window, which vexed me, but I believe they could not see my touzing her, and so we broke up and I went out the back way, without being observed I think, and so she towards the Hall and I to White Hall, where taking water I to the Temple with my cozen Roger and Mr. Goldsborough to Gray’s Inn to his counsel, one Mr. Rawworth, a very fine man, where it being the question whether I as executor should give a warrant to Goldsborough in my reconveying her estate back again, the mortgage being performed against all acts of the testator, but only my own, my cozen said he never heard it asked before; and the other that it was always asked, and he never heard it denied, or scrupled before, so great a distance was there in their opinions, enough to make a man forswear ever having to do with the law; so they agreed to refer it to Serjeant Maynard. So we broke up, and I by water home from the Temple, and there to Sir W. Batten and eat with him, he and his lady and Sir J. Minnes having been below to-day upon the East India men that are come in, but never tell me so, but that they have been at Woolwich and Deptford, and done great deal of business. God help them. So home and up to my lute long, and then, after a little Latin chapter with Will, to bed. But I have used of late, since my wife went, to make a bad use of my fancy with whatever woman I have a mind to, which I am ashamed of, and shall endeavour to do so no more. So to sleep.
Below are a variety of materials relating to the Viking 1 and 2 missions. Please use the menu at right to jump directly to the section you seek.
This is the first photograph ever taken on the surface of the planet Mars. It was obtained by Viking 1 just minutes after the spacecraft landed successfully on July 20, 1976.
This color picture of Mars was taken July 21, 1976, the day following Viking 1’s successful landing on the planet.
Viking 2’s first picture on the surface of Mars after the spacecraft touched down on Sept. 3, 1976.
The flag of the United States with the rocky Martian surface in the background is seen in this color picture taken by Viking 1 on July 26, 1976.
The boulder-strewn field of red rocks reaches to the horizon nearly two miles from Viking 2 on Mars’ Utopian Plain.
A Martian sunrise was captured in this Viking 2 lander picture taken June 14, 1978.
This Viking 1 image is one of first images of a sunset as seen on the surface of Mars on Aug. 21, 1976.
Operation of the surface sampler in obtaining Martian soil for NASA’s Viking 2 molecular analysis experiment.
The Martian weather reports started at Viking 1’s meteorology instrument, mounted atop the extended boom.
This compilation of images captured by the Viking 1 orbiter prominently features the Valles Marineris canyon system.
Shown here is a digital mosaic of Olympus Mons, the largest known volcano in the solar system, taken by the Viking 1 orbiter.
About 1,000 red-violet filter images from the Viking orbiters were combined to produce this full-color image of Mars.
Retro-style video features animation of one of NASA’s Viking spacecraft en route to Mars and landing there in 1976. Video includes actual footage of NASA mission control for Viking, and the Deep Space Network in California’s Mojave Desert, which communicates with spacecraft.
Learn More and Download
Artist’s concept of the Viking spacecraft, with the orbiter at the top and the lander tucked inside the aeroshell below.
An artist’s concept of the sequence of events leading to the Viking landers reaching the Martian surface.
Viking’s orbiter imaging systems helped find safe spots for the landers to come down and later went on to map the surface and study Mars’ atmosphere.
A section of the Centaur Standard Shroud being transported to the B-3 test stand.
The Centaur III/Titan third stage being mated with its rocket in preparation for the Viking launch.
Technicians inspect the Viking 2 lander at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center.
Technicians preparing the aeroshell cover that will protect the Viking 1 lander as it traverses Mars’s atmosphere.
One of the Viking landers and orbiters at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center Spacecraft Assembly and Encapsulation Facility.
Encapsulated Viking 1 atop the Titan III/Centaur ready for launch on Aug. 20, 1975.
Thirty-five years after NASA’s Viking missions launched, the team looked back at this extraordinary and “gutsy” mission.
Read More and Download
A mosaic of the Valles Marineris hemisphere of Mars, created with images from NASA’s Viking orbiters.
Download and color NASA’s Viking lander and other spacecraft and planets in our solar system.
A guided quest to discover information about Mars using NASA’s Space Place for Kids web site.
Commemorative 3D medallion from the Viking landing’s 40th anniversary.
Examine NASA data and images to help scientists find and catalog shapes in the Martian clouds in this Citizen Science Project.
Learn More
The post Viking Mission Resources appeared first on NASA Science.
Links for you. Science:
Updated COVID vaccines cut risk of hospital care, heart complications, new data reveal
CDC’s chief blocked a covid vaccine study. Now it’s in a top medical journal.
The Ebola Outbreak’s Central Mystery: Where Did This Virus Come From?
Be Not Afraid. Bats Are Amazing
U.S. provides experimental Ebola treatment for outbreak in Congo, bringing trials closer
New walking shark discovered in Papua New Guinea
Trump Administration Moves to Preserve Cells and DNA of Imperiled Species. The government is teaming up with Colossal Biosciences, a private company that claims to have revived extinct dire wolves, to store samples from at-risk animals and plants.
Other:
Dems Must Talk Seriously About Supreme Court Expansion
How The OMB Rule Will Hurt You And Your Town
In Search Of A Shared Theory Of Power
Trump’s Peeling Green Gift to America
Cargo Culture
Trump’s Reflecting Pool fiasco is no longer just a laughing matter
Russell Vought’s Latest Plan to Gut the Government Should Terrify You
What comes next after D.C.’s historic primary?
The politicization of federal grant funding will hurt Arizona
Senator Demands Trump Personally Pay Taxpayers Back For Reflecting Pool Mess: “This was not a result of vandalism, but your administration’s incompetence,” Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.) told the president.
Opponents Of The JCPOA Unlocked A Hellish Future
Iran and Egypt will meet, uncomfortably, in Seattle’s World Cup ‘Pride Match’
Sen. Van Hollen backs El-Sayed for Michigan Senate in break from Democratic leadership
A Final Day At Aqueduct, New York’s Forlorn And Forgotten Racetrack
And There’s Always The Bezos Post
We Must Restore Congress as the Predominant Branch of Government
Centrist Emotional Support Journalists
We Can Still Realize FDR’s Vision
NYC Rent Guidelines Board approves 2-year rent freeze, fulfilling Mamdani campaign pledge
Alexander Hamilton, the Wrong Founder
As America’s birthday approaches, its front yard is a construction zone
Ford Has Been Rehiring Quality Inspectors After AI Fell Short
Judge Blocks ‘Unconstitutional and Dangerous’ Trump Order Designed to Derail Mail-In Voting
Moody’s warns proposed political review of grants a credit negative
Trump the Bathroom Slob?
A Terrible Thing Happened to My Family
This MAGA Ohio Town Could Soon Face the Mother of All ICE Raids
Beware the Pink Tide?
Census Bureau Quietly Scraps Plan for Improved Data Collection on Race and Ethnicity
America Is Trapped in the Grossest Pool Party of All Time
Climate Change
I Went to Trump’s Great American State Fair. It Was Bleaker Than I Expected.
Starmersim
Over the last decade, multiple news organizations have inflicted Cletus Safaris on their readers, in which a reporter goes to a diner or some other folsky communal spot and talks with MAGA diehards with the goal of Elucidating The Real America. One would think that with the DSA seizing all three branches of governmentthree Mamdani-endorsed candidates winning Democratic primaries in New York City and a democratic socialist winning the D.C. mayorality it might behoove members of the political press corps to interview voters who voted for these candidates so as to understand this supposedly seismic event.
In D.C., for example, I really doubt democratic socialist Janeese Lewis George only lost D.C.’s Ward 3 by 1.8% (45.4% to 43.6%). It might be that Ward 3 is chock full of socialists, but I really don’t think that’s the case*. But a news organization could send reporters out to ask some questions! It would provide people with useful information, and it would be interesting: unlike the same fucking Cletus Safaris, this would be new–and you can’t spell news without new!
That they do not do this, and instead, fall back on the same tired tropes suggests that our news media also need the equivalent of a replacement election.
MOAR CLETUS SAFARIS! But leftistly!
*Not only do I think the Democratic primaries in areas where the primary is the de facto election experienced a ‘change’ election, but we also are seeing the weakening, if not collapse, of traditional urban power centers, and those centers are slowly being supplanted by new organizations and groups. Also, personality, as always, played a role. When Democratic voters in heavily Democratic areas are angry at Democrats, they don’t vote for Republicans, they move farther left (or off the axis entirely).
June 25-28
Red Sox 6, Yankees 3
Red Sox 6, Yankees 1
Red Sox 4, Yankees 1
Red Sox 5, Yankees 4 (10)
Yankees – 100 100 100 – 3 8 4
Red Sox – 000 040 02x – 6 7 0
Yankees – 000 000 010 – 1 3 0
Red Sox – 121 001 01x – 6 9 0
Yankees – 000 010 000 – 1 3 0
Red Sox – 112 000 00x – 4 7 0
Yankees – 000 000 002 2 – 4 3 1
Red Sox – 000 200 000 3 – 5 6 2
More Langs:
Sonny Gray with a 7 1/3 IP no-hit bid vs the Yankees
He’s the first former Yankees pitcher with a no-hit bid of at least 7 innings against the Yankees since 6/30/57 Ralph Terry (7 1/3 IP)1988: 14
1917: 13
1915: 12
1914: 12
2026: 11 *active
1933: 111917: 112:21 [Friday]2:22 [Saturday]This is the first time consecutive Yankees-Red Sox games have been 2 hours, 22 minutes or shorter since they played three straight Sept. 27-29, 1983
IP H ER BB K PIT
Thu: Connelly Early: 6.0 5 2 1 9 98
Fri: Payton Tolle: 7.0 1 0 2 7 88
Sat: Jake Bennett: 6.1 3 1 2 3 87
Sun: Sonny Gray: 7.1 1 0 1 9 97
26.2 10 3 6 28 1.01 ERA
Yankees Swept By Red Sox After Blowing Lead In Extras As Rally Goes For Naught In Brutal Loss
Greg Joyce, Post
A late rally gave the Yankees a chance to finish a brutal weekend on a high note.
Instead, somehow, it only delayed the misery.
On a night when Sonny Gray took a no-hitter into the eighth inning, Aroldis Chapman and the Red Sox defense melted down in the ninth inning, and the Yankees took the lead in the 10th, it still all came crumbling down for them . . . to deliver one last knockout punch on the way back to New York.
After the Yankees took their first lead since Thursday night with two runs in the top of the 10th, [Boston] came back to win it in the bottom of the frame against Fernando Cruz, as Jarren Duran's walk-off single lifted them to a 5-4 win that finished off a four-game sweep Sunday night at Fenway Park. . . .
[MFY manager Aaron Boone:] "It's one of those crap moments of the season, crap times of the season . . ."
On a weekend in which they were dominated by Red Sox starting pitching — Connelly Early, Payton Tolle, Jake Bennett and Gray combined for 26.2 innings in which they gave up just three runs, 10 hits and six walks while striking out 28 — the Yankees have now dropped eight of their past 11 after suffering their first four-game sweep to their archrivals since 2018.
The Red Sox had not won four straight games all season until this series. . . .
A month that began with the Yankees losing Aaron Judge to the injured list (his timeline for a return is still very fuzzy) is nearing an end with the club looking like it is feeling the effects . . . along with [the absences of] Giancarlo Stanton and Trent Grisham. . . .
The Yankees[' bats] . . . have all gone cold at the same time, resulting in a four-game sweep in which the Yankees combined to hit just 17-for-128 (.133) with 10 walks. . . .
The night had begun like the last few before it, with Gray mowing down the Yankees.
Tolle had retired the first 16 Yankees on Friday night before Bennett carried a no-hitter into the fifth inning Saturday. Gray took flirting with history a step further before another former disgruntled Yankee, Chapman, flushed it in the ninth.
But even after the Yankees rallied and went ahead in the 10th . . . Cruz could not finish it off in the bottom of the inning.
He left pitches up that turned into a single, double, sacrifice fly and then Duran's walk-off winner.
"Great teams go through this," Cruz said.
[Shitty teams go through it, too.]
Oswaldo Cabrera's First Game Back Since Gruesome Ankle Injury Comes With A Costly Yankees Error
Greg Joyce, Post
For the first time since a gruesome ankle injury last May, Oswaldo Cabrera was back in a big league lineup Sunday night.
It did not go as well as he had hoped, though, with a crucial fielding error giving way to a pair of runs early on the way to the Yankees' crushing 5-4, 10-inning loss to the Red Sox at Fenway Park.
Cabrera went 0-for-3 . . . But his fielding error at third base loomed large in the fourth inning.
With a runner on first and one out in a scoreless game, Carlos Rodón got Willson Contreras to hit a hard grounder to third. Cabrera bobbled it and by the time he threw over to first, it was too late.
One out later, the Yankees should have been out of the inning, but instead Caleb Durbin came up next and hit a two-run single in what became a 37-pitch inning for Rodón, a big reason why he only lasted five innings.
The Yankees defense had let them down Thursday night, committing four errors, and then came back to bite them again Sunday. . . .
Cam Schlittler played with fire for four innings and got away with it.But then in the fifth, his defense added some lighter fluid, and his start went up in flames.After Amed Rosario let a smoked ground ball go through his legs instead of turning a potential inning-ending double play, the first of four unearned runs came in on Schlittler to sink the Yankees in a sloppy 6-3 loss to the Red Sox on Thursday night . . .Former Yankees prospect Caleb Durbin delivered the deciding blow before the fifth inning was over, taking Schlittler deep for a two-run shot just over the Green Monster to break a 2-2 tie.The Yankees tried to mount a comeback in the ninth against their former closer, Aroldis Chapman, who loaded the bases with two outs before finally shutting the door.It was a messy loss for the Yankees, who committed a season-high four errors . . . and wasted some chances to cash in offensively before the scuffling Red Sox came alive. . . .The offense . . . [went] 3-for-11 with runners in scoring position — including Ben Rice, the Yankees' best hitter, going 0-for-4 in those situations and leaving seven men on base.Schlittler stranded a pair of runners in each of the first, second and fourth innings. He might have been able to do it again in the fifth, until Rosario's fielding error opened the floodgates. . . .
. . . the season-high four errors they made in Thursday's 6-3 loss to the Red Sox at Fenway Park were especially tough.And even as they made the most errors in a game since the four they committed in a loss to Boston at Yankee Stadium last Aug. 21, there were even more miscues than the ones that made the stat sheet. . . .Among the culprits was José Caballero, whose defensive versatility is part of what the Yankees were looking for when they acquired him from Tampa Bay last season.But they probably didn't foresee him starting in left field five times over an eight-game period as he's been forced to with Judge and Trent Grisham sidelined. . . . [H]is errant throw on Jarren Duran's very shallow fly ball [in the fifth] allowed Ceddanne Rafaela to score and helped Boston take control of the game.The fact that Rafaela even tried to score on the play indicated what the Red Sox thought of Caballero in left. . . .Ball goes right under Amed Rosario's glove and the Red Sox score pic.twitter.com/WpfNGlZdiD— Talkin' Yanks (@TalkinYanks) June 26, 2026As for his throw home, which took Austin Wells away from the plate, Caballero said, "I put good velo on it. It was just a little off the line. And mistakes happen." . . .[Thirs baseman Amed] Rosario let Willson Contreras' rocket 112 mph grounder go through his legs for a two-base error in the fifth . . .Wells was charged with an error on a catcher's interference that wiped away a groundout by Abreu in the first. Schlittler threw a pickoff attempt at second base that went into center field for an error, and the right-hander also watched Caleb Durbin's pop-up drop in front of him for an infield single in the second. Yerry De los Santos made the fourth error of the night in the eighth.
The Yankees at least spared themselves the infamy of having a perfect game thrown against them [on Friday]. . . .Red Sox lefty Payton Tolle dominated them across seven innings, allowing just one hit to Spencer Jones after retiring 16 straight to start the game, as the Yankees stumbled to a second straight loss by a score of 6-1. . . .Tolle, who struck out 11 in six innings of one-run ball against the Yankees in April, was even more untouchable on Friday night while striking out seven. Jones poked a single into center field off him with one out in the sixth, and Tolle later walked a pair in the seventh. But all three base runners proved harmless as he mowed down the Yankees, who have now lost six of their past nine. . . .Besides Tolle vying for a perfect game, the only real drama — if you can call it that — of the night came in the bottom of the fifth inning, when the benches cleared after Will Warren walked Willson Contreras. Ball four was up and in on Contreras, who essentially stands on top of the plate, and he flipped his bat before jogging down to first and jawing at Warren.Contreras, who had crushed a 418-foot homer off Warren earlier in the game, seemed to want to know why the Yankees pitcher was looking at him. . . .That only added to the frustration for Warren, who gave up five runs on seven hits and three walks across 5.2 innings. For the first time in his career, he did not record a single strikeout. Warren was consistently hit hard even on outs, as 10 of the 24 balls the Red Sox put in play against him came off the bat at 95 mph or higher.
What's become a mostly docile matchup in the AL East got some heat in the bottom of the fifth of a 6-1 Red Sox win, when Willson Contreras jawed at Will Warren as he headed to first base following a walk.Warren, whose second pitch of the at-bat was up and in to Contreras — clearly crowding the plate — said some words back to Contreras and the benches cleared.After Contreras homered and had an RBI single off Warren earlier in the game, Contreras flipped his bat after Warren walked him on a 3-2 pitch that was close to Contreras' elbow.Contreras continued to shout at the right-hander once he got to the bag, with first baseman Paul Goldschmidt looking to calm the situation.Warren clearly wasn't pleased with Contreras' behavior at the plate, saying the slugger was "playing games in the [batters'] box."Aaron Boone said it's what Contreras is known for."I think that's what he does a lot,'' the manager said. "His arms hang over the plate, so I don't know where we're supposed to go [with pitches]. I think there's probably a method to what he's doing. He probably wants that. . . ."Contreras was a menace to the Yankees all night, as he singled in a run in the first and homered to left in the third before the walk.The Yankees, losers of six of nine, have bigger concerns than any antics by Contreras as they try to right themselves . . .
Contrary to popular belief, those were not toothpicks the Yankees were swinging Saturday.But they essentially would have served the same purpose as the lumber they did use, which has been ineffective the past few days.Once again, the Yankees got shut down by a lefty, with their bats going silent and offensive woes growing louder in a third straight loss to the last-place Red Sox, this time 4-1 on a fine afternoon at a sold-out Fenway Park.For a second straight game, Jake Bennett and the Red Sox bullpen held the Yankees to just three hits while Gerrit Cole got hit around, resulting in their seventh loss in the past 10 games. . . .[New York] suddenly looks like it dearly misses Aaron Judge, not to mention Giancarlo Stanton and Trent Grisham, who are also on the injured list. Grisham should return within the week, but Judge and Stanton do not appear anywhere close to coming back . . .Cole got hit hard for a second straight start, giving up four runs on seven hits, including a pair of solo home runs to Masataka Yoshida (to lead off the bottom of the first) and former Yankees first-round pick Anthony Seigler (in the bottom of the second).But the bigger culprit was the offense. After Tolle took a perfect game into the sixth inning against the Yankees on Friday night, Bennett had a no-hitter into the fifth Saturday . . .Over the first three games of this four-game set, the Yankees have gone just 14-for-94 (.149) with eight walks.Some of their most dependable batters have contributed to the recent malaise. Ben Rice went 0-for-4 Saturday and is now 2-for-23 over his past six games. Bellinger went 1-for-2 with two walks, improving him to 2-for-19 over his past six games. Amed Rosario, who had been a reliable lefty killer early on, is now 7-for-42 over his past 15 games. . . .
Ben Rice has spent most of the season looking like an MVP candidate.But the past six games have been much more pedestrian, magnified by the rest of the Yankees offense going through a cold stretch with him. . . .He is batting just 2-for-23 with a .174 OPS over his past six games, of which the Yankees have lost four. . . .To be clear, Rice is far from alone in having a rough week. But it is noticeable because of how impactful he has been for most of the season — he finished Saturday batting .276 with a .940 OPS — with this marking the quietest stretch of his season so far.It comes during a week in which the Yankees have faced a heavy dose of lefty starters — including each of the past four games, with Red Sox southpaw Jake Bennett holding him down Saturday. . . .In a bit of an oddity, Rice grounded out in eight straight plate appearances before striking out in his final at-bat Saturday.There's still no timetable for the Yankees to get their two biggest bats back from the injured list in Aaron Judge and Giancarlo Stanton . . .
1. The great Scott Wheeler on Stephen Sondheim (Free Press).
2. Is space the most underrated policy area?
3. On the USAID and deaths debate. Hardly the final word, but an injection of sanity into what has been a low quality debate. Here is commentary from GPT Pro. In a few years we might have some accurate estimates.
4. Using LLMs in economic history.
5. Measuring economic growth through the valuation of human life.
6. Brooklyn Coffee Shop showcases my book The Complacent Class.
The post Monday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
The temptation to use artificial intelligence (AI) to cheat is shaking up elite universities in the United States. Professor Roberto Serrano, who is the Harrison S. Kravis University Professor of Economics at Brown University, has detected a massive fraud in one of the classes he teaches, ECON 1170, an advanced undergraduate course in mathematical economics. He has conclusive evidence that at least 50 students cheated on the March midterm exam, making it the biggest known scandal at Brown and in the entire Ivy League, which brings together the East Coast’s eight most elite private universities, including Princeton, Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth College and University of Pennsylvania.
When he reported the case to high-ranking officials at Brown, he got a cold reaction. The response from the president, he said, was absolute silence. The dean did not comment either until Serrano took the case before the Academic Code Committee.
Here is the full story, via Anecdotal.
The post AI cheating on math econ at Brown appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
It’s almost hard to remember nowadays, but before the pandemic a lot of us were worried about falling business dynamism in the United States. For whatever reason, Americans just weren’t starting companies — either high-growth startups or small businesses — at the rate they used to. Much ink was spilled discussing possible reasons for the trend, and potential levers for reversing it.
Then the pandemic came, and the trend shifted almost overnight. Suddenly, Americans were creating new businesses again:
Notably, even in 2024 the trend in business applications showed no sign of reverting to its pre-pandemic level. The shift seems at least partly durable.
No one knows exactly why new business creation has surged in recent years. But one possibility is that technology has made it possible for people to start businesses with a lot fewer employees. Stripe Economics has an interesting blog post about the rise of “solopreneurs” — independent businesspeople who don’t employ anyone else at their businesses:
The upshot is that there’s a big trend to “solopreneurship”, and that the pandemic accelerated the shift:
Solopreneurship has been increasing since 2008, both in absolute terms and as a percent of new business formation. Some of this is due to legal changes. The Obamacare exchanges make it easier for solopreneurs to buy their own health insurance. The Qualified Business Income deduction, the simplified home-office deduction, and other tax changes have made it more favorable to be a solopreneur.
On top of that, the internet made a lot of solo business models easier to execute, from dropshipping businesses to YouTube channels to subscription-based email newsletters. I am a solopreneur myself — Noahpinion is an S-corporation. Substack made it incredibly easy for me to sell and deliver content online, Twitter/X made it incredibly easy for me to market that content, and Stripe made it incredibly easy to receive payments — all without hiring anyone.
The team at Stripe Economics argues that this latter trend is just getting started. Thanks to AI, the number of business models that can be executed by single individuals is growing rapidly:
An agent can now help you find the best tools for your business and handle your integration with minimal support….The recent growth in nonemployer businesses shows a positive relationship with industry-level AI adoption…
Part of the reason businesses historically tended to be built by groups was that a single individual rarely possesses all the skills needed in the entrepreneurial journey. Whether it’s how to evaluate or size a market, code an app, price a product, write and execute a marketing campaign, or close a deal, AI (and AI-augmented software) can fill many of the gaps that founders previously turned to another human for. Or, as Sam Altman so succinctly put it: “revenge of the idea guys.”
We think this phenomenon is the true engine of the AI surge in business formation we’re seeing today. The availability of this breadth of on-tap assistance allows anyone with sufficient motivation to go it alone. Given this, we think the 20% figure is a floor rather than a ceiling in terms of AI impact.
This makes sense. It’s pretty clear that one big reason to have a multi-person company has always been individual specialization. But Claude is far more versatile than any human being, so in the age of AI agents, specialization will probably be less important in many cases.
Even in the (many) cases where that doesn’t allow one person to run a company all by themself, it will tend to push companies toward lower headcount. Kim and Koning have a new working paper showing that “AI-native” companies now being created tend to have about 25% fewer employees than their peers.
This is important, because it bears on the future of human employment — the question that’s currently on almost everyone’s minds. It raises the possibility that self-employment is the future of employment. It’s easy enough to imagine a future in which relying on a group of other humans for your economic sustenance won’t be as important — instead, we’ll all be like little private ship captains, ordering around our crews of AI agents.
That future is easy to envision because it’s the logical endpoint of a trend that had already been going on for quite some time: the rise of corporate outsourcing. Whether it was manufacturing supply chains strung out across dozens of countries, or companies hiring subcontractors to do their payroll or their IT or their accounting, or corporations paying SaaS providers for software products, companies generally do a lot less of their work in-house than they did half a century ago.
The rise of outsourcing — both domestic and foreign — was enabled by improvements in transportation and communication technologies. Shipping crates and the internet made it easy to turn local production networks into regional or global ones. The internet made it easy to find contractors, verify their reputability, communicate with them, and monitor them to verify their work.
That fit very well with the leading economics theory of outsourcing: transaction cost theory. First advanced by Ronald Coase in the 1930s and later refined by Oliver Williamson and others, transaction cost theory says that companies exist because it’s sometimes cheaper and easier to execute transactions in-house than at arm’s length.
Consider the process of paying the workers at a factory. In 1937, for a company to get some other company to handle their payroll would have been a very arduous process. You would have had to look up payroll contractors in the phone book, ask around to find out whether each one had a good reputation, have their representatives come by your factory to get information about how many hours each worker had worked, and so on. Far easier to just walk down the hall to your own payroll division and have them do it.
But by 2007, this calculus had switched — thanks to the internet, it was fairly easy to do all that stuff at arm’s length, online. This allowed specialization at the level of the firm rather than at the level of the division or the employee — in other words, corporate outsourcing.
That’s just a story, of course. But in general, transaction cost theory is strongly supported by empirical evidence; in cases where we can measure transaction costs, they do seem to affect the decision to in-house versus outsource. Bergeaud et al. (2023) find evidence that the internet drove a wave of outsourcing in France, for example:
Does domestic outsourcing react to technological change? We study the staggered diffusion of broadband internet in France in the 2000s, and show that connected firms increased their outsourcing expenditures while decreasing the diversity of occupations they employ in-house…Overall, we show that the deployment of new technologies stimulated domestic outsourcing in this context[.]
There are other theories about why companies choose to do things themselves versus buying them from someone else, but many of them — incomplete contracts theory, agency theory, relational contracting theory, etc. — overlap substantially with transaction cost theory. The informality, close monitoring, and long-term relationships that form within a company can all be seen as ways of decreasing transaction costs.
A lot of people are assuming that when it comes to transaction costs, AI will work like the internet, only more so. (In fact, I find “AI will be like the internet, only more so” to be one of the most common tacit assumptions in AI discourse in general.) AI can read, understand, and analyze your business’s website in an instant — or dispense with the need of a website entirely. It can scan the entire internet to assess whether your business is a trustworthy contractor, or even contact you directly to find out. It can absorb nearly unlimited reams of business data, in order to monitor that you’re doing a good job. And so on.
It’s easy to see how this might lead to a world of total outsourcing and solopreneurs. But at the same time, it’s possible to imagine that AI will increase transaction costs between companies.
The simple reason is that AI doesn’t just analyze information; it also creates it. Yes, an AI can search the web for payroll outsourcing companies and get an idea of which are reputable by researching everything that has ever been said about each. But by the same token, an AI can create a new company, give it a website, and invent a bunch of other companies and reviewers to make it look legit. And then if and when your AI pays that AI’s fake company to do your accounting or whatever, the fake company can just take all your money and vanish in a puff of smoke.
AI-driven fraud is already happening, at scale. Here’s a BBC story from last year:
Unscrupulous foreign firms are using AI-generated images and false back stories to pose as family-run UK businesses to lure in shoppers…Customers say they feel “completely ripped off”…Consumer guide Which? said the growing use of AI tools was making it possible for fraudsters to mislead the public on an “unprecedented” scale.
If human consumers can be fooled, so can human purchasing agents and procurement specialists. “OK,” you respond, “I’ll just get an AI to do the purchasing and procurement. Problem solved.”
But here we are, back in the realm of transaction costs. You might need a frontier AI and a lot of expensive tokens to check the ever-expanding galaxy of fake companies in a way that would allow you to make a reliable outsourcing decision.
Nor would it even necessarily take fraud and manipulation in order to make arm’s-length transactions between AIs unreliable. Human beings are relatively consistent over time — if I do business with you today, I can be reasonably sure that doing business with you tomorrow will be similar, because your knowledge and skills and character etc. are all going to be roughly the same.
This is not generally true with AI — at least, not with the AIs that exist today. They are ephemeral creatures; their ability to maintain the same goals, personalities, and capabilities over the weeks or months or even years of a business-to-business contractor relationship has yet to be demonstrated. So in the world where everyone doing business is an AI agent, even if your company verifies that it’s dealing with a real and honest contractor, that verification might not hold for long.
If AIs remain inconsistent over time, trust will therefore have to be reestablished from scratch every so often, and that could be expensive. In fact, we’ve already seen an example of just how expensive constant re-verification of trust can be: Bitcoin. In order to do away with the need for intermediaries like banks to verify transactions, Bitcoin has to reestablish trust between counterparties every time a transaction is performed. As Eric Budish has shown, constant reestablishment of trust is incredibly expensive in terms of electricity, which basically dooms Bitcoin’s use as a medium of exchange.
So AI doesn’t have to be an unreliable partner in order to put an end to the world of ubiquitous online contracting that we’ve built over the past three decades. All it has to be is a partner whose reliability is expensive to verify.
If AI brings about a world of higher transaction costs, due to the inherent unreliability of long-term arm’s-length dealings between AI agents, then the AI age will probably be one of bigger companies. Internal procedures for verifying trustworthiness — the AI equivalent of walking down the hall and knocking on the door of your own internal corporate division — might be the new equivalent of the informal long-term relationships that lower transaction costs within a typical human-staffed company.
In a post back in April, I predicted that Japan-style “salarymen” occupations — ever-shifting irregular bundles of tasks within a single big company — might be a more important kind of job all around the world going forward. But the transaction cost theory of the firm could give us another reason to expect the same. If only big companies can establish internal trust cheaply, then many humans — whatever kind of work they’re still doing 10 or 30 years from now — will be working for big companies.
That doesn’t mean solopreneurship is a temporary trend or a dead end. There are probably many lines of business in which long-term trust between agents carrying out specialized business processes is not a big deal. In those areas, solopreneurs will flourish. We may thus see a bifurcated distribution of company sizes and job types — a vast horde of solopreneurs, and a few monster companies employing huge numbers of wage earners.
I will now explain why at least 50% of your team finds your current All Hands to be a waste of their time. They believe:
Now, I will describe how to build an All Hands that will exceed their expectations. Let’s define the All Hands:
There’s an important organizational inflection point when you need the All Hands. The basic definition is, “The whole team — together.” If you’re a leader of a team of seven, then you might think your team meeting is your All Hands and — strictly speaking — that’s correct, but that’s your team or staff meeting. Not an All Hands.
The whole team — together. This is a required meeting when the whole team is no longer able to be together organically. Is that 50? Maybe? Is that when they no longer fit in one room easily? Probably? The inflection point varies as a function of the company, but this is a required meeting because it mimics what you did instinctively when you were a smaller team, and that’s a good place to start.
When it’s you, Frank, Aki, Liz, Gigi, and Joshua sitting in the same room cranking on your start-up, what are the events that everyone needs to regularly understand?
In the same room, it is relatively easy to gather much of this information. You look around, see that Liz is on the phone closing her new head of engineering, and you think, “Go, Liz! I liked her candidate a lot.” Then you look over at Gigi, who has been quiet for two days and hasn’t smiled in four, and think, “She is the most focused designer in the world. I can’t wait to see what she’s done with our logo.” And so on.
The ebb and flow of information in a group of humans decreases as a function of population size. With growth, your ability to organically discern what is going on within the team decreases1.
It’s not just the ebb and flow of information, but the chance that Critical Piece of Information X reaches Correct Person Y. Each additional human creates another opportunity for important information to not reach its intended recipient.
As the senior leader, it’s trivial to forget this simple math because there’s a firehose pointed straight at your face. Your challenge is not the absence of information, it’s the abundance. Your challenge is picking out the signal from the noise while also not drowning.
The firehose is the primary reason for my first piece of structure guidance: pick a format for your All Hands and stick with it. Here’s the format I’ve been using for a couple of decades:
I’ll explain the intent of each section in a moment, but the important thing to know right now is your structure will be different than mine, and that’s just fine. The point is not following my lead, but consistency. Anyone who receives an invite to this meeting understands broadly what to expect out of the meeting. Senior leaders who randomly do All Hands with fluid agendas at a time that suits them stress the team. When the unexpected and unexplainable meeting shows up, they instinctively think, “Uh oh. Someone’s in trouble.”
We open with Hello. Nothing fancy. Over the years, a simple hello seemed empty. I wanted to do a little more than say hello while folks were still gathering and getting into the All Hands mindset. At the last gig, I followed Hello with a single slide called “Tree Talk,” where I spent a few minutes teaching the team something interesting about trees. One slide, a few facts. Totally irrelevant to the team, but absolutely essential to the culture.
Why? Because I believe curiosity is an intrinsic motivator. I don’t want the team sitting there as I drone on about things they already know; I want them to see what I care about. I care a lot about trees, but I care more about the team understanding the value of curiosity.
This is often the most boring part of the presentation, except when it isn’t. This is a picture of your organization. “The org chart.” Your job is to describe what has changed since the last time you threw this up on the screen with a little color commentary.
The bulk of the presentation is not you, but some or all of your direct reports. What are they going to discuss? Up to them. The greatest hits:
There are more.
We haven’t discussed the length of your All Hands, and now is a good time. The maximum amount of time is 90 minutes. Frequency? Minimum is once a quarter.
I’m talking timing right now because Act 2’s size is a function of the number of direct reports. Three? They should all have a slot — seven minutes per direct, but they’ll end up using 10. Anything more than three and you’ll need to devise a rotation between directs.
Back to their agenda. You should roughly know what they are going to talk about, but don’t micromanage it. It’s their schtick. If they screw it up, give them feedback.
You’re building the humans who will replace you. All the time. This is one of the many ways you do that.
For Act 3, you want to bring in someone else for a fireside chat. Who? Depends on your team or your company. Start with known folks who are obvious co-conspirators. Folks you personally know with an existing rapport. Write 10 or so questions that you want to ask them, and send them the questions a week before. Warn them that you might go off-script — because you might — and see if they are OK with such vibes.
When you get to the External Speaker portion of the All Hands, sit down next to them and start asking the questions. The most important advice? Listen to their answers. By far, the most interesting bits of this interview are the new things you discover via the conversation.
After you’ve done a handful of familiar folks and have a well-refined set of questions, start asking humans you don’t know. Folks you’ve heard of that the team has worked with, but don’t know. My favorite one? I had the CEO show up once as a mystery guest. Fascinating 30 minutes.
Which reminds me. Tell no one who the speaker will be, except the humans who must know.2
A controversial take, but an earned one. If I’m doing a talk at a conference, the Q&A portion of the presentation is my favorite. The questions quickly tell me how well I delivered the core messages of my talk. Even the random ones that have very little to do with my talk.
All Hands meetings are a different beast. Yes, it is a series of presentations and, yes, there are core messages delivered, but the large surface area covered in ninety minutes plus the size of the audience usually means questions:
However, you must create one more venue for the team to ask questions. Think Slack, your favorite message app, or via staff meetings. Even if you don’t, don’t worry, the important questions will find you.
Being social is work. Especially for engineers. We’d much prefer to be jamming at our desktop. Each time I’ve landed at a new gig where there was no culture of All Hands, I was disappointed by the attendance at first. 50% or worse.
Yes, you can order donuts, and more will show up, but the real draw should be the presentation.
They should leave with the lesson: This is where I will learn.
A regular All Hands meeting is inoculation. You are inoculating your team with quality information. This information will be used to disassemble gossip, rumors, and lies. This information will answer questions before they are asked. This information will remove noise so the human can focus on why they are there — to build.
I am, generally, ambivalent towards AI. There is no doubt it has become a very powerful tool for development in the last year, but it also comes with many dangers, both for us individually (e.g. the slow dulling of our intellects) as well as collectively (e.g. environmental concerns, increasingly expensive personal computing, etc.)
In “Code is Cheap(er)�, I warn about The Sorcerer’s Apprentice problem, where a developer becomes reliant on AI and is unable to understand and properly address issues that come up in the systems they are building.
In this article I want to go through a specific interaction that I had with AI while maintaining hyperscript to show the strengths and weaknesses of AI in general and to demonstrate The Sorcerer’s Apprentice problem (which I narrowly avoided) in particular.
For some background, hyperscript is an alternative interpreted scripting language for the web. It is, ironically, written entirely in JavaScript.
It is a strange piece of software: I intentionally broke many of the rules of parsing when writing it as an experiment to see how things would work out.
Some examples:
It is not an approach I would recommend for most programming languages, but it has worked out pretty well for this project.
Yet another demonstration that there are indeed multiple ways to skin the cat in software.
Our story begins when a user reported a regression when upgrading to the 0.9.91 release. The following expression no longer parsed properly:
the joy of sox
fetch `{% url 'trade:get_symbol_data' %}?symbol=${symbol}` as JSON
In particular, the as JSON was binding too tightly and trying to convert the string literal into JSON before it
was handed to fetch instead of doing what the user expected (and what it did previously) namely fetching the
given url with the results treated as JSON.
This sort of binding conflict is a classic problem in parsing.
Because hyperscript is an xTalk style language and inherits many of the ambiguities of English, this problem is all the worse in it.
The first thing to do was to investigate why this regression occurred.
This is an area where I am typically going to lean on AI to help.
I use Claude, and it did an admirable job finding the root cause: in 0.9.91 I had been overly aggressive in refactoring the go command to reuse/share logic with the fetch command.
I had extracted a common method for both of these commands to use, parseURLOrExpression(), but, in doing so, I
accidentally expanded the grammar after the fetch command to include the general expression, er, expression.
The as keyword has a meaning in expressions: it is a conversion expression,
allowing you to convert between types:
set x to "42" as Int
But the as keyword is also a modifier of the fetch command, telling it how to convert the response:
fetch https://hyperscript.org as Text
(Perhaps this fact makes you throw up a little bit in your mouth. Good.)
The crux of the issue was that, inadvertently in the refactor, I had made the parser parse an expression after a fetch keyword
which was now consuming the as keyword as an expression, rather than allowing it to be a modifier for fetch.
With the help of Claude I was able to figure this out in a few minutes, much faster than if I had had to figure it out on my own.
AI was very helpful in finding the cause of the problem.
In fixing the problem, however, it was much weaker.
I will admit here I was being lazy and asked AI for a solution, so complaining about those solutions feels a bit, well, lazy, but I still think the string of events is informative, so let’s go through exactly what happened.
The first suggestion that was given was to parse what is called a “string-like� leaf first, then fall back to a full expression:
return this.parseElement("stringLike") || this.requireElement("expression");
This fix would have solved the immediate problem presented by the user.
However, it was very specific to the reported bug and wouldn’t have fixed the general case, such as if someone uses a variable as the target of a fetch:
fetch $url as JSON
I rejected this proposal because of this: too hacky and not general enough.
(Note that the hyperscript parser has plenty of organically supplied hacks in it, so this may have been the pot calling the kettle black.)
The second proposal was more interesting: add a noConversions flag on the parser, set it around the URL parse, and have
AsExpression.parse bail when it is set:
// AsExpression.parse()
if (parser.noConversions) return;
This will horrify many parser engineers because it makes the hyperscript parser context-sensitive.
Good.
The hyperscript parser was already context-sensitive.
In looking at this fix and thinking for a second, I realized that we already had the hacky context-sensitive infrastructure we needed without introducing a new flag on the parser, but Claude had missed it.
In the hyperscript parser we have a notion of “follows�, that is, tokens that are claimed by a “higher up� parse element as a follow token.
The hyperscript parser is (a somewhat strange) recursive descent parser, and this allows a parse element (usually a command) to “claim� a keyword, and expressions won’t match against them during parsing.
As an example, the when feature uses or as a separator rather
than as a logical connective in its declaration:
<div _="when $x or $y changes put it into me"></div>
(I can hear many parser engineers closing this window in anger. Good.)
It turns out that this feature could be used to achieve what we wanted: rather than adding a new flag to the parser
we could push as as a follow, then parse the expression, then pop it as a follow.
This would prevent the AsExpression from parsing, while still allowing most general expressions such as variables to work.
I pointed this out to Claude and, in a frisson of excitement, it told me that I was “absolutely right!� and set about using this technique to fix the bug.
Claude added the correct code to the parseURLOrExpression() which fixed the issue generally without adding any additional
parser infrastructure.
Good to go.
However, as I was reviewing the change, I realized that the new fix was overly broad: both fetch and go shared
this method, but only fetch used as to signal a modifier.
The existing fix prevented the perfectly valid use of as conversion expressions in go commands as well.
So I implemented the final fix myself, in FetchCommand#parse():
parser.pushFollow("as");
try {
var url = parser.parseURLOrExpression();
} finally {
parser.popFollow();
}
if (parser.matchToken("as")) {
...
Here I narrowed the special case to only the fetch command, leaving go parsing unaffected.
This ended up being my final answer to the bug.
Along the way I had Claude generate some tests for the various cases.
There is a good existing test suite for hyperscript, and Claude did a good job of creating small, focused tests that showed the problem and that the fix was working properly.
Another area AI appears to work well.
OK, so what is interesting about this fairly mundane bug fix story?
I think it is interesting to see where AI did well, namely in investigation and test creation, and to contrast that with where it didn’t do so well: coming up with a clean solution.
If I had not been familiar with the hyperscript parser and its infrastructure this fix could have easily led to technical debt being accrued in the project: another hacky parsing corner case, another bit of state on the parser, etc.
Technical debt, I assert without evidence1, grows exponentially, and therefpre it is very important to minimize it in your projects.
This story shows how having a human in the loop, working with an agent and with a good understanding of the underlying infrastructure, can be much more effective in controlling complexity than an agent left to its own devices.
Some people will look at the hyperscript code base and scoff at the notion that controlling complexity was ever a consideration at all. I am sympathetic to that view.
However, in this example we can see in a concrete scenario how complexity was restrained, at least a bit, in fixing an admittedly embarrassing bug, by a knowledgeable human working with an AI agent.
This is a situation where, rather than being a sorcerer’s apprentice and blindly accepting the solutions AI proposed, I was acting as a sorcerer (I hope that’s not too arrogant to say!) demanding a correct solution that better fit the existing codebase’s architecture.
I understood the problem and saw the correct solution and was able to work with AI to achieve it and then verify the solution with the help of AI-generated tests.
This is in contrast, I hope a good contrast, with some forms of vibe coding currently being pushed in which developers (or whatever) appear to pride themselves on not understanding what is actually going on.
Another thing occurred to me as I was going back over this experience.
I am an older developer, having turned 50 this year. As developers get older the reality is that we tend to “lose our fastball�, at least to some extent.
Practically, for me, this has meant two things:
It turns out that AI directly addresses both of these issues.
With respect to memory, while I can’t remember everything I used to be able to, I can understand things again very quickly with appropriate, er, prompting. AI is very good at helping me with this, and it lets me switch between open source projects and work projects much more efficiently than if I didn’t have it.
With respect to the long hours, AI is able to grind in a way that, even as a young developer, I would have had a difficult time keeping up with. This means, for example, I can have a much more extensive test suite for my projects than I would have otherwise.
Looking at the tests that Claude generated in this case, they are more extensive than what I probably could have mustered the energy to do myself.
So AI has addressed two fundamental (relative) weaknesses I have developed as an older developer.
On the other hand, I am very worried that it is also enabling a more general regression in my overall intelligence. This is something that occurs naturally as you age anyway. AI reliance may accelerate this process however and I have to say, looking back at this story, I’m a bit ashamed of how long I leaned on Claude before just doing the right thing darned myself.
This is an area I am still trying to navigate myself.
I wanted to write up this series of interactions because I thought it captured some of the good and some of the bad of AI assistance in coding. It demonstrated the value of a reasonably competent developer in the loop working with an AI agent, and also showed the danger of blindly accepting the first (or second) solution that an AI agent suggests to a problem.
I hope that it is useful to you as you develop your own thoughts and strategies around AI agents.
–
This was revealed to me in a dream.
Reading lists are interesting both for the books they describe, and for what they say about the list makers. Here are a dozen interesting-looking books from people at the venture capital firm Andreeason Horowitz (aka A16Z).
A reading list for the deeply curious
Part one of our summer reading list: 12 books on technology, markets, AI, code, and the systems behind change. a16z crypto
Four of the twelve recommended books come under the heading How markets are designed.
These are those:
Moral Economics: From Prostitution to Organ Sales, What Controversial Transactions Reveal About How Markets Work by Alvin E. Roth
“My doctoral advisor, Al Roth, has been thinking for decades about ‘repugnance’ – why some people prefer that some markets should not exist. In Moral Economics, he tackles the motivation for these prohibitions and the trade-offs they force, head-on. And he explores, in particular, how such non-market norms emerge and sometimes later collapse — limitations on alcohol and drugs, and, in a completely different category, same-sex marriage have all been relaxed in recent years — and what this means for making markets in the future.” – Scott Duke Kominers, research
Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson
“Acemoglu and Robinson’s central thesis, that inclusive institutions drive prosperity while extractive ones cause stagnation, maps surprisingly well onto crypto. Decentralized protocols are essentially an attempt to hard-code inclusive institutions: open access, no gatekeepers, rules enforced by code rather than by whoever’s in power. The book is a great lens for understanding why certain blockchain ecosystems thrive while others are captured by insiders. A must-read for anyone thinking seriously about governance, whether at the nation-state or protocol level.” – Kira Song, finance
An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets by Donald MacKenzie
“Sociologist Donald MacKenzie’s An Engine, Not a Camera is nominally a book about financial economics, but its real subject is more provocative: What happens when theories stop describing the world and start changing it? MacKenzie traces how academic models of markets escaped the university and became embedded in the markets themselves. First published in 2006, it remains relevant today in a number of contexts — not least because of the recent interest from TradFi in crypto. But I wanted to read it again because of the book I’m working on with colleague Robert Hackett, about how computer science theories acted on the world.” – Tim Sullivan, editorial
A Man for All Markets: From Las Vegas to Wall Street, How I Beat the Dealer and the Market by Edward O. Thorp
“Growing up, I was obsessed with the movie 21 and the idea that you could actually use math to beat the house. This book is the autobiography of the man who essentially started it all. Edward Thorp went on to apply those same principles to Wall Street, becoming the father of quantitative investing. It’s an incredible story about using pure logic to disrupt rigged legacy systems, which perfectly captures the same builder mindset we see in crypto today.” – Ben Wu, talent
Daniel Agee, an early member of the team at Glass, writing on the Glass blog:
It’s not lost on us that Om’s photography, often taken in frozen lands in or around the arctic circle, was the polar opposite of his personality. While he focused on subtle shapes and hidden landscapes, he was the sun of any group he was in. Folks just naturally fell into his orbit.
Agee’s lovely piece is replete with photos by Om.
A veteran of the internet publishing space, he was one of the first to take the now well-worn path of technology writing into venture capital. When we briefly explored raising a small round of VC funding after our launch to support our growth, Om was our first call. He answered and immediately said, “I love you guys, I’ll invest the money if you want it, but don’t fucking do it. What you have is special. Don’t fucking ruin it.”
That’s Om. Simple and to the point. That simplicity showed up in his photography practice. Strip away everything from a photograph, down to the bare minimum of contrast or shadow. What do you focus on? What do you see? How can something so simple be so fulfilling?
That is exactly how Om spoke. Always. To the point. Why waste time? Why mince words? Why make someone guess what you really think? Our instincts say otherwise, but it’s not rude to be blunt. Unmoderated honesty is a profound courtesy.
Matt Mullenweg:
Fundamentally, Om was a lover of humanity. He became a fast “regular” everywhere he went. He wouldn’t just buy coffee, he would also learn the name and story of every barista, the dogs and people in South Park. His deep curiosity and respect weren’t just for the fine and famous. It extended to every soul that crossed his path. His encyclopedic knowledge and photographic memory created connections not just in San Francisco, but all around the world wherever we traveled. (I need to pull the stats, but we went to five continents together, including Antarctica.)
He loved people and their stories.
And:
One of the biggest lessons I learned from Om is the deep appreciation of craft. When he took an interest in photography or pens, he would somehow find his way to the most obscure, highest-quality expression of that form. “What Would Om Want?” is a question I will always ponder. I want to craft products that would make Om proud.
If you’re going to get into something, you ought to pursue it to its full extent. If you’re not interested enough to do that, don’t bother getting into it. Find the few things you love; don’t waste your time on the many things you merely like.
Matt is keeping a wonderful list of links to other remembrances and tributes to Om.
Clay Risen, writing for The New York Times (gift link):
Mr. Malik started his blog just as the dot-com bubble burst, leading to a recession that also took down many of the journalism start-ups that wrote about tech, like The Industry Standard and Inside.com. He was among the most prominent of the writers who quickly filled the gap, covering Silicon Valley with a mixture of hot scoops and sharp opinions that quickly made Gigaom a must-read.
“The Android OS leaves me feeling like one feels three hours after having Chinese food: a tad empty,” he wrote in a 2010 post that neatly summarized Google’s struggles to move beyond its roots as a search platform. “Google has to learn the art of engagement — something particularly challenging.”
Lovely, warm, accurate and fair obituary. This pulled snippet is a great one. Early Android as Chinese takeout is such a deft analogy, and the piece really isn’t about Android specifically but Google institutionally. Not speeds and feeds, but can they make products with a soul? With heart? Om’s pessimism was obvious, and I’d say, prescient.
He had a rare ability to see around corners, and to pick out from the horde of new companies the ones that were going to make real change. He was an early champion of Slack, the workplace messaging service, and in 2006 he was the first blogger to write extensively about Twitter. He was not a fan.
Back in the day Letterman had a recurring bit called “Is This Anything?” They’d bring someone or something on stage and then Dave and Paul would render their up/down judgment: was that anything? The answer, more often than not, was no. The Letterman bit was a gag. But that’s basically what tech journalism is — especially back in the heyday of startups. Every startup believes it’s something and wants the press to think it’s something. Most of the time, it’s not something. Once in a while it is. Om was so goddamn good at identifying the somethings.
Long before Facebook came in for attacks from both the political left and right, he called out, during a 2013 interview with Bloomberg TV, what he said was “absolutely an air of amorality” on the part of its founder and chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg. In the same interview, he criticized the venture capitalist John Doerr for “patently trying to hijack the political process.”
He was right early, and right often. You can say now that everyone knows there’s “an air of amorality” at Facebook institutionally and with Zuckerberg personally. In 2013 that was not a common refrain. Just a year earlier, Apple had added Facebook account integration at the system level in iOS 6.
In a New York Times piece, “All Men Are Created Equal, Not Everyone Agrees“, Kim Phillips-Fein correctly critiques the current trend of rich men who disparage equality and want us to give way to whomever they take to be the exceptional few. She quotes billionaire Peter Theil and others that there are such special people, themselves included of course, whom we should defer to. She defends equality but points out that unfortunately notable people throughout U.S. history have disputed the idea that all are equal. It’s the same ridiculous and horrendous mistake that Ayn Rand made, which will be describe.
First, “All men” should obviously be shortened to “All”. All genders, all colors, all sexuality, simply “All”. The Times piece implies that but let’s state it explicitly.
Second, as the piece points out in quotes from various men, they confuse the meanings of equality. They claim that because not all have the same intelligence or productivity, that equality is therefore a myth. Well of course not all have the same capabilities or temperaments. The equality staked out in the Declaration of Independence is equality of value. Bright or not, greatly productive or not, each is a human deserving, no, requiring the full respect, and treatment-with-value as every other. That these men of claimed brilliance stumble over this simple distinction highlights their shortcomings. History shows that those same blind spots have created catastrophes.
To explain, let’s look at how this is all a repeat of the mistake Ayn Rand made. A mistake so absurd and deplorable as to, again, highlight its own shortcomings.
Well over a decade ago I read Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged”. Long before reading it I had known her philosophy, Objectivism, and felt it had some truth but was incomplete. Knowing that, I never felt the need to read her novel. When I did read it I was surprised at it’s core theme. The core thing that she expresses relentlessly, almost without pause, throughout her long novel, is her complete contempt for almost all people.
It’s supposed to celebrate the individual, but just like in real life, actions speak louder than words. In her story there are maybe 25 people in the whole U.S. who are virtuous, productive and capable. All of the other 99.9999 percent are idiots who couldn’t even feed themselves if not for the work of this handful of worthies.
This is not some exaggeration. This literally is the story. The brightest man goes about finding all the other men who can think and are productive (they are almost without exception men), and convinces them to leave society and live in their own compound. Their expressed purpose is they think society is so messed up it deserves to collapse, and that if this small group withdraws it will collapse. Indeed the end scene is several of them flying over New York City watching as transportation and power and lights fail. Society disintegrates into chaos with, we’re given to understand, starvation and all the worst results you can imagine. All because this handful of people withdrew and the rest of us idiots are incapable of keeping the lights on without them.
A philosophy of productiveness, of initiative, of responsibility for oneself is exactly correct as far as it goes, like one side of a coin. The side of the coin she missed has most of the value of everything from the teachings of Jesus, to the philosophy of the Western World in the constitution. Her extreme elitism stands in contrast to the open compassion of Jesus, and to our constitution. To our central idea that we hold all people in such high esteem that the sanctity of every individual is our core. That the sanctity of the wisdom of the people, through democratic elections, is the foundation of our government. She claims to believe that, but her book tells a different story.
It is the bulk of the people, workaday people, whose industriousness, ingenuity, and character creates pretty much everything worthwhile. Their relentless building, generation upon generation, of cultures, economies, societies, cities, philosophies. Far from being unable to feed ourselves or keep the lights on, we are the ones who grow the food and literally do keep the lights on. Who did she think she was and how did she come to be so bizarrely arrogant and blindly ignorant? How does one come to think that the very people who grow all the food and do all the work couldn’t keep things going if not for the “blessed” presence of her and a few who think too much of themselves? If Musk and Theil and some of their fellows wanted to leave now, leave their companies to the direction of others, and go live in a compound away from the rest of us, they are welcome to it.
Adding a note here about the current crop of uber-rich, it is also the work of the many that created the wealth owned by the few rich men now claiming superiority. As directors they may have ambitious ideas and state the goals but then every step of carrying that out is done by competent, workaday people. The many built the wealth that those rich few now stand on to claim their superiority.
Unfortunately, it is often those few that are exceptionally effective who are too good at amassing power. They leave the workaday people with less than what their work should gain them, get them frustrated, play on their fears, play groups off each other, and end up undermining the good world that the work of the bulk of the people creates.
Rand’s one-sided coin, her philosophy of logic without heart, is dangerous. In her story not only do her elites withdraw, some actively sabotage the work of the many, under the idea that their collapse is needed in order to have a clean start toward a better future. Better in the eyes of one person, Ayn Rand. That’s the exact same mistake Mao Zedong made in China, starving millions, certain it was necessary in order to lead them to a better future. There is nothing more dangerous than moral certainty without heart.
We humans, we many, contain both, logic and heart. Our ideas are great because they have both, from New Testament compassion to the democracy and rights in our constitution. Rand missed that. Missed it in a most extreme way. Missed the best 99.9999 percent of it.
Now this current crop of uber rich want to repeat all of that mistake.
They are amazingly good at some things, at amassing money, and spearheading organizations of engineers to build spaceships and satellite networks and the like. At the same time they readily demonstrate that they are very bad at some essential human skills and understanding.
Take Elon Musk’s DOGE project to radically cut government spending. Wantonly hacking away at parts of an organization in the “move fast and break things” mode and then building new things as you go is a great way to advance a technology company. But it’s a terrible way to approach governing when the “break things” part is real peoples’ lives who may be ruined in the mean time.
Musk either didn’t know that, which would emphasize that his skills do not extend to human leadership, or he didn’t care, which would be worse. It verifies that even though these men are uber-accomplished they have flaws which disqualify them from leadership regarding the lives of the many.
Mao Zedong, as noted, was also amazingly capable and accomplished. He rose from being a peasant to leading the people of the most populous country to completely transform it. But, oops, the holes in his understanding of humanity led him to impose policies that created a famine that killed 40 million people. In a current parallel, there is a very credible estimate that when the DOGE project mostly eliminated U.S.A.I.D., the foreign aid agency, it resulted in 600,000 additional deaths worldwide, in the first year.
Being good at some things does not qualify one to mess with peoples’ lives. The fact that these current uber few don’t even seem to have a sense of what their limitations are, that they are too un-self-aware to know that they don’t know, is such a fundamental disqualification they would be terrible choices for most high positions. Yes, let them lead companies. But don’t let them anywhere near the governing of the people.
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The post Uber-Rich Repeat Ayn Rand’s Deadly Mistake appeared first on DCReport.org.
Writing in the QJE, Derenoncourt, Kim, Kuhn, & Schularick argue that today’s black-white wealth gap can be explained by differences in initial conditions from over a hundred and fifty years ago, i.e. slavery. But there is an important, and glaring objection: in the age of immigration (1850–1924) millions of whites immigrated to the United States with essentially no wealth and yet they caught up to the “heritage” whites quite quickly and indeed today are richer than heritage whites.
Brian Marein collects and carefully analyzes the data:
Persistent racial wealth inequality in the United States is often attributed to the intergenerational transmission of historical wealth disparities. However, inferring the determinants of long-run inequality from group-level data is complicated by the arrival of 30 million Europeans during the Age of Mass Migration (1850–1924), who are by construction included in average white wealth despite having no direct claim to the wealth accumulated by earlier Americans. This paper accounts for this compositional change in the white population by documenting wealth dynamics among European immigrants and their descendants. Cash-on-arrival data show that immigrants began with substantial wealth deficits relative to the native-born. Yet by the late twentieth century, these deficits had closed, as indicated by comparisons between the descendants of later-arriving Southern and Eastern Europeans and those of longer-established Northwestern Europeans. This pattern implies rapid intraracial wealth convergence, in contrast to the slower convergence observed across racial groups. A stylized model shows that these differences can be largely accounted for by income. These findings demonstrate that large wealth disparities do not mechanically persist when groups have access to comparable economic opportunities.
If initial conditions don’t explain the wealth gap then the most likely explanation is an income and/or savings gaps. I am reminded of an earlier politically incorrect paper of the year by Nathaniel Hilger and see also my review of his book The Parent Trap.
The post Politically Incorrect Paper of the Day: The US Racial Wealth Gap appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
A wide range of Democratic voices are in the process of shaping new political language to move their party, and the country, forward. James Talarico is one of those new voices. On Friday, June 26, he delivered his official acceptance speech for the Democratic nomination for U.S. senator from Texas at the Texas Democratic Convention held in Corpus Christi.
He began by invoking Barbara Jordan, a lawyer who in 1972 became the first Black woman elected to Congress from Texas. A brilliant orator, Jordan delivered a statement on July 24, 1974, from her seat on the House Judiciary Committee during President Richard Nixon’s impeachment that is considered one of the most powerful speeches in U.S. history. “My faith in the Constitution is whole; it is complete; it is total,” she said. “And I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction, of the Constitution.”
After tying himself to both the state’s multicultural history and its defense of democracy through Jordan, Talarico used a different vision from Jordan to make his case for the future. He recalled that Jordan said “the soil and spirit of Texas” made her feel that she could accomplish whatever she wanted, “that there are no limits.” Talarico used Jordan’s embrace of the American dream to anchor his own new political vision for the twenty-first century.
It is a vision that resonates beyond Texas.
Talarico rooted himself firmly in Texas’s past and present. He emphasized that he is an eighth-generation Texan whose family arrived in the region when it was still Mexican. “We may not have always been wealthy or well educated,” he said, “but we always served our state.” His ancestor Elijah Stapp signed the Texas Declaration of Independence that declared the region free from Mexican president Antonio López de Santa Anna, risking everything, Talarico said, “to defy a tyrant.”
That independence cost Stapp dearly. Four months after he signed the document, Santa Anna’s army destroyed his home, leaving him, his wife, and their six children destitute. But Stapp was undeterred. He wrote to his neighbors, “Any duty that my bodily strength would enable me to perform, either in public or private, that would advance the cause of Texas, I feel anxious and ever ready to perform.”
“Texans don’t like tyrants,” Talarico said, “And we don’t surrender easily.”
Bringing that theme to the modern era, Talarico told the story of his mother, “a seventh-generation Texan from Laredo,” who left an abusive relationship to make a life with her infant son. “That’s what it means to be a Texan,” he said. “We are strivers and builders and dreamers of all colors and creeds of all backgrounds and beliefs. It’s in our blood.”
“Texas is big,” Talarico said. “Big hair, big hearts, and big dreams. Our athletes are beloved across the globe. Cowboys, Astros, Spurs. Our musicians, our musicians are so iconic, they only need one name. Willie. Selena. Beyoncé.”
“But the current political landscape is too small for Texas,” he said. “Texas used to be known for our hospitality…. Friendship across tribes, friendship across divides. That’s what makes Texas so great. We’re this big mash-up of all these different people, all these different cultures, all these different friends. Think about, think about Tejano music. If you’re listening to a Selena song, you’re hearing Spanish vocal styles from northern Mexico. But you’re also hearing polka dance rhythms from Czech and German immigrants. This uniquely…Texan ability to welcome new friends and new ideas has made us one of the most exciting and innovative states in the country.”
“We’re the state that put a man on the moon,” Talarico said. “We’re the state that pioneered ranching and energy and computers. We’re the state that gave this country Barbara Jordan, Ann Richards, LBJ, and the Great Society. We’re the state that put breakfast in a taco.”
Then Talarico turned to the present. “[T]oday, we face a new threat,” he said. “Our state is being taken over by a new kind of tyrant: billionaire megadonors. They’re not invading with an army. They’re just buying the system. The billionaires who own the social media algorithms, who own the cable news networks, who own the politicians fighting on our screens, they are turning neighbor against neighbor. Weakening that spirit of friendship that makes Texas so great. They divide us by party, by race, by gender, by religion, so we don’t notice that they’re picking our pockets. It is the oldest strategy in the world. Divide and conquer.”
“But,” he said, “Texas will not be conquered.”
Talarico accused “these new tyrants” of looking out of state “to find puppet politicians who were willing to do their bidding.” He said they picked his opponent, Ken Paxton, “the most corrupt politician in America,” who was “born in North Dakota, raised in California, and has a place in Hawaii.”
“Listen,” Talarico said, “I believe anyone can be a Texan.” That identity lives “not in the boots or in the truck,” but in people’s hearts. But the billionaires and “their puppets have the wrong state of mind. Their hearts and their dreams are just not big enough. We let these small men get their hands on our big state. You know the kind of people I’m talking about. The kind who make themselves feel big by making everyone else feel small.
“These men, they took all the money and power they could grab, and they set out to shrink Texas down to their size. They’re shrinking our Texas economy with job-killing tariffs. They are shrinking our Texas public schools with private school voucher scams. They’re shrinking our healthcare, so it covers less and less. They’re shrinking our paychecks and how much those paychecks can buy. And they’re shrinking our power by attacking our God-given rights at the ballot box and redrawing our districts to keep themselves in power. They have been shrinking Texas for three decades now. But that ends this year in this election.
“In November, we can make Texas big again,” Talarico said. “We can make Texas friendly again. We can make Texas, Texas, again. We have the chance to take back our state from those billionaire mega donors and their puppet politicians who stole it from us.”
“This isn’t a partisan thing,” Talarico said as he pointed out that Republicans and Democrats came together to impeach Paxton, and he reminded people that Sam Houston, the first president of the Texas Republic, told people to “do right, and risk the consequences.” “What would Sam Houston think about the small men who are shrinking Texas?” Talarico asked. “What would Sam Houston, who put Texas before himself, say about Ken Paxton, who puts himself before Texas? What would Sam Houston say to all of us at this critical moment in Texas history? I think he would say, do right, and risk the consequences.
“There’s an old country song by Gary P. Nunn, called ‘What I Like About Texas.’ In the song, he lists the rivers and the bluebonnets, the music and the food. But ultimately, he settles on one answer. He says it’s the spirit of the people who share this land. The spirit of Barbara Jordan. The spirit of my mom, the spirit that’s in this room. The feeling that we can accomplish whatever we want to….
“This election shouldn’t be about the Democratic Party or the Republican Party,” Talarico said. “It should be about chasing a vision of what our state can be. Texas schools that are the envy of the nation. A Texas economy that is second to none, and Texas families that are stronger and healthier than ever before. It won’t happen overnight. But a giant state deserves giant dreams. We are— We are bigger than extremism. We’re bigger than partisanship. We’re bigger than corruption. Texas is bigger than all of those things. Because it’s not just a state. It’s a state of mind….
“Texans don’t like tyrants. And we don’t surrender easily. Tonight, standing before you, to accept your nomination for the United States Senate, I make the same commitment to you that my ancestor made 200 years ago. Any duty that my bodily strength would enable me to perform, either in public or private, that would advance the cause of Texas, I feel anxious and ever ready to perform.”
—
Notes:
https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/impeachment/my-faith-constitution-whole-it-complete-it-total
YouTube:
Human prosperity depends on nature, but no global metric has captured this with precision. Enter the Nature Relationship Index
- by Yadvinder Malhi
We’ve taken one small step towards robot police officers: a drone capable of disarming a suspect:
In a June 22 video posted on the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office’s Instagram page, an officer wearing goggles can be seen operating a drone to retrieve a knife from an armed suspect hiding inside a cluttered house. “After not responding to negotiators, a drone was deployed inside the residence,” the post says. “Drone pilots located the suspect hiding in a corner of a garage” and then used a high-powered magnet attached to the drone to grab the knife out of the suspect’s hand. In the video which is soundtracked by the “Mission: Impossible” theme song—the intercepted knife can be seen spinning around in the air as the drone carries it back to the deputies.
Slashdot thread.
When 13 billion years of the cosmos get condensed into 10 epic minutes, when in the timelapse do you think humans appear?
- by Aeon Video
(Glasgow, UK) Glasgow-based space engineering company Craft Prospect has been selected for inclusion in the inaugural edition of The Sunday Times Scotland Fast 50, a new annual list recognising some […]
The post Craft Prospect selected for The Sunday Times Scotland Fast 50 appeared first on SpaceNews.
HELSINKI — China has established a national very low Earth orbit industry alliance, as multiple satellites demonstrate sustained operations below 300 kilometers and propulsion startups attract investment. China established a […]
The post China establishes VLEO industry alliance as satellites demonstrate sustained low-orbit operations appeared first on SpaceNews.
Most pharmaceuticals involve high upfront costs, to discover and test the drug, and very low marginal costs. Another pill can be printed almost for free.
That cost structure favors health systems, such as that of Britain, that try to pay lower for services. They can end up getting a relatively good deal from price discrimination. After all, they can be served at low marginal cost, at least for those ttreatments.
Now imagine a biomedical future where many more treatments are based on the sequencing of your individual genome, and then the development of specific treatments personalized to you. Obviously it will depend on developments, but very likely those remedies will have relatively high marginal costs.
In that setting the British approach to health care procurement and pricing will work less well. It is the well-capitalized, “overspending” systems, such as the United States, that will have an easier time making the adjustment.
“The rising relative advantage of well-capitalized health care systems” is a neglected trend, because it makes a lot of earlier elite pronouncements about health care economics look a bit off.
The post Will future biomedical advances be low marginal cost? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Workplace technological changes were instrumental in creating new tasks for women over the last century. This paper studies the adoption of the typewriter into US workplaces. Exploiting exogenous variation in typist demand across sectors, I document that the typewriter increased women’s labor force participation, leading to lower rates of marriage and fertility. These developments stemmed from a transition of White women from households into office work and an indirect crowding-in effect drawing Black women into household services. Acting as a “meeting technology,” the typewriter reshaped social interactions, enabling White women to marry above their socioeconomic backgrounds and achieve upward mobility.
That is from a recent paper by Myera Rashid. Via Kris Gulati.
The post Typewriters and fertility appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
At first glance, it may look as though we’re about to enter the Milky Way. However, today’s Picture of the Week actually features the road sign indicating the entrance to the ALMA Observatory, in Chile’s Atacama Desert. The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), which is operated by ESO together with international partners, studies the light from the coldest corners of the Universe.
Water vapour in Earth’s atmosphere readily absorbs the millimetre and submillimetre wavelengths of radiation that ALMA observes. This is why ALMA is located in one of the driest and highest places on Earth, on the Chajnantor Plateau in the Andes, at an impressive altitude of 5000 metres.
ALMA has given us some of the most detailed images of our Milky Way, showing among other things filaments of dense clouds of gas and dust at its core. Unlike our eyes, or a camera like the one that took this photo, ALMA uses a technique called interferometry that allows us to see fine details of distant celestial objects. By combining the light captured with each of the 66 high-precision antennas in its array, ALMA works as a single telescope with a diameter equal to the farthest distance between antennas.
While not being able to physically reach the glowing band of our galaxy seen in this picture, images like the ones produced by ALMA are some of the closest "gateways” we have to admire the Milky Way and its constituents.
Editor’s note: In honor of America’s 250th birthday, Earth Observatory is revisiting stories about the landscapes that helped shape U.S. history. The images and text on this page were originally published on September 14, 2014. Explore the full collection here.
The song is familiar to every American, but the moment and place where it was composed are less so.
On April 24, 2014, the Operational Land Imager (OLI) on Landsat 8 captured this view of Baltimore, Maryland, and its harbor. Fort McHenry and its star-shaped ramparts—the place where “that star-spangled banner yet wave[d],” on September 14, 1814—stand at the entrance to the city’s Inner Harbor. The area was a pivotal battleground in the War of 1812.
In September 1814, British naval and ground forces advanced on the city of Baltimore, emboldened by the August 24 burning of the White House and the Capitol building in Washington, D.C. On September 12, British forces landed at North Point, 5 miles (8 kilometers) southeast of Baltimore (just off the lower right of this image), and engaged American troops in several small battles. By September 13, the land forces approached the city of Baltimore but were repelled by U.S. Army and Maryland militia forces assembled behind a mile of earthworks and trenches along Hampstead Hill—near what is now known as Patterson Park (image top center).
On the morning of September 13, British naval vessels set up positions roughly at the point where this image is labeled Baltimore Harbor. They began a 25-hour bombardment of Fort McHenry, staying far enough offshore to hit the fort with rockets and cannonballs but out of the range of American artillery. Unable to subdue the fort, and hampered by several merchant vessels that were intentionally sunk in the harbor, the British forces ended their attack on the morning of September 14.
The Battle of Baltimore moved a young American lawyer and negotiator to write a song entitled “Defense of Fort M’Henry.” Francis Scott Key had spent the night of September 13 on a British vessel in the Patapsco River, working to secure the release of American prisoners of war. Local legend in Maryland holds that the HMS Tonnant was anchored roughly where the Key Bridge is now located, giving Key a direct view toward Fort McHenry and “the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air,” that “gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.” On September 14, a clean 30 by 42 foot American flag was raised over Fort McHenry “by the dawn’s early light.”
Key’s four-verse song was published on September 20, 1814, in the Baltimore Patriot and the Advertiser. The battle hymn was eventually renamed “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and was declared the national anthem in 1931.
Beyond its pivotal role in the War of 1812, Baltimore has long been an important seaport on the East Coast of the United States, particularly because of its proximity by road and rail to inland agricultural and industrial hubs in the Midwest. Situated on the Chesapeake Bay, the city is now home to more than 600,000 residents. According to some media reports, nearly one-quarter of the jobs in the Baltimore area are related to science, technology, engineering, or mathematics. It is home to the Space Telescope Science Institute, the operations center for the Hubble Space Telescope.
NASA Earth Observatory image by Jesse Allen, using Landsat data provided by the U.S. Geological Survey. Story by Michael Carlowicz.
Stay up-to-date with the latest content from NASA as we explore the universe and discover more about our home planet.
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The post Star-Spangled City appeared first on NASA Science.
Nearly a month has passed since the New Glenn rocket exploded on its launch pad in Florida, creating a massive fireball. It was likely the largest ever rocket explosion at the historic Florida spaceport, and we are still dealing with its implications today.
The rocket's explosion took out its only launch pad, LC-36A. So even if Blue Origin can quickly diagnose the cause of the failure, it has nowhere to launch the New Glenn rocket from. Company officials, including founder Jeff Bezos, have said the vehicle will return to flight at LC-36A before the end of this year, though there is widespread skepticism about that timeline.
Meanwhile, we have more questions than answers about a rocket that had become increasingly central to the needs of NASA and commercial customers. What does this failure mean for the Artemis Program to land humans on the Moon? What do we know about the timing of Artemis III and the lunar landing mission, Artemis IV? What about the Moon base?
Although they look like cotton candy, you cannot eat these clouds! Taken in
My thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring DF last week to promote Auth.md, their new open protocol for AI agent registration. (Who’d have thunk that I’d be getting paid to promote new uses for Markdown 22 years after releasing it?)
Sign-up forms were built for humans in browsers, so how do AI agents programmatically register with services? That’s the question Auth.md aims to answer. It’s a single Markdown file you host at your domain that tells agents how to register your users, which flows you support, what scopes you expose, and how credentials get issued. It’s like robots.txt but for agent registration.
Cloudflare, Firecrawl, and Resend have already adopted it.
An open protocol authored by WorkOS. Read the spec.
