Last week at the United Nations General Assembly, governments were confronted with a simple moral test: whether to formally recognize and take a stand against the enduring legacy of the enslavement of Africans and its continuing impact on millions of lives today. This was not about the past alone, but about the systems of exploitation that persist in the present.
Yet instead of standing on the side of justice, 52 countries abstained while Argentina, Israel, and the United States voted against the nonbinding resolution, which passed with 123 votes.
There is no neutral ground when it comes to slavery.
Ghana sponsored the resolution, which passed with strong support from African and Caribbean nations still damaged by the transatlantic chattel slave trade from the 15th Century into the late 19th Century.
The resolution called the slave trade the “gravest crime against humanity.” It also called for reparations as “a concrete step towards remedying historical wrongs.”
This was not a complicated geopolitical question. It was not a matter of interpretation or nuance. It was a vote on one of the most brutal and enduring injustices in human history.
And yet, 52 countries chose to abstain. Abstention is not neutrality. Abstention is a decision.
Wise Words
We should heed the words of Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor and recipient of the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize: “We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim.”
As Desmond Tutu, the anti-apartheid activist who received the 1984 Peace Prize, taught: “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.”
By refusing to take a stand, these governments aligned themselves, not with the victims, but with a system that continues to exploit hundreds of millions of vulnerable people.
Damage Endures
The legacy of the enslavement of Africans is not confined to history books; it lives on today in the structures of the global economy, where exploitation remains deeply embedded. Tens of millions of children, many of them in regions historically scarred by that legacy, are still forced into labor, deprived of education, dignity, and freedom.
We must also confront an uncomfortable reality: there are more people living in conditions of slavery today than at any other time in history, even if they are not chattel slaves in the historical and legal sense. Modern slavery has evolved, hidden in supply chains, factories, farms, and informal economies, but its essence remains the same: the systematic exploitation of human beings for profit.
Among the 52 countries that abstained are, in alphabetical order, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom, among others. These are not marginal actors in the global economy. They are some of its principal architects and beneficiaries.
The uncomfortable truth is that many of these countries, along with the United States, which voted against, are not passive observers.
Who Benefits
The 52 nations, and the three that voted against the resolution, are among the main financial beneficiaries of a global system built on exploitation and child labor in the Global South, and, in many cases, even within their own borders, where the labor of hundreds of millions of the poorest and most vulnerable, including little girls and little boys, is systematically undervalued and exploited to sustain consumption and profit.
I often hear the argument that those who provide work to children are helping them survive. This claim is not only misleading; it is appalling. It ignores a fundamental reality: every child who works loses far more than he or she earns, because that child is not in school. For these small children, work is a lifelong trap.
What is taken from these exploited children is not just time, but opportunity, dignity, and the possibility of a better future.
This is the contradiction at the heart of the modern world: nations that speak the language of human rights while benefiting from their violation.
Neutrality, in this context, is not caution; it is complicity. Abstention allows governments to avoid accountability while continuing to profit from injustice. It signals to corporations that there is no urgency to change. And it tells victims that their suffering does not merit even the most basic act of solidarity: a vote.
History does not judge kindly those who remain silent in the face of injustice. The great moral struggles of humanity, from the abolition of slavery to the fight against apartheid, were not won by those who abstained, but by those who chose to stand clearly and unequivocally on the side of human dignity.
Moral Duty
The 52 countries that refused to take that stand, together with the three that voted against, did more than miss a diplomatic opportunity, they revealed a deeper truth: economic interests still outweigh moral responsibility in the global order.
Ending modern forms of slavery and child labor requires more than words. It requires courage. It requires governments willing to confront the systems that benefit them. It requires a recognition that the legacy of the enslavement of Africans is not past; it is present.
There is no neutral ground when it comes to slavery. There never has been.
There never will be.
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Pinker writes about how Trivers introduced game-theoretic ideas into evolutionary biology (with genes as the players, and selection into subsequent generations as the payoffs). It's a well written tribute.
"Trivers’s contributions belong in the special category of ideas that are obvious once they are explained, yet eluded great minds for ages; simple enough to be stated in a few words, yet with implications that have busied scientists for decades. In an astonishing creative burst from 1971 to 1975, Trivers wrote five seminal essays that invoked patterns of genetic overlap to explain each of the major human relationships: male with female, parent with child, sibling with sibling, partner with partner, and a person with himself or herself."
Some attendees at an AI Tinkerers meetup in early Feb were asking me what it’s like to be the maintainer of a big OSS project where the community PRs are all AI slop. They thought it would make for a good blog post. I thought so too, at the time!
It turned out to be very, very, very hard to write down. It’s in many ways the opposite of conventional wisdom for software maintainers, OSS or otherwise. So this post has given me over 2 months of writer’s block. (I had to update that duration many times while writing this.)
Why is it so important for me to tell you how I deal with a storm of AI-generated PRs? Because I’m beginning to believe that my “vibe maintainer” workflow, crazy as it might sound, will be what a lot of you are doing before long. Everyone who works on successful OSS will soon have to deal with PR storms.
Vibe Maintainer: Using AI to help manage AI-generated PRs
The Rising Tide
To give you a sense of the scale I work at, I’m cruising towards 50 contributor PRs a day, combined between Beads (20k stars, 5 months old) and Gas Town (13k stars, 3 months old). That’s seven days a week; if I take a day or two off, they pile up and I may have to deal with 100 or more in a single day.
It’s an enthusiastic community. We’ve had over 1000 unique contributors between the two repos, with over 4k PRs (2300+ merged), and over 15k commits, all in just a few months. And we have a great community with almost two thousand Gas Town users hanging out chatting on the Gas Town Hall Discord.
Through all that, my median time to resolution is about 15 hours, with few PRs waiting more than a few days. This is high velocity. But I still manage to keep my quality bar high enough that both projects continue to exhibit strong growth. It may look like I’m only merging 60% of the PRs from the metrics, but that’s an artifact of fix-merging. I actually merge about 88% of all incoming contributor PRs, one way or another, and both projects are flourishing from it.
Beads in particular is well-integrated with the broader ecosystem — for instance, it now has solid integration with GitHub, GitLab, Linear, JIRA, Azure DevOps, Notion, and five self-hosted storage options. This is all encapsulated as a rich plugin interface for backend engines that each of them implement. Nearly all of that was from community contributions.
It’s safe to say people love Beads and Gas Town, even though mostly only agents have ever seen their source code. I certainly haven’t. No time for field trips.
I’m a very lazy person, and maintaining a popular OSS repo, let alone two of them, would simply not have been possible for me, like ever, up until maybe a year ago. I’m getting by with AI, that’s the only way. As my PR volume has increased, I’ve been able to keep afloat through model and tool improvements, automating as much of the decision tree as I can.
Even with AI help, keeping up with community PRs takes me 15–20 hours a week, usually 2 to 3 hours a day. Sometimes much, much more.
I wish I could tell you it’s easy work. I have at least managed to automate all the easy stuff, which is about half the PRs, sometimes up to two thirds of them. I was recently inspired by Dane Poyzer’s gt-toolkit package — a series of Gas Town formulas he published, which now has its own little user subcommunity. Dane’s formulas help you run his ambitious long running idea-to-delivery workflow, which is geared at comprehensive feature development and moving through mountains of work with his Gas Towns. My own PR workflow is now a formula as well.
Before we dive into the vibe maintainer workflow, let’s revisit why it’s needed at all. Am I not just bringing this on myself by allowing AI-assisted PRs in the first place?
Live of a Vibe Maintainer: Gems and Dead Birds
Saying No to AI: The “Fork You” Problem
Since 99% of my incoming PR submissions are AI-generated, it stands to reason that I could reduce my workload by 99% by saying “No AI PRs.” In that world, instead of doing all this crazy vibe maintainer stuff, I’d just wake up every morning, brew some coffee, shake my fist at the sky, browse HN, and maybe take the mule to town. The easy life.
Most OSS maintainers go this route. They straight-up forbid AI-generated or even AI-assisted pull requests. And I can understand why. The crap you see in AI-generated PRs these days can turn you into the Clint Eastwood angry-porch meme, practically overnight. Rather than deal with it, they outlaw it.
That of course triggers an arms race. You can get an AI-assisted PR accepted, but only if you sneak it in. So we hear comical stories of once-rejected PRs suddenly being accepted after they’re resubmitted with all the AI DNA scrubbed from the crime scene, hee hee haw haw.
But that’s the official party line for most OSS projects today: “No AI.” It all has to be done by sneaking. The whole status quo in open-source is characterized by historic levels of silliness.
Here’s the problem with that old-school approach. We are headed toward a world in which if you refuse enough PRs, the community will consider you a dead-end street and begin routing around you. They will copy your software, either by forking it or rewriting it from the ground up, and use their own mutated version from then on. They might even develop a community around their version.
Software survival is now about velocity–specifically, keeping up with what your users want. Even a permissively-licensed OSS project can be forked and lose a ton of users and mindshare, if the project owners don’t listen to a sufficiently large subcommunity of their happy users.
As just one of many easy examples, Roo Code is a big community that forked off Cline (which itself is a fork of VS Code). And now people are forking Roo; I’ve seen some sizable ones taking shape. That’s a sad list of at least three communities effectively fighting over a code base. They could have united, but none of them could keep up with what their own users wanted, so it keeps on forking.
That particular fork family all happened before coding agents came into their own in late 2025. It was hard back then. Now that everyone on earth has access to powerful coding agents, we will see way more forks. Forking used to be a declaration of war. Now it’s simply a declaration that someone liked your software enough to want to change it, but you said No.
It’s always been trivial to create a fork. The hard part has always been maintaining the fork. As the fork’s community grows, so does the maintenance burden. It used to take a good-sized team to support a fork, which was almost like a rival gang. Nobody liked a fork. There was always bad blood. The XEmacs/Emacs rivalry was absolutely the stuff of legend. You wouldn’t believe some of it. It used to basically require corporate backing to have a credible fork of a large OSS project.
Today, things are astoundingly different. With the coding agents of 2026, everyone who loves your software is a credible threat to forking you. Any grandma who wants to use your software for gardening could build a massive grandma subcommunity with your stuff if you don’t take her PRs. She might not even know she’s done it. It’s just there for the taking, and you weren’t flexible enough. So her agent routed around you.
There’s nothing wrong with forks per se; that’s how evolution will happen. But it’s also a ton of duplication that might not have been necessary. A lot of people just want to add a small feature or fix to an existing software product, not clone the whole damn thing and maintain it for the rest of their lives. They want to share tokens and energy by pooling features and fixes together, as a community. So there are good reasons to avoid forking.
I do actively encourage forks where people are trying to take the code in a direction I just can’t follow. The earliest big fork was beads_rust from Jeffrey Emanuel, who told me he was very embarrassed to be forking my code, until we chatted about it and I gave it my heartfelt blessing.
This was a situation where he wanted only the streamlined original code’s behavior. Nothing else. And that’s one thing I couldn’t offer with my kitchen-sink approach to making my tool community- and AI-friendly. So I was happy he made that fork for those who need that streamlining.
If your software is popular, and you want to avoid forking (or rewriting), you need to build and foster your community. You need to let your system expand to accommodate the needs of as many users as practical.
People will ask more and more of your software, so you also have to decide where to draw your lines. You choose what belongs in your code, and what to exclude–any of which may go off to live in a fork somewhere to “compete” with you. Choose wisely!
The Gravitational-Well Finish Line
My own approach is radically different from how most OSS maintainers work: I say Yes to AI. Instead of rejecting AI submissions, I encourage everyone to use AI to submit their PRs (subject to a growing list of hygiene rules). Indeed, I both observe and expect 99% of incoming PRs to be AI-assisted.
Why? Because this empowers my users to turn their wishes into code and get it into the system. It keeps them from thinking about off-ramps. It keeps them from forking me, and unites them into a larger community, which means they all benefit from sharing rather than reimplementing. It’s a net token savings, so software with strong communities will tend to survive.
Do some contributor PRs belong in a fork? Absolutely! I maintain high standards for what goes into the Beads and Gas Town core. I’ll reject PRs for many reasons, including being too opinionated, niche, or they don’t pull their tech-debt weight.
But if there’s a germ of a good idea in there, I try hard to find it and cultivate it.
Instead of requiring perfect PRs from everyone, I aim to find a quick resolution that is satisfying to all parties. I accept most PRs, but still maintain hard lines on architecture, what goes in core, code quality, and many other AI-era design principles (e.g. ZFC). If I were to send every PR back to the contributor for fixes, the rest of the community might be losing out on some important fix or feature for days to weeks. And there it is, sitting there in the PR; it just has issues with it.
In this situation, if you want to maximize throughput, then you may need to fix the contributor’s code yourself before it can be merged. Most OSS maintainers say, “Go fix your code.” I try my best to fix it myself and get it merged. There’s an art to this that I’ll discuss below.
My core philosophy is, help contributors get to the finish line. I optimize for community throughput. I review every PR and try to find the value in it, and have my worker agents do something appropriate for each one.
The PR Sheriff
My sheriff workflow consists of runs, where I try to resolve all PRs in a run, though I’m not always able. A run kicks off automatically every time I restart my designated sheriff crew members in my Gas Town, because I place a “sheriff bead” on their hook. So they notice it when they wake up. I can also start runs manually.
I discovered today, after many months of using this workflow with my Gas Town crew members, that the Mayor is actually way better at it. Like, far, far better, it’s crazy how much better it is. The Mayor, acting as PR Sheriff, takes a more holistic view, makes better decisions, and makes better use of Gas Town resources to get the PRs reviewed, fix-merged, and escalated in parallel.
The Mayor is my new PR Sheriff for my rigs
This was big news. It means I can shrink my Gas Town crew down to maybe 3 agents per rig (from 8 apiece), which will be huge for memory pressure. Huge for running it in parallel with Gas City while I cut over. More on that later.
Anyway, the workflow begins with the sheriff pulling descriptions of all open PRs, and categorizing them into easy-wins, fix-merge, and needs-review.
Easy wins are things like targeted bug fixes, doc updates, dependency bot auto-upgrades, and automatically closing drafts, PRs from banned contributors, etc. These are handled automatically every 2 hours with a patrol, which contributes to my sub-day median turnaround time. And they’re handled automatically during a PR sheriff run.
The first fix-merge candidates are easy wins that are broken for some reason — they fail CI, they need a rebase, or they have a simple error in them, but aside from that, they fit all the easy-win criteria. The sheriff may decide to auto-fix-merge those. My Mayor decided to sling them to polecats, which was nice.
Needs-review is any PR that looks kind of suspicious for some reason, so we’re going to have to have an agent suss it out, do a deep dive, and produce a report. These can be farmed to crew members or polecats, as the instructions are usually pretty simple. The reports can be handled however you like, e.g. having the sheriff summarize them for you. Or I sometimes go directly to the agents’ tmux sessions and read their reports.
From needs-review, we get a set of possible recommendations:
Easy win. Oops, it turned out to fit the easy-win criteria after all. Happens sometimes.
Merge. Agent recommends to human that we merge this PR. It may be small or big, but it is well-tested, broadly useful, well-documented, and good to go.
Merge-fix. It’s mergeable but we need to fix some issues afterward. But it’s OK to do it in a follow-up commit. We merge the PR as-is, then push a follow-up fix to main.
Fix-merge. It’s pretty busted, so we’re going to pull it locally, make a bunch of changes, and then we’ll push it; you will see the contributor attribution in the CHANGELOG.
Cherry-pick. The PR contains M items (features and/or fixes) and we only want N < M of them. We cherry pick the N things locally, fix them as needed, and commit them with attribution. We close the PR, effectively throwing the rest away, with an explanation.
Split-merge. The PR contains M items, but they’re separate concerns, and really should all have been in separate PRs. We pull it locally, split them into separate commits, and push them all with attribution to the original contributor.
Reimplement. The PR is essentially rejected, perhaps because I don’t like its design. But it was trying to solve some fundamental problem. So we see if we can find a better design, and if so, we implement it that way. We then close the PR thanking them and letting them know how we solved it.
Retire. This PR is obsolete; it may have been superseded by another PR (often from the same author, interestingly), or fixed by some other mechanism. Close it with a thank-you.
Reject. This may be a feature that does not pay its weight in tech debt, or one that is too niche to include in the core. Or it might be a design that does not fit my standards. Close the PR with a polite note to the sender.
Request changes. Last resort. This can lead to contributor starvation, so there’s almost never a good reason to do this, but I do use it occasionally.
There are a few other possible outcomes, such as re-routing the PR to the right project, banning the contributor, etc. But this is a pretty good starter list.
The PR decision tree has many outcomes
Notice that the first resort for almost every OSS maintainer, which is to send your PR back requesting changes, is the last resort in my vibe maintainer workflow. It ranks even lower than rejection, which itself is very serious, because rejection can lead to forking. And it’s cumulative. The more PRs you reject, the higher the chance of someone getting fed up with you.
Requesting changes is unfortunately the last resort because is quickly leads to contributor starvation; if you keep making them rebase it, the sheer velocity of the project can prevent their PR from landing for weeks, until you take steps to help it along. So you might as well help it right from the start. Don’t send it back for changes.
If there is good in the PR, then you should absorb that good into your code base, right there and then, rejecting anything you don’t like, and transforming the parts you’re absorbing. You can make bug fixes, architectural fixes, change the naming, make it a plugin, mix and match.
Most of the time, it’s Claude telling you, hey, this PR is mostly healthy but it’s missing a kidney, and you say, please add the kidney.
But sometimes, Claude looks at PR that adds a face-hugging alien to each worker, and it sizes it up, and says, “This PR is well-constructed, and the alien is robustly hugged to the agent’s face, with good test coverage and updates to all relevant work formulas.”
And you say, Claude, it’s a fucking face-hugging alien. And Claude says, oh right, that’s a very good point, we probably don’t want that, shall I close it with a polite note?
And that’s why the last 25% or so of pull requests need human review. At least, so far. It’s because there’s still a thing called taste that current models can’t be trusted with. Not yet.
Fix-merging: Keep the good parts, give contributor credit
PR Hygiene
I’ve instituted some lightweight hygiene rules for contributors. I don’t enforce them yet, and I’ve only announced them in a few places. I’m working to get them baked into the CONTRIBUTOR.md files and other important locations.
Here are some examples of hygiene rules for my repos:
Cross-project pollution: Beads must not know about Gas Town. Do not put Gas Town concepts into Beads. Gas Town doesn’t know about Gas City, and the Wasteland doesn’t know about any of them.
Use plugins whenever possible. Do not put stuff in core if there is a way to do it with integrations/extensions/plugins.
Don’t submit drafts. I’ll just close them.
One concern per PR. Split up large PRs.
Remove all unnecessary files. Minimalist. Make the fewest changes possible.
Rebase. Don’t use an old fork; rebase right before you submit the PR.
Right now, my policy is to fix all these things, and just complain about them when I close the PR. As the models get smarter, more of this can be handled automatically. But in general, I think people who abuse it might start getting banned, since they’re basically pushing their QA for their PRs (and associated costs for fixing them) onto me.
Summing Up
That’s a pretty good overview of the PR workflow. I know I said it was hard to write down. It was, dammit.
When you get down to the last 5–10% of the PRs, they’re usually hefty features, and you may need to spend a lot of time digging into them and figuring out whether you really want to pull them in. You may ask the agent a ton of questions about each PR, ask it to consider alternatives, or just tell it you don’t see the point. If the agent can’t justify the PR, then it’s probably not worth taking yet.
But that last 5% to 10% is the part that takes hours a day. There’s always a list of PRs that are just right on the edge and need my judgment call, though I wish it weren’t so. It is definitely getting easier now that Gas Town is becoming essentially feature-complete, due to the launch of Gas City. So I auto-close any large features and redirect the contributors to Gas City.
Summing it all up, being a vibe maintainer means trying to absorb the good parts from every PR, and there are various techniques for approaching it, depending on what’s wrong with the PR. It means only rejecting PRs with no alternative as a last resort, since each rejection increases the chances that someone’s going to fork you.
Most of all, it means helping contributors get to the finish line, with attribution, in whatever way you deem best for your projects and repos. Maximize community throughput, and you’ll have a happy and thriving community. In fact, I’m pleased to report that Beads crossed from 19.9k to 20k stars on GitHub as I was finishing this draft tonight.
My main success metric is whether my users are happy, and so far it’s looking pretty good!
Speaking of Gas City
Gas City went to alpha last week, and aims to be generally available later in April. What’s Gas City, you ask?
Gas City is a ground-up rewrite of Gas Town from first principles, using the MEOW stack (i.e., Beads and Dolt, the fundamental substrate of Gas Town.) It is almost a perfect proper superset of Gas Town’s features, and can be used as a drop-in replacement for Gas Town — except Gas City is also an orchestrator-builder.
Gas Town is a “pack” within Gas City, a fully declarative bundle of prompts and skills, no code at all — it still has the iconic original Mayor, Deacon, Dogs, Polecats, Witness, Refinery, and Crew, with their various hooks, inboxes, skills, prompts, and sandboxes. But there’s no dedicated code — unlike in the OG Gas Town, which is a large kitchen-sink binary.
Gas City was built by my buddies Julian Knutsen and Chris Sells, and as far as I can tell, it is exactly what I envisioned and outlined to them when they first suggested tackling it. They did a bang-up job. So good that Gas Town itself, the binary, is I think not long for this earth. Only its shape, the original characters, and all the individual features we loved about Gas Town remain — all available as LEGO-like pieces for creating your own agent orchestration shapes.
Beads, the original, powered fully by Dolt (Git for structured data), will live on as version 1.0. The MEOW stack from Gas Town, including formulas, molecules, hooks, the GUPP engine, and Nondeterministic Idempotence (NDI) are all implemented in Beads and Dolt. That means that all work is decomposed into durable, version-controlled, SQL-queryable orchestration steps.
That’s all stuff that your orchestrator doesn’t have, especially if you’re using something Claw-based…unless you’re also using Beads, or else you reimplemented the whole damn MEOW stack, including Dolt, which would just be incredibly foolish of you.
I think the MEOW stack and Dolt give both Gas Town and Gas City a gargantuan advantage over anyone using postgres and snapshots, or git-lfs, or really anything other than Dolt or Datomic for their agentic memory system. If you’re using Datomic, bravo. You’ve got a nice system with everything agents need for world-class forensics and mistake-recovery in production. I just prefer Dolt because it uses Git as its protocol. Both are great.
If you think of Gas Town as a Dark Factory (it is!), then Gas City is a Dark Factory Factory. I am putting my money where my mouth is, and diving in to start orchestrating my own game’s production systems using Gas City as my new SREs. I want to live this a bit before I evangelize it further.
Stay tuned for several upcoming announcements and new blog posts from me. I’ve been sitting on quite a backlog while I was trying to squeeze this one out. Unnnggghhh. I’ve got a post about dark factories coming up, including some insights into how to make a coding agent into the perfect dark factory worker — something I think coding agents will all need soon just to survive. But as a dark factory user, I’m biased, so who knows.
I’ve mentioned the Wasteland, and there’s more coming there. There has been a bunch of work behind the scenes, and it’s an important building block. Our two thousand Discord users are basically an army. We’re sitting on that army and it’s restless. I’m headed to Portland in the morning for a meeting of our generals, called by Chris Sells, and one of the topics for discussion is how best to put that army to use. Fun times.
I’ve also got upcoming announcements about Gas Town and Beads, both of which are headed to v1.0 very soon. And a blog post in the form of a totally untrue made-up fantasy-horror campfire story about a fake monster called the SaaS-Eater, whose wings shall beat a mighty Saas Hurricane, whose wind will de-SaaS companies and save them millions of storytale coins, which is all of course utter hogwash, merely an amusing fiction for scaring small children and investors and the general public. But I’m a horror fan, so we’ll see. Maybe an army could beat it. Or create it. Now that my Vibe Maintainer post is out, I can finally get to that blog backlog, and try my hand at some proper fiction.
See you next time. And to all of you who, one way or another, manage to read everything I write — thank you! When I hear those stories it really does help with the writer’s block. I hope you’re all having fun with agents and orchestrators. I’m absolutely having the time of my life. More posts coming soon!
Don’t forget to come visit our Discord at gastownhall.ai!
Pattern: The worse things get, the worse things get. Every time you try to intervene, it gets even worse.
Transformation: Map the effects & how they affect each other. Find the cycle with an even number of inhibitions. Go upstream & push one of the effects the opposite direction.
Okay, that’s an abstract brainful. But this is the most powerful tool I have for making big changes with small efforts, so it’s worth it. I promise. We’ll start with an example.
Yes, there are skills AIs haven’t mastered. But if your skill still appears to be the exclusive province of humans, that might mean the major AI companies do not yet consider it very important to master right away. Eventually it will rise to the top of the list.
Chinese firm CAS Space successfully reached orbit with the first launch of its Kinetica-2 launch vehicle Monday, with a prototype cargo spacecraft among the payloads.
Here’s the version of the orbital data center story you keep reading: Elon Musk says space will be the cheapest place to run AI within 36 months. LoneStar announces plans for a lunar data center. NVIDIA’s Vera Rubin Space-1 makes headlines. These are real announcements, and they all have one thing in common. Nobody talks about the source of electricity. While […]
SAN FRANCISCO – Voyager Technologies announced plans March 30 to help Icarus Robotics test a free-flying platform, called Joyride, on the International Space Station. Under the agreement, Voyager will handle payload integration, safety certification, coordination of a 2027 launch, on-orbit operations planning and execution for Joyride-1, a technology demonstration. Icarus Robotics was founded in Brooklyn, […]
Starcloud has raised $170 million to accelerate development of its next-generation spacecraft, reaching a $1.1 billion valuation as it awaits permission to deploy an 88,000-strong orbital data center network.
MILAN — The European Space Agency has launched the first two satellites of the Celeste in-orbit demonstration mission from New Zealand aboard a Rocket Lab Electron launcher on March 28. The two satellites were launched at 10:14 CET and separated from the launcher about an hour later into a quasi-polar low Earth orbit at 510 […]
Specification Searching in the Race between Education and Technology: Joseph Francis criticizes a canonical model of the American labor market, which has been used to advocate for more funding for education to reduce inequality. He shows how the model has routinely failed to predict the evolution of the college wage premium. Ad hoc econometric adjustments have been necessary to make the model fit the data, most notably in Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz’s well-known book. (The commented-on authors are hereby invited to reply in a future issue.)
Globalization and the China Shock: A Reassessment: David Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon Hanson estimated the effect of imports of manufactured goods from China from 1990 to 2007 on employment, wages, and social welfare payments in the USA, concluding that imports from China reduced manufacturing employment and lowered wages of workers in non-manufacturing industries. Robert Kaestner argues that the authors’ focus only on Chinese imports, which are correlated with imports from other countries and likely other omitted variables, muddles the interpretation and usefulness of their results. Kaestner argues that their estimates do not measure the effect of Chinese imports on employment and wages holding all other things equal, and do not even measure the broader equilibrium effect of Chinese imports on outcomes that includes changes in imports from other countries. Overall, the evidence suggests that omitted variable bias is likely, which renders their estimates uninformative. (The commented-on authors are hereby invited to reply in a future issue.)
Learning on machine learning on the housing supply impact of land use reforms: An Urban Studies article reports relatively modest housing-stock gains from liberalization, based on a dataset of reforms identified via machine learning applied to newspaper coverage. Researchers at the American Enterprise Institute challenge the article’s methodology and conclusions, and the Urban Studies authors respond.
An Article in Science on Covid Origins Contains a Fundamental Error: An influential article claimed that Bayesian analysis of the molecular phylogeny of early SARS-CoV-2 cases indicated that the likelihood that two successful introductions to humans had occurred was greater than the likelihood that just one had occurred. After correcting a fundamental error in Bayesian reasoning, the results presented in that paper imply larger likelihood for a single introduction, reducing the plausibility of the wet-market zoonosis account of Covid’s origins. (The commented-on authors were invited to reply and the invitation remains open.)
A Critique of Synthetic Control Method Studies on Covid-19 Policy—Evidence from Sweden: Five studies employing the Synthetic Control Method (SCM) conclude that Sweden would have experienced lower mortality had it imposed a mandatory lockdown in early 2020. Dividing Sweden into four hypothetical countries based on winter holiday timing—a proxy for pre-lockdown viral seeding—Jonas Herby shows that the estimated lockdown effect varies dramatically across regions with identical policies, suggesting SCM captures variation in viral spread rather than a causal policy effect. Sweden’s low excess mortality in the end suggests that Sweden’s state epidemiologist, Anders Tegnell, was right all along. (The commented-on authors are hereby invited to reply in a future issue.)
Central Banking Research Is Increasingly Directed to Environment, Inequality, Gender, and Race: Radu Șimandan and Cristian Valeriu Păun use the Scopus database to show how environment, inequality, gender, and race have soared as topics in research outlets supposedly focused on money and banking. They discuss the hazards of subverting price stability and other traditional central bank mandates.
Power Analysis Is Essential—A Case Study in Rounded Shapes: A Journal of Consumer Research article reported an A/B test where simply rounding the corners of square buttons increased click-through rate by 55 percent, but provided no power analysis. Ron Kohavi and coauthors show that the original study was highly underpowered. They report that three high powered A/B replications, each over two thousand times larger, had estimated effects approximately two orders of magnitude smaller than initially claimed. (The commented-on authors are hereby invited to reply in a future issue.)
The Ideological Profile of France’s Economic Bestsellers: Alexis Sémanne inspects the 100 economics bestsellers for 2024, as listed by a leading French bookseller. He develops seven categories and evaluates each book for its ideological tendency. Quite few of the books offer a freedom-oriented perspective.
Green Vanities in Europe:John Constable reviews A Green Entrepreneurial State? Exploring the Pitfalls of Green Deals, edited by Magnus Henrekson, Christian Sandström, and Mikael Stenkula, a book which reveals more than the fact that green deals in Europe have been failures.
Plains in western Nebraska, divided by the North Platte River, appear in light shades of green and brown in a false-color satellite image.
NASA Earth Observatory / Lauren Dauphin
A burned area on the plains of western Nebraska appears as a large tan area in a false-color satellite image.
NASA Earth Observatory / Lauren Dauphin
Plains in western Nebraska, divided by the North Platte River, appear in light shades of green and brown in a false-color satellite image.
NASA Earth Observatory / Lauren Dauphin
A burned area on the plains of western Nebraska appears as a large tan area in a false-color satellite image.
NASA Earth Observatory / Lauren Dauphin
February 28, 2026
March 29, 2026
Acquired with the VIIRS (Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite) on the NOAA-21 satellite on February 28 and March 29, 2026, these false-color images (bands M11-I2-I1) show grasslands in western Nebraska before and after several wildland fires spread through the area. NASA Earth Observatory/Lauren Dauphin.
On the afternoon of March 12, 2026, a wildland fire ignited in Morrill County, Nebraska. Within 12 hours, high winds had propelled flames approximately 70 miles (110 kilometers) east-southeast across the prairie. The Morrill fire would burn over 640,000 acres (260,000 hectares) within a week, becoming the largest wildfire in the state’s history.
This image (right) shows the extent of recently burned areas near the North Platte River in western Nebraska on March 29. By this time, authorities reported the Morrill fire was 100 percent contained. However, crews were working to contain two smaller blazes immediately to the northeast, the Ashby and Minor fires, which ignited early on March 26. For comparison, the left image was acquired on February 28, before the fires. Both are false-color to better distinguish the burned areas.
The fires occurred amid an active start for wildfires in the U.S. in 2026. The National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) reported that 15,436 fires had burned 1,510,973 acres nationwide as of March 27. That’s far higher than the 10-year average—9,195 fires burning 664,792 acres—for the same period.
The Great Plains have been particularly prone to fire in early 2026. Exceptionally dry fuels contributed to rapid fire growth and other unusual fire behavior for the time of year, according to the NIFC. Throughout the winter, much of the region saw warmer and windier-than-average conditions, as well as less than 50 percent of average precipitation over a 90-day period, leading to low soil moisture and grass fuels that were primed to burn.
The fires in western Nebraska affected large areas of ranch and pasture lands, destroyed homes, barns, and fences, and injured or killed livestock, according to news reports. The Morrill fire also burned much of the Crescent Lake National Wildlife Refuge in the Nebraska Sandhills, an area of grasslands, wetlands, and dunes used by migratory birds. Despite the fires, reports indicate that hundreds of thousands of sandhill cranes are still making their annual migration through the Platte River valley.
When my sons were little, I chose a children's adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey for bedtime storytelling. Before we started, I explained two reasons why this old story was special.
For a start, the Odyssey was the first time a hero in Western culture was celebrated for smarts and cunning—and not just fighting and violence. It was as if Homer had grown up after creating the Iliad (in which 239 characters, identified by name, meet their death), and decided to tell a more civilized tale.
I applaud that. We all need role models who only fight as a last resort, not as a way of life. So we can still learn from Homer.
My second reason for liking the Odyssey was a more personal one. I explained to my sons that the hero Odysseus wasn’t seeking adventure—he just wanted to get home. All his efforts were directed at returning to his wife and child. So he was just like their dad, I added, who would always come home to them as soon as he could.
But Odysseus was like their dad in other respects too. That’s because he had jobs to do out in the world, and he took his responsibilities seriously. So he made sure to take care of business—and only then make the journey home. In the case of the Odyssey, that entire round trip lasted twenty years (much worse, I admit, than my typical commute).
I was reminded of all these things when I watched the new sci-fi blockbuster movie Project Hail Mary, based on Andy Weir’s 2021 bestselling novel.
Up betimes and found my weather-glass sunk again just to the same position which it was last night before I had any fire made in my chamber, which had made it rise in two hours time above half a degree. So to my office where all the morning and at the Glass-house, and after dinner by coach with Sir W. Pen I carried my wife and her woman to Westminster, they to visit Mrs. Ferrers and Clerke, we to the Duke, where we did our usual business, and afterwards to the Tangier Committee, where among other things we all of us sealed and signed the Contract for building the Mole with my Lord Tiviott, Sir J. Lawson, and Mr. Cholmeley. A thing I did with a very ill will, because a thing which I did not at all understand, nor any or few of the whole board. We did also read over the propositions for the Civill government and Law Merchant of the town, as they were agreed on this morning at the Glasshouse by Sir R. Ford and Sir W. Rider, who drew them, Mr. Povy and myself as a Committee appointed to prepare them, which were in substance but not in the manner of executing them independent wholly upon the Governor consenting to.
Thence to see my Lord Sandwich, who I found very merry and every day better and better. So to my wife, who waited my coming at my Lord’s lodgings, and took her up and by coach home, where no sooner come but to bed, finding myself just in the same condition I was lately by the extreme cold weather, my pores stopt and so my body all inflamed and itching. So keeping myself warm and provoking myself to a moderate sweat, and so somewhat better in the morning… [continued tomorrow. P.G.]
Because we should report the crime data when they improve too. Almost three months into the year, homicides have cratered compared to the same time period last year: 34 versus 12 (or maybe ten*?). In fact, nearly every crime category, especially robberies (muggings) and car-related crimes has plunged, with one exception–assaults with dangerous weapon.
That has increased by thirty-five percent during the same time period. Some of that might be different reporting by police (how they classify non-homicides has been a matter of controversy), but what is worth noting is that nearly the entire increase is due to assaults without guns, which might explain why homicides have remained low.
To return to the subject of homicides, if the decline we have seen over the last two years continues at the same pace, we would be on pace for around 80-85 murders. We have not hit peak murder season yet–that starts in April and continues through early September–but hopefully homicides will stay low.
Good job, D.C.
*Based on the dates of two of the homicides, it does not appear that they occurred this year, so it might be ten, not twelve.
“Without fuel they were nothing. They'd built a house of straw. The thundering machines sputtered and stopped.” — “The Road Warrior”
Here is a chart of U.S. gasoline prices:
$4/gallon gas isn’t historically that high. If you measure relative to typical American incomes, it’s considerably lower now than it was in the early 2010s. But that’s cold comfort to people who have to commute every day to work, and who just saw their weekly gas bill increase by 50%. Those people have every right to be upset about Donald Trump’s war in Iran.
You know who’s not feeling the heat in their daily commute? People who drive electric cars. To them, the war in Iran isn’t a source of daily pain at the pump, because they don’t even go to the pump. Instead, they just park their cars in their driveways and garages every night, and attach a little cable to the back of the car, and in the morning the car is charged and ready to go.
And this means they get to drive around much more cheaply than people who fill up their cars at the pump. Yes, the price of electricity is higher than it was before the pandemic. But even so, an analysis last December by Autoblog found that it cost EV drivers only 5 cents to drive each mile, compared to 12 cents for good old gasoline-powered cars. And that was before the Iran War spiked the price of gas!
For years, whenever I’d say that EVs are the wave of the future, I was met with an absolute torrent of nonsense. “What about range anxiety?”, I’d hear from people who were unaware that EV range has tripled over the last decade. “But it takes so long to charge up,” I’d hear from people who don’t realize that EVs charge up while you sleep. “We’re going to run out of minerals!”, I’d hear from people who had never actually looked up the numbers. And so on.
This sort of nonsense failed to sway Yours Truly, obviously, but it did a number on the United States as a whole. Despite Elon Musk being one of their biggest backers, the Trump administration went on a crusade against EVs, canceling government support for American battery factories and canceling subsidies for EVs. In a free market, the end of those subsidies wouldn’t have mattered, since Chinese batteries and EVs are much cheaper anyway, but U.S. tariffs are so high that they make Chinese batteries and cars extremely artificially expensive. On top of that, Musk’s political antics made people stop wanting to buy Teslas. Ford utterly bungled its own EV rollout. And American consumers became increasingly reluctant to buy EVs in general, probably motivated by the aforementioned blizzard of FUD1 and nonsense surrounding the technology.
Everyone who was paying attention realized that the U.S. was falling alarmingly behind in this crucial technology. Here’s what Hengrui Liu and Kelly Sims Gallagher wrote in January:
Ford and General Motors had recently announced US$19.5 billion and $6 billion in EV-related write-downs, respectively…The message from Detroit was unmistakable: The United States is pulling back from a transition that much of the world is accelerating…
In China, Europe and a growing number of emerging markets, including Vietnam and Indonesia, electric vehicles now make up a higher share of new passenger vehicle sales than in the United States...That means the U.S. pullback on EV production is…an industrial competitiveness problem, with direct implications for the future of U.S. automakers, suppliers and autoworkers. Slower EV production and slower adoption in the U.S. can keep prices higher, delay improvements in batteries and software, and increase the risk that the next generation of automotive value creation will happen elsewhere.
Now, don’t get me wrong: EV drivers in these countries are still going to be very put out by Trump’s war in Iran. Liquefied natural gas exports are being severely disrupted, both by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, and by Iran’s strikes on Qatari refining infrastructure. That will send global electricity prices up, especially if you live in Asia, where most of the Gulf’s LNG goes. But of course, even that won’t make EVs a bad deal for customers in Asia and Europe, since oil prices have risen even more than LNG prices.
And the U.S. is in a completely different situation. Natural gas markets are fragmented, since — unlike oil — it’s costly to transport natural gas in liquid form. That means that the U.S., with its abundant shale gas, isn’t very affected by overseas wars. Natural gas prices are up only a little bit in the U.S., and even that is mostly due to the AI boom and a cold winter.
In other words, if you’re an American who drives an EV, the Iran War is hurting you a lot less right now.
Yes, at some point the war will end — probably when Trump backs down and makes some sort of “deal”. Crude oil supplies will resume, and gasoline prices will slowly follow. But if you drive a gas-powered car, you have to realize that this is just going to keep happening.
The price of oil, and thus the price of gas, is extremely vulnerable to supply shocks. Oil demand is very inelastic in the short run. If there’s a small disruption to supply, it’s very hard for lots of people to stop driving to work, or moving things by truck and ship and plane. Oil is also an indispensable input into plastics, which are necessary for much of the modern economy. So when there’s some sort of supply disruption — for example, the Strait of Hormuz getting shut down by the Iran war — a few people can switch away from oil, but most people just desperately offer to pay more and more. So the price shoots up very quickly.
This is why even though only 20% of global oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz, disrupting much of that supply caused oil prices to almost double. As I wrote the other day, this isn’t apocalyptic, especially for America (which is a major oil producer). But it could send inflation creeping up and curb economic activity a bit. And for people who drive gasoline powered cars, it’s a major headache.
And it’s a headache that’s going to happen again, and again, and again. Here’s a comparison of oil and gasoline prices versus electricity prices in the U.S. since the turn of the century:
As you can see, oil and gasoline bounce around far more than electricity does. If you drive a gas-powered car, you are economically vulnerable to these periodic price shocks. If you drive an electric car, you are not vulnerable. It’s as simple as that.
In fact, the price shocks may get even worse over the coming decades. The Iranian closure of the Strait of Hormuz, and the Houthis’ closure of the Red Sea, show how modern drone warfare makes it much easier for land powers to shut down commerce through key maritime choke points. The fact that oil is a global market means that any war, anywhere in the world, can shut down those choke points and send the price of gasoline skyrocketing everywhere in the world — including in America.
And Trump’s flailing efforts in Iran show how U.S. power is no longer a bulwark against such conflicts — both because the U.S. is more of a force for chaos than a force for order now, and because changes in military technology make the U.S. much less capable of stopping the cheap fleets of drones that can threaten global shipping. In 1991, you could count on Uncle Sam to use its military might to keep oil prices low; today, you can’t. “Just go to war in the Mideast and make oil prices go down” simply doesn’t work anymore.
The Iran War provides a vivid demonstration that the energy transition isn’t a climate issue — it’s an issue of national security. If there’s a silver lining to Trump’s stupid war, it’s that it’ll speed the world’s transition to solar power, wind power, and electric vehicles. Countries around the world are realizing how vulnerable their dependence on fossil fuels makes them. From Shaiel Ben-Ephraim, here’s a rundown of emergency measures various nations are being forced to take in response to the Iran war:
The Philippines declared a national energy emergency…Sri Lanka instituted a weekly public holiday for public officials and schools. It has also revived a QR code-based fuel rationing system that limits private cars to 25 liters of petrol per week…Pakistan closed schools for two weeks and cut free fuel allocations for government vehicles by 50%. It also hiked high-octane fuel prices by 60%…Bangladesh…shut down universities and colleges and implemented five-hour rolling blackouts for households to prioritize the garment export sector…South Korea launched a nationwide energy-saving campaign and released a record 22.46 million barrels of strategic oil reserves. It also temporarily lifted limits on burning coal…Thailand ordered civil servants to work from home, set office air conditioning to 26–27°C, and halted petroleum exports to preserve domestic stock…Japan…announced its largest-ever release of strategic oil reserves, approximately 45 days' worth, to stabilize local markets…Egypt ordered early closures for malls, restaurants, and government offices while switching off illuminated billboards…Myanmar introduced an "odd-even" rationing system where private vehicles can only purchase fuel on alternating days based on their license plate numbers…India has invoked emergency powers to divert liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) away from industrial users to prioritize household cooking needs…Slovenia became the first EU member to implement fuel rationing, limiting private drivers to 50 liters of petrol per week and businesses to 200 liters.
Unlike in previous episodes of crisis and disruption in fossil fuel markets, countries now have another option — build more solar, wind, and batteries. Auston Vernon has some good back-of-the-envelope estimates of how much countries can compensate for lost oil supply by going electric. And Todd Woody has a rundown of various ways that people and countries are either going electric, or considering going electric, as a result of the war. Buying an EV, of course, is the most obvious way to go electric:
As gasoline prices climb — hitting $6.81 a gallon at a nearby station on Wednesday — a flurry of drivers are making appointments to check out Ever’s lightly used EVs, many priced under $30,000…Ever is just one dealership, but signs of a shift are playing out across the world. In Southeast Asia, buyers are flocking to Chinese EV giant BYD Co.’s stores…
High fuel prices in Europe are also sparking a new wave of interest in EVs. In the UK, car site Autotrader recorded a surge in EV inquiries since the first attacks at the end of February…In Denmark, used EV searches on Bilbasen, a major online car marketplace, have jumped by as much as 80,000 a week…
American online searches for electric cars rose 20% in the first week of the war and dealers have reported more inquiries from buyers.
As Woody notes, this would not be the first time an oil shock led to a sustained shift toward vehicles that used less oil — the oil crises of 1973 and 1979 inaugurated the era of cheap fuel-efficient Japanese cars.
That story ended with Detroit rebounding in the late 90s and 2000s after oil prices went back down, by shifting to high-margin gas-guzzling SUVs. This episode might eventually end the same way — as the Iran war ends and oil demand falls from the global shift to EVs, oil prices will eventually fall again, and Detroit will go back to its same old tired strategy. Woody notes that “US carmakers are sticking to their decisions to scale back on EVs even as demand grows in the rest of the world.”
But this time won’t be like the 90s. Batteries have fallen so much in price that EVs are simply better than gasoline-powered cars now. Even if Fortress America uses tariffs and toxic political nonsense to keep itself wedded to obsolete internal combustion technology, its car companies will be cut off from global markets. The rest of the world does not have the luxury of forcing itself to use outmoded legacy tech, and the appetite for Detroit’s ancient gas-guzzlers will be very low.
Meanwhile, America’s stubborn refusal to adopt EVs will have other negative long-term consequences. Since the same tech used to make EVs is also used to make drones, robots, and electronics, the U.S. lack of EVs will crimp demand for these fundamental technologies and limit the scale that American component manufacturers can achieve. That will hobble and weaken American manufacturing even as it delivers the industrial future to China on a silver platter.
And as for American drivers, they will continue to live forever with intermittent spikes in gasoline prices — sometimes lasting for months, sometimes lasting for years — while paying triple for each mile and standing around at a gas station once a week. Perhaps, as they anxiously scan the latest news from the Middle East, they will comfort themselves with decades-old nonsense about “range anxiety”. Meanwhile, the increasingly affluent and secure middle classes of more pragmatic nations wake up in the morning to their fully charged EVs, cheerfully unconcerned with developments in the Strait of Hormuz.
Choosing to disbelieve in technological innovation has real consequences.
In Morning Memo and Where Things Stand today, we noted some news that broke as the weekend was beginning and, I think, got less attention than it should have. Here’s FCC Chair Brendan Carr playing the hits for a CPAC crowd that was, on other issues, divided:
“President Trump took on the fake news media. And President Trump is winning. Look at the results so far. PBS defunded. NPR, defunded. Joy Reid, gone from MSNBC. Sleepy-eyes Chuck Todd, gone. Jim Acosta, gone. John Dickerson, gone. Stephen Colbert is leaving, CBS is under new ownership, and soon enough, CNN is gonna have new ownership as well.”
To some extent this is pandering to the audience. Not all of this is the result of his work atop the FCC. On the other hand, he has found ways to exercise his power that go beyond what he can actually do in that job, such as through his gradual trickle of social media threats — some believable, some baseless. It’s hard to argue with his assessment of the results.
The U.S. is approaching a newly dangerous phase of its war against Iran. The administration is signaling that it will likely soon commence ground operations in Iran that will yet stop short of a full-scale invasion. Obviously, certainly to many TPM readers, this whole situation and war of choice are very bad things. But I want to point your attention to something specific.
The U.S. is talking variously about degrading Iranian missile, drone and nuclear capacities. But if you look closely at words and especially actions the real aim appears to be to force Iran to let the U.S. out of the war with something it can call a win. “Say we won and stop fucking with the Strait and we’re all set,” the administration is basically saying. The problem is that if this scenario is basically accurate the U.S. is escalating with nothing it can call a “win” that isn’t 100% at the discretion of Iran, which now seems even more under the control of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps than before the war, to offer. So what if the U.S. does a limited ground operation and Iran says, Nope, we’re still not giving you your win. What then? Full-scale invasion? As I’ve written, military planners and heads of state who are smart really want goals they can at least realistically try to achieve entirely on their own terms. So we want this piece of territory. Or we want to break this specific thing. In that case, you don’t need the other side to agree to anything. You can achieve your goals by force.
Eventually, you’ll want to make peace. But you can leave that to the other guys to worry about. You have what you want. But if your goal is entirely at the other guy’s discretion, you’ve got a big problem. And that really seems like what the U.S. is getting into now.
Of course, you need to have thought all of this through in advance. And this is very much the result of getting into this conflict with no clear idea of what we were trying to accomplish. Or perhaps we went into this with the really foolish or extremely high-risk assumption that the enemy state would shatter quickly. That clearly hasn’t happened and now seems highly unlikely, especially since the U.S. has made it clear it wants out.
You evaluate a war not by how much each side blows up but by who emerges stronger, either in relative or absolute terms, when the war ends. Who achieved what? If Iran emerges from this conflict with some kind of effective control of the Strait of Hormuz, that will be a tremendous strategic victory. In fact, even surviving the full force of U.S. aerial bombardment for a month is a big deterrent accomplishment. Right now Iran holds the initiative in the whole conflict. And the president is escalating but without any goal or off-ramp that isn’t under Iran’s control to give or deny. Sometimes you simply have to admit you got it wrong and try to redefine goals that are workable. But the president appears to be on the brink of a severe escalation, banking on the hope that blowing up more things will take the initiative back from Iran when that seems highly unlikely.
Last year, just before the Fourth of July holiday, the US Space Force officially took ownership of a new operating system for the GPS navigation network, raising hopes that one of the military's most troubled space programs might finally bear fruit.
The GPS Next-Generation Operational Control System, or OCX, is designed for command and control of the military's constellation of more than 30 GPS satellites. It consists of software to handle new signals and jam-resistant capabilities of the latest generation of GPS satellites, GPS III, which started launching in 2018. The ground segment also includes two master control stations and upgrades to ground monitoring stations around the world, among other hardware elements.
RTX Corporation, formerly known as Raytheon, won a Pentagon contract in 2010 to develop and deliver the control system. The program was supposed to be complete in 2016 at a cost of $3.7 billion. Today, the official cost for the ground system for the GPS III satellites stands at $7.6 billion. RTX is developing an OCX augmentation projected to cost more than $400 million to support a new series of GPS IIIF satellites set to begin launching next year, bringing the total effort to $8 billion.
A thoughtful review of Apple’s system to alert users that the camera is on. It’s really well-designed, and important in a world where malware could surreptitiously start recording.
The reason it’s tempting to think that a dedicated camera indicator light is more secure than an on-display indicator is the fact that hardware is generally more secure than software, because it’s harder to tamper with. With hardware, a dedicated hardware indicator light can be connected to the camera hardware such that if the camera is accessed, the light must turn on, with no way for software running on the device, no matter its privileges, to change that. With an indicator light that is rendered on the display, it’s not foolish to worry that malicious software, with sufficient privileges, could draw over the pixels on the display where the camera indicator is rendered, disguising that the camera is in use.
If this were implemented simplistically, that concern would be completely valid. But Apple’s implementation of this is far from simplistic.
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket stands in the launch position at Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station ahead of the launch of the Starlink 6-88 mission. Image: John Pisani/Spaceflight Now
SpaceX’s fleet-leading Falcon 9 booster will make a record-breaking 34th flight Monday on a mission to deploy a batch of 29 satellites for the company’s internet service.
Liftoff from pad 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida is scheduled for the opening of the launch window at 5:15 p.m. EDT (2115 UTC). Forecasters Sunday predicted a 70 percent chance of acceptable weather for launch with violations of the cumulus cloud, surface electric fields, thick cloud layers rules.
Spaceflight Now will have live coverage starting about an hour before launch.
The Falcon 9 first stage booster for the mission will set a new record for reusabilit,y launching for a 34th time. Booster 1076 entered the SpaceX fleet in 2021 and since then has launch missions including CRS-22, Crew-3, Turksat 5B, Crew-4, CRS-25, Eutelsat Hotbird 13G, SES O3B mPOWER-A, PSN Satria, Telkomsat Merah Putih 2, Galileo L13, Koreasat-6A Crew-6 and USSF-124, plus 22 batches of Starlink satellites.
Nearly 8.5 minutes after liftoff, B1067 landed on the drone ship, ‘Just Read the Instructions,’ positioned in the Atlantic Ocean.
Quick Answer — Which Free Online Passport Photo Maker Should You Use Right Now?
If you need a compliant US passport photo today, the most reliable option is a free online passport photo maker that processes your image against official government specifications — not just generic cropping templates. After testing five tools against the US State Department’s updated 2026 standards, PhotoGov ranks first for compliance accuracy and transparency. If you’re applying or renewing a US passport specifically, skip any tool that uses automated AI enhancements — since January 2026, the State Department rejects those photos automatically, with no grace period.
What’s Different in 2026 — and Why Your Go-To Photo Tool Could Now Let You Down
Passport photo services are all just variations on one another, most people say. Submit a selfie, crop it to 2×2 inches, download it, done. That logic worked fine in 2023. In 2026, it can kick your entire passport application to the curb before a human reviewer even lays eyes on it. Here’s what changed — and what that means before you choose a tool.
The US AI-Editing Ban: What “Zero Tolerance” Really Means
As of January 1, 2026, the US Department of State stopped accepting passport photos that have been digitally retouched. That includes background editing, skin smoothing, lighting adjustment, color filters, or any other modification performed by an automated app or AI solution. The State Department’s official instructions on travel.state.gov are clear: do not “alter your photo with computer software, phone applications or filters, or AI.” “No modification of the photo you upload is permitted.”
This isn’t a new rule — the principle has been established for a long time. What changed is enforcement. Automated systems are now able to detect non-compliant images before they are viewed by a human, and there is no appeal process at the initial processing stage. A flagged photo means your entire application is bounced back and you have to start all over again.
For users of online photo editors, this means a compliance pitfall that very few listicles point out: many popular “free” passport photo makers — including a handful of the highest-rated ones that come up in search results — automatically replace your photo background or normalize lighting as core features. Those very attributes, when applied to a US passport photo, are now grounds for denial.
There’s also an international push worth mentioning. The International Civil Aviation Organization has started transitioning member countries to the ISO/IEC 39794 biometric encoding standard, which requires capturing more detailed facial geometry. While the full transition is scheduled to be completed by 2030, photographs created using tools that haven’t adapted to the new dimensional accuracy requirements for biometric checks are already getting rejected at some application centers.
Why Rejection Rates Reached 300,000+ in 2024
More than 300,000 passport applications were declined by the US State Department in 2024 for having non-compliant photos — and that was before the even more stringent 2026 rules took effect. The most common reasons were bad lighting, head-to-frame ratio too big or too small, shadows appearing on the background or face, and the use of beauty-enhancement filters on photos, which some applicants hadn’t realized were turned on.
Numbers are likely to climb in 2026, not fall. With stricter enforcement and more applicants using phone-based photo tools, the margin for error is smaller. A picture that would have passed in 2023 could now be flagged by the State Department’s automated scanner.
The practical takeaway: tool selection is no longer just a convenience decision. It is a compliance decision. Below is how we ranked each tool against that standard — which ones met the bar, and which ones didn’t.
How We Tested These Products
Not all passport photo tools fail for the same reasons. Some crop inaccurately. Some perform background processing that runs afoul of US digital-alteration rules. Some are genuinely free to download, while others watermark your photo until you pay. To cut through the noise, we held every tool reviewed here to the same five-point scale.
Our 5-Point Compliance Rubric
Compliance with US Standards — The most critical factor for 2026. Does the software generate a photo that complies with the US State Department’s standards, including: 2×2 size, white or off-white background, head size of 1 to 1⅜ inches from chin to crown, neutral expression, no shadows, and no digital manipulation? Tools that perform automatic AI corrections on the background or face rank lower on this list, no matter how clean the results look, since the act of processing itself triggers rejection under current rules.
Background Processing Accuracy — A clean, white background is required for US passport photos. We checked whether each tool can deliver a clear, shadow-free background — and, more importantly, how it achieves that. Tools that replace the background via automated segmentation also introduce the AI-alteration risk described above. Tools that direct users to take their photo against a correct background before uploading, or that allow only manual cropping, carry lower compliance risk for US-based applications specifically.
Convenience and Processing Time — Time elapsed from photo upload until a ready-to-use downloadable file is available. This includes how clear the instructions are, how many steps are involved, and whether the tool tells you if your photo doesn’t meet requirements. A perfectly compliant tool that buries the download behind five confusing screens isn’t worth recommending.
Transparency — No Hidden Charges or Watermarks — “Free” means a lot of different things in this category. Some tools are completely free. Some let you preview for free but require payment to download a watermark-free file. We make the actual pricing model clear for every tool, because an app that isn’t truly free at download isn’t a free app.
Handling Difficult Cases — Infant and child passport photos are rejected nearly three times more often than adult photos, chiefly because of shadows, closed eyes, and visible hands. We also evaluated how each tool handles images taken in suboptimal lighting and whether it offers actionable guidance for edge cases — beyond a generic error message.
Tools are evaluated primarily on criteria 1 and 2, since a fast and easy tool that produces a rejectable photo is worse than a slower tool that passes. Tie-breakers are cost transparency and handling of difficult cases.
The Top 5 Free Online Passport Photo Makers in 2026
#1 — PhotoGov
For US passport applicants in 2026, PhotoGov is the safest all-around bet.
What sets it apart from most tools in this category is how it handles your image. Instead of applying automated AI edits, PhotoGov uses a human-assisted system that formats your photo to official government requirements. That distinction matters under the State Department’s current rules, which prohibit AI-edited photos for US passport submissions.
How it works: Take a selfie on your phone or computer → the system crops and formats the photo to US passport specifications → a compliance check is applied → you download the result. The free tier includes the basic digital photo output.
A few things worth noting before you get started:
The platform is ad-free and doesn’t watermark previews to force an upgrade
It supports multiple countries and document types, not just US passports
If first-time acceptance is your priority on a US application or renewal, this is as low-risk as it gets among the tools tested
Free tier
Yes
Human review
Yes
US compliance risk
Low
Best for
US passport and visa applications
#2 — Passport Photo Online
Passport Photo Online is the longest-standing name in this category — and a top choice for many applicants outside the US.
Upload a selfie and the platform automatically crops, resizes, and formats your photo. A human specialist checks the result, usually within a couple of minutes. The acceptance guarantee is meaningful: if your photo is rejected by the issuing agency, the service will re-edit it for free.
The catch for US applicants: The tool’s processing pipeline appears to have some tolerance for background modification, which is at odds with the State Department’s zero-alterations policy. For applications outside the US — UK, Canada, Schengen countries — this is more or less a non-issue. For a US passport specifically, confirm with the platform whether your processed output complies with current State Department guidance before submitting.
There are also limits to the free tier. Most users will hit a paywall before downloading a full-resolution file, so set your expectations accordingly.
Free tier
Freemium
Human review
Yes
US compliance risk
Medium
Best for
Non-US applications, users who want an acceptance guarantee
#3 — IDPhoto4You
Since 2009, IDPhoto4You has offered a genuinely free service — no paywall, no advertisements, no watermarks, and no account required.
The tradeoff is control. Because the tool has removed auto face-detection, you have to manually position the crop box over your face. That puts more responsibility on the user to get the head positioning right — which is one of the most common reasons photos get rejected.
What it does well:
Covers 73 countries and supports a wide range of document types
Clean UI with no upsell interruptions
No app download needed — works on any device
Where it falls short:
No background removal — you need to take the photo against a plain white or light background before uploading
No compliance check or feedback on whether your photo meets requirements
Results vary depending on how precisely you position the crop
A good choice for experienced users who know what they need and just want a resizing and formatting utility. More challenging for first-time applicants or anyone unfamiliar with passport photo rules.
Free tier
Yes — fully free
Human review
No
US compliance risk
Medium (user-dependent)
Best for
DIY-confident users, non-US documents
#4 — PassportPhotoWiz
PassportPhotoWiz takes a notably different approach to one of the bigger concerns in this space: privacy.
All photo processing is done in your browser. Your image is never sent to a third-party server, so you don’t have to worry about your biometric data being stored or processed elsewhere. For users concerned about where their face data goes, that’s a significant feature.
Practical strengths:
No sign-up required
Processing is instant with no waiting
Background removal included
Supports major document-issuing countries, including the US, UK, Canada, and Australia
Limits to know:
No human verification — compliance check is automated only
Country template coverage is narrower than some competitors
No acceptance guarantee
For US applicants, the background removal feature once again raises the question of whether automated editing conflicts with the State Department’s current photo rules. The tool’s on-device processing may reduce that concern, but there is no clear official guidance distinguishing on-device from server-side processing.
Free tier
Yes — fully free
Human review
No
US compliance risk
Low–Medium
Best for
Privacy-conscious users, fast digital submissions
#5 — Cutout.Pro Passport Photo Maker
Cutout.Pro is a broad creative platform with a passport photo maker among its many editing features. The background removal quality is genuinely impressive — one of the cleanest results in our testing — and the printable sheet (4×6, A4, multiple layout options) is convenient if you need physical copies.
There is also a suit-changer option that lets you swap in formal attire. It’s a fun feature, but flagged: a digitally altered piece of clothing is a potential compliance issue under US standards.
The bigger concern: Cutout.Pro is fundamentally an AI-driven platform. Its passport photo maker runs on the same automated image processing system as the rest of the platform. That is a significant compliance risk for US passport submissions under 2026 rules — the tool is not marketed as a government-compliance service and makes no claims about conforming to State Department requirements.
It works well for non-US applications, where the AI-editing ban doesn’t apply. Proceed with caution for US passports.
Free tier
Freemium
Human review
No
US compliance risk
High (for US submissions)
Best for
Non-US applications, users who need print layouts
Tool Comparison at a Glance
Tool
Free Tier
US Compliant
Human Review
Background Auto-Removed
Processing Time
Best For
PhotoGov
✅ Yes
✅ Yes
✅ Yes
✅ Yes
~30 sec
US passport, compliance priority
Passport Photo Online
⚠️ Freemium
⚠️ Verify first
✅ Yes
✅ Yes
~3 min
Non-US, acceptance guarantee
IDPhoto4You
✅ Yes
⚠️ Manual
❌ No
❌ No
Manual
DIY-confident users
PassportPhotoWiz
✅ Yes
✅ Yes
❌ No
✅ Yes
Instant
Privacy-conscious users
Cutout.Pro
⚠️ Freemium
❌ Risk
❌ No
✅ Yes
Instant
Non-US, print layouts
A couple of things this chart doesn’t capture, but that are worth noting:
“US Compliant” is conditional. No third-party tool can guarantee acceptance — that determination is always made by the issuing office. What the compliance column reflects here is whether the tool’s processing method aligns with current State Department guidance, particularly on digital modifications.
Processing time matters more than it sounds. If you’re renewing a passport under a deadline, a tool that requires manual adjustment or queues your photo for human review adds meaningful wait time. Factor that against your timeline.
Free doesn’t always mean free to download. IDPhoto4You and PassportPhotoWiz are entirely free from start to finish. PhotoGov provides a free digital file download on its basic plan. Passport Photo Online and Cutout.Pro offer free previews but generally require payment for a full-resolution, watermark-free file.
Red Flags — 3 Things to Watch for When Choosing Any Tool
Most passport photo tools look legitimate at first glance. Clean UI, reassuring language about “compliance,” a prominent upload button. The problems usually surface after you’ve already submitted your application.
Here are three specific red flags to check before you commit to any tool.
1. The Tool Replaces Your Background Automatically — and Calls It a Feature
Background removal is sold as a convenience. For US passport applications in 2026, it’s a liability.
Digitally altered photos are not permitted — and that includes backgrounds. Tools that use image-segmentation technology to replace your background with white are applying precisely the type of digital manipulation the policy is designed to prevent.
What to look for instead: A tool that either instructs you to take your photo against a plain white background before uploading, or one that is transparent about how its background processing works and whether it aligns with US State Department policy. If a tool’s front page leads with “instant background removal” as its main feature, that’s a yellow flag for US submissions specifically.
2. The Preview Is Free — the Photo Isn’t
This is the most common bait-and-switch among passport photo tools.
You upload your photo, the tool processes it, and you’re shown a clean, compliant-looking result — and only then does a prompt appear asking you to pay for a full-resolution, watermark-free download. The “free” part of the tool is the preview, not the finished file.
How to check before you waste your time: Before uploading, read the tool’s pricing page. Look for language like “free preview,” “download from $X,” or “digital delivery with purchase.” If the pricing model isn’t clearly stated upfront, assume there’s a paywall at the end.
IDPhoto4You and PassportPhotoWiz are the only two fully free end-to-end options on this list — no watermark, no account, no payment. PhotoGov provides a free digital download at the standard tier. The others are effectively freemium.
3. The Tool Hasn’t Updated Its Specs for 2026
Passport photo requirements change. The US State Department has revised its digital submission requirements, the transition to ISO/IEC 39794 biometric encoding is underway, and national regulations — UK photo recency rules, Germany’s digital-only requirement — have all shifted in the past year.
A tool that was properly calibrated in 2023 may be producing out-of-spec photos today.
Signs a tool is out of date:
The “specifications” section shows old pixel dimensions or file size limits
There’s no mention of 2025–2026 regulatory updates anywhere on the site
The tool allows glasses in photos without flagging them — glasses are no longer permitted in US passport photos without a signed affidavit from a medical provider
When in doubt, cross-check any tool’s output specifications against the official requirements at travel.state.gov before you file.
FAQs
Is a free online passport photo maker acceptable for US applications in 2026?
Yes — with an important caveat. The tool you use should not perform any digital editing on your photo. That includes automated background replacement, lighting correction, skin smoothing, or any other in-app processing.
For online renewals specifically, the State Department’s automated photo checker reviews your submission before it ever reaches a human. A photo processed through a tool that applies AI enhancements is likely to be flagged at that stage, regardless of how clean it looks.
Best approach: Use a service that is transparent about how it processes your photos and that aligns with the latest State Department guidelines. PhotoGov is designed to meet this standard. IDPhoto4You and PassportPhotoWiz are also safe options, provided you take your photo against a proper white background before uploading.
Are AI-edited passport photos actually being rejected by the US State Department?
Yes. This is no longer a theoretical risk.
The State Department’s official guidance explicitly states that applicants should not edit their photo with “computer software, phone apps or filters, or artificial intelligence.” Beginning in January 2026, automated detection systems flag non-compliant images before a human reviewer sees them — and no grace period or appeals window is available at the initial processing stage.
A rejected photo means your entire application is sent back. You’ll need to submit a new compliant photo and reapply, which can set back your timeline by several weeks.
In practical terms, any service that performs automated image enhancement as part of its standard workflow — even enhancements you didn’t explicitly enable — poses a compliance risk for US submissions.
How do I take a compliant passport photo at home?
The source photo matters as much as the tool. A few essential basics:
Background: Plain white or off-white. No patterns, no shadows on the wall behind you. A white bedsheet or a blank wall in natural light works well.
Lighting: Bright, diffused light on your face. Avoid direct sunlight, which creates harsh shadows. Facing a window rather than sitting with your back to one is a reliable approach.
Expression: Neutral. Mouth closed, eyes open and looking directly at the camera. Do not smile.
Framing: Center your face in the frame. Your entire head should be visible — chin, both ears, and the top of your hair.
Camera settings: Turn off any beauty mode, portrait smoothing, or filter your phone applies automatically. These are enabled by default on many phones and can cause your photo to be rejected.
Once you have a clean source image, the tool’s job is formatting — not fixing. That distinction is the crux of the 2026 compliance challenge.
How is a digital passport photo different from a printed one?
A digital passport photo is a JPEG file that you submit electronically — used for online passport renewal, visa applications submitted through government portals, and similar digital submissions. The US State Department’s online renewal process, for example, requires a digital upload rather than a physical print.
A printed passport photo is a 2×2 inch photograph that you print and submit with a paper application. Most tools can produce both: a digital file for download and a printable sheet — usually containing multiple copies on a 4×6 inch sheet — that you can print at home or at a photo lab.
If you’re unsure which format your application requires, check the instructions for your application type at travel.state.gov.
Can I use the same photo for my passport and visa applications?
Usually yes — as long as the photo meets the requirements for both documents. US passport and US visa photos share the same basic requirements: 2×2 inches, white background, neutral expression, taken within the last 6 months.
However, some countries require visa photos with slightly different specifications — different dimensions, a different background color, or a different head-size ratio. If you’re applying for a visa from one of those countries, check their requirements directly rather than assuming your passport photo will work.
One additional caveat: the US State Department now uses more sophisticated duplicate-detection algorithms that can identify previously submitted photos. A fresh photo should be taken for each new application, whether for a passport or a visa.
Final Recommendation
The right tool depends on what you’re applying for — and how much compliance risk you’re willing to accept.
For most readers, that risk matters quite a bit. A rejected passport application doesn’t just mean the hassle of resubmitting. It consumes processing time you may not have, especially if travel is already booked. Given that more than 300,000 US applications were rejected for photo-related issues in 2024 — before the stricter 2026 rules took effect — treating tool selection as an afterthought is a gamble that rarely pays off.
For US passport and visa applications, the guidance is consistent: use a tool designed specifically for government-compliance standards that does not apply automated AI enhancements to your photo. Of all the tools tested, PhotoGov is the strongest option on both counts. It’s free at the core tier and transparent about its processing approach in a way that aligns with State Department guidance — something most tools in this category can’t say.
For non-US applications — UK, Canada, Schengen, and other countries where the AI-editing ban doesn’t apply — the calculus shifts. Passport Photo Online is a strong choice with a real acceptance guarantee. PassportPhotoWiz is ideal for privacy-conscious users. Cutout.Pro produces clean output if you need a formatted print sheet for a non-US document.
For users who simply need a free formatting utility and are confident they can take a technically sound source photo, IDPhoto4You remains the most straightforwardly free option — no account, no watermark, no upsell.
One final point worth stating clearly: no third-party tool can guarantee your photo will be accepted. That determination belongs to the issuing authority. What these tools can do — if chosen carefully — is give you a photo that gives the compliance checker nothing to reject.
That’s the real objective. Start with a clean photo, use the right tool, and let the result speak for itself.
For official US passport photo requirements, refer directly to the State Department’s guidance attravel.state.gov.
This matters for the AI question, and the book leaves it unfinished. If the breakthroughs of the past required social conditions, not just cognitive capacity, then what does it mean when the next breakthroughs are produced by systems that have no social conditions at all? A neural net does not need a university chair or financial independence from the church. It does not need to reorganize its commitments. It does not, in any recognizable sense, have commitments. The machine that replaces the marginalist is not a better marginalist. It is a different kind of thing entirely.
Mining rarely changes in neat, report-friendly increments. It changes in shifts. A bench advances while a grader “just fixes that corner,” a stockpile grows unevenly because one side is easier to dump on today, a haul road is nudged outward because the old line is suddenly too tight for the current traffic pattern. By the time the office map is updated, the site has already moved again—sometimes quietly, sometimes aggressively.
That is why gnss devices matter on mining operations: not as trophies of technology, but as tools that keep measurement close to reality. The goal isn’t to make a beautiful model. The goal is to stop planning and arguing from last week’s terrain.
Three Daily Questions, Repeated Until the Mine Stops Moving
Most measurement work in mining—no matter how it’s packaged—answers the same three questions:
How much moved? Volumes for stockpiles, cut/fill, dumps, and material movement.
Where did it move? Progress: bench lines, crest/toe positions, road alignments, drill patterns, as-built surfaces.
Did it move safely? Exclusion zones, stand-off distances, berm compliance, traffic separation, temporary keep-out areas.
If those answers are consistent, decisions keep pace. If they aren’t, you get familiar conversations: production says one thing, survey says another, and everyone blames “the model” as if it were a single person with opinions.
Start With One Boring Agreement: What Reference Are We Using?
Before you talk about workflows, settle the reference story. It’s not glamorous, but it’s where avoidable errors begin.
Coordinate reference and vertical datum: pick one, document it, publish it.
Control: decide what points are trusted, how they’re protected, and how they’re checked.
Corrections: choose a method that works where you actually operate, not where a coverage map looks optimistic.
Mining sites chew up control points. They also change access. That’s normal. The mistake is letting reference discipline drift, because then you can’t tell whether your “change” is real change or a shifting coordinate setup.
Choose Tools Like an Operator, Not Like a Catalog
Mining measurement is a toolkit job. Each method is good at something and annoying at something else. The best workflows accept that and combine methods intentionally.
Rovers for Edges That Matter
When a line has consequences—crest and toe, berm alignment, drainage channels, road edges, safety boundaries—you want deliberate, traceable capture. A rover is slower, but it’s controllable. It also encourages a useful habit: thinking about breaklines instead of only surfaces.
A good practical rule: walk the geometry that changes decisions. Don’t rely on a surface to “imply” the edge of a bench if that edge determines stand-off.
Vehicle-Mounted Capture for Long Corridors
Roads, ramps, and long linear assets change often and are expensive to walk frequently. Mobile capture can keep you current—if you enforce quality control. Without checks, it becomes a firehose of points that look precise and behave inconsistently.
The difference is not the sensor. It’s whether you have a simple routine: known-point check, consistent speed assumptions, and filtering rules that don’t change every time someone processes the file.
Drone Surfaces for Coverage and Volumes
For stockpiles, dumps, and broad surface updates, drone mapping is often the fastest way to get density and coverage. It’s also easy to produce output that is visually convincing and quietly offset if reference and QA are sloppy.
Here, the workflow discipline is non-negotiable: repeatable ground reference, repeatable flight planning, repeatable processing settings. The mine doesn’t need new “art” every week; it needs comparable surfaces.
The Hybrid That Saves Arguments
A surface without reliable edges can be politely misleading. A set of edges without a surface can be incomplete. The productive compromise is simple: use drones for surfaces, rovers for edges. It’s not ideology; it’s a way to keep models from smoothing away the very lines people care about.
Volumes: Most Disputes Are Boundary Disputes
Volume disagreements are rarely caused by one bad measurement. They’re caused by inconsistent definitions.
If the boundary polygon changes, the volume changes—sometimes more than the pile did. If filtering choices change, the volume changes. If the “base surface” assumption changes, the volume changes. People then argue about the receiver, because arguing about boundaries sounds less technical and therefore more uncomfortable.
A defensible volume workflow keeps a few things fixed:
Versioned boundaries: treat stockpile and dump polygons like controlled assets.
Consistent capture logic: same method, similar density, same reference approach.
Simple cross-checks: spot checks on known points, repeat a small test area, compare weekly deltas for sanity.
This doesn’t create perfect truth. It creates consistent truth—good enough for trend decisions and clear enough to investigate when something looks wrong.
Progress: Make It Useful to People Who Don’t Love GIS
Progress tracking fails when it becomes a file dump. Most supervisors don’t need a giant surface; they need clarity: “Where are we compared to plan, and what should move next?”
A better progress package is lighter:
current surface for context,
crest/toe lines and key road edges,
a small set of annotated deltas (“bench advanced here,” “ramp shifted here”),
and a short list of field actions (“rebuild berm along this segment,” “update signage here,” “adjust drill pattern boundary”)
This is where survey becomes operational, not archival. You’re giving crews a narrative they can act on, not a dataset they have to interpret.
Safety Zones: Keep Them Current or They Become Fiction
Safety buffers are easy to draw and hard to maintain, because the site keeps changing. Exclusion zones near active faces, stand-off distances around unstable ground, separation zones for light vehicles versus haulage—these aren’t “set once” layers. They are living boundaries.
A useful safety-zone workflow is:
easy to update,
easy to distribute,
hard to misread,
and fast enough that it doesn’t lag a week behind operations.
If safety layers update only after a long processing cycle, they become historical documents—interesting, but not protective.
The Part Everyone Postpones: Data Governance
Mining sites often have multiple data producers: survey, contractors, drone teams, engineers. Without basic governance, you end up with two authoritative maps that disagree—both “correct” inside their own rules.
You don’t need a bureaucracy. You need a baseline:
one reference standard (horizontal + vertical),
one official repository for control and transformations,
a naming convention that prevents “final_v7_reallyfinal,”
Day 4: pilot one stockpile and one active area; record what breaks.
Day 5: QA the pilot (known points, boundary versioning, export tests).
Days 6–7: write the short field and office checklists—short enough that crews will actually follow them.
If the checklist doesn’t fit on one page, it won’t get used when the mine is busy.
Keep Measurement Close to Reality
Mining decisions are time-sensitive. When your measurements lag, planning drifts, and safety layers become outdated stories about yesterday’s ground. The point of positioning workflows isn’t to create perfect models; it’s to keep operational truth current.
Measure volumes consistently, track progress in a way people can act on, and treat safety zones as living boundaries. Do those three well, and the site stops “surprising” you on paper—because the paper finally keeps up with the ground.
I moved to Orange County from North Hollywood about four years ago.
I had been diagnosed with stage IV colorectal cancer and relocating here was the only way my insurance would work with City of Hope, a hospital I wanted to get into. It was an easy decision. My fiancée had spent a lot of her life here and her parents still lived in Ladera Ranch. So now we live in Ladera Ranch.
Before the move, I was a bit nervous about life down here. I had very low expectations. My fiancée and her parents were great, but I also knew that Orange County had … a reputation.
It could have been L.A. snobbery driving that rep, but the first time I set foot in Huntington Beach, (I’m a comedian and used to work a gig in Huntington) a dude at the bar told me, “Huntington Beach used to be the white supremacist capital of Southern California.” It was an odd answer to, “Do they validate parking here?” and after he said it, he looked dejected, very much upset by the used to. He was genuinely down that Huntington Beach seemed to have lost that title. With that, I’m assuming, he sauntered off to the beach at night to sing David Allen Coe and Lee Greenwood songs under his breath.
On our second day living here, I drove to the gym. It was only a 15-minute trip, but my heart sank every time I passed a “Blue Lives Matter” or “Let’s Go Brandon” decal on cars.
In many ways, this fucking place makes the town from Footloose look like the town from Footloose had drag shows after town hall meetings. It was instant regret.
I found myself saying, “Oh, fuck off” aloud when I gassed up and saw that some choad put a sticker of Joe Biden next to the gas prices with an “I did that!” word bubble. I’m stunned I didn’t see more “I don’t eat at Chick-Fil-A cause I like the food” T-shirts.
But then …
I arrived at the gym and parked next to a beat-up old truck. I was ready to see a, “Here are my Top 5 racial slurs” sticker affixed to the bumper, but instead the one sticker read, “Veterans for Biden.” Holy shit! I looked again. And again. Rubbed my eyes. I didn’t imagine it. It was real. Maybe this place ain’t all half bad. I almost waited for whoever drove that truck to be done with their workout so I could hug them.
The more I got to know my area of Orange County, the more I noticed (like most places) the cool people well outnumbered the shitty ones. I started to ignore all the pro-Trump shit I saw and, since the election, I’ve seen a whole lot less pro-Trump material. Is it possible some people are realizing they got conned? Hmm.
The only pro-Trump rally I’ve ever seen in Ladera was the Trump merch kiosk on Antonio. It boasted roughly the same turnout as John Turturro’s character’s funeral in Miller’s Crossing.
Okay, the other pro-Trump rally I’ve seen is when the check-out line at Stater Brothers grows more than five people long. My fiancée and I even went to a Ladera Ranch Pride gathering at a park near our apartment to show support, and it was wonderful to see how many people were there. Sure, there was a small handful of chumps walking around like the Mississippi Burning villains trying to start shit, but they were rightfully ignored, and soon took off.
The party went on.
My biggest gripe about Orange County has much less to do with the MAGA and much more to do with the sad fact that there are only, like, two places worth going to for pizza. Oh, and those damn Stater Brothers commercials, which look as if they were filmed using the Heaven’s Gate cult a week before they got ready for the comet.
I’m happy I live here now. I have no idea if Orange County could ever go blue, but I love that even if it stays purple (despite Trump’s best efforts to melt this nation), my fiancée and I are here to push back against it. We’ve found plenty of friends willing to do the same.
It feels like victory in a time when progressives need as many as they can get.
The news has come at us so fast and furiously in 2026 that I’ve hated to take a night off because the doubling-up of news just makes the next night harder. But it hit me today that the last image I had queued up to post for a night off was one of my friend Peter Ralston’s photos, perfect for February because it was titled “Almost March.”
We’re now at March 29 and I have yet to use it.
It’s definitely time for a night off.
Another of Peter’s photos perfectly captures the spring, especially a spring you just know is going to be full of hard work. It’s called “March” and I’m posting it just under the wire. It’s one of my favorites of his.
I’ll be back at it tomorrow.
[Photo, “March,” by Peter Ralston]
—
Notes:
You can find Peter at his gallery in Rockport, Maine, or at www.ralstongallery.com.
You walk in without thinking much of it, but something settles almost immediately. You slow down, you stay longer than planned, and everything just seems to flow.
Then there are places that do the opposite. Nothing is obviously wrong, but you feel slightly out of place. You move quicker, you notice less, and before long, you are ready to leave.
In both cases, the difference rarely comes down to one obvious factor. It is usually a collection of small details working in the background, shaping how the space feels without drawing attention to themselves.
First impressions happen faster than we think
Most people form an opinion of a place within seconds.
It is not a conscious decision. It happens before we have taken in the layout or looked closely at anything. The brain is already picking up on signals, deciding whether a space feels comfortable or not.
These early impressions tend to stick. Once we feel at ease, we are more open to staying. If something feels off, even slightly, it is difficult to shake that feeling.
Lighting sets the pace
Lighting plays a big role in how a space is experienced, even if it is rarely noticed directly.
Soft, warmer lighting tends to create a slower, more relaxed environment. It encourages people to settle in and take their time. This is why restaurants and cafés often lean toward this kind of lighting. It supports a longer, more comfortable visit.
Brighter, harsher lighting has a different effect. It can make a space feel more functional, but also more rushed. People tend to move through more quickly, even if they do not realise why.
Layout influences movement
The way a space is arranged affects how people move through it.
Open, well-spaced layouts feel easier to navigate. There is less friction, and people are more likely to explore without feeling guided or restricted.
When a space feels crowded or slightly disjointed, movement becomes more deliberate. People focus on getting from one point to another rather than taking their time.
These differences may seem small, but they change how long someone stays and how they interact with the environment.
Sound shapes the mood more than we realise
Sound is one of the least discussed elements of a space, yet it has a strong influence on how we experience it.
It is not just about volume. It is about the overall feel. The pace of the audio, the tone, and how it blends with everything else happening in the room.
In dining environments, for example, carefully chosen music for restaurants can help create a sense of comfort without becoming the focus. When it fits naturally, it supports conversation and helps people settle into the experience.
When it does not fit, it tends to stand out in a way that feels distracting, even if people cannot explain why.
Small discomforts add up
Physical comfort is another factor that often goes unnoticed until it is missing.
Something as simple as seating, spacing, or temperature can influence how long someone is willing to stay. If a chair is slightly uncomfortable or the room feels too warm, it can quietly affect the experience.
Individually, these details may seem minor. Together, they can shift the overall feeling of a place.
Consistency makes a space feel intentional
The spaces that tend to feel the best are usually the ones where everything works together.
Nothing feels out of place. The lighting, layout, and overall atmosphere all align in a way that feels natural. You are not thinking about any one element. You are just comfortable being there.
This sense of consistency is what makes a space feel intentional rather than accidental.
Why these details matter more than we think
Most people do not walk into a space analysing its design. They are not thinking about lighting levels or sound choices in a conscious way.
But these elements still shape the experience.
They influence how long we stay, how we feel while we are there, and whether we want to come back. Over time, those small moments build into lasting impressions.
The spaces we return to
When you think about the places you return to again and again, it is rarely just about what they offer.
It is how they feel.
They are easy to be in. Nothing distracts from the experience. You can settle in without thinking about it.
And more often than not, that feeling is created by small, overlooked details working quietly in the background, doing far more than we give them credit for.
3. Profile of Hussein Aboubakr. Good piece on one of today’s best thinkers and writers. Link to Twitter and Substack. Unlike many writers on these topics, it is not about your opinion of Israel, rather each piece is interesting and substantive. Try his essay on Mahfouz.
5. “China is cracking down on families who opt to bury their dead in empty high-rise properties — known as “bone ash apartments” — rather than pay skyrocketing costs for cemetery plots.” (FT)
I learned that the OSV.dev open source vulnerability database has an open CORS JSON API, so I had Claude Code build this HTML tool for pasting in a pyproject.toml or requirements.txt file (or name of a GitHub repo containing those) and seeing a list of all reported vulnerabilities from that API.
Long before a lab leak/pangolin connoisseur/over-eager chiropterologist made mRNA vaccines famous, Jake Becraft and Tasuku Kitada were exploring ways in which mRNA technology could be applied to trea…
Do you remember the “Axis of Evil”? In 2002 George W. Bush introduced this phrase as the opening salvo in his campaign to build support for military action against Iraq and possibly Iran and North Korea — regimes that, in fact, had nothing to do with 9/11. Those were the days when the US was still a nation in which presidents believed that they needed to make a case for war, even if that case was fraudulent.
I say fraudulent both because the supposed case for invading Iraq, WMDs, was fake and because Bush’s claim that those countries were members of a united front was a bizarre misrepresentation: all three regimes were indeed evil, but Iraq and Iran were enemies rather than allies, while both had little interaction with North Korea.
Today, however, there really is a coalition of regimes and political movements that one can justifiably call an axis of evil — a coalition that is bound together by a shared hatred for democracy and freedom. Call it the Axis of Autocracy. The most important players in that axis are Vladimir Putin; Viktor Orbán in Hungary; right-wing European political movements like Germany’s neo-Nazi AfD; and, of course, the Trump administration. And unlike Bush’s imaginary grouping, the Axis of Autocracy is a true alliance.
Allies, after all, help each other in times of need. And that’s what Trump is doing for Viktor Orbán. Despite Orbánist control of the Hungarian media and extensive electoral rigging, Fidesz, Orbán’s party, is at serious risk of losing power in the next election. So Trump is rushing to its aid with extravagant statements of support, as you can see in the Truth Social post above. Beyond that, JD Vance will be visiting Hungary, in effect to campaign for Fidesz, just a few days before the election.
The overt politicking on behalf of any foreign leader runs counter to a long tradition of American administrations generally staying out of other countries’ domestic politics.
Indeed. There would be deafening howls of outrage if a foreign government were similarly to insert itself into a U.S. election. But then Vance has also positioned himself as a strong defender of Germany’s AfD, which, as NBC says,
has included leaders who have embraced old Nazi slogans and minimized the atrocities of Adolf Hitler and the Holocaust.
Trump’s brazen allegiance to the Axis of Autocracy is now playing out – to America’s detriment – in his disastrous war against Iran. Russia, by all accounts, is supplying extensive aid to Iran, providing real-time targeting information about the locations of U.S. warships and aircraft. According to Ukraine, Russia took satellite photos of a U.S. base in Saudi Arabia just days before Iran struck the base, wounding multiple U.S. service members and destroying a crucial surveillance aircraft. Western intelligence sources indicate that Russia is supplying the Iranian regime with sophisticated drones.
Yet Trump continues to staunchly defend Putin and is becoming ever more explicit in his support for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
Have we ever before in this country seen a president side with a foreign regime that is actively putting the lives of American service people in danger? Has this happened in any country with a democratically elected head of state? It would be akin to LBJ and Nixon siding with the Chinese during the Vietnam War.
The betrayal is almost too deep to fathom.
So what motivates the slavish devotion of Trump and MAGA to Orbán, Putin and the AfD? I can make sense of Trump’s affinity with petrostate autocrats and tech broligarchs because they, after all, can shower him with private planes, millions for his vainglorious ballroom, and hundreds of millions of dollars of purchases of his crypto con.
But neither Orbán nor Putin have the unfettered deep pockets to bankroll Trump in the style to which he is accustomed. Nor can they give him any political capital with the average American voter. So it’s clear that the major source of affinity between MAGA, Fidesz and Putinism is something more raw and atavistic: a shared commitment to racism, ethnonationalism, and social illiberalism. Unlike the Europeans who chastise Trump for breaking norms and threatening allies with invasion, Trump is in his element in the company of swaggering, deceitful and power-hungry strongmen.
Indeed, autocracy itself is a shared value. Trump and those around him clearly admire systems in which the Leader — Trump’s capitalization in his Orbán post, not mine — faces no restraints and is protected from criticism, perhaps one in which critics have a tendency to die after falling out of windows.
And autocracy as a value in itself explains the flip side of the current U.S. government’s affinity for authoritarian regimes: Its loathing for democratic governments in Europe and, especially, its ever-more-open hostility to Ukraine.
All that being said, I personally remain amazed by Trump’s willingness to betray Americans on the battlefield by allying himself with Putin despite Russia’s aid to Iran. This is, after all, Trump’s war, and his personal political fate may depend on whether he can somehow extricate himself from the quagmire he got us into.
It’s just another proof of the Trumpian dictum: every time you think he can’t go any lower, he does.
Trip Venturella released Mr. Chatterbox, a language model trained entirely on out-of-copyright text from the British Library. Here's how he describes it:
Mr. Chatterbox is a language model trained entirely from scratch on a corpus of over 28,000 Victorian-era British texts published between 1837 and 1899, drawn from a dataset made available by the British Library. The model has absolutely no training inputs from after 1899 — the vocabulary and ideas are formed exclusively from nineteenth-century literature.
Mr. Chatterbox's training corpus was 28,035 books, with an estimated 2.93 billion input tokens after filtering. The model has roughly 340 million paramaters, roughly the same size as GPT-2-Medium. The difference is, of course, that unlike GPT-2, Mr. Chatterbox is trained entirely on historical data.
Given how hard it is to train a useful LLM without using vast amounts of scraped, unlicensed data I've been dreaming of a model like this for a couple of years now. What would a model trained on out-of-copyright text be like to chat with?
Thanks to Trip we can now find out for ourselves!
The model itself is tiny, at least by Large Language Model standards - just 2.05GB on disk. You can try it out using Trip's HuggingFace Spaces demo:
Honestly, it's pretty terrible. Talking with it feels more like chatting with a Markov chain than an LLM - the responses may have a delightfully Victorian flavor to them but it's hard to get a response that usefully answers a question.
The 2022 Chinchilla paper suggests a ratio of 20x the parameter count to training tokens. For a 340m model that would suggest around 7 billion tokens, more than twice the British Library corpus used here. The smallest Qwen 3.5 model is 600m parameters and that model family starts to get interesting at 2b - so my hunch is we would need 4x or more the training data to get something that starts to feel like a useful conversational partner.
But what a fun project!
Running it locally with LLM
I decided to see if I could run the model on my own machine using my LLM framework.
Trip trained the model using Andrej Karpathy's nanochat, so I cloned that project, pulled the model weights and told Claude to build a Python script to run the model. Once we had that working (which ended up needing some extra details from the Space demo source code) I had Claude read the LLM plugin tutorial and build the rest of the plugin.
When you are finished with the model you can delete the cached file using:
llm mrchatterbox delete-model
This is the first time I've had Claude Code build a full LLM model plugin from scratch and it worked really well. I expect I'll be using this method again in the future.
I continue to hope we can get a useful model from entirely public domain data. The fact that Trip was able to get this far using nanochat and 2.93 billion training tokens is a promising start.
Exciting new browser library from Cheng Lou, previously a React core developer and the original creator of the react-motion animation library.
Pretext solves the problem of calculating the height of a paragraph of line-wrapped text without touching the DOM. The usual way of doing this is to render the text and measure its dimensions, but this is extremely expensive. Pretext uses an array of clever tricks to make this much, much faster, which enables all sorts of new text rendering effects in browser applications.
Here's one demo that shows the kind of things this makes possible:
The key to how this works is the way it separates calculations into a call to a prepare() function followed by multiple calls to layout().
The prepare() function splits the input text into segments (effectively words, but it can take things like soft hyphens and non-latin character sequences and emoji into account as well) and measures those using an off-screen canvas, then caches the results. This is comparatively expensive but only runs once.
The layout() function can then emulate the word-wrapping logic in browsers to figure out how many wrapped lines the text will occupy at a specified width and measure the overall height.
I had Claude build me this interactive artifact to help me visually understand what's going on, based on a simplified version of Pretext itself.
The way this is tested is particularly impressive. The earlier tests rendered a full copy of the Great Gatsby in multiple browsers to confirm that the estimated measurements were correct against a large volume of text. This was later joined by the corpora/ folder using the same technique against lengthy public domain documents in Thai, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Arabic, and more.
The engine’s tiny (few kbs), aware of browser quirks, supports all the languages you’ll need, including Korean mixed with RTL Arabic and platform-specific emojis
This was achieved through showing Claude Code and Codex the browsers ground truth, and have them measure & iterate against those at every significant container width, running over weeks
For your weekend listening enjoyment: Christina Warren returns to the show to discuss Apple big month of product announcements — in particular, the iPhone 17e and MacBook Neo. And we pour one out for the Mac Pro.
Sponsored by:
Squarespace: Save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code TALKSHOW.
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But in almost every way that mattered, the Macintosh was right.
Right about how we’d use computers going forward. Right about the
idea that computers needed to be less complicated. Right about the
fact that caring this deeply about both hardware and software
design would make a difference. Though Apple didn’t sell many of
those original Macintoshes, there’s no question it changed
computers forever.
On this episode of Version History, we tell the story of the
original Macintosh. David Pierce, Nilay Patel, and Daring
Fireball’s John Gruber explain the strange corporate infighting
that led to the project in the first place, the ways in which the
Macintosh changed over time, and how Jobs and his team drove such
massive hype for the device some people didn’t even want to ship.
Then they debate the device’s true legacy, and whether the
computer or the commercial is the true icon.
A month into the war, and now they’re talking about pointless ground action and/or war crimes.
TRANSCRIPT
Pete Hegseth believes in the lethality fairy, and that’s a very bad thing. Hi, Paul Krugman here.
Most people watching this probably don’t get the reference. In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, a number of governments did what economic textbooks say is exactly the wrong thing. They slashed government spending in the face of mass unemployment. And they justified this in part by arguing that although, yeah, sure, if we slash spending and eliminate a bunch of jobs, that should be bad, could make things worse. never mind because it will improve confidence and that will lead to economic expansion. I, in an essay in 2010, called this believing in the “confidence fairy,” one of the coinages that seemed to stick.
And of course, the confidence fairy never arrived. Countries that created worse unemployment by engaging in austerity policies suffered worse unemployment. There was no rescue from improved confidence.
In this case, our Secretary of Defense, which is his legal title, although he calls himself the Secretary of War, continually argues that if only we get even more violent, if only we do even more damage, that this will somehow translate into success in Iran. He clearly relishes the thought of violence himself. He’s now holding prayer breakfasts, and in his prayer breakfast, he called upon the Lord to support us in “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.”
I think this is deeply un-American, but anyway, aside from the evilness — I don’t think there’s any other way to put it — of the world view, how is this supposed to work? If you look at the plans or ideas that are being bruited for using ground forces now, and that’s clearly very much sort the next step here, for using ground forces against Iran, well, yeah, you can seize Kharg Island, although hanging onto it could be very expensive, but then what?
You’ve cut off Iranian oil exports, we could do that anytime anyway, then what? You can, well, try to occupy some of Iran, but the relevant coastline is well over a thousand kilometers long. Missiles and drones can be fired from deep inside Iran. 10,000 soldiers, maybe, is not remotely enough to secure the Persian Gulf, let alone allow shipping to transit, let alone allow tankers to transit through the Strait of Hormuz. So this doesn’t make any sense, unless you somehow think that the sheer act of violence will shock and awe Iran into submission, which, if it was going to happen, would have happened already. Clearly not on the cards.
Hegseth is all, we are going to kill lots of people. Trump is vacillating. In his Truth Social post this morning, he started out by saying we are on the verge of successful negotiations, and we’ll get the Strait open soon because we’re having extremely good talks with the Iranians.
Other presidents have been accused of negotiating with themselves. Trump is negotiating with his imaginary friends. There’s no reason at all to believe that these talks are actually happening.
But he then pivots midway through the post, to saying, and if we don’t get this, then we’re going to start bombing civilian power plants and water supplies.
So give us what we want or we’ll commit a massive, massive war crime, which I hope is not going to happen. But even if it did, why would you think this would open up the Strait of Hormuz? So it’s this lust for violence with no actual coherent story about how that violence is going to produce results. It’s horrifying.
I really don’t know how this ends, except that it does feel as if this is a quagmire largely in the minds of top Trump officials, Trump himself and Hegseth, who having this utterly unshakable belief that hurting people will produce great results, respond to each failure of violence to produce results by getting even more destructive with no end game in sight.
It’s well known that grade inflation has “degraded” the informational content of grades at many colleges. At Harvard, two-thirds of all undergraduate grades are now A’s—up from about a quarter two decades ago. In response, a Harvard faculty committee has proposed capping A grades at 20 percent of each class (plus a cushion for small courses). That may give professors some cover to resist further inflation, but it doesn’t solve the real problem.
The real problem is not inflation per se. It’s that students are penalized for taking harder courses with stronger peers. A grade cap leaves that distortion intact—and can even amplify it. As Harvard economist Scott Kominers argues:
A grade cap systematically penalizes ambitious students for surrounding themselves with strong classmates. Perverse course-shopping incentives ensue as a result. A student who is prepared for an advanced course but concerned about landing in the bottom 80 percent may choose to drop down preemptively—seeking out a pond where they are a relatively bigger fish. As strong students move into lower-level courses, competition for A grades increases there while harder courses continue to shrink—reducing their A allocation further and driving more students away.
The underlying issue is informational. A grade tries to capture two things—student ability and course difficulty—with a single number. Gans and Kominers show that in general this is impossible: if some students take math and earn B’s while others take political science and earn A’s, there is no way, from grades alone, to tell whether the difference reflects ability or course difficulty.
There is, however, a solution in some cases. Clearly, if every student takes some math and political science courses, informative patterns can emerge. If math students tend to get B’s in math but A’s in political science, while political science students get A’s in their own field but C’s in math, you can begin to separate course difficulty from student ability.
Students don’t all overlap the same classes. But full overlap isn’t necessary—you just need a connected network. If Alice just takes math courses, Joe takes math and political science courses, and Bob just takes political science courses, then Alice and Bob can be compared through Joe. With enough of these links, the entire system can be stitched together. The more overlap, the more precise the estimates.
Valen Johnson proposed a practical method along these lines in 1997. Gans and Kominers embed the same intuition in a much more general framework, showing exactly what can and cannot be inferred, and under what conditions.
The great thing about achievement indexes based on relative comparisons is that they are robust to grade inflation and do not penalize students for taking hard classes or subjects. A political science student who chooses to take a tough math class instead of an easy-A intro to sociology course won’t be penalized because their low math grade will, in effect, by boosted by the difficulty of the course/quality of the students. That’s good for the student and also good for disciplines that have lost students over the years because they held the line on grade inflation.
One final point. Harvard’s cap proposal appears to have been developed with little engagement with researchers who have studied problems like these for decades in the mechanism and market design literature—people like Kominers, Gans, Budish, Roth, Maskin, and Sönmez, some of them at Harvard! Moreover, this isn’t a case of ignoring high-theory for practice. The high-theory of mechanism design has produced real-world systems including kidney exchanges, school choice mechanisms, physician-resident matching, even the assignment of students to courses at Harvard, as well as many other mechanisms. Mechanism design is practical.
Grade inflation is a mechanism design problem—and we know a lot about how to solve it, if we want to solve it.
"Democracy is in grave peril, worldwide. This is the message of two authoritative recent reports — one, from Sweden’s V-Dem, subtitled “Unraveling The Democratic Era?” and the other, from Freedom House in the US, subtitled “The Growing Shadow of Autocracy”. These make two fundamental points. The first is that what Stanford’s Larry Diamond has labelled a “democratic recession”, which began two decades ago, is beginning to look dangerously like a democratic depression. The other is that, in 2025, the Trump administration launched what turned out to be the swiftest decline in the health of any significant democracy in recent times.
The subtitle of the piece is “Evidence From Chinese and Swedish Twins.” Abstract:
Economists have long studied how parental behavior shapes within-family inequality, yet empirical findings remain mixed. Using twins data from China and Sweden, we examine the predominant mechanisms reported in the literature. Parents in both countries invest similarly during childhood. Inter vivos transfers, however, differ: Chinese parents reinforce income inequality, whereas Swedish parents distribute wealth equally; the reinforcing pattern reflects exchange motives. Bequests are divided equally in both countries. Parental education plays a key role: less educated parents reinforce income inequality, whereas more educated parents transfer wealth equally. Cross-country differences in parental education may thus help explain the mixed findings.
While NASA outlined plans to increase the cadence of robotic lunar lander missions at a recent event, it said little about accelerating work on crewed lunar landers.
Cerulean blue meltwater flows through drainage channels on the Nivlisen Ice Shelf, Antarctica, in this image acquired on January 6, 2026, by the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 9.
NASA Earth Observatory/Michala Garrison
Summer is a busy season at Schirmacher Oasis, a rocky, ice-free plateau in Queen Maud Land, East Antarctica. Located near the grounding line of Nivlisen Ice Shelfand about 100 kilometers (60 miles) from the open waters of the Lazarev Sea, the “oasis” of land amid an otherwise continuous expanse of ice is home to dozens of small ice-covered freshwater lakes and two research stations.
It’s the season when all-white snow petrels are sometimes spotted soaring over the oasis, and fuzzy south polar skua and Wilson’s storm petrel chicks grow up in sheltered crevices on its cliffs and ridges. Under constant sunlight, the plateau’s freshwater lakes come to life, supporting cyanobacterial growth and teeming with microscopic tardigrades, rotifers, and nematodes. At times, groups of Adélie penguins toddle through the oasis and attempt to breed.
The summer months are also when temperatures creep just above freezing long enough for expansive networks of seasonal melt ponds and drainage channels on and within the surrounding ice to fill with bright blue meltwater that flows north onto and across the Nivlisen Ice Shelf. The satellite image above shows seasonal melt on January 6, 2026, during the peak of the 2026 melt season.
Lakes dot the rocky surface of Schirmacher Oasis in this image acquired on January 6, 2026, by the OLI on Landsat 9.
NASA Earth Observatory/Michala Garrison
The Nivlisen Ice Shelf is a floating tongue that forms as glacial ice flows off Antarctica and into the waters of the Lazarev Sea. The many blue ice areas found around the oasis are snow-free areas where old, compressed glacial ice with few air bubbles has been exposed by powerful katabatic winds and sublimation. This dense ice absorbs red wavelengths of light and reflects blue wavelengths, making it appear blue. Blue ice areas are rare in Antarctica, covering about 1 percent of the continent’s surface.
“The image captures the Nivlisen Ice Shelf during a phase of strong, system-wide hydrological connectivity,” said Geetha Priya Murugesan, a remote sensing scientist with the Jyothy Institute of Technology in Bengaluru, India. Such features aren’t always visible in optical satellite imagery, she added, noting that they are often frozen, buried under snow, or drained. “This image is notable because the ‘cerulean veins’ we see on the surface align with a deeper, persistent plumbing system that we monitor with radar.”
Surface drainage channels filled with meltwater flow across the Nivlisen Ice Shelf in this image acquired on January 6, 2026, by the OLI on Landsat 9.
NASA Earth Observatory/Michala Garrison
Murugesan and colleagues have analyzed decades of satellite data and conducted several years of field research in the area, including in 2026. Their work shows that since 2000, the surface melting caused by seasonal melt ponds and channels on the ice shelf has grown in depth, area, and volume. The depth and volume of melt features grew by a factor of 1.5, while their surface area increased by a factor of 1.2.
Murugesan thinks that the visibility of the drainage network in images like these hints at a deeper vulnerability of the ice shelf. The drainage channels trace preexisting structural weaknesses, including crevasses, that act as “hydraulic pathways” that concentrate meltwater in vulnerable zones near the grounding line, where it can weaken the ice shelf, Murugesan said.
The researchers have also linked peak melting periods like this one to atmospheric rivers and foehn winds that enhance surface melting and help route meltwater through the drainage networks. The dark color—low albedo—of the many blue ice areas surrounding the oasis contributes to drainage events by making ice surfaces less reflective, warmer, and thus more prone to summer melting, Murugesan added.
While Murugesan and colleagues are currently conducting a detailed analysis of the 2026 melt season to determine how it compares to past years, she said it appears to be a “strong melt event consistent with elevated melt conditions.”
NASA Earth Observatory images by Michala Garrison, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey.Story by Adam Voiland.
After Claudia Goldin became the first woman to win a solo Nobel in economics in 2023, she received hundreds of invitations and requests. She accepted just three.
One of them was advising the WNBA players union as the women prepared to negotiate a new labor deal with the league.
When Goldin replied via email to Terri Carmichael Jackson, executive director of the players union, “I remember just reading it and screaming,” Jackson said. Goldin had one requirement: She refused to be paid.
This month, the two sides reached a collective bargaining agreement that gave Women’s National Basketball Association players a nearly 400% raise. Starting this season, players’ average salary will top $580,000.
It isn’t just the biggest pay increase in U.S. league history. It is, as far as Goldin is aware, the biggest increase any union anywhere has ever negotiated.
“It’s astounding,” the 79-year-old Harvard economist said.
Mike Bass, a spokesman who represents both the National Basketball Association and the WNBA, called the deal “transformational.”
…More recently, as the pay negotiations stretched on, Goldin said she stayed focused not on the countless separate points in the typical lengthy labor deal but on one central equation: the fraction of league revenue going to players’ salary and benefits.
Goldin’s calculations had a calming effect on the players, said Jackson, the union’s executive director.
Two sunlit spheres can be seen in today's Picture of the Week. While these orbs share similarities in their shape and in being illuminated by the same star, they are vastly different. The one farthest away from the camera, hiding behind the clouds, is our own Moon, the Earth's only natural satellite. The other object is the dome of a telescope at ESO's La Silla Observatory, located in the outskirts of the Atacama Desert, in northern Chile.
The telescope is one of the three in the French project Exoplanets in Transits and their Atmospheres (ExTrA). ExTrA is focused on detecting Earth-sized worlds in the Milky Way. It relies on the transit method, where planets block a fraction of the light from the star they orbit when passing between it and Earth, just like a partial eclipse. ExTrA centres on worlds orbiting red dwarfs –– stars much smaller, colder and dimmer than the Sun. Because red dwarfs are small, planets crossing in front of them block more light, making them easier to find than planets orbiting regular stars.
Who knows, perhaps some of these planets may look as otherworldly as the landscape of this picture. “These places compel me every time to think about our position in the Universe, putting my life ‘in context’ so to say,” says the photographer, ESO astronomer Luca Sbordone. “It always brings me peace.”
File: SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket stands at Space Launch Complex 4 East at Vandenberg Space Force Base ahead of the Starlink 17-31 mission on March 13, 2026. Image: SpaceX
SpaceX launched 119 payloads to a Sun-synchronous, low Earth orbit on a rideshare mission from Vandenberg Space Force Base.
Liftoff of the Transporter-16 mission from Space Launch Complex 4 East aboard a Falcon 9 rocket occurred at 4:02 a.m. PDT (7:02 a.m. EDT / 1102 UTC).
The Falcon 9 first stage booster for this mission was B1093 making its 12th flight. Previously it launched a pair of missions for the Space Development Agency and nine batches of Starlink satellites.
A little more than 8.5 minutes after liftoff, B1093 landed on the drone ship, ‘Of Course I Still Love You,’ positioned in the Pacific Ocean. It was the 187th landing on this vessel and the 592nd booster landing for the company to date.
What’s onboard?
Like previous SpaceX’s rideshare missions, this flight carried dozens of customers, from companies to sovereign governments to academia.
Exolaunch, with 57 payloads, and Seops Space, with 19 were responsible for booking the majority of the customers.
“Exolaunch is enabling launch access for more than 25 commercial, institutional, and government customers from the United States, the United Kingdom, Bulgaria, France, Finland, Greece, Italy, Spain, South Korea, Taiwan, Turkey, and more on this mission,” Exolaunch said in a statement in February.
The payloads overseen by Seops Space are a combination of 14 CubeSats and five PocketQubes. The latter of which are from a company called Alba Orbital and are Earth observation satellites.
“The Seops Transporter-16 manifest represents a truly global cross-section of the small satellite community, with payloads originating from 13 countries, including Canada, France, Malaysia, Nepal, Norway, Romania, Scotland, Spain, Switzerland, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Vietnam,” Seops said in a statement.
Other notable payloads include Varda Space’s sixth reentry satellite bus, designed for on-orbit manufacturing, and the so-called ‘cake topper,’ the Gravitas satellite from K2 Space.
The Gravitas satellite has a wingspan of 40 meters with its solar panels unfurled and weighs about two metric tons. It’s designed to produce 20 kW of electricity. It will test technologies that will be needed for power-hungry in-orbit data centers.
At K2 Space, we’re Building Bigger to deploy the largest satellites ever on orbit.
Matt Cooper, our Principal Mission Assurance Engineer, describes what it’s taken to get Gravitas on orbit. As our first free-flying satellite, it meant working through every step end-to-end, from… pic.twitter.com/pEJ1tOkdfj
The subtitle of the movie is Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist, and here is the trailer.
Overall this film was better and smarter than I was expecting. Intelligent people were allowed to speak, and to present various sides of the issue. It was also interesting to see how various people one knows come across on the big screen.
It is easy enough to mock the final section of the movie, which calls for a participatory “civil rights” movement on AI, negotiations with China, and a big voice for trade unions in the decisions. What Dan Klein calls “the people’s romance.” The Straussian read there is correct, even though it probably was not intended by the moviemakers. In reality, for better or worse, the final decisions will continue to be made by the national security establishment.
On a weekend, there were five other people in the theater.
(Lord’s day). Waked as I used to do betimes, but being Sunday and very cold I lay long, it raining and snowing very hard, which I did never think it would have done any more this year.
Up and to church, home to dinner. After dinner in comes Mr. Moore, and sat and talked with us a good while; among other things telling me, that [neither] my Lord nor he are under apprehensions of the late discourse in the House of Commons, concerning resumption of Crowne lands, which I am very glad of.
He being gone, up to my chamber, where my wife and Ashwell and I all the afternoon talking and laughing, and by and by I a while to my office, reading over some papers which I found in my man William’s chest of drawers, among others some old precedents concerning the practice of this office heretofore, which I am glad to find and shall make use of, among others an oath, which the Principal Officers were bound to swear at their entrance into their offices, which I would be glad were in use still.
So home and fell hard to make up my monthly accounts, letting my family go to bed after prayers. I staid up long, and find myself, as I think, fully worth 670l.. So with good comfort to bed, finding that though it be but little, yet I do get ground every month. I pray God it may continue so with me.
At some point, you will have learned about the passive voice,
where the actor in a sentence is unclear.
For example, my software didn’t compile. That’s a good example
of the passive voice.
However, you might not know the full set of rules,
because here are some sentences in the passive voice
that you might not recognize:
Claude made an error in my writeup.
ChatGPT messed up the commitment.
Gemini didn’t write tests.
You might think those are active sentences, but those
are in fact examples of the agentic passive voice.
The rule here is: whenever the actor in a sentence is a model,
then it’s a passive sentence.
I’m sorry if your grammar instructor never taught you this rule,
but this is just the way it works now.
This is an important grammatical distinction to make, because
I’m increasingly seeing folks say that Claude made a mistake,
without recognizing that they’re writing unclear, nearly ungrammatical
sentences that their grade-school teacher would reject.
So please, aspire higher. Write in the active voice, avoiding all passive variants.
Caruana and Sindharov have won today, obviously boosting Caruana’s chances as favorite (he beat Nakamura, the number two rated player in the tournament). Yet what the chess world needs right now is not a winner, but rather a greater sense of legitimacy for the world title. Ideally the same person should win a championship match two or three times in a row, and with a decisive margin. They do not have to be as good as Carlsen, just clearly better than everyone else. Nepo never quite made it, Ding has retreated from the chess world, and Caruana has yet to win a first title. Is he young enough to win a few in a row? Or are we waiting for Nordirbek Abdusattorov (or someone else) to enter the cycle? I fear decisiveness is not soon on the way. There are several (relatively) weak players in this tournament, so a variety of players can win just by beating up on the weakies, rather than by demonstrating mastery over their strongest peers. Legitimacy is likely to remain uncertain, to the detriment of the chess world. But soon we will know more.
So my plan today was to attend a bunch of early No Kings rallies all over Orange County. I’d do the ol’ journalistic two-step bounce. First here, then there, then up there, then down there. It was a grand and ambitious plan of an 8 am wake-up, a breakfast burrito—then, go!
Alas …
The wife and I take a weekly improv class (highly recommend, by the way), and it’s always Saturday morning. So, instead of marching my ass off, I stood inside a Tustin comedy studio pretending to be eating animal crackers shaped like the members of NSYNC. [You had to be there]
This is a long way of explaining that it is 6:19 pm, and I’ve just returned from the corner of Harvard and Culver in Irvine, where Indivisible hosted a fantastic No Kings rally.
Was it the biggest? No—I’d say there were about 1,500 people lining the streets.
Was it the loudest? No—though there were plenty of horn honks.
Did I walk away feeling pumped up and inspired?
Hell to the triple yes.
I say this as someone who has spent the past year chronicling the weird highs and lows of Orange County politics: There is something uniquely inspiring in the smaller rallies. What I mean is, it’s easy when you’re surrounded by 100,000 people, and the music is blasting, and the water bottles are free, and [fill in the blank celebrity] offers up a pep talk/free concert. Those are amazing experienxes—but fairly simple.
The smaller events, on the other hand, take work. They call upon people who are so entrenched in their convictions that the No. 1 inspiration isn’t unity, but justice and righteousness. Those standing on the corner of Harvard and Culver were there because they’re mad at Donald Trump, horrified by the GOP, terrified for their children and grandchildren—and DOF (Desperate as Fuck) to do something about it. You could see it in their faces; see it in their signs. This was not a fun outing to be followed by pizza and beers. No, this was a purposeful pursuit of justice, and a necessary effort to remind our fellow Americans that what we are (right now) is not who we will be (in the near future). The conversations I had were fruitful, engaging, inspirational, informed.
In short, I loved it, I loved it, I loved it.
All hail Irvine.
PS: A thought worth sharing: There were a bunch of petition gatherers at the march. They wore black shirts, they smiled, they said the right buzz words. Please, please, please—do NOT sign petitions in the moment. Never, ever, ever. Take a photo, read the words, research the information. If it’s actually worthwhile, you can do it online a day later. Many of the petitions I’ve seen are sponsored by gaming brands, alcohol, weed, etc. They pay people minimum wage to attend events, bellow, “Help the homeless! Sign this petition!”—but leave out that, in truth, it’s a Draft Kings initiative to legalize online gambling that gives .00000000006% of proceeds to a homeless shelter in Bethesda.
My point: Do NOT sign petitions by people you don’t know. Ever.
Almost exactly a year ago, on March 27, 2025, President Donald J. Trump issued an executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” The order asserted that “[o]ver the past decade, Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.”
The order claimed, as Trump did in his first term, that “historical revision” was reconstructing “our Nation’s unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness…as inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed.” Trump has claimed since his first term that a “left-wing mob is trying to demolish our heritage, so they can replace it with a new oppressive regime that they alone control.” He told his followers that they are in “a battle to save the Heritage, History, and Greatness of our Country.”
Embracing the idea that there is a perfect past currently being destroyed, Trump echoes twentieth-century fascists who promised to return their country to divinely inspired rules that, if ignored, would create disaster.
Trump’s order called for putting his ideology in place, turning federal historic sites, parks, and museums into “solemn and uplifting public monuments that remind Americans of our extraordinary heritage, consistent progress toward becoming a more perfect Union, and unmatched record of advancing liberty, prosperity, and human flourishing.”
The order directed the Secretary of the Interior to “determine whether, since January 1, 2020, public monuments, memorials, statues, markers, or similar properties within the Department of the Interior’s jurisdiction have been removed or changed to perpetuate a false reconstruction of American history, inappropriately minimize the value of certain historical events or figures, or include any other improper partisan ideology,” to restore their previous content, and to make sure that they “do not contain descriptions, depictions, or other content that inappropriately disparage Americans past or living (including persons living in colonial times), and instead focus on the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people or, with respect to natural features, the beauty, abundance, and grandeur of the American landscape.”
Setting administration officials’ eyes on the Smithsonian Institution, it said: “Museums in our Nation’s capital should be places where individuals go to learn—not to be subjected to ideological indoctrination or divisive narratives that distort our shared history.” Trump’s order named a three-person team to review the Smithsonian’s museums, including his Florida criminal defense attorney Lindsey Halligan, who joined his team from the field of property law and who, as legal analyst Anna Bower observed, “didn’t like some of the museum’s exhibits when she visited after the inauguration so she convinced Trump to sign an executive order putting her in charge.” Also on the team is Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget and a key author of Project 2025.
Since then, Trump’s people have tried to rewrite American history according to their ideology. Revealingly, one of the first things the administration did to alter the past was to remove from a U.S. military cemetery in the Netherlands two displays that recognized Black soldiers who helped liberate Europe from the Nazis.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum issued his own order on May 20, 2025, also titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” He told officials at all National Park Service sites to make sure information in the park adhered to Trump’s demands and to ask the public to let them know if they had “any signs or other information that are negative about either past or living Americans or that fail to emphasize the beauty, grandeur, and abundance of landscapes and other natural features.”
By July 2025, National Park Service teams were trying to figure out what the vague order not to “inappropriately disparage Americans” meant, flagging exhibits on sea level rise due to climate change at Cape Hatteras National Seashore in North Carolina, human enslavement at Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia, and the imprisonment of Seminoles, Cheyennes, Araphaos, Kiowas, Comanches, Caddos, and Apaches at the Castillo de San Marcos National Monument in Florida.
On August 12, 2025, Trump’s Smithsonian team wrote to Dr. Lonnie Bunch, the historian who serves as the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, informing him they intend to review museum exhibitions, curatorial processes, planning, the use of collections, and artists’ grants in order to make sure they align “with the president’s directive to celebrate American exceptionalism, remove divisive or partisan narratives, and restore confidence in our shared cultural institutions.”
They said they were focusing on the National Museum of American History, the National Museum of Natural History, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the National Museum of the American Indian, the National Air and Space Museum, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.
On December 18, 2025, they wrote to Bunch again to complain he had not provided as much information as they had requested. They expressed concern “that the museums of the Smithsonian Institution be well positioned to play an important role during the historic yearlong celebration of our Nation’s 250th birthday that is fast approaching. We wish to be assured that none of the leadership of the Smithsonian museums is confused about the fact that the United States has been among the greatest forces for good in the history of the world,” they wrote. “The American people will have no patience for any museum that is diffident about America’s founding or otherwise uncomfortable conveying a positive view of American history, one which is justifiably proud of our country’s accomplishments and record.”
At about the same time, Trump unveiled that the history he intended to see shared was one that remade the U.S. by destroying its complicated history of struggle toward multicultural democracy and rewriting it as a dictatorship.
In mid-December the White House revealed that Trump had attached partisan descriptions of previous presidents on the “Presidential Walk of Fame” at the White House, calling Democratic president Barack Obama “one of the most divisive figures in American History,” and Joe Biden “by far, the worst President in American History.” “Taking office as a result of the most corrupt Election ever seen in the United States,” it continued, “Biden oversaw a series of unprecedented disasters that brought our Nation to the brink of destruction.” Trump described himself, though, as the architect of “the Greatest Economy in the History of the World.”
Then, on the fifth anniversary of the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, the White House unveiled a new website blaming the Democrats for the attack and saying Trump had “corrected a historic wrong” by pardoning the rioters. Under pressure from the White House, the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery removed text by Trump’s portrait that referred to Trump’s two impeachments, as well as his loss to Democrat Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election.
In January the National Park Service took down displays about the enslavement of nine Black Americans at the home of President George Washington and First Lady Martha Washington in Philadelphia, and the city sued. In February, U.S. District Judge Cynthia Rufe, who was appointed by President George W. Bush, ruled that the materials must be put back as the case works its way through the courts. She began her order with a quotation from George Orwell’s 1984, a novel based on the premise that an authoritarian regime constantly rewrote history for its own ends.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the erasure of American history in favor of a whitewashed authoritarianism. The American people began to preserve the truth of who we have been.
Volunteers worried at the potential loss of National Park Service information created the Save Our Signs project, a crowd-sourced archive of photographs from National Parks. Historians appalled by changes to the Smithsonian created Citizen Historians for the Smithsonian, similarly documenting changes to the Smithsonian. One of its leaders, James Millward, is a scholar of Chinese history and is concerned that “history being snipped and clipped and disappeared” looks a great deal like the methods of the Chinese Communist Party. Sitting next to Trump’s portrait in the Portrait Gallery, he handed visitors copies of the old text until guards closed the exhibit.
At the Organization of American Historians, the History, Archives, and Records Preservation Project (HARPP) is made up of historians, archivists, librarians, and their allies, who are recording “changes since January 2025 that threaten the historical record.”
Even more dramatically, though, today’s Americans are demanding the preservation not just of who we have been, but of who we are. Far from accepting the administration’s whitewashed assertion that the nation has an “unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness,” we are remembering our complicated history of community struggle and mobilizing to protect our right to govern ourselves against those who would take that right from us.
Millions of Americans and their allies turned out today for more than 3,100 “No Kings” events in all 50 states, U.S. territories, Washington, D.C., and towns and cities around the world in what appears to be the largest one-day protest in American history.
Instead of accepting the destruction of the true lessons of our past, we are bringing them back to life.
Lena Bohman, Molly Blake, Jenny McBurney, Amelia Palacios, and Henrik Schönemann, “Save Our Signs: A Crowdsourced Project to Combat Censorship at US National Park Sites,” Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 11, no. 2 (Fall 2025), https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.20459.
My favorite part of Tyler’s book is where he asks a very good but non-obvious question: Why did it take so long for economics as a field to develop a coherent model or framework of analysis? Much of the book discusses how three economists simultaneously developed marginal analysis, with a focus on the work of Stanley Jevons. Here I’ll briefly provide the intuition of marginal analysis and then explain why economics is both extremely easy but also quite difficult…
Tyler does a great job explaining why Jevon’s model of marginal analysis (which underlies most of modern microeconomics) is elementary on one level, but also something that wasn’t discovered until the 1860s because it was not at all obvious. Here’s how he concludes Chapter 3:
[This is TC now] By studying the slow intellectual development of economics, and contrasting it with other fields of study, we can learn the following:
1. Some insights are very hard to grasp, even if they are apparently simple once they are understood. People need to “see around corners” in the right way to understand these insights and incorporate them into their world views.
2. Economics is one of those fields, and that is why it took intuitive economic reasoning so long to evolve, marginalism included. Those of us who are educators, or who spend time talking to policymakers, should take this point very seriously.
3. Even very, very smart people are likely unaware that these “see around the corner” insights are missing – did Euclid rue that he did not have access to proper supply and demand and tax incidence theory? Probably not.
4. Economics is not the only such field that is hard to grasp, some other examples being segments of botany, geology, and evolutionary biology.
5. Scientific revolutions come about when many complementary pieces are in place, such as financial support, intellectual independence, and networks of like-minded others to talk with.
Those conditions help people to understand that “seeing around those corners” can bring both high social and professional returns.
Are there major conceptual corners that today still no one can see around? If so, how might we discover what they are? And why are we not working harder on this? Or are we?
The start of the week was taken up with Mary driving us over to Essex to empty the beach hut and drive us back again, spending a couple of nights over there in between. On the one hand it was obviously very sad to say a final goodbye to that special wooden shed. On the other, once it’s sold, there will be one less thing for me to feel responsible for and to worry about.
I’m not entirely sure where the other four days of the week went. I’ve done some blogging (more in the pipeline). I’ve wrangled some WordPress. We lopped some surplus or low-hanging branches off trees in the garden and I lugged them all out of the way.
§ I canceled my Spotlight membership this week. Having done no acting in the past six years other than two classes, it seems silly to hang on to a web page that costs over £200 per year just so I can pretend a bit of me is still A Proper Actor.
§ After I wrote last week we finished watching season 8 of This Farming Life always a telly highlight of the year for us. It can be repetitive on two levels: the annual cycles of the farming calendar obviously change little from one season to the next, and then the narration insists on repeating background information over and over, not just from one episode to another, but within each episode. But, otherwise, as nice as ever. I don’t know how many of them do it, especially the couple moving their dairy herd up to Scotland and then everything else they coped with.
§ We watched Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man (Tom Harper, 2026) and it wasn’t very good. A little bit of this is that the whole thing feels like it’s aged badly, the style co-opted by banter lads in baker boy caps, so it’s like a parody of what was once novel. But even aside from that, and aside from Cillian Murphy being as good as ever, there’s nothing there. This review by Dan Monaghan sums it up well.
§ We also watched season one of Last One Laughing UK despite my usual No Jimmy Carr rule. It was fine, I guess. It had a few little laughs. It had a lot of the annoyances of that style of show (hyperactive editing, repetition, no pauses). For me the entire premise suffers from the fact that funny things are much funnier if you’re part of them or at least in the same space, and even more so if you know the people involved. And they’re all well-known comedians, so it’s all very chummy and I end up with the same feeling of being outside, watching successful people being paid to hang out and have fun together, like Taskmaster. If you like that maybe you’ll like this too.
§ I think we’ve given up on the TV series of High Fidelity. I had high hopes but it turns out that a record nerd moping about a break up for episode after episode, surrounded by annoying people, isn’t endurable even if they’re a woman now.
§ Conversely I was put off the title and premise of Dying for Sex (a woman with terminal cancer embarks on a quest to have an orgasm). But I figured anything starring Michelle Williams is worth a try, and in general I like one-off series, and it was great. Funny, well done, and sad without being soppy. Not one to watch with your children or parents (well, I don’t know what your relationship with your parents is like) but worth a go.
I’ve thought a lot about the bad timing Jones mentions. Had Apple
stuck to the original timeline, and killed off the 2013 Mac Pro in
favor of an iMac “specifically targeted at large segments of the
pro market,” back in 2017, Apple could have
avoided putting out the best Intel Mac ever, less than a year
before the transition to Apple silicon.
Did Apple know in 2017 that 2020 was the year the M1 would make it
out of the lab? Probably not, but it doesn’t make the timing any
less painful.
Apple might not have had 2020 set in stone for the Apple Silicon transition, but in 2017, they definitely knew that Apple Silicon was the future. I think they knew that years before 2017, and in broad strokes, that’s why 2015–2020 was such a bad period for Mac hardware. They didn’t ship a retina MacBook Air until 2018. The 12-inch MacBook was beautiful but expensive and seriously underpowered. And nothing suffered more than the Mac Pro in that stretch. I think Apple knew that the future was on their own silicon, but in the meantime, they just couldn’t get it up for the last five years of the Intel era.
While I’m bitching about Netflix’s craptacular new video player on Apple TV, let me quote from a piece I wrote two years ago (also complaining about Netflix’s tvOS app):
In tvOS, go to Settings → Accessibility → Accessibility
Shortcut, and set it to “Closed Captions”. Now you can just
triple-click the Menu/Back button on the remote to toggle
captions. (On older Apple TV remotes, the button is labelled
“Menu”; on the new remote, it’s labelled with a “<”.)
But here’s the hitch: Netflix’s tvOS app doesn’t support either of
these ways to toggle captions. Netflix only supports the
on-screen caption toggle in their custom video player. I get why
Netflix and other streaming apps want to use their own custom
video players, but it ought to be mandated by App Store review
that they support accessibility features like this one.
What Apple should have done right from the start with the tvOS-based Apple TV a decade ago is require all apps to use the system video player. No custom video players. It’s too late for that, alas. But the tvOS App Store review process ought to insist on compliance with these accessibility and platform compliance features.
You want to use your own custom video player? Fine. But apps with custom video players must support the “CC” button in the iOS Control Center remote control, must support the triple-click accessibility shortcut, must support the platform conventions for fast-forwarding and rewinding using the Apple TV remote control, etc. If your video player doesn’t comply, your app update doesn’t get approved.
Apple should use the App Store approval process for the benefit of users. Isn’t that supposed to be the point?
Oil rents are the difference between the value of oil produced and the cost of producing it
Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are petrostates — nations whose economies are driven by oil and gas. As a result, their politics are deeply shaped by their natural resource wealth. Iran is also a petrostate despite the fact that it exports significant quantities of manufactured goods. It’s a petrostate nonetheless because most of these are goods that make use of its oil and gas, like fertilizers and petrochemicals. The main exception has been Iran’s growing exports of military hardware, especially missiles and drones.
Russia is also widely considered a petrostate: John McCain famously called it “a gas station masquerading as a country,” although Matt Klein argues that this overstates the case. And critics of the Trump administration often accuse it of trying to convert the U.S. into a petrostate, at an especially inopportune moment. In my recent conversation with David Roberts, he declared that
the US is basically aligning itself as the last big petrostate. We’re going to go down with the fossil fuel ship, and China is aligning itself as the first electrostate.
Last month Rana Faroohar of the Financial Times basically said the same thing.
At this moment in history critiques of economic reliance on fossil fuels often focus on changing energy technology. At a time of rapid progress in renewable energy and general economic electrification, many argue, as Roberts does, that clinging to fossil fuels means missing the boat.
However, warnings that reliance on oil or other natural resources can be a trap have been prominent in economic discourse for decades. They were widespread long before the current renewable energy revolution began and were largely separate from concerns about the environment. The term resource curse, coined by Richard Auty in 1993, refers to a familiar though controversial proposition in development economics. It says that nations rich in natural resources, especially minerals including oil, tend to do worse in the long run than resource-poor nations. As we will see, the resource curse proposition claims that countries with economies heavily tilted towards natural resource extraction are afflicted by a tendency towards backwardness compared to countries less dependent on natural resource extraction.
Historically, most discussion of the resource curse has been concerned with small or poor nations. At this point, however, many are arguing that the United States faces some of the same issues and that our success in extracting oil and gas is actually hurting us. What’s the source of these arguments and how reasonable are they?
Beyond the paywall I will address the following:
1. The economic consequences of natural resource abundance
"In “Reimagining Transplant Center Incentives Beyond the CMS IOTA Model,” published in January in theJournal of the American Medical Association, Chan explores a government experiment that pays kidney centers for volume and efficiency—not just outcomes—which could increase transplant numbers. Chan cowrote the article with Alvin E. Roth, the George Gund Professor of Economics and Business Administration, Emeritus, at HBS.
In addition, covering funeral costs for organ donors could increase donation rates by up to 35%, and save up to 419,000 life years and as much as $800 million in Medicare expenses, Chan and coauthor Kurt Sweat of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center write in “Funeral Expense Reimbursement as a Strategy to Enhance Organ Donation and Transplantation Access,” published in October inNPJ Health Systems.
...
"Why Chan felt compelled to study the organ market
“Two things pulled me in. First, this is a market where the stakes are brutally clear. Organ transplantation is one of the few places where inefficiency shows up not as a deadweight loss in a textbook, but as people dying on a waiting list. When a market fails here, it fails loudly.
Second, the level of inefficiency is staggering. Each year, more than 5,000 organs are recovered and then discarded, while roughly the same number of people die waiting for an organ. These are million-dollar transactions once you account for surgery, lifelong care, and avoided dialysis. So even small improvements in incentives can save lives directly and save the healthcare system billions of dollars.
For an economist or market designer, that’s a rare alignment: moral urgency and economic leverage pointing in the same direction.”
Incentives must consider what’s socially acceptable
“Incentive design is much harder than we like to admit. Organ transplantation is a supply chain. You have procurement organizations, hospitals, surgeons, patients, regulators, all responding to different incentives.
Designing a good incentive for one actor is already difficult. Designing incentives so that the entire chain works well is not just adding up the optimal incentives for each link. Sometimes improving one part of the system quietly breaks another.
The choice isn't between market and no market. It’s between a system we design on purpose and a system that fails by accident.
This is a market with moral and political constraints embedded in it. In healthcare, and frankly now in most markets, the incentives that are economically sensible also need to be socially legitimate.
Incentives don’t just change behavior; they express values. In markets that touch life, death, or dignity, people react not only to what the incentive does, but to what it seems to say. That makes incentive design less like tuning a machine and more like negotiating a fragile social contract.
...
"The ‘ick factor’ might prevent progress
“Very often people do not want to use the right incentives because they have this concept of it being repugnant.
[For instance], we would pay for the funeral of someone who gives their life for their country when they serve in the military. We will pay for the funeral of someone who donated their body for scientific research to advance society. But if people want to donate an organ to save another person's life? If [that donor’s] family would very much welcome some support at a moment of crisis, we are not going to pay for the funeral. Even a very sensible incentive sometimes is bound by social norms, or even what we call the ‘ick factor,’ and we have a less effective system at the end.
People worry that incentives will corrupt the gift of life. But the truth is that we already have incentives; they’re just accidental and poorly distributed. The choice isn't between market and no market. It’s between a system we design on purpose and a system that fails by accident. Ignorance of incentives doesn't make a system moral; it just makes it inefficient.”
He is currently serving as the Chief Economic Advisor to the Government of India, and also is the co-author of the books Economics of Derivativesand The Rise of Finance: Causes, Consequences and Cures. The podcast covers import substitution and strategic resilience, futures and options market, gross fixed capital formation, crypto markets, India’s growth trajectory, and much more.
Now, STT on futures is being levied on the notional value of the contract, which is the full traded price, whereas the STT on the options is levied on the premium, which is a small fraction of the overall underlying value of the notional exposure. The effective tax that is imposed is much more on the futures trade, manyfold more actually, than it is on the options trade, whereas the speculation is mostly happening on the options side, which is also where most of the retail investors are losing money because the futures side is much better capitalized, larger firms, and so on.
NAGESWARAN: No, also the futures side is probably used more by institutions, and therefore, they are able to put up the margin requirement, etc., better than the options trades, where the individuals are being sold almost like the₹10 sachet-type options, and the options…
RAJAGOPALAN: Now with each successive hike in the STT,we’re seeing the gap widen. It’s on the margin, making futures relatively more expensive than options just because it’s taxing each trade. It’s like a toll fee that’s paid almost on every transaction. Your book was precisely about understanding these kinds of policy instruments. Given that now we have a tax instrument which inadvertently favors the more speculative instrument. Is that a good way of thinking about it, or how would you think about this problem?
NAGESWARAN: No, I think you have given me a lot to think about on this. I probably haven’t applied my mind as much to the mechanics of the STT being levied on the premium when it comes to options, but on the notional value of the contract when it comes to futures. Actually, you have given me something to think about. As you said, it could be having the unintended consequence of reducing the hedging role of futures, which probably is playing a better role there and encouraging the speculative element. Let me think about it and also probably take back this aspect of the conversation back to my colleagues in the revenue department, in the Ministry of Finance. Thank you for that, yes.
Of great importance for the world’s most populous country.
My thanks to WorkOS for once again sponsoring the week at DF. Their latest is a CLI that launches an AI agent, powered by Claude, that reads your project, detects your framework, and writes a complete auth integration into your codebase. No signup required. It creates an environment, populates your keys, and you claim your account later when you’re ready.
But the CLI goes way beyond installation. WorkOS Skills make your coding agent a WorkOS expert. workos seed defines your environment as code. workos doctor finds and fixes misconfigurations. And once you’re authenticated, your agent can manage users, orgs, and environments directly from the terminal. See how it works at WorkOS’s website.
See also: WorkOS just completed another Launch Week. This one, for Spring 2026, does not disappoint with its custom UI and theme. Even if you don’t have a need for WorkOS you should check out their Launch Week site just for fun.
Market Design
