This is the mess that is left when a star explodes.
This is the mess that is left when a star explodes.
In a number of recents posts I’ve been trying to make sense of the climate of drift and enervation that now seems to suffuse the Trump administration and, in a way, the country. Making sense of these things isn’t just interesting in the abstract or an opportunity to dunk on the administration. It’s important to know just where we are, what’s possible now that might not have been possible in the Spring or even a few months ago. And that’s important because we’re all kind of worn out. It’s not just the Trump administration. In a way the opposition to Trump is, too, albeit in a very different way. It’s been a really long year.
I first proposed my DOJ-in-Exile idea back in April. If you’re not familiar with the DOJ-in-Exile concept, this post explains the idea. But the main points I’m about to make don’t require knowing those details. As I’ve mentioned a few times here and to a number of you in email correspondence, it was harder going than I anticipated. For a mix of reasons, I did not want to run it myself or even be involved. I wanted to find a group that wanted to do it and hand the idea and the name off to them. But people were scared. Without my really asking, various TPM Readers came forward with soft pledges totaling probably upwards of a million dollars. So money wasn’t going to be a problem. But the kind of people who would run it or take responsibility for it were scared. People in the key do-gooder groups were scared. People who are hard-chargers were scared. Sometimes they wouldn’t quite say as much in calls but I could read their intonations and I realized a conversation wasn’t going to go anywhere.
In a way that mirrors a pattern I’ve described over the year: elites or people in positions of social and professional prominence were scared, but ordinary people were not. Now, “ordinary” people don’t offer six-figure contributions to an embryonic idea like the DOJ-in-Exile. So I’m not just talking about average Joes working average jobs. Obviously some of these people must have a lot of money. But there’s still a difference here. Those who are visible and operate within the systems of elite power and those who don’t. That’s a big dividing line. And one of the things we’ve learned during the second Trump presidency is how an effectively weaponized presidency and a pliant judiciary can very effectively cast a penumbra not only of fear but of genuine menace across especially elite society. The presidency’s fingers dip into almost everything. Some things are clearly illegal. But if the judiciary decides the president is a sovereign whose will is essentially un-reviewable, anything becomes possible.
But it’s been clear for a while that the calculus of fear and menace has shifted. In some cases, new and corrupt modes of operation are taking on lives of their own. Many people don’t care what the rules are. They just want to know what they are and how to operate within them. So some new rules of the road are congealing. At the same time, many people are less afraid and ready to oppose. That balance shifts as the 2026 midterm election comes into view and people see that Trump’s unchallenged power is not permanent. And that it could be cleaved back significantly in as soon as a year.
In any case, all of this is a way of saying that the time, I think, is more ripe now for these projects than it was in the Spring or Summer. Much of the strength of a political opposition is its resilience. When a rogue executive is truly in the saddle and on fire the real order of business is just rolling with the punches and holding on. Now the administration is much more vulnerable.
I don’t know what that means specifically about the DOJ-in-Exile project. This post is really about projects like that. (And I will repeat again, whoever you are, please steal the idea. Just do it right.) And to conclude this post, I want to make a point about different kinds of opposition efforts. Democrats finally seem to have arrived at some meeting of the minds on “affordability”, it’s not the fuddy-duddy squish talk of “kitchen-table issues” that progs hate and it’s not the scary, socialist weirdness that more center-left Dems see red at. That makes a lot of electoral sense. It captures within it a whole range of middle class and working class precarity (not just grocery prices but ACA prices and a lot more) while also speaking directly to the reality of oligarchic rule. It’s a language that can speak to prices as well as corruption and the connection between the two. But electoral projects are not the only kinds of projects. That freights elections with too much baggage. The point of elections is to win them. No more and no less. But shaping opinion and articulating a path to a different future are different. They work different. They have different goals. They have different kinds of messages. They do different things.
That is where you need groups, or projects or new organizations to do things that define a public record, creating an expectation of accountability and a vision of a different kind of future. Stuff like the DOJ-in-Exile idea — but there are endless numbers of permutations. I think they are more viable now than they were before. And they are critical now. And people should be setting them up and getting off the ground now. What’s important is that these are in a different lane from electoral efforts. It’s not one or the other or one having more valor or seriousness than the other. But now is the time.
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Some follow-up on the looks-like-AI-slop “painting” Tim Cook posted on Twitter/X on Christmas Eve to promote the Pluribus season finale. Slashdot contacted the credited artist, Keith Thomson, and quoted this interaction with him:
Slashdot: I just wanted to confirm that that’s your work... If it is your work, can you say anything about what software you used when creating the image?
Thomson: I’m unable to comment on specific client projects. In general, I always draw and paint by hand and sometimes incorporate standard digital tools.
That is a non-denial denial that he used generative AI to create the image.
Dwayne Cubbins at PiunikaWeb also contacted Keith Thomson and got this statement:
The artist, Keith Thomson, responded to my request for a comment, stating that they “always draw by hand and sometimes incorporate standard digital tools.”
That is the same non-denial denial, because “standard digital tools” might include generative AI.
MG Siegler wonders if it’s a deliberate allegory to some of the themes from the show, writing:
Keith Thomson using AI to produce art that’s like Keith Thomson’s art because it’s trained on Keith Thomson’s art. How’s that for a mindfuck?
I’m sure I’m reading wayyyy too much into that tweet (and retweet), but given my previous post about Pluribus as an AI allegory, I think it’s sort of interesting to think about in that context.
MG’s posts have some spoilers re: Pluribus, so follow those links at your own risk. Pluribus is best enjoyed if you start watching it knowing as little about it as possible. But without spoiling anything, I think MG didn’t put enough y’s in the wayyyy in “I’m sure I’m reading wayyyy too much into that tweet”. There is no 3D chess being played here.
I wrote just a few months ago that I firmly believe generative AI tools not only can be, but already are, used to create genuine art. My problem with AI slop isn’t the AI, it’s the slop. Whatever “standard digital tools” Keith Thomson used to create this, the result is a turd.
Pluribus, among numerous other merits, is a beautifully filmed show. Thomson’s published paintings are beautiful. The image Tim Cook posted on Twitter/X (and which the Apple TV account retweeted) is ugly and awkward. It either is AI-generated slop or it looks like AI-generated slop for no artistic or thematic reason whatsoever. Occam’s razor would suggest the conclusion that it simply is AI-generated slop, and Keith Thomson suckered Apple into paying for it.
It’s coming to the surface now. But it’s a marvel in itself that it has taken as long as it has. AI is really, really unpopular with the American people — even more unpopular than I’d realized, as I noted a week ago. And yet for most of the last couple years, in elite discourse, on TV and in the big news publications, you would feel very backwards and Luddite expressing more than a general caution that rogue AI intentionally blowing up the world would be a bad thing. Because it’s the new thing and who doesn’t like the new and innovation and all the good stuff? We remain, meanwhile, in an economic moment in which vast, almost unprecedented amounts of economic resources are being directed toward AI rollout. Public messaging in advertising and product development are filled with reminders of how many awesome things AI can do for you. And yet everyone basically hates it.
As this Politico piece from a couple days ago points out, something like 80% of Americans think AI should be robustly regulated and fewer than 20% of Americans think AI will have a positive impact on America over the next 20 years. These are shocking numbers, to put it mildly. AI is running only slightly ahead of child molesters in the public imagination. And yet the signature AI policy of the Trump White House is banning states from regulating AI — a remarkable thing regardless of the fact that the president has no power to do this. These are the kinds of disconnects you only see at fluid and unstable, inflection-point moments in a country’s politics.
Of course, perhaps if AI can do all the things its boosters claim and corporate America buys in, maybe it doesn’t matter what anyone thinks? It will generate enough money to keep the politicians happy and winning elections. This vision of what we might call escape velocity is baked into almost all AI boosterism: the escape from the mundane stupidities of public accountability or public oversight. I continue to believe that while the future of AI itself seems uncertain to me, as an idea and an ambition it is the central thing around which the whole world of oligarchs and strongmen now revolves.
The lawless no man’s land between the holidays and the New Year are an apt time to announce the winners of the 17th Annual Golden Duke Awards, TPM’s yearly toast to the toads who took venality and nonsense to new heights.
In 2025, the first year of Donald Trump’s second term, those who specialize in political corruption, shameless capitulation and unabashed betrayals of public trust had ample opportunity to shine. And shine they did.
Earlier this month we asked you to vote on nominees for Golden Duke awards in five different categories to help us celebrate 2025’s Best Of degradation. The competition was fierce in some categories. In others … well, anytime the name Donald Trump was mentioned, you readers couldn’t help yourselves.
My colleagues Josh Marshall and Kate Riga announced the winners of this year’s Golden Duke awards on the podcast this week, which you can listen to here or watch below. You can also scroll further to see some snippets of the discussion. Thank you to everyone who participated in the 17th Annual Golden Dukes and, fingers crossed, your preferred psycho won!
Happy Golden Dukes to you and yours.
The Nominees: Trump’s $300 Million White House Ballroom, Kristi Noem’s Ghoulish Photo Ops, Podcaster Dan Bongino’s Conspiracy Theory Fail, Eric Adams’ Entire Mayoral Administration.
The Winner: Trump’s $300 Million White House Ballroom takes the cake for, as one reader put it, the most visually “on the nose” corruption of Trump’s second term and the “raw indulgence of the gold plated ballroom funded by shady crypto guys.” Trump’s ballroom won with 62% of the vote.
Runners Up: They were virtually tied with Noem’s Ghoulish Photo Ops winning 17.3% of the vote to Eric Adams’ corrupt run as NYC mayor with 17.2% of the vote.
“Not everyone can have good taste.”
Kate Riga
The Takes*:
Kate: “I mean, Trump is a good choice in terms of the size of the scandal. I think in terms of like raw dollars, that’s going to be the biggest. And it’s funny because Noem’s is like, not really what I think you would think of as a scandal in normal terms. It’s more just like … “
Josh: “A hideous spectacle.”
The Nominees: Winnie Greco Let the Chips Fall Where They May, Relaxium’s Very Own Mike Huckabee, Tom ‘Cashbag’ Homan, The Trump Family’s Shady Memecoin.
The Winner: The Trump Family’s Shady Memecoin won with 60% of the vote. The blatantness of the crimeing is what made this a top choice for readers. As TPM reporter Layla A. Jones put it in her nomination, “a big chunk of the $800 million his sons raked in this year for the family business conglomerate has 1) come from the sale of memecoins actually called $TRUMP to 2) foreign investors, several of whom told Reuters they were hoping to curry favor with the president, as 3) Trump has openly sought to deregulate crypto at hyperspeed. It’s just a ridiculous out-in-the-open grift.”
Runner Up: Tom “Cashbag” Homan with 30% of the vote. As a reader put it in their nomination, Homan’s “simple-yet-brazen approach — old school bag and only 50k *in cash* — was a reminder of days gone by.”
“Grifty, but stupid and weird.”
Kate Riga
The Takes*:
Josh, on the inevitability of a Trump win in this category: “It’s sort of like … if you’re doing the acting awards at your high school. And Robert De Niro somehow was in the play, like, okay he’s going to win. I mean, come on. You need to focus on runner up at that point, right? Because it’s De Niro and that’s that.”
The Nominees: Bill Pulte, Housing Henchman, DOJ Weaponization Czar Ed Martin, Perplexed Prosecutor Lindsey Halligan, Trumponomics Enabler Scott Bessent.
The Winner: With 29.8% of the vote, Bill Pulte — “the 37-year-old scion of a major homebuilding family ensconced as the head honcho simultaneously at the Federal Housing Finance Agency, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac, where he’s free to rifle through the personal mortgage records of prominent Democrats,” as David Kurtz put it — wins.
Runners Up: This was the closest category by far. Second place goes to Ed Martin (28%), followed by Scott Bessent (21.5%) with Lindsey Halligan in last (20.7%).
“There’s a kind of respect for the hustle here.”
Kate Riga
The Takes*:
Kate: “It’s just, like, it’s a little bit funny to have this rabid pit bull who — the best assignment he could get is in this random little housing office. And he’s like, ‘don’t worry, sir, I will weaponize everything at my disposal.’ And that involves just having these poor schlubs sift through mortgage paperwork, looking for errors. It’s all a little comical.”
Josh: “Right, it’s so striving. … Like you find yourself in different places in life and you do the best you can in your station in life, and you try to do more than people thought you could do.”
“A lot of these Trump appointees, because they have inner darkness, it must make them age prematurely.”
Josh Marshall
The Nominees: SignalGate, Olivia Nuzzi Goes Hiking the Appalachian Trail, The New York Times vs. Zohran Mamdani, Lindsey Halligan Fails to Go Off the Record.
The Winner: NYT vs. Zohran wins with 37.2% of the vote.
Runner up: SignalGate came in close second with 34.3% of the vote.
“Left at the altar more than one way here.”
Josh Marshall
The Takes*:
Kate: “Okay. And the winner is. Oh NYT vs. Zohran. What! What! What!”
Josh: “What!”
Kate: “With a whopping 37.2% of the vote? What?”
Josh: “What?”
The Nominees: Mike Braun Bends the Knee, Columbia Accepts Trump’s Terms of Engagement, Tim Cook and His Golden Idol, Bill Cassidy Believing Bullshit.
The Winner: Columbia won with 43.6% of the vote. As TPM reader Elizabeth described it in her submission, Columbia should receive its due recognition because it demonstrated “the worst capitulation to nonsense and the most grotesque pandering from an institution of higher learning.”
Runner up: Bill Cassidy “for his haplessness, cowardice, and self-debasement that would be comical were the consequences not so grave,” as TPM reader BW put it.
“Columbia. What the fuck?”
Kate Riga
The Takes*:
Kate: “Columbia … the poster child for university capitulation and getting absolutely nothing in return.”
* Lightly edited for clarity.
I wanted to let you know that we are now out of free TPM 25th anniversary baseball caps and t-shirts that we were giving away as inducements for people to become members of TPM or upgrade their memberships. Thanks to everyone who took us up on the offer. Your ultra-merch should either be in your hands or on the way.
I wanted to add an important additional point. This isn’t the last chance. A number of you wrote in asking if you could simply purchase a piece of ultra-merch or why newbs were getting first dibs while years-long-members were shut out. Here’s the deal.
The ultra-merch we commissioned for the 25th anniversary was also basically a proof of concept. We wanted to find good suppliers and get a sense of pricing and so forth for a different quality tier of clothing, something a few notches above the standard made-to-order, meh-quality stuff that any substack can set up to sell in a few minutes, stuff that is essentially a novelty. We wanted stuff that that was of quality you’d feel good wearing as a simple garment. That’s a different part of the clothing commission industry; pricing is different, fulfillment is different. And what we found is really nice stuff. Like the high end version of the kind of baseball cap you might buy from an MLB team or the kind of well-made t-shirt you might buy at a real clothing store. So it was done with the expectation that we would start selling similar ultra-merch in the new year. So there’s more coming and that was the point all along.
That question is taken from a recent Spectator poll. Their experts offer varied answers, so I thought at the near quarter-century mark I would put together my own list, relying mostly on a seat of the pants perspective rather than comprehensiveness. Here goes:
Cinema
Uncle Boonmee, In the Mood for Love, Ceylan’s Winter Sleep, Y Tu Mama Tambien, Four Months Three Weeks Two Days, from Iran A Separation, Oldboy, Silent Light (Reygadas), The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, Get Back, The Act of Killing, Master and Commander, Apocalypto, and New World would be a few of my picks. Incendies anyone?
Classical music (a bad term these days, but you know what I mean):
Georg Friedrich Haas, 11,000 Strings, Golijov’s Passion, John Adams Transmigration of Souls, The Dharma at Big Sur, Caroline Shaw, and Stockhausen’s Licht operas perhaps. Typically such works need to be seen live, as streaming is no substitute. As for recordings, recorded versions of almost every classic work are better than before, opera being excluded from that generalization. So the highest realizations of most classical music compositions have come in the last quarter century.
Fiction
Ferrante, the first two volumes of Knausgaard, Submission, Philip Pullman, and The Three-Body Problem. The Marquez memoir and his kidnapping book, both better than his magic realism. The Savage Detectives. Philip Pullman. Sonia and Sunny maybe?
Visual Arts
Bill Viola’s video art, Twombly’s Lepanto series, Cai Guo-Qiang and Chinese contemporary art more generally (noting it now seems to be in decline), the large Jennifer Bartlett installation that was in MOMA, Robert Gober. Late Hockney and Richter works. The best of Kara Walker. The second floor of MOMA and so much of what has been shown there.
Jazz
There is so much here, as perhaps the last twenty-five years have been a new peak for jazz, even as it fades in general popularity. One could mention Craig Taborn, Chris Potter, and Marcus Gilmore, but there are dozens of top tier creators. Cecile McLorin Salvant on the vocal side. Is she really worse than Ella Fitzgerald? I don’t think so.
Popular music (also a bad term)
The best of Wilco, Kanye, D’angelo, Frank Ocean, Bob Dylan’s Love and Theft. How about Sonn O)))? No slight intended to those listed, but I had been hoping this category would turn out a bit stronger?
Television
The Sopranos, the first two seasons of Battlestar Galactica, Srugim, Borgen, and Curb Your Enthusiasm.
Assorted
Hamilton, and there is plenty more in theater I have not seen. At the very least one can cite Stoppard’s Coast of Utopia and Leopoldstadt. There is games and gaming. People around the world, overall, look much better than ever before. The Museum of Islamic Art in Doha and the reoopened Great Egyptian Museum in Cairo. The new wing at MOMA. Architecture might need a post of its own, but I’ll start by citing the works of Peter Zumthor. (Here is one broader list, it strikes me as too derivative in style, in any case it is hard to get around and see all these creations, same problem as with judging theatre.) I do not follow poetry much, but Louise Glück and Seamus Heaney are two picks, both with many works in the new century. The top LLMs, starting (but not ending) with GPT-4. They are indeed things of beauty.
Overall, this list seems pretty amazing to me. We are hardly a culture in decline.
The post What is the greatest artwork of the century so far? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
A proposal by the Trump administration to dismantle a leading atmospheric science center would also have implications for space science.
The post Proposal to dismantle NCAR would have space science impacts appeared first on SpaceNews.
China reached 90 orbital launches in 2025 with consecutive Long March missions deploying Guowang megaconstellation satellites and the advanced Fengyun-4C weather spacecraft.
The post China hits 90 launches as Guowang deployment continues, Fengyun-4C heads to GEO appeared first on SpaceNews.
A French launch startup that recently closed a funding round is seeking defense applications for its hybrid propulsion technology.
The post HyPrSpace looks for applications beyond launch for its hybrid propulsion technology appeared first on SpaceNews.
Almost three years ago, the world learned that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman had put a staggering $180 million into a longevity start-up called Retro Bio. And now we can report that Retro has begun a clinical trial of its first longevity therapy.
In mid-December, eight individuals in Australia orally ingested a Retro-designed treatment meant to blunt the effects of Alzheimer’s disease and perhaps other neurodegenerative conditions. The therapy – dubbed RTR242 – aims to improve the ways in which brain cells (neurons) clear waste by pushing the cells into a more active, youthful state. Boosting this waste removal process – known as autophagy – has been one of three main longevity therapies Retro has chased after in these early days of the company.
This first stage of the clinical trial will focus on safety above all else. Retro has dosed healthy people to see how they tolerate the drug. Next year, Retro will give the trial participants higher doses of the drug with the hopes of publishing the results from the experiments in the third quarter. If all goes well, Retro will move into a second phase of its trial and give its therapy to people suffering from Alzheimer’s disease.
Retro has been seeking hundreds of millions in new funding, according to multiple reports, and has built up a reputation as a fast-moving, risk-taking bio-tech company. Along with the autophagy therapy, Retro has been experimenting with new ways to reprogram our cells back into younger states. Joe Betts-LaCroix, the company’s co-founder and CEO, hailed the new trial as an important shift for the start-up. “It’s a binary transition between being a discovery stage and a clinical stage company,” he said in an exclusive interview.
Betts-LaCroix declined to comment on the status of the company’s fundraising efforts other than to say he expects to use the money to fuel new research programs.
From Matthew Graham at Mortgage News Daily: New 2-Month Lows, Just BarelyWith another holiday closure on deck and light calendar of events, the rate market is off to another uneventful start this week. In fact, the average lender barely budged from last Friday. But it was enough for MND's 30yr fixed rate index to tick down by 0.01%.Tuesday:
This is the lowest level since October 28th--just barely edging out the lows seen on November 25th. There were only 5 days in November and one day in September with lower rates. Before that, you'd have to go back to September 2024 to see anything lower.[30 year fixed 6.194%]
emphasis added
The hard part of computer programming isn't expressing what we want the machine to do in code. The hard part is turning human thinking -- with all its wooliness and ambiguity and contradictions -- into computational thinking that is logically precise and unambiguous, and that can then be expressed formally in the syntax of a programming language.
That was the hard part when programmers were punching holes in cards. It was the hard part when they were typing COBOL code. It was the hard part when they were bringing Visual Basic GUIs to life (presumably to track the killer's IP address). And it's the hard part when they're prompting language models to predict plausible-looking Python.
The hard part has always been – and likely will continue to be for many years to come – knowing exactly what to ask for.
— Jason Gorman, The Future of Software Development Is Software Developers
Tags: ai-ethics, careers, generative-ai, ai, llms
Copyright Release for Contributions To SQLite
D. Richard Hipp called me out for spreading misinformation on Hacker News that SQLite refuses outside contributions:No, Simon, we don't "refuse". We are just very selective and there is a lot of paperwork involved to confirm the contribution is in the public domain and does not contaminate the SQLite core with licensed code.
I deeply regret this error! I'm linking to the copyright release document here - it looks like SQLite's public domain nature makes this kind of clause extremely important:
[...] To the best of my knowledge and belief, the changes and enhancements that I have contributed to SQLite are either originally written by me or are derived from prior works which I have verified are also in the public domain and are not subject to claims of copyright by other parties.
Out of curiosity I decided to see how many people have contributed to SQLite outside of the core team of Richard, Dan and Joe. I ran that query using Fossil, SQLite's own SQLite-based version control system, like this:
brew install fossil
fossil clone https://www.sqlite.org/src sqlite.fossil
fossil sql -R sqlite.fossil "
SELECT user, COUNT(*) as commits
FROM event WHERE type='ci'
GROUP BY user ORDER BY commits DESC
"
I got back 38 rows, though I think danielk1977 and dan may be duplicates.
Tags: open-source, sqlite, d-richard-hipp
Jevons paradox is coming to knowledge work. By making it far cheaper to take on any type of task that we can possibly imagine, we’re ultimately going to be doing far more. The vast majority of AI tokens in the future will be used on things we don't even do today as workers: they will be used on the software projects that wouldn't have been started, the contracts that wouldn't have been reviewed, the medical research that wouldn't have been discovered, and the marketing campaign that wouldn't have been launched otherwise.
— Aaron Levie, Jevons Paradox for Knowledge Work
Tags: ai-ethics, careers, ai, llms, generative-ai, jevons-paradox
Here’s the TLDR:
Monetary policy can control nominal aggregates, even at the zero lower bound.
Monetary policy can address real problems caused by unstable nominal aggregates.
Monetary policy cannot address real structural problems.
Japan is a near perfect example of all three claims. I hope this post will also dispel a few myths about Japanese inflation, interest rates, exchange rates, fiscal policy, etc.
In late 2012, presidential candidate Shinzo Abe promised Japanese voters that he would create higher inflation. He went on to achieve a series of impressive electoral victories. So much for the claim that voters hate inflation. (They hate some types of inflation—not all.)
[As an aside, at roughly the same time the Fed committed to a more expansionary monetary policy, which ended up fully offsetting the effects of fiscal austerity, contrary to predictions of Keynesian economists that expected the fiscal austerity to discredit market monetarism. Instead, their failed predictions of a slowdown in the economy during 2013 discredited simple Keynesian models that ignore monetary offset.]
By the time Abe took office at the beginning of 2013, Japan had experienced nearly two decades of very mild deflation, and near zero NGDP growth. This deflation had occurred despite one of the most reckless fiscal expansions in human history, pushing Japanese public debt much higher as a share of GDP.
Interest rates were stuck at zero, and many economists argued the BOJ was “out of ammunition.” Instead, Abe’s policies ended deflation and led to significant growth in nominal GDP, which has continued right up to the present:
This growth in NGDP occurred despite the fact that Abe instituted a tighter fiscal policy, which greatly reduced Japanese budget deficits. Other than a single year during Covid, Japanese public debt has leveled off as a share of GDP. So much for “fiscal dominance”:
As predicted by the musical chairs model, the growth in NGDP helped to return Japanese unemployment back to its historical norms of close to 2%. Most real problems are structural and cannot be solved by improved monetary policy. One problem that can be solved is high unemployment that is caused by insufficient nominal growth:
Many people are surprised by the fact that Japanese interest rates have recently been increasing, after a period of nearly 30 years of near-zero rates. I am surprised that Japanese interest rates remain so low, far below levels in countries such as the US, despite solid NGDP growth.
Yes, it’s a “30-year high”. But the short-term interest rate is still only 0.75%.
Other pundits also worry about fiscal dominance:
“Things to come”? Maybe, but exchange rates are close to a random walk.
Back in the 2000s, I warned that Japan was making a mistake running large budget deficits and that what they really needed was monetary stimulus. In the 2010s, I made the same criticism of US budget deficits. Each time, I was told “deficit don’t matter” because interest rates were low at the time. I pointed out that rates might not stay low forever, and that these debts would still be on the books when interest rates started rising.
Now I’m being told that the public debt situation is so bad in Japan and the US that the situation is almost hopeless, and that we will have to monetize the debt with an easy money policy and give up on 2% inflation. That’s what people mean by “fiscal dominance”.
I’m not buying either argument. It was never true that “deficits don’t matter”, and I don’t believe that the US and Japan are now stuck with fiscal dominance. If we end up with high inflation it will be because the Fed screwed up with a flawed Phillips Curve model (as they did in the late 1960s, and again in 2021-22), not because they were forced to inflate. Not only is the public not clamoring for the Fed to inflate the price level, voters have now decided that inflation is public enemy number one. I believe the public overrates the harm done by inflation, but in this case I’m sort of pleased with the misconception—it will help us to avoid fiscal dominance.
Yes, it is possible that at some point in the distant future the US might experience fiscal dominance. That would occur if our government continues down the road to banana republicanism. But it is also possible that at some point we come to our senses and address the budget deficit, as we did in 2013 (before reversing all those gains five years later.) As long as the Fed targets inflation at 2%, Congress will be forced to eventually address the budget. That’s what it means to have monetary dominance.
If Congress wishes to impose fiscal dominance, they would eventually need to tell the Fed to raise its inflation target above 2%. And don’t assume that 3% would solve the problem, it wouldn’t. One percent higher inflation reduces the real debt by an extra 1% each year, but it would also raise nominal interest rates by 1% due to the Fisher effect. At best, you get a one-time gain from reducing the real value of the existing stock of debt, but those gains are reversed the next time you revert to 2% inflation. Many people who read Thorsten Slok’s recent comments on monetary and fiscal policy might erroneously infer that fiscal dominance is a bigger problem when the debt is primarily short-term:
Actually, the one-time gain from an unexpectedly inflationary monetary policy is greatest when the debt is mostly long-term bonds. Never reason from an interest rate change.
Under our current fiscal trajectory, we would eventually need much higher inflation to avoid default. But I very much doubt that Congress has the votes to tell the Fed to raise the inflation target to 5% or 10%. So how does Congress exert fiscal dominance? The President could appoint doves to the Fed, but after what happened to Biden, what president wants to be known for creating high inflation? (If Trump wants easy money the motivation would be economic growth—he couldn’t care less about long run fiscal sustainability, or anything else that occurs after he leaves office.)
So why is the Japanese yen currently so weak? In a word—China. Japan’s strength has been their ability to export manufactured goods such as cars and consumer electronics. Now they face competition from a rising power with 11 times their population, which can export many of those same goods at much lower prices. This is what explains the dramatic fall in Japan’s real exchange rate—not monetary policy.
Japan’s solid but not excessive NGDP growth and their low unemployment rate suggest that monetary policy is currently not the problem. Japan’s problems are structural. Back in the 1980s, who would have expected Japan to struggle so much in competing not just with China, but also with places like Taiwan and Korea. What are the Japanese versions of TSMC and Samsung? Why does Japan seem stuck with a 20th century economy?
Japan’s monetary policymakers have done all they can, now Japan’s policymakers need to figure out a way to make their economy more dynamic.
PS. Keynesian readers may be skeptical of claims about Japan made by a market monetarist. I suggest they look at Paul Krugman’s excellent 2018 paper on Abenomics, which reached similar conclusions.
Thanks to a recent note from my son Will, I found out that I’m not the oldest person on the block.
Carl Williams was born in Kirkwood, Missouri in 1921. He’s the dad of our neighbor down the block, Mesa Broek, and has been living with Mesa and her husband Jan for the last 3 years.
He was one of 9 children — 6 sisters and 3 brothers. His dad was a house painter. The family had chickens and a big garden and his dad also had an egg route and sold raspberries. His mother did a lot of canning and his dad made beer.
Pretty amazing to get to talk to someone who’s been on the planet 14 years longer than me.
Carl is unique. His mind is clear and he’s in good physical condition.
He quit school in the 6th grade and started mowing lawns and fixing things. As a teenager, he got a job in a piston factory, running lathes.
After the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, he joined the Navy and became a ship fitter, learning to do both arc welding and stick welding.
He was on a mine sweeper in World War II. He said there were 100 men on the ship and they would locate the mines, cut the cables so they’d float to the surface, and then explode them with cannon fire.
His ship was in Tokyo Bay on September 2, 1945 when the Japanese formally surrendered in a ceremony on the Navy battleship Missouri.
After the war he became service manager for a Chevy dealer in Kirkwood. He retired at age 62 and then worked as a handyman for elderly people.
“I could fix anything — I was good at what I did.”
At age 96, he got remarried to Dolores, who was 88 (they had known each other since they were teenagers). He quit driving at age 98.
He has a really nice room in the Broek’s house, with his own bathroom.
“I’m a lucky guy,” he says.
What about exercise, I asked. He used to bowl and play horseshoes and softball. Now he rides a stationary bike and lifts weights every morning, as well as doing some core exercises.
“I’ve always kept busy.”
Owners of small businesses are, on average, a strongly right-leaning group. Indeed, along with white Christian nationalists, they are one of the core components of the MAGA base. And small business owners celebrated Donald Trump’s victory last fall. Small business optimism, as measured by the National Federation of Independent Businesses’ monthly survey, soared after the election:
Yet 2025 was a miserable year for small business — and 2026 will be worse.
Before I get into the reasons MAGA is so bad for some of its most fervent supporters, let’s talk about why small-business owners lean right.
Partly it’s a matter of who they are. Other things equal, higher income — which means paying more in taxes and being less likely to depend on the safety net — tends to make a voter more Republican. However, higher levels of education, which are correlated with income, tend to make voters more Democratic.
This is a fairly new development — as recently as two decades ago the correlation between education and partisanship went the other way. I would attribute this reversal to the changing nature of the G.O.P., which has become ever more anti-intellectual and anti-science. For the purposes of today’s post, however, this doesn’t matter. The point, instead, is that if we ask who in America is likely to have relatively high income either without having a college degree or without having had any postgraduate education — and therefore be predisposed to favor Republicans — the answer is clearly owners of successful small businesses.
Beyond that selection effect, a recent study of small-business partisanship by Malhotra, Margalit and Shi finds that “the experience of being a small business owner leads people to adopt conservative views on government regulation.” So small business owners supported Trump in the belief that he would get the government off their backs.
That’s not what happened. Instead, the second Trump administration has been marked by increased government-imposed burdens on small business. High tariffs have been a body blow to the many small businesses that rely, one way or another, on imported goods. Mass arrests of immigrants have also been highly disruptive for businesses, such as construction contractors, that depend on foreign-born workers.
You might be tempted to say that these are burdens on all businesses, not just small business, which is true. But large businesses have been better able to weather the Trump shock than small businesses, for at least three reasons.
First, big businesses are more likely than small businesses to have the resources needed to adapt to a suddenly changed business environment. Suppose, for example, that a business has been heavily reliant on inputs imported from China, which now face an average tariff rate of 37 percent. A large corporation can try to find alternative suppliers in nations that face much lower average tariffs, such as Vietnam and Mexico. A small business won’t have the staff or money to search for and develop these alternative sources of supply.
Second, big businesses are better able to game the system. For example, one unanticipated result of the Trump tariffs has been much more thorough exploitation of the rules of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement, the agreement formerly known as NAFTA. It turns out that until this past spring, there were many goods produced in Mexico and Canada that were legally entitled to enter the U.S. duty free — but as long as tariffs were low, many importers chose not to pay the legal fees or fill out the paperwork needed to claim these exemptions. When Trump went on his tariff spree, the incentives changed, and many companies decided that the cost of the extra paperwork was worth it, after all:
But big corporations were much better positioned than small businesses to bear the cost of certifying that the goods they import are “USMCA-compliant.”
Finally, under Trump the United States has moved rapidly toward crony capitalism, a situation in which businesses with strong political connections get favorable treatment. Under this system, big businesses can in effect buy themselves a privileged position. Small businesses can’t.
For example, Apple has so far dodged most of the negative impact of Trump’s tariffs. Over the summer Trump imposed punitive tariffs on India, which is where most iPhones sold in the United States are produced. But for some reason smartphones were exempted from Trump’s India tariffs. What’s the logic behind this exemption? Might it have something to do with the fact that Apple is helping to pay for the construction of the grotesque ballroom that Trump is building to replace the demolished East Wing of the White House?
All of these factors help explain the trends shown in the chart at the top of this post: 2025 was a difficult year for many businesses not benefiting from the AI boom, but it was especially hard on small business.
But the worst is yet to come — or, actually, is happening as you read this.
Small-business owners tend to be disdainful of government, yet in many cases they and their employees depend in crucial ways on government programs. In particular, almost half of the adults receiving health insurance via the government-run exchanges established by the Affordable Care Act — Obamacare — either own or work for small businesses.
However, the cost of buying insurance on these exchanges has more than doubled on average since a year ago, because Trump and his party have refused to extend enhanced subsidies enacted under the Biden administration. As a result, many small business owners are in the process of finding out that they can no longer afford health insurance for their employees — or, in many cases, themselves.
In short, small business placed its faith in Trump but has been betrayed. But then, that’s what has happened to everyone who trusted Trump, from farmers to blue-collar workers — everyone, that is, except for the tech billionaires who have bought their way into his inner circle.
MUSICAL CODA
Could be about crony capitalism, could be about Ep*****
The new shot-scraper har -x https://simonwillison.net/ command is really neat. The inspiration was the digital forensics expedition I went on to figure out why Rob Pike got spammed. You can now perform a version of that investigation like this:
cd /tmp
shot-scraper har --wait 10000 'https://theaidigest.org/village?day=265' -x
Then dig around in the resulting JSON files in the /tmp/theaidigest-org-village folder.
But once we got that and got this aviation grade testing in place, the number of bugs just dropped to a trickle. Now we still do have bugs but the aviation grade testing allows us to move fast, which is important because in this business you either move fast or you're disrupted. So, we're able to make major changes to the structure of the code that we deliver and be confident that we're not breaking things because we had these intense tests. Probably half the time we spend is actually writing new tests, we're constantly writing new tests. And over the 17-year history, we have amassed a huge suite of tests which we run constantly.
Other database engines don't do this; don't have this level of testing. But they're still high quality, I mean, I noticed in particular, PostgreSQL is a very high-quality database engine, they don't have many bugs. I went to the PostgreSQL and ask them “how do you prevent the bugs”? We talked about this for a while. What I came away with was they've got a very elaborate peer review process, and if they've got code that has worked for 10 years they just don't mess with it, leave it alone, it works. Whereas we change our code fearlessly, and we have a much smaller team and we don't have the peer review process.
— D. Richard Hipp, ACM SIGMOD Record, June 2019 (PDF)
Tags: testing, d-richard-hipp, postgresql, sqlite
Up and walked to Whitehall, where the Duke and Mr. Coventry being gone forth I went to Westminster Hall, where I staid reading at Mrs. Mitchell’s shop, and sent for half a pint of sack for her. Here she told me what I heard not of before, the strange burning of Mr. De Laun, a merchant’s house in Loathbury, and his lady (Sir Thomas Allen’s daughter) and her whole family; not one thing, dog nor cat, escaping; nor any of the neighbours almost hearing of it till the house was quite down and burnt. How this should come to pass, God knows, but a most strange thing it is! Hither came Jack Spicer to me, and I took him to the Swan, where Mr. Herbert did give me my breakfast of cold chine of pork; and here Spicer and I talked of Exchequer matters, and how the Lord Treasurer hath now ordered all monies to be brought into the Exchequer, and hath settled the King’s revenue, and given to every general expence proper assignments; to the Navy 200,000l. and odd. He also told me of the great vast trade of the goldsmiths in supplying the King with money at dear rates.
Thence to White Hall, and got up to the top gallerys in the Banquetting House, to see the audience of the Russia Embassadors; which [took place] after long waiting and fear of the falling of the gallery (it being so full, and part of it being parted from the rest, for nobody to come up merely from the weakness thereof): and very handsome it was. After they were come in, I went down and got through the croude almost as high as the King and the Embassadors, where I saw all the presents, being rich furs, hawks, carpets, cloths of tissue, and sea-horse teeth. The King took two or three hawks upon his fist, having a glove on, wrought with gold, given him for the purpose. The son of one of the Embassadors was in the richest suit for pearl and tissue, that ever I did see, or shall, I believe. After they and all the company had kissed the King’s hand, then the three Embassadors and the son, and no more, did kiss the Queen’s. One thing more I did observe, that the chief Embassador did carry up his master’s letters in state before him on high; and as soon as he had delivered them, he did fall down to the ground and lay there a great while. After all was done, the company broke up; and I spent a little while walking up and down the gallery seeing the ladies, the two Queens, and the Duke of Monmouth with his little mistress, which is very little, and like my brother-in-law’s wife. So with Mr. Creed to the Harp and Ball, and there meeting with Mr. How, Goodgroom, and young Coleman, did drink and talk with them, and I have almost found out a young gentlewoman for my turn, to wait on my wife, of good family and that can sing. Thence I went away, and getting a coach went home and sat late talking with my wife about our entertaining Dr. Clerke’s lady and Mrs. Pierce shortly, being in great pain that my wife hath never a winter gown, being almost ashamed of it, that she should be seen in a taffeta one; when all the world wears moyre;1 so to prayers and to bed, but we could not come to any resolution what to do therein, other than to appear as she is.
Footnotes
Links for you. Science:
More loons are filling Maine’s lakes with their ghost-like calls
Earth-Like Planets Are More Common Than We Thought, Study Says
Scientists Discover the Earliest Human-Made Fire, Rewriting Evolutionary History
Scientists Thought Parkinson’s Was in Our Genes. It Might Be in the Water
Does wearing a face mask stop you catching flu? Experts give verdict
Covid Vaccines Reduced Children’s Likelihood of E.R. and Urgent Care Visits, the C.D.C. Reported
Other:
Can the “Sistine Chapel of the New Deal” Be Saved From Trump? Precious murals by Ben Shahn, Philip Guston, and others are even more endangered than we knew.
LLM use in scholarly writing poses a provenance problem
FDA intends to put its most serious warning on Covid vaccines
FIFA’s phony “peace prize” can’t redeem Donald Trump. Trump is an incompetent warmonger, and an elderly man in obvious decline. A made-up medal won’t change that
Bluesky Is Back for Mississippi Adults, But Larger Social Giants Still Haven’t Implemented Required Age Checks
West Bank violence is soaring, fueled by a capitulation of Israeli institutions to settlers’ interests
House probe slams D.C. police chief for ‘ecosystem of fear, retaliation, and toxicity’
Inside Chicago’s Neighborhood ICE Resistance
Trump’s library plan: An ‘iconic building’ in Miami and a ‘fake news wing’
The Washington Post’s AI Generated Podcasts Are Already an Error-Laden Disaster
Library board ousted after voting to keep children’s book about trans boy
GOP Lawmakers Tucked A Controversial Provision Into A 3,000-Page Bill. Lawmakers tucked language into a fast-moving defense bill to grant federal recognition to the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina, the only tribal provision in the 3,086-page bill.
Reviving Inuit culture, young Greenlanders find strength against Trump
Time Magazine Deploys AI “Ask Me Anything” Box That Covers Up Its Actual Journalism and Can’t Be Closed
Extremely online at the Tiffany Network
A New Report Reveals the Real Reason Democrats Lost in 2024
The casino-fication of news: New partnerships between the prediction market Kalshi and cable TV networks will transform every news event into a betting opportunity.
15 Ukrainians are suing US tech factories over chips in Russia’s deadly weapons
Ex-Trump DOJ lawyers say ‘fraudulent’ UC antisemitism probes led them to quit
Purdue University Approves New AI Requirement For All Undergrads (this is awful)
“AI”: A Dedicated Fact-Failing Machine, or, Yet Another Reason Not to Trust It For Anything
OU Faculty Senate raises concerns with policy suspending faculty members who receive student complaints (inmates running the asylum)
‘There’s power in numbers’: New Yorkers are banding together to protect street vendors from ICE
Church Nativity scenes add zip ties and gas masks to protest immigration raids
AI “Companion Bots” Actually Run by Exploited Kenyans, Worker Claims
Democratic Voters Are Clamoring for AI Regulation. Their Leaders Aren’t Interested.
The Curse of Trump 2.0
Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes: What Could Go Wrong?
Jurors in Sandwich Thrower Case Found Charges ‘Bunch of Baloney’
In Florida’s Panhandle, a Hearing on School Vaccine Mandates Gets Heated
The Undocumented Underground Is Fighting Back Inside New York’s Notorious Immigration Court
Or, a change in presidential administration should not lead to such qualitative changes in policy.
While this might be stating the obvious, what has struck me about the radical change in U.S. immigration policy is that much of it–not all of it–is legal and, other than a budget increase, has not been accompanied by significant changes in legislation. We have gone from a system, while convoluted, that still was open enough to encourage immigration to one which is not. Yet there has been no passage of the equivalent of the Asian Exclusion Act.
Instead, the immigration laws are labile enough to enable a qualitatively different immigration regime, simply at the whim of the executive (admittedly, with some assistance by the Republican Supreme Court judges). This implies bad legislation, since something like immigration policy–which obviously is of great interest–should be debated, not unilaterally decided.
One could argue this is part of a larger ceding by Congress of its Article I powers to the executive branch, but there are people who are smarter about that sort of thing than I am. Regardless, having major policy shifts (also see: tariffs) without passing legislation also means the stability of law and governance is non-existent, as many business owners here and abroad have discovered.
One more thing that will have to be fixed during the deTrumpification.
The post I podcast again with Kevin Gentry appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Click on graph for larger image."We expect core PCE inflation to slow to 2.1% by the end of 2026 as tariff pass-through fades and wage growth and shelter inflation continue to fall."
Over the Christmas holiday, the Trump administration threw its weight against the U.S. Constitution in favor of Christian nationalist authoritarianism.
The Framers of the Constitution established the United States of America on the rule of law, rejecting any religious qualifications for office or religious legal doctrine. They recognized that the establishment of one religion over others attacked a fundamental human right—an unalienable right—of conscience. If lawmakers could destroy the right of freedom of conscience, they could destroy all other unalienable rights. Those in charge of government could throw representative government out the window and make themselves tyrants.
In the First Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1791 as one of the ten amendments that make up the Bill of Rights, the new Americans agreed that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
To that, sometimes under pressure, the nation has held. It is central to what it means to be an American.
And yet, on December 25, 2025, a religious holiday for many Christians, the Trump administration attacked that American principle to claim the U.S. is a Christian nation. As Ashley Ahn of the New York Times chronicled, Secretary of State Marco Rubio posted: “The joyous message of Christmas is the hope of Eternal Life through Christ.” The Labor Department posted: “Joy to the World. Let Earth Receive Her King.”
On December 24, over a video of officials wishing Americans Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, and Happy Holidays, the Department of Homeland Security posted: “Christ is Born!” Over another video featuring iconic Christmas movies and scenes made up almost exclusively of white Americans and including several images of President Donald J. Trump, DHS posted: “Merry Christmas, America. We are blessed to share a nation and a Savior.” On December 25, over a video of iconic American scenes with “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” playing, DHS posted: “Rejoice America, Christ is born!”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posted: “Merry Christmas to all. Today we celebrate the birth of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. May His light bring peace, hope, and joy to you and your families.”
At 6:46 on Christmas evening, Trump’s social media account posted: “Tonight, at my direction as Commander in Chief, the United States launched a powerful and deadly strike against ISIS Terrorist Scum in Northwest Nigeria, who have been targeting and viciously killing, primarily, innocent Christians, at levels not seen for many years, and even Centuries! I have previously warned these Terrorists that if they did not stop the slaughtering of Christians, there would be hell to pay, and tonight, there was. The Department of War executed numerous perfect strikes, as only the United States is capable of doing. Under my leadership, our Country will not allow Radical Islamic Terrorism to prosper. May God Bless our Military, and MERRY CHRISTMAS to all, including the dead Terrorists, of which there will be many more if their slaughter of Christians continues.”
As foreign policy journalist Anne Applebaum noted, rhetorically, “Not sure I understand why the Trump administration cares about Christians in Nigeria and not Christians in Ukraine.”
The Guardian explained yesterday that for years now, the U.S. right wing has insisted that Islamist terrorist groups are persecuting Christians in Nigeria. Those claims motivate Trump’s political base, the people he is depending on to stick with him as the rest of the country turns away.
Earlier this year, Trump designated the West African nation a “country of particular concern” under the 1998 International Religious Freedom Act and warned he might go in “guns-a-blazing” if the Nigerian government didn’t stop what he claimed was the “killing of Christians.”
Nigerian officials have pushed back on the idea that Christians are suffering at the hands of extremist groups more than people of other faiths. Nigeria has no official religion: Muslims make up about 53% of the population and Christians 45%, with the rest of the country’s population tending to follow traditional African religions. Most analysts agree that the violence in Nigeria is complex, often rooted in competition for water or land but exacerbated by ethnic and religious differences. In the northwest, The Guardian explains, heavily armed criminal gangs kidnap both Muslims and Christians and raid both Christian and Muslim communities.
Nimi Princewill of CNN reported that Nigerian president Bola Tinubu had given Rubio the “go ahead” for the strikes, apparently to hit camps of militants, but Nigerian foreign minister Yusuf Tuggar said the operation was not about religion but about trying to ensure safety for Nigerian civilians.
Nonetheless, Trump supporters cheered the strikes. Far-right activist Laura Loomer posted: “I can’t think of a better way to celebrate Christmas than by avenging the death of Christians through the justified mass killing of Islamic terrorists. You’ve got to love it! Death to all Islamic terrorists! Thank you.” “Amazing Christmas present by [Trump]!” Representative Randy Fine (R-FL) posted. “With Muslim terrorists attacking Christians in Nigeria, Syria, and even Europe—simply for refusing to submit to Islam—the President is showing that we will no longer tolerate these barbarians.”
Trump needs right-wing evangelical voters in order to stay in office, as protection from possible legal exposure but also to continue the pattern of “extortion, conquest, and theft” Will Saletan of The Bulwark identified yesterday. Saletan noted that “as president, [Trump] reduces every question to money.” What he can make from a deal determines both his domestic policy and foreign policy.
As Saletan puts it: “He arm-twists companies into giving the government a chunk of their stock. He withholds food stamps as a bargaining chip. He calls low-income housing an offense against rich people. He muses about awarding himself $1 billion from the Treasury.” His approach to foreign policy is to see what land or resources he and his cronies can grab by leveraging the economic or military power of the United States of America.
On December 23, Rebecca Ballhaus, Josh Dawsey, and C. Ryan Barber of the Wall Street Journal examined Trump’s use of the president’s pardoning power to cash in, with “lobbyists close to Trump” saying that “their going rate to advocate for a pardon is $1 million.” Some of those eager for a presidential pardon have offered lobbyists as much as $6 million if they succeed.
The Justice Department’s former pardon attorney, Liz Oyer, was fired in March. She told the Wall Street Journal reporters that Trump “appears to be considering political, personal and financial interests and not the interests of the American public,” subverting the pardon process.
If his presidency gives Trump legal protection and the ability to grift, what Trump’s right-wing supporters get from his presidency is the promise of overturning traditional American values in favor of imposing white Christian nationalism on the rest of the country.
In addition to its Christian messaging at Christmas, DHS posted, “This Christmas, our hearts grow as our illegal population shrinks,” over a video of “Christmas after Mass Deportations.” U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) shared an AI video of Santa Claus putting on a bulletproof vest, then handcuffing an immigrant, processing the person, and then loading them onto an “ICE” plane for deportation.
On December 22, Brian Lyman of the Alabama Reflector noted that the determination to purge the country of “others” is not limited to those in the administration. Last week, Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) escalated his attacks on Muslim Americans to demand their mass deportation. Tuberville has made it clear, Lyman wrote, “that he works for a very white, very Christian and very wealthy sliver of the population of Alabama.”
Tuberville “considers large numbers of people who live here aliens or threats to public safety” and is running for governor. He has tried to downplay his threats, saying his critics are overreacting or, as he calls it, “pearl-clutching.” But “no one should treat this as one of Tuberville’s many stupid, provocative statements with no follow-through” or pretend “it’s performative…[o]r even grimly funny.” If elected, Lyman notes, “he will have access to law enforcement resources and the ability to act on his paranoia.”
“Just the threat of that should give you pause.”
On Christmas Day, Republican Indiana state senator Chris Garten posted AI images of himself punching, kicking, and body-slamming Santa Claus in front of the state capitol. His explanation for the images was that he was reacting to the “fact” that “the North Pole is trying to bring more bureaucratic overreach & unfunded mandates down the chimney disguised as ‘Christmas cheer.’” “We The People run Indiana, not the bureaucrats,” he wrote. “Take it back to the North Pole big guy.”
Garten called outrage over the posts “fake” and “a stark reminder of how overly sensitive society has become.” He later blasted the “intolerance, swearing, and outrage” over the images and said: “Some of you clowns are just insufferable…. Merry Christmas, snowflakes!”
Notes:
https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-08-02-0163
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/25/admin/trump-administration-religion-christmas.html
https://www.cnn.com/2025/12/26/africa/trump-christmas-strike-jabo-nigeria-latam-intl
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/26/trump-supporters-nigeria-airstrikes
https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/trump-presidential-pardon-process-dda97c15
https://alabamareflector.com/2025/12/22/dont-ignore-the-threat-that-is-tommy-tuberville/
X:
DHSgov/status/2003915864769507838
DHSgov/status/2003862964336759062
DHSgov/status/2004208041605128250
RepFine/status/2004335614616027610
DHSgov/status/2002424827798585786
Bluesky:
On the clear, cold morning of December 29, 1890, on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, three U.S. soldiers tried to wrench a valuable Winchester away from a young Lakota man. He refused to give up his hunting weapon. It was the only thing standing between his family and starvation, and he had no faith it would be returned to him as the officer promised: he had watched as soldiers had marked other confiscated weapons for themselves.
As the men struggled, the gun fired into the sky.
Before the echoes died, troops fired a volley that brought down half of the Lakota men and boys the soldiers had captured the night before, as well as a number of soldiers surrounding the Lakotas. The uninjured Lakota men attacked the soldiers with knives, guns they snatched from wounded soldiers, and their fists.
As the men fought hand to hand, the Lakota women who had been hitching their horses to wagons for the day’s travel tried to flee along the nearby road or up a dry ravine behind the camp. Stationed on a slight rise above the camp, soldiers turned rapid-fire mountain guns on them. Then, over the next two hours, troops on horseback hunted down and slaughtered all the Lakotas they could find: about 250 men, women, and children.
Fifteen years ago, I wrote a book about the Wounded Knee Massacre, and what I learned still keeps me up at night. But it is not December 29 that haunts me.
What haunts me is the night of December 28.
On December 28 there was still time to avert the massacre.
In the early afternoon, the Lakota leader Sitanka had urged his people to surrender to the soldiers looking for them. Sitanka was desperately ill with pneumonia, and the people in his band were hungry, underdressed, and exhausted. They were making their way south across South Dakota from their own reservation in the northern part of the state to the Pine Ridge Reservation. There they planned to take shelter with another famous Lakota chief, Red Cloud. His people had done as Sitanka asked, and the soldiers escorted the Lakotas to a camp on South Dakota’s Wounded Knee Creek, inside the boundaries of the Pine Ridge Reservation.
For the soldiers, the surrender of Sitanka’s band marked the end of what they called the Ghost Dance Uprising. It had been a tense month. Troops had pushed into the South Dakota reservations in November, prompting a band of terrified men who had embraced the Ghost Dance religion to gather their wives and children and ride out to the Badlands. But at long last, Army officers and negotiators had convinced those Ghost Dancers to go back to Pine Ridge and turn themselves in to authorities before winter hit in earnest.
Sitanka’s people were not part of the Badlands group and, for the most part, were not Ghost Dancers. They had fled from their own northern reservation two weeks before when they learned that officers had murdered the great leader Sitting Bull in his own home. Army officers were anxious to find and corral Sitanka’s missing Lakotas before they carried the news that Sitting Bull had been killed to those who had taken refuge in the Badlands. Army leaders were certain the information would spook the Ghost Dancers and send them flying back to the Badlands. They were determined to make sure the two bands did not meet.
But South Dakota is a big state, and it was not until late in the afternoon of December 28 that the soldiers finally made contact with Sitanka’s band. The encounter didn’t go quite as the officers planned: a group of soldiers were watering their horses in a stream when some of the traveling Lakotas surprised them. The Lakotas let the soldiers go, and the men promptly reported to their officers, who marched on the Lakotas as if they were going to war. Sitanka, who had always gotten along well with Army officers, assured the commander that the band was on its way to Pine Ridge and asked his men to surrender unconditionally. They did.
By this time, Sitanka was so ill he couldn’t sit up. Blood dripped from his nose. Soldiers lifted him into an Army ambulance—an old wagon—for the trip to the Wounded Knee camp. His ragtag band followed behind. Once there, the soldiers gave the Lakotas an evening ration and lent Army tents to those who wanted them. Then the soldiers settled into guarding the camp.
And the soldiers celebrated, for they saw themselves as heroes of a great war, and it had been bloodless, and now, with the Lakotas’ surrender, they would be demobilized back to their home bases before the South Dakota winter closed in. As they celebrated, more and more troops poured in. It had been a long hunt across South Dakota for Sitanka and his band, and officers were determined the group would not escape them again.
In came the Seventh Cavalry, whose men had not forgotten that their former leader George Armstrong Custer had been killed by a band of Lakotas in 1876. In came three mountain guns, which the soldiers trained on the Lakotas’ encampment from a slight rise above the camp.
For their part, the Lakotas were frightened. If their surrender was welcome and they were going to go with the soldiers to Red Cloud at Pine Ridge, as they had planned all along, why were there so many soldiers, with so many guns?
On this day and hour in 1890, in the cold and dark of a South Dakota December night, there were soldiers drinking, singing, and visiting with each other, and anxious Lakotas either talking to each other in low voices or trying to sleep. No one knew what the next day would bring, but no one expected what was going to happen.
One of the curses of history is that we cannot go back and change the course leading to disasters, no matter how much we might wish to. The past has its own terrible inevitability.
But it is never too late to change the future.
1. Medical breakthroughs from 2025.
2. 52 things Kent Hendricks learned in 2025.
3. Séb Krier.
4. Nusantara (NYT). A good piece, good photos.
5. What is the difference between cheap vs. expensive jeans?
6. Why Mexico does not grow more rapidly.
The post Monday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
In case you missed this one, a few days ago Judge Roger Benitez ruled that California parents have a constitutional right to be informed whether their child might be transgender and that public schools within the state are not allowed to prevent employees from notifying mothers and fathers.
And at the risk of losing some of my liberal street cred, I get where Benitez is coming from. As a parent of two kids, I’d be fairly annoyed (aka: extraordinarily pissed off) if I found out a teacher was keeping secrets from me—about my children. It would feel like a violation, as well as a determination of life inside a household that most educators are certainly unqualified to make. And this isn’t, oh, “Your son is obsessed with caterpillars” or “Your daughter thinks aliens are real.” No, this is, “Your child presents as a different gender at school than at home.” It’s a huge deal.
It’s also a complex deal. Nancy Young, a Murrieta school board member, told the Orange County Register that students who hide gender identity from parents are usually doing so for a justified reason. “I do think personally that the parents should know,” Young told the newspaper’s Kristen Taketa, “but that is assuming that the parents are going to support their kid.”
Anyhow, the ruling came down and the left bemoaned it and the right cheered it and the New York Jets kept losing and earth continued to rotate on its axis.
However …
I don’t want to let certain people off so easily. See, while it’s fair to argue right v. wrong, and it’s fair for liberals to take conservative stances and conservatives to take liberal stances, and it’s fair to admit these issues are overflowing with complexities and layers, there are unique folks among us who—come Benitez’s decision—surely whooped and hollered and stomped and cheered and bellowed and danced because they are (bluntly) hateful assholes.
To them, I believe, this was never about parental notification nearly as much as it was about God. Their God. Their Christian God. Their white Christian God. Their white Christian God who surely views trans kids as vile pieces of regurgitated oxen phlegm best left charred and melting atop the depths of Satan’s BBQ pit. From jump, it has always felt like a movement fueled by hate, not love. In particular, for me, the collective awfulness can be surmised by the time earlier this year when Sonja Shaw—fringe-right candidate for State Superintendent/ReformCapo superhero/Botoxed Bandit1—attended a high school track and field meet to berate a trans athlete and the athlete’s mother. There was no compassion in that behavior. Certainly no Christ. It was cruelty for the sake of cruelty. Raw. Piercing. Calloused. Intentional.
And yet, so many on the local MAGA scene cheered her on. Encouraged her. Saluted her. Not for taking a stand on behalf of so-called parental rights, but for doing so in the most look-at-how-awful-we-can-behave! way possible. Hell, find me a local right-wing school board member, I’ll find you someone clamoring for Shaw’s attention and affections.
So people can feel how they want about Benitez’s ruling. Truly. But it’s always righteous to take some time to ask oneself—Why am I behaving this way?
And what, deep down, do I truly represent?
PS: Something I’ve been thinking about a lot: Having run this site for nearly a year, I’ve learned a ton—including the number of hard-right local culture warriors who have either gay children, trans children or closeted gay husbands. It’s actually remarkable. And while I would never, ever, ever out anyone, there is something to be said about morphing into a culture warrior because, deep down, you’re experiencing a certain level of self-loathing. Like, why would someone hate gay or trans kids t-h-i-s much? There has to be something broken in you. Something missing.
I actually have no problem with Botox. Do what makes you happy. But the audacity of shooting stuff into your head to chance your appearance, while ridiculing trans kids, is startling.
Caring for an elderly individual involves navigating a wide range of physical and emotional demands each day. From mobility and hygiene to eating and resting, the routines that form daily life can be overwhelming without the right tools. For caregivers—whether family members or professionals—having practical and supportive equipment is essential in providing safe, efficient, and dignified care. This article explores the key caregiver-friendly tools that make managing daily routines more achievable.
Supporting safe movement is a critical part of caregiving. For elderly individuals with limited mobility, even getting out of bed or moving to a chair can pose risks. Tools such as walking frames, transfer belts, hoists, and standing aids help facilitate safe movement while reducing the physical burden on caregivers.
These devices are designed to provide stability and reduce the chance of falls, while also giving carers the ability to assist without strain or injury. Proper transfer support also helps maintain the confidence and dignity of the person being cared for. Suppliers like Safety and Mobility provide a wide selection of mobility and transfer equipment designed to accommodate varying levels of ability, helping carers deliver safer support while preserving the user’s comfort and independence.
Personal care is a daily task that requires privacy, safety, and support. For individuals who struggle with balance, strength, or coordination, simple tasks like bathing or using the toilet can become hazardous. Tools such as shower chairs, grab rails, toilet frames, and commodes allow these routines to be carried out more safely and with greater comfort.
These aids reduce the need for physical support during washing or toileting and help the person being cared for to engage in the process with dignity. For caregivers, these tools also lessen the risk of injury and simplify what are often the most physically demanding aspects of the day.
Extended periods of sitting or lying down can lead to discomfort, stiffness, or pressure injuries. Caregivers must frequently reposition or support posture to avoid such complications. Pressure-relief cushions, reclining day chairs, and adjustable-height seating improve comfort and support circulation throughout the day.
In bed, bed wedges, side rails, and positioning supports help maintain safe and supported resting positions. These tools not only enhance comfort for the care recipient but also reduce the physical strain on carers by minimising the need for constant manual adjustments.
Mealtimes can be particularly challenging for individuals with conditions affecting grip strength, coordination, or hand control. Tools like non-slip mats, angled cutlery, plate guards, and two-handled cups make eating easier and more independent.
For caregivers, these aids help ensure that mealtimes are more efficient and less stressful. They support nutrition by enabling the person being cared for to participate in eating with less frustration or mess, fostering a more positive experience overall.
Dressing and grooming play an important role in maintaining self-esteem, routine, and independence for older adults. However, reduced hand strength, coordination, or fine motor control can make tasks such as fastening buttons, handling zips, or managing grooming tools increasingly difficult. Research on assistive technologies for individuals with dexterity impairments highlights how thoughtfully designed tools can reduce task complexity, improve usability, and support greater independence in daily activities.
Practical aids such as button hooks, zip pullers, and long-handled shoehorns are specifically designed to compensate for limited dexterity by simplifying movements and reducing the need for precise finger control. These tools allow individuals to remain more actively involved in dressing while decreasing reliance on direct caregiver assistance.
Similarly, grooming aids—including electric razors, long-handled hairbrushes, and adaptive nail care tools—support personal care by improving grip, reach, and ease of handling. By reducing physical effort and fine motor demands, these aids help streamline daily routines, preserve dignity, and lessen the physical and time burden placed on caregivers.
A safe living environment is crucial for effective caregiving. Tools such as motion-sensor lighting, fall detection alarms, and anti-slip flooring help prevent accidents and make the home more secure. Bed exit sensors, portable grab bars, and doorway ramps enhance accessibility and promote independence without compromising safety.
These solutions allow caregivers to focus on quality of care rather than constant supervision, creating a more manageable and reassuring daily routine.
Managing daily routines as a caregiver requires patience, adaptability, and the right support. Purpose-built tools can transform daily care—from moving safely around the home to managing mealtimes and personal hygiene. These aids not only ease the physical demands on carers but also ensure that the people they support can retain dignity, comfort, and autonomy wherever possible.
With thoughtful selection and use of caregiver-friendly tools, daily routines become less about coping and more about living well—for everyone involved.
Photo: Freepik via their website.
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Pending home sales in October increased by 1.9% from the prior month and fell 0.4% year over year, according to the National Association of REALTORS® Pending Home Sales Report. ...Note: Contract signings usually lead sales by about 45 to 60 days, so this would usually be for closed sales in December and January.
Month-Over-Month
3.3% increase in pending home sales
Gains in all four regions
Year Over Year
2.6% increase in pending home sales
Gains in all four regions
emphasis added
The traditions of Australian racing, be it horse racing, greyhounds, or footy tipping, have long been woven into the cultural fabric. However, over the past decade, digital platforms have significantly transformed how fans engage with their favourite sports and racing events. From the way information is consumed to how fans interact during live action, the influence of digital technology is undeniable and ongoing.
Digital platforms have introduced a level of speed and convenience that was previously unimaginable. Fans no longer need to be physically present at the track or in front of a television to follow events. With mobile apps and live data streams, races and sports updates are now at people’s fingertips 24/7.
This accessibility has changed the rhythm of interaction. Previously, racing fans might have followed a few marquee events each week. Now, thanks to real-time notifications, mobile streaming, and user-friendly interfaces, fans are engaging more frequently and across a broader range of sports. The shift has made it easier for fans of horse racing, greyhounds, NRL, and AFL to stay involved regardless of location.
Platforms such as the Betr online betting platform have responded to this demand with interfaces that streamline the entire user experience. From form guides to market comparisons and personalised updates, fans can act on insights in real time. This ability to engage quickly and seamlessly has shaped a more dynamic and responsive sporting culture.
Where once racing fans relied on newspapers or word-of-mouth for tips, digital platforms now offer comprehensive, data-rich tools. Performance statistics, historical trends, jockey and trainer insights, weather updates, and live form changes are all standard features. This abundance of information has created a more informed and analytical fanbase.
For example, a greyhound racing enthusiast can now compare runner statistics across different tracks instantly, while an NRL follower can view injury reports, player stats, and game-day matchups within moments. This has encouraged fans to base decisions on data rather than gut instinct, levelling the playing field between casual and experienced followers.
The personalisation of these platforms further strengthens engagement. Many services now learn from user preferences, highlighting specific events or teams of interest, which keeps fans connected and encourages deeper exploration across the racing and sporting calendar.
Digital platforms have also altered the social rituals associated with Aussie racing. The days of race-day meetups or crowded pubs are far from over, but they’ve been complemented, if not partially replaced, by digital communities. Group chats, online forums, and social media have created spaces where fans can share tips, celebrate wins, and discuss outcomes in real time.
This evolution has brought more people into the fold, particularly younger generations. The integration of racing content into platforms like YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram has made the sport more visible and accessible. Even those with no prior background in racing are discovering its appeal through influencers, explainer content, and short-form race recaps.
In fact, according to 2022 national data, horse racing and sports events were the most-streamed categories, with 91% and 86.7% of adult viewers tuning in, respectively. With live stats, second-screen apps, and real-time commentary, fans now stay more connected and immersed than ever before.
As with all digital transformations, the shift has not been without challenges. Constant connectivity has raised concerns about over-engagement, and the industry has had to invest heavily in ensuring responsible participation. Regulatory frameworks have been updated to ensure that platforms include time-out tools, spending limits, and self-monitoring features.
Transparency has also become vital. With so many platforms available, users are now more discerning, choosing services that offer clear terms, accurate data, and secure environments. Trust and credibility are central to sustained user engagement in an increasingly competitive digital market.
Digital platforms have redefined how Australians experience racing and sports. The shift from scheduled events to interactive participation has transformed fan habits. Whether accessing live updates, diving into data, or engaging in online communities, today’s racing enthusiast is more connected than ever. As technology evolves, so too will the ways fans interact with the sports and traditions they love.
Photo: peoplecreations via Freepik.
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You’re typing. You pause. You wait. And wait. The little spinner spins. Your mind wanders. What was I doing again?
Back in 1982, Walter Doherty and Ahrvind Thadani at IBM published research that challenged the prevailing wisdom. Everyone assumed 2 seconds was an acceptable response time for computer systems. Doherty and Thadani said no—400 milliseconds is where the magic happens. Below that threshold, users stay engaged. Above it, they start drifting into a “waiting” state.
This became known as the Doherty Threshold, and it fits neatly inside Jakob Nielsen’s broader response-time framework: 0.1 seconds feels instantaneous, 1 second keeps your flow of thought but you notice the delay, 10 seconds risks losing you entirely. The 400ms mark is where “continuous” starts degrading into “merely acceptable.”
No research says “human attention starts to slip at exactly 400 milliseconds.” The number is a practically motivated threshold, not a universal cognitive constant. But the IBM productivity research was real. The perceptual bands are real. And anyone who’s waited for a build to finish knows the phenomenon is real, even if the exact boundary is fuzzy.
400 milliseconds. That’s the window. Give or take.
Modern IDEs/languages/tools have made a choice, and not consciously—choosing completeness over speed. VSCode wants to tell you everything that’s wrong with your code—every type error, every lint warning, every possible issue. And it will take as long as necessary to give you the whole picture.
The extreme version of this philosophy is theorem provers. “We will give you perfect feedback about your code. We will prove it correct. It will just take... a while.”
I’m not saying theorem provers are bad. I’m having fun working with Lean (with a genie’s help). Theorem proving is valuable for certain problems. But it’s at the far end of a spectrum:
Fast but incomplete ←————————————→ Complete but slowMost IDEs have drifted toward the right side of this spectrum without acknowledging the cost. Every millisecond over 400 is attention tax. Every second of delay is an invitation for your mind to wander off and check email. What if we just didn’t?
What is feedback for?
Did I do what I think I just did?
Did I break anything in the process?
Quick feedback keeps you in flow. Did that work? Yes? Next.
What if I could learn about most of my errors in 400 milliseconds rather than all of my errors in 30 seconds? The first keeps me in the zone. The second kicks me out of it.
It’s as if IDEs/languages/tools operate with this implicit assumption:
More feedback leads to more progress. That’s part of the story but there’s more:
Which of these effects is stronger?
When something breaks in production, the first question isn’t “tell me everything.” It’s “what changed?”—and the answer needs to arrive before you context-switch.
Early-signal systems should be designed to surface the most important change fast, so you can stay in flow and decide what to do next. Instead of waiting on perfect answers, you get fast, close-to-right insight that keeps investigations moving forward.
Read the blog, “Fast and Close to Right: How Accurate Should AI Agents Be?” to learn why speed, partial answers, and early signals matter more than completeness, and how Honeycomb designs for fast understanding in observability.
This post is sponsored by Honeycomb.
There’s a reason programmers my age get nostalgic about certain tools from our past, the LISP machines, the Smalltalks. They were fast. Blazingly, impossibly fast by modern standards. They often gave you feedback as soon as your finger left the key.
Yes, they missed things. Yes, modern tools catch more errors. But those old tools respected human attention, the 400 milliseconds.
Somewhere along the way, we decided that more feedback was always better feedback. We forgot that feedback has a time dimension, not just a completeness dimension.
I don’t have a complete answer, but I have some principles:
Prioritize ruthlessly. Not all feedback is equally valuable. Show me the most important thing first, fast. The rest can come later. Tests that have failed recently are more likely to fail than tests that have run flawlessly for years. Run them first.
Degrade gracefully. If you can’t give me complete feedback in 400ms, give me something. A partial result is better than a spinner.
Let me choose. Minute-by-minute I want some feedback now. On my espresso break I’d like more reassurance. Let me make that tradeoff consciously.
Measure what matters. How many milliseconds until first feedback? That number should be on every IDE team’s dashboard. Test runners should be measured by mean time to first failure.
This isn’t just about IDEs. It’s about respecting human constraints in tool design. We’re so focused on what tools can do that we forget to ask what humans need.
How much feedback can we pack into a human attention span?
The 400 milliseconds isn’t going to change. It’s not a bug to be fixed. It’s a specification to design around. Doherty figured this out in 1982. Nielsen reinforced it. The research on feedback timing and brain activation keeps confirming that delays in the few-hundred-millisecond range are cognitively salient—our brains notice and respond differently.
Every tool designer faces this choice: do we optimize for the capabilities of the tool or the constraints of the human? The best tools find ways to do both. The mediocre ones make humans adapt to the tool’s preferences.
I want tools that respect my attention. That treat the 400 milliseconds as the precious resource it is. That understand their job isn’t just to be thorough—it’s to help me manage my limited resources to best effect.
Around 2000 I briefly sold a test runner for Eclipse called JUnit Max (named after my ultimate farm dog Max). JUnit Max followed the “maximize feedback in a given span of time” principle.
Tests ran on every save.
Tests ran in this order:
New tests
Recently failed tests
Everything else
If a test was going to fail, then, the test was likely in the first two categories. As a programmer, you glanced at a little “test feedback” icon. If it went from gray to light green, that meant that the rest of the tests would likely pass & you could get back to programming.
Because you were switching between coding & looking at test feedback so frequently, you couldn’t afford to context switch between “coding mode” and “test running mode”. Test failures appeared in the code looking similar to syntax errors. Debugging a test was one click from there.
I haven’t seen any test runners optimized for latency like this. Could be that it’s just not that good an idea. Could be, though, that we’ve all failed to optimize for an important factor for the last quarter century.
Click on graph for larger image.
This second inventory graph is courtesy of Altos Research.Ominous signs that at least one of America’s “Too Big to Fail” banks is yet again seriously short of cash emerged this weekend in documents examined by James Henry, DCReport’s economics correspondent.
For the past two months the Federal Reserve has been silently injecting tens of billions of dollars of cash into banks. No one announced this. Henry found the evidence in public records that few, if any, Wall Street journalists consult, but that we routinely review at DCReport.
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York (NYFed), acting like a financial Santa Claus to recklessly naughty bankers, delivered $17 billion in cash to an unknown bank or banks at 8 AM the morning after Christmas.
That’s just the latest scary development that has gone unreported until now.
The sudden spate of cash shortfalls raises serious concerns about the stability of the largest banks and the utter failure of 21st Century regulators to identify problems and protect the public.
The sudden demands for cash to cover shortfalls began on Halloween. That day the NYFed injected more than $50 Billion into one or more unnamed banks. Since then, it has injected tens of billions into banks 14 times, delivering greenbacks galore roughly every third business day.
Contrast this with the five years beginning in July 2020. Virtually no such cash infusions were made during that time, as the graphic below from the NYFed website shows.
While the NYFed doesn’t identify which banks benefitted, other records Henry found indicate that major beneficiaries are Bank of America, Barclays, Citi, HSBC, UBS, and likely of greatest concern the nation’s largest bank holding company, JP Morgan Chase & Co.
There’s more. Cash infusions are likely to grow enormously—and soon.
In a vaguely worded NYFed policy change on Dec. 10—which not one of the major financial news organizations has reported—the Fed flung its vaults wide open to troubled banks. The only reason the NYFed would do this is because it has good reason to expect that cash infusion demands are about to balloon.
“Going forward, standing overnight repo operations will no longer have an aggregate operational limit,” the NYFed said.
The vaguely worded announcement seems to tell bankers that they can get up to $240 Billion in cash each day to cover shortfalls. Even if read narrowly, the policy would allow cash infusions twice per day, so up to $80 billion per bank on any one day with no overall banking industry limit.
To give you an idea of how much money is involved consider this: together the six biggest banks earned $152 billion in profits last year, less than any two of them could get in cash on a single day by a narrow reading of the new policy.
To get the cash, banks hand over Treasury notes and bonds, mortgages, and other securities, known as a “repo.” Then they get to borrow cash at face value.
The banks also pay super-low interest rates, noted Bill Black, who as a banking regulator uncovered the savings and loan scandals three decades ago that resulted in almost 900 high-level bankers going to prison. And, Black notes, should their corporate parents seek refuge in bankruptcy courts the normal rules don’t apply, another little-known government favor for misbehaving bankers.
“This comes up about every five years,” Black said of banks turning to the Fed for cash. Indeed, other Fed records we examined basically confirm this pattern.
But why? Henry and Black both argue, reasonably, that banking regulators aren’t doing their job. Previously Black showed that the much ballyhooed “stress tests” for banks are designed to ensure that no bank fails. Henry has shown that big banks flout rules and even court orders that conditioned forgiveness for past misconduct on no repeats.
American banking has what I call the appearance of regulation, an issue I explored in my 1992 casino industry expose´ Temples of Chance.
Both Henry and Black should be hailed as a national heroes for looking out for the public’s wallets. Instead, Black is persona non grata on Capitol Hill and at banking regulatory functions while I’ve dealt with public officials and academics who snarl at the mention of Henry’s decades of work without citing any flaw.
Black later developed a whole new field of criminology and wrote a fascinating book about what he uncovered: The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One.
During the Great Recession of 2008-10, JPMorgan got billions in bailout money. The bank says federal rules forced it to take the money.
Should America face a new Wall Street debacle, JP Morgan would likely get all the help it wants, perhaps even by forcing it to accept cash infusions.
JPMorgan Chase & Co. , the bank’s parent, is of particular concern because in mandatory disclosures, that few journalists examine but our Jim Henry did, the company revealed it is on the hook to deliver more than 5,900 tons of silver it doesn’t have. Tradeable silver is relatively scarce right now, government data shows.
The bank sold contracts for silver it didn’t own, expecting the price would fall. Then it planned to buy the contracts back for less, making a profit by selling high and buying low. This risky practice is known as “short selling.”
Buying stocks or other assets and holding them in the hope the price will rise is called “going long,” which is what most investors do because its less risky.
JP Morgan got caught in a squeeze because the spot price of silver has nearly tripled since Donald Trump took office, creating an exposure that I calculate at up to $13.7 billion, roughly equal to the profits JP Morgan earns every 90 days, though likely just a costly fraction of that.
A big problem is that there’s not enough actual silver available for trading to get JP Morgan out of the squeeze it got into through unbridled greed. The more silver prices rise the more JP Morgan gets hurt.
Compounding this, Samsung has developed a powerful battery for electric vehicles that can go a thousand miles and recharge in under ten minutes. It requires roughly a kilo of silver for each car or truck. And while EV sales are falling in America, they are soaring in China, the world’s largest car market, and other places. About 90% of new cars sold in Norway are electric.
A smaller problem arises from the Trump administration, which on Christmas Day alone lobbed at least a dozen Tomahawk missiles at supposed Muslim extremists in Nigeria. Each Tomahawk used about 500 ounces of silver, currently priced at about $80 per ounce or $40,000 per missile.
DCReport emailed and texted five JPMorgan spokespeople on Sunday afternoon but has not heard back. That’s what we experienced in the past, but if the bank gets in touch we will promptly give you a full report on their stance.
JP Morgan has a well-documented history of making wildly bad speculative bets, including a 2012 deal that ballooned into a loss of $6 Billion or so, a disaster it initially passed off to leading financial journalists as a minor matter.
The bank claimed that a hedge that was meant to reduce risk had “morphed” into a speculative and unauthorized bet by a London office trader, who was cashiered.
The reality, as I reported at the time, is that a hedge—a complex legal contract—can no more “morph” into a speculative bet than my marriage can morph into a dog. But go-along-to-get-along Wall Street journalists faithfully repeated the bank’s nonsense.
The sudden spate of cash shortfalls raises serious concerns about the stability of the largest banks and the utter failure of 21st Century regulators to identify problems and protect the public.
Will Wall Street soon seek another huge bailout of the kind that the George W. Bush administration forced on the public in its final months? Congressional leaders from both parties insisted in 2008 and 2009 that such a debacle would never again be allowed or become necessary. Do you believe that?
If you think there’s little to no chance that the Trump Administration will give Wall Street whatever it wants, keep in mind that Donald Trump just blew nearly $40 billion dollars of your money bailing out Argentina.
There’s an obvious question raised by the sudden need for serial and now unlimited cash infusions now: are we facing a repeat of the economic collapse of 2008, which by some measures caused deeper and more lasting harm than the Great Depression?
The Great Recession cost America the value of two years of economic output, known as Gross Domestic Product, according to Prof. Alexander J, Field of Santa Clara University’s business school. His estimate fits my own back-of-the-envelope calculations back then when I was one of the few journalists critical of the bailout terms.
Ponder Prof. Field’s assessment for a moment – two years of all the economic activity of economic everyone in America down the drain, tens of millions of people wiped out financially with many yet to recoup, while instead of being prosecuted, or at least fired, the top bankers remain in power, their gigantic pay packages growing larger each year.
Henry calls these cash infusions “bankster socialism.” Henry is referring to the de facto policy of letting banks reap outsized profits when their speculative bets win big and shoving the losses onto the rest of us when they sour.
I agree. So long as shareholders aren’t at risk of being wiped out, top bank executives will keep engaging in financially dangerous behavior, aided by dubious accounting, and so called “stress tests” that were designed to ensure that the banks would pass no matter how shaky their financial condition. The winning bets, and Fed bailouts, increase the value of executive and board stock and stock options, the losses cost them noting.
In a heads-we-win, tails-the-public picks up the losses, who but that rarest of rarities, a deeply moral banker, would do otherwise?
Henry views the recent cash infusions as eerily reminiscent of the NYFed bail-out of child rapist Jeffrey Epstein’s strange offshore firm Liquid Capital Funding 17 years ago. When Epstein’s capital evaporated, the New York Federal Reserve Bank stepped in with cash. Epstein’s firm failed anyway.
But why did NYFed intrude into a routine business failure? After all, capitalism is based in good part on the idea that businesses fail while better managed operations prosper. And why try to save an offshore firm?
Henry, a Yale University Global Justice Fellow who has spent decades exposing illicit financial transactions, notes that Bear Stearns, a venerable Wall Street investment house, owned 40% of the illiquid Liquid Funding. JP Morgan was also involved in the firm, which was partly a criminal tax dodge. Bear Stearns soon collapsed, costing many investors the bulk of their fortunes, as did the collapse of Lehman Brothers. In both cases rampant speculation, weak internal financial controls, and see-no-evil regulators bear the blame.
Let’s hope Wall Street journalists, and politicians, get onto this story now that DCReport has broken it. But don’t hold your breath.
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The post Big Banks Enjoy Stealth Bailouts – A DCReport Exclusive appeared first on DCReport.org.
I'm always puzzled by the fact that much of the discussion of the wages of medical residents ignores that many residency positions are paid at rates established by Medicare, which also has a big influence on the number of residency positions.
MedpageToday has the story:
CMS Funds 400 New Residency Slots — Most new Medicare-funded positions will go to primary care, psychiatry programs by Joedy McCreary
"The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) last week allocated the 400 Medicare-funded residency slots to 135 hospitals in 37 states. Nearly two-thirds of the positions will support primary care and psychiatry residency programs.
...
"The announcement "marks a critical milestone in enabling academic health systems and teaching hospitals to continue providing top-quality patient care," said Jonathan Jaffery, MD, the AAMC's chief healthcare officer. "Academic health systems are already incurring a significant financial burden by choosing to train a portion of their medical residents without federal support. This new round of residency positions will allow them to continue investing in physician training to the benefit of patients nationwide."
...
"Under the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021, Congress authorized 1,000 new residency positions to be distributed over 5 years. The 200 positions announced this month represent the fourth allocation from that total. An additional 200 slots were authorized under the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2023, with at least 100 positions required to support psychiatry or psychiatry subspecialty residency training programs.
"The Balanced Budget Act of 1997 capped the number of Medicare-supported residency positions at each teaching hospital. Lifting that cap, the AAMC's 2024 report concluded, would help alleviate -- though not fully eliminate -- current and projected physician shortages. "
#######
On a lighter note, here's their headline about Xmas-time emergency medicine:
Here are the top MR posts of 2025 as measured by page views. Number one post goes to Tyler:
An excellent post that pairs well with another Tyler post, also in the top ten, A median voter theory of right-wing populism which has the punchline:
The right-wing populists are gaining ground in so many countries because the cultural liberals in various parliaments and congresses are extremely reluctant to meet the preferences of their median voters.
Number two was also a Tyler post. Why I think AI take-off is relatively slow, an excellent accounting of AI economic and institutional bottlenecks. This pairs well with another top-ten post in which Tyler announces that AGI is already here. Both posts are correct. An interesting conundrum.
Third and fourth are two of my posts:
3. UCSD Faculty Sound Alarm on Declining Student Skills
4. One-Third of US Families Earn Over $150,000
Next is Tyler’s rundown of non-fiction books. Well worth re-reading.
5. Best non-fiction books of 2025 with one late addition.
Next I was pleased to see my post in which I explain some standard economics but in a deeper, more fundamental way than is usually done: One of my favorite posts of the year:
Why Do Domestic Prices Rise With Tariffs?
Zephyr Teachout’s op-ed wasn’t fun to read but I admit I did have some fun writing a response
Here’s another issue which makes me mad. The destruction of boarding houses, a perfectly reasonable housing form that reduces homelessness. Or to put it more simply, why is sharing a house illegal? Outrageous.
The War on Roommates: Why Is Sharing a House Illegal?
I am all for American greatness but the approach of the Trump administration is often backwards. I pointed out the big differences between the Sputnik moment and what I called the DeepSeek Moment in two posts.
The Sputnik vs. DeepSeek Moment: Why the Difference? and The Sputnik vs. Deep Seek Moment: The Answers.
I was pleased that David Brooks picked up on my framing in the NYTimes.
Finally my post The Library Burned Slowly sparked a brief spat with Chris Rufo. Rufo’s ability to turn the tools of the left on them is impressive but I haven’t changed my mind that “Bludgeoning your enemies is fun while it lasts but you can’t bludgeon your way to a civilization.”
What were your favorite posts of the year, either at MR or elsewhere?
The post Top Posts of 2025 appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) overlords are a common trope in science-fiction dystopias, but the reality looks much more prosaic. The technologies of artificial intelligence are already pervading many aspects of democratic government, affecting our lives in ways both large and small. This has occurred largely without our notice or consent. The result is a government incrementally transformed by AI rather than the singular technological overlord of the big screen.
Let us begin with the executive branch. One of the most important functions of this branch of government is to administer the law, including the human services on which so many Americans rely. Many of these programs have long been operated by a mix of humans and machines, even if not previously using modern AI tools such as Large Language Models.
A salient example is healthcare, where private insurers make widespread use of algorithms to review, approve, and deny coverage, even for recipients of public benefits like Medicare. While Biden-era guidance from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) largely blesses this use of AI by Medicare Advantage operators, the practice of overriding the medical care recommendations made by physicians raises profound ethical questions, with life and death implications for about thirty million Americans today.
This April, the Trump administration reversed many administrative guardrails on AI, relieving Medicare Advantage plans from the obligation to avoid AI-enabled patient discrimination. This month, the Trump administration took a step further. CMS rolled out an aggressive new program that financially rewards vendors that leverage AI to reject rapidly prior authorization for "wasteful" physician or provider-requested medical services. The same month, the Trump administration also issued an executive order limiting the abilities of states to put consumer and patient protections around the use of AI.
This shows both growing confidence in AI’s efficiency and a deliberate choice to benefit from it without restricting its possible harms. Critics of the CMS program have characterized it as effectively establishing a bounty on denying care; AI—in this case—is being used to serve a ministerial function in applying that policy. But AI could equally be used to automate a different policy objective, such as minimizing the time required to approve pre-authorizations for necessary services or to minimize the effort required of providers to achieve authorization.
Next up is the judiciary. Setting aside concerns about activist judges and court overreach, jurists are not supposed to decide what law is. The function of judges and courts is to interpret the law written by others. Just as jurists have long turned to dictionaries and expert witnesses for assistance in their interpretation, AI has already emerged as a tool used by judges to infer legislative intent and decide on cases. In 2023, a Colombian judge was the first publicly to use AI to help make a ruling. The first known American federal example came a year later when United States Circuit Judge Kevin Newsom began using AI in his jurisprudence, to provide second "opinions" on the plain language meaning of words in statute. A District of Columbia Court of Appeals similarly used ChatGPT in 2025 to deliver an interpretation of what common knowledge is. And there are more examples from Latin America, the United Kingdom, India, and beyond.
Given that these examples are likely merely the tip of the iceberg, it is also important to remember that any judge can unilaterally choose to consult an AI while drafting his opinions, just as he may choose to consult other human beings, and a judge may be under no obligation to disclose when he does.
This is not necessarily a bad thing. AI has the ability to replace humans but also to augment human capabilities, which may significantly expand human agency. Whether the results are good or otherwise depends on many factors. These include the application and its situation, the characteristics and performance of the AI model, and the characteristics and performance of the humans it augments or replaces. This general model applies to the use of AI in the judiciary.
Each application of AI legitimately needs to be considered in its own context, but certain principles should apply in all uses of AI in democratic contexts. First and foremost, we argue, AI should be applied in ways that decentralize rather than concentrate power. It should be used to empower individual human actors rather than automating the decision-making of a central authority. We are open to independent judges selecting and leveraging AI models as tools in their own jurisprudence, but we remain concerned about Big Tech companies building and operating a dominant AI product that becomes widely used throughout the judiciary.
This principle brings us to the legislature. Policymakers worldwide are already using AI in many aspects of lawmaking. In 2023, the first law written entirely by AI was passed in Brazil. Within a year, the French government had produced its own AI model tailored to help the Parliament with the consideration of amendments. By the end of that year, the use of AI in legislative offices had become widespread enough that twenty percent of state-level staffers in the United States reported using it, and another forty percent were considering it.
These legislative members and staffers, collectively, face a significant choice: to wield AI in a way that concentrates or distributes power. If legislative offices use AI primarily to encode the policy prescriptions of party leadership or powerful interest groups, then they will effectively cede their own power to those central authorities. AI here serves only as a tool enabling that handover.
On the other hand, if legislative offices use AI to amplify their capacity to express and advocate for the policy positions of their principals—the elected representatives—they can strengthen their role in government. Additionally, AI can help them scale their ability to listen to many voices and synthesize input from their constituents, making it a powerful tool for better realizing democracy. We may prefer a legislator who translates his principles into the technical components and legislative language of bills with the aid of a trustworthy AI tool executing under his exclusive control rather than with the aid of lobbyists executing under the control of a corporate patron.
Examples from around the globe demonstrate how legislatures can use AI as tools for tapping into constituent feedback to drive policymaking. The European civic technology organization Make.org is organizing large-scale digital consultations on topics such as European peace and defense. The Scottish Parliament is funding the development of open civic deliberation tools such as Comhairle to help scale civic participation in policymaking. And Japanese Diet member Takahiro Anno and his party Team Mirai are showing how political innovators can build purpose-fit applications of AI to engage with voters.
AI is a power-enhancing technology. Whether it is used by a judge, a legislator, or a government agency, it enhances an entity’s ability to shape the world. This is both its greatest strength and its biggest danger. In the hands of someone who wants more democracy, AI will help that person. In the hands of a society that wants to distribute power, AI can help to execute that. But, in the hands of another person, or another society, bent on centralization, concentration of power, or authoritarianism, it can also be applied toward those ends.
We are not going to be fully governed by AI anytime soon, but we are already being governed with AI—and more is coming. Our challenge in these years is more a social than a technological one: to ensure that those doing the governing are doing so in the service of democracy.
This essay was written with Nathan E. Sanders, and originally appeared in Merion West.
Jewels don't shine this bright -- only stars do.
Abstract. J. M. W. Turner is famous for his achievements in graphic arts. What is not known is that he engaged in some pioneering market arbitrage, a profitable and risk-free swapping of British government securities. His activities lead to interesting insights into British markets of the 19th century. Financial innovation frequently created profitable arbitrage opportunities. However, among regular investors it seems that it was mostly mavericks like Turner who took advantage of them. Apparently there were strong cultural factors that inhibited most people from imitating him, which allowed obvious pricing anomalies to persist for extended periods.
That is from a recent paper by Andrew Odlyzko. Via Colin.
The post J. M. W. Turner, financial arbitrageur appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
A few weeks ago, a man got on the New York subway wearing his expensive Meta AI glasses. They cost $300, but give users super powers—for example identifying total strangers, and taking quasi-surveillance videos.
It’s a step below Superman. But it’s the best that Mark Zuckerberg can offer right now.
A woman on the subway wasn’t impressed. She stepped up to this tech-loving bro, and grabbed his glasses. Then she broke them in two with her bare hands.
He smugly told her that she would soon “be famous on the Internet.” But she didn’t flinch and just stared him down.
In the aftermath, he posted a protest video on TikTok—asking for help in finding this anti-tech vigilante. And he called her a “Karen”—which seems to be the new way of saying bitch.
Tiktok failed to load.But the response was the opposite of what he expected.
Major update to Rogue Amoeba’s essential audio utility for the Mac. I’ve written about versions 5 and 4 previously, and everything I wrote then remains true. SoundSource remains the system-wide audio menu item that ought to be built into MacOS, giving you easy, intuitive control over every audio device (input and output), and easy, intuitive control over every app in which you play or record audio. That one seemingly-simple app does both those things is quite the remarkable design achievement. And aside from that usability, SoundSource remains an exemplar of UI design stylistically — distinctive and branded, while looking and feeling in every way like a standard Mac app.
New tentpole features in version 6 include fine-grained AirPlay support (e.g. route output from one app over AirPlay while leaving the rest of your system’s audio output local to your Mac), groups for output devices, and a new “Quick Configs” feature for saving and switching between, well, quick configurations. $49 for a new license, $25 to upgrade from a previous one.
From Oliver Pfäuti:
The recent inflation surge brought inflation back on people’s minds. I quantify when and how much attention to inflation changes and derive the macroeconomic implications of these attention changes. I estimate an attention threshold at an inflation rate of 4%, that attention doubles when inflation exceeds this threshold, and that supply shocks have stronger and more persistent effects on inflation in times of high attention. Developing a model featuring the attention threshold, I show that the observed attention changes offer a joint explanation for the recent inflation surge, its interplay with inflation expectations, and the long last mile of disinflation.
Here is the paper.
The post The Inflation Attention Threshold appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Today, instead of a picture, we feature a Video of the Week giving a glimpse into one of the highest altitude observatories on Earth: the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX).
APEX is a telescope designed to explore cold, dark regions of our Universe, such as dense clouds of gas and cosmic dust where new stars are born. While visible light is obscured by the dust, these regions glow bright at the (sub)millimetre wavelengths that APEX observes. APEX allows astronomers, among other things, to study the chemical conditions within these clouds, detecting a variety of molecules in these dark, distant regions of our Universe.
Water vapour in the atmosphere absorbs these wavelengths. That's the reason APEX is located on the Chajnantor plateau in Chile’s Atacama Desert at an altitude of 5100 m: one of the driest regions on Earth with few clouds.
Once a joint project of the Max-Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (MPIfR), the Onsala Space Observatory (OSO) and ESO, APEX now enters a new chapter and becomes a project solely of the MPIfR. But the science continues!
This caption was written by Julian Seeholzer, one of the winners of the European Contest for Young Scientists in 2023.
The project reflects a broader global shift toward using commercial remote-sensing satellites for national security missions
The post Synspective tapped to provide satellite imagery for Japan’s new military constellation appeared first on SpaceNews.
Since 2015, Canada has tripled its Indigenous spending – paying more than on national defense. Over those same years, Indigenous people have suffered a catastrophic collapse in health and well-being: on average almost a full decade of lost life expectancy.
That is from David Frum.
The post Canada fact of the day appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Market Design
actions/setup-python@v4 when the latest is actions/setup-python@v6 for example.
I couldn't find a good single place listing those latest versions, so I had Claude Code for web (via my phone, I'm out on errands) build a Git scraper to publish those versions in one place:
https://simonw.github.io/actions-latest/versions.txt
Tell your coding agent of choice to fetch that any time it wants to write a new GitHub Actions workflows.
(I may well bake this into a Skill.)
Here's the first and second transcript I used to build this, shared using my claude-code-transcripts tool (which just gained a search feature.)
Tags: github, ai, github-actions, git-scraping, generative-ai, llms, coding-agents, claude-code
I just sent out the latest edition of the newsletter version of this blog. It's a long one! Turns out I wrote a lot of stuff in the past 10 days.
The newsletter is out two days later than I had planned because I kept running into an infuriating issue with Substack: it would refuse to save my content with a "Network error" and "Not saved" and I couldn't figure out why.
So I asked ChatGPT to dig into it, which dug up this Hacker News post about the string /etc/hosts triggering an error.
And yeah, it turns out my newsletter included this post describing a SQL injection attack against ClickHouse and PostgreSQL which included the full exploit that was used.
Deleting that annotated example exploit allowed me to send the letter!
Tags: sql-injection, security, newsletter, substack
Donald Trump’s erratic policies have dominated world economic news in 2025. But if U.S. policy weren’t being whipsawed by a wannabe authoritarian’s whims and obsessions, we would all be focused on a different problem: China’s massive trade surplus.
China’s surplus briefly made headlines a few months ago when it passed the trillion-dollar mark. While there is no special significance to that number, it helped bring attention to an important point: that China’s surplus has been surging for years — roughly since 2020.
One doesn’t have to be a crude, Trumpian-style trade protectionist to understand that it’s a major problem for the global economy when an economy the size of China’s – either #1 or #2 in the world, depending upon the measure used – runs persistent, extremely large trade surpluses. China’s trade surpluses are causing major economic disruptions around the world – particularly in the US and in Europe. Furthermore, China is an authoritarian regime. Its growing dominance of several strategic industries poses serious concerns, both in terms of national security and technology capture.
So today’s primer is the first of a two-part series devoted to China’s surplus: How big it is, what’s causing it, why it’s a problem, and what can be done about it.
Beyond the paywall I’ll address the following:
1. How to think about the scale of the Chinese surplus
2. China’s underconsumption problem and the role of Chinese government policies
3. China saves too much for its own good
4. How China’s government has effectively chosen to run trade surpluses
5. The Chinese trade surplus trap
Next week I’ll discuss how China’s surplus causes problems for the rest of the world, and how other nations — especially in Europe — should respond.
(Lord’s day). Up and, with my wife to church, and coming out, went out both before my Lady Batten, he not being there, which I believe will vex her. After dinner my wife to church again, and I to the French church, where I heard an old man make a tedious, long sermon, till they were fain to light candles to baptize the children by. So homewards, meeting my brother Tom, but spoke but little with him, and calling also at my uncle Wight’s, but met him and her going forth, and so I went directly home, and there fell to the renewing my last year’s oaths, whereby it has pleased God so much to better myself and practise, and so down to supper, and then prayers and bed.
Links for you. Science:
COVID Vaccines Slashed Kids’ ER Visits by 76 Percent, Study Finds
Why CDC health data are still reliable… even amid challenges to communications and integrity
Sparking ancient fires. New research helps to show the challenges of documenting ancient firemaking (more here)
Black Coffee and Cancer Hype Unsubstantiated
Save America from the MAHA Movement
FDA vaccine chief’s memo cited 10 pediatric Covid-19 vaccine deaths—but the agency’s own analysis found 0–7. Dr. Vinay Prasad circulated a memo before FDA scientists finished their work. His conclusions overshot what the agency’s own analysts ultimately found.
Other:
If He Builds It, Tear It Down
Next target of trump’s wrecking ball: Irreplaceable New Deal murals by Ben Shahn and others
How the right-wing backlash to the Covid pandemic led to the FDA’s anti-vax turn
Impeach and Remove the Bastards
GOP will regret pushing Jasmine Crockett to run for the Senate
What the Dems Talk About When They Talk About A.I. With an A.I. profiteer in the White House and no congressional mojo, Democrats have been shockingly impotent on A.I., an issue that infuriates or scares the hell out of most Americans. Now, even as they muster some resistance, they risk being outflanked.
One Senate Primary Just Got a Lot More Interesting—and Poses Big Questions for Democrats’ Future
Seth Harp Talks About The Rot At The Core Of America’s Empire
Trump’s reality TV tricks can’t hide the affordability crisis
New Orleans Is Watching You, Fuckers.
Greg Bovino’s the star of Trump’s deportation show. We trace his roots.
The deeply personal reasons why many Indiana Senate Republicans said no to Trump
How the Trump Administration’s Most Wanted Man Finally Went Free
Top ADL civil rights lay leader quits, accusing group of being ‘useful idiot’ for Trump
Fiasco for Trump as Judge Issues Harsh Rebuke in Ábrego García Case
Trump attacks on political opponents spur a surge of threats, NBC News review finds (Trump is a stochastic terrorist)
“I was forced to use AI until the day I was laid off.” Copywriters reveal how AI has decimated their industry
DOJ report on D.C. police says chief created a ‘culture of fear’
A GOP senator broke ranks to defend Somali Minnesotans. Will anyone join him?
Professors are turning to this old-school method to stop AI use on exams (‘AI’ making education less efficient…)
Do you feel like a failure?
Amazon pulls AI recap from Fallout TV show after it made several mistakes
Where the Money Comes From
Will the 21st Century Nabobs Win Their War on Public Accountability?
You, Robot
Abolish the Texas Rangers
A band-aid on a festering hand wound. Something’s up with Trump’s health and we should really find out what it is.
The Lies Americans Tell Themselves to Justify State Violence Against Migrants
Instagram Is Generating Inaccurate SEO Bait for Your Posts
FDA finds new way to make COVID more deadly
Traveled back home on Monday, on a seven-train journey, stopping off en-route to visit our aunt, who also recently moved to a care home. Then at home for Christmas, with sister and Mum, and cat.
§ Twice this week our Kia e-Niro has been completely dead, fortunately while at home. Turns out these hi-tech EVs, largely comprised of high-power batteries, still rely on an old fashioned 12V battery to start. The first time it happened the builders were here and jump-started it from their van.
The second time they weren’t so we read a lot of vague posts on forums, watched YoutTubes, waited until after Christmas, and spent £110 on a battery jump start pack. Which worked although, neither of us being car-heads, it was a bit nerve-wracking. We’ll keep that in the car but this doesn’t instill confidence in the vehicle.
§ We finished watching Pluribus and my opinion has only solidified. In fact the US-centering of it feels even worse to me now: a story that’s about the entire planet being taken over by something, with a dozen un-affected people spread around the world, and the only American one is the centre of the show. Which suggests that either she is more interesting than all of the others – which so far feels unlikely – or that the writers think she is more important than all the others.
I still don’t care whether Carol succeeds in “saving the world” although I care a bit whether Manousos succeeds, because he’s been so much more determined and obsessive about it. Overall I find it odd that, given a potentially interesting and bizarre global/galactic situation, so little has been done with it in nine hours or so of screen time, other than spend a lot of money.
And now I dislike myself a little for watching the whole thing. It was OK, not terrible, but if it hadn’t been for the fact so many other people were also watching the whole thing, I might have given up.
§ We also watched:
§ No doubt there’ll be some yearnotes along in the next few days.
2. Ryan Briggs: “Prediction: in the short-to-medium term LLMs will make the reputation of the researcher matter more for whether or not we view results as credible because it will become too hard to read everything and people will want shortcuts for filtering. Again, this hits juniors hardest.”
3. Brian Greene and Ed Witten discuss string theory.
4. Short video of the Grand Egyptian Museum. Go, go, go!
5. Why Israel recognized Somaliland? Many things going on, risk of war in East Africa is now heightened, here is some speculation. Big story for 2026?
6. Gary Graffman, RIP (NYT).
The post Sunday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
| 25 bp Rate Moves | FOMC Members 2026 |
|---|---|
| One Rate Hike | 3 |
| No Change | 4 |
| One Rate Cut | 4 |
| Two Rate Cuts | 4 |
| Three Rate Cuts | 2 |
| Four Rate Cuts | 1 |
| More than Four | 1 |
"We expect the FOMC to compromise on two more 25bp cuts to 3-3.25% but see the risks as tilted lower. "
Earlier I wrote about China’s Libertarian City, Boao Hope City (officially the Boao Lecheng International Medical Tourism Pilot Zone), China’s first special economic zone for advanced healthcare. Boao Hope City is following the peer approval model I have long argued for:
Daxue: Medical institutions within the zone can import and use pharmaceuticals and medical devices already available in other countries as clinically urgent items before obtaining approval in China. This allows domestic patients to access innovative treatments without the need to travel abroad…. The medical products to be used in the pilot zone must possess a CE mark, an FDA license, or PMDA approval, which respectively indicate that they have been approved in the European Union, the US, and Japan for their safe and effective use.
Boao Hope City is part of the larger Hainan Free Trade Zone. Hainan is a large island off China’s Southern Coast, often called the Hawaii of China. The entire island is being turned into the world’s largest free trade zone. As of Dec. 18, 2025, Hainan now boasts:
- Expanded “Zero-Tariff” Coverage…“zero-tariff” eligible goods expand from about 1,900 to approximately 6,600 tariff lines, increasing coverage from 21% to 74% of total import/export items, encompassing most production equipment and raw materials. This exemption applies to import tariffs, import VAT, and consumption tax, potentially saving enterprises about 20% in tax costs on imported equipment.
- Optimized “Tariff Exemption for Value-added Processing” Policy: One of the most transformative measures, this policy sees significantly relaxed restrictions (e.g., on core business income ratios) and now allows cumulative value-added calculation across upstream and downstream enterprises. This makes it easier for businesses to meet the “over 30% value-added” threshold for tariff exemption when selling finished products into the mainland market. Companies can ship primary products or components to Hainan for substantial processing; if the value-added meets the standard, the final products can enter the mainland market tariff-free.
- “Dual 15%” Tax Incentives as a Long-term Advantage: Encouraged industries registered and substantively operating in the Hainan FTP enjoy a reduced 15% corporate income tax rate. Eligible high-end and in-demand talents benefit from an individual income tax exemption for the portion exceeding 15%, providing long-term, stable fiscal predictability.
- Enhanced Trade and Investment Liberalization/Facilitation: Measures include implementing a negative list for cross-border trade in services, relaxing foreign investment access, adopting a “commitment-based registration system” for business setup, and streamlining procedures. A visa-free policy for nationals of 59 countries is in effect, with further eased entry-exit restrictions for business personnel.
The post The Hainan Free Trade Port appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Most organ transplants come from deceased donors, and the vast majority of these deceased donor organs are allocated by a regulated system of national waiting lists. That is, the organs of a deceased donor go to strangers in need. In contrast, most transplants from living donors (of kidneys and livers) are direct donations from someone healthy enough to donate to someone who they know.* Living donations are also different in that they can be planned well in advance, while deceased donations have to be hastily arranged following a death.
But it is legal, and sometimes possible, for the next of kin of a deceased potential donor to direct an organ donation to someone they know who needs a transplant. This will only take place if the potential recipient is available on short notice, and if the donor organ is compatible with the recipient. So it's a rare event: the next of kin need to know someone in need, and the transplant has to turn out to be feasible.
But rare events happen, and the NYT reports on just such a story:
A Man Who Shunned Cheap Sentiment Left a Gift for Others: Life By Dan Barry
"Informed that her 55-year-old brother would never regain consciousness, Darlene Costello made the heartbreaking decision to have him removed from his ventilator — only to learn, seconds before it was time, that Brendan was a registered organ donor.
"Once Ms. Costello calmed down — why wasn’t this known before? — she came to embrace the news of her brother’s final selfless act. She also knew someone who desperately needed a kidney. Calls were made, tests done, overwhelming odds overcome."
...
" His lungs went to a woman in Tennessee, his right kidney to a man in Pennsylvania. And his left kidney was received by Ms. Costello’s mentor and employer, Dr. Sylvio Burcescu, 62, whose ability to run his Westchester County clinic had been hampered by a rare kidney disease requiring dialysis."
########
*Nondirected living donors can also start chains of kidney exchange.
We, Patrick and Tyler, have differing views of the artistic merits of Bauhaus, but we are both very impressed by the movement’s success: they sought to define an aesthetic for the twentieth century, and basically did. Bauhaus obviously sits as part of broader tides—functionalism, constructivism, De Stijl, etc.—but the project also shows how intentional artistic ambition can succeed. Everything from modern offices to modern tech hardware is in some sense downstream of Bauhaus.
We’re more than a quarter way through the new century and we can now ask: what is the aesthetic of the twenty-first century? Which are the important secessionist movements of today? Which will be the most important great works?
Today, futuristic aesthetics often mean retrofuturistic aesthetics. So, what should the future actually look like? There will not be a singular answer to that, but we are very interested in attempts to answer the questions.
In particular, we would like to fund some artists who are thinking about this.
Tyler: Circa 2026, beauty can be found in strange and unusual places. It does not always announce itself as such. It can violate our expectations in unreasonable ways. It often springs from an understanding that the world has changed fundamentally, and matters of the aesthetic need to recognize and respond to that. What can you do that that will surprise and inspire me?
Patrick: In 1925, Ortega y Gasset said “modern art, on the other hand, has the masses against it, and this will always be so since it is unpopular in essence; even more, it is antipopular.” Sagmeister and Walsh argue that we’ve stopped trying to produce beautiful work, and Nicholas Boys-Smith shows empirically that modern buildings are substantially less favored than designs that respect the specific character of the place. So, what are new directions forward? What is new and also beautiful?
Grant. We are seeking to fund artists, architects, and designers who are consciously working to define New Aesthetics.
To apply, just email apply@newaesthetics.art.
TC again: Here is the website.
The post A Call for New Aesthetics appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
A lot of readers tell me that my fundamental optimism about the world is one of the reasons they appreciate my blog. I think my usual sunny attitude springs from my above-average skill at resisting the negativity bias inherent in the media. It’s very easy to read the news every day and conclude that the world is in a never-ending hydra-headed “polycrisis”; if you have a cool, detached perspective, you’ll realize that things are rarely so dark.
That said, this year I was a bit of a downer. The coming of the second Trump administration means the end of the era of stability that the world enjoyed after World War 2. Even if the U.S. can fix its domestic problems (which are not all Trump’s fault by a long stretch), the ascendance of China and Russia as the world’s dominant power bloc will not be so easily undone, and the ramifications of that shift are only getting started. That’s what motivated the somewhat darker tone of my blog this year.
But that doesn’t mean I think the world is going to Hell in a handbasket. From India’s resilient economic growth to Europe’s timely rearmament to the ongoing technological revolutions in AI, electric technology, and biotech, there is plenty to be happy about.
Even when it comes to American society, I see lots of quiet reasons for optimism. Our politics is dysfunctional and our media landscape resembles a demon-haunted wasteland, but underneath the surface, I see signs that our society is starting to knit itself back together after the unrest and chaos of 2014-2021. Health is improving. Violence is falling. Americans are starting to use technology more responsibly. Some of the economic sclerosis of the pre-pandemic years seems to be falling away.
I suspect that there are “macrosociological” forces at work. To my knowledge, sociologists haven’t really modeled a cycle of aggregate social division and health,1 but if you look at events like the collapse of the USSR and the decade of violence and self-destructive behavior that followed in Russia, or the multi-decade rise in pro-social behavior around the mid-20th century in America, it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that such forces exist.
But I’ll leave the grand theorizing for another day. Today I just want to document ten positive trends in American society. It’s been a tough year; you all deserve a little optimism!
This is probably the most encouraging recent social trend in America. One of the biggest downsides of life in the U.S., compared to other rich countries, is our low life expectancy. A big gap opened up a few decades ago, and in recent years, and in the late 2010s, Americans’ life expectancy fell outright for several years. Then came the pandemic, of course, and it fell right off a cliff.
But I’m happy to report that this trend has now reversed! Not only has U.S. life expectancy more than bounced back from the pandemic, but the negative trend of the 2010s seems to be over as well. The gap with other rich countries remains, but the U.S. is no longer falling further and further behind:
Why is U.S. life expectancy improving? There are two main reasons why Americans live shorter lives than their rich-world counterparts: Unsafe behavior, and obesity. The first of these — overdoses, suicides, murders, and traffic accidents — surged after the pandemic but is now on the wane.
The most important way in which life in America differs from life in other rich countries is our high level of violence. Murder rates — the most reliable measurement of violence — are typically around 5 or 6 per 100,000 people in America. That’s about five times as high as in Europe and ten or twenty times as high as in East Asia. And it’s a proxy for a bunch of other kinds of public violence — assaults, robberies, etc. — that are harder to compare across countries or across time.
I believe that America’s high violence levels are the main reason our cities are so car-dependent — many people refuse to take public transit or walk on shop-lined streets if they’re in danger of getting mugged or attacked. That means that some part of our obesity and boredom is also downstream of violence.
In the late 2010s, U.S. murder rates went in the wrong direction, rising from their low point in 2014. Then in the pandemic they spiked alarmingly. But in late 2021 or 2022, murder rates started falling, and they haven’t stopped falling since. There are several data sets that record murder rates, based on reporting by hospitals, police agencies, and so on. But they all closely agree. Here are two sources:
Jeff Asher, who does a great job documenting trends in American violence, notes that many other indicators of violence in America are down as well, including reports of gun crime and reports of violent crime other than homicides:
Most encouragingly, the drop appears to have continued, or even accelerated, in 2025. Murders are plunging in almost every big city:
Trump’s return has not led to the reestablishment of the negative trend of the mid-2010s. Just why this has happened deserves a longer blog post, but for right now we should just celebrate the new trend.
Asher’s best guess is that although overall violence in America remains above its historic low point in the early 1960s, murder and property crime are now less common than they were during that famously peaceful era. Part of that is due to mitigation efforts — everyone moved out to the ‘burbs and started locking their houses and driving everywhere. America remains far too violent to support the kind of pleasant urban life that Europeans and East Asians enjoy. But for many years we were going the wrong way, and now we’re headed in the right direction.
Hey folks! Apologies for this coming out late – alas the pedant household has been struck by a nasty cold that has made keeping up with work this week quite challenging. No post this week, on account of it being Christmas time. May you all have a Merry Christmas or a Happy Holidays or simply Friendly Season’s Greetings, whichever is your preference!
We’ll be back next week with some Tolkien (I am planning to post up the text of my keynote, “Tolkien and Éowyn Between Two Wars” which I delivered this past week at the 2025 Prancing Pony Podcast Moot) and then we’ll be back to finishing out our discussion of hoplites in the New Year.
In the meantime, this is normally the spot in the calendar where I do a bit of ‘year in review’ so let me indulge in that. 2025 set a new record for traffic on the blog – it looks like we’ll end up around 4.25m page views, at last dethroning 2022 which had held the record.1 The most popular post this year by far was “Why Archers Didn’t Volley Fire” with more than 140,000 views. The distant-runners-up (but still doing quite well) were “Coinage and the Tyranny of Fantasy ‘Gold,'” and “How Gandalf Proved Mightiest.” Meanwhile I was pleasantly surprised that the series on “Life, Work, Death and the Peasant” also pulled in a decent number of readers despite being a pretty technical-in-the-weeds series without a strong ‘pop-culture’ hook. It ended up the year a bit short of 300,000 page views split over its 10 parts and subparts.
In the New Year, my plan is to get to a lot of lingering Patron requests, including the winners of the ACOUP Senate poll. We’re going to get some discussion of the Late Bronze Age Collapse, some on of how ancient polytheism interacts with ancient states and some of mercenaries and other things. I think 2026 is probably also the year for the nearly inevitable Teaching Paradox: Hearts of Iron IV (in which you can look forward to some praise but perhaps some sharper criticism of the Paradox approach; HoI4 is a remarkable game but it has some remarkable problems too).
My thanks to Copilot Money for sponsoring last week at DF. Copilot is a personal finance app for the iPhone, iPad, and Mac, and they’ve always deeply believed in the value of embracing the design idioms and technical features of truly native apps for Apple platforms. Apple has noticed, awarding Copilot an App Store Editor’s Choice and featuring Copilot earlier this year on Apple Developer for their use of Swift Charts.
Copilot’s big news this week is they’ve launched a new web app, bringing access to Copilot from any device, anywhere. It’s designed with all the attention to detail — and concern for privacy and security — as their native apps.
Copilot Money brings all your spending, budgets, investments, and net worth into one organized dashboard, with intelligent categorization and insights that help you stay on track without spreadsheets or app-hopping. Designed to feel calm and intuitive, Copilot makes it easy to understand your finances across all your devices.
Copilot first sponsored DF back in 2021. My wife and I started using it then to track our finances, and we haven’t looked back. Copilot Money isn’t just better than anything we’d used before, it absolutely blew everything else away. It’s easy to connect to your financial accounts, and once you do, you don’t need to spend any effort at all to enter transactions. Copilot just tracks it all automatically, and most importantly, presents it to you in clear, intuitive ways. It’s so good. I’m not saying that because they sponsored DF last week — I’m saying that as a happy paying customer for over four years now.
Copilot is offering DF readers two months free with code DARING, plus 26% off your first year for a limited time, available through this link.
Yes, but can your comet tail do this?
