Politics Chat, October 6, 2026
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Listen on Apple Podcasts
Listen on Spotify
Get full, free access to Letters from an American here.
You can also find Heather:
YouTube
Bluesky
Instagram
Facebook
Threads
TikTok
Watch today's live recording here.
Listen on Apple Podcasts
Listen on Spotify
Get full, free access to Letters from an American here.
You can also find Heather:
YouTube
Bluesky
Instagram
Facebook
Threads
TikTok
Last night, while the sane and reasoned denizens of Southern California were watching an amazing playoff game between the Milwaukee Brewers and San Diego Padres, I found myself inside the chambers of Laguna Niguel’s City Hall, attending the City Council meeting.
There are three reasons for this:
• 1. God hates me.
• 2. I smoke crack.
• 3. I run a local political website.
Whatever the case, there I sat in the back corner, fighting to keep my eyes open as official city proclamations were presented to some Scouts and some civic-minded folks, followed by politician-spoken words no one will remember and more politician-spoken words no one will remember and more politician-spoken words no one will remember and (surprise!) Laurie Davies coming and going as quickly as hummingbird’s whistle—and then, finally … the BIG stuff.
The REALLY BIG STUFF!
THE SUPER BIG BIG BIG STUFF!
THE EARTH-SHATTERING STUFF!!!!
[Cough]
Orrrrrr … a meaningless debate on Proposition 39, the stupid voter ID initiative which Californians are voting on in the coming election.
By “meaningless,” I mean utterly, fantastically, dramatically meaningless. The five council members devoted an hour (or so) toward trying to decide whether to officially have Laguna Niguel back the proposition—which, if OKed by the majority of the board, would feature all the power and oomph of a dead squirrel’s left testicle.
Put differently, it was entirely for show.
Entirely, entirely, entirely for show.
There is no legal bearing whatsoever.
Lord, it was ponderous, especially when the board’s three MAGA members (Ray Gennawey, Gene Johns and Kelly Jennings) and one right-leaning moderate (Stephanie Winstead) felt compelled to express why Prop 39 is important. It was sorta like being in a Toledo-based meeting of a cardboard box company, where the CEO happens to be in town and everyone present tries to impress, so we go round and round the room and the employees (sensing their spotlight moment has arrived) regurgitate the same three points over and over and over and over and over and over again.
That’s precisely what happened last night: You see, they argued, voting is great. But sometimes voting isn’t great. Like, say, when people cheat. Or do bad. So we need Prop 39 to make sure everyone is happy. Because unhappy people aren’t happy. They’re unhappy. And we don’t like that.
Obviously, I’m paraphrasing—but not by much. In her remarks, Jennings reminded me of the substitute teacher who has to fill in on “The Grapes of Wrath,” but only reads “Twilight.” Johns felt like the dude who used to hang out at Archie Bunker’s house, drink Schlitz and complain about the neighbors. And Winstead seemed possessed by the wide-eyed terror of a one-legged duck crossing the 405.
For my money, though, the worst of the bunch was Ray Gennawey, the council’s dime-a-dozen nepo-baby who made the impassioned case that Prop 39 is needed—because people no longer trust elections, and it’s a national emergency. The three-time Trump voter proceeded to explain, with great passion, that Americans have lost faith in voting, only …
… Gennawey …
… Just …
… Couldn’t …
… Put …
… His …
… Finger …
… On …
… Why.
It was bizarre. Every summer, Ray’s mother appears at the Sea Country Festival, standing alongside a cardboard cutout of the orange rapist. Yet here was her boy, decrying a nation’s lost trust and simultaneously unable to identify the cause and culprit. I found myself wondering: Is this man more (A) naive, (B) stupid (C) incurious or (D) duplicitous.
I settled on (E) All of the above.
The proceedings were made palpable solely by a handful of impassioned speakers and, ultimately, Stephanie Oddo, the lone liberal on the board and a woman who took her colleagues’ collective reasoning to the woodshed …
When it all mercifully ended, I walked outside, where several attendees discussed the madness coop we now occupy. A Trump voter approached, identified himself as a veteran and explained why he believed Prop 39 to be vital. After a polite back and forth (the guy was far from a jerk), I asked whether he thought—should the Democrats win the House and Senate—Donald Trump would take the L with honor and grace.
“I don’t know,” he said with a shrug. “But Biden …”
I can’t remember the words that followed.
I needed more crack.
Judging from his social media posts, Trump is panicking.
Shortly after noon yesterday, he posted that it was “no longer the Strait of Hormuz” driving up gasoline prices, but Ukraine’s strikes on Russia’s refineries. In fact, some oil tankers have indeed been passing through the strait but, as Spencer Kimball of CNBC explains, “only due to a major U.S. military commitment and at a high cost to the lives of tanker crews.” That policy was already too expensive to sustain, and now increased strikes from Iran are threatening it altogether.
Then, clearly incensed at reports that people are not turning out for his rallies, he posted pictures to prove the arenas were full, but those pictures were carefully cropped to avoid the empty upper decks shown in news photographs. “I never have empty seats—Never have, and never will!” he posted. “The Rallies are “HOTTER” than ever.” He added: “The New York Times, and many other Artificial Media Outlets, should be arrested for their dishonesty and disservice to our Country.”
Then he accused the New York Times of doctoring a picture of his Miami club, Trump National Doral, where he has announced he will hold this year’s Group of 20 (G20) summit of leaders from the world’s major advanced and emerging economies this December. His attempt to hold the G7 there in 2019 created an uproar even from Republicans about the blatant self-dealing.
There is less uproar now, leaving Trump free to complain that the New York Times “is a CROOKED outfit that caters to Lunatics who want to see our Country fail” and to warn that “Some day in the not too distant future The Times will be forced to close its dirty doors, and that will be a Great Day for America!” Next to the New York Times image that showed a dirty, yellowed building looking out at the elbows, Trump posted one showing it gleaming white with immaculate gardens.
A New York Times spokesperson told Alice Gibbs of Newsweek that the 2020 photo was not doctored. Gibbs noted that multiple photos from 2023 to 2026 show the same weathering shown in the New York Times photo. The founder of the Photography Ethics Center, Savannah Dodd, told Gibbs that the image Trump shared appeared to be a promotional photograph, and “[c]ommercial photography has different standards for accuracy, which are less stringent than journalistic standards.”
Then Trump posted a wild attack on Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate from South Carolina, Annie Andrews, in an effort to boost his hand-picked candidate, Darline Graham, the late Senator Lindsey Graham’s sister. Begging people to vote for her, he wrote: “For years my dear friend Lindsey would say that, ‘Darline is the finest, most reliable, and one of the smartest people I have ever known.’ He would then always add, ‘Also, the most loyal!’ Oftentimes I would be upset with Lindsey for saying this, because I thought I had all of those qualities.”
Why is Trump suddenly interested in South Carolina? As William Kristol noted in The Bulwark today, new polls show that Andrews, a doctor who has refused to respond to what Kristol calls Trump’s revolting bigotry, is competitive against Graham, whose major qualification for the seat is that she is Graham’s sister.
Kristol notes that in response to Trump’s post, Andrews wrote: “As a mom and a pediatrician, I’m in this race to fight for my patients, my three kids, and South Carolina. And I’m going to work with anyone to put South Carolina first, because lowering costs and making life better for families across our state is going to take all of us working together. If you care more about your bills than the politics in Washington, this campaign is for you.”
Then, once again, Trump promised: “If Republicans win the House of Representatives and the Senate in the 2026 Midterm Elections, I’m going to give all Adult Citizens in the United States of America, $5,000.”
Then he acknowledged the bipartisan outcry over his using $20 million of taxpayer money to run ads boosting himself, writing: “The Radical Left is upset with the fact that I am taking Ads, which I consider to be a positive promotion for our Great U.S.A., and paying for them with U.S.A. money. This is a rather standard thing to do but, rather than doing that, although nothing will make them happy, I have decided to do the Patriotic Ads, among others, and pay for them myself, and with money I raised for MAGA, Inc. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
(This afternoon, Trump walked that back, telling reporters that “many presidents before” him had produced ads like the ones he’s been running that boosted himself, so “we’ll decide” if he should reimburse the American public for the cost of the ones he’s run. Tonight, the White House said he would not reimburse the American people, and his promise would only apply “moving forward.”)
Then, yesterday, he posted again about the Doral photo, saying “The New York Times DOCTORED the picture of the beautiful exterior facade of Doral, in Miami, trying to make it look as bad as possible. These people are STONE COLD LOSERS—Totally dishonest. That’s why they’re going TO HELL, and their subscription numbers are way down!”
With media stories noting that Republican candidates do not want to be seen with Trump, this morning he posted: “My Rally crowds and enthusiasm are unbelievable! Nobody has ever seen anything like it. We are flipping races all over the place. The Fake News knows it, but they don’t want to be truthful with their viewers. It’s all happening! The Dumocrats never counted on this. Thanks you [sic] to the great Networks that are covering the Rallies in full. They are being rewarded with BIG RATINGS. Watch for the ‘Midterm Surprise!’”
About an hour and a half later, he posted: “MY RALLIES ARE SAVING THE REPUBLICAN PARTY, AGAIN!!!”
That post was likely in light of the outrage today over his statement about oil prices at a rally in Nebraska last night:
“And again, remember, with the war it’s just artificial, it’s a little bit high, it’s a small price to pay for keeping the world safe, keeping our country safe. They can take out a city, let ’em take out Los Angeles. Let ’em take out San Diego. [crowd cheers] That’s, this is a very small price to pay, and it’s gonna be over with very soon. It’s essentially almost over with, and they might keep going a little long, you know? They always say they have a big threshold for pain. They need it, let me tell you, they need it. But it’s gonna end very soon….”
The outcry against a president suggesting a nuclear attack on U.S. cities has been rapid and profound. California governor Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, posted: “After sending the National Guard and Marines to occupy California, Donald Trump is now saying our foreign enemies should ‘take out’ Los Angeles and San Diego. He is deranged and dangerous.” Newsom’s press office followed up with: “Let’s be clear: The President is advocating for an attack on 10+ million U.S. residents in two of America’s largest cities. This is not normal. None of this is.”
Democratic San Diego mayor Todd Gloria posted: “San Diego is not collateral damage. We are not expendable. And we are never a ‘small price to pay.’ Keep our city out of your reckless war talk.”
Scholar of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder warned that Trump appears to be inviting a terrorist attack. “Telling Americans that it would be acceptable, or even good, if San Diego were destroyed, if Los Angeles were destroyed by Iran…tells us where his mind is. His mind is exclusively focused on staying in power. It’s exclusively focused on himself. There is no care for Americans there. There’s only an obsession with perhaps having less control over things than he has now. It’s a very clear sign of just how wrong things have gone, when the American president can stand in front of Americans and fantasize about millions of Americans being killed.” Snyder urged Americans to vote, organize, and be prepared to defend the results of the election.
Meanwhile, the administration appears to be pulling out all the stops to get MAGA voters to turn out. Sam Ogozalek of Politico reported today that the Federal Transit Authority is now saying it wants to steer grant money for local and state infrastructure to areas with higher-than-average birthrates and marriage rates. This plan reflects the administration’s embrace of the “Great Replacement” theory, the idea that white Americans must increase their birthrates to prevent being replaced by people of color.
In an event in May, after Centers of Medicare & Medicaid Services administrator Mehmet Oz said that “one in three Americans are under-babied,” Trump called himself “the father of fertility.” Senator Patty Murray (D-WA), the top-ranking Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, said: “Tying funding for transit projects to marriage rates and how many babies a woman has is the sort of bizarre and dystopian idea you’d expect in a TV show, not actual policy put forth by the U.S. government—yet here we are.”
Transportation consultant Peter Rogoff told Ogozalek: “It’s throwing a bone to these ideologues who want to incentivize child rearing and marriage, but it’s ludicrous on its face to try to achieve that goal through an infrastructure program. Does anyone really believe that there are couples out there saying, ‘Hey, sweetheart, you and I should get married and raise a passel of kids because a dozen years from now, maybe they’ll build light rail out to our neighborhood?’”
Wes Siler points out in Wes Siler’s Newsletter that the administration has also promised major changes in hunting and fishing regulations, most of which can’t possibly happen, including Trump’s promise to create a “task force” to kill sharks and seals “to reduce the economic and ecological impact of shark depredation on the recreational angling sector.” Siler notes that this would require changes to existing laws and both national and international fisheries and endangered species agreements.
“SHARK FORCE would be a lot cooler if it was actually like a team of highly trained sharks sent to remove naval mines from the Strait of Hormuz,” Siler writes. But while removing apex predators might benefit anglers in the short term, the whole reason we have all those agreements in the first place is that we know destroying the food chain breaks ocean ecosystems.
Felicia Schwartz of MS NOW reported today that the Trump administration has not invited monitors from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) from observing the U.S. midterm elections. This will be the first time since 2002 that the U.S. has not welcomed these observers. Until now, the only two countries of the fifty-seven in the organization that refused such observation were Russia and Belarus. Now the U.S. joins them.
Dan Baer, who served as U.S. ambassador to the OSCE during the Obama administration, told Schwartz: “Refusing election observers is usually something that countries in a position of weakness do, when they know that they have corrupt or unfair elections. It’s very strange for the United States, which has been historically a standard setter in free and fair elections, to refuse observers.”
On Monday, election denier Tina Peters reportedly met with Trump at the White House. As Matt Cohen of Democracy Docket reported, Peters and voter suppression lawyer Cleta Mitchell have been pushing the idea that Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick can seize voting machines because they use some foreign-made parts. As Cohen notes, election experts are crystal clear that no law gives Lutnick that power.
This afternoon, at a rally in Maryland, Trump called out Director of the Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought, a key author of Project 2025, saying: “We have some big surprises coming up in another few weeks, right Russ? He’s gonna be one of the very important people in the history of our country in my opinion. He’s got some great things happening.”
—
Notes:
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/10/06/crude-oil-tanker-strait-hormuz-iran-attack.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/04/us/politics/trump-moving-ethical-lines.html
https://www.newsweek.com/trump-accuses-nyt-doctoring-doral-photo-what-images-show-12527994
https://populationconnection.org/learn/pronatalism-in-the-us/
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/10/06/babies-marriage-transit-funding-trump-01107399
https://www.ms.now/news/trump-midterms-osce-election-observers
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/06/us/politics/trump-taxpayer-funded-ads.html
YouTube:
Trump’s Truth:
X:
GavinNewsom/status/2107288831112466787?s=20
GovPressOffice/status/2107308699509555244
MayorToddGloria/status/2107295637058494706?s=20
Bluesky:
atrupar.com/post/3mx63vpx2ms22
atrupar.com/post/3mxa57dh5my22
atrupar.com/post/3mxaanp6u3d2s
Links for you. Science:
How did Rosalind Franklin miss the helix in her iconic DNA image? She didn’t. New analysis refutes James Watson’s claim he was first to recognize significance of famed photograph 51 (paper here)
Whole genome sequencing of Yersinia pestis isolates from Central Asian natural plague foci revealed the role of adaptation to different hosts and environmental conditions in shaping specific genotypes
RFK Jr. Wants to AI-ify Health Care. Claude Says He’s Full of Sh*t.
Cyclospora found at Mexican farm linked to lettuce outbreak
Is coffee good or bad? Studies vary, but this New Orleans cardiologist has done the research.
This Worm Has No Ifs And Many Butts
Kenya confirms first case of Ebola Bundibugyo virus
Other:
What Is Zionism? To understand what the word means today, you have to go back to the beginning of the story.
‘Elon is my prophet’: how Musk’s Doge team took a wrecking ball to Washington. When the new ‘department of government efficiency’ sent young techies to disrupt federal agencies, not everyone complied. Here’s what happened when one worker fought to protect immigrant data
Lewis George says she won’t let the ‘loudest person’ hold up transit projects (““The loudest person doesn’t get to influence basic safety infrastructure that we know works,” Lewis George said. “It’s time that we stop believing that everyone has to love an idea in order for an idea to happen. That’s not what governance calls for us to do.””)
‘De-Trumpification’: America’s Ruler Is ‘Consumed’ by Fear His Self-Tributes Will Be Erased. As Dems flirt with tearing it all down, Donald Trump is forcing administration officials to brainstorm novel legal arguments for institutionalizing his personality cult forever.
PSA: Trump Continues to Commit Crimes
Trump loses favor with crypto fans who call him out for cashing in (lol)
ChatGPT is adding real cartoonists’ signatures to fake New Yorker cartoons
Reclaiming Worker Power in the Age of AI
Trump backs down on his taxpayer-funded political ads after fiery pushback (“It’s still unclear whether Trump’s new plan is entirely legal, since his proclamation seems to suggest some level of campaign coordination with his own super PAC, which by law is meant to operate independently.”)
Advocates Hold Another Rally in Support of East Potomac Park. Ex-Olympian David Hearn, who had been accused of vandalizing the reflecting pool in June, joined dozens of protesters at the rally.
Parking debate dominates first phase of Commanders stadium development (the Council and Mayor Bowser really fucked this up)
Polls and “fundamentals” basically agree about the blue wave
Sen. Roger Marshall has an ex-governors problem in reelection campaign
How the Government Forces Doctors to Defraud Our Seniors
If Amendment 3 passes, Florida will need city hospice
AI costs are rising for organizations, reports warn
Paychecks aren’t going as far. More Americans say they trust Democrats to help.
America Wants to Make More Generic Drugs. India Shows Why That’s Hard.
Rural MAHA followers say Trump health policies haven’t reached their communities
Lucien Lazare, Jewish Resistance Fighter in Occupied France, Dies at 101
Susan Collins Voted to Confirm Russ Vought. Is She Having Second Thoughts?
Fury in California After Trump Suggests Iran Could ‘Take Out’ L.A. or San Diego. Gov. Gavin Newsom called the president “dangerous and deranged” after his remarks at a political rally, where Mr. Trump said the Iran war was necessary to “keep the world safe.”
Make. Him. Cut. A. Check.
Swapping money for expertise
In Georgia, two trans candidates believe voters are ready for them
In Retrospect, the ‘Access Hollywood’ Tape Marked the End of the Gender Politics Debate
Trump drops longtime aversion to mail-in voting with GOP trailing in polls
A thirsty Patel juices FBI stats — and DOJ gets Watergate wrong
Putin’s dirty tricks reach Finnish lavatories. Russian spies accused of leaving faeces in homes of politicians to intimidate them
Megyn Kelly on Cornell’s Jane Doe: “I’m just going to be honest, she’s not the most attractive gal. She’s extremely beefy in her arms and her legs.” (Kelly has no idea how sexual predators operate, and that’s the kindest interpretation of Kelly)
While the AI safety cultists are worried about the singularity, what we should be concerned about is how AI can be used to make existing problems worse (boldface mine):
An explosive and newly partially unsealed court filing alleges that the US Department of Homeland Security built up dossiers on ICE observers—including their photos, license plate numbers, and other information—and stored them in a system called the Investigative Case Management database, which was built by Palantir.
Palantir did not immediately respond to requests for comment…
Plaintiffs allege in the filing, which is heavily based on documents produced by the government and depositions of DHS agents, that agents had a practice of intimidating protesters and observers. They did this, the filing says, by doing drive-bys of the observers’ homes and, in the case of at least one observer, requiring that she be referred to secondary inspection any time she tries to cross the border until at least January 2027…
According to the legal filing, that afternoon, J.C. called Williams on her cell phone, identifying himself only as “the Department of Homeland Security.” According to Williams, he told her she “should encourage” her spouse, Pantos, “not to do anything like that in the future because people who are doing things like that might get added to a domestic terrorism watchlist.” J.C. testified in a deposition that he warned Williams she would be arrested if she “continue[d] to do this.” Government attorneys asserted in a court filing that he denied referencing a “domestic terrorism watchlist.”
But you might think, well, this is just a database and it doesn’t involve AI. Nope:
Palantir’s role extends beyond field enforcement. ICE is using generative AI tools supplied by the company to assist with software development, database queries, and system diagnostics inside its Investigative Case Management System, a customized version of Palantir’s Gotham platform. DHS filings again describe the models as off-the-shelf systems rather than agency-trained AI.
Per FedScoop, “ICE added 25 AI use cases since its disclosure last summer, including to process tips, review mobile device data relevant to investigations, confirm identities of individuals via biometric data and detect intentional misidentification. Of the newly added uses at ICE, three are products from Palantir, which has been a notable — and at times controversial — technology partner for the U.S. government under the Trump administration.”
This is first and foremost a data privacy and civil liberties problem, but AI makes it worse, in that DHS minions can use and abuse this information far more easily. There are a whole slew of existing problems, from hacking* to deepfakes that various AI-based tools make worse, but they are longstanding problems–data privacy was a problem before 2022 (give or take), but it’s just easier to acquire and misuse data now.
Essentially, those that purport to govern us haven’t moved on a whole bunch of issues, and now those problems have become magnified by AI.
*From what I’ve read, most of the hacks are cribbed from hacks designed by people, and aren’t particularly novel in and of themselves, and are just applied by the various AI systems.
Santa Rosa, CA — October 2026 — Deposition Sciences, Inc. (DSI), a leader in advanced thin film coatings, proudly announces the introduction of a new 12″ × 30″ format for […]
The post Deposition Sciences, Inc. Expands Sunshade® Tape Offering with New 12″ × 30″ Format appeared first on SpaceNews.
1. Palo Alto Networks (cybersecurity firm, check out YTD).
2. OAI doing math again. Quasi-Riemann! And just one metric of import.
3. The AI agents pitching literary magazines.
4. Redux of my 2022 post on the effective altruists.
5. Rude AI video about Europe.
6. Power constraints and the productivity slowdown.
The post Wednesday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Meet the 43 leaders and accomplishments that exemplified excellence across the industry over the last 12 months
The post Announcing the finalists for the 2026 SpaceNews Icon Awards appeared first on SpaceNews.
A research team at the University of Warwick (UK) has turned up what may be a planet orbiting a white dwarf. That’s an interesting find given the lifetime of white dwarfs after the parent star has lost its outer envelope. Any life on such a world would have several billion years to work with (see White Dwarfs and Habitable Planets for more), although this planet is far too young for that. But this find has other implications. If confirmed, it would be the first planet thought to have formed through accretion of materials left over from the death of the red giant. It would be evidence of a second generation, a planet-hosting period that begins after the red giant phase is over.
The star is HS 0209+0832, a young and hot white dwarf maybe five million years beyond the red giant phase. The original discovery came in 1999 by way of the Hubble Space Telescope, although the data had remained little studied in the archives since then. It took examination by doctoral candidate Jamie Williams at Warwick to explain some of the unusual chemical signatures lurking in the data. Over 100 chemical features from the initial Hubble observations needed clarification, and Williams discovered that a primary player was niobium.
Image: This artist’s concept depicts a possible explanation for the unusual chemical abundances the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope detected in the HS 0209+0832 system: a second-generation planet orbiting the white dwarf star. The white dwarf is the “dead” core of a star that burned through all of its nuclear fuel and lost its outer envelope of gas and dust to space. The second-generation planet formed from that cast-off gas and dust, which is why its chemical content is very different from a planet that formed as its host star was forming. Credit: NASA, ESA, L. Hustak (STScI).
This is interesting not only because of the idea of planet formation in a kind of ‘rebirth’ of a planetary system, but also because it opens up new lines of research. Here’s Williams, who is now lead author of a paper on this work:
“Rather than the white dwarf stage being a kind of epilogue to the story of a star and its planets, this research points to the systems we are familiar with only being the first chapter of a potentially much longer tale, with some new characters showing up. That’s a really exciting prospect to pursue. What Hubble is showing us in this white dwarf system is something we haven’t seen before: a high abundance of the element niobium, the signature of which I was unfamiliar with when I first found it in the archival data.”
To clarify what was going on in this unusual system required that Williams and team study not just the Hubble data but also that of further observations from the Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer mission (FUSE), launched in 1999, the latter confirming the presence of niobium in the spectrum. Interestingly, the team looked at 33 other white dwarfs with signs of metal pollution in their atmospheres and found none with niobium. Further observations with TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) showed periodic brightness variations consistent with a planet orbiting at approximately 6 million kilometers.
The niobium signature is critical because it is an element that is not formed in a stellar core through fusion. “Instead,” says co-author Nicholas Stone (University of Wisconsin – Madison) “these heavy elements can only be synthesised in the exotic conditions that briefly emerge inside dying stars. The presence of niobium is a signpost of these ‘death’ throes, and the expulsion of the dying star’s innards into space.”
The supposition is that material ejected from the dying star, enriched by exotic chemistry, coalesced into what appears to be a gas giant. The team argues that it is likely the size of Jupiter, and probably losing atmosphere given that the white dwarf would be stripping its outer material in such a tight orbit. Says Williams: “If the second-generation planet is there, I think it is likely to survive. Eventually the white dwarf will cool and then maintain a consistent temperature, with the planet in its stable habitable zone for millions of years.”
But forming this kind of disk is itself tricky. If planets like this are as rare as they seem, that may be because forming them requires another companion that helps to shepherd the ejected material from the dying star into orbit, rather than simply shedding it into interstellar space. For that, let’s look at the paper:
Assuming spherically symmetric mass loss, a second-generation proto-planetary disc is unlikely to form around a single AGB star, but there are several mechanisms that can lead to a disc if a binary companion was present. Evidence for the formation of such a disc has been found at the post-common envelope binary NN Ser as well as several post-AGB binaries. In particular, a close-in low-mass companion to the progenitor of HS 0209+0832 would have entered a common envelope event during the AGB phase, resulting in the ejection of the envelope and the formation of a circumstellar disc rich in s-process elements. A second-generation giant planet could have formed within that disc via direct gravitational collapse close to the white dwarf. Alternatively, a first-generation sub-Neptune or super-Earth that was scattered towards the second-generation proto-planetary disc could have accreted a second-generation atmosphere around a first-generation core.
Image: This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope spectrum shows the unusual abundances of certain elements it found in the HS 0209+0832 system. Dips indicate where niobium, nickel, and calcium are absorbing light, so less light in that part of the spectrum reached Hubble. The reason the starlight is showing elements that astronomers attribute to a planet has to do with interactions between the white dwarf star and planet. The white dwarf is still hot and is blasting the planet with radiation, causing it to lose atmosphere to space. That atmospheric material is flowing back toward the white dwarf, forming a disk and then falling back onto its surface. Credit: NASA, ESA, L. Hustak (STScI).
So while we can speculate about the fate of the inner planets in our Solar System when our Sun goes through its red giant phase, we may have to add in a scenario where a new inner system forms around a hot white dwarf with a long lifetime of its own. That’s assuming a mechanism that supports planet formation there. A still viable Jupiter using its formidable mass to shape a growing circumstellar cloud/disk? The example of HS 0209+0832 makes this at least plausible, although again, we have no good idea of how often such processes produce new planets.
White dwarfs will continue to energize research. From an exoplanet standpoint, imagine an Earth-size planet in transit across a white dwarf. That would be a transit signature for the ages. From the astrobiological perspective, consider that a white dwarf gradually loses heat because it has no fuel. This is a process, however, that can take several billion years before the star’s surface cools to the Sun’s current temperatures. Even that long life-time is eclipsed by the star’s eventual death as a ‘black dwarf,’ an inert object of a sort never observed because to reach that state would take longer than the age of the universe.
The paper is Williams et al., “Discovery of a second-generation planet candidate accreting onto a white dwarf,” Nature Astronomy 5 October 2026 (full text).
For years, and especially in the last month or so, we’ve been collectively inundated with an AI industry which, uncannily and bizarrely, tells us simultaneously that AI is essential, inevitable and runs a significant chance of exterminating all of us in as few as two or three years. If you’ve dipped into this debate at all, you’ve quickly come upon discussions of so-called “rationalists” or “long-termists” or supporters of “effective altruism” who are simultaneously ubiquitous among those developing AI and in the AI safety (i.e., the folks sounding the alarm) community as well. (For the sake of simplicity and brevity, I’ll refer to these folks as the “REL nexus”: rationalists, effective altruists and long-termists. This is my coinage since I don’t know a better one.) I’ve spent a fair amount of time familiarizing myself with this world and how it relates to current debates about AI. So I wanted to share my basic impressions.
My global impression is that REL thinking really does suffuse the whole Silicon Valley and Silicon Valley-adjacent AI world, and that the risk projections about the chances of AI-driven extinction or existential risk are part of a belief system and set of certainties that long predates the entire existence of Large Language Models, which are what public AI discourse is really about. (By that, I mean there are other forms of machine learning under the AI heading which predate LLMs and other forms in development. But everything we’re currently talking about in the public sphere are LLMs.) There are both really fantastical (not necessarily false but fantastical) beliefs about AI’s potential and also its dangers. For me, it’s a big deal that this tightly woven set of beliefs predates almost all the empirical realities we’re seeing and dealing with today.
Something related applies to what is usually referred to as AGI (artificial general intelligence). This is a major part of the AI debate, and key parts of the public debate center on how close AGI may be. But there’s no real clarity about what AGI even is. Broadly, what it means is AI with a general intelligence — i.e., it has intelligence across most or all of the domains in which humans operate and is superior to that of humans. Not just language, not just number crunching, but most or all of them. Because of this, it becomes significantly autonomous. You don’t have to train it on new things or add new programming. It can learn things itself somewhat in the way that we can learn things. If you or I set our minds to it we could develop expertise in geography, mindfulness, plane-flying, mathematics, providing psychotherapeutic counseling. AGI could do all those and most of the other things humans can and do them better — with more effective and powerful reasoning, faster etc.
But as I noted above, this is a posited concept that long predates the AI/LLM breakthroughs of the last half dozen years or so. It’s a very ambiguous idea with very few hard parameters for what constitutes it or how we’d know it’s been developed. It seems relatively untethered to our more general understandings of what intelligence, or at least intelligence in humans even is. And it’s unclear that we’re close to it whatever it might be. Again, we’re talking about a tightly woven set of beliefs that predate all the current empirical findings about what LLMs are, how they work, etc.
Now, some people are just really good at seeing over the horizon. It was very clear to physicists early on that Relativity Theory pointed to the possibility of releasing unimaginable amounts of energy by splitting atoms and engineering uncontrolled chain reactions. They could also see the implications and dangers associated with creating technologies that could do that in a controlled and scalable way. They were right. It was pretty bad, a genie that could never really be placed back in its bottle, and we’ve been living with that reality since 1945. But I don’t think this is like that. The role of empiricism, the scientific method, and falsifiability are just fundamentally different. What we’re talking about is more like a culture, an interwoven set of beliefs, that have only an uncertain relationship to the technologies (LLMs) that we’re talking about. To an extent, we’re also talking about a set of beliefs that is highly centered within the community and mentality of engineering with too little grappling with what takes place outside of that world.
If you read up on people in the REL world (again, my coinage, don’t Google REL) you’ll hear that it’s adjacent to a lot of right-wing thinking, a lot of eugenicist thinking, a lot of very suspect moral reasoning that involves doing dark or evil things in the present in the interests of large numbers of theoretical future people who REL folks think will exist 10,000 years from now. What is the moral standing or worth of a mere billion people today compared to a trillion people who might be alive in a million years across the galaxy? Or the trillion that that might live over the next 10,000 years? (No, I’m not kidding. Don’t get me started.)
Each of these claims are true to some degree. But the bigger point is that people in the REL world are far too loose with their beliefs in things that we have no evidence are true. They posit technologies with no clear path to making them and engage in a way of thinking about probability that frankly just isn’t how the world actually works. In a very broad sense, the whole community talks a lot with the language of science without the practice science, by which I mean frameworks of proof, falsifiability and specifics. And just to bring this back to specifics, why should any of us care what these people in what we’re short-handing as the REL community think? Because the great majority of what you hear about AI safety in the context of extinction events and existential risks comes back to them or is highly shaped by their thinking. A lot of things that are discussed in the REL world as real, tangible things, albeit things that are still a bit off in the future, at best stretch the limit between reality and science fiction. When I was kid and significantly into adult life and to a significant degree still today I too am really into Star Trek and thinking about what things could be real and what the limits of our imagination are. But that’s not a valid basis for making public policy. And it’s mostly not the basis of ethical judgments in the here and now or on planet Earth.
Now, these are some pretty big claims I made above, especially coming from someone who struggled with high school math. I can only say that I try to be very aware of what I don’t now, areas of knowledge that are mostly unknown to me, attentive to how people do and don’t engage with genuine domain knowledge, how people reason in areas I do know something about. (When I hear top AI executives trying to convince clergy that LLMs are in some sense conscious and have moral standing akin to humans, it makes me think I’m not dealing with serious people.) The credentialed drivers of the REL community tend to be not in the sciences but rather in academic philosophy. And the more I’ve learned, the more I’ve been genuinely baffled that people who think in these ways have managed to secure quite prestigious academic appointments. In any case, I’m not asking you to take my word for any of this stuff. I’m giving you my perspective on a question at the center of a critical public conversation.
Now, where does this leave us? I want to be clear that I’m emphatically not saying AI is awesome and let’s go full speed ahead. Just because this whole conversation about AI exterminating humanity comes from a very iffy place doesn’t mean that AI is therefore safe. That’s a basic fallacy. It doesn’t even necessarily mean it doesn’t pose existential risks. It’s just that the current claims are too infected, too much fruit of the poisoned or nonsensical, quasi-religious tree to draw any from them. And this has been where I’ve been kind of hung up. There are clearly a lot of things we need to worry about and take steps to deal with about AI right now. One of those is the fact that a lot of AI development and testing has been quite reckless, taking risks and assuming society will absorb the consequences, using either sloppy or inexpert security precautions to wall off testing (in which frontier labs are often testing whether their models will do damaging things) from the larger web. To the extent that there are near term big risks from current LLMs, they seem much more likely to come from bad actors using powerful AI to do bad things than LLMs “deciding” to do bad things because their actions are unpredictable.
What I think we as citizens and as people involved in the civic process need to do is focus on concrete potential dangers that have evidence behind them, specific arguments and to-dos. And we proceed on that basis. We shouldn’t be starting from claims about the potential of LLMs exterminating humanity and reasoning back to slightly less worse things and thinking of how to stop them. One of the most consistent patterns of the REL world is to posit maximal risks or opportunities, assign degrees of risk to them, often on the basis of no more than guesswork or intuition, and then start building whole structures of ideas and plans downstream of those initial postulates or assumptions. But often the assumptions — the scientific-sounding, numerical percentages of risk — are really based on nothing.
On Monday, Politico published an interview from what appears to be OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s most recent post-controversy media tour in which he said, “We believe that the world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology and people having the agency.” As one person pointed out to me, on its face, or out of context, this isn’t necessarily such a controversial remark. We accept tens of thousands of people dying every year from auto accidents as the price of having cars. Those are definitely “bad things.” Every major technology has some risks inherent in it. But in the context of AI and the current public conversation about AI risks and downsides, this comment epitomizes the mentality behind Silicon Valley’s rush to embrace AI. “Bad things” covers a pretty expansive amount of territory. Altman and his team think we should accept whatever “bad things” means because AI is just so amazing and will bring so many wonderful things. But just what those wonderful things are seems highly speculative and uncertain. And big majorities of Americans are at best uncertain whether they want them at all. What you get from the collision of these two realities is that yet again it’s Silicon Valley’s world and we’re just living in it. That’s fundamentally what the data center backlash is about. It’s the one piece of the equation where ordinary people — because of these specific details of zoning law — can say no. We should see this wild and ecstatic boosterism — that AI is our salvation and destiny — as just the flip side of the doomerism that predicts our near-term extinction. They both flow downstream from a series of assumptions and beliefs, which when you see them close up, are genuinely weird, usually unsupported by actual evidence and often based on ethical assumptions and values that are simply bad.
You have questions, we have answers. Since TPM readers are as obsessed with political minutiae as our staffers are, we’re launching a special limited-run bonus version of the pod in this final month before the 2026 midterms. Introducing: the Polltober Show.
On Tuesdays, Josh and Kate will get into the weeds on all things midterms, drawing on questions that you — our lovely readers — will submit! If there’s anything you want to know about specific races, candidates, chamber control, the courts, the polls, whatever, just drop your queries in the YouTube comments on the latest episode of the TPM Show or the Polltober Show itself. Our producer Jackie Wilhelm will scoop them up and pass them on to Josh and Kate to mull over.
Look forward to getting into the weeds with you!
It’s surprising to see Donald Trump campaigning in Texas a month before a midterm election, as he will this week. Far more surprising to see him snubbed by the incumbent Republican governor who until as recently as a month ago appeared to be in an all but nominal reelection campaign against state Rep. Gina Hinojosa. Houston Chronicle reporter Ben Wermund caught up with Greg Abbott who told Wermund he wouldn’t be able to show up because of “other campaign events already planned.” Said Abbott: “Whenever he does show up, it leads to excitement with the base. He does a good job with getting the base organized and turning out.”
He “does a good job.” lol …
While I am certainly not predicting Abbott’s defeat, recent polls have shown a genuinely competitive race. Fox and Siena polls both take in the last week of September showed at Abbott +5 (Fox) or Hinojosa +4 (NYT/Siena). A Marist poll a week earlier showed Hinojosa +3. A few lesser known or GOP sponsored polls have leaned more toward Abbott. An additional concern for Abbott is that Ken Paxton seems to be running genuinely behind. So Abbott could also pick up some some of the downdraft from that race.
Scharon Harding, Ars Technica:
Unlike with previous versions of macOS, macOS 27 Golden Gate doesn’t have a toggle for turning off Apple Intelligence. That makes disabling AI features that you may not want more difficult. It also means that the AI models necessary for running Apple Intelligence will take up space on your disk, even if you don’t use them or if you go through your settings to individually find and disable AI capabilities.
In response, a developer known as Om Lahore on GitHub last week created RemoveMacAI, a command-line tool that allows macOS 27 users to “turn off Apple Intelligence on macOS 27” in a way that is “fully reversible,” per the GitHub page. They said that Apple’s Intelligence models take up “about 12GB,” but the models can actually take up over 30GB, The Verge noted.
RemoveMacAI “turns off Siri, Writing Tools, Genmoji, Image Playground, the ChatGPT extension, and all the summaries, then it deletes the models and stops macOS from downloading them again. Dictation still works because it’s a separate setting,” the developer said in a Reddit post first spotted by MacRumors.
Sounds crazy but it’s not rming files in the /System/ folder — it uses techniques that work with System Integrity Protection remaining enabled. I mean, I wouldn’t do it on a production machine, but, I don’t want to disable Apple Intelligence.
I can see the reasons why some people are frustrated that MacOS 27 Golden Gate doesn’t have built-in support for disabling this and removing the local models, though. If your Mac only has 256 or even 512 GB of storage, a dozen GB (or more) is meaningful. And there are institutional groups that have rules against AI — these places aren’t allowing Golden Gate at all until and unless Apple Intelligence can be removed. And that means not buying new Mac hardware that only runs Golden Gate.
You have questions, we have answers. Since TPM readers are as obsessed with political minutiae as our reporters are, we’re launching a special limited-run bonus version of the pod in this final month before the 2026 midterms. Introducing: the Polltober Show.
Every Tuesday from now until Election Day, Josh and Kate will get into the weeds on all things midterms, drawing on questions that you — our lovely readers — will submit! If there’s anything you want to know about specific races, candidates, chamber control, the courts, the polls, whatever, just drop your queries in the YouTube comments on the latest episode of the TPM Show or the Polltober Show itself. I will scoop them up and pass them on to Josh and Kate to mull over.
This week, Kate Riga and Josh Marshall dig into the first listener mailbag, breaking down key races in Florida and Georgia as well as decoding Democrats’ generic ballot lead.
Don’t forget to subscribe to our YouTube page for more content and the rest of Polltober!
My comment on Mistral Large 4 — Hacker News.
wren6991: The benchmark is saturated. Frontier models are tested with an armadillo in fishnet tights jaywalking on Mars.
OK well I couldn't resist this one:
llm -m claude-opus-5.5 'Generate an SVG of an armadillo in fishnet tights jaywalking on Mars'
llm -m gpt-6.1-sol 'Generate an SVG of an armadillo in fishnet tights jaywalking on Mars'
llm -m gemini-3.8-flash 'Generate an SVG of an armadillo in fishnet tights jaywalking on Mars'
llm -m mistral/mistral-large-4 'Generate an SVG of an armadillo in fishnet tights jaywalking on Mars'
Default reasoning levels for each: https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer?url=ht...
Release: datasette-atom 0.11a0
A minor fix for compatibility with the latest Datasette alphas. This meant we could upgrade the datasette.io site to Datasette 1.0a41.
Tool: Scrimshaw Jukebox
I wanted to see if Claude Opus 5.5 could compose music, so I tried this:
I want you to write some computer game music for me. First design simple text based format for the music and build an artifact that can play it out loud - include some example tracks in that artifact
I am looking for music of the quality of the original secret of Monkey Island
It leaned a lot harder into the Monkey Island theme than I had intended, but the results are surprisingly good.
I wonder if the ability to compose competent music is similar to the 3D graphics thing - a new capability for text models that emerged in the past few months?
Would need some careful experiments with other recent and not-so-recent models to confirm if this is new or if they've been able to do this for a while.
Tags: ai, generative-ai, llms, claude, vibe-coding
Perhaps one of the most important decisions a fledgling founder will make is what to name their office’s conference rooms. For the founders of Minerva Humanoids, a robotics company making its debut this week, the answer was industrial catastrophes. I met them in Chernobyl. Down the hall is Deepwater. One of the phone booths is Piper Alpha, after the North Sea oil platform that exploded in 1988 and killed 167 people.
“We actually take our mission so seriously that we name our conference rooms after disasters,” says Sandor Felber, the company’s 26-year-old CEO.
Minerva’s office is in San Francisco’s South Park neighborhood. It’s tiny for a robotics company, with just enough room for Felber, his cofounder and CTO Maurice Rahme, their first engineering hire Ali Kuwajerwala, and Roger, their humanoid victim slash product.
Release: llm-openai-decisions 0.1a0
OpenAI released their new Jev-style Decisions API, as previously announced at last week's DevDay.
Since I already have an llm-typesafe plugin for talking to Jev, I had GPT-6 Astra read the new OpenAI API documentation and build an llm-openai-decisions plugin inspired by llm-typesafe.
Unlike Jev, the new gpt-6-luna decision model supports image input in addition to text. Both models charge for input it and not for output: OpenAI's is 10 cents per million input tokens, Jev's is 4.2 cents per million.
Otherwise the API shape is very similar to Jev, at least conceptually. Jev supports three question types for yes/no, choices, or scores. OpenAI Decisions supports the same three types.
Install the plugin like this:
llm install llm-openai-decisions
Here's an example query against an image attachment:
llm -m openai-decisions/gpt-6-luna \
-a https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2025/two-pelicans.jpg \
-s 'Does this image contain any mammals?'And example output:
{"type": "predicate", "name": "evaluation", "probability": 0.0}Consult the README for full details of how to run the other types of questions.
Tags: openai, llm, coding-agents, jev
Release: llm-mistral 0.16
Adds support for reasoning models, such as the newly released Mistral Large 4.
Tags: llm, mistral, llm-reasoning
My comment on EmbeddingGemma 2 — Hacker News.
I really appreciate that EmbeddingGemma 2 is under the Apache 2.0 license.
For embedding models in particular, I don't think it makes sense to use a closed, proprietary, hosted-only model.
Most applications of embedding models involve calculating thousands or even millions of embedding vectors and storing them for later comparison.
If your model is proprietary, the vendor is likely someday going to decide to stop offering that model. They'll have a better model to replace it, but you still need to pay to re-calculate those millions of stored existing vectors.
(In April 2024 OpenAI offered to "cover the financial cost of users re-embedding content with these new models" - https://openai.com/index/gpt-4-api-general-availability/ - but I don't think that's something we can rely on from every provider.)
Notably, I don't want to host the model myself. I'd much rather pay a provider for a hosted model while knowing that if they ever stop hosting it I can run the open weights version myself - or find another vendor who can do that for me.
Tags: google, ai, generative-ai, embeddings, gemma
Introducing Mistral Large 4: Le chonk
Mistral are back in the game. Today they're releasing a preview of Mistral Large 4, a 1 trillion parameter, 49 billion active parameter model trained on their own cluster of 3,800 NVIDIA Grace Blackwell GPUs.The preview is available via their API. They promise to release the open weights model at the "end of this month".
The model only supports two reasoning levels - "none" and "high" - via the Mistral API. Here are both pelicans - the "high" one looks better, though surprisingly it only used 2,717 output tokens compared to "none" which used 3,275:
On Artificial Analysis it scores 38, just behind DeepSeek 4.1 Flash, which is a 552B model. It's a huge improvement on last December's Mistral Large 3, which drew this terrible pelican and scored 9 on AA.
It's certainly not a Fable-class model, but it's great to see Mistral put out a model that's back to being maybe about 6 months behind the frontier.
Via Hacker News
Tags: ai, generative-ai, llms, mistral, pelican-riding-a-bicycle, llm-release
TIL: Using Parseable with Datasette for OpenTelemetry traces
I saw Parseable in a Show HN today - it's a new observability platform with both an open source (AGPL) Rust implementation (a single ~180MB binary), an "Enterprise" version with extra features and a cloud hosted option.
Since Datasette 1.0a41 added OpenTelemetry support (thanks, Alex Garcia), I decided to fire up Codex and have it figure out how to run Parseable and feed it traces from Datasette.
Here's my (human-written) TIL showing the patterns that worked, and here's a screenshot of a Datasette trace displayed within the Parseable localhost web application:
Tags: datasette, observability, alex-garcia, opentelemetry
There’s plenty to talk about, especially the mess in France. But I need some time to think before writing.
I was a graph theory junkie long ago and even moved to Budapest for awhile to study among the greats. While I was there I started working on Barnette's Conjecture which came to occupy my thoughts over the next 24 years of my life, on and off as I worked in many different fields. Last summer I even thought for a few days that I had actually solved it.
But it's supposedly proven here - problem 180. I don't know what to think exactly. I spent thousands of hours on that problem. I really enjoyed it. Hearing that it is solved somehow makes me sad in a far-off way, like hearing an ex-girlfriend died suddenly in a car crash. I don't know, there's probably a lot of people feeling odd emotions tonight.
— Jake Boggan, Hacker News comment on openai/math
Tags: openai, mathematics, deep-blue, llms, ai, generative-ai
OpenAI “rogue” agent activities found on Wikimedia projects
Given how tempting a target wikis are for rogue agent swarms, it's not a huge surprise that Wikipedia found evidence of that activity once they went looking:The Wikimedia Foundation conducted its own investigation to see whether Wikimedia websites had been similarly affected by AI agents, focusing on those operated by OpenAI. We can confirm that we have discovered some activity by these “rogue” OpenAI agents on Wikimedia platforms. The unauthorized bot activities included edits to our wikis, some unsuccessful attempts to exploit a public note-taking tool we host, and heavy traffic, which are described more below.
They found evidence of agents editing sandbox pages, trying to use pieces of infrastructure such as Etherpad to help proxy content from elsewhere, and saw widespread crawling and "hundreds of thousands of data queries" to their Wikidata Query Service.
My best guess is that most of this was a similar (or the same) swarm of agents as those that defaced that German wiki while training for research tasks.
The Wikipedia sandbox wiki edits appear to have started on May 12th, and the initial test edits to the UseModWiki Sandbox page reported by that incident started on May 11th.
Tags: wikimedia, wikipedia, wikis, ai, generative-ai, llms, ai-ethics, accidental-cyberattacks
Since the Medicare breach, OpenAI has put in place additional monitoring to allow “immediate intervention” by staff to stop training if the company’s models access the internet in ways they’re not supposed to, Mr. Kwon [chief strategy officer at OpenAI] said.
— Victoria Kim, Reporting from the Australian parliament
Tags: accidental-cyberattacks, generative-ai, ai-security-research, openai, ai, llms
In the wake of tragedy, an elderly couple must make a choice: should they let their son go to save the lives of others?
- by Aeon Video
Here's a controversial market with something for everyone to argue about: organ donation after euthanasia, including psychiatric patients, in the Netherlands.
van Dijk, N., Wijffels, S., Wind, T. et al. The first 100 cases of organ donation after euthanasia in the Netherlands: lessons from preliminary experiences. BMC Med Ethics (2026). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12910-026-01590-5
"Background
Organ donation after euthanasia (ODE) is an evolving, patient-initiated procedure in the Netherlands. While it gives meaning to donors at the end-of-life, it introduces complex ethical and practical challenges for healthcare professionals. This study aims to describe the clinical characteristics and donation outcomes of the first 100 ODE procedures in the Netherlands, while outlining the practical and ethical dilemmas encountered.
Methods
A retrospective analysis was performed on prospectively collected data from the first 100 ODE procedures conducted between September 2012 and February 2023. To gain deeper insight into practical experiences and ethical themes, these data were discussed with organ donation coordinators and intensivists involved in the procedures. The analysis focused on clinical characteristics and donation outcomes, as on ethical and practical challenges.
Results
Neurodegenerative disorders were the primary underlying cause of suffering (52%), followed by psychiatric conditions (31%). The first 100 procedures resulted in 408 transplanted organs. Most procedures were performed in intensive care units, with general practitioners performing euthanasia. Key ethical and practical challenges included the tension between clinical protocols (e.g., fasting) and patient comfort, the medicalisation of the dying process through invasive monitoring, and the logistical barriers of starting ODE from home (ODEH). Furthermore, ethical concerns persist regarding euthanasia in psychiatric and dementia cases, and the emotional burden on healthcare professionals.
Conclusions
Patient-initiated ODE is feasible and allows patients to fulfil altruistic end-of-life wishes, but introduces complex ethical and practical challenges. Balancing organ donation with a dignified, non-medicalised death requires careful planning, especially as ODE expands to psychiatric and early dementia cases. Healthcare professionals face emotional and logistical burdens, yet are motivated by the positive impact on donors and recipients. Insights from these initial cases contributed to the development of the 2024 Dutch guideline, which supports both local and centralised procedures and which removed distinctions between somatic and psychiatric suffering. Further research should explore relatives’ perspectives to understand the broader impact of ODE(H). "
In a new paper, Brennan and Freiman argue persuasively that:
the arguments against laissez-faire capitalism apply in a rather straight way against laissez-faire democracy. This should be a rather startling result, considering that laissez-faire capitalism is widely rejected, yet laissez-faire democracy is widely accepted.
All the typical market failure arguments–externalities, asymmetric information, principal-agent problems, behavioral issues–apply to democracy. For example:
democracies also suffer from obvious externality problems. Indeed, this is the key difference between markets and politics. Market decisions are usually and mostly internalized; negative externalities are seen as an anomaly to be corrected. Political decisions are by nature public. For instance, about 37% of the eligible
voting public, and 26% of the entire population of the UK voted in favour of Brexit, but the effects of Brexit are borne by everyone else, including losing voters, eligible voters who abstained, children and other citizens ineligible to vote, future generations, and foreigners.…The problem is similar to the pollution of individual automobile drivers or airline passengers. We drive too much and pollute too much because we bear the benefits of these actions but pass the costs onto others. Individually we matter little but collectively we matter a great deal. If externality regulation is prima facie justified in the case of pollution, it is prima facie justified in the case of voting.
They go on to suggest regulations that might apply to democracy. Noting first that:
…pretty much everyone already accepts some government actions which are plausibly seen as vote or democratic regulation. For instance, some issues are put directly to voters, while others are left to elected leaders, while others are left to judges and bureaucracies, and still others are removed from political consideration entirely. The timing and place of elections, who is permitted to vote (at what age), who is permitted to run for office, and so on are kinds of regulation. Government funding of public education is in part meant to be a non-laissez-faire subsidy meant to increase voter competence. Many readers are likely comfortable with government regulation of campaign donations, campaign expenditures and even which kinds of speech are permitted. Probably almost all readers reject straight up markets in votes (Freiman 2014). Each of these things is a kind of government regulation of democracy which inhibits laissez-faire democracy.
The authors sketch possible regulations while stipulating, for the sake of argument, universal, equal suffrage—no weighted votes or knowledge tests for voting eligibility. Possibilities include paying citizens to pass a voluntary civics exam; tracking campaign promises and fining deceptive claims; regulating political advertisements more like drug advertisements; and requiring supermajorities for certain decisions. See the paper for more.
You may object that these regulations would be captured by special interests, be administered by biased officials, or have unintended consequences. Indeed, welcome to the argument for laissez-faire.
The post Against Laissez-Faire Democracy appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Texas produces more than Canada with three quarters of the population. Rough numbers for 2025:
| Texas | Canada | Texas / Canada | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Population | 31.7 million | 41.7 million | 0.76 |
| GDP, nominal (US$) | $2.9 trillion | $2.3 trillion | 1.27 |
| GDP per capita, nominal | $91,500 | $55,700 | 1.64 |
| GDP per capita, PPP | $94,000 | $66,700 | 1.41 |
| GDP, PPP (int’l $) | $3.0 trillion | $2.75 trillion | 1.09 |
Sources: BEA (Texas GDP, preliminary 2025; regional price parity), Census Bureau (Texas population), World Bank and IMF (Canada). Texas PPP figures divide nominal GDP by the BEA regional price parity.
Hat tip: Chris Powers.
The post Texas-Canada Fact of the Day appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Apple just released a system called “Reference Image.” It can verify the image is exactly as taken by an iPhone—new models only—without tying it to a specific iPhone or photographer. It can also verify that multiple images came from the same iPhone.
Other industry solutions require a photographer or institution to vouch for an image using their own credentials. We are concerned this puts some photographers, such as those operating in conflict zones, in a difficult position; it should not be necessary to forgo anonymity in order to prove image authenticity. We built Apple Reference Image to avoid using an explicit, public credential for photographers, and to avoid even implicit public association between different photos taken by the same sensor. The final reference image is instead signed by Apple’s signing service, after validation by PCC. That signature is backed by Apple’s strongest technical guarantees.
Our implementation also protects the confidentiality of the image itself, including from Apple. Merely capturing a reference image should never expose the actual pixels to Apple or anyone else. We achieve this through the exceptional privacy properties of PCC the nodes themselves are architected so that not even Apple can access image data, just as Apple cannot see the information processed for Apple Intelligence in PCC. While the revocation service must maintain a private record of photo GUIDs and associated sensors to allow for revocation, it never has access to the image data, and does not allow for public access to this record. And as final revocation checks occur using on-device lists, a device never reveals to anyone which photo it’s looking at in order to find out whether it’s still valid.
The report makes for good reading; the details are interesting.
404Media is reporting (alternate link) that a cyber-weapons arms manufacturer is exploiting a vulnerability in iOS to bypass its automatic reboot security feature. This is the feature that automatically puts an iPhone into a more secure state if it hasn’t been used for 72 hours.
The new technology to get around inactivity reboot was developed by Magnet Forensics, the company behind GrayKey, a popular tool sold to law enforcement agencies that allows them to unlock and access data stored in iPhones and Android smartphones. Magnet has developed a new device called GrayKey Preserve and a feature for its regular GrayKey devices called Evidence Preservation Mode, according to the video.
“This is an absolute game changer for iOS forensics and a function that I wish we had years ago,” a Magnet employee says in the leaked video, specifically mentioning that the solution is targeted at the iPhone’s inactivity reboot feature and the data it makes unavailable. GrayKey Preserve and Evidence Preservation Mode are also designed to combat another iPhone feature that automatically deletes certain data - such as cached locations, and recently deleted photos and iMessages - after a certain number of days. “We’re gonna be able to preserve that data for an infinite amount of time.”
Presumably, now that Apple engineers know that this flaw exists they can find and fix it. AI turns out to be really good at this sort of thing.
Another news article.
As a flight director during NASA's Apollo missions, Gerry Griffin led several lunar landings. He helped bring the crew of Apollo 13 safely back to Earth. Later, he directed Johnson Space Center in Houston.
Through these experiences, Griffin learned the value of teamwork in spaceflight—during the dynamic moments that can make or break a successful launch or landing, you absolutely have to trust your colleagues in the trenches.
"When lightning struck the rocket during Apollo 12, we had to react in a hurry," Griffin said in an interview. "With people like John Aaron and Jerry Carr, the trust and communications came through. It made the difference."
Stereotypes are a foundational construct in psychological science, often defined as beliefs concerning characteristic group attributes. We present a cognitive-ecological theory of social perception that predicts and explains why such characteristic attributes are likely negative, that is, why most stereotypes are negative. The theory assumes that, cognitively, people characterize groups by attributes that distinguish them from other groups. Ecologically, positive social information is more frequent (i.e., positivity prevalence), and negative social information is more diverse (i.e., negativity diversity. If negative attributes are less frequent and more diverse relative to positive attributes, then they must be more likely to distinguish one group from another. Consequently, the attributes people see as characteristic of a group are likely to be negative. We illustrate the predicted stereotype negativity across two studies and two existing data sets. We then formalize the theory and illustrate it with simulations showing that rare attributes can be highly diagnostic of group membership while applying to only a minority of group members. Thus, the theory explains why most stereotype content is likely negative, despite the well-documented positivity prevalence, and why stereotypes may be diagnostic and comparatively accurate, despite being descriptively inaccurate. The theory explains stereotype negativity without requiring motivational derogation, essentialist group differences, or a general negativity bias, and it clarifies when positive stereotypes should occur. We also discuss the theory’s relation to dimensional models of stereotype content and consequences for interventions aimed at reducing stereotype negativity.
That is from a recent paper by Christian Unkelbach, Anne Irena Weitzel, and Hans Alves, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
The post Why most stereotypes are negative appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
A low-pressure system in the western Gulf of Mexico should soon become a tropical storm, and based on the latest forecast modeling, it has a decent chance of becoming a hurricane.
Normally, a hurricane forming in early October would not be particularly noteworthy. However, this year the development of a hurricane would be a big deal—because it has not happened yet.
In the modern hurricane record—an era dating to about World War II when there has been aircraft reconnaissance and later continuous satellite coverage—there has never been an Atlantic season without a hurricane, and no season has gone this late without one forming.
That is the theme of my latest Free Press essay, here is one excerpt:
I feel I am well aware of the limitations of effective altruism, and I have outlined many others in an hour-long dialogue I had with MacAskill, arguably the father of the movement, in 2022.
Nonetheless, at the margin I think more effective altruism would be a good thing.
First, I am not worried that the desires of current human beings will be devalued or ignored. Such desires rule the politics of all Western nations and many others as well. If anyone tried to pass a bill to advance shrimp welfare, I do not think it would get a single vote in Congress. In the meantime, we still do treat animals with excessive cruelty, relative to improvements we might make (you could start by eating less chicken and more beef, because a demand for beef kills fewer cows, given the larger size of the cow.) It would be better if people paid at least partial heed to the strictures of effective altruism on this and many other points.
What about the AIs? Well, artificial intelligence is going to fundamentally transform our world. Many connected to effective altruism may exaggerate its effects, or perceive a high risk of doom without sufficient evidence. Nevertheless, it would be a good thing if we paid more attention to AI issues, and to AI safety in particular. Score another point for effective altruism, at least if you make marginal rather than fully extreme adjustments.
As for aid to Africa and poor nations everywhere, I am not sure of the exact policy to pursue, but foreign aid is currently well below 1 percent of the U.S. federal budget, and the Trump administration pared it back. We are hardly sacrificing our seed corn in America to elevate the rest of the world. In the meantime, if you support some charitable public health programs in Africa and save some lives instead of donating to Harvard, that is probably a better decision.
Again, effective altruism is directionally correct, even if you should not follow its recommendations all the way.
Recommended.
The post Effective altruism is useful at the margin appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
At every rally he does in the home stretch of the midterm election, President Trump tells people to “pretend I’m on the ballot.” Democrats love this message, because Trump is so spectacularly unpopular right now; the more voters who have him in their minds when they make their choice for House, Senate, or city council, the better.
And yet, in the discussion of how Trump will and won’t affect the election, there is a broad acceptance, or at a minimum a lack of disagreement, with the foundation of Trump’s argument: that when he is literally on the ballot, waves of people who won’t vote in a midterm election, and might not even vote in presidential elections in which he isn’t participating, do in fact turn out to cast their ballots for him. He is such an extraordinary personality that he garners the support of millions of otherwise passive voters in a way no one else can.
This is a myth, one it’s long past time we discarded.
It’s fed by a widespread habit of treating Trump’s electoral history as though it contains only two relevant data points: 2016 and 2024. This narrative accepts Trump’s argument about him being the tribune of the masses; it’s just that some of them are staying home this year, as they have in previous midterms. But he isn’t the tribune of the masses, and never was.
To begin, let’s remind ourselves of Trump’s actual record when he’s on the ballot, which is essentially 1-2, or, if you want to look at it a different way, 1-1-1: one win (2024), one loss (2020), and one popular vote loss but electoral vote win (2016). Here are his vote margins:
2016: -2%
2020: -4.5%
2024: 1.5%
It may seem silly to have to remind ourselves of this, but when Donald Trump has been on the ballot, he hasn’t done very well. No matter how many times he says he was the true winner of the 2020 election, he wasn’t, and no matter how many times he says that 2024 was a landslide, it was one of the closest elections in American history.
In a thousand ways, Trump has been a unique political figure. But when it comes to his performance at the ballot box and that of his party, he’s more like an ordinary, not-very-popular politician who has benefited from luck and good timing more than anything else.
As I have noted many times, we’re in an era in which every election is a “change” election. In the 10 midterm and presidential elections of the last 20 years, the president’s party has been victorious only once, when Barack Obama was reelected in 2012. If you want the Occam’s Razor explanation of Trump’s performance, there it is: He was the challenger in 2016 and 2024, so he won; he was the incumbent in 2020, so he lost.
His own interpretation of the current moment is that there are millions of devoted Trump fans who are not mobilized yet, but if he urges them to get to the polls, they will and Republicans will win. But there is no reason to believe that’s true. What we’re learning instead is that the population of truly devoted Trump supporters is rather small. In this recent UMass poll, for instance, a bit less than a third of Republicans say they very much identify with the MAGA movement, and a bit more than a third say they somewhat do. As a proportion of the whole population, it works out to 12% who are devoted MAGA supporters and 18% who are sort-of MAGA supporters.
Which is not enough to win an election.
With every new poll that comes out, we’re learning that there were large numbers of people who voted for Trump in 2016, 2024, or both not because he forged a profound and lasting connection with them, but because they thought things in the country kinda sucked and figured maybe he’d fix them, or because they didn’t want to vote for a woman, or some combination of those and other more mundane reasons.
Take, for instance, Latino voters. In 2024, Trump did extremely well with Latinos, losing them to Kamala Harris by only 3 points, after losing them to Biden by 25 points four years before. Was that interesting and significant? Sure. But now, like everyone else, Latinos think he’s doing a terrible job. An NBC/Telemundo poll finds that they favor Democrats controlling Congress by a 59%-35% margin, and only 27% approve of Trump’s performance. How could that have happened if Trump won the hearts of so many Latinos? The answer is: he didn’t.
This is part of a bigger picture in which the GOP’s central problem isn’t that loyal Trump voters who would be voting Republican if they turned out are staying home, but that so many independents and even self-identified Republicans are unhappy. A significant number of people who voted for Trump in 2024 no longer approve of his performance; for instance, in the latest Economist/YouGov poll, 23% of those who voted for Trump say they disapprove of him. A full 33% said they think the economy is getting worse.
The logical conclusion is that there is no demobilized Trump electorate that could be re-mobilized.
There are a variety of reasons why many in the media could be laboring under the misconception that there is, even if they aren’t so foolish as to think such a re-mobilization will actually happen this year. But I suspect the biggest reason is that they mistake the loyalty Trump has built among the party’s elite — members of Congress, elected officials at the state and local level, party activists, the conservative media — for a similar loyalty in the electorate at large.
But he has never had that kind of loyalty from the masses, and certainly doesn’t have it now. He stumbled his way into an accidental victory in 2016, got rejected with extreme prejudice by the voters in 2020, and won a squeaker in 2024 in another unusual year against a pretty weak sort-of-incumbent, all of it in an era in which the opposition party always has an advantage. And when he’s in office, his party does terribly in midterm elections, because he’s awful at governing and most of the electorate doesn’t like him.
It may not be the most colorful and fascinating story of the elections of the last decade. But it’s the true one.
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City Observatory welcomes this guest commentary from Ethan Seltzer. Seltzer is an Emeritus Professor of Urban Studies and Planning at Portland State University, a past President of the City of Portland Planning Commission, and former land use planner for Metro, the regional government in the Portland metropolitan area, and the Southeast Uplift Neighborhood Program in southeast Portland, Oregon.)
Roberto Deriu sets out to make a splash with his recent essay in Common/Edge entitled “Who Shapes the Territory? Or, Why Urban Planning Does Not Exist” (https://commonedge.org/who-shapes-the-territory-or-why-urban-planning-does-not-exist/).
Attacking planning, particularly public sector-led planning, has received a boost lately from those on the right. However, whether Deriu is on the right or not is not what this response is about. Rather, as one who has seen both strengths and weaknesses in public planning efforts, Deiru’s painting with such a strikingly broad brush demands a response.
Setting aside that this is plainly, in fact, a rhetorical provocation, Deriu rightly identifies that urban planning, in practice, is largely a negotiation. Plans are guides that often don’t include or anticipate all the things that people might envision for their land, their investments, or their community. To bridge the gap between adopted policy and unsatisfied needs and desires, private interests engage public planning bodies to negotiate a fix.
This is not new or enlightening. In fact, the last 50 years of planning theoretical debates have most often revolved around the role that plans and planners play in what is in reality, a transactional process. Further, to simply blame “politics” for the ways in which plans get sidelined overlooks the fact that politics is nothing more than the process we use to allocate resources. In a world of limited resources, that negotiation through our politics is ongoing and never-ending. To think otherwise is simply naive.
Most of the planning history that Deriu relies on is from about 100 years ago and older, and where he ends up is largely with the writing of architects, not planners. On one hand he criticizes planning for not having an exclusive technical language and practice, and on the other he criticizes planning for relying on ideas and concepts unable to keep up with the pace of change in society and the ebbs and flows of politics. He wants it both ways: a rejection of planning for not being both authoritative in application and accommodating in thought.
Where he ends up is with three proposals. The first I fully agree with. Planning, at a minimum, must be based on clear ecological objectives for which there should be little to no compromise. The most important task for planning should be to contextualize the development of the present in the larger landscape ecology that it is a part of, and in light of the unknowable needs in the future for irreplaceable and fully functioning natural systems. He would do well to look at the writing and work of Benton MacKaye and Ian McHarg for reassurance that this has, in fact, not escaped the thinking of planners.
Second, he proposes to dump 20-year plans and substitute “discrete, fully financed strategic projects.” This raises a host of issues that he doesn’t consider. How can you assess the potential for unintended consequences outside of the context provided by a long-range consideration of the unfolding city? Why should the inertia of past decisions take precedence over all other possibilities? Why would a list of “strategic projects” not succumb to the same political manipulation that he says plans are bedeviled by? In this case, Deiru derides planning for not knowing the future while championing designers never asked to consider the possibilities. Robert Moses would love this.
Finally, Deiru calls for formalizing the negotiating table, making it public and accessible. Nothing wrong with transparency and access, but who can afford to engage in every negotiation? In a fast-moving world, offering a chair is of little consequence to individuals and communities unable to keep up with the pace of changes being proposed.
Sadly, Deiru does little to acknowledge the role that planning plays to engage everyone in making plans. When governing systems can’t hold private interests and public planners and decisionmakers accountable to broadly understood and adopted plans, then that is a governance, not planning, problem.
Some have said that cities rely on institutions and rules because the relational basis for decision making associated with very small towns and neighborhoods can’t operate at a city, much less metropolitan, scale. I would love to live in a city where I knew everyone and about everything going on or being conceived, but I don’t. There are 650,000 of us here in Portland alone. Maybe this would work for “inland Sardinia” but I would never think of substituting my experience with this place, its planning, plans, politics, and governance, for that of Deriu, anyone else in his community, or inland Sardinia itself.
From the point of view of my community, what Deriu proposes is simply disconnected from the reality of why we plan and when and how planning makes a difference. I have seen long-term plans that have made a profound difference for our city and region, and proposed “strategic projects” that, if fully funded, would have made this a far less livable place.
Designers will undoubtedly love his line of thought, since it looks to their presumed expertise as being decisive in the present-oriented, short-term world he is settling for. Had Deriu avoided going down the rhetorical road he chose at the outset of his essay, he might have arrived at a place where short-term, technical thinking could have worked well with the ongoing struggle to try to mesh a critical reappraisal of the past and the dynamic present with the hard-to-know future. Too bad he didn’t.
Slept pretty well, and my wife waked to ring the bell to call up our mayds to the washing about 4 o’clock, and I was and she angry that our bell did not wake them sooner, but I will get a bigger bell. So we to sleep again till 8 o’clock, and then I up in some ease to the office, where we had a full board, where we examined Cocke’s second account, when Mr. Turner had drawn a bill directly to be paid the balance thereof, as Mr. Cocke demanded, and Sir J. Minnes did boldly assert the truth of it, and that he had examined it, when there is no such thing, but many vouchers, upon examination, missing, and we saw reason to strike off several of his demands, and to bring down his 5 per cent. commission to 3 per cent. So we shall save the King some money, which both the Comptroller and his clerke had absolutely given away. There was also two occasions more of difference at the table; the one being to make out a bill to Captain Smith for his salary abroad as commander-in-chief in the Streights. Sir J. Minnes did demand an increase of salary for his being Vice-Admiral in the Downes, he having received but 40s. without an increase, when Sir J. Lawson, in the same voyage, had 3l., and others have also had increase, only he, because he was an officer of the board, was worse used than any body else, and particularly told Sir W. Batten that he was the opposer formerly of his having an increase, which I did wonder to hear him so boldly lay it to him. So we hushed up the dispute, and offered, if he would, to examine precedents, and report them, if there was any thing to his advantage to be found, to the Duke.
The next was, Mr. Chr. Pett and Deane were summoned to give an account of some knees which Pett reported bad, that were to be served in by Sir W. Warren, we having contracted that none should be served but such as were to be approved of by our officers. So that if they were bad they were to be blamed for receiving them. Thence we fell to talk of Warren’s other goods, which Pett had said were generally bad, and falling to this contract again, I did say it was the most cautious and as good a contract as had been made here, and the only [one] that had been in such terms. Sir J. Minnes told me angrily that Winter’s timber, bought for 33s. per load, was as good and in the same terms. I told him that it was not so, but that he and Sir W. Batten were both abused, and I would prove it was as dear a bargain as had been made this half year, which occasioned high words between them and me, but I am able to prove it and will. That also was so ended, and so to other business.
At noon Lewellin coming to me I took him and Deane, and there met my uncle Thomas, and we dined together, but was vexed that, it being washing-day, we had no meat dressed, but sent to the Cook’s, and my people had so little witt to send in our meat from abroad in that Cook’s dishes, which were marked with the name of the Cook upon them, by which, if they observed anything, they might know it was not my own dinner.
After dinner we broke up, and I by coach, setting down Luellin in Cheapside. So to White Hall, where at the Committee of Tangier, but, Lord! how I was troubled to see my Lord Tiviott’s accounts of 10,000l. paid in that manner, and wish 1000 times I had not been there.
Thence rose with Sir G. Carteret and to his lodgings, and there discoursed of our frays at the table to-day, and particularly of that of the contract, and the contract of masts the other day, declaring my fair dealing, and so needing not any man’s good report of it, or word for it, and that I would make it so appear to him, if he desired it, which he did, and I will do it.
Thence home by water in great pain, and at my office a while, and thence a little to Sir W. Pen, and so home to bed, and finding myself beginning to be troubled with wind as I used to be, and in pain in making water, I took a couple of pills that I had by me of Mr. Hollyard’s.
From Diego Costa:
“Hi Tyler,
If you’re still interested in the fallout from Brazil’s elections, here are some observations that add texture to the usual narratives:
Nine of the 10 candidates who received the most votes for the Lower Chamber are under 40. The exception is 41. Their average age is 31.6. They’re all very online and cultural-war centered. Four are pro-woke and six are anti-woke. The biggest vote-winner, anti-woke Nikolas Ferreira, will still be too young to run for president in 2030.
There is a divergence between evangelical influencers and the big evangelical churches. While evangelical politicians with strong personal followings did well, several major big church machines lost seats, particularly in Rio.
Brazil is expected to have its most female Senate ever, with 18 of 81 senators, driven by women on the right. All three senators representing the Federal District will be right-wing, including Jair Bolsonaro’s wife, Michelle Bolsonaro.
This might be the end of Lulismo. Lula or his chosen candidate has run in every presidential election since 1989, but he has no obvious successor. If he loses the runoff, his personal presidential record will stand at three wins and four losses. Several historical PT historical figures also lost their bids. And Lula, who began his career with votes from the educated middle class in Brazil’s industrial Southeast, is ending it by leading only in the poorest income bracket and the poorer Northeast region.
Flávio Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party won 121 seats in the Chamber and should hold 28 in the Senate, a record for any party since the 1988 Constitution. It will nevertheless remain short of a majority in both houses. The Chamber will feature 20 parties, down from the 30 elected in 2018.
The Bolsonaro family elected two senators (Jair’s wife Michelle and son Carlos) and two federal deputies (his son Jair Renan and brother Renato). His son Flávio is leading going into the presidential runoff, while his other son Eduardo might become minister. That is possibly the highest concentration of national political power in one immediate family since the Brazilian Republic was founded in 1889.
Lava Jato’s leading figures made a strong electoral comeback. Sergio Moro, the former judge who convicted Lula, won the governorship of Paraná in the first round. Deltan Dallagnol, who led the prosecution, won enough votes for a Senate seat, although his eligibility may be contested in the superior courts.
Anger over corruption and power grabs by Supreme Court justices was a defining factor in the first-round result. I expect a confrontation between the new Senate and the court over limits on its powers to become a major story in 2027. Brazil’s Supreme Court issued over 100,000 decisions in 2025 alone.”
The post Brazil election notes (from my email) appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
In case you missed this (and you likely haven’t), Donald Trump traveled to Nebraska yesterday, where—among a string of batshit crazy offerings that could fill up 1,000 rooms—he served up this genocidal gem of gems …
And if you’re wondering, “What was Will O’Neill response?”—the head of the Orange County Republican Party offered this quote: “After sending the National Guard and Marines to occupy California, Donald Trump is now saying our foreign enemies should ‘take out’ Los Angeles and San Diego. ... He is deranged and dangerous.”
Oops. That was Gavin Newsom.
If you’re wondering, “What was Will O’Neill response?”—the head of the Orange County Republican Party offered this quote: “The President says the Iran war will end ‘very soon.’ How many times have we heard that promise? And if it means attacks on two major American cities in the process, he is not troubled by the cost.”
Oops. That was Adam Schiff.
If you’re wondering, “What was Will O’Neill response?”—the head of the Orange County Republican Party offered this quote: “Thirteen million Californians call LA and San Diego counties home. Their lives are not a ‘small price to pay’ or a punchline for Donald Trump.”
Oops. That was Xavier Becerra.
If you’re wondering, “What was Will O’Neill response?”—the head of the Orange County Republican Party offered this quote: “America must stand up to Iran and defend our interests, but the first responsibility of our Commander in Chief is to protect the American people and our homeland,” Desmond, the former mayor of San Marcos, said in a statement.”
Oops. That was Republican Jim Desmond, who is in a competitive San Diego-based House race.
No—if you’re wondering what, exactly, Will O’Neill said—stop wondering. The Truth OC can confirm that, at this very moment, O’Neill is hiding in his Newport Beach coat room (deftly designed and organized by California Closets) , wrapped in the Snuggie he bought off QVC in 2002, blasting Air Supply’s Greatest Hits (Volume I, not II) and repeating the mantra, “I am a beautiful blonde swan named Pepper … I am a beautiful blonde swan named Pepper … I am a beautiful blonde swan named Pepper” while Isabella, his undocumented Guatemalan house keeper for the past 13 years, strokes his hair and coos Marco Antonio Solís lyrics into his left ear.
He’ll be back at the office next week.
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Last night, on October 4, U.S. Southern Command posted that it had struck another small boat in the Caribbean, killing another four people it called “narco-terrorists.” This brings the number of strikes to more than 70, and the number of people killed in the strikes that began a year ago to more than 230 people.
The administration’s justification for the strikes has not been made public. It has claimed—without evidence—that the men on the boats were trafficking drugs, but such a charge would normally be handled by the legal system. The Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice produced an opinion providing legal cover for the strikes, and some of the members of Congress who have seen it are alarmed.
Senator Adam Schiff (D-CA) saw the memo in November and said: “If that opinion were to be adopted, it would not constrain any use of force anywhere in the world. I mean, it is broad enough to authorize just about anything.” In December the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights sued to gain access to the memo after the government denied their requests to see it under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
On September 21 a report from the United Nations concluded that the extrajudicial killings broke international law and may be crimes against humanity.
Last Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York ordered the Department of Defense and the Department of Justice to show him the memo and let him know who else has seen it, in order to evaluate whether to release it to the public.
On October 1, John Hudson of the Washington Post reported that the Trump administration has taken $52 million Congress appropriated for countries impacted by Russia’s war on Ukraine and rerouted it to right-wing governments in Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, and Peru.
On Saturday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told reporters the U.S. could move U.S. military personnel from Europe to the Western Hemisphere, saying: “Well, we’re definitely expanding our presence and our footprint in Central and South America with partners, and because of the bold move the president made in Venezuela,” referring to the U.S. capture of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife in a nighttime raid in early January. “We have a whole new suite of options economically and militarily with partnerships.”
While the administration is billing its intervention in Latin America as a battle against drugs, the comparison to Venezuela, where Trump has claimed control over the country’s oil fields and says he has taken billions of dollars out, although there is no public acknowledgement of where that money has gone, is instructive.
On Sunday, Jan Crawford of CBS News published an interview with Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, in which Alito said one of his first thoughts after he learned that a draft of his Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health decision overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision had been leaked was that “this would endanger” the people on the court.
Alito went on to say that he does not anticipate that the court will overturn the 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision recognizing the right to same-sex marriage. That case is different from Roe v. Wade, he said, because people have come to rely on Obergefell as they organize their lives.
“One of the important factors we take into account in deciding whether we should reexamine a past decision is the degree to which there has been reliance on the decision,” Alito said. “Obviously a great deal had changed in the country as a result of Obergefell. There was a lot of reliance in various ways on the decision in Obergefell.”
In fact, all but one of the justices who overturned Roe—Thomas declined to answer—said in their confirmation hearings that they considered Roe settled law. Crawford pointed out that people thought Roe was settled law and had organized their lives around it, just as people had organized their lives around Obergefell.
“After Obergefell, people of the same sex got married and entered into contracts…it was much more concrete,” Alito told Crawford. “Whereas with Roe, the argument was made that it had an effect on people’s ideas, women’s ideas about the kind of society that they were going to live in, that this would have an effect on the society. It was much more abstract than what would’ve been involved had we been asked to overrule Obergefell.”
These are the same story: the deliberate destruction of the post–World War II order those who had lived through the horrors of World Wars I and II put in place to prevent another world war.
Even before the U.S. entered World War II, U.S. president Franklin Delano Roosevelt and British prime minister Winston Churchill and their advisors laid out principles for an international system that could prevent future world wars. In the 1941 Atlantic Charter, they declared that countries must not invade each other.
In April 1945, 850 delegates and their staff and advisors met in San Francisco, California, where they wrote, and adopted unanimously, the United Nations charter prohibiting “the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.”
Trump and his loyalists reject this framework in favor of one favored by those like Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, one that looks much like the world did before 193 nations signed onto the United Nations charter. In their worldview, strong nations exercise spheres of influence, taking political and economic control of neighboring nations.
Part of the post–World War II attempt to prevent future wars was an insistence that all human beings had certain rights and must be treated equally before the law. In 1948 the United Nations General Assembly announced the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), which provided a common standard of fundamental rights for all human beings.
Eleanor Roosevelt, widow of former president Franklin Delano Roosevelt and much beloved defender of human rights in the United States, led the commission that wrote the UDHR, figuring out how to define the violation of human rights not only internationally but also within a nation, and how to protect “the rights of man all over the world.”
Drafted over the next two years, the final document established that “[a]ll human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights…without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status” and regardless “of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs.”
Those rights included freedom from slavery, torture, degrading punishment, arbitrary arrest, exile, and “arbitrary interference with…privacy, family, home or correspondence, [and] attacks upon…honour and reputation.” They included the right to equality before the law and to a fair trial, the right to participate in government, either “directly or through freely chosen representatives,” the right of equal access to public service. After all, the UDHR noted, the authority of government rests on the will of the people, “expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage.”
Under Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, the U.S. has abandoned the U.N. prohibition on violating the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, as well as the human rights of the people in the small boats, not to mention migrants. As Alito’s statement that the right of women to have control over their healthcare was simply an abstract idea that didn’t have to be protected suggested, undermining the post–World War II order has been a long-term project.
In its place, Trump and his allies propose a dictatorship. Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, who was jailed in the U.S. for money laundering but pardoned by Trump, worked with the Trump family to establish the crypto start-up World Liberty Financial, which put $799 million in Trump’s pocket last year. Zhao now lives in the United Arab Emirates.
In a recent interview with David Yaffe-Bellany of the New York Times, Zhao explained: “Democracy has been hailed as, like, the holy grail for the last couple hundred years, but democracies are inefficient. If you get a benevolent dictator, it’s actually extremely efficient. There’s very little debate going on. You don’t waste time on a lot of frivolous stuff.” It’s a model for which Trump repeatedly has expressed admiration.
In March 1941, eight months before the U.S. joined World War II, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt noted that “Nazi forces are not seeking mere modifications in colonial maps or in minor European boundaries. They openly seek the destruction of all elective systems of government on every continent—including our own; they seek to establish systems of government based on the regimentation of all human beings by a handful of individual rulers who have seized power by force.”
“[T]hese men and their hypnotized followers call this a new order,” FDR said, but “[i]t is not new and it is not order.” “[T]he rallying cry of the dictators, their boasting about a master-race, will prove to be pure stuff and nonsense,” he said. “There never has been, there isn’t now, and there never will be, any race of people on the earth fit to serve as masters over their fellow men.”
“The world has no use for any Nation which, because of size or because of military might, asserts the right to goosestep to world power over the bodies of other Nations or other races,” he said. “We believe that any nationality, no matter how small, has the inherent right to its own nationhood” and that “the men and women of such Nations, no matter what size, can, through the processes of peace, serve themselves and serve the world by protecting the common man’s security; improve the standards of healthful living; provide markets for manufacture and for agriculture. Through that kind of peaceful service every Nation can increase its happiness, banish the terrors of war, and abandon man’s inhumanity to man.”
“Never, in all our history, have Americans faced a job so well worthwhile,” he concluded. “May it be said of us in the days to come that our children and our children’s children rise up and call us blessed.”
—
Notes:
https://www.courthousenews.com/pentagon-ordered-to-show-legal-justification-for-boat-strikes/
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ck5ye7v88qy7o
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/sep/21/us-boat-strikes-crime-against-humanity
https://thehill.com/policy/defense/6127801-hegseth-redeploys-troops-western-hemisphere/
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/us-supreme-court-justice-roe-wade-senate-hearings-1.6501786
https://www.un.org/en/about-us/un-charter/full-text
https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/01/business/changpeng-zhao-binance.html
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, March 15, 1941, Address at the Annual Dinner of the White House Correspondents’ Association, at https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-the-annual-dinner-white-house-correspondents-association
X:
Links for you. Science:
Our Solar System Is Terminally Unstable and Will Be Completely Destroyed, Study Finds (we apologize for any inconvenience this may cause…)
Plague is Scary but That Doesn’t Make It the Next Pandemic.
In Colorado, the Majestic Ponderosa Pines Are Dying
1 in 13 adults under 30 already had hidden artery plaque
What Do We Owe New York City’s Wild Parrots?
Fair Moderation, Equitable Access, and AI: arXiv’s Updated Rate Limit Policy
Trump’s Border Wall Construction Destroys 6,500-Year-Old Arizona Geoglyph – Older Than Stonehenge
Other:
Trump’s failure hides Project 2025 success
The Long and Extremely Urgent To-Do List if Democrats Take the House
Abdul El-Sayed on Why Medicare for All is Non-Negotiable
Susan Collins’ time is up as Maine’s Houdini
Don’t Bet On The Fever Breaking. Democrats have to be ready to box Trump in, even if Republicans in Congress close ranks around him, the way they always have
An Open Letter to Cornell University from the Mother of a Prospective Male Student
Metro’s Iconic Striped Pylons Are Off the Chopping Block
Modern Architecture Has a Beauty Problem
Lawyer Cites ChatGPT-Invented Fake Witnesses in Murder Appeal
Cloudy John
Sam Altman Déjà Vu: A candid conversation with Gary Marcus, the machine learning founder turned A.I. skeptic, about why Altman’s U.N. warning sounded so eerily familiar, and what has—and hasn’t—changed since the two of them testified together before the Senate about the threat of superintelligence gone wild.
Federal Judge Rules a Flock Search Was ‘Indiscriminate Mass Surveillance’ and Unconstitutional
Can Publishers Survive the Agentic Apocalypse?
Gentlemen and Scholars of the Ivy League
Steve Witkoff’s Ninth Circle
Montgomery County High Schools Are Navigating a New Cellphone Ban
Crypto’s Washington Winter
U.S.-Russia Talks on Ukraine Now Involve an Oil Deal Tied to Trump Allies
Sure Why Not
Dennis Hastert, disgraced former House speaker, dies at 84
Who paid for this? Political mail is the darkest corner of American political advertising. It can be micro-targeted and receives almost no media attention. This tool gives you immediate, unprecedented insight into who is sending you mail.
Kimberly Guilfoyle Is a Master of Mafia Diplomacy
Muse Creates Detailed Profiles of All Your Friends and Family
Gang of eight sperm whales sink yacht after ramming boat in South Pacific
You Can’t Build a Better Politics on Bad History. Sarah Longwell’s “How to Eat an Elephant” offers useful advice for Democratic politics. Yet it is also based on a false history of the GOP.
The Reality Today Is That Foreign Policy Hawks Are a Minority in the Democratic Party
RFK Is Gloating That His Changes to HHS Are Permanent
My Rape, the Cornell Case—and Why We Need Better Approaches to Teaching How Consent Works
Trump tomato tariffs could spell the end of free chips, salsa at restaurants (Trump take salsa)
America Without the NFL
Parseable is a brand new observability tool, compatible with OpenTelemetry, for storing and querying observability data.
Datasette 1.0a41 added support for OpenTelemetry tracing, contributed by Alex Garcia.
Here's how I ran the two together, giving me neat local visualizations of traces of Datasette responses.
I used the open source release of Parseable from their GitHub releases - I tried v3.2.4. They have a macOS Apple Silicon release (a 171MB download) which I downloaded and ran like so:
Market Designcurl -fL https://github.com/parseablehq/parseable/releases/download/v3.2.4/Parseable_OSS_aarch64-apple-darwin -o parseable
chmod +x parseable
./parseable local-storeRunning ./parseable local-store starts Parseable with all of the default settings, and stores data in ./data and ./staging directories. It uses ports 8000, 8001, and 8002.
Then visit http://localhost:8000/ and sign in with the default admin/admin username and password.
I fetched a test database for Datasette to use:
wget https://latest.datasette.io/fixtures.dbThen I started Datasette like this:
OTEL_SERVICE_NAME=datasette-local \
OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT=http://127.0.0.1:8000 \
OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_TRACES_HEADERS='Authorization=Basic%20YWRtaW46YWRtaW4%3D,X-P-Stream=datasette_traces' \
OTEL_TRACES_EXPORTER=otlp_json_http \
OTEL_METRICS_EXPORTER=none \
OTEL_LOGS_EXPORTER=none \
uvx --from 'opentelemetry-instrumentation==0.66b1' \
--with 'opentelemetry-distro==0.66b1' \
--with 'datasette==1.0a41' \
--with 'opentelemetry-exporter-otlp-json-http==0.66b1' \
opentelemetry-instrument datasette fixtures.db -p 8004
Note that we are not starting datasette directly - we are instead starting opentelemetry-instrument datasette ... to properly initialize the tracing.
Load up http://localhost:8004/ and click around a bit, then wait a few seconds for the traces to be sent to Parseable. Then navigate to "traces" in the Parseable web interface and you should be able to find things like this:
Each request now has a trace which shows the details of every subsequent SQL query. Consult the Datasette OpenTelemetry docs for more details.
To run Parseable on ports other than 8000, 8001, and 8002:
P_ADDR=127.0.0.1:18000 ./parseable local-store \
--grpc-port 18001 \
--flight-port 18002You'll need to also update Datasette's environment variable to point at the new port:
OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT=http://127.0.0.1:18000
Amazon wants more than 5,000 satellites in orbit. Blue Origin has proposed another 5,400. Chinese companies have filed plans encompassing vastly more. Elon Musk has talked about a constellation numbering […]
The post Resource competition intensifies with surge in megaconstellations appeared first on SpaceNews.
1. What is the real rate of Chinese economic growth?
2. An Abundance caucus rolls out a bipartisan agenda.
3. Canada fell to 18th from 9th in global ranking of economic freedom.
4. Will there ever be a Latin Bomb?
7. Seb Krier!
8. Good review of the new Kevin Roose book (NYT).
9. Research taste in foundation models is rising rapidly.
10. “Shares of South Korean cybersecurity companies surged by as much as 30% Tuesday.” (WSJ)
The post Tuesday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Pope Leo XIV recently tweeted that there is “an ontological difference, even before an aesthetic one, between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images created by others.”
As a description of how today’s models work, that’s fair enough. AI learned to paint by looking at our paintings.
Paul Graham (also a painter!) notes that this is about to change. Robots wired into the world will soon perceive it for themselves. A robot or AI that learns from its own sensors isn’t borrowing images from others. LLMs were founded on our words but their words will dominate the future.
So picture a robot on a beach at dusk. It watches the sun go down, then paints what it saw. Is it art? The Pope would no doubt still assert an ontological difference. But once the factual distinction between borrowing and perceiving fades, what makes that more than a statement of faith?
The post Paul Graham Versus the Pope appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
How can B2B software be so friggin’ delicious? Early access drops 10/19. Spread the love.
OpenAI, today:
The EU AI Act requires generative AI providers to make generated text identifiable in a machine-readable way. Text watermarking and detection remain early technologies with significant limitations, and views about their benefits and responsible uses are still developing. Our phased approach reflects both the EU AI Act requirements as well as the technology’s limitations, with an emphasis on transparency about what a text watermark can and cannot tell people:
- Starting today, API customers globally will be able to opt in to text watermarking for select models. Text watermarking will remain off by default in the API.
- Over the coming weeks, we will add an invisible watermark to eligible ChatGPT and Codex text output in the European Union.
- We’re opening applications to access our text watermark detector. Access will initially be limited to approved researchers and expert organizations that can help us evaluate and improve the technology.
First, unlike Anthropic, OpenAI is only forcing this upon users in the EU, where it’s mandated by their ill-considered 2024 regulation. Second, also unlike Anthropic, OpenAI has made this available via an API so developers should be able to actually see if this adulterates text output with real-world usage.
Third, none of these companies have yet made their watermark detectors publicly accessible. I remain highly skeptical that they will work as advertised in the real world. I think this is all somewhat of a sham to claim compliance with the EU AI Act without actually providing anything that anyone can actually use in a practical way.
Our text watermarking technology, textGrain, adds an invisible statistical signal to the model’s word choices. Our detector looks for that signal to assess whether a passage contains an OpenAI watermark. More details about how textGrain works can be found in our technical report, which will be updated with additional details in the coming weeks. We also plan to make the technology available in open source so that others can build on it.
In our evaluations, textGrain matched or exceeded the performance of other approaches we tested, including SynthID for text. Even so, strong performance under ideal conditions does not guarantee reliable detection in everyday use.
SynthID-Text is the Google algorithm that Anthropic says they’re using too.
Maybe I’m all wet, but I think what they mean in that last sentence quoted above is that it only performs usefully in ideal conditions, with simplistic prompts, and will prove to be unusable in practical everyday use, especially if the user’s prompt contains instructions designed to circumvent it.
John Ternus, posting on X:
The way Steve taught us to care about every detail, every experience, every person, still guides our work today. Forever grateful.
Tim Cook, also on X (with a photo I don’t recall seeing before):
There are people who leave a mark on the world, and then there are people who change it entirely. Steve changed the world and so many lives in the process. He certainly changed my life forever. His spirit lives on in everything he created and everyone he inspired.
Hard to know quite what to make of this, or how much to make of it. But we’re getting what may be a preview of elements of a new era in the Middle East. According to a just released communiqué, Turkey and Pakistan will be sending troops to Saudi Arabia under the three countries’ new “Mecca Pact” to assist with fighting the Houthis in Yemen. The statement is very short on details. So it’s not clear whether this is a meaningful deployment of manpower and resources or something more nominal and symbolic. Nor is the timing of any deployment clear.
To the extent this is real it’s part of longer-standing trends. But the effects of the US/Israel/Iran war are clearly key. Saudi Arabia can’t easily defend itself against the emerging Houthi blockade along the Red Sea – notwithstanding its vast supply of high dollar, high dollar weaponry from the US. That used to be the US’s job – defending Saudi Arabia. But Trump has refused. So this new alliance could be in the process of becoming more than mere signatures on paper.
It’s hard to know what to say about former Republican Speaker of the House Denny Hastert, whose death at the age of 84 was reported this morning. Few if any political leaders in modern American history have experienced a fall quite so ignominious and total. The obvious point of comparison is Richard Nixon. But post-Watergate Nixon was never without his defenders and supporters. All but his most adamant critics granted significant successes of his presidency. And by the time of his death in 1994, he’d made significant progress in being treated by many as a sage elder statesman, albeit a greatly tarnished one. Hastert remains almost a test case of a top political leader whose fall was immediate and absolute. He came as close as one can come to have to having zero public defenders (though a significant number of former colleagues wrote leniency letters on his behalf at sentencing in 2016).
What stands out in my mind are two moments, one from his moment of ascent to power and another at the denouement but certainly not the nadir of career. Go back to 1998. The so-called Lewinsky scandal had been trundling forward for most of the year. Republicans are giddy about the Red Tsunami that was about to supercharge the existing GOP majority. Predictions of a 30- or 40-seat pick up were common and assumed. (I was one of few people I knew to basically predict no wave at all; it was simply a matter of watching the polls rather than the bipartisan hype.) When Democrats ended up gaining five seats, House Speaker New Gingrich was summarily tossed overboard — a mix of the failure of his wild overpromising and slowly building frustrations with his erratic and high drama leadership style.
After Newt’s defenestration, Rep. Bob Livingston of Louisiana quickly emerged as his successor. But a problem soon emerged: Livingston himself had been carrying on an affair. He soon bowed to the inevitable and pulled himself out of the running. At the time, I was about a year into my first journalism job working at The American Prospect, then located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. But I was covering the drama for Salon as a freelancer. Before we get to any of that, it’s important to understand the context of this moment.
As noted above, basically the whole year had been a drip, drip, drip about Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky. With today’s high octane politics in mind, it’s hard to capture just how wild, chaotic and disruptive this was. A 24/7 news cycle, the beginnings of upstart online news, all with a daily feed of subject matter that had never been this explicit in American politics. What presaged the 1998 electoral outcome was that Republicans had wildly overplayed their hand from the beginning, focusing attention on their hypocrisy and the fact that people were generally pretty happy with how the country was doing. Inexplicably but also predictably in this context, Clinton’s approval ratings didn’t sink but rather shot up and stayed in the 60s throughout the year. In this climate, there was a deep hunger among angry Democrats to uncover Republican affairs. And Salon in September had published a story that then-senior Republican Rep. Henry Hyde, who was 74 years old at the time, had carried on an affair in the 1960s. What wouldn’t come out until the following year was that Gingrich himself had been carrying on an affair with then-staffer, now-wife Callista Bisek, all through the scandal and for years before.
So the point is that when Livingston stepped aside, it was in this context of Republican affairs seemingly popping up all over the place, the background of the ever-present Lewinsky scandal, what had been experienced as a massive electoral upset and two consecutive House Speakers getting tossed in a matter of weeks. Both Gingrich and Livingston announced they’d also be leaving Congress entirely. (Livingston never actually became Speaker. But that was kind of a technicality.) On top of all this, after first suffering a electoral rebuke over the Lewinsky scandal, Republicans had steadied themselves and were now rushing as fast as possible to impeach Clinton — election verdict notwithstanding. Livingston announced his departure on the morning of the impeachment vote. This all came together in one concentrated day of almost unimaginable drama on Capitol Hill when Republicans absolutely more than anything else wanted calm and some sense of predictability, regularity and trust. And in this climate, out of the blue, all eyes turned to an all-but-unknown congressman from Illinois named Denny Hastert.
Now, to be clear, Hastert wasn’t unknown on Capitol Hill. He was a known commodity, chief deputy whip for the Republican majority. To most of the public, though, he seemed like someone very much from the back bench, not someone at all who seemed primed to ascend to the speakership.
That day was Dec. 18, 1998, and on that particular day I was busily phone reporting from Somerville, trying to make sense of it all for a piece for Salon. It’s difficult to overstate the degree to which everyone rushed to endorse Hastert within hours of Livingston’s departure because he seemed like the one person who could absolutely relied upon to be normal, no scandal, no skeletons, a return to steady, uncontroversial and calm leadership. “It’s really the power structure putting him forward. It’s a consensus day in the capital,” one GOP staffer told me that afternoon.
The irony of this has always remained with me. Because that was absolutely the calculus. It’s wild how close to the sun some people will fly.
But there was another key moment which looks very different in retrospect.
Fast forward eight years to 2006. There was a lot of talk coming out of the 2004 presidential election that the GOP had constructed permanent Republican congressional majorities. This wasn’t simply about public opinion or gerrymandering or the small state advantage. It was also about creating a kind of iron system of campaign contributions and regulatory and legal returns on that investment to corporate America. Because of that conventional wisdom, there was well into 2006 doubt that Democrats could really retake Congress, despite how much evidence there was that that would happen. The so-called Foley scandal, which broke out in September, helped catalyze shifting expectations.
For those who don’t remember it, Mark Foley was a very lightly closeted gay congressman from Florida. I’m not even sure it’s right to say he was closeted. It emerged that Foley had sent a series of sexually suggestive emails and instant messages to former teenaged male pages who had worked on Capitol Hill. When the messages were released, Foley resigned. But then the scandal quickly moved to what leadership had known about Foley’s behavior. Hastert, of course, remained Speaker of the House.
In retrospect, it is clear this scandal must have filled Hastert with fears that his past would be exposed. (In fairness to Foley, who was never charged with a crime, his wrongdoing paled in comparison to Hastert’s.) This was another period of chaos on Capitol Hill. There were lots of end-of-the-majority vibes, changing of the guard. In a different role, I was working phones much as I had eight years earlier. What was clear at the time was Hastert was taking a very passive and kind of MIA role toward the whole unfolding drama. One potential theory was that Hastert had either warnings or knowledge about Foley’s behavior. And that was probably true to at least some extent. There were also rumors or I guess what you’d call chattered suggestions that there was a kind of “gay mafia” of staffers around Hastert that wanted to keep the whole story under wraps, or prevent further investigations.
Accusations like that have a long and dark history. I mention them now — 20 years on — not to suggest they were true but to give you a sense of the climate of that moment, the kinds of rumors and accusations that were flying — a mix of homophobia and some legitimate bafflement about Hastert’s hands-off role. Of course we can’t know what Hastert was thinking in September 2006 while all this was happening. But it seems all but impossible not to conclude that Hastert feared that this was a climate in which his own secrets would be revealed. It’s a bit like kryptonite being casually brought into the office of a dark-side Superman.
Subsequent House investigations and news reports found that there was a history of inappropriate emails, overtures and more from Foley, and that many of these had come to the attention of House officials and been briefed to Hastert. Hastert said almost nothing publicly and relied on his office to in most cases deny testimony or claims that he’d been briefed on different incidents months or years before.
Everything eventually came pouring out into the open in 2015. Hastert had left the House soon after the Republicans’ 2006 defeat and had transitioned into a high-flying D.C. lobbyist. Hastert’s undoing actually began with FBI scrutiny of what they suspected was more typical D.C. lobbyist corruption as far back as 2012. Hastert had been paying hush money to one of his then-teen victims. And it was his efforts to hide those payments that led to charges of “structuring”, lying to federal agents and more. The statutes of limitations on the actual sex abuse had run out decades earlier. The payments themselves weren’t necessarily illegal, though perhaps they could have led to blackmail charges.
Hastert served just over a year in federal prison and lived another nine years after his release.
Research: Qwen3.8 27B addition in words
Colin Frasier posted on Bluesky about an experiment he ran over two years ago using GPT-4o to see how well it could "compute the sum but return the answer in words" across increasingly large numbers. Here's the chart he shared of those results:
I'm confident GPT-4o didn't cheat and use a calculator, especially since it got so many of the calculations wrong, but I was inspired to run the experiment again on local hardware (a DGX Spark) to explore the effect in a fully controlled environment.
I pasted his image into a Codex Remote session (GPT-6 Astra) and had it run the same experiment using Qwen3.8-27B-Q4_K_M.gguf. Here's the result for a run of 30 attempts per combination with reasoning disabled:
Then I ran it again with reasoning enabled. This took a lot longer per pair, so instead of running 30 samples per square I ran just one - which results in a much less visually appealing heatmap since each square is either 100% or 0%:
It got the right answer in 167 out of 169 attempts, and since these were one-shot I'm confident a second run would produce different results here.
Here's a version of the report that includes the reasoning traces from some of those larger calculations, which include text like this:
Wait, let me redo this more carefully.
4,299,366,105,622
6,088,794,067,970
Let me align them:
4 2 9 9 3 6 6 1 0 5 6 2 2
6 0 8 8 7 9 4 0 6 7 9 7 0
Adding from right to left:
Position 1 (units): 2 + 0 = 2
Position 2 (tens): 2 + 7 = 9
Position 3 (hundreds): 6 + 9 = 15, write 5, carry 1
Tags: mathematics, ai, generative-ai, local-llms, llms, qwen, llm-reasoning, dgx-spark
It feels like only yesterday that techies on X first heard the sound of TBPN’s gong. The show was so ridiculous, its hosts so charismatic, its content so nerdy that Silicon Valley just couldn’t look …
Humanity produces a staggering amount of new knowledge every day. The question is how to make sense of it all
- by Helen Pearson
Today’s post is brought to you by my sponsor, Mechanize. They’re hiring junior software engineers at $300K/year base salary. Apply now!
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Janan Ganesh has a recent Financial Times piece entitled A tribute to great wrong ideas, which argues that flawed models occasionally end up generating useful insights. Ganesh suggests that the Enlightenment concept of the blank slate contributed to the rise of liberalism, the Malthusian Trap contributed to Darwin’s theory of natural selection, and Freudian psychology contributed to innovations in painting and literature.
But the primary focus of Ganesh’s essay is Francis Fukuyama:
The title was too good for the author’s own good. The End of History: it had a definitive ring, and therefore travestied the subtler argument that came in the following hundreds of pages.
Francis Fukuyama, who has a memoir out, can be defended on another count. Even if he was wrong to assume the ultimate triumph of freedom circa 1989, he was usefully wrong. His thesis shaped and guided debate for decades. At the margins, it might also have had real-world benefits. The era of liberal hubris that he unwittingly fed probably swept people along who otherwise had illiberal instincts: who might, say, have opposed EU or Nato enlargement. People back the strong horse. He told them which one it was, accurately or not.
The view that Fukuyama was actually sort of correct has now become so popular among intellectuals that it probably no longer counts as contrarian—similar to how the observation that Machiavelli wasn’t all that Machiavellian is now common knowledge. Mocking Fukuyama has become an indicator of having a “mid” intellect.
Here’s Ezra Klein, discussing The End of History:
My view is that very few books in politics are as insightful or as important for understanding where liberal democracy went wrong, why figures like Donald Trump keep rising and why the opposition to them seems so wan and uninspiring so often.
This is a book that I think needs to be cleared of a sin it didn’t really commit because it has something to say to us now.
Ironically, Fukuyama did mention Trump in his book:
I actually referred to Donald Trump in my original End of History and the Last Man, when I said that one of the great advantages of living in a capitalist democracy is that it gives you an outlet for megalothymia — for the desire to be recognized as better than other people — in the economy. You could get very, very rich, and that would bleed off some of the ambition and energy that might otherwise go into politics. Little did I realize that, more than thirty years later, that wouldn’t be enough for Donald Trump. So it’s not a guarantee that you won’t have destabilized democratic politics as a result of that kind of outsized ambition.
Matt Yglesias cites another example of a book that is important despite its core thesis being wrong:
For an 80-year-old book written by an Austrian guy in a language he didn’t speak natively, Friedrich von Hayek’s 1944 book “The Road to Serfdom” is incredibly engaging and accessible. It’s also crackling with insights on nearly every page — I kept furiously highlighting passages that reminded me of contemporary controversies and phenomena so I’ll have quotes and points for future articles on everything from antitrust policy to Waymo to health care.
What’s remarkable is that even though the book is really good and I strongly recommend it to anyone interested in the future of liberalism in these fraught times, its ostensible core thesis also seems totally wrong.
I’d like to nominate another example. It seems to me that Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz’s Monetary History of the United States is the greatest book on monetary policy ever written, despite being in an important sense wrong about its core thesis.
Friedman and Schwartz argued that contractionary Federal Reserve policy was largely to blame for the Great Depression. More recently, economic historians including Barry Eichengreen, Peter Temin, Ben Bernanke, David Glasner, and Clark Johnson have suggested that this claim overlooked the key role of the international gold standard. I’d include my own work (The Midas Paradox) within that revisionist group.
So why does Friedman and Schwartz’s Monetary History remain such a great book, if its central thesis is at least partly wrong? I’d point to two reasons:
At a time when most people believed the Great Depression showed the inherent instability of capitalism, Friedman and Schwartz showed that the actual problem was contractionary monetary policy. They erred in putting too much weight on the specific role of Fed policy at a time when we were part of an international gold standard, but monetary policy broadly defined was in fact the cause of the Great Depression.
The policy implications of their study became vastly more important just 5 years after the book was published (in 1963), as in 1968 we transitioned to a 100% fiat money system where the central bank really does have the ability and responsibility to stabilize nominal spending. In that sense, they were ahead of their time.
Now I’d like to argue that NGDP targeting is another useful but wrong idea. In the past, I’ve argued that while NGDP targeting is not precisely optimal, it is a useful proxy for nominal wage targeting. I’ve also argued that NGDP targeting is likely to be inappropriate in countries where non-wage income is highly volatile, such as major commodity producers like Kuwait. Even so, I suggested that there was little difference between NGDP targeting and a theoretically more optimal approach such as wage targeting for an economy like the US.
So, why did I advocate NGDP level targeting? Perhaps because I couldn’t fit aggregate nominal labor compensation targeting onto my license plate:
It is easier to market NGDP targeting than labor compensation targeting, and I assumed that it made little practical difference. Over the past year, however, NGDP in the US has been distorted by a number of factors, some of which I do not fully understand. Tariffs seemed to cause a big increase in indirect business taxes. And both the tech boom and the energy crisis seem to have sharply boosted corporate profits. This is important because NGDP has four components: wages, capital income, indirect business taxes and depreciation. As a result, NGDP has been rising more than 6.5%/year even as average hourly earnings growth has slowed to 3%:
By early December, 12-month wage growth will likely fall to well below 3%. I did not expect to see this, especially at a time of such rapid growth in NGDP.
But even if NGDP targeting was not precisely optimal in 2026, I’d still argue that NGDP targeting is a useful wrong idea. The actual optimal policy target might be a component of NGDP, such as total labor compensation. Or it might be a Divisia-type index that puts more weight on wage income and less weight on capital income. Either way, NGDP is the place to begin when thinking about stabilizing the economy, as inflation is subject to the “never reason from a price change” problem. NGDP targeting is not perfect, but it’s usefully wrong.
My mistake in this case was not in overlooking the theoretical flaws in NGDP targeting—those are well understood—rather my mistake was in assuming these flaws were not likely to matter for a large, diversified economy such as the US.
Will this mistake be consequential in the future? My hunch is that we’ll go “back to normal” over the next few years, with NGDP once again closely tracking labor income. After that it’s anyone’s guess, as it all depends on progress in AI. If we get the sort of productivity explosion that some are predicting, then capital income might rise sharply as a share of GDP. It’s also possible (but unlikely) that employment would decline sharply. In either case, the Fed should try to maintain a rate of NGDP growth consistent with stable growth in nominal hourly wage rates.
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Chart 1: Steve Rattner
Until now, discussions of the potential economic problems created by the AI boom have mostly focused on the future. Will it destroy millions of jobs? Is there a bubble and will it cause a severe recession if it bursts? Will it destroy humanity? While these are doubtless very important questions, attempts to answer them are at best educated guesses.
We don’t have to guess, however, about one major effect of the AI boom, because it’s happening right now: Massive spending on data centers is crowding out investment in everything else in the economy.
“Crowding out” is a familiar term in economics, usually considered a consequence of government spending. When a government engages in deficit spending and the economy is at or near full employment, it drives up interest rates. That’s because, at near or full employment, the private sector is using all the available credit in the economy at the current interest rate. Therefore, in order to attract enough funds to satisfy its deficit, the government has to offer a higher interest rate. And this, in turn, leads to lower private investment. In effect, private investment is “crowded out” by the government deficit.
Note that this story only applies when the economy is near full employment. In the past, conservative claims about crowding out were widely invoked to justify fiscal austerity after the 2008 financial crisis, when all the world’s major economies were deeply depressed. Harsh spending cuts created severe slumps in Europe, while in the US Republicans compelled Obama to cut government spending, delaying full recovery from the Great Recession. In fact, when an economy is suffering from high unemployment, deficit spending doesn’t hurt private investment. Instead, it often leads to “crowding in”: government spending boosts the economy, and the private sector is more willing to invest when the economy is stronger.
However, given the situation we are in now, with relatively low unemployment and elevated inflation, crowding out is a legitimate concern. Yet it’s important to understand that the sources of crowding out aren’t limited to government spending. Surges in private spending, like the current immense AI boom, also drive up interest rates. And that is where we are now: the surge in AI spending is driving up interest rates and crowding out all other investment. Indeed, in my October 4 primer I argued that the AI boom is the main cause of soaring long-term interest rates.
Evidence of that crowding out is revealed by a recent article in the New York Times, which noted that the AI Boom is not being slowed by these soaring rates. Yet the spike in interest rates is being felt throughout the non-AI economy. In other words, all that money going into construction of datacenters and purchasing foreign produced semiconductors comes at the expense of investment in everything else.
The chart at the top of this post, which I borrowed from Steve Rattner, clearly makes this point: construction of datacenters appears to be diverting funds and resources from the construction of housing, office buildings, and factories — more or less everything that isn’t AI-related.
That said, AI-related construction — building the structures that house datacenters — is only a fraction of the AI spending boom. Most of the money is going for equipment and software. In fact, that’s one main reason AI spending is so resistant to high interest rates: Borrowing costs matter much less for assets like GPUs, which depreciate rapidly in any case, than they do for long-lived assets like buildings.
Does this story hold if we focus on investment in equipment and software rather than construction? Yes.
Chart 2 shows my version of Rattner’s story. I look at business investment in “tech” — information processing and software — measured as a percentage of GDP. The blue line in the graph below shows how much that measure of tech spending has changed since the beginning of 2023. I compare that with the corresponding change in all other investment. This chart clearly reveals dramatic crowding out by tech spending of all other investment:
Chart 2: Data from FRED
So the AI boom is crowding out everything else. While high interest rates are the main mechanism, there are also others: datacenters are gobbling up scarce electricity, and their demand for semiconductor chips has caused a “RAM apocalypse” of soaring chip prices that is hurting a wide range of industries such as autos and personal computers.
There are, as I see it, three main questions that we should ask about this AI-induced crowding out.
First, wasn’t it always thus? That is, isn’t this what always happens when a new technology drives an investment boom?
Surprisingly, the answer is no. Chart 3 shows the same calculation as Chart 2, but applied to the tech boom of the 1990s, and it doesn’t show any crowding out at all — in fact, non-tech investment rose:
Chart 3
How was that possible? Most of the answer is that during the 90s boom America attracted very large inflows of investment from abroad, which effectively financed the tech boom even as other investment rose.
That isn’t happening this time. True, Donald Trump insists that he has brought in 20 quadrillion dollars of foreign investment, or something like that, but most of that alleged foreign investment surge is a figment of his imagination, and there’s no sign of such a surge in balance of payments data.
A second question is, shouldn’t we assume that the private sector knows what it is doing -- that the reallocation of investment toward AI and away from everything else makes economic sense?
Definitely not. We shouldn’t assume that this reallocation of investment makes economic sense for the country as a whole. Through the tax code, and especially through changes in the tax code in Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, the data center boom is effectively being subsidized by taxpayer dollars.
Moreover, we shouldn’t assume that the private sector knows what it’s doing. There’s often a double standard when thinking about bad investments, in which public investments that go bad are treated as evidence that the government can’t do anything right, while private malinvestment is brushed off as no big deal.
Think about the $80 billion that Meta, formerly known as Facebook, spent on the “metaverse,” only to basically abandon the concept. A government program that spent $80 billion on a failed project would be the subject of endless Congressional hearings. Yet the waste from a failed private investment is equally real.
Finally, how much risk is the AI boom creating in the rest of the economy? Tales of financial stress caused by high interest rates are proliferating. For example, a report in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal was titled “The surge in rates is blowing up commercial real-estate deals.” There’s a growing sense among observers I talk to that the adverse financial fallout of the AI boom for private credit and other loosely regulated parts of the financial system may be larger than many realize.
So it’s clear that crowding out by the AI boom is happening on a very large scale. And unlike the risks of technological unemployment or a burst bubble, this isn’t a hypothetical risk. It’s happening right now.
MUSICAL CODA
The "old" version of Cowork runs model inference in the cloud, executing tool calls in an Anthropic-provided VM we shipped to your computer. We added the VM for capability, safety, and security reasons - mapping in just the data you explicitly added to your session. People loved what they were able to do with Claude but didn't love the disk, battery, and performance cost of running the VM locally. Also, people didn't love that closing your laptop means the work stops.
The "new" version of Cowork runs model inference and the VM in the cloud. Each session gets its own sandbox, not sharing state with other sessions. When the VM needs something on the users' device (like a file), the desktop app is responsible for that file access tool call. [...]
We think this solves a lot of problems we've heard about (like using Cowork from a phone, keeping work running, or getting all the same power without losing battery to the VM)
— Felix Rieseberg, Anthropic, see also this help page
Tags: claude-cowork, anthropic, claude, generative-ai, ai, general-agents, llms
This one is from 1809, written by Napoleon’s nephew.
Paul Krugman is the greatest econ writer in the world, and also a legendary economist. But I sometimes feel that he has a blind spot when it comes to the value of new technologies. In 1998 he famously wrote:
The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in ‘Metcalfe’s law’—which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants—becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.
By the time he wrote that, America was already well into an IT-driven productivity boom that would temporarily interrupt the stagnation that had begun in the 1970s. The internet was surely part of that story; it allowed companies to reshuffle and optimize their supply chains for greater efficiency, find customers, suppliers, and workers more easily, conduct business communications cheaply and in greater depth, and so on. Dolfen et al. (2023) estimate large consumer gains from the rise of e-commerce, Barrero, Bloom, and Davis (2021) find large economic gains to households from high-quality internet access, and so on. The internet is a lot more than just people yelling at each other on forums and social media. (Krugman later argued that the internet’s economic impact had been disappointing, but I suppose that depends on your expectations.)
In 2011, Krugman wrote that American kitchens hadn’t changed much since 1957. I can forgive him for not being an early adopter of the air fryer or the Instant Pot, which came out in 2010, but he really should have given more consideration to countertop microwaves, food processors, Keurig-type coffee machines, crock pots, and induction stoves, all of which became available between 1957 and when he wrote the post.
So although it’s always dangerous to disagree with Paul, I am going to go ahead and push back on his argument that AI technology “does nothing” for most Americans:
He writes:
There is also, however, a more prosaic reasons for the public’s dislike of AI: This is a technology of, by and for oligarchs, with hardly any of the benefits trickling down to regular Americans…Or to put it a different way, never before in history have corporations spent so much money — playing a major role in soaring interest rates — to create so few jobs.
I think that this is basically wrong. Although we don’t know the long-term effects of AI on the distribution of income and wealth, right now we can see a substantial amount of economic benefit flowing — I wouldn’t say “trickling down”1 — to regular Americans.
This is not to say that regular Americans couldn’t stand to benefit more from the AI boom. I think they could. I like some (though not all) of Jared Bernstein’s ideas for spreading the benefits of the data center boom more broadly. But I think Krugman has underestimated the benefits of the data center buildout in terms of direct employment, and has basically ignored the fiscal, macroeconomic, and consumer benefits of the current AI boom.
Building data centers takes a lot of labor. But Krugman argues that data centers aren’t doing much in the way of providing construction jobs:
Given this spending surge, one should expect a sharp rise in nonresidential construction spending — basically construction for businesses rather than housing...But that’s not what we actually see. Nonresidential construction…has basically flatlined under Trump, despite the immense AI investment boom…[E]ven the physical construction of a data center involves relatively little construction.
He quotes Van Nieuwerburgh (2026), who shows that only about a third of the cost of a data center involves construction work.
But I don’t think Krugman proves his case here. First of all, if we’re talking about construction jobs, we should look at employment levels, not spending. And here we see an increase in construction jobs since the AI boom began in late 2022:
Construction has also increased as a percentage of the workforce:
And remember, this was at a time when Trump was deporting construction workers en masse — 13% of the construction workforce is undocumented, and deportations also have knock-on negative effects on the industry that result in the firing of native-born workers as well. This probably explains the pause in the increase of construction employment in 2025. But even that couldn’t stop construction’s rise.
And it’s exactly the type of construction workers who are required for building data centers who are seeing the biggest job gains:
Construction workers’ real wages have also risen since the middle of 2022:
You might be tempted to think that this is a composition effect from Trump deporting the lowest-paid construction workers in 2025. But in fact, there has been a big jump in construction workers’ wages relative to national average wages just this year:
These are all signs of healthy labor demand.
In fact, although estimates of the effect of the data center buildout on construction employment produce very different numbers, they all agree that it’s a significant positive impact. The state of Virginia, for example, produced the following numbers:
And of course these are just the numbers so far; the data center buildout is accelerating, and Goldman estimates that 500,000 new construction and trades jobs will have to be added by 2030 in order to sustain it.
So while you can argue that this boost to labor demand isn’t worth the costs of AI (whatever you think those are), we need to count it on the positive side of the ledger here.
Jobs aren’t the only way that the economic benefits of data centers get spread to ordinary Americans. There’s also the tax system. Data centers pay property taxes, sales taxes, corporate taxes, various fees, and so on — here’s a good explainer from the Tax Foundation. All in all, depending on their policies, local and state governments can reap large windfalls from data centers:
Those taxes go to pay for local public goods, like roads, public transit, and parks. They go to pay for public services like education and health care. Those expenditures all tend to benefit regular people. This is from a story in the New York Times about Loudoun County in Virginia:
A convergence of early fiber internet access and fast-track zoning has made Loudoun the data center hub of the world…Two decades into its experiment, Loudoun has become a case study for the rest of the nation on how to make data centers pay off. Thanks to the proliferation of the warehouses, the quiet bedroom community 30 minutes outside Washington, D.C., has transformed into a tech destination with trophy schools and libraries, and freshly tarred roads.
Now that doesn’t mean data centers are necessarily good for a city or state on net. There are real costs, too — electric power demands that put strain on the grid, nuisance noise, and so on. But the benefits are real, and they don’t come in the form of job creation.
And crucially, state and local governments can demand even more benefits whenever they want! They can raise taxes and fees — in fact, they can even raise them after a data center is already up and running, so that relocation to avoid higher taxes becomes less attractive of an option.
And before construction, they can demand “community benefit” agreements that are actually just additional taxes. Here’s what Jared Bernstein suggests:
Such agreements should include reduced electric and water rates for the surrounding community, funding for the local infrastructure upgrades (roads, substations, water systems) these facilities require anyway, and substantial investment in the schools, parks, and public goods that make a host community better off for having said yes.
Bernstein wants much more of this, of course, and better enforceability. But note that even as things stand, taxes and fees are substantial, and community benefits agreements are common.
I spent my early blogging years supporting Paul Krugman in his epic quest to remind people that aggregate demand is a real and important thing. But for whatever reason, Paul doesn’t mention the demand-side benefits of AI investment in his post.
When Donald Trump came into office, he did a bunch of things that should have clobbered the economy. He announced high tariffs on nearly all of America’s trading partners, then created massive uncertainty by walking some of these back, periodically announcing new ones, granting tons of exceptions, and striking opaque and confusing “deals”. On top of that, he deported large swaths of America’s workforce, visibly weakened the U.S. international alliance system, ran enormous deficits, and behaved in a lawless and corrupt manner that caused people around the world to question the long-term stability of the U.S. government.
All of this created huge amounts of policy uncertainty:
Uncertainty on this scale usually causes big economic problems. Businesses can’t invest if they don’t know if the president of the United States is going to destroy their business model with an executive order tomorrow. All of this Trumpian chaos and meddling should have caused a visible negative demand shock.
But it didn’t, because just as Trump was trying his best to hit the American economy over the head with a stick, the AI boom came along and pushed in the opposite direction. AI technology itself is a positive supply shock, of course, but the data center buildout is a positive demand shock.
How big of a shock? It’s hard to say, because causal estimates of aggregate demand are inherently difficult. But it’s clear that the data center boom has made up a large percent of economic growth for Trump’s entire second term so far:
Now as I mentioned, it’s hard to know whether we’d just be building something else instead if this boom wasn’t happening. Data center construction certainly crowds out some other forms of economic activity, by sucking up scarce labor, and by raising interest rates (which makes it harder to finance other projects).
But to believe that the AI boom isn’t having a big effect on aggregate demand would require some heroic assumptions. You’d have to assume very strong crowd-out. You’d have to assume that Trump’s tariffs and other irresponsible policies are having basically no effect on demand, so that there isn’t any negative shock in need of canceling out. You’d have to assume that “animal spirits” — i.e. corporate bullishness — basically don’t affect the business cycle. And so on.
I don’t think those assumptions are realistic. I think if you see one industry contributing a very large percentage to U.S. economic growth, your prior should be that it’s causing a positive demand shock.
And if so, that means that the AI boom is the only thing standing between countless regular Americans and Trump’s self-destructive chaos. According to Okun’s Law, shaving just 1 percentage point off of economic growth would throw almost a million Americans out of work. That would be bad for regular people.
This macroeconomic benefit is hidden; it’s the proverbial dog that didn’t bark. But it’s pretty significant.
So far, I’ve been talking about the benefits of the data center construction boom. But I should also mention the impact that AI technology is already having on consumers. Krugman’s post seems to treat AI and the data center buildout as synonymous, and jobs as the main (or only) way by which regular Americans might benefit from the new technology. But the truth is that AI is also something that lots of Americans already use, and seem to derive a lot of utility from.
By every measure I can find, AI has seen more rapid household adoption than any other consumer technology in recorded history. And what do Americans use AI for? Everything. This poll is from over a year ago, but already it showed the incredible diversity of use cases for consumer AI:
Here’s a more recent poll, asking what people regularly use AI for, rather than what they’ve ever used it for:
Medical advice and diagnosis has emerged as a particularly important consumer use case. But in general, Americans say chatbots make them more productive, informed, and creative:
This does not mean Americans like AI overall; in fact, they’re overwhelmingly negative on the technology. They’re afraid it’ll take their jobs, and increasingly afraid it’ll kill them. But there are real, substantial consumer benefits from AI that we shouldn’t ignore.
How substantial? In April of this year, Brynjolfsson et al. used surveys to estimate a total annual consumer surplus of $172 billion in the United States. That’s more than the run rate revenue of Anthropic and OpenAI combined, and certainly much much more than their combined profits would be even if they stopped spending anything on fixed costs right now. It’s about half of the annual profits of Nvidia.
So when Krugman says that “this is a technology of, by and for oligarchs, with hardly any of the benefits trickling down to regular Americans,” he’s just wrong. Just the consumer surplus alone is substantial. On top of that the data center boom is creating a significant amount of jobs, generating a significant amount of local and state tax revenue, and propping up the macroeconomy and the job market as a whole.
There are plenty of big problems with AI. Malicious use or accidents might wipe out our whole species in the not-too-distant future. Job loss hasn’t been a big deal so far, but it might eventually be huge. Cognitive weakness from overreliance on AI could affect our society in strange and negative ways that we have yet to even comprehend, much less reckon with. When you ask Americans why they hate AI, these are the things they’ll tell you. Anger at “oligarchs” monopolizing the wealth from AI doesn’t typically make the list, and I don’t think it’s a great way of framing the AI issue.
I’m kind of annoyed by the use of “trickling down” to describe the broad benefits of an investment boom. Yes, businesses make investment decisions, but this is the case in every boom, and for economic growth in general. By this definition, pretty much all benefits in the entire economy “trickle down”, except perhaps for the tiny amount produced by worker-owned co-ops.
A very old idea, returning with a vengeance:
The Second Industrial Revolution sparked a wave of new products and industrial processes, fueling an optimistic Roaring Twenties. But did excitement about technological progress contribute to an over accumulation of investment, despite a slowdown in new product development and satiated demand during the 1920s? And, was this over investment worsened by continuous process innovation? Could these factors have played a role in triggering the Great Depression? To explore these questions, a macroeconomic model that incorporates both process and product innovation is proposed. Proof-of-concept simulations are performed to assess whether these factors can help explain the Great Depression. The answer is yes.
That is from a recent NBER working paper by
The post The Great Accretion and the Great Depression appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Honestly, simply skimming the headlines is enough to provide a heady jolt of ye olde schadenfreude:
Yankees' Disastrous Defense Pushes Season To Brink With ALDS Game 2 Loss
Yankees Doomed By Errors In Game 2 Loss To Rays
The Yankees Humiliated Themselves In Game 2. Now They're On The Brink Of Elimination
The Yankees Ace Needed Help This Time — And His Teammates Utterly Failed Him
Yankees Do Just About Everything Wrong In Calamitous First Inning
Aaron Boone's Toughest Decision Immediately Backfired In Game 2 Debacle
Yankees Better Remember How To Play Baseball After This Clown Show — Or Else
Yankees Ace Is Built For Surprising Environment Team Faces In Game 2
Momentum In A Best-Of-Five Series Can Flip Quickly — And Yankees Have Just The Thing To Do It
Sure they do. . . . P.S.: Here's some advice for any gamblers out there. Do not -- I said, DO NOT -- rely on the Post for any tips when it comes to wagering even a nickle.
Expect Bellinger, Yanks To Even ALDS On Monday vs. Rays
the joy of sox
Yankees - 000 100 010 - 2 4 4
Rays - 100 040 00x - 5 8 0
Yankees' disastrous defense pushes season to brink with ALDS Game 2 loss to Rays
Greg Joyce, Post
Game 5 of the 2024 World Series, you now have company.
The stakes were not quite as high on Monday, but the Yankees turned in an even bigger defensive abomination to put themselves in a 2-0 hole in the ALDS.
Three errors in the bottom of the first inning . . . [and] another error in the fifth helped provide the dagger, sinking the Yankees in a 5-2 loss to the Rays in Game 2 of the ALDS . . .
The Yankees flew home licking their wounds with their season on life support . . .
In a recurring theme of too many postseasons past, the Yankees melted from the Rays' ability to put the ball in play and wreak havoc . . . resulting in four errors – one shy of their franchise record for a single postseason game. . . .
[A]fter [the Yankees] left the bases loaded in the top of the fifth [unable to break a 1-1 tie], they lost the game in the bottom of the frame.
Jonathan Aranda, who homered for the only run in Game 1, led off with a sinking liner to right field that Spencer Jones did not get a good jump on as it fell for a single. [Sung to the tune of "O'Neill plays it on a hop"]
After Junior Caminero's double put runners on second and third, Liam Hicks . . . hit a weak tapper to Chisholm, who looked at home before taking the out at first as the Rays went up 2-1. The infield was in again when the speedy Chandler Simpson hit a chopper to shortstop, where George Lombard Jr. could not get his backhand on it, allowing another run to score.
That led Aaron Boone to pull Schlittler, who looked stunned, for Brent Headrick, who got the second out on a strikeout. Then he generated a ground ball to shortstop that Lombard fielded and fired slightly off-target to first, where Luis García Jr. dropped it, putting runners on the corners. Brooklyn's Richie Palacios came up next and delivered the big swing, a two-run single to center field that put the Rays ahead 5-1. . . .
The Yankees played a bottom of the first that was just about disastrous as possible, except by some miracle, . . . it only resulted in a 1-0 deficit.
It began with Yandy Diaz's leadoff chopper to third base that Ryan McMahon – who Boone considered replacing in the lineup for a better threat of offense but said he wanted to "prioritize the defense" – whiffed on for the first error.
After Aranda's single through the right side, Caminero hit a grounder up the middle that Lombard ranged to and flipped to second base for the out. But Chisholm tried an off-balance, ill-advised throw to first for the double play, which instead bounced past the bag, allowing Diaz to score for the 1-0 lead.
The comedy of errors continued when Schlittler appeared to strike out Liam Hicks for the first out, except Hicks' bat hit Austin Wells' glove for a catcher's inference.
Simpson then hit a grounder to second base where Chisholm fielded it and threw high to second base, pulling Lombard off the bag. The rookie was able to get his foot back in time to get the force out, but Chisholm's throw wiped away any chance of a double play.
The final count from one nightmare of a bottom of the first inning for the Yankees: three errors, four misplays and somehow . . . just one run.
Against a team that famously puts the ball in play often on a home turf that famously can be difficult to adjust to, the Yankees looked as if they had never played on this stage of the ALDS or at this locale of Tropicana Field. . . .
[T]he Yankees did just about everything wrong to start Monday's Game 2.
On Schlittler's second pitch, Yandy Díaz chopped the ball to third baseman Ryan McMahon, who appeared to misjudge the turf bounce as the ball ticked off his glove for an error. . . .
Junior Caminero sent a bouncer up the middle. George Lombard Jr. ranged over and backhand-flipped to Jazz Chisholm Jr. to record the only potential out on the play — but Chisholm wildly spun and threw to first, far off-line of Luis García Jr., enabling Díaz to score and Caminero to reach second base.
The comedy of errors was only going to grow funnier for Rays fans.
Schlittler appeared to strike out Liam Hicks, but what looked like strike three instead became a catcher's interference . . .
Yankees doomed by errors in Game 2 loss to Rays, trail 0-2 in best-of-five ALDS
Peter Sblendorio, Daily News
The Yankees made error after error, miscue after miscue in Game 2 of the ALDS.
And now, there's no more margin for error.
A mistake-filled 5-2 loss to the Tampa Bay Rays at Tropicana Field on Monday night left the Yankees in an 0-2 hole and on the brink of elimination . . .
The Yankees committed four errors — including three in the first inning — and failed to make several other defensive plays on a nightmarish night that just kept snowballing. . . .
In 17 road starts this regular season, Schlittler pitched to a 1.16 ERA — the fifth-best road ERA in MLB history. . . . But the Yankees defense did the flame-throwing ace no favors.
Third baseman Ryan McMahon booted a chopper off the bat of Yandy Díaz, the Rays' very first hitter.
Two batters later, Junior Caminero grounded into a force out, but second baseman Jazz Chisholm Jr. made an off-balance throw wide of first base as he attempted to turn a double play, allowing Díaz to score.
Catcher's interference by Austin Wells erased a called third strike and further extended the inning, as did another off-line throw by Chisholm . . .
That marked the first time in Yankees playoff history that they committed three errors in a single inning. . . .
It was a similarly frustrating start for the Yankees' offense . . . Rays starter Freddy Peralta . . . retired the first nine Yankee batters. . . .
[The MFY left the bases loaded in the top of the fifth.] It all unraveled for the Yankees from there.
After back-to-back hits against Schlittler to begin the fifth, the Rays took a 2-1 lead when an aggressive Jonathan Aranda scored from third base on a slow groundout . . . with the infield in.
Caminero then scored on a slow roller off the bat of Simpson that rookie shortstop George Lombard Jr. failed to field. That play was deemed an error before the official scorer changed the ruling. After Brent Headrick replaced Schlittler . . . Lombard committed an actual error — this time on a wide throw . . .
The only playoff game with more Yankee errors was Game 2 of the 1976 ALCS, when they committed five.
"I'm not disappointed in our defense," Schlittler said. "I'm not disappointed in the offense."
Aaron Boone's toughest decision immediately backfired in Yankees' Game 2 debacle
Mark W. Sanchez, Post
Manager Aaron Boone kept the lineup intact from Game 1 — most notably keeping a struggling Ryan McMahon at third base — in part because he wanted "to prioritize the defense," he said a couple of hours before Monday's first pitch.
It took two pitches from Cam Schlittler for that decision to backfire.
McMahon made the first error, a drip that became a flood, in an embarrassing 5-2 loss in Game 2 to the Rays in which the Yankees defense was charged with four errors and probably should have been charged with more.
The problems started on the second pitch Rays leadoff hitter Yandy Díaz saw, chopping a grounder toward McMahon. The normally sure-handed veteran, perhaps misjudging the springs on the Tropicana Field turf or an infield dirt that played fast, missed on his backhand attempt. The ball skittered past him, McMahon raising his palms wondering what had just happened. Two more errors followed in an inning in which the Rays scored an unearned run.
McMahon did not make a second mistake in the field, but he also did not atone at the plate. . . . In four postseason games, McMahon is 1-for-7 — the lone hit an infield single — with two walks . . .
Cam Schlittler needed help this time — and the Yankees utterly failed him
Mark W. Sanchez, Post
"I feel like if I need to get [a strikeout]," [Cam Schlittler] said Saturday, "I'm going to be able to do that."
Schlittler's prediction was off the mark because Tampa Bay's bats were constantly on the mark.
The Yankees ace of aces . . . was not able to play hero . . .
In the game's biggest moments, Schlittler needed the help of his defense, which let him down repeatedly. . . .
It started immediately, with the aggressive Rays swinging early in counts and making consistent, often loud contact in the first inning. Errors by Ryan McMahon (on a chopper) and Jazz Chisholm Jr. (an ill-advised throw to first after recording an out at second) scored one run, but Schlittler did well to limit the damage.
The game changed, though, in a four-run fifth inning during which the flame-throwing righty needed to throw pitches by Rays bats and could not.
A single by Jonathan Aranda (played conservatively by Spencer Jones, who might have had a chance at a diving catch) and a smashed double from Junior Caminero put runners on second and third without an out in a game that was then tied, 1-1. Schlittler needed one of those strikeouts. Unlike the Rays, he whiffed.
Liam Hicks managed to make contact — the softest imaginable, a tapper that traveled 5 feet in the air — but the slow roller to Chisholm was good enough to score the go-ahead run. . . .
Next it was Chandler Simpson who fell behind 1-2 but kept fighting. . . . [He] chopped a swinging bunt 4 feet in the air toward George Lombard Jr. The rookie shortstop had a play at the plate and knew it, his eyes toward Austin Wells instead of the ball as he booted it on a backhand attempt to let in another run.
On a night Schlittler needed help . . . [he] received none . . .
Yankees better remember how to play baseball after this clown show — or else
Joel Sherman, Post
Cam Schlittler has to be "win day" for the Yankees in these playoffs. That felt nonnegotiable . . .
Still, his teammates had to help him a little.
Yet, they could not even muster a little . . . All you need to know is that in a four-batter span to begin the bottom of the first inning, the Yankees committed three errors . . . So they had as many errors in about five minutes as they had hits in this game until . . . one out in the eighth inning.
Basically the Rays forced the Yankees to play baseball — and the Yankees were just awful at it.
And because of that their season is on life support. They need a three-game winning streak against a rival who has outplayed them all season and now in the postseason. Or else it will assure a 17th straight title-less season. Or else yet another Aaron Boone team will have been ousted in the playoffs by a team that had a better record in the regular season. The competition rises and the Yankee hitting and defense sink; it has become a rite of fall.
They lost embarrassingly, 5-2, Monday night to the Rays. They have two runs in 18 innings in this division series, compared to one unpardonable baserunning gaffe by Austin Wells in the opener Saturday in which they were nearly no-hit and lost 1-0. They then committed four errors in Game 2.
Those four errors do not fully encapsulate how incompetent the Yankees were defensively. Because no team struck out fewer times this season than the Rays (18.8 percent) and what they did against Schlittler was attack strikes early in the count, put it in play and let the Yankees fielding clown show do the rest. . . .
[After five innings, Tampa led] 5-1 — and the way the Yankees are hitting against Tampa Bay, that was insurmountable. The Yankees have gone 1-2-3 in 12 of 18 innings. They have five hits and two runs in two games — and yet their baserunning and defense might be worse.
The Yankees have now lost their last six road playoff games. . . .
It feels like déjà unacceptable.
They play at home Wednesday trying to extend their season . . . Their fans will hope that somewhere between Games 2 and 3 they recall how to hit, field and run the bases smartly. You know, play baseball well.
The Yankees humiliated themselves in Game 2. Now they're on the brink of elimination
Gary Phillips, Daily News
As Aaron Boone awaited the start of the ALDS in the visiting manager's office at Tropicana Field on Saturday, he answered what turned out to be a prescient question.
Does it bother Boone, he was asked, that opposing teams' scouting reports say its key to put the ball in play when the Yankees are in the field. The insinuation made by such scouting reports . . . is that the Yankees don't have a sound defense. . . . [T]hat's been their rep for years under Boone, and it even became public that the Dodgers made the same evaluations after the Yankees lost the 2024 World Series to L.A. in sloppy fashion.
[The Yankees] ranked 24th in errors, 17th in Outs Above Average and 13th in Defensive Runs Saved this season . . .
"[A]t times we've been very good and people don't acknowledge it," Boone insisted. . . . "We're trying to prepare as best we can . . . If you're implying with that question we're a bad defense, no, we're not." . . .
While the manager can debate just how strong his defense was on the whole this season, there is no arguing that it was catastrophic . . . . embarrassing . . . . pathetic — take your pick — in Game 2 of the ALDS on Monday. With three errors in the first frame, four totaled on the night, and several other balls misplayed, the futile Bombers suffered a humiliating 5-2 loss to the much tidier Rays.
Now both teams are headed to Yankee Stadium with the pinstripers on the brink of elimination . . . They have no one but themselves to blame.
"Tonight was just not good enough for us . . .," Boone said . . .
The Yankees' comedy of errors in this series began on Saturday when, in a desperate attempt to jumpstart a dormant offense, Austin Wells was thrown out inexplicably trying to stretch a double into a triple. On Monday . . . Ryan McMahon committed a fielding error on the second pitch of the game.
Earlier in the day, Boone said that he had given some thought to Anthony Volpe starting in place of the light-hitting third baseman . . . "I want to prioritize the defense," Boone said, but his defense didn't prioritize taking care of the ball.
McMahon wasn't the only Yankee to falter in the first, as Jazz Chisholm Jr. helped a run score when he made an off-line throw from second base to first base on a double play attempt. With his back turned to first and Jonathan Aranda sliding at him, Chisholm's heave was off-balance and ill-advised. And yet, he didn't think he should have held onto the ball.
"Honestly, I'd probably still throw it in the play that was trying to be made," Chisholm said. . . .
Wells was then called for catcher interference upon review, and Chisholm nearly threw another ball away before the inning ended.
[D]isaster struck their defense again in the fifth inning, which began with an Aranda single to right. The ball bounced in front of Spencer Jones after he got a jump that was -13.4 feet below average, per Statcast. Boone claimed the 109.4-mph "bullet" wasn't catchable . . . Jones disagreed. He said he should have caught it, but he admitted to hesitating on a "tough read." . . .
Now the Yankees — devoid of fundamentals, riddled with mistakes, and short on offense — find themselves in an unenviable 2-0 hole as they head back to Yankee Stadium, where the Rays have already celebrated a division crown in the past month. The Yanks need to win three straight to keep their season alive . . .
Yankees head home from unlikeliest house of horrors clinging to hope for return
Mike Vaccaro, Post
This has never been what you would call a standard house of horrors. Nobody has ever thought to give it a nickname. . . .
It's just "The Trop," short for Tropicana Field, and let's be very honest: It's not even anywhere close to the best atmosphere in a building that has been named for orange juice. That would be Daikin Park, formerly Minute Maid Park, in Houston.
The Trop?
The Trop could mostly pass for study hall for most of its existence. . . .
But the Yankees are going to be grateful to get the hell out of Dodge, to get the hell out of St. Petersburg. This has been a road trip from hell, and it has shoved them right to the brink of a season that promised so much and is on the verge of delivering precious little.
The Rays beat the Yankees 5-2 on Monday night, but they only got around to that once the Yankees were done beating the Yankees on Monday night. They couldn't catch the ball, couldn't hit the ball . . .
It was like that fifth inning of the fifth game of the World Series a few years ago, only spread around the whole game. And the suddenly very audible Rays fans took great delight in silencing the Yankee invaders — the ones in the stands as well as the ones on the field — and enjoying every one of the four — four!! — errors the team in the road grays committed.
The Yankees' slapstick contrasts sharply with the Rays' tight, smart, efficient brand of ball. . . .
The Yankees used to feel at home down in Tampa-St. Pete . . . Tampa used to be an easy, breezy stop along the way, with so many Yankees fans inside the arid walls of the Trop that it felt and sounded like a smaller, uglier version of Yankee Stadium. . . .
But this year they lost five of the seven games they played in St. Pete during the regular season, and they're now 0-2 here in the postseason, and maybe the most dire of all the thoughts the Yankees face in their present predicament is this: They will now pay any price and bear any burden to get another game here. . . .
[B]ack in The Bronx . . . [i]t'll be a desperate house facing desperate times . . .
They couldn't do it last year. . . . The Bronx couldn't save them last year.
It has to save them this time.
Heroes, zeros and the inside pitch from the Yankees' 5-2 loss to the Rays in Game 2 of the ALDS . . .
Hero
Old-school baseball. Baseball's best team at putting the ball in play struck out just four times total in a game started by Cam Schlittler, putting constant pressure on a Yankees defense that wilted.
Zero
The entire Yankees defense. Misplays, four of which were scored as errors, from (in order) Ryan McMahon, Jazz Chisholm Jr., Austin Wells, Spencer Jones, George Lombard Jr., Lombard again and Luis García Jr. led to three unearned runs and one of the ugliest playoff performances you will see. . . .
Key Stat
4: Errors by the Yankees — and they probably should have been charged with five — including three in the first inning
Before Game 2:
Clock is ticking for Yankees to change the harsh reality of their playoff reputation
Joel Sherman, Post
The Yankees have a few days this week to demonstrate that when the playoff going gets tough, they don't just get going toward their offseason golf game.
Until proven otherwise, they are the Boone Bullies. They are capable of outdoing inferiors and the AL Central in the postseason, but wilt when their equal or better shows up. . . .
[A]s Game 1 of the division series again reiterated, at this time of year, when the level of competition goes up, the Aaron Boone Yankees have yet to rise concurrently.
Saturday night, they were nearly no-hit by Drew Rasmussen, totaled just one hit and lost 1-0 to the team that outdid them all season — the AL East champion Rays.
This is not a funeral. The Yankees have their most postseason bulletproof player of the Boone Era, Cam Schlittler, starting Monday night's Game 2. . . .
Still, the math is not favorable for the Yankees. They have to win three of four now to advance, with the knowledge that the Yankee killer Rasmussen (1.60 ERA in 12 games/11 starts against the Yankees) will get one more start if necessary. Plus, the Rays were just better than the Yankees over 162 games. . . .
To this point, a Boone Yankee team has completed 15 playoff series since he became manager in 2018. They are 7-0 against foes they had a better overall record than during the year. They are 1-7 against those with the same or worse records. The one series win was against Cleveland during the 60-game 2020 COVID season.
And really the meek AL Central should hardly count. They are like the mildly good wrestler who gets beaten to elevate a challenger for a championship shot. The Boone Yankees are 5-0 against the AL Central in the postseason. . . .
[In Game 1] the Yankees did not give their fans many reasons to cheer. Even their lone hit, an Austin Wells eighth-inning double, devolved into the kind of boneheaded play that has defined the Boone Yankees' extinction this time of year when Wells unforgivably tried and failed to stretch it into a triple.
The Rays and Yankees have had the two best records in the AL every day since April 23 except for one. Tampa Bay went into first place for good June 27. The Yankees have been trying to play catch-up since. Even reset at 0-0 on Oct. 3, the Rays have gone up on the Yankees again. . . .
[U]ntil proven otherwise, this is the time of year in which the Boone Yankees see their superiors and begin offseason plans.
I talk to a lot of old people, those who were born in the 20th century, and if I ask them what the word “unalive� means, they usually have no idea what I’m talking about, except for some of them who have kids or who study Internet culture.
This will, of course, probably seem very weird to most people who were born in or grew up in the 21st century. Just to recap for the olds: “unalive� is the word you use to represent concepts like dying, or death, or killing or being killed, on digital platforms where saying those words accurately will cause the algorithm to punish or censor you. Or, maybe, where the perception is that using those words will result in being censored by the algorithm, and no one is actually willing to find out what happens if you use the forbidden words.
This sort of attack on people’s expression started on platforms like TikTok, where nearly all content is distributed through an algorithmic feed, but has since become ubiquitous in nearly all digital media that we see. In fact, these tics are now so prevalent that it’s routine to hear people using this kind of language in everyday life, even though there’s not yet an algorithm to appease in the physical world. I’ve heard people say, out loud, “he unalived himself�, in reference to someone dying by suicide.
And all of this has become even more visible in recent days as online conversation has turned to discussion of the horrific lack of accountability around the tragic rape case at Cornell University. Across the Internet, people are routinely referring to the central crime in the case as r*pe or “grape� or even using the � emoji, without a second thought for what it means that the very word can’t be said online anymore. Or, at least, the assumption is that it can’t be said.
To be clear, I am very much in favor of people using content warnings or sensitivity markers for content, and fine with people using abbreviations like “SA� for references to disturbing or triggering topics like sexual assault; we should provide people with as much context and control as possible when choosing what information they want to consume and when. I also know that sometimes, people use lesser terms for stressful subjects like death or assault to create a bit of ironic distance from painful or upsetting topics.
But most of the different variations of wording and emojis are coming from trying to appease the platforms, and there’s a heavy cost for those who are worried about being mindful: If someone is using a tool to filter out content, it will no longer be effective because everyone is using misspellings and euphemisms and imagery to get around the algorithm.
The spread of censored and mangled syntax is happening because people believe, or have experienced, that platforms will silence them for accurately describing the world in plain language. This shit is terrible, and it has to stop.
One of the things that’s most concerning to me is that an entire generation has grown up not realizing how extreme it is that their very language is being chosen for them by platforms run by people who hate that generation’s ability to express itself, and who hate the things it has to say. From their youngest days, this generation grew up watching people make stupid faces at them for YouTube thumbnails and never had a chance to reflect on the fact that those creators didn’t want to be humiliating themselves by making those expressions — the demands of the algorithms of Big Tech forced them to do that.
The rituals of feeding the algorithm are so built into people’s everyday habits that they’re invisible to people who weren’t alive before today’s platforms took over. Every parent of my cohort remembers the first time they heard their toddler finish doing something cute in their living room, and then turn around and say, “please like and subscribe!� afterwards. It’s a ghastly, sickening feeling to confront the fact that our little kids were being brainwashed into thinking that every adorable thing they did should be followed by a prompt to provide data to Google.
Over on Instagram, where people originally signed up thinking they were going to see someone’s vacation pictures, or shots of their cousin’s kids, you’re now stuck watching people beg for everyone to reply with cultish phrases in the comments, which will then earn them an obviously AI-generated response in return, all in service of “showing activity� to the algorithm, like it’s an angry god that needs a sacrifice. They’re just not sure exactly what the angry god wants.
Your free speech was taken away from you, and the people who did it are the same ones who spent years pretending to care about “free expression�. They contrived examples of lack of free speech on college campuses while squashing protests, and cried crocodile tears about “cancel culture� while getting people fired for political criticism. Now they have no problem with billionaires deciding exactly what words everyone is allowed to say. Larry Ellison is not content with his family owning all of the movies and TV shows — his family has to control what words people are allowed to speak on TikTok, too. Elon Musk isn’t content to merely generate and distribute child sexual abuse material for profit — he wants to silence the messages of the few decent people who are foolish enough to remain on Twitter/X, too. (That’s why I wrote you a guide on how to get your organization off of that cursed platform.)
Now that an entire generation has grown up using these Orwellian euphemisms, and all of the Big AI products are trained on the Internet that was created under this regime, do you think today’s AI tools even know that the real, uncensored world exists? If you can’t say “genocide� on any of the major platforms, yet those are the ones all of the Big AI tools used as their training data... well, then the AI tools sure aren’t very likely to know much about genocide, are they?
Our creativity can be constrained by the language we use — our imaginations are limited by what we can think to say. If we’re trained to limit the words we speak just by habit, and those limits are put in place by people whose social, political, cultural and moral goals are the opposite of what we value, then our work is unalive before it is even born.
The answer to this is simple: say what you mean. This will take, to some degree, courage. It may even take, I hesitate to say, some sacrifice. When I suggest this course of action to people, they inevitably say, “But it will cost me audience!� or “But what if I lose followers!� or “What if they demonetize me!�
Okay, what if they do? What if they do.
Are you willing to push on this? To make a point about it? To move to platforms where you can actually say what you mean? Or to remember that you already have platforms where you can say what you mean? On an email newsletter or podcast you can say whatever the hell you want and nobody can stop you. On my blog right here, I can even curse in a headline and it won’t affect anything about how my site operates.
(And a reminder: Substack is not an email newsletter, and a Spotify show is not a podcast — they’ll be unaliving your distribution any day now.)
If you are a 20th century relic like me, it is incumbent upon you to remind the generation that grew up inside the algorithm that another world is possible, and that we know this because we lived it. We were able to style a MySpace page in any way that we wanted; the code for LiveJournal was entirely open source so there was no part of the algorithm that was unknowable. A blog like the one you’re reading right now could be made by anyone, and put up for pennies, and nobody could stop it from being read by millions of people. (And that last one? It’s still possible.)
If you are from this century, forget all that rambling bullshit about ancient history: all that matters is you getting what you deserve, because you’ve been fucked over by the same billionaires who’ve poisoned your planet and infested your world with slop. The best artists around you are invisible to you, and the most important statements by activists that you care about are being silenced. It’s not a conspiracy, it’s a system working as designed. And the proof is as obvious as the fact that the angriest activists you know can’t even talk about systemic abuses or state violence without having to put it in algorithmically approved speech or censoring their captions like they’re going to be read by 5-year-olds.
It should make you furious. It is time to kill “unalive�.
The response is simple:
If we keep accepting the words that are forced upon us by TikTok and Meta and Google and all the rest, while platforms like Twitter/X allow the most hateful and harmful content in the world to be distributed completely unfettered, we’ll only see authoritarianism rise, and the harms against the vulnerable accelerate. But what breaks my heart almost as much is that we’ll see so many brilliant artists and activists and thinkers whose genius will be muted or silenced by mindless, heartless algorithms that capriciously decide who gets to say exactly what words, in what ways.
I get angry every time I think about it. The tech tycoons get ever more brazen in what they’re willing to say publicly, boasting about how they’re going to cause the end of the world, or calling for ethnic cleansing, all while putting tighter and tighter reins on the speech and expression of ordinary people. It’s time for “unalive� to die.
We analyze the academic affiliations of nearly 6,000 award-winning researchers in 18 major fields in the natural sciences, engineering, and social sciences from the 1820s to the 2020s, focusing on the 1960s onward. The analysis reveals a trend of declining concentration in the institutional affiliations of award-winning researchers, shifting from a few science-strong universities in high-income countries to a more diverse set of institutions across the world. The decline in concentration is observed in all fields except one: economics. The institutional affiliations of prizewinning economists have become more concentrated over time, making economics the most concentrated field. We associate the higher concentration of prizewinning work in economics with the field’s stronger sorting by institutional prestige, its lower reliance on specialized equipment and instruments, and its assessment of findings based on a synthesis of evidence rather than on decisive experiments or proofs. We discuss the benefits and costs of this high and rising institutional concentration of prizewinning economists.
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In 1960, a country boy named Glen Campbell showed up in Los Angeles with a guitar, a pompadour hairdo, and a lean, hungry look. He was blessed by fate, and soon started playing on hit records. He was always on the radio.
But there was a catch—they weren’t his records. Campbell was just a member of the band, and the public didn’t know his name. Even so, what amazing company this young man kept: He now played guitar for Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Phil Spector, Nat King Cole, Dean Martin, Bobby Darin, Sammy Davis Jr., the Everly Brothers, Doris Day, and dozens of other superstars.
This all happened because he had earned the respect of some lesser-known peers, the first-call musicians who worked in the trenches during these sessions. Nowadays they are known collectively as the Wrecking Crew, and are acknowledged as the leading studio players of the era. Glen Campbell would be remembered today, even if he had never released a single record under his own name, just for his membership in this elite cohort.
He deserved every bit of his new-found success. Rock star Leon Russell, who also worked in these sessions, called Campbell the “best guitar player I'd heard before or since.” Songwriter Jimmy Webb later declared that Campbell could match up with “any guitar player in the world, from George Benson to Eric Clapton.” Eddie Van Halen was so desperate to get a guitar lesson from Campbell, that he traveled all the way to Arizona just to make it happen.
Campbell was that good.
“In 1963 alone, he showed up on 586 recorded songs.”
There was, of course, a tiny problem. Glen didn’t know how to read music. So he sometimes asked the other musicians to play a new song without him the first time, so he could hear what was happening. But for the second run-through, Campbell was ready and contributing.
He played for union scale in those early days. That meant $65 for a three-hour session. In the early 1960s that was solid money. Back in Arkansas, Glen had picked cotton for $1.25 for every hundred pounds—that was more than a whole day’s work. Music was a much better option. And Campbell was in the studio constantly now. In 1963 alone, he showed up on 586 recorded songs.
But this young man hoped for more. Glen Campbell wanted to be a star. And he tried everything to make it happen. But nothing worked.
In 1962, he focused on bluegrass, and released his first album on Capitol. It came and went with little fanfare.
In 1963, Campbell reinvented himself as a traditional country singer. He released his second album on Capitol, but it also fizzled out.
In 1964, he set himself up as a guitar virtuoso, and released The Astounding 12-String Guitar of Glen Campbell, again on Capitol. Judging by the sales, few were astounded.
In 1965, Campbell adopted the guise of a rock musician. He put out The Big Bad Rock Guitar of Glen Campbell. It’s amazing that Capitol was still in his corner. Audiences, however, gave it a pass. That was the year everybody wanted British rock stars from Liverpool, not former studio musicians from Billstown, Arkansas.
Was there anything left to try? Yes, there was.
Around this same time, Glen Campbell rebranded himself as a surf musician, and got a choice gig with the Beach Boys. That’s quite a feat for a kid from a landlocked state. For a time, he actually replaced Brian Wilson as lead singer with the band. You might think this would turn him into a superstar, but fans wanted Brian back, and had no interest in celebrating his successor.
At this point, I would have given up and gone back to Arkansas. Campbell had made enough cash from those Beach Boys gigs to lease a Gold Cadillac, and could have returned home in grand style. But he was determined to try his luck one more time, and Capitol Records—then flush with cash, due to all those Beatles hits—still had money to burn.
That’s when they finally struck gold, or a gold record, to be more precise. Gentle on My Mind, released in August 1967, not only got Campbell on the charts but earned him two Grammy awards. He was now on a rapid trajectory to stardom, and would never look back.
During the next 34 months, Campbell released twelve more albums. This staggering output not only happened while he was concertizing and touring, but Campbell was now also acting in Hollywood movies. Adding to the craziness, he launched his CBS television show The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour in 1969.
For the next three years, this good-looking young man, with his polite manners and affable demeanor, would entertain audiences from the small screen in their homes. He also showed a knack for comedy (it helped that Steve Martin and Rob Reiner were his writers). Best of all, Campbell always seemed to have some new hit song to share.
This was his golden era, and a surprising time for a down-home performer to enjoy pop music acclaim. In an age when teenage tastes controlled the charts, and three-minute anthems of rebellion took over the radio, Campbell found success in the most unlikely way of all, with lonely songs about lonely guys far away from home.
The protagonist in a Glen Campbell song isn’t heading to San Francisco with flowers in his hair. He’s not a street-fighting man or a working-class hero or even just a fortunate son. He’s sad and alone and wants to get back to Wichita or Galveston or some other place he used to be.
Listeners could relate to his, and maybe especially in a time when almost everyone was going on strange trips—at least in their head, if not to actual locales like Haight-Ashbury or Vietnam. There was something comforting in Campbell’s repeated reminder that places like home still existed, and someone special might be waiting there.
“The protagonist in a Glen Campbell song isn’t heading to San Francisco with flowers in his hair. He’s not a street-fighting man or a working-class hero or even just a fortunate son….”
Of course, I can’t give Glen Campbell total credit for these songs, because he didn’t write them. He got his best songs from a Hollywood hippie named Jimmy Webb. The first time they met, it didn’t look like they had much in common. They both showed up at the same studio one day, where they had been hired to make music for a Chevrolet commercial. That’s when country boy Campbell strolled up to long-haired Webb, and simply said: “Get a haircut.”
As it turned out, they had more in common than they realized. Jimmy Webb may have been a Hollywood hippie, but he was also a country boy from Laverne, Oklahoma—population of one thousand souls, and almost as many oil rigs. Webb may have left the heartland, but it stayed in his songs.
Campbell rode Webb’s tune “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” into the Billboard top forty and up to number two on the country chart. He wanted more of the same, and asked the hirsute balladeer to compose another song about a city. So one day, Webb let Campbell hear an early version of “Wichita Lineman.”
There would never be a later version—although Webb thought the song needed more work—because Campbell recorded it immediately. “When I heard it I cried,” Campbell later admitted. It made him feel homesick—almost the defining sensation of his best work from the 1960s. Others must have felt the same, because this time Campbell reached number three on the Billboard Hot 100.
Webb was worried that “Wichita Lineman” had two many flaws. It lasts for just two verses, without a chorus or bridge, and the verse modulates by a third in the middle—so the song doesn’t resolve in the tonic. There wasn’t even an intro (although bassist Carol Kaye invented a short one at the session). And the rhymes didn’t always rhyme.
The closing word of the song is line, but it’s supposed to rhyme with time. Webb wanted to come up with something better but, ironically, he didn’t have time to fix his line. It was already on the radio.
That didn’t stop “Wichita Lineman” from thrilling audiences, or earning extravagant praise from famous admirers. Bob Dylan once called it “the greatest song ever written.” Billy Joel cited “Wichita Lineman,” in his recent interview with Rick Beato, when asked to pick a perfect song. I’ve been playing it for decades (even at jazz gigs), and wouldn’t change a note of this supposedly flawed tune.
Glen Campbell now saw his name in lights—as they say in show business. That was quite a change for someone who had grown up without any lights, or even electricity, in the family home. That was back in Billstown, a city so small that it didn’t show up on road maps.
His father was a sharecropper, and the family only ate what they grew or hunted—and sometime there wasn’t enough for the large Campbell family (which produced twelve children). There were days when Glen stayed inside his classroom during school recess, because it was cold and he didn’t own a coat. “We didn’t just endure poverty,” Campbell recalled, “we wore it.”
In his autobiography, Campbell tells of the time his father gave up all hope, and decided to commit suicide. The story is half a tragedy, and half a miracle:
Dad couldn’t bear the pressure of not being able to provide the bare necessities for his large family any longer. So he took a shotgun and headed into the woods. He loaded the weapon and was about to put the barrel in his mouth when he was distracted by a squirrel running down a tree branch. He shot and killed it. Almost instantly another came down, and another. My dad was crying and shooting his gun, and the family had eight squirrels for supper….Dad lived an additional forty years.
The father was a survivor, but his son was destined for greater things and, like Johnny B. Goode, that little country boy could play the guitar. He got his first instrument at age four—a three-quarter size Sears Roebuck model that cost five dollars—and was gigging and going on the road while still a child. He joined his uncle’s band and they made the move to Albuquerque when Campbell was seventeen. Six years later he came to Los Angeles. And six years after that, Glen Campbell was a superstar.
He enjoyed every bit of it. Campbell built the first million-dollar house in Laurel Canyon—a 16,500 square-foot home on seven acres. He later bragged that he had “stayed in smaller three-story hotels.” But he could afford it—he was now making $50,000 or more in a single night.
But the enjoyment soon turned sour. “There were times when I was too drunk to recall what I did or with whom I did it,” he later admitted. He sometimes got bad write-ups in the press for the times he faltered on-stage.
In his autobiography, Campbell admits his failings, but can’t resist pointing out that the same journalists who criticized him were also drinking and using drugs, although nobody called them out. But the reality was that Campbell was under the bright lights, front and center, night after night—undergoing a kind of scrutiny no music critic ever faces.
The pressure was intense. “In the late 1960s and early 1970s, I didn’t have a career,” he later mused. “My career had me.” Sometime he was so confused on the road, that he would hunt for a local telephone book just to remind himself what city he was in. And now, in addition to the booze, he was also using cocaine.
“You have the illusion of new energy and refreshment,” he later explained, “You think you’re alert and become optimistic and happy, but this feeling only lasts ten to fifteen minutes.” Your choice is to snort more, or return to reality. And after too much cocaine, reality is more depressing than ever.
This was when the slow-motion collapse began. His marriage fell apart. He lost the fancy house in Laurel Canyon, and moved into an apartment. In the aftermath, he had little contact with his children. Campbell’s TV show got cancelled, and his record sales started to dip.
How did he respond? In the worst possible way: “I was drinking and drugging now to ease the pain.”
Not all the blame accrues to Campbell for his declining record sales. The public’s taste in songs changed too. In the late 1960s, a new style of wistful pop music, infused with country and folk elements, had taken off, and he was a beneficiary. Capitol Records was the leader in this new sound, and released a series of hit records featuring Glen Campbell, Bobbie Gentry, and Linda Ronstadt. He rode that wave as long as it lasted—but it didn’t last long.
Many thought that this was the beginning of a new era in pop, but it was really the end. Gentry soon disappeared from view (never seen in public after 1982). Ronstadt gradually adopted a more mainstream pop sound, and eventually tried her hand at almost every other genre (Latin, jazz standards, R&B, punk, even Gilbert & Sullivan operetta). And Campbell had to reinvent himself again, or at least that’s what he believed at the time.
So he kept trying new things—much like he had done at the outset of his career—but not always with good judgment or taste. I cringe when I hear him on record imitating Jerry Lee Lewis and the Big Bopper, or playing “Yakety-Sax” in concert or acting like a hillbilly in an embarrassing movie with Joe Namath. One week he is releasing a gospel album, and then next thing you know he is covering Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” or singing an overwrought version of the theme from Love Story with a gazillion strings and a bombastic choir.
He pulled a lot of these things off through sheer talent. He always had plenty of that. But many were now asking: Who is the real Glen Campbell? I’m not sure even the artist himself could answer this question at the time.
And certainly not his family. After his third divorce, Campbell told the press: “Perhaps I’ve found the secret for an unhappy private life. Every three years I go and marry a girl who doesn’t love me, and then she proceeds to take all my money.” For his faithful fans, this cynicism was as much a shock as the artist’s personal travails. Campbell had always been known as one of the nicest people in show business, but even that reputation was lost from all the drinking—which made him rude and angry.
“When he wasn’t drinking, he was the best guy in the world,” his last wife Kimberly Woollen told an interviewer after Campbell’s death. “But I feared every time he took a drink.”
Campbell eventually found his way back to the charts, releasing two more mega-hits: “Rhinestone Cowboy” from 1975 and “Southern Nights” in 1977. But there would be no more gold records after that—not until his final studio album Adiós, forty years later. These triumphs from the mid-1970s have powerful hooks, but I’m not the only person who missed those lonesome, intimate songs from the 1960s. I’m still puzzled why Campbell didn’t try to build more on that sound and his relationship with Jimmy Webb.
On the few occasions when those two reunited, the results were memorable. My favorite Campbell album after the 1960s is Glen Campbell and Jimmy Webb: In Session from 1988—but that collaboration only happened because of a Canadian TV show, and the music wasn’t released on record until many years later. It’s worth hearing if only for the slower version of “Galveston,” which captures delicate emotions not found on the original hit single.
Around that same time, Campbell released Light Years, which featured eight Webb songs. That record deserves to be better known, but this duo would never get back to the Top Forty. Campbell, for his part, quickly shifted to other moods and genres—performing church hymns or (a staple of his live shows) the “William Tell Overture” or whatever else captured his fancy in any given month.
In time, Campbell gravitated more and more to religious music, a choice that reflected his own deeply held faith. That may have been when he was most true to his own sense of his vocation—sometimes people asked him if he was going to start a ministry, and he always responded: “I’m already in it.” But a turn to Christian music didn’t help his record sales.
Yet even without new hits, Glen Campbell never lost his audience. Everybody fell under his charm, even crusty jazzcats like me. Campbell was just plain likeable with that aw shucks demeanor and beaming smile. Even when his personal troubles got into the news, fans found a way to forgive him. There was something about him that invited forgiveness.
We wanted him to succeed. And when he had victories in his battle with alcohol and drugs, we cheered him on, despite the relapses. Fans did the same when the singer finally settled into a more peaceful life with his fourth wife Kimberly Woollen. And they offered him support, one final time, after he went public with his Alzheimer’s diagnosis in 2011.
They came out in droves for his farewell tour, and their support lifted his album Ghost on the Canvas to his highest Billboard chart placement in decades. His last studio album Adiós, released a few weeks before his death in 2017 also sold well, and earned him his sixteenth appearance in Billboard’s ranking of the top forty albums.
At the time of his death, all the stars sang his praises—Paul McCartney, Brian Wilson, Dolly Parton, and other luminaries. They liked him too. How could they not? “Find me somebody that doesn’t like Glen Campbell,” commented Alice Cooper, in an unlikely tribute. “Find me anybody.”
“When you think about great singers, you’ll think of Glen Campbell,” Parton reminisced. Then she went on: “When you think about good looks, you’ll think of Glen Campbell. When you think about an all-around entertainer and wonderful human being, you will think of Glen Campbell.”
Brian Wilson said pretty much the same thing about his former understudy. Campbell, he declared, was an"incredible musician and an even better person.”
That’s his legacy, and always will be. Those two aspects of Glen Campbell—the musical and the personal—somehow merged, almost effortlessly. In his definitive moments, he felt real in a way that few celebrities do, and that same realness came across in his songs.
Maybe Campbell didn’t write his hits, but he brought something to them that was distinctly his. Even Sinatra and Presley couldn’t capture that particular kind of feeling. When Campbell sang about Wichita and Galveston and Phoenix, you felt he really was that man on a lonesome journey. That’s why you listened. And it’s why we still do, long after his journey has ended.
Up with pain, and with Sir J. Minnes by coach to the Temple, and then I to my brother’s, and up and down on business, and so to the New Exchange, and there met Creed, and he and I walked two or three hours, talking of many businesses, especially about Tangier, and my Lord Tiviot’s bringing in of high accounts, and yet if they were higher are like to pass without exception, and then of my Lord Sandwich sending a messenger to know whether the King intends to come to Newmarket, as is talked, that he may be ready to entertain him at Hinchingbroke.
Thence home and dined, and my wife all day putting up her hangings in her closett, which she do very prettily herself with her own hand, to my great content. So I to the office till night, about several businesses, and then went and sat an hour or two with Sir W. Pen, talking very largely of Sir J. Minnes’s simplicity and unsteadiness, and of Sir W. Batten’s suspicious dealings, wherein I was open, and he sufficiently, so that I do not care for his telling of tales, for he said as much, but whether that were so or no I said nothing but what is my certain knowledge and belief concerning him. Thence home to bed in great pain.
On September 30th, the first officer on a FlyDubai 737 en route from Dubai to Tel Aviv attacked the captain with a cockpit crash axe. A panicked struggle followed as passengers and off-duty pilots rushed to the cockpit.
The first officer, Hamam al-Hammami, was subdued and the jet landed safely in Tabuk, Saudi Arabia — though not before it was pushed into a high-speed dive that tore away part of its tail. Nobody was killed. Injuries to the captain were serious but he’s expected to recover fully.
Al-Hammami’s exact intentions are uncertain. According to reports thus far, his most likely plan was to hijack the Boeing and fly it into a Tel Aviv skyscraper.
This was a close call. If the captain, 38 year-old Smith Machchhar, hadn’t managed to unlatch the cockpit door from inside, al-Hammami would have probably killed him and crashed the plane.
It later came to light that al-Hammami had been banned from commercial flying in his home country of Oman, apparently for espousing radical Islamist views. How FlyDubai, a large and successful carrier, managed to overlook this is a question that needs answering.
Goodness. It’s Germanwings all over again. Or EgyptAir flight 990. Or SilkAir 185. Air India 171. Sad but true, pilots have gone rogue and crashed airplanes before. That list is much too long.
So how do we keep it from growing?
Passing through aircrew security yesterday at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris, the screeners were a little more tightly wound than usual. It took our crew a good half hour to get through, with our luggage enjoying lots of extra scrutiny. This kind of nervousness isn’t surprising, but neither is it logical. The weapon employed by al-Hammami wasn’t something he smuggled aboard; it was a piece of standard cockpit equipment. And heck, you can fashion a deadly weapon out of any number of innocuous things.
It’s not about hardware. It’s about the element of surprise. The danger was Hammami himself, not what he was carrying. This was true of the others on that list above — and of the 9/11 hijackers as well.
We can, in the meantime, debate the merits of additional psychological testing, though at a certain point there’s not a lot we can do. We’re forced to rely on a set of presumptions. It comes down to trust. I don’t want this to sound like an airline press release, but you can confidently presume that the people flying your plane are exactly what you expect them to be: well-trained professionals for whom safety is their priority. As an airline pilot I do not leave for work wondering if one of my colleagues is going to kill me. I shouldn’t be expected to. And neither should passengers.
For someone like me, the most frustrating takeaway from this near-disaster is knowing that people around the world are getting on airplanes today and wondering, if only idly, if their pilots are potential mass-murderers. No, this wouldn’t have been the first instance of pilot murder-suicide, but such acts have been, and will remain, exceptionally rare.
Related Stories:
PSYCHING OUT
PILOTS AND MENTAL HEALTH
The post The Pilot Threat appeared first on AskThePilot.com.
Links for you. Science:
Measles outbreaks could leave thousands vulnerable to infectious diseases for years
Florida’s dengue outbreak reportedly largest US has seen in decades
COVID-19 Drops Out of World’s Top 10 Causes of Death for First Time Since Pandemic Began
Ancient Negev Wine Was a Global Hit. Can Israeli Winemakers – and Scientists – Bring It Back?
Is It a Bird? Is It a Plane? It’s a Newly Discovered Microraptorine Dinosaur That Sheds Light on the Evolution of Flight Gear
Alien Life Can Survive on This Tiny Moon—We Just Need to Go Find It
Two New Birds Louder Than Jackhammers Just Dropped
Other:
“We will never let anyone tell us what to do again”
The African American Civil War Museum Invites Us To Remember. The museum recently held its grand reopening in Washington’s historic U Street Corridor.
Republican Disarray And The Second Failure Of McCarthyism
“Nearly $100”
Trump Erupts in Panic as GOP Midterm Fears Grow: “Wipeout”
Trump’s Census Proposal Could Cut House Seats From Red States
With more Amazon workers on SNAP benefits, company offers Whole Foods discounts
Prepare Yourself For A Lame-Duck Session From Hell. In defeat, Republicans will try to arrogate as much power to Trump as they can. Democrats can’t play along.
A Reckoning in Springfield
Today’s affordability crisis is rooted in Trump’s insurrection
The Free and Unfree Press
Nation Of Bondholders
The weakest strongman ever: When faced with a chance to confront the enemy, Donald Trump flinched.
Trump can’t trick Americans into loving him
Hochul will seek to close ‘voluntary intoxication loophole’ after Cornell case (reporters should ask Speaker Heastie why he didn’t push to move this bill out of committee)
Cornell rape case: The Snapchat messages say it all. More horrific rape allegations, more outrage. Maybe this time it will last.
The Targets: Gay Men and Protesters. the Israeli Cyber Firm Quietly Arming Autocrats
Spucky Spagnolo is dead. So is the Boston Mafia he once led.
California just passed the strongest AI labor laws in the US
A gut punch in Ohio: Nearly 1,400 laid off at truck factory just days before Trump rally
“A Massive Power Grab”: White House Proposal Threatens Funding That Helps Disabled Americans Vote
Chris Rufo — Known For ‘DEI’ and ‘CRT’ Panics — Tries to Make ‘the Indian Question’ a Thing
We Have No Supreme Court. The philosophical incoherence of originalism prevents the Court from performing its core functions as a supreme court.
D.A. in Cornell Rape Inquiry Declined to Review Additional Evidence
Economic probabilities for our grandchildren
How Cornell Punished Each of the 7 Men Accused of Sexual Assault
Trump’s opponents are planning efforts to reverse his changes to presidency (since this is the Washington Post, it spends a great deal of space allowing the Heritage Foundation to both-sides this)
Trump Was Reportedly Pushed Into Invading Venezuela by Conversation With Grok
FBI Warns ICE Agents Not to Trust Any Woman Willing to Date Them
Why I am not reading your AI-generated email
So there are select times in this world when it pays to be a racist, xenophobic piece of shit.
For example, oh, you’re president.
Or you attend MAGA rallies.
Or you’re the chief sales manager at the David Duke Gift Emporium.
Or you live in Biloxi.
Mostly, however, it backfires tremendously.
Take, for example, Lori Nunis, a wedding and Laguna Beach.
Somewhat recently, Nuns (a Laguna Beach resident and owner of Lori Nunis Handcrafted Jewelry) was walking her dog inside Crescent Bay Point Park when she stumbled upon a looming marriage proposal. There was a setup involving some umbrellas and a mariachi band and a photographer, and Nunis—white as the snow, frustrated as a speed bump, Karen as Marsha Blackburn—didn’t seem particularly happy.
Take a gander …
I’ve been a journalist for more than three decades, but this may well be the best exchange of all time:
Nunis: “This isn’t Mexico either, you motherfuckers.”
Woman: “Say hi to TikTok.”
Nunis: “Go back to Mexico.”
Bam.
And, thanks to the power of social media, Nunis is famous. Well, infamous. Wildly infamous. That exchange went crazy viral, to the point where millions upon millions upon millions of people have witnessed an ugly-yet-real moment frozen in time.
I suspect, in the coming days/weeks/months:
A. Lori Nunis will take to Facebook and offer a tearful apology, including some variation of the now-familiar sentence topper, “I’m not racist …”
B. Lori Nunis Handcrafted Jewelry will hold a kick-ass GOING OUT OF BUSINESS sale.
C. The Nunis Family will find Boise an inviting place to relocate.
•••
To be clear, I am not always a fan of social media justice. It’s often ugly and unfortunate and grotesque. We jump to conclusions unlike ever before.
Also, I feel badly for Nunis’ kids, who surely now walk the hallways of their schools with heads low and overwhelming shame. This is not their fault. And the dog is cute, and just wanted a walk.
But this was a real moment, when an ugliness that needed to be exposed deserved to be exposed.
Plus, I could use a new bracelet.
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On Friday night, just before 11:00, Trump announced that his administration “will, immediately, begin sending ‘Checks’ of nearly $100 to over 20 MILLION wonderful Seniors to help pay for their Medicare Part B premiums, which we have already reduced by significant amounts. This money will come from the Medicare Improvement Fund, a pointless ‘Slush Fund’ that has only been used by Dumocrats in Congress to pay for the Waste, Fraud, and Abuse for their Special Interest friends, and drive up Healthcare costs.”
Congress established the Medicare Improvement Fund in 2008 to enable improvements to the program and periodically adjust payments to healthcare providers. A Republican congressional aide told Dan Diamond of the Washington Post that lawmakers had been planning to use the fund to help fund several health programs this year, and were taken aback by Trump’s announcement.
Trump continued: “Because I delivered on this very important issue for the American People, they can also rest assured the highly popular $5,000 Trump Dividend will be distributed to every U.S. Citizen if, and when, the Republicans win the Midterm Elections!”
The fact that he is openly using taxpayer money to buy votes in the election suggests just how worried Trump is about Democrats winning control of Congress in the upcoming midterms.
He has reason to be worried. If Democrats retake control of one or both chambers of Congress, they will not necessarily be able to pass legislation, since Trump will still be able to veto it. But they will be able to start investigations immediately, and they have made it so clear they intend to do so that the administration is already taking steps to trip them up.
In April the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice issued an opinion that the president doesn’t have to comply with the Presidential Records Act, enacted to make sure presidents after Richard M. Nixon could not destroy their records; in May a federal judge said they did, in fact, have to follow the law. In August the Department of Justice issued a memo saying that the executive privilege that enables a president to protect his conversations with government advisors also covers any civilian to whom the president speaks “so long as they relate to official presidential decisionmaking.”
As Trump’s time in office stretches out, more and more stories of corruption are surfacing. As Aaron Parnas reported in Meidas News, Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, the top-ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, wrote a letter on September 30 to Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI director Kash Patel demanding they immediately release a document they are “illegally” concealing, and any others like it.
Wyden has been doggedly following the money trail connected to sex abuser Jeffrey Epstein, noting that his operations, including human trafficking and sexual abuse, depended on the banks whose officers looked the other way as Epstein’s finances repeatedly indicated he was engaged in criminal activity. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has refused to give the Senate Finance Committee access to Treasury materials about those finances, including Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs). When Wyden tried to get Congress to pass a law forcing the release of those files, Senate Republicans blocked it.
Now Wyden’s investigators have discovered that the FBI conducted an interview with a banker tied to Epstein, but the bureau did not release the transcript of the interview, known as a “302 report,” as Congress required when it passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act. Wyden suggested that the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the FBI “are withholding key documents from Congress and the public.”
“Furthermore,” he added, “the existence of this 302 indicates that it is likely that the FBI possesses additional, related, FBI 302s that have not been released” as they should have been under the Epstein Files Transparency Act.
A new report from Anton Troianovski and Eric Lipton of the New York Times Saturday revealed that the administration’s talk about doing business deals with Putin while he continues to strike Ukraine was not hypothetical. As they have allegedly been negotiating for an end to Russia’s war on Ukraine, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff—neither of whom are diplomats—have been talking with Russia’s president Vladimir Putin about a multibillion-dollar deal to buy the assets of Russian oil giant Lukoil at the rock-bottom prices to which they have sunk because of U.S. sanctions.
Because such a sale would immediately remove those assets from U.S. sanctions, they would instantly become far more valuable. Those looking to benefit financially from the purchase would include a major Trump donor, as well as Middle Eastern investors tied to the Trump family and the Witkoffs. The U.S. government would take a stake in the company as well, through the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, which Congress authorized in 2018 to invest in development projects in lower- and middle-income countries.
While Lukoil is technically a private company, observers believe Putin has control over it. And while the deal would have to be approved by the U.S. Treasury Department, it seems unlikely that Trump loyalist Bessent would stop it.
According to Troianovski and Lipton, Putin suggested the deal on September 5. It was likely not coincidental that the offer came after Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) died on July 11. Graham, who was close to Trump, was firmly behind Ukraine as it tried to fight off Putin’s invasion. Until Trump, Democrats and Republicans both felt strongly that American national security depended on stopping Putin’s aggression, and they stood behind Ukraine.
Trump’s ties to Russia are extensive and well known, but this apparent attempt to buy Trump’s support for Russia even as the war drags into another winter and Ukraine’s drones are destroying Russia’s oil sector seems especially blatant. It puts a spotlight on the fact that, under Trump, U.S. national security is for sale. A Democratic-led Senate would undoubtedly object to what the Republicans have permitted.
Indeed, under Trump there does not appear to be a line between foreign affairs and Trump family business deals. On October 1, Allegra Goodwin, Katie Polglase, and Majlie de Puy Kamp of CNN reported that while in discussions about ending the war in Gaza, Kushner has major financial interests in the Israeli military.
Kushner’s private equity firm, Affinity Partners, has invested in Phoenix Financial, a firm based in Tel Aviv, Israel, that, in turn, has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in at least nine companies that provide equipment for the Israeli military. The CNN journalists report that the stock values of all the nine companies grew last year and that many of the companies attributed the growth to the war in Gaza. Kushner’s firm sold a quarter of its stock in Phoenix in July for more than $340 million, more than five times the value of its initial purchase.
If he were a government employee, Kushner would have to disclose his finances, but he is a “volunteer” negotiator. One of Kushner’s lawyers told the reporters that Kushner has “never participated in or directed Phoenix’s decisions” about investments, but, as the journalists note, Kushner told Forbes that he meets with the leaders of the financial group every few weeks and maintains “a very active dialogue” with them.
Kushner’s lawyer confirmed that was true a year ago when Kushner said it, but that since he has been “substantially more engaged in volunteer public-service and diplomatic efforts,” he has scaled back that contact significantly.
It’s not just Kushner. The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal on October 2 warned that “Don Jr.’s Star Turn Is Coming,” noting that the “Trump family businesses will be in the spotlight on Capitol Hill for the next two years.” “Does the Trump family know what is about to hit them?” the board asked. It noted that even Republicans are upset at the news that an oligarch close to Putin had paid for Don Jr.’s wedding celebration. Senator John Curtis (R-UT) has called for the Senate to subpoena Don Jr. to find out how that financial underwriting came to happen. While they’re at it, Curtis wants to learn more about the family’s cryptocurrency and prediction market ventures.
The corruption of the administration is matched by its incompetence, and neither will come out well in congressional investigations.
In September, hackers broke into the FBI jobs portal and stole information about nearly every FBI employee as well as more than 8,000 state and local law enforcement officers who had worked with the FBI agents. On Saturday, Ken Dilanian and Carol Leonnig of MS NOW reported just how devastating that breach was. The hacked data included “names, home addresses, cell phone numbers, FBI email addresses and employee ID numbers, in addition to personal identifying information for emergency contacts, including Social Security numbers and personal email addresses.”
According to FBI officials and outside experts, Dilanian and Leonnig report, the breach is a counterintelligence disaster—one of the worst in U.S. history. The information not only exposes the people involved, but also enables adversaries to figure out U.S. priorities and who is working on what.
One cybersecurity expert at the FBI said the cause of the breach was “definitely incompetence.” The information should never have been linked to the internet, the expert said. “It belonged on our internal system and some dumbass moved it all” to a system connected to the internet. The expert told Dilanian and Leonnig that in chats the FBI obtained, the hackers wrote they couldn’t believe that the hack of such important information was so easy.
Speaking at a high school gymnasium in Ohio Saturday night, Trump told an audience: “Just get out and vote. If you do that, we’re going to win, and we’re going to win big, and we’re gonna shove it up their *ss.”
—
Notes:
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/10/03/trump-checks-seniors-medicare-midterms-01105956
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/6022381-doj-executive-privilege-outside-advisers/
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/05/20/trump-records-judge-00930190
https://www.justice.gov/olc/media/1457271/dl
https://www.finance.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/fbi_on_fbi_302_for_epstein_banker.pdf
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/6127449-trump-russia-ukraine-oil-deal-lukoil/
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/03/us/politics/trump-putin-ukraine-oil-deal-5-takeaways.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/03/us/politics/kushner-witkoff-russia-oil-deal.html
https://www.cnn.com/2026/10/01/us/jared-kushner-israel-gaza-investments-invs-vis
https://www.ms.now/news/fbi-hack-shinyhunters-breach-data
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/donald-trump-jr-private-island-wedding-john-curtis-senate-eeb6fcf8
Trump’s Truth:
X:
KDilanianMSNOW/status/2106476845537595426
KDilanianMSNOW/status/2103992686575284237
Bluesky:
DURANGO, Colo., Oct. 5, 2026 — Agile Space Industries today announced that Jonathan Baliff has joined its Board of Directors, bringing extensive experience in aerospace, finance, and corporate leadership. His […]
The post Agile Space Industries Strengthens Board and Corporate Development to Support Continued Growth appeared first on SpaceNews.
1. Jokic. And another angle.
2. Six questions for believers in AI consciousness.
3. Prediction markets do not seem to be politically biased.
5. Short Knausgaard documentary and interview.
The post Monday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
There is one. Wait, two. No, three. Ok, four humans who directly inspired my writing. (Ok, five.)
The list is not in order of importance, but by time:
Think what a better world it would be if we all—the whole world—had cookies and milk about three o’clock every afternoon and then lay down with our blankies for a nap. Or if all governments had as a basic policy to always put things back where they found them and to clean up their own mess. And it is still true, no matter how old you are—when you go out into the world, it is best to hold hands and stick together.
Fulghum wrote a whole series of front-porch wisdom books, but the one that most people know is All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, published in 1988. I was working at Waldenbooks in the Vallco Mall, and this book literally flew off the shelves. Fulghum was a Unitarian minister, and he wrote “Kindergarten” for his church bulletin. The essay was passed around (pre-Internet) and eventually landed with a literary agent.
The essays were brief, dense, and heartfelt. He effortlessly gives names to all parts of the human condition… ideas and feelings you have all the time, but have not named.
Fulghum is hopeful.
I waited. I knew he was trying to size me up. That was okay, I was used to that. People didn’t know anything about hiring someone like me, and they almost always vamped around for a bit.
Looking for Rachel Wallace was published in 1980. Fall 1991, unlike other entries on this list, is when I read the book as part of a UCSC class called “The American Detective.” It’s how you know a new author or book is novel — you start reading, hours pass, you are hungry and have a headache, but you read the whole god damned book.
Parker comes from the Dashiell Hammett School of detectives. Spenser, the detective who never has a first name, is an ex-boxer from Boston, but geography is not important to these books. It’s dialogue. 80% of Parker books are gritty, intelligent dialogue. His characters are talking all the time, and it’s delicious. They are clever, funny, moral, and respectful. You sniff out the villains because they can’t keep up the banter with Parker’s main recurring characters.
Parker was conversational.
Here’s the important part: they are our nerds. And having, by their conspicuous success, helped create this mess we’re in, they had better have a lot to teach us about how to recreate the business spirit we seem to have lost.
I first discovered Cringely as he wrote a gossip column for InfoWorld. This was on the last page of the magazine and, again pre-Internet, was full of the latest gossip and news about the relatively nascent technology landscape. Accidental Empires read like a historical record of the early days of tech companies like Microsoft, but it later became clear that many of the more entertaining stories were unsubstantiated. Cringely explained this by claiming he was not a historian, but an explainer.
Like PC Week’s Spencer F. Katt, Cringely’s column was the first thing I flipped to when InfoWorld showed up. Sure, it was gossip and mostly not true, but…
Cringely was entertaining.
Bill (Bill!) sent Michael this totally wicked flame-mail from hell on the e-mail system — and he just whaled on a chunk of code Michael had written. Using the Bloom County-cartoons-taped-on-the-door index, Michael is certainly the most sensitive coder in Building Seven — not the type to take criticism easily. Exactly why Bill would choose Michael of all people to whale on is confusing.
We figured it must have been a random quality check to keep the troops in line. Bill’s so smart.
Accidental Empires was still echoing through Silicon Valley when Coupland’s article that became Microserfs was published in the then-fledgling print magazine Wired. Like Rachel Wallace, I vividly remember starting the piece, realizing I was reading something revolutionary, and finishing it.
And reading it again.
While clearly fiction, the book read like nonfiction to me because it so clearly reflected my life working in technology in the early 90s. This was pre-Big Bang Theory, where we nerds were not remotely mainstream. Seeing my work and personal life so clearly reflected hilariously in writing made me feel like less of an outsider.
Coupland is hilarious.
Basically, what it comes down to is that there is no place in the Pointcast world for anything resembling a point of view. And that is what you should be surfing for. Now that you can have all the pre-digested information you can handle spewed to you in real time — in a nice, animated screensaver, nonetheless — you should spend your time surfing for someone that actually has something to say.
Finally. Michael Sippey started the blog Stating the Obvious in August of 1995. You know the feeling. You know you can write, but you haven’t really gotten around to that first piece, and then you read something so good, so relevant, and so important that you realize… yeah, I would never be able to write like that.
Fortunately for me, I ignored that instinct and, like everyone else in the mid-to-late 90s, I started a blog before we called it a blog in 1996 called The Bitsifter Digest. Like my early journals, I can’t read any of those early writings without nauseating disgust. Horrible, horrible writing. I stopped in 1999 probably because I knew the writing was… bad.
Sippey did not. Some version of Stating the Obvious has been published every year since 1995 and, thankfully, quite a bit more starting in October of 2003. If you’ve ever read one of my pieces and thought, “Duh, that’s obvious,” my first question is, “It is. Are you already following that advice?” Probably not.
Sippey states the obvious.
With the Bitsifter Digest purged from the system, I started this place on a whim when someone irrelevant said, “You should blog.” So I did.
The conversational tone and snark come from Parker. Fulghum reminded me to stay hopeful. Coupland showed me how stories can entertain. Sippey allowed me to state the obvious, which sounds easy, but requires discipline. And, finally, Cringely — who sadly allegedly passed away recently — showed me how stories (real or not) can both educate and become legend.
It's October once again, and that means it is time to take the new release of Python for a spin (technically, it is the 3.15.0rc3 release that I'm using, the official 3.15 release is still a few days out). As I did with my Python 3.14 performance article of a year ago, today I'm sharing a new run of my informal Python benchmark, comparing Python 3.15 against previous interpreters all the way back to 3.10.
If you are not interested in the charts and the tables and just want to read my analysis, feel free to jump to the conclusions section at the end.
Authenticity doesn’t interest me. It’s a way of marketing subpar material: this might not be any good, but at least it’s sincere. You can always tell when a book is going to be dogshit because the blurb copy describes it as ‘raw’ or ‘unflinchingly honest.’ In my personal experience, the writers who make a big show of authentically portraying themselves in their writing, warts and all, raw and authentic, are all actually portraying an entirely separate set of more interesting personality defects that they wish they had. In person, they’re unbearable. Authenticity is exactly the same as phoniness. Good writing is never authentic to the self, because a good writer needs to know that the self is fundamentally unknowable: it’s the ‘wedge-shaped core of darkness’ that Virginia Woolf saw humming beneath the surface of daily life, and definitely not anything you can write autofiction about.
From Sam Kriss, there is more of interest at the link, on varied topics, some of the remarks being quite “off.” Via Isaac.
The post “Authenticity is exactly the same as phoniness.” appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Moral Economics has been translated into Portuguese in Brazil, as Economia moral
Economia moral (Portuguese Edition)
Portuguese Edition by Alvin Roth (Author), Alessandra Bonrruquer (Translator) Format: Kindle Edition
"Alvin Roth, vencedor do Prêmio Nobel de Economia de 2012, analisa o que acontece quando os mercados esbarram em questões controversas e mostra por que precisamos lidar com escolhas difíceis quando não conseguimos concordar sobre o que é certo ou errado para a coletividade.
"Economia moral parte de algumas das perguntas mais complexas de nosso tempo: o que pode ser comprado, vendido ou trocado em uma sociedade e quais são os limites morais dos mercados? As pessoas devem ter o direito de interromper uma gravidez, de realizar tratamentos de fertilização in vitro ou de “alugar” seus úteros? A maconha deve ser comercializada em mercados legalizados? E quanto aos opioides? Devem ser vendidos irrestritamente? É aceitável remunerar alguém pela doação de sangue ou até mesmo de um rim? Essas questões geram debates intensos, uma vez que os argumentos sustentados por aqueles que consideram essas transações aceitáveis e os que as consideram repulsivas geralmente se baseiam em convicções morais ou religiosas inegociáveis.
"Em Economia moral, Alvin Roth defende que é possível buscar a resolução desses e de outros impasses da atualidade quando os examinamos sob a perspectiva dos mercados. Mediante uma análise cuidadosa dos mercados controversos e das chamadas transações repugnantes, o autor aborda temas que provocam debates éticos e sociais, como a venda de órgãos, a prostituição e a eutanásia. Sua proposta não é a liberação ou a proibição de todo tipo de transação repugnante, mas sim suscitar uma profunda reflexão acerca de um desenho de mercado eficiente e responsável que encontre o equilíbrio entre preservar a liberdade individual e proteger os grupos mais vulneráveis."
“O livro aborda assuntos fundamentais, mas controversos, de maneira profunda, perspicaz e envolvente. Esta é uma leitura essencial.” ― Science Magazine
Earlier I wrote “Greg Clark may well be the most important social scientist of the 21st century.” Thus, the symposium in Econ Journal Watch on Clark’s new but perhaps not forthcoming book is very welcome. The symposium includes serious critics, most notably Stuhler and Benning, but I suspect even the critics would agree with Arden and Plomin who write:
We agree wholeheartedly with Clark’s overall message that genetics accounts for outcomes long assumed to be due to nurture. Like other books in his trilogy, Clark marshals evidence from diverse sources to support his argument.
The data reach in this book—1600–2026—is jaw-dropping. Clark (and his colleague Neil Cummins) turned to wedding-register marks, probate courts, Huguenot wills, Oxbridge matriculation rolls, Sandhurst cadet lists, Wedgwood servants, and the Guild of One-Name Studies, to name a few. These data are imaginative, arresting, and inspiring. The analyses conducted, given the manifest complexities of harmonising across data types, time, and place, are impressive.
…This audacious scholarly book properly lights a fire under important questions. We look forward to following the work, its critics, and its rebuttals. It’s a terrific scientific contribution; because it is so thoroughly interdisciplinary, it will enrich and enliven the conversation about social status, its causes, and malleability.
One thing I am struck with from the critics (not just those in the symposium) is that most acknowledge that twin and adoption studies have badly undermined the claim that parental investments are big determinants of adult ability and earnings. The critics are correct that more elaborate environmental models can reproduce genetic-looking correlations but keeping an environmental explanation alive is not the same as vindicating the explanation people originally believed. Clark and many others have pushed the debate far into new territory.
There is also a basic asymmetry between the competing explanations. Genetics supplies independently established inheritance rules. When an environmental model reproduces the same patterns by choosing transmission rules precisely because they mimic genetic inheritance, it is accommodating the evidence, not independently predicting it. True, Clark also requires some free parameter choices, but he is clear that these can and need to be independently estimated.
The kinds of parental effects being demonstrated also matter. The nurture effects the environmentalists point to often seem to be for optional, steerable, or transferable choices than for more fundamental abilities, that is, changing what a child chooses to do with a given set of abilities, versus changing those abilities. Parents, for example, have more influence over religious identification than over religiosity, more influence over wealth than income, more influence over educational attainment than IQ.
The genetic arguments in the book draw the most criticism and yet the book has much else offer as Clark notes. For example:
Social status is inherited as strongly as height. Even relatives as distant as nine generations apart, 270 years, still show significant correlation in social status.
That is a very striking finding–especially given the intervening industrial revolution, multiple wars, huge changes in social mores etc.–but if it stands, it does so independent of the genetic explanation.
The fact that this monumental and challenging book–right or wrong–cannot find a major academic publisher is an intellectual scandal. The editors at Princeton University Press and the University of Chicago Press should be ashamed.
Addendum: See previous MR posts on Clark including Tyler’s Conversation.
The post The Greg Clark Symposium appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
A ball suspended in mid-air meets an athlete’s determination: in the one-foot high kick, competitors must defy gravity
- by Aeon Video
For a decade, I’ve posted episodes of my memoir to Facebook. My readers correct my understanding of my past
- by Thomas Söderqvist
The cesspit of corruption that is Donald Trump’s presidency is finally getting the attention it deserves. It’s about time. And if a massive blue wave sweeps Washington on November 3rd as polls now suggest, Democrats should put corruption front and center of their agenda in Congress.
The level of corruption that Trump has engaged in and enabled in others is completely unprecedented – self-dealing that, as Trump would say, is like nothing anybody has ever seen before. America currently has a Republican president who, along with his family, has raked in billions, possibly close to $10 billion in personal gain from office in less than two years. He has effectively sold criminal pardons to scammers, invalidating the legal claims of their victims for restitution. His son-in-law Jared Kushner has become a billionaire running an investment fund for Gulf petro-state autocrats despite having no discernible investment skills. The Times just reported that Kristi Noem paid hundreds of millions over the reasonable price for 5 aircraft – one of which contains a marble bathroom and luxury bedroom – that were ostensibly for deportations but are instead sitting on the runway. And then there’s Trump’s Secretary of the Commerce, Howard Lutnick, whose family has doubled its net worth to over $7 billion, largely through its investments in Tether, the crypto-currency of choice by Iran, terrorists and rogue states.
And I shouldn’t omit the tragic fate of Simon Andriesz, the British banker and whistleblower, who recently died by suicide. Andriesz revealed to the Senate that Lutnick had lied about the extent of his ties to Jeffrey Epstein. Right before his death, Andriesz spoke openly about how threats to himself and his family as a result of his testimony had ruined his life.
Despite the extent of Trump and Co’s corruption, there’s still some voter education to be done here. Given everything else — the disastrous Persian Gulf war, tariffs, inflation, threats against our closest allies, visions of AI annihilation — it has taken a long time for Trump and Co’s lurid, open corruption to emerge as a major political issue. But there are growing signs that corruption is finally breaking through into the public consciousness. Hopefully this breakthrough will be hugely important not just for the midterm elections but for what happens afterwards.
A clear indication of this breakthrough was the startling Oct 2nd lead editorial in the Wall Street Journal — yes, that left-wing rag, the Wall Street Journal —excoriating the Trump family’s corruption. True, the headline — “Don Jr.’s star turn is coming” — was oddly elliptical, and the example of corruption it chose to focus on – the wedding gift bestowed by a Russian oligarch worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, is penny-ante by Trump standards. The tone was more “this is a public relations problem for Republicans” than “the Trumps are selling America to the highest bidders, some of whom are enemies of the State”. But apparently even the formerly pro-Trumpian Wall Street Journal editorial page has finally reached its gag level.
Reflecting this trend, the latest Economist/YouGov poll included questions about corruption and which political party voters blame most. This appears to be the first time that this question has been asked systematically. Here’s what the poll found:
At first sight, these poll results are somewhat disappointing: only 30 percent of Americans see Republicans as the more corrupt party, with a majority either saying that Democrats are more corrupt or that there is no difference between the parties. But if one combines a closer look at these numbers with a more realistic understanding of public opinion, this poll actually shows that corruption is becoming a serious G.O.P. problem.
First, only a small fraction of independents say that Democrats are more corrupt than Republicans. The only group in which a majority say that the Democrats are the more corrupt party are MAGA Republicans — and as the old line puts it:“they would say that, wouldn’t they?”
Second, most voters, too busy trying to cope with daily responsibilities compounded by inflation and surging car loan rates, don’t pay close attention to the news. They are vaguely aware that corruption is an issue, and too often equate low-level, routine grifting like that of Hunter Biden or Bob Menendez with Trump’s wholesale looting and vandalism. They have little sense of the reality that recent corruption is orders of magnitudes bigger and more blatant than anything we saw in the past.
But that may soon change. According to all the polls, Democrats have a virtual lock on winning the House by a large margin. In addition, polls indicate a high probability that they will also take the Senate. And this means subpoena power. Through Congressional hearings and investigations, Democrats can vastly elevate the visibility of the extent of the outright looting and vandalism of this country by Trump and his gang.
Given the extent of the corruption, the rise of oligarchy in America, and the ever-rising flood of money in politics, many people may reasonably ask “Why will this matter?” Having elected Trump twice, can we trust Americans to vote for what is right rather than for lies? And can we trust Democrats, once in power, to be immune to the seduction of Big Money, as the Big Money will certainly try?
So, in a very real sense, once in power Democrats will have multiple battle fronts on their hands. In addition to battling Trump in his two remaining years of power, they will also have to prove to the American people that they will be immune to the inevitable attempts by Big Money to buy them off through campaign contributions and back-room deals. A couple of examples of what is already going wrong are the recent employment of Chuck Shumer’s daughter by OpenAI and the crypto billions raised by Kirsten Gillibrand’s 22-year old son for a new venture.
Granted, these two examples are exceedingly small potatoes in comparison to Trumpian corruption. But a significant number of voters won’t see it that way and will instead settle into a disaffected stance that both parties are equally bad. Furthermore, it’s a sure bet that once Democrats are in power, the Wall Street Journal and its ilk will revert to form, lambasting Democrats and elevating the Republicans.
So Democrats need to use this coming blue wave not only to clean out Trump’s corruption but to also put their own house in order. Because the forces that gave rise to Trump will not go meekly into the night.
MUSICAL CODA
With surrogacy illegal in China, an industry of agencies, consultants and fertility clinics has emerged to connect clients with women overseas willing to carry their children. While there is no data on the number of children born to Chinese parents via surrogacy, a recent study showed nearly a third of intended parents for surrogate babies in the US were international and some 40 per cent of those were from China.
Early demand largely came from couples struggling with fertility. But there was growing interest from younger women physically capable of becoming pregnant but reluctant to accept its impact on their bodies and careers, said consultants, clients and doctors interviewed by the FT…
Other destinations include Georgia and Kyrgyzstan, where packages can cost as little as $63,000.
Here is more from Eleanor Olcott at the FT.
The post China fact of the day appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
What caused the historically unique volatility in American homicides since 2019, driven by gun homicides? While there is no shortage of candidate explanations, a coherent understanding has been elusive because of the widely held view that gun violence, like other crimes, stems from a rational weighing of benefits and costs as in Becker (1968). This model does a generally poor job of explaining recent trends in homicide. Behavioral economics helps explain what the Becker model cannot. This view starts with the fact that most shootings don’t further some larger goal like robbery or gang wars over drug turf (“instrumental violence”); they’re arguments settled with guns (“expressive violence”). Why do arguments start or escalate? The behavioral model points to automatic cognition that is fast, effortless but sometimes prone to error. The pandemic increased automaticity by increasing distress – a cognitive “bandwidth tax.” Recent homicide trends, driven by changes in expressive violence, are mirrored by similar trends for deaths from drug overdose, car crashes, and suicide (especially for Black Americans, the group most affected by violence) – “deaths of decision-making.” Also relevant is a large rise and fall in gun carrying, which might partially stem from Becker-like mechanisms: Large changes in handgun sales and police stops, both of which may also have been affected by the killing of George Floyd. Since American gun violence is mostly arguments with guns, no wonder homicide trends are due mostly to changes in the number of arguments and the odds a given argument had a gun present.
The post Crime in Covid Times appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Like a portal to another dimension, a hypnotising swirl features in today’s Picture of the Week. This is the spiral galaxy M83, also known as the Southern Pinwheel, located approximately 15 million light-years away. It is one of the brightest galaxies in the night sky, but this image –– taken with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), in which ESO is a partner –– doesn’t show how M83 looks in the light our eyes can see. Instead, it depicts the light emitted by cold gas molecules, the ingredients of star formation.
Astronomers are interested in molecular gas clouds as virtually all stars are born from their collapse. Once stars form, they heat up their surroundings, making it harder for gas to condense and form further stars. This, combined with galactic dynamics that continually stirs gas, controls the growth of galaxies. ALMA allows astronomers to map how the density and temperature of these gas clouds change in different locations within a galaxy, such as the central regions, the spiral arms, or the space between them. This in turn helps us understand whether stars form differently in different galactic environments.
M83 closely resembles our own galaxy, the Milky Way. Since M83 appears nearly face-on in the sky, astronomers enjoy a privileged view to study whether the recipe to turn gas into stars is universal or changes within M83.
