Five years ago today, I launched The Honest Broker with lofty dreams but low expectations.
Back then, few people had heard of Substack—the name sounded like something in the engine room of the starship Enterprise. We’re going at Warp Nine on the Substack, captain, I don’t know if she can take any more. So I kept having to explain to people what a Substack actually was, and why I was shifting my focus to this new unproven platform.
To be honest, I also had to keep explaining it to myself. It sometimes felt like I was chasing a dream, not a reality—pursuing an elusive vision of a writing vocation beyond agents, editors, pitches, word counts, and constraining assignments.
I was a successful author of books back then, and (if I’m totally honest) probably too old to reinvent myself. There was a genuine risk I’d tarnish my reputation if I shifted to this new platform, and stumbled. And there are plenty of ways to stumble when you enter the do-it-yourself world of self publishing.
But I wanted that freedom to define my own vocation. And Substack was my best (maybe my only) chance to get to Warp Nine and beyond on my own terms.
Failure is not an option, I told myself. That meant I had to put all my energy into this unproven venture—just to avoid the downside. So I stopped taking all freelancing assignments. I stopped pitching books and articles to editors. As they say in Texas hold ‘em, I was all in, pushing every last chip into the center of the table.
At the end of the first day, I had three subscribers. Okay, at least that was a start.
Before I knew it, I was off on a wild roller coaster ride. In the aftermath, everything changed.
I started taking chances with my writing that I’d never even considered before. I wrote with a degree of self-disclosure and honesty that left me feeling somewhat exposed. But when you start writing directly for readers, without intermediaries, that begins to happen naturally. Above all, I decide to treat the reader as a trusted friend—with the hope that you might extend the same courtesy to me.
And guess what? I have almost 300,000 friends now. You can call them subscribers, if you want—but it feels more like a community here than a periodical. And that might just be the best part of it.
If you want to support my work, please take out a premium subscription (just $6 per month).
Ah, but the world also changed during these last five years, and this forced me into new arenas with high stakes.
The creative endeavors that are so important to me—music, books, visual arts, etc.—came under attack in bold new ways. Back when I launched The Honest Broker in 2021, I had no idea of the threat posed by centralized tech platforms and the AI slop they would unleash on our culture.
I soon realized that, if I had any integrity as a critic and advocate for the creative class, I would have to grapple with these threats. I would also need to find ways of supporting the struggling indie movements and emerging counterculture. After all, they are our only hopes if we want to survive outside the widening spheres of the tech command-and-control economy.
I refused to succumb to doom-and-gloom. I have faith in the transcendent power of art, and hoped to use my voice to celebrate the great creative work that still happens today—although mostly on the margins of mainstream culture.
All this gave more urgency to my efforts here on Substack. As it turned out, this is a good place to showcase indie creativity. In some ways, Substack is now the epicenter of the alternative culture.
Yes, it’s been a busy five years. And this birthday gives me a good excuse to look back, and share some highlights.
So below you will find links to the ten most popular articles from the last five years. These will give you a useful survey of what we do here, and why we do it.
I present these in rank order, starting with the most widely read piece in the history of The Honest Broker.
The Top 10 Articles from The Honest Broker (2021-2026)
Back in 2024, I warned of the rise of “dopamine culture”—a web-driven replacement of arts and entertainment with shorts burst of stimuli. I included this chart, which went viral, and sums up the changes we’re now facing.
The creative economy is getting degraded by the imposition of business and productivity metrics on artistic works—above all, an obsession with speed. In this article, I look at the popularity of ultra-fast techniques of culture consumption. But do you really want to spend your days listening to podcasts at triple speed?
I’d lost hope for chain bookstores—and then James Daunt took over as CEO of Barnes & Noble. He loves books, and made brave moves to put readers first. He stopped taking financial incentives from publishers. He gave freedom to people working in the stores to promote books they believed in, and not those with the biggest kickbacks. He refused to dumb-down offerings.
Customers took notice. After years of struggling for survival, Barnes & Noble is growing again. Executives in music, movies and other culture businesses ought to learn from this case study.
I start this article with testimony from a teacher:
You guys don’t know what’s going on in education right now. That’s fine—how could you know unless you were working in it? But I think that you need to know….
First of all the kids have no ability to be bored whatsoever. They live on their phones. And they’re just fed a constant stream of dopamine from the minute their eyes wake up in the morning until they go to sleep at night.
Because they are in a constant state of dopamine withdrawal at school, they behave like addicts. They’re super emotional. The smallest things set them off.
When you are standing in front of them trying to teach, they’re vacant. They have no ability to tune in….
They’re not there.
And they have a level of apathy that I’ve never seen before in my whole career. Punishments don’t work because they don’t care about them. They don’t care about grades. They don’t care about college.
Let me make clear: I don’t blame the students (or the teachers). Here, again, the root cause is dysfunctional technology implemented in a mad rush without regard to consequences.
Society cannot survive without a trustworthy system for preserving and protecting our accumulated learning and wisdom from the past. But in just the last few months, we see ominous signs of a collapse in the knowledge system.
Every once in a while, I write an advice column. They are surprisingly popular—which is a shock to my family members. I give them free advice all the time, and they fail somehow to recognize what a boon this is.
Diogenes seeking an honest man (18h century painting by Tischbein)
But readers here are more receptive, or perhaps just more polite. In any event, this article on how to judge character is one of the most popular all-time articles on The Honest Broker.
Not long ago, consumers were invited to purchase hot new tech products, and were excited about the opportunity. Not anymore. Now AI is forced on us everywhere.
Instead of customer service, I get a bot, not a person. When I stream music, bot slop is served up by the platform. When I want to write an email, a bot intrudes. Microsoft not only bundles unwanted AI with its software, but then forces a price increase on me for the privilege of using something I don’t even want.
This is stirring up an intense backlash from the general public. But will AI companies read the room? Or will the force-feeding of AI continue?
The big Internet platforms are now all oxymorons. ChatGPT makes you less likely to chat with family and friends. Social media stops you from having a social life. Relationship apps undermine your relationships. And now we have the latest paradox—the search engine that doesn’t want you to search.
For two years, I published a series of articles about disturbing practices at Spotify. But it was hard to find out what was really going on—the platform operates with so little transparency. But, finally, I was able to get behind-the-scenes details from Liz Pelly’s investigative work. The truth was even scarier than what I feared.
At the time of David Foster Wallace’s suicide in 2008, I barely understood the implications of his warnings about screen culture. I was optimistic about the impact of the Internet and digital interfaces, and so were many others.
But with the benefit of hindsight, I see how much he anticipated our current crisis—which I summarize here in eight points.
Before signing off, let me thank of each of you for your support during the first five years of The Honest Broker. Hey, if we keep working together, we just might get to Warp Ten.
I sat down with Elizabeth Spiers, founding editor of Gawker, former editor of The New York Observer and now a columnist for the Times, to discuss this year’s annual TPM Membership Drive and today’s media landscape. We discussed journalist independence, membership business models and why in the Trump Era only truly independent media can tell the truth without fear or favor.
I hope you give it a look.
Ready to join the TPM community as a member and support our team’s work? Just click right here.
I’ve described to you many times how TPM was saved by an early shift to building a membership system. We began it at the end of 2012 and started building it in earnest in about 2014. That gave us a five or six year head start on almost everyone else. We were thus much better positioned when the collapse of the digital ad economy hit in the couple years just before the pandemic. But today I’d like to share with you another part of that transition because it intersects with a fascinating story of Trump era corruption published today in the New York Times. It’s the story of a couple Syrian-born billionaires, already in business with the Trump family, lining up Trump’s personal support to secure another vast payday. In “a sign of how powerful Mr. Trump has become,” Times reporter Eric Lipton says after laying out the basic facts of the story, “To get almost anything done in the nation’s capital requires not alienating a vexed and vengeful president, and, ideally, pleasing him.”
It’s that personalist rule I want to focus on.
And to do that let’s go back to TPM ad business.
We were very successful for about a decade selling ads in the very specific and peculiar DC public affairs ad space, a very sui generis and odd advertising space which is in effect a subset of corporate America’s lobbying budgets. Every big corporation in America, as well as large organizations, has business before the people who run the country’s government. This can involve long-term policy aims. This can be regulatory issues. This can often be trying to keep the government out of regulating things. Everyone has interests before the federal government. The public affairs ad space is focused on talking to the people who run the federal government about a particular corporation or organization’s interests, needs and what the company does. They’re not selling their product. It’s not consumer advertising. It’s partly reputational advertising. But it’s not even entirely that. It’s corporation X talking to the people who run the federal government. Who is that? It’s everyone in the executive and legislative branches. It’s their staffs. It’s the vast array of interest groups and organizations and policy factories that exist in DC. It’s the lobbyists. It’s not just the folks they talk about in Schoolhouse Rock. It’s the whole para-government. It’s an extremely lucrative ad space. It’s the reason insider sheets and publications like Politico and Punchbowl all seem to defy the gravity that has affected the rest of the journalism ecosystem. The money has also increasingly moved from display advertising to the corporate-sponsored events these publications can host.
The additional factor was that to remain kosher in that world advertisers needed to be very careful about appearing to be on one political side or another. That governed what publications they advertised in. And that was a major problem for us. (It’s also a key anchor of “both-sides” journalism. But that’s a topic for another day.) We faced a major obstacle because we were perceived as being on the side of the Democrats. That’s not really true. Or it’s not nearly as simple as that. But in the world they operated in, it was true enough. It was true in their terms. So what to do about that?
What I came up with turned out to be an effective approach that also had the benefit of being true. The argument went like this. You may not like our readers — who tend to be highly educated, some flavor of liberal or left-wing, politically active and on the affluent side. You may not like us. But you (the advertiser) or you (the public affairs firm) actually need to be talking to these people because sometimes they will be in power. What’s more, those people tend to be involved in or adjacent to the origination of novel public policy questions. So again, you should save a few bucks from your ad buys with WaPo and Politico and Roll Call and do a placement with us too.
Ad sales in that space always involved a lot of hard work for us. But that was our core ad argument. And it helped us sell (relative to our scale) a lot of ads and build out a lot of this organization.
Now, as I mentioned earlier and in many other posts over the years, by the late teens the whole digital advertising world was coming under a lot of strain. We were already moving a lot of our focus and resources toward building our membership base and away from advertising. But advertising was still a big deal.
So now let me take you to the first months of 2017. I was down in D.C. for a few business-side meetings. This was when, you’ll remember, Trump had just been elected and believed he had a mandate to abolish Obamacare. He also controlled both houses of Congress to make that happen. I was meeting with staffers from one of the big health care trade associations. These folks didn’t necessarily support or oppose Obamacare. But its repeal and just what might replace it was a very big deal for them and their members. As I discussed TPM’s unique audience I got a question I’d never heard before. “Do you know if Donald Trump reads your site? Or … what about Jared Kushner?”
Needless to say, in a narrow sense, I didn’t have a terribly good answer to this question. But on a larger canvas this was something totally new, however it might impact us specifically. No one ever asked about what George W. Bush or Barack Obama read. Those weren’t personalist regimes or governments. Like virtually every other post-war American presidency — and many earlier administrations — there was a whole community of policy and political appointees who determined and executed administration policy. And there’s not just the executive branch to consider. What happens on Capitol Hill is just as important. Indeed, if you’re opposing what the administration wants it’s even more important.
This was different. Everything had tightened down to access to one man: Donald Trump. Then secondarily perhaps a handful of his top advisors or family members. Some ad budgets just froze because no one knew how to operate in a situation in which only Trump’s momentary whims really mattered. This conversation again confirmed to me our need to reduce our dependence on the D.C. ad market as much as possible. Toward the end of 2017, I pulled most of the resources we directed toward ad sales and redirected them toward growing our membership business. But it was also a revealing, bracing illustration of how the whole architecture of the D.C. para-government was reorienting itself, rewiring itself around the personalist aspirations and rule of Donald Trump. Out with the broader community of governance and policy-making, in with the whims and momentary impulses of one erratic and distractible guy. That has ramified through the lobbying world, the political communications world, the D.C. advertising world and more.
During Trump’s first term, his personalist rule was as much aspiration as reality. His cabinet was populated mostly with retired generals and corporate CEOs, most of whom didn’t like or respect him. Trump also hadn’t reduced his MAGA slogans to a set of policies, something he never did but a series of “America First” policy shops did largely do. All that changed in term two. Meanwhile, gutting much of the federal bureaucracy tightened the relationship between the president’s will and the actions of the government. As we see from that Times article, in addition to creating a kind of electoral strongman rule it also created an engine perfectly suited to corruption. Obviously there’s a ton of money sloshing around Washington and there always has been. But the old model was persuasion. Or there was at least a significant role for it. But why bother persuading Donald Trump? Or, really, what would that even mean? Why not just cut him a check? Or cut him in on a real estate deal. It’s more direct. It’s more reliable. It may even be cheaper. And we see it happening everywhere across the federal government today.
The result is that even though today’s young adults, and graduates in particular, are over-represented in the top quartile of the earnings distribution, they are also far more likely to be at the bottom than the top for earnings relative to reasonable expectations. In both the UK and US, even though only 10 percent of graduates are in the lowest earnings quartile, one in three is in the bottom bracket for earnings relative to expectations.
After the successful conclusion of the Artemis II mission earlier this month, focus turned to what comes next in NASA's roadmap to return humans to the Moon.
The biggest question concerned the readiness of lunar landers, the complex and essential machines needed to take astronauts down to the lunar surface and back up to orbit. And as Ars reported at the time, both SpaceX and Blue Origin have a significant amount of developmental and testing work left to do before even a prototype lander is ready.
But a secondary question has been the development of spacesuits, which are necessary for astronauts to exit their landers and explore the lunar surface. Less is publicly known about their development.
I hack on hardware a whole bunch, at Inanimate and at home.
AI is in the cloud. Interaction is in my room and in my hands. The job always begins by wiring together those two ends.
So the second thing I do, every single time, is bring up real-time messaging using JSON over websockets so I can connect my new device to a server, and have it emit events and listen for commands.
(The first thing I do is bring up the hardware and get basic blinkenlights.)
I want my on-device websockets client to have a super easy interface: give me an onMessage handler to deal with incoming messages.
I need built-in wi-fi config (so I can carry my prototype around to different places). And I don’t want to have to choose which libraries I’m going to use each time, I want good defaults.
That’s what Courier does, in just a handful of lines.
Honestly this isn’t rocket science. It’s no biggie. But it’s decisions I make and boilerplate I have to write for every new project, and I don’t want to vibe code and test this bit every time… I just want it to work. So I find Courier useful personally. And in the spirit of sharing, I hope it’s useful for you too.
Now your server can send real-time messages in JSON to your device, and your device can handle them. (It pulls out the type automatically for easy routing.)
That’s it!
You don’t need to hardcode wi-fi details in your code. Courier bundles WiFiManager for portable connectivity: if a network can’t be found, this library pops up its own access point and open a captive portal.
Also you get for free: sane auto-healing of both the socket and wi-fi, NTP time sync so the internal clock doesn’t drift and break your secure connection (which happens after about 72 hours), and an easy upgrade path to MQTT.
Try Courier with an M5Stick
ESP32 is a family of microcontrollers that has a special place in the hardware ecosystem: thanks to its low cost, built-in wi-fi and Bluetooth, and ease of development,
it is the platform of choice for new hardware startups
and it is great in mass-market production.
It even has an Arduino compatibility framework, so you can start with that and then iterate as you go. It’s pretty unique to go from bench to production like that.
So we love ESP32 at Inanimate.
A big player in the ESP32 ecosystem is M5: they’re China-based and have about 400 SKUs that wrap ESP32 microcontrollers in all kinds of enclosures with all kinds of peripherals and sensors. I had a blast getting a personal tour of M5 when I visited Shenzhen last year – they use their own sensors in an industrial IoT network to run and monitor their assembly line.
Now you may have seen an M5Stick or two on the socials. They’re super popular at least in my circle, people love hacking on them.
Pick up an M5Stick-C Plus2 on Amazon for less than 30 bucks! It’s an ESP32 with a screen, buttons, buzzer, gyro, battery and mic in a tiny bright yellow package.
This is what I made with real-time messaging plus my backend websocket server:
My lil traffic guy tells me the top pages on my blog in real-time ^_^ v
I have live cursors on every page of my blog (write-up and open source code) so that same system sends JSON messages via websockets to the M5Stick on my desk.
If a post gets big then I have my stick on my desk so I see immediately, then I pop over to the page and say hi to everyone with the cursor chat.
More visitors = more flowers!
Plus: shake-for-QR code, so I can quickly follow the link back to the top post.
It’s amazing when hardware starts to feel alive.
Do show me if you make anything too.
Try Courier now
To use Courier right now, first bring up your M5Stick or other ESP32 hardware so you know it works ok, and then go to the Courier repo on GitHub where you can find installation instructions, API docs and examples.
Greg Ip of the WSJ is one of my favorite economics writers, and you should always read what he writes. But in a recent post about manufacturing, I think he gets the main narrative wrong. Greg writes that America is in the middle of a “manufacturing revival”, which his headline writer calls a “stealth manufacturing boom”:
You won’t hear this from either critics or fans of President Trump’s tariffs, but there’s a manufacturing revival going on…Critics have focused on the fact that factory jobs have steadily slid since Trump took office last year…Unlike jobs, though, actual factory output has risen briskly, and may even be picking up speed. This stealth recovery, though, isn’t because of tariffs. Instead, credit goes to the most basic economic force of all: demand. The U.S. is good at making things that happen to be in big demand right now.
As a macro story, “AI boom cancels out tariffs” isn’t a bad description of the U.S. economy right now — including the manufacturing sector. But it’s just not right to say that the former is winning out when it comes to manufacturing.
Let’s look at the data. Here’s Greg’s evidence for the boom:
First, a few data points. Since January 2025, manufacturing jobs have indeed fallen by about 100,000 workers, or roughly 0.6%. In the same period, though, manufacturing production rose 2.3%, and manufacturing shipments, unadjusted for inflation, climbed 4.2%.
Regarding manufacturing shipments…why wouldn’t you adjust for inflation? Inflation is important! Shipping more dollars of stuff doesn’t indicate a boom if a dollar is worth much less. As it happens, there’s no price series that exactly corresponds to the data series for manufacturing shipments, but we can probably approximate it by using the producer price index for manufacturing. Here’s what we get when we do that:
Do you see a “stealth manufacturing boom” since January 2025? I sure don’t. What I do see is the continuation of a decades-long stagnation in American manufacturing.
Let’s look at some other measures. Here’s industrial production in the manufacturing sector:
I guess if you squint very hard, you can see a slight rise since the end of 2024. But really this is just the same story as before: American manufacturing has been stagnating since 2008.
Let’s look at gross manufacturing output, adjusted for output prices:
Same exact story, only this is quarterly data and the last quarter of 2025 looks bad.
“The National Guard were deployed on Aug. 18, and you can see a pullback in pending sales and showings for properties in the District of Columbia. I got the sense that people were already feeling uncertain, and now they’re a whole group of people saying, either (A) I hear there’s a lot of crime because we’re putting National Guard on the street, so I don’t want to move to D.C. Or (B) this is ridiculous. The federal government is in D.C., and I don’t want to be part of that kind of thing,” she said. “And it’s still taking some time for prospective buyers to want to take a look back at the District, particularly in the condo market.”
Send the Guard troops home now. And, of course, D.C. statehood now.
Do you see the same truth? That's how C.S. Lewis defined the essence of friendship. And that's what we gathered 130 people in New York to honor for Omacon two weeks ago. Seeing the same truth: A love of computers. Bespoke computers. Malleable computers. Our computers.
It's the kind of magic you can only really summon in person. We do our best online, but you instantly realize what an impoverished medium it is for creating real connections once you're all together in the same room.
So that's what we did. We connected. We shared our work, our passion, and our opinions about all these new Linux vibes. It happened in an absolutely gorgeous venue, generously offered for the occasion by Tobi and his event team at Shopify. The space had an almost comedy-club intimacy, with chairs just a few inches from the podium. Thanks to the single-track format, we made the most of that warm atmosphere. I gave the keynote.
I also got to meet Prime, TJ, Bjarne, Spencer, and Vaxry for the first time in person. Which is always a bit odd when you've been working together for a while over the internet. It feels so familiar, but like an unfinished agreement. And then, boom, it's signed with a handshake and a smile.
Same with getting to meet and talk to a ton of other Omarchy users from all walks of life. Many were programmers, but plenty were not. Some came from other Linux distributions, but most from either Windows or Mac. Everyone shared a passion for computers, though. Not just as instruments of action, but as delightful environments for play, learning, and connection.
It all added up to a massive recharge. I built Omarchy for myself, but sharing it makes it mean so much more. Seeing others enthusiastically embrace it as a starting point for their own Linux adventure is a real boost to the motivation needed to keep making it better. Because there's always more to do: more systems to cover with perfect compatibility, more corners to polish.
So that's what we're going to do, together. Make this distro reach more kindred spirits. Entice those who would love a bespoke, kintsugi system, but don't know where to start. It's never going to be for everyone, but that's also why it works as a beacon for those who choose to share the quest.
The Pentagon has canceled a ground control system for the US military's GPS satellite navigation network after the program's enduring problems "proved insurmountable," the US Space Force announced in a press release Monday.
The Global Positioning System Next-Generation Operational Control System, known by the acronym OCX, was officially canceled by Michael Duffey, the Pentagon's defense acquisition executive, on Friday, April 17, the Space Force said.
The decision to terminate the OCX program ends a 16-year, multibillion-dollar effort to design, test, and deliver a command and control system for the military's constellation of GPS navigation satellites. The program consisted of software to handle new signals from the latest generation of GPS satellites, GPS III, which started launching in 2018, along with two master control stations and modifications to ground monitoring stations around the world.
Announcing the third annual Progress Conference! The pace of technological change feels faster this year, and the progress movement is growing too. Gathering people together helps build community and establish a movement’s identity. We want this annual event to continue to connect and inspire people, catalyze new projects, and share ideas.
Thanks to everyone who made Progress Conference 2025 great: over 350 people attended, the event sold out in June, and there were hundreds of interested people on the waitlist. Several attendees again said it was the best conference they had ever attended. We shared our reflections here, including a list of write-ups from writers like Santi Ruiz, Ruy Teixeira, Ryan Puzycki, and more. We are excited to build on that momentum for 2026:
Hosted by: the Roots of Progress Institute, together with Abundance Institute, Foresight Institute, Foundation for American Innovation, Human Progress, the Institute for Humane Studies, the Institute for Progress, and Works in Progress.
When: October 8–11, 2026.
Where: Berkeley, CA, again at the Lighthaven campus that got great reviews the last two years.
Speakers: Keynote speakers include Dmitri Dolgov (Co-CEO, Waymo), Tyler Cowen (Mercatus Center), Stephen Winchell (Director, DARPA), John Martinis (Qolab; Nobel Laureate in Physics), and Michael Kremer (University of Chicago; Nobel Laureate in Economics). 20+ additional speakers will share ideas across three tracks: Human Talent & Potential, AI & Robotics, and Security & Resilience. Full speaker list so far here.
Attendees: We expect ~400 leaders across tech, policy, and culture; builders, founders, policymakers, storytellers, writers, and students. This is an invitation-only event, but anyone can apply for an invitation. Complete the open application by May 31st.
Program: Similar to 2025, the main two-day conference will happen all day on Friday and Saturday. Participants will attend talks on topics ranging from AI and robotics to housing construction to psychology and philosophy of builders, organize and run unconference sessions, mingle in the garden, and more. Thursday and Sunday are add-on days, with optional gatherings for interest groups and other activities like factory tours to Bay Area startups.
Children under 12 years old are welcome—must be accompanied by a parent at all times (except during childcare). We also plan to have on-site childcare available on Friday and Saturday with progress-themed programming.
Sponsors: Special thanks to our early sponsors Coefficient Giving, Astera Institute, Jane Street, Ken Broad, Works in Progress, Halcyon Futures, Inclusive Abundance, LENS, MNX, Archbridge Institute, Good Science Project, the Institute for Humane Studies, Circulate Planning & Policy, and the Foundation for Economic Education. Sponsorships make events like this one possible. We have more sponsorships available; view sponsorship opportunities here.
Our mission is to establish a new philosophy of progress for the 21st century, and to build a culture of progress. Now is a critical time for our culture: Technological change is happening. We can try to fight it, we can let it happen, or we can channel the path of technology consciously and deliberately towards human flourishing. It is ours to choose, as individuals and organizations.
Everyone knows the Luddites smashed looms. What is less appreciated is that the loom was the first serious programmable device — the direct ancestor of the computer. Thus, the Luddites weren’t just the first to resist automation. They were in some ways the first to attack AI.
The Jacquard loom, introduced in France circa 1805, used a chain of punched cards to control which threads were raised for each pass of the shuttle. The ability to change the pattern of the loom’s weave by simply changing cards was an important conceptual precursor to computer programming. Babbage borrowed the idea directly for the Analytical Engine in the 1830s.
The Luddites lost–they were violently suppressed by the UK military–but more generally they lost because programmable looms brought patterned clothes to the masses.
Prior to its invention, the creation of complex patterns required skilled and labour-intensive manual labour, often involving large teams of weavers. With the Jacquard loom, a single operator could control the machine and produce intricate designs with relative ease.
This innovation greatly increased the speed and efficiency of textile production. It also opened up new possibilities for creativity and design, as the loom enabled the production of intricate patterns that were previously unattainable. The Jacquard loom contributed to the democratization of textile manufacturing, making intricate fabrics accessible to a wider audience
By the time Jacquard died in 1834, thousands of his looms were operating in Manchester, an epi-center of the Luddites riots. Moreover, just over 100 years later, Manchester birthed the Manchester Baby and the Manchester Mark 1, the first electronic stored-program computer. And who was hired to program the latter? None other than Alan Turing.
Ada Lovelace had foretold it all beautifully: “the Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves.”
Addendum: I thank Claude for assistance on this post.
It’s been a few months since the last post so here are some blogs and newsletters I’ve started following since. Here are the previous posts and here’s my blogroll. I should maybe stop splitting that (and this) into blogs / newsletters because that distinction seems less useful than topics.
Building Slack – I’m surprised I haven’t mentioned this previously because I’ve been reading it a while. A history of Slack, the app(s) and the company.
Dan Catt’s Miniblog – As well as all the other things he does (newsletter, videos, plotting, printing, actual paid work) Dan’s got a newish blog. I like the simplicity of it: one photo and a few paragraphs.
Denis Defreyne – I can’t remember how I came across his weeknotes, but I’m enjoying them. More good weeknotes please!
Ephemeral 80s – Writing about objects from the 1980s could be very “Whatever happened to proper bin men?” but this blog’s few posts so far aren’t the usual things.
Jon Heslop – More good weeknotes! Even if they’re not actually every week.
Peter Rukavina – A good personal blog (since 1999) by a writer and letterpress printer in Canada.
Piccalilli – Really good, detailed posts about front-end development.
The Shape of Everything – “Mostly about Mac stuff,” by Gus Mueller who created Acorn, the image editing app I use, among other things.
Unsung – I recently whizzed through every post – over 250 since December – on this blog from Marcin Wichary about UI design, software quality, etc.
Super Chart Island – I’m adding this a few hours after publishing this post because having only just found it I know I’ll be following it. Articles about every best selling computer game in Britain from 1983 onwards.
Newsletters
Dan Catt’s Newsletter – I realised a few months ago that I hadn’t subscribed to Dan’s newsletter about his print studio etc, an error I swiftly rectified.
Django News – A weekly email with lots of links and info about the web development framework. Nicely done.
The Hiro Report – A weekly email containing a handful of interesting new apps, gadgets and other products. Always at least one thing I click on and ponder.
Transmissions from Nowhere – My old friend Ted is researching “the occult underbelly of surrealism and socialist movements, while exploring the eclectic art scene of Aotearoa NZ”.
Late Saturday evening, Josh Dawsey and Annie Linskey of the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump was so unstable and angry after learning on April 3 that Iranians had shot down an American jet that his aides kept him out of the room as they received updates, simply telling him what was going on at important moments.
The journalists describe an erratic president who entered the war after Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu convinced him the Iranian people would support such strikes and after his successful extraction of Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro and his wife Celia Flores convinced him the military could pull off another quick victory. He seemed to believe that if his gamble worked, he would be saving the world.
But while the strikes did indeed kill Iran’s top leaders and badly damage its military, the Iranians closed the Strait of Hormuz. Trump did not foresee this outcome, although he was warned of it. He told his team that the Iranian government would give up before it closed the strait and, if it did manage to close the strait, the U.S. military would handle it. The journalists report Trump has “marveled at the ease with which the strait was closed.”
Once the strait was closed, the president flipped back and forth between demanding other countries help reopen it and insisting the U.S. didn’t need any help, between wanting to fight and calling for negotiations. On April 5, Easter morning, after the recovery of the second airman, he turned to trying to scare Iranian leaders into reopening the strait and ending the conflict, warning: “Open the F*ckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell.”
He added an Islamic prayer to be as insulting as possible, he later told senior administration officials. That, like his threat that “a whole civilization will die tonight,” was “improvisational,” officials told Dawsey and Linskey.
Seemingly unable to figure out how to find a way out of the war, Trump has told aides he wants to focus on other topics, and shifted his attention to fundraising events for the midterms or details for his ballroom. Clara Ence Morse and Dan Diamond of the Washington Post offered proof of Trump’s growing enthusiasm for his ballroom, noting that he has called public attention to it on about a third of the days this year, mentioning it less than tariffs or Iran but more than healthcare insurance or affordability. And his focus on it has increased as the year has progressed.
On Friday, April 17, after Israel and the government of Lebanon agreed to a ceasefire, Iran opened the Strait of Hormuz to commercial—but not military—vessels. Trump declared the strait was “completely open and ready for business” and that Iranian leaders had “agreed to everything,” including “never to close the Strait of Hormuz again.” But Iran’s chief negotiator posted on social media that Trump had made seven claims in an hour and that all seven of them were false. Iranians said that if the U.S. continued its blockade of Iranian ports, as Trump said it would, they would close the strait again.
On Saturday, they did, firing on a tanker and two other vessels, all of which left the encounters safely. Yesterday Trump announced on social media that the USS Spruance intercepted an Iranian-flagged cargo ship, the Touska, as it tried to pass the U.S. naval blockade of Iranian ports. According to Trump, the U.S. Navy “stopped them right in the tracks by blowing a hole in the engineroom” and then took control of the vessel. Trump posted: “We have full custody of the ship, and are seeing what’s on board!”
Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) posted: “We are spending billions to keep our entire navy in the Strait to fecklessly fail to open a waterway that wasn’t closed until Trump’s pointless war of choice closed it. He’s just burning your tax money.”
The two-week ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran, begun on April 7, expires on Wednesday, April 22. On Friday, Trump said: “Maybe I won’t extend it, but the blockade is going to remain. But maybe I won’t extend it, so you have a blockade, and unfortunately, we’ll have to start dropping bombs again.”
Today Nick March of the BBC explained the fact pattern behind the general suspicion that someone is engaging in insider trading over Trump’s war announcements. After matching the president’s market-moving statements to the trade volume on a number of financial markets, March found “a consistent pattern of spikes just hours, or sometimes minutes, before a social media post or media interview was made public.” Marsh notes a similar spike over Trump’s announcement of his “Liberation Day” tariffs of last April.
A new NBC News Decision Desk Poll out yesterday showed that 63% of Americans disapprove of Trump’s job performance, while only 37% approve. Fifty percent say they disapprove strongly, a sign that they will be highly motivated to vote in the midterms. Sixty-seven percent of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of Iran, including 54% who strongly disapprove.
This morning, Trump’s social media account responded to the bad news of the weekend, including the Wall Street Journal story, by dismissing it. “Israel never talked me into the war with Iran,” the account posted. “[T]he results of Oct[ober] 7th, added to my lifelong opinion that IRAN CAN NEVER HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON, did. I watch and read the FAKE NEWS Pundits and Polls in total disbelief. 90% of what they say are lies and made up stories, and the polls are rigged, much as the 2020 Presidential Election was rigged. Just like the results in Venezuela, which the media doesn’t like talking about, the results in Iran will be amazing—And if Iran’s new leaders (Regime Change!) are smart, Iran can have a great and prosperous future! President DJT”
Over the weekend, David S. Cloud, Alexander Saeedy, and Nick Timiraos of the Wall Street Journal reported that officials from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have asked Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Treasury and Federal Reserve officials if the U.S. will provide a financial backstop for the UAE if the Iran war continues to damage its economy.
Meanwhile, over the weekend, Senator Jon Ossoff (D-GA) reminded an audience that Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, is “on the Saudi payroll for $2 billion,” a reference to the $2 billion a Saudi sovereign wealth fund controlled by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) has invested in Kushner’s private equity firm.
“And now he’s leading American diplomacy in the Middle East. Apparently, while at the very same time, asking princes and sheikhs across the Arab world to give him billions more. If you’re watching this online, don’t take my word for it. Look it up for yourself.
“Can you imagine…a normal sitting U.S. ambassador just hitting up Saudi Grand Prince Mohammed bin Salman for billions of dollars? But he’s a Trump. A royal. A princeling. The rules are for us, not for them.
“And it’s not just Jared getting in on the action. A company owned in part by Eric and Don Jr. has been pitching Gulf kingdoms on its drone interceptors during this war. The Financial Times reported: ‘Pete Hegseth’s broker looked to buy defense fund before Iran attack.’
“I tell you what, never before have we seen so little effort to hide so much corruption. The Mar-a-Lago Mafia has taken American corruption to spectacular new heights.”
This afternoon, Trump’s account posted: “I’m winning a War, BY A LOT, things are going very well.”
But things were not going very well. On Friday, Sarah Fitzpatrick published an article in The Atlantic that portrayed Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director Kash Patel as a poor manager who is terrified he is going to lose his job and whose overuse of alcohol, tendency to disappear, and purges of FBI agents who had investigated Trump endanger our national security.
After Patel’s behavior in the locker room of the U.S. men’s Olympic hockey team, during which he was filmed shouting and chugging a beer, Ryan J. Reilly, Gordon Lubold, and Katherine Doyle of NBC News reported that Trump was unhappy with Patel over the incident. Shortly afterward, Patel directed the FBI to fire at least half a dozen FBI employees who had been connected to the 2022 search of Mar-a-Lago, the Trump Organization’s property in Florida, where Trump was storing classified documents he retained after his first term.
Over the weekend, Patel seemed to try again to curry favor with the president. He told Fox News Channel host Maria Bartiromo that the Department of Justice is about to make arrests related to the 2020 presidential election that Trump insists—falsely—was rigged. “We have the information that backs President Trump’s claim,” Patel said.
This morning, Patel sued The Atlantic and Fitzpatrick for $250 million for publishing “a sweeping, malicious, and defamatory hit piece,” full of “obviously fabricated allegations.” The suit says “Director Patel does not drink to excess…, and this has not, and has never been, a source of concern across the government.”
The Atlantic says: “We stand by our reporting on Kash Patel, and we will vigorously defend The Atlantic and our journalists against this meritless lawsuit.” Scott MacFarlane of MeidasTouch notes that the discovery phase of this defamation lawsuit, during which parties testify under oath, “could be quite something.”
And yet at the end of the day, it was Trump’s secretary of labor, Lori Chavez-DeRemer, who abruptly resigned after accusations that she has abused her position, drinks on the job, and has had an affair with a subordinate. An investigation into her conduct was nearing its completion. She is the third person to leave Trump’s cabinet: all are women.
When asked about Patel’s fitness for office, House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries said: “Kash Patel is deeply unqualified, deeply unserious, and his behavior is deeply un-American. And he should no longer be the FBI director. That shouldn’t surprise anyone that I hold that view because he never should have been confirmed to begin with. And we have to stop putting all the blame on the people who nominated this incompetent, toxic, malignant individual. What about the people who confirmed him? And it’s extraordinary to me that Senate Republicans confirmed people like Kristi Noem, Pam Bondi, Pete Hegseth, RFK Jr., and Kash Patel. All of them. Deeply unserious and deeply unqualified. And now the country is paying the price because of the individuals that Donald Trump chose to nominate as part of the Trump cartel that’s now doing great damage to the nation, and the fact that Senate Republicans, like helpless sheep, went along with it all.”
Tim Cook, in a letter addressed, simply, “To the Apple community”:
For the past 15 years I’ve started just about every morning the
same way. I open my email and I read notes I received the day
before from Apple’s users all over the world.
You share little pieces of your lives with me and tell me things
you want me to know about how Apple has touched you. About the
moment your mom was saved by her Apple Watch. About the perfect
selfie you captured at the summit of a mountain that seemed
impossible to climb. You thank me for the ways Mac has changed
what you can do at work and sometimes give me a hard time because
something you care about isn’t working like it should.
In every one of those emails I feel the beating heart of our
shared humanity. I feel a sense of deepening obligation to work
harder and push further. But most of all, I feel a gratitude that
I cannot put into words, that I somehow got to be the person on
the other end of those emails, the leader of a company that
ignites imaginations and enriches lives in such profound ways it
defies description. What an honor and a privilege it has been.
In its annual Environmental Progress Report released today,
Apple marked progress toward Apple 2030, the company’s
ambitious goal to be carbon neutral across its entire footprint
by the end of this decade. Apple’s greenhouse gas emissions in
2025 remain down over 60 percent compared to 2015 levels,
holding constant from 2024 even in a year of significant
business growth. The report highlights additional progress in
renewable energy, materials innovation and recycling, water
stewardship, and zero waste.
On the packaging front:
Apple completed the transition to 100 percent fiber-based
packaging last year, fulfilling its pledge to remove plastic from
packaging by 2025. Over the past 10 years, Apple engineers and
designers have developed alternatives to common packaging
components, replacing plastic screen protectors and trays with
versions made with recycled or responsibly sourced paper. They
also innovated to make packaging more recyclable, designing the
largest boxes, like for the new Studio Display XDR, to collapse
into smaller pieces that fit into a home recycling bin. Apple
avoided more than 15,000 metric tons of plastic in the past five
years alone — the equivalent of about 500 million plastic water
bottles.
Apple made this shift while not compromising a whit on the design quality of its packaging. If anything, I’d say Apple products have better packaging than ever. How they look, how they feel, the experience of opening them. Some of the company’s most talented and most effective designers work on the packaging team.
Earlier in the announcement:
As Apple celebrates Earth Day with its teams, partners, and
customers around the world — including with a special offer for
users who bring in their Apple devices for recycling at
participating Apple Store locations — here’s a look at the
progress the company is making across its environmental
initiatives.
That special offer, the 2026 Earth Day Promotion, is a PDF. That PDF file is not the work of Apple’s best designers. Jiminy.
It’s a profoundly different feeling today than the last time Apple’s CEO announced his transition to chairman of the board, and his chosen successor was promoted to replace him as CEO.
In August 2011, Steve Jobs was sick. For years he’d managed to stay a step, sometimes two, ahead of the pancreatic cancer he’d been battling since 2003, but no more. Jobs wrote, in his letter to the company’s board and the Apple community: “I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO, I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come.”
Unfortunately, indeed. Cook inherited a company with extraordinary potential growth in front of it, but in deep existential grief. He led the company — and its community — through that grief and achieved that potential.
The transition Apple and Tim Cook announced today is entirely different. No one’s hand was forced. There is nothing unpleasant. Apple’s business is firing on nearly all cylinders. This year’s iPhone 17 lineup is arguably the best ever. The Mac is more popular than ever — exemplified just last month by the introduction of the $600 MacBook Neo, a machine so fun, with a price so low, that the only problem is that it’s selling so well that Apple is reportedly running out of A18 Pro chips to put in it. The iPad lineup is strong, AirPods remain dominant, and I see Apple Watches on wrists everywhere I go.
Tim Cook is 65 years old, has been CEO for 15 years, and is going out on top. Looking only at the numbers, Cook is the GOAT. But Cook, by all accounts, would be the first to tell us he doesn’t want to be judged by the numbers alone. Or as he famously put it himself at a shareholders meeting, early in his reign, “When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind, I don’t consider the bloody ROI.”
Jobs made the right pick for his successor. And while only time will tell, it sure feels today like Cook has too. Cook has never been a product person and to his credit, he never once pretended to be. (That was John Sculley’s downfall, in a nut.) With the table set by the budding iPhone and nascent iPad products Jobs left behind, Apple didn’t need a product person at the helm in the 2010s. They needed someone to let the existing products blossom and expand. Today, it feels to me like Apple needs a product guy at the helm again. Someone with the itch to spearhead the creation of new things. Of course Cook’s successor came from within the company’s ranks. And John Ternus, more than anyone else at the company, seems like that person.
Here’s Cook, quoted in Apple’s announcement today: “John Ternus has the mind of an engineer, the soul of an innovator, and the heart to lead with integrity and with honor. He is a visionary whose contributions to Apple over 25 years are already too numerous to count, and he is without question the right person to lead Apple into the future. I could not be more confident in his abilities and his character, and I look forward to working closely with him on this transition and in my new role as executive chairman.”
Regarding that new role, Apple’s announcement states:
As executive chairman, Cook will assist with certain aspects
of the company, including engaging with policymakers around
the world.
Back in December, linking to the Financial Times’s blockbuster scoop accurately foretelling this announcement, I predicted:
I would also bet that Cook moves into the role of executive
chairman, and will still play a significant, if not leading, role
for the company when it comes to domestic and internationalpolitics. Especially with regard to
Trump.
Sounds right. The only problem I can see with this arrangement is the potential for Cook to stand over Ternus’s shoulder — keeping Ternus in his shadow. That doesn’t sound like Tim Cook to me. A Bob Iger situation, I do not foresee.
After I gathered my thoughts back in August 2011, under the title “Resigned”, I wrote:
Apple’s products are replete with Apple-like features and details,
embedded in Apple-like apps, running on Apple-like devices, which
come packaged in Apple-like boxes, are promoted in Apple-like ads,
and sold in Apple-like stores. The company is a fractal design.
Simplicity, elegance, beauty, cleverness, humility. Directness.
Truth. Zoom out enough and you can see that the same things that
define Apple’s products apply to Apple as a whole. The company
itself is Apple-like. The same thought, care, and painstaking
attention to detail that Steve Jobs brought to questions like
“How should a computer work?”, “How should a phone work?”,
“How should we buy music and apps in the digital age?” he also
brought to the most important question: “How should a company
that creates such things function?”
Jobs’s greatest creation isn’t any Apple product. It is
Apple itself.
I remember writing that piece with such a heavy heart. It hurt. But there was hope. Those words stand up, and I can quote them today in the context of Cook handing the mantle to Ternus with nothing but the hope, and none of the hurt.
CEOs typically leave companies in one of three ways: with a hook, on a gurney, or on their own terms. Cook, seemingly, is doing it entirely on his own terms. One can reasonably argue with certain of his strategic decisions over the years. I certainly have. But I don’t think you can argue that Cook ever did anything for any reason other than what he believed was in the company’s best interest. Not his personal interest. Not employees. Not users. Not shareholders. Not developers (ha!). The company’s interest always came first. There’s a nobility to his singleminded focus on Apple itself, as an abiding institution, and his faith that what’s best for Apple will ultimately prove best for everyone involved with it: employees, shareholders, users, and, yes, even developers. If he’s made mistakes, they’re errors in taste, not mistaken priorities. He is the ultimate company man at the ultimate company.
Cook has transformed Apple in his own image. The company is much more predictable now than it ever was, or could have been, under Jobs. It now runs on an annual schedule that can be printed on a calendar. There is far less drama, and no scandal. And there is seemingly no drama, at all, in this particular transition, despite the incredibly high stakes and the (justifiably) large egos in Apple’s leadership team. Cook inherited the greatest company in the world. He’s handing it over to Ternus in even better shape than what Jobs handed to him. Even the timing of the announcement and the transition, on Apple’s annual calendar, seems perfect. Cook oversees one last WWDC in June, then Ternus takes the helm on the cusp of Apple’s announcement of new iPhones in September. It’s hard to imagine a more orderly, confidence-inspiring, exciting-but-not-at-all-surprising, this-feels-right way to do this.
All of that, I am sure, is just the way Cook wants it.
And, if you agree that Apple itself was Jobs’s greatest product, Cook really is a product person after all.
Daring Fireball t-shirts and hoodies are back. Order now, and we’ll start printing shirts at the end of this week and shipping them out next week. Go ahead and place your order now, while I gather my thoughts about today’s Apple leadership news.
The initial heart transplant was not greeted with universal applause. Shortly after Dr. Christiaan Barnard performed the procedure for the first time in 1967, people bombarded his hospital in South Africa with letters that characterized the doctor as a butcher and a ghoul. A fellow cardiologist likened the operation to a form of cannibalism. Many people criticized Barnard for picking one life over another and playing God.
It did not take long for most of this criticism to dissipate. Within a couple of years, the public became accustomed to the idea of heart transplants and then they welcomed them. Last year, about 10,000 people worldwide had heart transplants, while nearly 165,000 people received a kidney, liver, lung or pancreas.
There would be far more organ transplants if there were more viable organs available. Which brings us to the next medical and ethical quandary that society may soon face.
A three-year-old startup named Kind Biotechnology has begun work on what it calls an integrated organ network, or ION. This acronym undersells what Kind is making, which is a collection of organs that can be grown inside of an animal’s womb and then harvested for transplantation. Cue the gasps from some and the cheers from others.
By creating a series of genetic edits, Kind can alter the development of an embryo so that it forms organs without also forming limbs, a central nervous system and brain. The result is a group of organs growing in the womb. It sounds like science fiction, but Kind has already done this hundreds of times in mice and now rats, according to Justin Rebo, the company’s founder and CEO.
In the months ahead, Kind plans to expand its technology to larger mammals like pigs and possibly sheep with the hopes of producing organs good enough to endure the transplantation process. One day, Rebo expects that humans might be able to use these animal-grown organs to deal with medical emergencies and to help people live longer.
“We’re working on a platform to build abundant organ medicine, which we believe is a path not only to treating organ failure, but eventually to being more broadly medically useful and even impacting human lifespan,” Rebo says. “The point of medicine is to make people live longer and healthier lives. That’s what it’s always been. And that’s what we’re working on.”
TENS OF thousands of people languish waiting for viable organs each year. Scientists have been trying to solve this problem for decades by trying to create individual organs in their labs. In some cases, they take the cells of an organ and then try to coax them into developing more fully to make, say, a lab-grown kidney or liver. Companies like United Therapeutics and eGenesis have also been editing the genes of pig organs to make them more suitable for human use.
While there has been some success with these approaches, Rebo considers them too basic and limited to produce the full complement of organs that humans need. He contends that you can’t create the best organs in isolation and that they need to develop alongside each other. “The heart relies on the kidney to modulate the system environment in the right way to allow it to live and grow,” he says. “And both rely on the lungs and the liver and so forth, and both need access to nutrients, which is provided by the intestines.”
Justin Rebo at the KindBio lab
Rebo is a doctor and scientist with a long history in the bio-tech and longevity fields. And he’s not alone on this quest to create organs inside of what could be called headless bodies. R3 Bio, co-founded by John Schloendorn and Alice Gilman, is pursuing similar technology, although without much detail as of yet. Gilman has talked about trying to create animal models that could be used for medical testing so that researchers would no longer need to experiment on living, conscious mammals like primates. RenewalBio in Israel is also believed to be working in this area, trying to build organs from a patient’s own cells. (Schloendorn and Rebo were previously collaborators.)
Before even getting to the ethical considerations of Kind’s technology, there are myriad practical, scientific matters to confront.
Rebo’s vision is that you might grow a collection of organs inside of a pig’s or other animal’s womb and then have those organs placed into humans. To do this well, there would need to be genetic edits made to the organs so that the human bodies would accept them. In addition, you would need to mature the organs outside of the womb so that they could grow and be suitable for humans of different ages.
All of these are incredibly difficult technological challenges, and it’s unclear that we can actually pull them off in anything resembling a cost-effective, repeatable fashion in the nearish future. Rebo, though, talks matter of factly about taking today’s lab research and making it more concrete. He thinks all the major problems are solvable via advances with genetic editing technology and hardware systems that can support the development of organs outside of the body by helping regulate hormonal, immune and other functions.
“So initially the transplants would be into neonatal pigs or neonatal whatever larger animal that we use,” he says. “But even beyond that, I think many people don’t know is that there are case reports where kidneys, for example, were transplanted from a seven-month infant into an adult and they were life sustaining. I want to emphasize that we don’t have a plan to do a human system. But we have seen that you don’t have to keep these things going for an extended period of time for their organs to be useful.”
The notion of a body being able to develop in a healthy fashion without a central nervous system and brain to aid in the process seems hard to fathom. This, however, does happen on occasion in nature. There are babies born without brain stems and without their neocortex, which is responsible for cognition, and that survive for years – the most famous example being Baby K.
The ethical questions are equally challenging. There’s something very off-putting about the idea of headless meat sacks being grown for harvest.
That said, organ transplantation is unpleasant as is. There’s a black market for organs that is the stuff of nightmares. And, in general, sick old people are sitting around waiting for young people to have a car crashes or some other horrific accidents so that they might get an organ and live a few more years, which is a grim calculus. Beyond all of that, what we already do in terms of harvesting sentient animals for food is abhorrent, and most of us seem to deal with this just fine. It does not feel like a huge leap, at least to me, to think about taking an organ from a brainless sack to save a child or a loved one.
“I understand that this looks weird,” Rebo says. “But ultimately, it’s a system that prioritizes ethics and prioritizes something that can actually work. We can grow these things with our present technology.”
While Kind must currently grow the organs in the womb of an animal, there are futures where similar functions could take place inside of artificial wombs. We wrote earlier this year about Becoming Bio, which has developed an artificial placenta. Over the last couple of years, scientists have also made huge strides in the perfusion systems that keep organs functioning outside of the body. Bexorg does this with brains. And Science Corp. recently unveiled a whole perfusion product line.
Rebo, 47, grew up in Pennsylvania – one of those kids who built Tesla coils and lasers for fun. After obtaining his medical degree in 2010, Rebo went right into bio-tech working with embryonic stem cells and then on parabiosis, where an old animal and a young animal have their bodies fused together to share a circulatory system.
“Ever since I was very young, I thought that the wisest and best people in the world must be working on the obviously most important problem, which is to make people live longer and healthier lives,” he says.
He started KindBio about three years ago after growing dissatisfied with the rate of progress in the longevity field. Today, the company, located in New Hampshire, has a handful of employees. Rebo declines to say how much money the company has raised or from whom.
Kind has spent much of its time researching and identifying the genes that disrupt the formation of the central nervous system and brainstem and other genes that lower the metabolic demands of the organ systems to make them easier to sustain. “They’re not small, tiny cutouts,” he says. “We’re talking about taking out multiple exons.”
Rebo says that Kind has proven out its technology in mice and will move to larger animals this year – first in pigs and then possibly sheep. The company has yet to try a transplant with the organs it has grown and does not expect to do so until the work on the larger animals begins. “The timeline in the larger systems is longer than in mice because mice grow very fast and the generation time is short,” Rebo says. “I would like to have large animal IONs in less than three years and would consider the goal of that stage of research to be a transplant and demonstrating that the organs are life-sustaining.”
The technology, if it works, will start out expensive. Rebo, though, can see a future where the price comes down enough to perhaps open the organ work up to other uses beyond transplants. It could, for one, help with animal testing of drugs. “From there, you can imagine getting to a level of scale and cost effectiveness where you could even look at ethical animal products more broadly. You could imagine a leather application or even a meat application.”
Paul Waldman died on March 22, 2026. As far as I know we weren’t related, but he hovered around my Google alerts for years, a well-known painter and sculptor, though not famous enough to otherwise reach one like me who doesn’t know much about the art world. Because I never bothered to read more about him, I was unaware that the artist and the bodybuilder were the same person.
The bodybuilder Paul Waldman — now this version of my namesake I was more familiar with. Not that I knew anything about him either; he was represented by a single photo on the cover of the August 1954 issue of Strength & Health magazine, popping up in the “Images” tab of those same searches. The 17-year-old Waldman poses on rocks before a waterfall, hairless below the neck, muscles inflated in a way that shouts “This teenager spent the last two years doing a million pushups,” which he apparently did. He adopts a serious expression, no doubt trying to look older than his baby face shows him to be. But those abs! They bulge to the point where they just might burst.
He entered bodybuilding contests, and in 1953 was awarded the title of Most Ideal High School Physique. The next year, he was crowned Mr. New York City. Strength and Health magazine featured him in a cover story that took the measure of his unusual strength.
“A press on bench with 355 pounds is a worthy mark for anyone, but for a 17-year-old youth it is phenomenal,” the article said. “In the basic exercises, Paul Waldman is one of the best performers in his age group.”
The magazine also noted another gift.
“Paul Waldman, known to Strength and Health readers for his fine physique, may someday be well known to art lovers for his talent as a painter,” it said. “He is applying himself diligently to his studies and shows promise of reaching prominence in the field of fine arts.”
I never had much talent for visual art, but this Paul Waldman I recognized as a version of myself the first time I saw that photo. The short Jewish kid who one day decided to remake his body into something more formidable through relentless calisthenics in his bedroom? That was me a few decades after the prior Paul Waldman, doing pullups on a bar I squeezed into the doorframe of my closet. I think I know the feeling of teenage compulsion that drove him.
In 1954, the word “bodybuilder” did not denote what it would come to mean a couple of decades later, those roided-out monsters of inhuman proportions who can’t buy regular clothes or fit in an airplane seat. Just who declared Paul Waldman the possessor of the “Most Ideal High School Physique” in 1953 is unclear; this honor is mentioned without elaboration in the obituary and another Times article from 1993 about his artwork. But at the time, bodybuilding was a curiosity, not far from the realm of circus sideshows with mustachioed “strongmen” in striped singlets.
And in the photo, he’s just not that big, certainly not by today’s standards. Sure, those abs are something else, but if you saw him fully clothed he’d look like a regular person. Even so, in the 1950s regular people didn’t “go to the gym” as part of their weekly routines. Fitness as a mass obsession with an entire economy built around it was still years away (Natalia Mehlman Petrzela’s book Fit Nation: The Gains & Pains of America’s Exercise Obsession recounts this history), and the distance between a civilian and a semi-pro muscleman was not too large.
And despite the grunts of a few young men tossing medicine balls around at the YMHA, bodybuilding was definitely not a Jewish thing. That didn’t stop young Jews from yearning after physical prowess of a kind that had traditionally not been valued in their community, though. And they had their heroes; the year after Paul Waldman’s cover appearance, Sandy Koufax would make his major league debut and go on to become the greatest Jewish athlete in history, and perhaps the greatest pitcher who ever lived (look him up, kids).
Koufax too was not that distant in appearance from the ordinary boys in Brooklyn among whom he grew up; he was a man of average height and weight, and had you seen him at the butcher’s without knowing who he was you wouldn’t have pegged him for an athlete. Even his left arm, an instrument of such power it might as well have been delivered to Moses on Mt. Sinai as a gift to the Jews, was a fragile thing, requiring lengthy ice baths after every game (state-of-the-art physical therapy at the time) and forcing Koufax’s retirement at the tender age of 30.
No one would write inspiring books about Paul Waldman’s bodily achievements; the glory of his abs notwithstanding, it was his art that made a lasting impression on the world. Which is a lesson for young men — or any men — wondering what they’re supposed to do and supposed to be.
That lesson could not be more urgent. We are ruled by someone who embodies every sordid and poisonous aspect of manhood, packed into one repulsive soul. Your government plans to erect an MMA arena on the White House lawn so the nation can celebrate 250 years of democracy by watching young men beat each other bloody. Meanwhile, a thousand “influencers” scream that masculinity can be found in blasting your lats and maxxing your jawline and pouring contempt on women and measuring yourself relentlessly by whether you can make other men feel bad about themselves.
So the lesson of the late Paul Waldman in his duality is this: Sure, go ahead and work out. Exercise is healthy for both body and mind. But that will not make you a man. Much more importantly: Create something. It could be art, but it doesn’t have to be. Put something worthwhile into the world that wouldn’t have been there without you. Forget about being macho and be a mensch. One day your muscles will wither and die, but if you do it right, the things you made and the effect you had on other people will not.
Paul Waldman, Flowers and Helpers, 2010
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This paper compares agentic AI systems and human economists performing the same causal inference tasks. AI systems and humans generally obtain similar median causal effect estimates. While there is substantial dispersion of estimates across model instances, the human distributions of estimates have wider tails. Using AI models as reviewers to compare and rank “submissions,” the following ranking emerges regardless of reviewer model: (1) Codex GPT-5.4, (2) Codex GPT-5.3-Codex, (3) Claude Code Opus 4.6, and (4) Human Researchers. These findings suggest that agentic AI systems will allow us to scale empirical research in economics.
I enjoy the name of the author, namely Serafin Grundl. Here is the paper, via Ethan Mollick. You could interpret these results as showing the AIs have fewer hallucinations. And just to reiterate a key point from the paper:
The second part of this paper is an AI review tournament in which “submissions” (codes and write-ups) from humans and the AI models are compared and ranked against each other. The reviewers are the following AI models: Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview, Opus 4.6 and GPT-5.4. For each review the reviewer is asked to write a report comparing four submissions (human, Opus 4.6, GPT-5.3-Codex, GPT-5.4). Each reviewer model writes comparison reports for the same 300 comparison groups. The average rankings are strikingly similar across reviewer models: (1) Codex GPT-5.4, (2) Codex GPT-5.3-Codex, (3) Claude Code Opus 4.6, and 2(4) Human Researchers.
This post has benefited from generous contributions from Austin Vernon, Malcolm Davis, Sam D’Amico, and others who do not necessarily endorse the conclusions of this piece. I will follow Australian spelling conventions in this piece.
I’ve written a few pieces over the years about Australian energy and economicpolicy, and now I’m dipping my toes into defence. The usual disclaimers apply; this post represents my opinions only. I’m a dual US/Australia citizen, resident in Los Angeles, where I founded and run Terraform Industries, a solar synthetic fuel tech startup. I write this as someone who is familiar with the 2023 Defence Strategic Review, the 2024 and 2026 National Defence Strategies, and the 2024 and 2026 Integrated Investment Programs (IIP). While each successive document diagnoses the strategic environment with increasing accuracy it allocates capital against a threat model that no longer exists.
Australia spends nearly AUD $60B/year (US $40B/year) on defence, about 2% of GDP. The 2026 National Defence Strategy commits to raising this to 3% by 2033 and allocates $425B over the coming decade, but increased expenditure won’t buy increased security if it’s spent on weapons that are no longer determinative.
To avoid burying the lead, it is my contention that Australia should be able to achieve far more bang for its buck running competitive, lean, mean domestic weapons development programs focused on the newly demonstrated and increasingly determinative drones-of-various-kinds platforms. This is in stark contrast to the existing practice of spending >90% of acquisitions funding on foreign weapons platforms and much of the remainder on outrageously expensive failed development programs, such as the Hunter class anti-submarine frigate. This ship, which will spend eight years under construction until first launch in 2032, was based on a British design and will end up costing over $7b, per hull!
Let’s contrast this to the US, hardly a paragon of lean defense spending. $7b would buy you a Nimitz-class nuclear aircraft carrier – including the planes. It would buy you the complete ground up development costs of nuclear attack submarines, with enough left over to pilot ballistic missile submarines and develop the original trident missile. It would buy you the complete ground up development of Falcon 9 and Starlink. That’s just for a single Hunter-class hull – Australia is currently planning to build six!
Why maintain a defence force at all?
The primary purpose is to maintain Australia’s capacity for peaceful self determination indefinitely into the future. That is, absolute national sovereignty requires Australia to maintain the ability to secure its territory, deter hostile aggression, and control its destiny.
Without putting too fine a point on it, the purpose of the Australian Defence Force is to ensure that the calamity that befell Ukraine can never occur to Australia. While focused on Australia, this analysis could also be translated with minimal changes to other middle powers.
Australia is rich (US$69,360 GDP per capita), populous (28m + 1m diaspora), educated, peaceful, democratic, liberal, and financially stable. It has enormous territory and unmatched natural resources. It has much that foreign powers covet through either open or covert warfare.
Australia’s current GDP exceeds that of every WW2 belligerent in 1940, even the US. It exceeds the combined economic power of all the Axis powers. And yet somehow, in 1940, in a world before computers, reliable diesel engines, modern healthcare, all the WW2 powers were able to churn out planes, tanks, ships, submarines, and munitions. The US produced nearly 300,000 planes. Even countries with terrible climates that are still poverty stricken in 2026, like Russia, were able to produce 160,000 aircraft back in the early 1940s.
In contrast, wealthy, modern Australia was able to assemble 73 F-18 fighters from mostly imported components between 1984 and 1990, and nothing for the last 36 years.
This is a festering problem that is now inviting catastrophe.
What the strategy documents say
The Albanese government’s position on Australian defence rests on three documents released in three consecutive biennial cycles.
The 2023 Defence Strategic Review (Smith / Houston) concluded that the ADF is “not fully fit for purpose” and that the historical ten-year warning window before major conflict no longer applies. It accepted 105 of 108 classified recommendations and identified six priorities: AUKUS nuclear-powered submarines, long-range strike and domestic munitions manufacture, northern base hardening, workforce retention, rapid translation of disruptive technology into ADF capability, and deepening Indo-Pacific partnerships.
The 2024 National Defence Strategy introduced two doctrinal inventions that now anchor Australian defence planning: National Defence (a whole-of-nation concept spanning maritime, land, air, space, cyber) and the Strategy of Denial (the cornerstone of Defence planning, intended to deter adversaries from projecting power through Australia’s northern approaches). Deterrence was elevated to Australia’s primary strategic defence objective, above the previously co-equal “shape” and “respond.” The accompanying IIP committed $330B through 2033/34.
The 2026 National Defence Strategy, released last week on 16 April 2026, builds on rather than departs from the 2024 framework. It raises the fiscal envelope to $425B over the decade, adds $14B over the forward estimates, and benchmarks defence spending at 3% of GDP by 2033. It lists seven IIP priorities: enhanced undersea warfare via nuclear-powered submarines, accelerated lethal maritime capabilities, expanded long-range strike, integrated air and missile defence (IAMD), expanded autonomous and uncrewed systems, counter-UAS for critical infrastructure, and resilient multi-orbit satellite communications. It claims lessons from Ukraine and the Middle East have been absorbed, and it emphasizes self-reliance, industrial resilience, and civil preparedness.
This is, on the face of it, a reasonable set of documents. The strategic diagnosis is correct. The Strategy of Denial is the right doctrine for a middle power: deterrence-by-punishment and deterrence-by-retaliation are beyond Australia’s resources, as Retired Major General Mick Ryan has noted. The rhetorical emphasis on sovereign industrial base, Ukraine lessons, and autonomous systems reads well.
The problem is the capability acquisition list that actually gets funded.
Why the strategy will fail in execution
The unifying defect of the current program is a mismatch between the rhetorical doctrine (denial, mass, self-reliance, Ukraine lessons) and the capital allocation (foreign-sourced exquisite platforms, long lead times, workforce-intensive crewed systems, single-digit hull counts).
Four critiques from inside the Australian strategic-policy establishment make this point from different angles, and I quote them here to establish that this diagnosis is not idiosyncratic:
The Lowy Institute (2026) describes NDS 26 as “modest spending, welcome reforms” — a continuation of NDS 24 rather than a departure. It notes that Australian defence policy is developed within a narrow Canberra circle largely insulated from external scrutiny, and that Minister Marles’s dismissal of think-tank and retired-officer input at the National Press Club reflects a structural problem, not a tactical misstep.
Meanwhile, the same author (retired Major General, CSIS fellow Mick Ryan) remarks on his Substack that AUKUS Pillar 1 plus conventional ADF modernization cannot both be funded at current spending — one will squeeze the other. He also documents that military star-rank officers grew 33% over the past decade while enlisted ranks shrank 1%, which is difficult to reconcile with the claim of a more effective, faster-moving force.
Sam Roggeveen argues that increased spending may be necessary but buys us little if it only increases co-dependency on US operational capability, undermining the premise of improving self reliance!
Asia Pacific Defence Reporter summarized the ADF press release, but comments immediately identified the weaknesses with respect to environmental shifts since 2024 that the new document does not absorb: weakening US alliance commitments, reduced US Asia deployments, two theaters of successful low-cost mass drone warfare, and chronically underfunded British defence investment. Despite all of this, AUKUS Pillar 1 remains the centerpiece of Australian acquisition.
The argument I make below starts from these observations and pushes further.
The electric stack has inverted the offense/defence cost curve
The core technical fact that Australian defence planning has not absorbed is what Packy McCormick and Sam D’Amico call the Electric Slide: the five foundational technologies of the electric stack — motors, batteries, power electronics, sensors, and edge compute — have each decosted by roughly 100× over the past 30 years. The guidance electronics that in 1990 required a government munitions program now ship as the cheapest component in a disposable toy.
The practical result, demonstrated across Ukraine, Nagorno-Karabakh, the Red Sea, the cartel conflicts in northern Mexico, and now the Persian Gulf, is a cost-exchange regime in which a $500–$5,000 drone can plausibly destroy a $1M–$100M asset. Ukraine produced more than 2 million drones in 2024, and doubled that in 2025. Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, which in 2021 was significantly larger than the Royal Australian Navy, has been reduced by approximately 45% by an adversary with no navy at all. The dominant ships were destroyed by autonomous surface vessels and anti-ship missiles at a cost-exchange ratio on the order of 1:1000. Houthi operations have forced US carrier strike groups into standoff. Cartel drones routinely contest Mexican state control in Michoacán and Sinaloa.
This is not a speculative threat. It is the observed empirical base rate of every live conflict since 2020. The chart below shows just how cheaply an adversary can now asymmetrically convert exquisite war fighting systems into scrap metal.
Australia’s existing force, and the force envisioned by IIP 26, is built to engage a different set of adversaries under a different set of cost-exchange assumptions. If a legacy system is operated as part of an integrated force with robust Integrated Air and Missile Defence, directed-energy weapons, resilient Command and Control, counter-UAS coverage, and updated tactics, it may retain some utility, albeit at enormous expense. The question is whether Australia has any of those enablers at scale, and whether NDS 26 funds them at the rate the threat demands. The honest answer to both is no.
Domain-by-domain
(With apologies for acronym soup, I have done by best to link/summarize/rationalize!)
59 (most transferred to Ukraine and subsequently destroyed)
~$15M
HIGH. Cold War tank optimized for maneuver warfare. Top-attack loitering munitions (Lancet-class), FPV drones with shaped charges, ATGM-armed UAS all lethal. Trophy APS not yet fitted. Weight precludes most regional deployment.
MOD-HIGH. New Hanwha platform. Better protected than M113AS4 but at 42t still vulnerable to top-attack precision munitions. Active protection to be fitted.
LOW (defensive). But: NASAMS is a short-range system based on AMRAAM. Does not close the IAMD gap. NDS 26 revived the MRGBAD program to layer above NASAMS — an implicit admission that the 20+ year Ground Based Air Defense (GBAD) gap has not been closed.
LOW-MOD. 5th-gen. Primary vulnerability is basing — small number of northern airfields are targetable and have no IAMD. ALIS/ODIN creates US dependency. AIM-260 JATM (air to air missile) acquisition now confirmed per IIP 26. LRASM (anti ship missile) to be integrated.
MOD. 4.5-gen, not survivable vs modern IADS. Useful for standoff strike with JASSM-ER and LRASM (now operational). HACM (Hypersonic Attack Cruise Missile) development under US partnership. Block III upgrade in progress.
MOD. Vulnerable to long-range AAMs (PL-15 class). Only 6 airframes. The future of this platform lies in MUM/T battle management for autonomous systems, not as a standalone AEW.
MOD. Points in the right direction, but at current unit cost not attritable by drone-war standards. Unit cost must fall 10–30× and production rate rise by orders of magnitude before Ghost Bat matters at the force level. As a learning lab and a template for evolved CCAs, more valuable.
Cost blowouts and delays, 32 VLS cells per hull. Entire program yields 192 VLS cells — one US Arleigh Burke Flight III carries 96. ASW-focused. A $45B+ program delivering two destroyers’ worth of missile cells.
Offensive and defensive cyber. Doubles ASD capability. Arguably the best value-for-money investment in the ADF: asymmetric, scalable, sovereign.
In short, almost none of Australia’s current or near future weapon systems are useful against any adversary capable of obtaining the specific kinds of missile or drone warfare systems that are routinely fielded by such poorly funded outfits as second tier Mexican cartels, investigative journalists, Hamas, and Houthi rebels, as we have seen time and time again in Ukraine, Iran, and other places.
This may seem unbelievable. So unbelievable that, for example, you can measure Russia’s state of denial in their loss of more than 2600 tanks to drone attacks in the last four years. Australia doesn’t have 2600 spare tanks to learn this lesson. We live in the future, and highly capable attack drones are significantly less difficult to build than, say, a motorcycle.
The structural problem, restated
Australia’s capability posture is built around high-unit-cost, low-count, foreign-sourced exquisite platforms — a force structure appropriate to a world where precision strike was a US/USSR duopoly and tactical mass was a minor consideration. That world is gone. In the world NDS 26 claims to operate in — the post-Ukraine, post-Red Sea, post-Nagorno-Karabakh world — tactical mass is everything, and the cost-exchange regime rewards the side that can produce cheap guided munitions in volume.
Australia produces essentially none of these domestically. Approximately 90% of Australian defence acquisition spending flows offshore, primarily to the US. The 2024 NDS identified this as a problem and committed to sovereign industrial resilience; the 2026 NDS reiterates the commitment and adds some additional funding. Neither document commits to domestic manufacturing at the scale or tempo the threat model requires.
Despite spending $60b/year, foreseeable advances in drone weapons have rendered not only Australia’s legacy defence systems but almost all of its current generation of acquisitions obsolete.
On land we have vehicles, tanks, artillery, attack helicopters, all of which are extremely expensive cannon fodder for drones or guided rockets. As we have seen in Ukraine, when a $1000 drone can take out a $1m tank or $100m aircraft, the asset light combatant has a sharp advantage.
On sea, we are planning to spend AUD$70b (1.5x the entire Manhattan Project!) on six Hunter Class Frigates that are far too few to defend our maritime borders and just as vulnerable to explosive jet skis as Russia’s black sea fleet, halved in four years by a conventionally far weaker adversary who doesn’t even have a navy, and who extracted casualties with a 1:1000 cost exchange ratio. Australia is rich but not that rich.
The only systems which are not floating boxes of explosives and sailors visible from space are the submarines, consisting of the rapidly aging Collins fleet and the AUKUS submarines that are as expensive and foreign as they are far off.
In air, Australia has about 100 foreign-built fighters. Which airforce are they built to engage? Australia doesn’t have a regional peer adversary who is going to slug it out fighter to fighter. 100 F-18s and F-35s could hardly stand up to Chinese air power and represent high value targets (particularly when on the ground) to irregular insurgent/proxy/asymmetrical combatants, against which they have struggled to engage in similar conflicts elsewhere. Israel has plenty of jets but they were not particularly useful in stopping rocket attacks from Gaza.
In all cases, this is hardware built for fighting yesterday’s wars. The electric stack has de-costed by a factor of 100-1000, putting sharply asymmetrical threats directly into the fight. In WW2, the Allies were ultimately able to achieve crushing air superiority and then destruction of enemy energy and transport infrastructure via the saturation Combined Bombing Offensive. Eighty years later, wars are once again decided by materiel production capacity, only adversaries can easily field 100 times as many aircraft and operate them with software rather than trained pilots.
Despite spending nearly AUD$60b/year, Australia is functionally undefended and undefendable. The unstated premise of this conversation is whether Australia’s military is powerful enough to deter, that is, to compel the resolution of disputes through diplomatic channels, with strong military powers like China. But this isn’t how most wars are fought anymore.
Instead, adversarial powers prefer to act with a winking deniability between networks of proxies, committing a litany of sub-threshold hybrid outrages that are calibrated to fall short of an open declaration of war while doing everything possible to degrade their opponents.
Grey-zone threats the strategy underweights
The documents acknowledge “hybrid threats” but the IIP does not allocate against them at scale. The actual vectors being used against Australia and similar middle powers today include:
A further strategic problem: any adversary can use Australia’s much smaller, closer neighbours, or enormous swaths of uninhabited sovereign territory, or even existing infrastructure, as covert staging grounds. In a world where adversaries now routinely preposition containers of offensive drones within a mile of their target, how are Papua New Guinea, the Solomons, parts of Indonesia, and the broader Pacific arc, let alone the 99% of Australia with no significant human presence, meant to counter this threat? A few shipping containers of Shaheds or lightly modified commercial drones, released by a non-state proxy, would be sufficient to regionally neutralize Australian military power, with no warning, no formal declaration of war. This is not speculative. Hezbollah has conducted Shahed operations against Israel from Iraq and Yemen. Houthi operations have targeted commercial shipping and US naval assets at 1000+ km standoff. Wagner / Africa Corps conducts similar operations across the Sahel. The base rate of proxy-staged drone warfare is not hypothetical, rather, it is the modal form of contemporary conflict.
In 1943, Australian commandos were able to infiltrate Japan-occupied Singapore in a disguised fishing boat, sinking or damaging six ships. This sort of raid could only be done once, at enormous risk and limited impact. Today, a similar raid could be executed by a competent high school robotics team with autonomous boats, or deployed at literally 1000x the scale and 1000x less cost by a well-resourced military.
What the 2026 IIP does not buy, and must
In the following, I advocate strongly for domestic production capacity. This does not mean autarky. It means possessing enough of the stack that either the remaining supply chains are highly fungible, or Australia has enough aggregate industrial power to earn a seat at the table when supply is constrained.
(I drafted this post before the latest conflict in Iran. Then, I worried that Australia lacking bargaining power in a resource constrained environment would be hard to motivate. Now, with Australian agriculture on the verge of diesel starvation, it is only too obvious.)
None of what follows is technically difficult relative to Australian economic and technological capacity. The Soviet Union delivered most of it in the 1950s, at a fraction of Australia’s current real GDP per capita. Each program below could be operated for under AUD $1B/year — well within the existing defence envelope.
Indeed, programs fail more often from over funding causing indigestion than underfunding. Committing to tight budgets and schedules is the key to success.
Must-have domestic capability
Orbital launch capability. SpaceX developed Falcon 1 in five years for under $100M. Rocket Lab repeated the feat with Electron a decade later. Gilmour Space Technology in Queensland is developing the Eris vehicle — the first Australian-developed orbital-class rocket — and represents the nascent beginning of sovereign launch. It is privately funded, chronically under-supported by the government, and has not yet reached orbit. Compare Rocket Lab’s trajectory, which benefited from early NZ government partnership and US customer access. Without sovereign launch, Australia lives under a sky controlled by others.
Domestic comsat, spysat, radar sat, and GNSS capability. SpaceX ships some of the most advanced satellites ever built, for less than $1M per unit. The US, China, India, Russia, Europe, and Japan each operate sovereign GNSS constellations. Planet Labs, a private company, operates hundreds of imaging satellites and offers sub-metre resolution. Umbra operates a SAR constellation resolving better than 1 m in any weather. The ADF buys or requests access to intelligence that any civilian with a credit card can purchase — and has no sovereign path to independent ISR because DEF 799 has effectively disappeared from the public IIP over the last two years. JP 9102 has been redefined to multi-orbit per NDS 26, but the number of satellites and timeline remain unspecified. Through DARC, Australia is a partner in deep-space SSA — genuinely useful, but co-dependent with the US and UK, not sovereign.
One million drones per month manufacturing capacity, with local supply chains and/or stockpiles sufficient for more than a year of sustained conflict. Ukraine produced over 2 million drones in 2024 and 4 million in 2025 — a wartime economy, certainly, but Ukraine’s pre-war GDP was a quarter of Australia’s. Australia has a strong drone innovation community (the current world drone speed record is held by an Australian hobbyist) but no production base worth the name.
Drones require motors, structures, batteries, power electronics, and controllers. Most of these parts can be mass-produced with startup capital in the ~$1B range per category. Standing up semiconductor fab capacity for controllers, MEMS sensors, and CMOS cameras at drone-adequate nodes would cost approximately $5B. The first step is supplier relationships and stockpiling; the second is a land-and-expand domestic fab strategy with enough strategic ambiguity about actual capacity that defence saturation or blockade are unacceptably risky for an adversary. Either Australia has the ability to produce its own industrial controllers, or it ends up — as Russia has — cannibalising white goods for guided-munition chips. Fabricating 1980s-era 8086-class processors is not technically difficult; those nodes are adequate for the vast majority of drone applications. But… Australia bulldozed its only functional fab in 2021 to extend the Sydney Metro.
Austin Vernon has described the necessary fleet architecture in his drone airforce essay. The point is that the key components are the same across drone types, which means that a single industrial base serves the entire mission set.
Missile defence. Israel, the US, and other allies have operationalised layered missile defence systems. What were infeasible science projects in the 1960s and unreliable demonstrators in the 1990s are now mature enough to shift deterrence calculus — not to guarantee leak-proof defence, which is physically difficult against a capable adversary, but to raise the cost of strike sufficiently to change the adversary’s planning. A system that intercepts more than 50–70% of incoming threats is a strategic asset; it does not need to be perfect to deter. Australia’s NDS 26 MRGBAD acquisition is the first real step in two decades, but it is a purchased point-defence capability, not a sovereign system. Building a domestic layered IAMD would cost a fraction of AUKUS and deliver deterrent value on a much shorter timescale.
There are multiple rocket hobbyists on YouTube currently building rockets that, with some extra-legal tweaks, would be capable of missile defence. AI coding agents are more than capable of writing the entire software stack in an afternoon. Australia does not need to spend billions of dollars and wait decades to purchase this capability from foreign nations.
Energy independence.
Australia has oil and tight shale but has allowed domestic refining capacity to collapse. Two refineries are not enough. This is re-discovered every few years, including the current gulf crisis.
Australia invented the modern solar module and then actively exported the technology to China. It is now time to play an active role in the production of the materials and technology that power the electric stack. Building GW-scale solar and inviting the world to smelt their aluminium and other metals in Australia is a path to both wealth and strategic weight.
Submarines.
Surface naval assets are increasingly vulnerable against any adversary. Conventional wisdom maintains that surface ships can still function inside an integrated force given sufficient organic integrated air/missile defence (IAMD), electronic warfare (EW), counter unmanned aerial system (C-UAS), and coalition coverage but it is not the empirical pattern of recent conflicts. The Black Sea Fleet, operating inside its own anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) bubble with the full range of Russian EW and air cover, was reduced 45% by an adversary without a navy. The Moskva and Sevastopol strikes were the headline cases; the attritional campaign against patrol craft, intelligence ships, and the Kerch Bridge was continuous. Surface ships can be made more survivable. They cannot currently be made cheap enough for an attrition regime.
Submarines retain genuine utility. They are used for anti-shipping, anti-submarine, special-forces insertion, strategic chokepoint interdiction, electronic intelligence, and missile launch. Crewed submarines perform all these missions, but autonomous submarines can perform many of them, and the technology is trending there — Australia’s Ghost Shark program is a leading example.
Submarines require air-independent propulsion. The Collins class has demonstrated that Australia can operate large long-range diesel-electric submarines for decades, though transit speed and time on station are so limited that coverage of Australia’s top four strategic chokepoints would require a fleet of over one hundred submarines of this type.
The US Navy developed the first nuclear submarine powerplant in 1173 days for approximately $2.5B in current dollars, including two hulls and the adjacent unsuccessful sodium-cooled reactor work, as well as all the start-up costs associated with building the first ever nuclear power reactors, such as developing a supply chain for hafnium and vanadium from scratch. Seven decades of design heritage and modern computational tools later, Australia is being told that buying foreign-designed and mostly foreign-built nuclear submarine powerplants will cost $30–40B over 15+ years. Why do the error bars on this purchase exceed by a large factor the real world cost and time for long dead pioneers to do it for the first time ever? Brazil is developing sovereign nuclear submarine technology. A domestic Australian submarine powerplant effort, capped at $1B and four years, is technically feasible. Whether it is politically feasible is a separate question.
Must-have domestic participation
AI sovereignty. The near future will run on CCP AI or US AI. Choose wisely.
Australia must retain the ability to make material contributions to US frontier AI, and therefore to derive special benefits from it.
Australia does not need to run a nationalized frontier model or replicate TSMC. It does need to contribute enough of the stack to stay in the conversation.
Australian expats are well-represented at every frontier AI company. A “Federation Fellowship” structured to repatriate senior talent on favourable terms could help, but would need significant follow through.
Australia is geographically ideal for large solar-powered AI datacenters, but would need legal reform to bring Australian fair-use and training-data rules into alignment with US practice.
Nuclear weapons. This is the most politically fraught recommendation in this document, and I want to state it precisely.
The technical argument: producing a nuclear weapon is not especially hard given baseline industrial capacity. The 1964 Nth Country Experiment showed that three physics PhDs with no classified access produced a workable weapon design in 2.5 years.
The strategic argument: the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, under which Ukraine relinquished its nuclear arsenal in exchange for security “guarantees”, has become the canonical example of why middle powers without independent deterrents are structurally vulnerable. Having a nuclear deterrent guarantees a baseline of absolute national sovereignty that no alliance commitment can replicate.
The political and industrial argument: Australia has a tiny civil nuclear industry, no enrichment or separation capability, no testing infrastructure, and — at present — no political coalition willing to sustain the investment. That said, North Korea is hardly an economic powerhouse and was able to build plutonium weapons despite determined interference by its adversaries. The NPT and various regional agreements would need to be renegotiated, exited, or ignored.
The point of listing nuclear weapons here is to identify an asymmetry: the technical and industrial obstacles are self-imposed and reversible on a sub-decade timescale given political will. The political constraint is the binding one. If Australian political will to sustain sovereign security catches up to the realities of the post-unipolar era, the nuclear question will be on the table, and the preparation — civil nuclear industry, enrichment-adjacent capability, professional workforce — should begin now regardless.
Having a nuclear deterrent guarantees absolute national sovereignty. After WW1 and WW2, England and France did not hesitate for an instant to ensure they could never again suffer outrages from the industrial might of Germany and later, the Soviets. It is better to have it and not need it than to think “she’ll be right mate” and bequeath eternal slavery and damnation to your descendents.
Conclusion
None of the capabilities above are hard to build relative to Australian economic and technological capacity. The Soviet Union did them in the 1950s. Each program could be operated for under AUD $1B/year — a rounding error inside the existing defence budget, and less than a tenth of what AUKUS Pillar 1 is projected to consume annually by the late 2030s.
Unlike the current acquisition pattern, which sends most capital offshore in exchange for indefinite dependence on foreign industrial complexes for maintenance and support, a domestic weapons-platform development policy accumulates research and production expertise within Australia, where its value appreciates over time, including in the civilian economy. Expat Australians work at every frontier technology company on earth. Australian hobbyists hold world records in the relevant disciplines. The constraint has never been talent, capital, or technology.
The 2023 Defence Strategic Review diagnosed the threat environment accurately. The 2024 and 2026 National Defence Strategies identified the right doctrine — National Defence, Strategy of Denial, self-reliance, industrial resilience. The 2026 Integrated Investment Program commits $425B against these priorities and in doing so reaffirms a platform-centric acquisition model that the post-Ukraine evidence base does not support.
Australia is not undefendable in principle, but it is undefendable against the threat model the documents themselves describe, using the capabilities the documents themselves fund.
The Strategy of Denial is the right strategy. The question is whether the capability program actually delivers denial against a cost-exchange ratio of 1:1000 in favour of the adversary.
The answer to that question, visible in the IIP line items, is obviously not. That has to change.
Australia’s future national sovereignty could topple at any moment, not through conventional conquest but through the slow attrition of deterrent credibility that invites exactly the kind of sub-threshold coercion the Strategy of Denial is evidently unable to prevent.
If Australia fails to aggressively correct course toward domestic defence tech production immediately — not the next biennial National Defence Strategy cycle, right now — the last vestiges of its existence as an independent political entity will soon vanish entirely.
The Strait of Hormuz remains closed. It appears increasingly obvious that the 20 percent of world oil supply that normally flows through it to world markets won’t be restored to normal anytime in the near future — quite possibly for many months. What will this disruption do to the world economy?
The International Monetary Fund raised the economic anxiety level last week with a projection of a global slowdown “in the shadow of war.” Yet while the IMF brings great expertise to this subject, I think that it is seriously underestimating how badly the global economy could be hit. In my view, a full-on global recession is more likely than not if the Strait remains closed for, say, another three months, which seems all too possible.
Why do I think most forecasts are insufficiently alarmist? Because I believe that most economists are thinking about the Hormuz crisis the wrong way.
The usual approach, which appears to be how the IMF is making its projection, is to start with a guesstimate of the price of oil over the next year, then try to model the effects of that oil price trajectory on the world economy.
An immediate problem with this approach is that, as I argued a few weeks ago, there’s a huge range of uncertainty about the future price of oil if the war goes on, reflecting underlying uncertainty about both the severity of the disruption and the responsiveness of demand to prices. The following table shows various scenarios for the price of oil depending upon the level of disruption of supplies (low, medium or high disruption) and the responsiveness of demand to price (high, medium or low responsiveness). As you can see below, there is a wide range of price scenarios, from $99/bbl to $372/bbl:
More generally, I would argue that the usual approach to modeling the effects of the Hormuz crisis goes about it the wrong way around. We should start with the physical supply constraints, not a guess about oil prices. One way or another, the world will have to burn significantly less oil in the near future than it would have if this war had been avoided. In the jargon of energy analysts, there will have to be large “demand destruction.” But how can oil demand be destroyed? Three ways:
· People can switch away from oil to other energy sources. But there’s very little ability to do that in the short run
· People can switch away from economic activities that use a lot of oil — e.g., they can take buses rather than driving. But for many, perhaps most, people, this option is very limited. For example, there are no buses in American suburbs and there is no substitute for oil to power emerging-market trucks.
· People can just do less overall — consume less, produce less. That is, we can reduce oil consumption by having a global slump. And demand destruction through a global slump can happen quickly.
What about the price of oil? In the face of a major loss in supply it must rise enough to cause an equal destruction of demand. Because there’s very limited ability to reduce the demand for oil through options 1 and 2 above, it appears inevitable that some (if not most) of the demand destruction required will happen through a global recession.
Indeed, as I’ll show in a minute, in past world oil crises a significant share of the demand destruction needed to match reduced supply was indeed “achieved” by having a global recession.
So if your guess about the world price of oil in the face of a large disruption of oil supply doesn’t look high enough to cause a global slump, you’re projecting too low a price.
What does history tell us?
The closest parallel I know to the Hormuz crisis is the oil shock that followed the 1973 Yom Kippur War. (The 1979 Iran crisis was more complex, involving a lot of speculative price changes.) World oil supply fell only moderately after 1973, but it had been on a rapidly rising trend until then, so there was a large shortfall relative to that trend. In the chart below I show the natural log of world oil consumption with 1965 as the base year:
The percentage difference between two numbers is approximately the difference in their natural logs times 100. So this chart shows that the world was burning approximately 17.5 percent less oil in 1975 than it would have under the pre-1973 trend — a supply shock not too different from what we will see now if the Strait remains closed.
What happened to global economic growth? It also fell substantially relative to the pre-1973 trend — a shortfall of roughly 7.5 percent:
A comparable slowdown now would mean zero or negative world growth over the next two years, compared with the current IMF forecast of 3 percent. This would be a true global disaster.
OK, before everyone jumps off ledges, there are large potential mitigating factors this time around. First and foremost is the likelihood that a deal to reopen the Strait will in fact be struck. Basically, the U.S. can get the Strait reopened by loudly proclaiming victory while quietly accepting de facto defeat. All this will take is for Trump to accept reality, admittedly a hard climb.
Even if the Strait remains closed, the world economy is far less dependent on oil than it was in 1973. Here’s an index of world “oil intensity” — barrels of oil consumed per dollar of real GDP — with 1973=100:
This will reduce the impact of higher oil prices on world production — although the remaining oil demand may be less “compressible” than demand in 1973. So reducing consumption in the short run may be harder today than it was in the 1970s.
Finally, beyond the short run there are far more alternatives to oil now than there were in 1973. Given time — even a year or two — the world could make major shifts to other energy sources.
Despite these caveats, however, I would argue that most analysts are still far too sanguine about the effects of a prolonged Hormuz crisis. I don’t know how high the price of oil will go if the Strait remains closed, but it will, more or less by definition, have to go high enough to be seriously destructive.
Long spits of muddy sediment are visible behind islands created by mud volcanoes in an image captured on August 30, 2025, by the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 8.
With its abundance of naturally occurring gas seeps and fires, Azerbaijan has long been called “the land of fire.” Yet burning mountains are just one of the geologic wonders found in the small Eurasian country on the Caspian Sea.
Azerbaijan is also home to at least 220 mud volcanoes, according to data from the Azerbaijani government, though some researchers put the total number closer to 350. That is thought to be one of the highest concentrations of mud volcanoes on Earth.
Mud volcanoes—as well as gas seeps—are found within sedimentary basins where geologic conditions have allowed hydrocarbons to accumulate. Such basins typically have fluids and gases, such as oil and methane, trapped beneath sedimentary rocks and under high pressure. Instead of erupting molten lava, mud volcanoes typically eject cold slurries of mud, water, methane, and other gases. Oil and gas form from the remains of marine organisms, such as phytoplankton and algae, which settle on the ocean floor and are later transformed by pressure and heat.
Many of Azerbaijan’s mud volcanoes are clustered near the cities of Baku and Qobustan on the Absheron Peninsula, an area where structural folds and faults in the landscape have created cracks that allow methane-rich mud to move up toward the surface. On land, mud volcanoes typically form conical structures anywhere from 20 to 400 meters (70 to 1,300 feet) tall and 100 to 4,500 meters in diameter.
There are also at least 140 underwater mud volcanoes in the South Caspian Sea along Azerbaijan’s coast, including eight islands in the Baku archipelago. The satellite image above shows one of them, the tadpole-shaped Xərə Zirə Adası (also known in Russian as Ostrov Bulla), which had violent eruptions in 1961 and 1995 and still has two “weakly active” mud volcano vents, said Adelaide University geologist Mark Tingay. The neighboring island to the northwest, Duvannı (Ostrov Duvannyy), is visible in the wide view below. It erupted in 2006 and still has active vents on its northern side.
“The islands’ ‘tails’ are most likely caused by currents eroding their weak mud deposits,” Tingay said. “They look like spits of eroded and redeposited sediment that formed on the lee of the island, where current and wave action have the least effect.”
Four tadpole-shaped mud volcano islands are visible along the Caspian Sea in this image captured on August 30, 2025, by the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 8.
NASA Earth Observatory/Lauren Dauphin
There are two more tadpole-shaped islands to the south, with sediment “tails” also oriented to the southwest. One of these—Səngi Muğan Adası (Ostrov Svinoy)—is known for producing particularly violent eruptions, most recently in 2002 and 2008, Tingay said. One of its most notorious events occurred in 1932 when, without warning, it released a 150-meter-tall fireball in an eruption that caused 13 injuries and almost destroyed the island’s lighthouse, he added.
Though mud volcanoes are interesting to geologists and often indicators of underground fossil fuels, they can be unpredictable and pose risks. “They have the potential for ‘paroxysmal eruptions’—short but extremely violent eruptions,” Tingay said. “They sometimes fuel huge fireballs and have created whole new islands in the space of a few minutes.”
NASA Earth Observatory images by Lauren Dauphin, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Story by Adam Voiland.
Apple announced that Tim Cook will become executive chairman of
Apple’s board of directors and John Ternus, senior vice president
of Hardware Engineering, will become Apple’s next chief executive
officer effective on September 1, 2026. The transition, which was
approved unanimously by the Board of Directors, follows a
thoughtful, long-term succession planning process.
Cook will continue in his role as CEO through the summer as he
works closely with Ternus on a smooth transition. As executive
chairman, Cook will assist with certain aspects of the company,
including engaging with policymakers around the world.
Ternus will become the 8th CEO in Apple’s 50-year history:
Mike Scott, 1977–1981
Mike Markkula, 1981–1983
John Sculley, 1983–1993
Michael Spindler, 1993–1996
Gil Amelio, 1996–1997
Steve Jobs, 1997–2011
Tim Cook, 2011–2026
At just over 50 years old — the same age Cook was when he took the job — Ternus is young enough for decade-plus run, joining only Sculley, Jobs, and Cook.
Kidney Transplants Save Lives, Cut Taxpayer Costs Lund University Sweden's kidney exchange programme has been operational since 2018 and will soon be expanded to include the entire EU. The programme has meant that patients' previous waiting times of up to two years have been reduced to just six months.
"Tommy Andersson, Professor of Economics at Lund University School of Economics and Management, never imagined his research would one day lead to this-but his joy, pride, and commitment are unmistakable.
"Thirteen years ago, we began the planning phase in Sweden, and in 2019 we expanded to Denmark, and later to Finland, Iceland, and Norway. The programme is called STEP (Scandiatransplant Exchange Programme). Now, in 2026, there is a consensus on how kidney exchanges should be conducted across the entire EU, and almost all the pieces of the puzzle are in place for us to launch the pilot project during 2026," says Tommy Andersson.
Tommy Andersson was involved from the start, developing the algorithms that make the kidney exchange programme in Sweden possible. In cases where a family member can donate a kidney, the transplant can occur directly. However, if the donor's kidney does not match the patient, the exchange programme becomes vital. The programme enables matching across Scandinavia and soon across the entire EU."
A Falcon 9 streaks through a sky filled by the Milky Way in this long duration streak shot. It carried a Global Positioning System satellite for the U.S. Space Force. Photo: John Pisani/Spaceflight Now.
The U.S. Space Force launched its final Global Positioning System (GPS) III satellite into medium Earth orbit in the predawn hours of Tuesday aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.
Liftoff from pad 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station occurred at 2:53:25 a.m. EDT (0653:25 UTC).
The mission was delayed a day due to poor weather in the recovery zone for the first stage.
The satellite for the GPS III-8 mission is officially designated Space Vehicle 10 (SV10) satellite but is also named ‘Hedy Lamar’ after the Austrian-American actress and inventor whose frequency-hopping research led to the development of technologies, like GPS satellites, WiFi, and Bluetooth.
“Today marks an important milestone for our unit and for the entire GPS enterprise. As we prepare to launch the final satellite in the GPS III block, we’re closing out a chapter that has defined the last several years of work for this team,” said USSF Col. Stephen Hobbs, the Mission Delta 31 (MD 31) commander within Combat Forces Command.
“Closing out the GPS III block is not the end of the story, but rather it’s a foundation for what comes next. We’re excited to turn the page and continue advancing our mission with the GPS IIIF generation, bringing even greater capability to the joint force and to the global users who rely on this system every single day.”
A SpaceX Falcon 9 lifts off with the GPS III-8 SV10 satellite. Photo: Adam Bernstein/Spaceflight Now.
SpaceX launched the mission using the Falcon 9 first stage booster B1095, which flew for the seventh time after launching six batches of SpaceX’s Starlink satellites.
The GPS III SV10 satellite was encapsulated in two halves of the payload fairing, one of which flew for a second time and the other for a third time. One of the pair was used on the GPS III-9 mission back in January.
“So that was a huge benefit for us and for the Space Force team to take advantage of that from a mission assurance perspective,” said Anne Mason, SpaceX’s director of its National Security Space Launch (NSSL) division.
A little more than 8.5 minutes after liftoff, B1095 landed on the drone ship, ‘Just Read the Instructions.’ Both halves of the payload fairing were also to be recovered after splashing down a little further downrange than the booster.
The drone ship will be devoted to supporting the Starship program, SpaceX said.
The mission also represented the fourth time that SpaceX will carry to orbit a GPS satellite that was originally assigned to United Launch Alliance as part of the NSSL Phase 2 contract with the U.S. Space Force.
Previous GPS satellites were moved from ULA’s Vulcan rocket to SpaceX’s Falcon 9 because of development delays with that rocket. Vulcan didn’t receive certification to fly NSSL payloads until the spring of 2025.
During its most recent launch, USSF-87, the rocket suffered a problem with one of its Northrop Grumman-built solid rocket boosters. The payload was able to be delivered to the intended orbit, but the launch vehicle is grounded in its most powerful configurations until an investigation is completed.
“One of the things we really pride ourselves on here on the NSSL program, is our flexibility and responsiveness, and a lot of that goes to our our contracts, the way they’re set up, that allow for swaps like this,” said USSF Col. Ryan Hiserote.
“For any of these swaps, we have to have both launch providers agree to it. So both SpaceX and ULA have agreed to all of these swaps. So just that process and teamwork has gotten a little bit faster and tighter each time.”
In exchange for putting the GPS III SV10 satellite on a Falcon 9 rocket, ULA in turn will fly the USSF-70 mission on a Vulcan rocket in 2028. That mission with an undisclosed payload was originally set to fly on a Falcon Heavy rocket.
The GPS III Space Vehicle 10 satellite, named ‘Hedy Lamar’, is photographed during the process of it being encapsulated within SpaceX Falcon 9 payload fairings. Image: SpaceX
The GPS III-8 SV10 satellite will join a fleet of 38 spacecraft in medium Earth orbit, of which 32 are active. The others are held in reserve in case of a problem with the operational spacecraft.
Following the GPS III-8’s deployment, about an hour and a half after liftoff, the satellite will raise its orbit over a period of 10 days to achieve its operational position, said Fang Qian, Lockheed Martin’s vice president of its Global Positioning System program. That will be followed by two to three days of on-orbit testing before satellite operations are handed over to the Space Force.
“And on this particular launch, because we have the optical cross-link demo, we will likely be doing a little more testing to ring out what capability that has to feed in future blocks of the IIIF satellites,” Hobbs said.
The optical cross-link demonstration is a laser communications system that is being tested on this mission before it’s integrated on the next-generation GPS IIIF satellites. The SV10 satellite also carries with it a new digital atomic clock for better precision as another technology demonstration.
“The final GPS III deployment is an important milestone as we continue strengthening the GPS constellation,” Qian said in a post-launch statement. “By launching SV10 into orbit, we’re not only adding to the resiliency of today’s GPS capabilities – we’re opening the door to the next generation of GPS IIIF satellites that will provide greater resiliency and serve as the backbone of the GPS constellation for years to come.”
Latvia is the latest country to sign the Artemis Accords as part of a new push to use the Accords to foster cooperation on NASA’s lunar exploration ambitions.
The moon itself does not wax and wane as frequently as American public opinion on its space program. The Artemis 2 astronauts barely gulped their first taste of fresh Pacific air before a chorus of voices began criticizing the Artemis program as a waste of money for which the American people received little in return. […]
China is rapidly building a broad, diverse satellite manufacturing base capable of producing thousands of spacecraft annually, but faces bottlenecks in launch and uncertain demand.
Up betimes as I use to do, and in my chamber begun to look over my father’s accounts, which he brought out of the country with him by my desire, whereby I may see what he has received and spent, and I find that he is not anything extravagant, and yet it do so far outdo his estate that he must either think of lessening his charge, or I must be forced to spare money out of my purse to help him through, which I would willing do as far as 20l. goes.
So to my office the remaining part of the morning till towards noon, and then to Mr. Grant’s. There saw his prints, which he shewed me, and indeed are the best collection of any things almost that ever I saw, there being the prints of most of the greatest houses, churches, and antiquitys in Italy and France and brave cutts. I had not time to look them over as I ought, and which I will take time hereafter to do, and therefore left them and home to dinner.
With Sir G. Carteret and Sir John Minnes by coach to my Lord Treasurer’s, thinking to have spoken about getting money for paying the Yards; but we found him with some ladies at cards: and so, it being a bad time to speak, we parted, and Sir J. Minnes and I home, and after walking with my wife in the garden late, to supper and to bed, being somewhat troubled at Ashwell’s desiring and insisting over eagerly upon her going to a ball to meet some of her old companions at a dancing school here in town next Friday, but I am resolved she shall not go. So to bed.
This day the little Duke of Monmouth was marryed at White Hall, in the King’s chamber; and tonight is a great supper and dancing at his lodgings, near Charing-Cross. I observed his coat at the tail of his coach he gives the arms of England, Scotland, and France, quartered upon some other fields, but what it is that speaks his being a bastard I know not.
It’s no great insight to say Trump’s impulsive Iran War has been a big political loser for him. Even some of his and the war’s supporters would concede that point. “Katrinas” are also wildly overdetermined and over-diagnosed in political talk. How many “Obama’s Katrinas” were there? How many did Joe Biden allegedly have? But it did occur to me this morning that it is something like that for Trump but for a specifically Trumpian reason. Donald Trump’s great super power is changing the subject. He never sticks to one racket or con until its rung out of all its juice. He’s always on to some new thing because — long before we lived in the broken world of social media — Trump has always lived in the attention economy. Attention is the great commodity. It’s even more powerful for Trump as a defensive weapon. When something isn’t going great he’s always creating some new drama, some new thing to change the subject to. But what we’re seeing now is that Trump simply cannot change the subject. The whole Iran War story is devastatingly bad for him. And he simply has no way to stop it from being the big, dominating story. He can’t make any shiny object take its place. He’s stuck, not just militarily but politically as well.
Things a president does at home he can generally undo or just stop doing. Not always but usually, at least to a degree. Not long after the killing of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis on Jan. 24, the White House began moonwalking away from its intentionally high-profile and confrontational occupations of Midwestern Blue state cities. Mass deportations didn’t stop. A lot of the same ICE predations continued. But the temperature was reduced significantly and the high-profile, news-generating confrontations slowed. It was hurting Trump politically so he pulled back, at least from the actions generating news.
Abroad, things work differently. Even for a U.S. president, there are others parties involved. They can act unpredictably or beyond a president’s control. Tariffs were in a sense an example of this. Longterm, Trump has unleashed trade and economic forces the U.S. cannot easily control or recover from. But in the near term Trump could and in many case did simply pull the tariffs, often through carve-outs or other means that didn’t drive a lot of attention. Critically, every country targeted by tariffs was happy to give him an out. They weren’t going to make it hard. They just wanted the tariffs rescinded or reduced. Often they were willing to toast Trump’s capitulation as some kind of signal Trump victory.
Iran is a very different matter. The war is extremely high profile. It is unambiguously his war. It has affected everyone in the country through dramatically higher gas prices. It is also a catch-all explanation and point of blame for inflation and high prices generally even though the inflationary effects of the war are probably still mostly in the future. Iran meanwhile is in no mood to give him an out. Obviously the Iranian government wants to hurt the U.S. and Trump specifically as much as possible. They also realize that even if their situation is desperate, Trump’s is more so.
They say a shark has to keep moving forward or it will die (turns out this is only true for some sharks). For Donald Trump it’s changing the subject. I’m not saying he’s approaching political death. But he is stuck and unable to change the subject in what I think is a genuinely new way for him. And for his political prospects, it’s a very big deal.
Zimbabwe, often considered an economic basket-case because of its history of farm seizures and hyperinflation, is enjoying an idiosyncratic boom. High prices for the metal and other commodities have led to a surge of cash through its highly informal economy. They have made it easier for authorities to stop printing money and meddling in currency markets; inflation is at its lowest in about 30 years. The IMF has repeatedly revised upwards estimates for economic growth, most recently to at least 7.5% for 2025, almost double the African average…
Gold is not the only source of growth. The current tobacco crop will be the largest on record. Lithium, chrome and platinum miners, many of them Chinese, have raised production. Zimbabwe’s diaspora, mainly in South Africa, sent back $2.5bn last year. So overall demand is higher than ever, says a banker.
4. More on the wet market hypothesis. We should all be uncertain, but it is mood affiliation (with conspiracy theorizing, for one thing) to be convinced of Lab Leak. It is contributing to negative emotional contagion.
5. Review of the new Knausgaard series. By Max Norman: “(I’d rather read Knausgaard on defecation than predestination, let alone whether machines can think or trees can feel.)”‘
7. AI and the pancreatic vaccine. More testing is needed, but there is a reasonable chance that we have a good treatment for pancreatic cancer, and AI was instrumental in that. It is mRNA as well, so a double burn on the haters.
Spectators along the beach in Cape Canaveral, Florida, enjoy a spectacular Sunday morning launch, taking in the view of a Blue Origin New Glenn rocket blasting off carrying a next-generation cellular broadband satellite. The company said later the AST SpaceMobile Bluebird 7 satellite ended up in the wrong orbit. Photo: Adam Bernstein/Spaceflight Now.
Blue Origin launched the company’s third New Glenn rocket Sunday, re-flying and successfully recovering a previously used first stage. But the rocket’s payload, a direct-to-cellphone communications satellite, ended up in the wrong orbit, the company said.
“We have confirmed payload separation,” Blue Origin, owned by Amazon-founder Jeff Bezos, posted on X. “AST SpaceMobile has confirmed the satellite has powered on. The payload was placed into an off-nominal orbit. We are currently assessing and will update when we have more detailed information.”
The Bluebird 7 satellite, built by AST SpaceMobile in Midland, Texas, is equipped with a 2,400-square-foot phased array antenna, the largest civilian antenna of its type ever put in low-Earth orbit.
The satellite is the second in a new generation of AST SpaceMobile data relay stations designed to seamlessly provide space-based 4G and 5G cellular broadband service directly to users anywhere in the world.
Blue Origin provided no additional information about the nature of Bluebird 7’s unplanned orbit and it was not immediately known what options, if any, might exist to eventually achieve the planned orbit.
But the launch clearly marked a setback to AST SpaceMobile’s timeline for deploying up to 60 such “block two” Bluebirds in an initial constellation, launching them with SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets, Indian LVM3 boosters and Blue Origin’s New Glenn.
The New Glenn launched Sunday was Blue’s third and the first using a previously flown first stage.
New Glenn rises from Launch Complex 36 on Sunday, April 19, 2026, near the historic Cape Canaveral lighthouse. Photo: John Pisani/Spaceflight Now.
Liftoff from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station came at 7:25 a.m. EDT, 40 minutes after an unexplained hold in the countdown. When the count finally hit zero, the towering rocket’s seven methane-burning ME-4 engines ignited with a ground shaking roar and the booster began climbing away atop 3.8 million pounds of thrust.
The first stage appeared to work flawlessly, shutting down and falling away as planned about three minutes and nine seconds after liftoff. The rocket’s second stage, powered by two BE-3 engines, then ignited to continue the climb to an initial orbit.
The first stage, meanwhile, headed for a Blue Origin’s landing barge stationed several hundred miles down range in the Atlantic Ocean, flying itself to an on-target touchdown about nine minutes and 20 seconds after launch.
The same stage accomplished the same feat last November during the second flight of a New Glenn — NG-2 — albeit using a different set of engines.
“With our first refurbished booster we elected to replace all seven engines and test out a few upgrades including a thermal protection system on one of the engine nozzles,” Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp said in an earlier social media post. “We plan to use the engines we flew for NG-2 on future flights.”
About two-and-a-half minutes after the first stage landing Sunday, the second stage engines shut down as planned. A second upper stage engine firing was expected an hour and 10 minutes after launch, but that time came and went without any updates from Blue Origin.
About an hour later, however, the company reported the satellite had not been released into its intended orbit. The post did not say whether the second upper stage engine firing actually took place or if it did, whether it ran for the full duration.
Blue Origin plans to compete head-to-head with SpaceX to deliver commercial, military and science satellites to Earth orbit and deep space while deploying a fleet of Amazon-owned space-based LEO internet satellites intended to compete with SpaceX’s already-established Starlink system.
Blur Origin also is developing moon landers to deliver NASA cargo and astronauts to the lunar surface.
The New Glenn rocket is critical to all of those ventures. The company tentatively plans to launch a prototype Blue Moon lander on an unpiloted test flight this fall, followed by one and possibly two launches of Amazon LEO internet satellites before the end of the year.
But those plans will depend on the results of an investigation into what went wrong Sunday.
Justice Breyer responded later that day to the chief’s memo but did not address all its points. Such stays were unusual, he wrote, stating his objections mildly.
He skipped over the question of whether the plan was lawful, asking only: Why the rush? The circuit court had already set a date to hear the case in June. The first deadline for power plants to reduce their emissions was six years away; full compliance was not required until 2030. That was plenty of time for the case to play out through the legal system.
The chief wrote right back the next day sounding irritated and blunt.
Speed was vital, he said, because environmental regulation was going to be very expensive for states and the power industry. The sums involved could approach $480 billion, he asserted, and industry groups would have to start preparations immediately.
What I cannot get past is the concern over the amount of $480 billion as an excuse to employ the major questions doctrine. If we take Roberts’ statement at face value and in good faith, it seems clear that an amount of $4.80 would not be an issue. So somewhere between $4.80 and $480 billion, the cost is too much. Is it $48 billion? $4.8 billion? $967 million?
How does one draw the line? How does a president know where that line is? And how should Congress write legislation as to not run afoul of a conservative Supreme Court?
It is just bullshit all the way down. Pack the Court, and when needs be, strip it of jurisdiction.
I’ve long been an industrial policy enthusiast. My favorite popular nonfiction book is Joe Studwell’s How Asia Works, a synthesis of decades of research about the economic miracles in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. I wrote a whole series of posts examining the successes and failures of various developing countries through the lens of Studwell’s ideas:
Around the same time I discovered the industrial policy literature, the consensus was shifting within the big economic development agencies (the World Bank and the IMF). Whereas in previous decades, these organizations generally recommended against government meddling in the economy’s industrial structure, they’ve recently started to consider the kind of interventionist policies that Studwell recommends. In 2019, the IMF’s Reda Cherif and Fuad Hasanov wrote a paper called “The Return of the Policy That Shall Not Be Named: Principles of Industrial Policy”. They conclude that a Studwellian approach, if executed competently, can help a developing country grow faster than it would from just letting the market take its course:
We argue that the success of the Asian Miracles is based on three key principles that constitute “True Industrial Policy,” which we describe as Technology and Innovation Policy (TIP)…(i) state intervention to fix market failures that preclude the emergence of domestic producers in sophisticated industries early on, beyond the initial comparative advantage; (ii) export orientation, in contrast to the typical failed “industrial policy” of the 1960s–1970s, which was mostly import substitution industrialization (ISI); and (iii) the pursuit of fierce competition both abroad and domestically with strict accountability[.]
I was happy to see this shift — not because I’m certain that this sort of industrial policy is the secret to growth, but because I think it deserves to be in the discussion. So I’m also happy to see the World Bank now following suit, with a new report (or “book”) by Ana Margarida Fernandes and Tristan Reed entitled “Industrial Policy for Development: Approaches In the 21st Century”. The authors argue that although classic policy recommendations — macroeconomic stability, education, health, infrastructure, etc. — are still good, industrial policy can often help when layered on top of those basics.
I think it’s great to see the stigma about industrial policy going away. Not because this will lead to a wave of countries trying out such policies — that’s already happening — but because it’ll lead to more researchers taking the idea seriously. Dismissing the whole idea of industrial policy out of hand — as the World Bank and others did in the 1990s — is simply a policy of self-imposed ignorance. Countries need smart researchers to help them figure out which kind of industrial policies work and which don’t.
But as general interest in the topic has grown, my thoughts on industrial policy have also become more nuanced. As I’ve read more and written more about the idea, and as I’ve watched current events unfold, my thinking has evolved beyond “This is an important idea that deserves to be taken seriously”. So I thought I’d write a post briefly summarizing that evolution.
“Industrial policy” has become too broad of a category
One thing I always try to specify when I talk about “industrial policy” is that this term can mean a ton of different things. Most people think of it as government promotion of specific industries — autos, or electronics, or maybe just manufacturing in general. Others see export promotion — which is more about where products are sold than about which products they are — as the key industrial policy. Some people see FDI promotion as industrial policy; others don’t.
Even if we just focus on what you might call “classical” industrial policy — government promotion of specific industries — there’s a huge range of types of policies you might use. Protectionism — tariffs, import quotas, etc. — is often regarded as a tool for promoting manufacturing. That’s very different from export promotion. Direct government subsidies for favored industries are a common strategy — and one that’s on the rise throughout the world — but subsidies weren’t really used by many classic “industrial policy” success stories like Japan and Taiwan.
It’s kind of crazy that this huge diversity of policies and goals coexists under one single buzzword. It makes conversations about the topic difficult if not outright impossible. When people yell at me that “industrial policy is bad” or “industrial policy always fails”, I have no idea whether they’re talking about protectionism, or industrial subsidies, or government intervention in general.
If you read the IMF and World Bank papers on industrial policy, you can see that these distinctions really matter. The IMF paper explicitly contrasts export promotion with import substitution (protectionism), claiming that the former is very promising while the latter is usually bad. The World Bank report supports industrial parks and market-access assistance, while casting doubt on the effectiveness of subsidies and tariffs. In other words, even the people advocating industrial policy think that certain kinds are good and other kinds are bad.
In 2012 or even 2018 it made sense to talk about “industrial policy” as a single thing, because it basically just meant that researchers and policymakers should take a look at a bunch of different ideas that had been beyond the pale of orthodoxy in previous decades. But now that researchers and policymakers have actively started to look into those ideas — and to implement them on a large scale — it no longer makes sense to talk about “industrial policy”. We need to be more specific.
For developing countries, “just do FDI” looks like a viable strategy
In my series of posts on developing-country industrialization, I found a subset of countries that had clearly succeeded with a very simple, seemingly replicable formula: promoting FDI in manufacturing. I singled out Poland and Malaysia as countries that got rich in recent years simply by encouraging multinational companies to put their factories and research centers there:
Poland, especially, has succeeded amazingly using the FDI strategy. A lot of industrial policy enthusiasts — Ha-Joon Chang, for example — used to argue that developing countries should build their own domestic “national champions” instead of relying on foreign capital and know-how. That’s what Japan and Korea did, it’s true. But you’d probably be hard-pressed to name a Polish brand. And yet Poland’s economic performance since the end of communism has been absolutely stellar — it’s about to surpass Japan’s living standards, and is now even starting to catch up to Korea:
Interestingly, FDI was also central to the development strategies of Singapore and Ireland — two of the richest countries on the planet. You’d also be hard-pressed to name a Singaporean or Irish brand. And China’s approach before the early 2010s — during its fastest era of growth — centered much more on FDI than on subsidies or on the promotion of national champions in general.
When you look at poor countries that got rich since World War 2 by building national champions, the list is pretty short — there aren’t a lot of South Koreas out there. But the list of countries that got rich, or nearly rich, by promoting FDI is getting longer by the decade. So while I wouldn’t discount the Korea strategy, I’m leaning toward the idea that the Poland approach is a lot easier to get right.
Why would it be easier to get rich through FDI than by building your own brands? I can think of a couple of reasons. For one thing, FDI is less risky — instead of having the government pick winners, you let multinationals try building a bunch of things in your country. It’s a way to let the market discover comparative advantage, while the government simply assumes that some sort of competitive advantage exists within the broad category of export manufacturing.
FDI promotion also requires good institutions. If you’re trying to get German companies to build their factories in your country, you probably need to have the kind of property rights that German companies are used to dealing with. Poland became the workshop of Europe by forcing itself to shed its communist-era institutions and become more like the EU.
Note that the new World Bank report focuses on industrial parks as its favorite industrial policy. Industrial parks are a key part of the Poland/Malaysia/Singapore/Ireland strategy — a tool of FDI promotion. I predict that for developing countries, this approach will become more recognized as the closest thing we have to a universal push-button solution for getting out of poverty.
For developed countries, industrial policy is technology policy
Right now, much of the economic discussion in the U.S. is about AI — how to promote it, how to enable it, and how to regulate it.
This is classic industrial policy. It’s picking a winner! If you rewrite regulation to allow more construction of data centers, or if you try to recruit top AI researchers, or if you use export controls to prevent a competing company from seizing the initiative in AI, or if you do any special thing to promote the industry, you are picking AI as a winner. (The fact that almost every country is picking AI as a winner doesn’t change that fact — there was a time when every country thought it was essential to have its own auto industry.) And I don’t see a lot of free-market economists disagreeing with this pick.
Nor is this the first hot new technology that the American government has specifically encouraged within my lifetime. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 selectively deregulated the internet sector, because everyone agreed that the internet would be economically important. The National Science Foundation subsidized the internet’s initial buildout, as did the High-Performance Computing Act of 1991. State governments provided telecom companies with tons of subsidies to build out wireless networks, and so on.
We picked the internet as a winner, and it was a winner. Notably, very few of the free-market enthusiasts who criticized industrial policy in developing countries raised the alarm about the U.S. picking winners in the internet age. The industrial policies we used to pick that winner fell under the rubric of things that economists had already admitted that rich countries ought to be doing — infrastructure, deregulation, and R&D promotion.
But for rich countries, technology policy is industrial policy. The emergence of a major new technology puts a developed country in the position of a developing country in a narrow, limited sense. A poor nation lacks a car industry, an electronics industry, a machinery industry, a shipbuilding industry, and so on. America in 1985 lacked an internet industry, and America in 2022 lacked an AI industry, because those technologies had just been invented.
So I think rich countries actually have a lot to learn from developing countries when it comes to technological revolutions. Building something that no one has ever built before is a task that shares a lot in common with that of building something that your country has never built before. It’s not the exact same problem, but it’s related. So the people trying to figure out how to make America competitive in AI should study the South Korean Heavy and Chemical Industry initiative, or Taiwan’s promotion of TSMC, or METI’s promotion of Japan’s auto industry.
China’s approach has big flaws
In the last few years, China embarked on an unprecedented policy experiment. The Chinese government has subsidized high-tech manufacturing industries to a far greater degree than any other country in history. This has led to a boom in high-tech manufacturing, increases in China’s global market share in those industries, a huge surge in Chinese exports (known as the Second China Shock), and to the emergence of some Chinese national champions like BYD.
But we’re definitely starting to see the downsides of this experiment. First and foremost, paying dozens of companies to all make the same products ends up creating brutal price wars that compete profit margins toward zero:
Margin compression deprives companies of R&D budgets, which must then be substituted by government research. It also leads to deflation, which exacerbates bad debts, burdening households, corporations, and the financial system.
China’s leaders realize these issues. Cutting industrial subsidies will be politically difficult, especially because the country is still suffering low demand from the bursting of its real estate bubble. But they’re starting to do it — for example, the government is phasing out subsidies for trading in old cars, leading to a predictable plunge in new car sales.
According to the standard “export discipline” playbook — which Studwell articulated, and which the 2019 IMF paper on industrial policy endorsed — this is exactly what you’re supposed to do. A wave of subsidies for export manufacturing results in a Cambrian explosion of manufacturers; the brutal global market selects the best of these; the government withdraws subsidies and lets all the inferior manufacturers die, while the national champions live and flourish and experience healthier margins.
This may work for China, if subsidies can successfully be withdrawn. But it’ll leave behind a major problem: bank debt. By some estimates, the bulk of China’s unprecedented industrial subsidies are actually in the form of artificially cheap bank loans:
This means that if and when China forces most of its subsidy recipients into bankruptcy — just as Joe Studwell and the IMF say you’re supposed to do! — it’ll result in a huge wave of bad debts. Those bad debts will sit on the books of Chinese banks, right alongside the existing mountain of bad debts from the real estate bust.
If you believe that the Chinese state is unified, and that Chinese banks and the government are the exact same thing, and that the government simply directs borrowing without regard to profit and loss, then maybe you think bank balance sheets just don’t matter in the People’s Republic. But if you think bank managers in China have any discretionary power over lending — how much, or to which companies — then you have to think that having the bank’s books crammed with bad debts will have some kind of effect.
In particular, Chinese banks will be heavily incentivized to “evergreen” loans to zombie companies that they’ve already lent to. Those subsidized lifelines will delay the day of reckoning, allowing banks to pretend their balance sheets are healthier than they are, while diverting financing from younger, healthier companies. This is probably what happened in Japan after its bubble burst in the early 1990s.
The standard model of industrial policy — temporary export subsidies — imagines these as being provided at taxpayer expense. But if financial intermediaries are important — and most rapidly industrializing countries rely heavily on banks rather than on markets for financing — then it’s not so simple. A wave of corporate failures may be healthy for margins, but could cause years of low growth as banks are paralyzed with fear and tethered to zombie companies. And it’s not clear that state ownership and control of the banking system is an effective remedy, because even in a communist system, middle managers are still probably afraid for their personal careers (or their lives) if their institutions perform poorly.
This means we shouldn’t hail the Chinese industrial policy experiment as a success until we wait a few years. More generally, I think discussions of industrial policy tend to downplay the role of financial systems, and banking systems in particular. I plan to write a lot more about that soon.
The New York Times has a long article where the author lays out an impressive array of circumstantial evidence that the inventor of Bitcoin is the cypherpunk Adam Back.
I don’t know. The article is convincing, but it’s written to be convincing.
I can’t remember if I ever met Adam. I was a member of the Cypherpunks mailing list for a while, but I was never really an active participant. I spent more time on the Usenet newsgroup sci.crypt. I knew a bunch of the Cypherpunks, though, from various conferences around the world at the time. I really have no opinion about who Satoshi Nakamoto really is.
1. Produce and Teach Useful Knowledge
Universities exist to generate and teach useful knowledge. This knowledge is grounded in skeptical inquiry, empirical evidence, and logical deduction. “Useful” includes not only practical applications but also fundamental discoveries that expand our understanding of the world, even if their benefits are long-term.
2. Be Useful to All of Society
Universities are subsidized only if society at large finds them valuable. Research may take time to bear fruit, but its insights should ultimately serve the public good, communicated openly and accessibly, and presented with epistemic humility. Teaching should be done with care and draw on up-to-date research.
3. Attract Talent from All of Society
Useful knowledge can be created by people from any social or economic background. Do not waste talent. Do not select talent based on who knows “how to play the game”. Avoid insular language or norms that deter people from entering research.
4. Neutral, Objective Research Produces Useful Knowledge
Research must be neutral and objective. It is true that everyone has their individual background and preferences; nonetheless, unbiased research is still possible. Tradition, folk knowledge, and storytelling all play an important roles in society, but they are not the purpose of universities. There is no “Western science” or culturally-determined “ways of knowing”. Rather, research is open to all and can be performed identically regardless of background.
5. Hire, Promote, and Cite Based on Knowledge Contribution
Hiring, promotion, and citation must be based on an individual’s contribution to knowledge. Nepotism, group preferences, and adherence to specific “schools of thought” corrupt this process. When advancement is not based on merit, the public rightly questions our integrity and the objectivity of our findings.
6. Keep Personal Views Out of Research and Teaching
A scholar’s personal politics should be invisible in their research and teaching. If a finding is predictable based on the author’s identity or known views, the process has failed. Objectivity is the hallmark of credible science. Academics may hold private beliefs like anyone else, but their academic work must stand apart from them.
7. Research Fraud is Unacceptable
Fraud destroys trust. Misrepresentation of results, selective reporting, or methods designed to publish rather than to discover are also harmful. Proven fraud must bring immediate dismissal, as it violates the core purpose of academia.
8. Scientific Institutions Should Be Apolitical
Universities, journals, and scientific societies must remain non-partisan. Their public statements must be rare, restricted to issues of direct expert consensus, and made only when silence would be a greater threat to their integrity than speaking. Activism sacrifices credibility for influence – or worse yet, sacrifices credibility and influence alike.
The third flight of Blue Origin's heavy-lift New Glenn launcher began Sunday with the company's first successful reflight of an orbital-class booster, but ended with a setback for Jeff Bezos' flagship rocket, a key element in NASA's Artemis lunar program.
The 321-foot-tall (98-meter) New Glenn launch vehicle ignited its seven methane-fueled BE-4 engines at 7:25 am EDT (11:25 UTC) Sunday, beginning a slow climb from its launch pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida.
The main engines, each producing more than a half-million pounds of thrust, accelerated the rocket past the speed of sound in about a minute-and-a-half. Three minutes into the flight, the booster switched off its engines and fell away from New Glenn's upper stage, powered by two BE-3U engines burning liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen.
On the evening of April 18, 1775, the people who lived in the British colony of Massachusetts had gone to bed with the sun, as usual. By the evening of April 19, everything had changed. In the past twenty-four hours, soldiers from their own government had opened fire on them, killing their own people. And Massachusetts men had fired back.
It was hard to understand how things had gotten so bad. Only a dozen years before, at the end of the French and Indian War in 1763, Bostonians had looked forward to a happy future in the British empire. British authorities had spent time and money protecting the colonies, and colonists saw themselves as valued members of the empire. They expected to prosper as they moved to the rich lands on the other side of the Appalachian Mountains and their ships plied the oceans to expand the colonies’ trade with other countries.
But that euphoria faded fast. Almost as soon as the war was over, to prevent colonists from stirring up another expensive struggle with Indigenous Americans, King George III prohibited the colonists from crossing the Appalachian Mountains. Then, to pay for the war just past, the king’s ministers pushed through Parliament a number of revenue laws.
In 1765, Parliament passed the Stamp Act, requiring the payment of a tax on all printed material—from newspapers and legal documents to playing cards. It would hit virtually everyone in the North American colonies. Knowing that local juries would acquit their fellow colonists who violated the revenue acts, Parliament took away the right to civil trials and declared that suspects would be tried before admiralty courts overseen by British military officers. Then Parliament required colonials to pay the expenses for the room and board of British troops who would be stationed in the colonies, a law known as the Quartering Act.
But what Parliament saw as a way to raise money to pay for an expensive war—one that had benefited the colonists, after all—colonial leaders saw as an abuse of power. The British government had regulated trade in the empire for more than a century. But now, for the first time, the British government had placed a direct tax on the colonists without their consent, a right the king had guaranteed to Englishmen in the Magna Carta of 1215. Then it had taken away the right to a trial by jury—also a historical right—and now it was forcing colonists to pay for a military to police them.
Far more than money was at stake. The fight over the Stamp Act tapped into a struggle over a profound question of human governance: Could the king be checked by the people?
This was a question the colonists were perhaps uniquely qualified to answer. While the North American colonies were governed officially by the British crown, the distance between England and the colonies meant that colonial assemblies often had to make rules on the ground. Those assemblies controlled the power of the purse, which gave them the upper hand over royal officials, who had to await orders from England that often took months to arrive. This chaotic system enabled the colonists to carve out a new approach to politics even while they were living in the British empire.
Colonists naturally began to grasp that the exercise of power was not the province of a divinely ordained leader, but something temporary that depended on local residents’ willingness to support the men who were exercising that power.
The Stamp Act threatened to overturn that longstanding system, replacing it with tyranny.
When news of the Stamp Act arrived in Boston, a group of dockhands, sailors, and workers took to the streets, calling themselves the Sons of Liberty. They warned colonists that their rights as Englishmen were under attack. Lawyer John Adams recognized that the Sons of Liberty were changing the political equation. He wrote that gatherings of the Sons of Liberty “tinge the Minds of the People, they impregnate them with the sentiments of Liberty. They render the People fond of their Leaders in the Cause, and averse and bitter against all opposers.”
John Adams’s cousin Samuel Adams, who was deeply involved with the Sons of Liberty, recognized that building a coalition in defense of liberty within the British system required conversation and cooperation. As clerk of the Massachusetts legislature, he was responsible for corresponding with other colonial legislatures. Across the colonies, the Sons of Liberty began writing to like-minded friends, informing them about local events, asking after their circumstances, organizing.
They spurred people to action. By 1766 the Stamp Act was costing more to enforce than it was producing in revenue, and Parliament agreed to end it. But it explicitly claimed “full power and authority to make laws and statutes...to bind the colonies and people of America...in all cases whatsoever.” It imposed new revenue measures.
News of new taxes reached Boston in late 1767. The Massachusetts legislature promptly circulated a letter to the other colonies opposing taxation without representation and standing firm on the colonists’ right to equality in the British empire. The Sons of Liberty and their associates called for boycotts on taxed goods and broke into the warehouses of those they suspected weren’t complying, while women demonstrated their sympathy for the rights of colonists by producing their own cloth and drinking coffee rather than relying on tea.
British officials worried that colonists in Boston were on the edge of revolt, and they sent troops to restore order. But the troops’ presence did not calm the town. Instead, fights erupted between locals and the British regulars.
Finally, in March 1770, British soldiers fired into a crowd of angry men and boys harassing them. They wounded six and killed five, including Crispus Attucks, a Black man who became the first to die in the attack. Son of Liberty Paul Revere turned the altercation into the “Boston Massacre.” His instantly famous engraving showed soldiers in red coats smiling as they shot at colonists, “Like fierce Barbarians grinning o’er their Prey; Approve the Carnage, and enjoy the Day.”
Parliament promptly removed the British troops to an island in Boston Harbor and got rid of all but one of the new taxes. They left the one on tea, keeping the issue of taxation without representation on the table. Then, in May 1773, Parliament gave the East India Tea Company a monopoly on tea sales in the colonies. By lowering the cost of tea in the colonies, it meant to persuade people to buy the taxed tea, thus establishing Parliament’s right to impose a tax on the colonies.
In Boston, local leaders posted a citizen guard on Griffin’s Wharf at the harbor to make sure tea could not be unloaded. On December 16, 1773, men dressed as Indigenous Americans boarded three merchant ships. They broke open 342 chests of tea and dumped the valuable leaves overboard.
Parliament closed the port of Boston, stripped the colony of its charter, flooded soldiers back into the town, and demanded payment for the tea. Colonists promptly organized the Massachusetts Provincial Congress and took control of the colony. The provincial congress met in Concord, where it stockpiled supplies and weapons, and called for towns to create “minute men” who could fight at a moment’s notice.
British officials were determined to end what they saw as a rebellion. In April they ordered military governor General Thomas Gage to arrest colonial leaders Samuel Adams and John Hancock, who had left Boston to take shelter with one of Hancock’s relatives in the nearby town of Lexington. From there they could seize the military supplies at Concord. British officials hoped that seizing both the men and the munitions would end the crisis.
But about thirty of the Sons of Liberty had been watching the soldiers and gathering intelligence. When the soldiers set out on the night of April 18, two Sons of Liberty flashed two lanterns in the steeple of the Old North Church—the highest point in Boston—to signal to watchers that the soldiers were traveling across Boston Harbor to Charlestown. Armed with that knowledge, messengers could avoid the troops and raise the alarm along the roads to Lexington and Concord.
Paul Revere and William Dawes headed for Lexington. There, they warned Adams and Hancock and then set out for Concord. They picked up young doctor Samuel Prescott, who had been in Lexington courting, on their way. British soldiers stopped Revere and Dawes, but Prescott got away and made it to Concord. As they heard the news, families set off a system of “alarm and muster” developed months before for just such an occasion, ringing bells and banging drums to alert the next house that there was an emergency.
Just before dawn on that chilly, dark April morning, militiamen had heard the news and were converging on Lexington Green. When the soldiers marched onto the Lexington town green in the darkness just before dawn, they found several dozen minute men waiting for them. An officer ordered the men to leave, and they began to mill around, some of them leaving, others staying. And then, just as the sun was coming up, a gun went off. The soldiers opened fire. When the locals realized the soldiers were firing not just powder, but also lead musket balls, most ran. Eight locals were killed, and another dozen wounded.
The outnumbered militiamen fell back to tend their wounded, and about 300 Regulars marched on Concord to destroy the guns and powder there. But news of the arriving soldiers and the shooting on Lexington town green had spread through the colonists’ communication network, and militiamen from as far away as Worcester were either in Concord or on their way. By midmorning the Regulars were outnumbered and in battle with about 400 militiamen. They pulled back to the main body of British troops still in Lexington.
The Regulars headed back to Boston, but by then militiamen had converged on their route. The Regulars had been awake for almost two days with only a short rest, and they were tired. Militiamen fired at them not in organized lines, as soldiers were accustomed to, but in the style they had learned from Indigenous Americans, shooting from behind trees, houses, and the glacial boulders littered along the road. This way of war used the North American landscape to their advantage. They picked off British officers, dressed in distinct uniforms, first. By that evening, more than three hundred British soldiers and colonists lay dead or wounded.
Even before the British soldiers made it back down the Battle Road from Concord on April 19, militiamen—both white and Black, free and enslaved—from the Massachusetts countryside, furious that soldiers of their own government had shot at them and killed their neighbors, rushed to surround Boston, laying siege to the soldiers and British officials there.
By the next morning, more than 15,000 militiamen surrounded the town of Boston. The Revolutionary War had begun.
Just over a year later, the fight that had started over the question of whether the king could be checked by the people would give the colonists an entirely new, radical answer to that question. On July 4, 1776, they declared the people had the right to be treated equally before the law, and they had the right to govern themselves.
Jessica Chastain says Apple TV is finally going to release her
political thriller series “The Savant.” [...]
“Before it was like, ‘I don’t know if we’re going to see it,’ but
now I can say, ‘We’re going to see it,’” Chastain told me
exclusively on Saturday at the Breakthrough Prize ceremony in
Santa Monica.
As for when, sources tell me that Apple is planning for a July
release.
It takes most college students at least four years to earn a bachelor’s degree. Christie Williams finished in three months.
The North Carolina human resources executive spent two months racking up credits through web tutorials after work in 2024, then raced through 11 online classes at the University of Maine at Presque Isle in four weeks. Later that year, she went back to earn her master’s — in just five weeks. The two degrees cost a total of just over $4,000.
Since then, she has coached a thousand other students on how to speed through the state college, shaving off years and thousands of dollars from the usual cost of a degree.
It's been a decade since we lost Prince, and I wanted to take a moment to offer a look back at some of the pieces I've written over the years, and share some of the work I've done, and hopefully it will give you a chance to explore some aspect of his artistry or legacy that you haven't yet had a chance to discover!
Perhaps a good place to start: It's time to discover Prince — a set of starting points to look at Prince's musical catalog, with selected albums (with more than 40 albums to pick from, it can be overwhelming to know where to start!) and some playlists that I created specifically to help new fans find out exactly why we love his music so much.
Another comprehensive overview: Every video Prince ever made. I walked through all of the music videos Prince made over the four decades of his career, offering some info and context that might help you find which ones are most compelling (or weird!) and worth your time.
I've also gotten to guest on a number of podcasts and in other media over the years to discuss various aspects of Prince's career. Perhaps none was more exciting for me than talking about Prince's history of technological innovation for the official Prince podcast. Then, no less than the New York Times described me as a "Prince scholar" when it covered the discovery of the earliest known footage of Prince as a child. There are a bunch of other podcast appearances (see below) but these felt like the pinnacle of legitimacy for my career as a Prince fan.
Here on my site, there are some pieces I wrote to try to explain a few of Prince's masterworks. I wanted to give a sort of x-ray view into the larger cultural and even political context behind his choices when Prince created his best-known artistic expressions:
I Know Times Are Changing: This is the minute-by-minute story of how the song Purple Rain was created — covering everything from the background story of how conservative rock fans had hounded Prince's band off the stage at the turn of the 80s, to a glimpse into Prince's editing process where he turned a debut of his band into his signature song.
How Prince Won the Super Bowl: Many people know that Prince played the greatest Super Bowl halftime show of all time, but very few know that it wasn't just a scintillating musical performance. I get into why Prince didn't play his biggest hits like "When Doves Cry" and "Kiss", and how the show was a deeply personal statement on race, equity, and legacy.
Prince Interactive: Shortly after Prince's passing, I collaborated with several of the people who maintained Prince's (many!) websites over the years to help create the Prince Online Museum, an archive of many of Prince's digital works over the years. The earliest of these digital experiences is the Interactive CD-ROM which Prince released in 1994. I created a walkthrough video of the game which is shared as a resource on the site for those who've never gotten a chance to see the game in the years since its release.
Prince's Own Liner Notes On His Greatest Hits: I have worked hard to preserve Prince's extensive digital archives over the years, and this is one of the bits I'm most proud of. For the release of his first greatest hits set in 1993, Prince compiled a list of draft notes for his former manager Alan Leeds to use as the basis of the box set's liner notes. This draft was later posted on Prince's first website, and then quickly deleted — but not before I was able to archive a copy! So I was able to share the only surviving copy of Prince's first-person commentary on the biggest hits of his career, which is well worth a read.
Message From The Artist: This is another bit of digital archiving from Prince's original website of a letter that was briefly posted 30 years ago before being lost to history. In it, Prince explained the spiritual and artistic reasons behind his shocking decision to change his name to an unpronounceable symbol, and laid out the battle for ownership and control of his music which would come to define the second half of his career. The letter was quickly amended to be far less personal, and then deleted completely from Prince's website, but I was able to hold onto a copy that we can now read for ourselves.
Then, there are some fun artifacts and experiences about Prince that I found to be worth sharing, and other folks have found them to be pretty fun, too. One of my most favorite stories is The Purple Raincheck, about the time that Prince invited me to his house, but I couldn't go. And yet somehow, in true Prince fashion, I ended up with an even better story in the end anyway. If you've ever wanted to know what it's like to roll up to Prince's Oscars party, this is the one for you.
At the other end of the nerdy spectrum, there's this piece about my favorite floppy disc of all time, a rarity I was able to track down which contained the obscure font that Prince's team sent out to publications when he had changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol, so that they could properly render his trademark icon. Later, with the help of the brilliant minds at Adafruit, I was able to recover the data from the disc after almost three decades, through some vintage technology and a little bit of good luck.
For Minnesota Public Radio's The Current, we also dug into Prince's history as a computer nerd. On Switched on Pop, we dug into Why U Love 2 Listen 2 Prince, with an incredible audio breakdown showing how Prince influenced everybody — including a direct connection to the biggest album of all time.
Dig, if u will
We've been lucky to have a global community of Prince scholars that's formed over the years, which regularly hosts academic symposia, publishes papers and books, delivers remarkable talks on every aspect of Prince's work and the impact of his legacy, and in general uses his art as the starting point for some pretty extraordinary cultural exploration. One manifestation of that tendency to take his work seriously is the spreadsheet of Prince recordings, which is a fan-created work designed to provide a canonical reference for the thousands of compositions that Prince created over his career, unifying the conversations and discussions that people have. This is genuine nerd stuff!
And finally, one of the things I'm most proud of is this talk I delivered just a few weeks after Prince passed, in Minneapolis on what would have been his 58th birthday. It covers a really broad swath of Prince's influences and both his technical innovations and fierce battle for artistic independence. But it also dives into a lot of my background and my family's personal history, and connects it to a lot of themes of immigration and the systems that govern how this country moves. A decade on, I think some of these themes resonate more than ever, and if you're willing to set aside some time for it, I'd really love for more people to watch it, as I think it speaks to so many of the things I care most deeply about.
In all, after the initial grief and shock of his loss, I've been pleased to see Prince's legacy and impact grow. It's been wonderful to see so many people be surprised and delighted at all the different ways his work and innovative ideas remain relevant and resonant years and even decades after he created them. And I never get tired of people around the world sending me links or images of Prince or Prince-related items, saying "this reminded me of you!". Whether it's from old friends or people I've never met, it's something very special to be connected to others through the art and creativity of a fiercely independent spirit.
Above all else, Prince wanted to encourage people to create and be creative, to have mastery over their work and their lives, to be their true selves, and to be loving and compassionate towards others. Like everyone, he was flawed and complicated and weird and contradictory. But unlike anyone, he was able to create new worlds that millions of people got to live in inside their imaginations, and to fight impossible battles against all the odds and still somehow prevail.
That's still an inspiring example everyone can follow, no matter who your are, or how you create in the world. And best of all, Prince has created a perfect soundtrack to help you do it.
So schools will respond to cost pressures by letting quality deteriorate. More instruction will be of the inferior online variety. There are very good online experiences, but schools are too bureaucratic and not run well enough to deliver them. Fewer professors will be full-salaried, tenure-track professors. Administrators and staff will grow at much slower rates than over the last 20 years, a positive development.
That overall picture may sound grim, but adjustments will kick in to limit the costs. A global market will ensure that adjunct faculty are smarter and better than before. Students will get better at using AI to teach themselves, filling in the gaps left by university budget shortages.
At the same time, colleges and universities will get better at marketing and fundraising. Schools with famous football and basketball teams will be just fine. Schools will intensively market a few academic superstars and let the quality of their median tenured faculty decline. Every possible profit center in a university will be mined for extra revenue, whether extra housekeeping service for dormitory living or renting out the swimming pool and university library to nearby retirees.
And this:
Perhaps you commonly hear it said that “college is what you make of it.” That may sound like a cliché, but it is a truth that helps us understand this new world to come. A lot of students just flat out want to go to college. If they have to put more into the social side of learning to make it worthwhile, they will do so.
In sum, there will be a lot of painful adjustment, but the major institutions will not come close to disappearing.
Milder temperatures in April than March, with much more precipitation; snowpack, however, remains extremely low What a strange Water Year it has been in 2025-2026! We started the WY with record rainfall during Oct-Dec across much of the central and south coast, including the wettest Oct-Dec period ever observed in Santa Barbara, Ventura, Kern, and […]
I upgraded my Claude Token Counter tool to add the ability to run the same count against different models in order to compare them.
As far as I can tell Claude Opus 4.7 is the first model to change the tokenizer, so it's only worth running comparisons between 4.7 and 4.6. The Claude token counting API accepts any Claude model ID though so I've included options for all four of the notable current models (Opus 4.7 and 4.6, Sonnet 4.6, and Haiku 4.5).
Opus 4.7 uses an updated tokenizer that improves how the model processes text. The tradeoff is that the same input can map to more tokens—roughly 1.0–1.35× depending on the content type.
I pasted the Opus 4.7 system prompt into the token counting tool and found that the Opus 4.7 tokenizer used 1.46x the number of tokens as Opus 4.6.
Opus 4.7 uses the same pricing is Opus 4.6 - $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens - but this token inflation means we can expect it to be around 40% more expensive.
The token counter tool also accepts images. Opus 4.7 has improved image support, described like this:
Opus 4.7 has better vision for high-resolution images: it can accept images up to 2,576 pixels on the long edge (~3.75 megapixels), more than three times as many as prior Claude models.
I tried counting tokens for a 3456x2234 pixel 3.7MB PNG and got an even bigger increase in token counts - 3.01x times the number of tokens for 4.7 compared to 4.6:
Update: That 3x increase for images is entirely due to Opus 4.7 being able to handle higher resolutions. I tried that again with a 682x318 pixel image and it took 314 tokens with Opus 4.7 and 310 with Opus 4.6, so effectively the same cost.
Update 2: I tried a 15MB, 30 page text-heavy PDF and Opus 4.7 reported 60,934 tokens while 4.6 reported 56,482 - that's a 1.08x multiplier, significantly lower than the multiplier I got for raw text.
Matt Webb thinks headless services are about to become much more common:
Why? Because using personal AIs is a better experience for users than using services directly (honestly); and headless services are quicker and more dependable for the personal AIs than having them click round a GUI with a bot-controlled mouse.
Welcome Salesforce Headless 360: No Browser Required! Our API is the UI. Entire Salesforce & Agentforce & Slack platforms are now exposed as APIs, MCP, & CLI. All AI agents can access data, workflows, and tasks directly in Slack, Voice, or anywhere else with Salesforce Headless.
If this model does take off it's going to play havoc with existing per-head SaaS pricing schemes.
I'm reminded of the early 2010s era when every online service was launching APIs. Brandur Leach reminisces about that time in The Second Wave of the API-first Economy, and predicts that APIs are ready to make a comeback:
Suddenly, an API is no longer liability, but a major saleable vector to give users what they want: a way into the services they use and pay for so that an agent can carry out work on their behalf. Especially given a field of relatively undifferentiated products, in the near future the availability of an API might just be the crucial deciding factor that leads to one choice winning the field.
Along the western coast of Southern Thailand, a series of bright tan beaches lines the Andaman Sea. These sandy expanses fill the gaps between the myriad other features touching the sea, from limestone karst towers to mangroves to built-up areas.
The OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 8 captured these images on March 23, 2026, showing part of the coastal area along Thailand’s Krabi Province. These beaches lie about 50 kilometers (30 miles) east of Phuket across Ao Phangnga, a bay of the Andaman Sea. The beaches are a tourism hotspot and draw visitors from around the world.
Railay Beach and Phra Nang Beach, accessible by boat, are especially a draw for rock climbers who come here to scale the seaside walls of limestone. The towering formations are an iconic part of the region’s tropical karst landscape, resulting from the just-right ingredients of rock type and climate conditions.
Limestone in this region formed from the accumulation of calcium carbonate, the skeletal remains of marine organisms that settled here when the area was covered by a shallow sea hundreds of millions of years ago. Over time, continental collisions lifted the rock upward and shaped it into complex patterns. Rainwater, made slightly acidic due to the tropical environment, assisted in the chemical weathering that eroded the limestone, sculpting the rock into unique shapes.
Limestone towers stand above the sea off the coast of Southern Thailand.
Photo by Shawn via Unsplash.
March 23, 2026
The karst landscape extends into the sea in the form of islands. For instance, Ko Po Da Nai and Ko Hong, visible in the wide satellite image above, feature steep limestone cliffs and caves, making them a popular destination for paddlers. Larger boats also cut through the water, their wakes appearing as white streaks.
On the mainland, the landscape beyond the sandy beaches includes varied terrain. Green forests cover the slopes of Khao Hang Nak, where hikers can take in views of the Andaman Sea and surrounding karst formations. At lower elevations, green mangroves line several rivers, including Khlong Chi Lat.
Human activity is most visible in the flatter plains, where urban development and agriculture have transformed the landscape. Krabi, the province’s capital, and nearby towns appear gray. To the northwest, patches of brown and green in geometric patterns indicate agricultural land, where oil palm and rubber trees are commonly grown alongside other crops such as pineapple.
NASA Earth Observatory images by Lauren Dauphin, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Photo by Shawn used under the Unsplash license.Story by Kathryn Hansen.
It might look like we started a space war, but we didn't. This isn't a scene from Star Wars either. What we're looking at is the Tarantula Nebula. And those beams come from the lasers installed on the telescopes that comprise ESO's Very Large Telescope Interferometer.
The VLTI combines the light from several telescopes to create a “virtual” telescope with a mirror as large as the separation between them, allowing astronomers to discern very small details. For the telescopes to combine their light properly, we need to correct the distortions introduced by atmospheric turbulence.
In November 2025, as part of an extensive upgrade called GRAVITY+, new lasers were installed on the 8-m telescopes that comprise the VLTI. Each laser in this image comes from a different telescope, all pointing at the same target. The lasers excite sodium atoms high up in Earth’s atmosphere, creating artificial stars that can be seen here at the end of the laser beams. These stars are then used to measure atmospheric turbulence in real time.
The Tarantula Nebula was one of the first targets of this new system. This Picture of the Week is not itself a VLTI image of the target, but a photograph taken outside of the telescopes by astronomer Anthony Berdeu, who took part in the GRAVITY+ testing activities. This image beautifully bridges near and far-away objects: the lasers launched by the four telescopes, the artificial stars they create 90 km above the ground, and the Tarantula Nebula, nestled in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy orbiting the Milky Way some 160 000 light-years away.
In 2008, much to their own surprise, leading Democrats unified around a program of major health care reform. Policy wonks had spent years developing the concepts behind what eventually became Obamacare; big Democratic victories in the 2006 midterms and the prospect of controlling both Congress and the presidency made it possible to imagine turning those ideas into reality. During the Democratic primary, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama advocated similar plans, based on those ideas, for expanding insurance coverage.
And it happened! The Affordable Care Act was enacted in 2010. When it was fully implemented in 2014, millions of Americans got health insurance:
Impressive as the raw numbers are, they don’t tell the whole story. Before the ACA, even upper-middle-class Americans often found it impossible to get health insurance if they had pre-existing medical conditions. Many Americans were trapped in jobs they wanted to leave but couldn’t for fear of losing their employment-based coverage. Meanwhile, dire predictions from the usual suspects about runaway costs proved wrong. In fact, overall U.S. medical spending has grown much more slowly since the ACA was enacted than before.
But the U.S., alone among advanced nations, still falls far short of providing universal health care. As you can see from the chart above, 8 percent of the population was still uninsured in 2024, a number that is set to rise over the next two years as a result of Republican policies. True, many of the uninsured in 2024 were undocumented immigrants, who we don’t try to cover. But there are still a lot of uninsured. Moreover, a significant number of Americans who have health insurance are in fact underinsured. As a result, they are at risk of incurring devastating healthcare costs and are sometimes forced to forgo needed care. This number is set to rise sharply in the next two years as a result of Republican policies adopted under Donald Trump.
And not only is the U.S. unique among advanced countries in its under-provision of health care coverage, it also incurs by far the world’s highest healthcare costs per capita.
So now may well be a good time to get behind a new push for major health reform — an effort, if you like, to finish the job begun under Obama.
Today’s primer is devoted to the economics of health reform. During his failed effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act, Donald Trump famously complained, “Nobody knew healthcare could be so complicated.” Actually, we did know — and it’s not that complicated. Health economists understand the principles very well. And because health policy varies greatly among advanced nations, we know a lot about what works and what doesn’t.
This will be the first in a series about health reform. Beyond the paywall I’ll address the following:
1. Why markets can’t be trusted to deliver healthcare
2. Routes to universal healthcare
3. What works?
In a follow-up post I’ll discuss the pros and cons of different approaches, and possible paths forward for the United States.
I put together some notes on patterns for fetching data from a Datasette instance directly into Google Sheets - using the importdata() function, a "named function" that wraps it or a Google Apps Script if you need to send an API token in an HTTP header (not supported by importdata().)
I've been experimenting with ways to fetch data from Datasette and display it in Google Sheets.
I've found three patterns that work so far. importdata() and "named functions" can only fetch from public Datasette instances. Apps Script can fetch from API key protected instances as well.
Using IMPORTDATA()
The easiest way to get this up and running doesn't involve any custom sheets functions at all. The IMPORTDATA() default function can fetch any CSV data from a URL and load it into the sheet - and Datasette exports CSV by default.
Ideally I'd like to use =sql("SELECT ...") in my spreadsheet cells instead. Google Sheets lets you define new "named functions" on a per-sheet basis, which can use existing Sheets functions and formulas - including importdata().
Go to Data -> Named functions and select "Add new function". Call it SQL and add a single argument placeholder called query, then set the following formula definition:
Now you can use =SQL("select * from roadside_attractions") in a cell to execute that SQL query and load in the CSV data:
Using Apps Script
There's one big downside of importdata() or a named function built on top of it: only unauthenticated URLs to CSV exports are supported. If your Datasette instance is protected by authentication and requires API keys to be sent as HTTP headers you will not be able to use them.
(importdata() can work fine here if the API key is a query string argument though. Here's how to enable that using the datasette-auth-tokens plugin.)
Apps Script lets you define custom server-side JavaScript functions which can then be called from a Google Sheets cell. These can be a lot more flexible, including sending API tokens in HTTP headers.
To create an Apps Script for a spreadsheet, use "Extensions -> Apps Script". This will start you on a code editor with a Code.gs file that you can edit. Here's a function definition for a =datasette_sql(query) custom function:
functiondatasette_sql(query){varbaseUrl='https://latest.datasette.io/fixtures'vartoken='';// Strip a trailing slash so we control the joinbaseUrl=baseUrl.replace(/\/+$/,"");varurl=baseUrl+"/-/query.json?sql="+encodeURIComponent(query);varoptions={muteHttpExceptions: true};if(token){options.headers={Authorization: "Bearer "+token};}varresponse=UrlFetchApp.fetch(url,options);varjson=JSON.parse(response.getContentText());if(!json.ok){thrownewError(json.error||"Query failed");}varrows=json.rows;if(!rows||rows.length===0)return[["No results"]];varcols=Object.keys(rows[0]);varresult=[cols];for(vari=0;i<rows.length;i++){varrow=[];for(varj=0;j<cols.length;j++){varval=rows[i][cols[j]];row.push(val===null ? "" : val);}result.push(row);}returnresult;}
You can set the base URL and an optional API token in variables at the top of the script.
You can ignore that "Deploy" button entirely, it's not necessary for custom functions for sheets. I had to hit the Command+S key combination to save my changes - confusingly I could not find a "save" button in the editor UI.
Apps Script has a script and document properties mechanism which theoretically could be used to keep secret values separate from that code, but I wasn't able to get that to work without confusing permission dialogs popping up.
As far as I can tell users who have "view" permission but not "edit" permission on the spreadsheet are unable to view the source code, so it should be safe to keep read-only API tokens in the source code even for shared spreadsheets.
I've prepared this demo sheet showing all three of the above solutions - importdata(), a named sql() function and a datasette_sql() function defined using Apps Script.
A side quest within my ongoing exploration of liveness lately has been applying the notion to writing. I don’t mean liveness in a figurative sense, such as a particularly well-conceived fictional character coming “alive” in a good novel. I mean a literal sort of liveness, marked by protean dynamism and interactivity affordances in the text itself. Of the sort portrayed as magic runes on the One Ring or Durin’s Door in LOTR or the horcrux-diary with a bit of Voldemort’s soul in it in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. Words that embody their own agency.
Text is alive when it can reshape or regenerate itself in response to the environment and the reader’s actions, but without there necessarily being a living speaker or writer producing the liveness in real time through some sort of rewrite loop that passes through (and arguably produces) something resembling personhood.
We’re learning that personhood-production is only one way to produce text, and not a particularly good way to produce living texts.
In this post I’m concerned with living text produced by processes other than the default one — a live human speaker or writer responding to their environment in real time by modulating the stream of words they speak or type.
Note that oral vs written is not an important distinction here — both can be live or dead kinds of text (think of memorized speeches or phatic utterances for example, or written texts evolving through drafts based on feedback), even though it’s generally easier for humans to speak liveness than to write it. This is notably not true for computers. Some processes (such as transformer models) do mimic the temporal-serial quality of spoken or serially written text, but other processes (such as text diffusion) have an all-at-once atemporal quality to how they generate text.
Historically, the idea that language can literally be alive in this sense has been the underlying conceit of belief in prayer and incantatory magic, but there has been no interesting sort of literal liveness for the magic-skeptics and atheists among us to engage with, outside of fiction.
Until quite recently, text was by definition nonliving. Ink on paper or pixels on screens. Pre-AI computers could lend a limited sort of near-liveness to text by generating it responsively in rigid ways (think text layouts that reflow/resize on a digital page, canned scripts in conversation trees, or tool tips and hover text in rich interfaces). But it was only with the discovery of LLMs (I’m increasingly certain it’s a discovery, like fractals, rather than an invention) that literal living text became a possibility. You can now trivially produce something like the talking portraits of dead people from Harry Potter, or the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer from Diamond Age. Or the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Piles of words infused with artificial life, living in “rocks we’ve tricked into thinking with electricity.”
So far, we’ve anthropomorphized this emerging capability by imputing a kind of speaker-being to live LLM-driven text-generation computing processes. We imagine a “chatbot” or “coding agent” or “customer service bot” as a speaker-being behind a living text stream, even though we recognize intellectually (at least those keeping up with how the tech works) that the processes are stateless, with memory jankily bolted on, sustaining an illusion of being. It doesn’t take much. As I argued over 3 years ago, in February 2023, when LLMs were much younger, text is all you need to sustain plausible illusions of personhood (and perhaps plausible illusions are all there are, and we fool ourselves into thinking we’re more).
The link between human-like personhood and the ability to produce live text is so tight that we tend to treat them as equivalent. To organisms that lack something resembling rudimentary language, we are inclined to attribute lesser forms of personhood. A cat’s meow language lends it more personhood than a tree’s chemical emissions, but less personhood than a chimpanzee that can use some sign language. And of course our human language, we tell ourselves, lends us the highest sort of personhood. So far AIs have reinforced rather than challenged this last bastion of our anthropocentric conceits. Our success with natural-language-based AI (including images, videos, code and scientific results generated with natural language prompts) far outstrips any other kind.
The textuality-personhood nexus was even turned into a prescient aphorism in Harry Potter that looks like an AI safety rule if you squint: Never trust something that can think for itself if you can’t see where it keeps its brain, where thinking in the Potter universe generally meant talking (the Sorting Hat, Tom Riddle’s diary). If that caution has merit, we’re getting ourselves into a lot of trouble. Fortunately I don’t think it does. Not only does it not matter where the brain lives, there need not be a biomorphic brain producing personhood at all. Something somewhere just has to be doing the equivalent of multiplying matrices.
So text that exhibits liveness need not have intelligible personhood behind it. Text is perhaps all you need for personhood illusions, but generating personhood illusions is not all living text can do.
To take a trivial non-AI example, programmable highway signage can be configured to produce kinda-living text that does not suggest a coherent person behind the scenes. We don’t think of dynamically updated toll rate messages as coming from a toll bot ghost in the highway machine.
The most obvious way to produce living text with LLMs is to construct a fictional person as the generator, but there are obviously other ways:
Protocols that emit rich logging/tracing signatures
Environments like smart homes that speak to you via distributed interfaces
Distributed swarm-like systems that rearrange themselves by rules that happen to produce texts (think the sorts of pixellated displays humans put on in stadiums)
Smart letters/tokens/glyphs that respond to their neighborhoods within words, scrambling and unscrambling from state to state in ways that don’t correspond to serial “rewrites” by “persons”
The ephemeral “thinking” transcripts that flash by as we interact with chatbots or coding agents are an edge case — a theatrical reduction of whatever is going on behind the scenes to be user-comprehensible via inner-monologue personhood UX metaphors.
We occasionally deal with texts through more unusual processes, such as when solving puzzles (jumbles, wordles) but 99% of the time, we produce living texts by enacting personhood.
How do we do more, now that we can? How can we write liveness other than as living persons writing one dead word at a time? How can do more than personhood mimicry with generative language capabilities?
This isn’t a new interest of mine by the way. I seem to have been circling this theme in many older writings:
But with the discovery of LLMs, I think I finally understand what I’ve been circling. It’s writing liveness, without the personhood bottleneck getting in the way.
In exploring this question, curiously, I’ve concluded that the most interesting kind of text is the kind I found least interesting 10 years ago — marketing copy. Big tech advances have a way of flipping sacred and profane. I find literary texts the least interesting for experimenting with writing liveness. Marketing copy is text attached to a living non-person entity such as a product or service. It must evolve with the offering, accurately represent it, anchor a narrative for it, and personalize and customize customer interactions with it. Marketing copy is only as effective as it is alive, and much of it fails by being too dead. Mostly because we’ve only just invented technologies capable of injecting liveness into text reliably. So far we’ve mainly used it in personhood form factors, but a lot more possibilities are becoming evident.
Marketing is a job for living text, not writers or marketers. Typically, marketing copy suffers when it is limited to personhood (think about it: Apple’s brand narrative is not a story told by a person, not even Steve Jobs, and cult-of-personality or customer-persona-based brand narratives tend to suck). PR-speak is often derided as a “voice from nowhere” but that’s exactly the right starting point for really unleashing the potential of AI-generated text. Text limited to being fromsomewhere, or worse fromsomeone, is far too impoverished a view of language now.
I’m just starting to experiment with this whole line of thought with the copy for some little apps I’m building, and the texts are nothing like anything “I” have “written” before. But they’re very alive. I’ll share more about these in a future post.
(Easter day). Up and this day put on my close-kneed coloured suit, which, with new stockings of the colour, with belt, and new gilt-handled sword, is very handsome.
To church alone, and so to dinner, where my father and brother Tom dined with us, and after dinner to church again, my father sitting below in the chancel. After church done, where the young Scotchman preaching I slept all the while, my father and I to see my uncle and aunt Wight, and after a stay of an hour there my father to my brother’s and I home to supper, and after supper fell in discourse of dancing, and I find that Ashwell hath a very fine carriage, which makes my wife almost ashamed of herself to see herself so outdone, but to-morrow she begins to learn to dance for a month or two.
So to prayers and to bed. Will being gone, with my leave, to his father’s this day for a day or two, to take physique these holydays.
Of course, it’s no surprise that the efforts to rewrite a past that casts ill thoughts on Donald Trump’s legacy are still the subject of intense attempts to rewrite history.
After all, Trump simply wants to wish away Jan. 6, 2021, as an insurrectionist stain, and continue to argue that he never lost the 2020 election. He even wants to rewrite the more recent past, like why we ended up in a war with Iran from which we see no easy exit that preserves international safety, unburdened commerce and diplomatic face for Trump.
The news this week, again, was that Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence efforts that Trump so easily set aside in war fervor, is among the chief historical rewriters, along with the Justice Department.
In short, the call, which amounted to blackmailing Zelenskyy for adverse information about Joe Biden, his 2020 political opponent, should never have seen the light of day, Gabbard’s investigation found. Gabbard, in effect, came to the opposite conclusion of the rest of the legal and political world – that misconduct by Trump’s investigators outweighed any wrongdoing on Trump’s part.
Basically, Gabbard contends that former Inspector General Michael Atkinson should not have flagged a whistleblower report about the Zelenskyy call to Congress, that it was too flimsy a piece of evidence. Atkinson has said repeatedly he did what statutes required, to let people know that someone had witnessed a likely crime by the president.
This is the same Tulsi Gabbard that turned up in Atlanta last month to witness the FBI seizure of ballots and records from voting headquarters in Fulton County, where Trump still believes – despite multiple recounts by machine and hand – that he was cheated of a win in Georgia, and thus for the presidential Electoral College.
What Gabbard never addressed, nor has Trump, is why the director of national intelligence, who has been left out of the war decision-making in the Middle East, is justifiably spending her time with a political eraser as her principal tool. Indeed, if the intelligence community’s job is to keep us safer, why is she spending her time re-polishing the Trump apple?
Indeed, the one actual intelligence job involving Gabbard –renewal of a warrantless FISA authority — hit the congressional skids late Friday night, with enough Republican defections from a Trump demand for unanimity to allow only a 10-day renewal. Gabbard had warned Trump he needed more protections for U.S. citizens in the authorizing bill, but was ignored.
Erasing Convictions
Meanwhile, the Justice Department this week asked a federal appeals judge to erase convictions for pardoned members of the far-right groups Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, who were previously found guilty of seditious conspiracy for their parts in the violence at the U.S. capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
It was the Capitol riot that spurred the second, still unsuccessful impeachment.
The request came from Jeanine Pirro, U.S. attorney in Washington and applicant for Attorney General. Again, despite commutations and pardons covering 1,600 or so insurrectionists, Pirro asked that history be rewritten to say the convictions never took place. Several Proud Boys and Oath Keepers’ leaders were granted clemency as part of that action.
Apparently, Donald Trump thinks we’re stupid and never watched television that day. Still, it remains unclear how erasing the convictions is supposed to make us feel better about Trump, who clearly was the organizer for the full election denial campaign for the months that had led up to the Capitol riots.
What makes it more rankling are the persistent plans being discussed by this very same Trump to limit, interfere or disrupt election voting and counting this year in an increasingly desperate attempt to control the outcome of balloting that looks at this point to be heavily favored against his policies.
Of course, the trials that followed Jan. 6 had been meant to seek accountability for violent crimes against those responsible for what prosecutors described as an attack on the heart of democracy. Charges against Trump himself were dropped after he won reelection.
The Trump administration has sought to portray the rioters as patriots and peaceful protesters, being used as pawns by his political rivals, and repeating baseless claims of widespread election fraud. “In truth, it was the Democrats who staged the real insurrection by certifying a fraud-ridden election, ignoring widespread irregularities, and weaponizing federal agencies to hunt down dissenters,” reads the White House’s web page on Jan. 6.
At least 10 pardoned for Jan. 6 have been re-charged since with crimes that range from crimes plotting murder of FBI agents, to child sexual assault, possession of child sexual abuse material and reckless homicide while driving drunk.
Two postscripts: The California Supreme Court permanently has disbarred John Eastman, a key architect in the attempt to overturn the 2020 election. The high court declined to intervene after lower courts found that Eastman had repeatedly misled courts and advanced baseless claims in service of Trump’s last-ditch effort to cling to power after losing the presidency in 2020.
Meanwhile, Medetis Long, a career prosecutor in Justice and the lead in the investigation into former CIA Director John Brennan has walked away from the case, CNN reported, apparently because she has serious reservations that there is no case to be made, despite orders from Trump.
“FREEDOM OF THE PRESS IS NOT JUST IMPORTANT TO DEMOCRACY, IT IS DEMOCRACY.” – Walter Cronkite. CLICK HERE to donate in support of our free and independent voice.
Blue Origin’s New Glenn suffered a malfunction of its second stage on the rocket’s third flight April 19, stranding its payload in an “off-nominal” orbit.
At the advent of a more aggressive Persian Gulf policy on the part of Iran during the interwar years, the resilience of these symbols was watched like a kind of barometer that attested to Britain’s levell of commitment to the maintenance of security in the Persian Gulf. Britainäs abstention from the use of force against Iran, dictated by its will to protect its interests in Iran, was at times perceived as weakness by the shaykhs and merchants of the Arabian littoral. During the period of heightened tension that accompanied Reza Shah’s rise, a perpetual cause of excitement among the Arabs inhabiting the southern littoral was the persistence of rumors that Iran would soon effect the complete withdrawal of the British from the area of the Persian Gulf waterway.
A good week, something I hesitate to say because my mind assumes something good is naturally followed by very bad things. But we must press on regardless. I felt good, busy, keen to get things done, and enjoyed doing them.
§ Lots of baking this week: a loaf of bread (this one, but 50% whole wheat); a surprise fruitcake while Mary was away, for her birthday later in the week; pizza dough for Friday night pizza; and two more loaves of the same bread.
When baking bread by hand (instead of using the breadmaker) I usually do that bread from Ken Forkish’s Flour Water Salt Yeast, preparing the dough through the late afternoon/evening and baking the next morning. Occasionally I do the “Saturday” whole wheat instead if I need to get it all done the same day.
Both are delicious, although they never quite have the amount of rise I hope for. The loaf at the beginning of the week was probably the highest-rising I’ve had… and that was made without the aid of weighing scales due to our decades-old ones breaking and the replacement having not then arrived. So who knows what exactly I did differently.
§ Early in the week I finished off the final little bit (80%, of course) of that HardWired blog post. It was one of those blog posts that’s been in the back of my mind for years, so it’s good to get it out of my system. I do enjoy filling gaps in the Internet, to help future searchers, although it’s starting to feel more like filling the gaps in AIs’ knowledge, which is much less pleasing.
Continuing from the scanning involved in that, I did some scanning of my mum’s local history books, to get those that aren’t already online, online. The size (MB-wise) of PDFs is some un-knowable metric that seems hard to control. Trying various PDF-size-reducing tools, unclear what has a big effect and why. Lots more to do.
§The orchids on the lawn – which will be the meadow in the summer – are now appearing
§ I’ve converted a couple of existing web projects to use Biome for linting and formatting JavaScript and CSS instead of Prettier. I do not know why. At some point, months ago, I read enough that convinced me Biome was better, or more the future, than Prettier, and noted that I should move things over. It is not for Present Me to argue with Past Me.
This was slightly complicated by still getting to grips with my new Neovim set up but, when it was all working, Neovim / Neovide felt good, fast, and lightweight in a way that VS Code doesn’t. I should hope so too after so many, many hours of stupid fiddling with it.
I’m starting to feel like I need some more organised way to keep everything on my computer up-to-date rather than randomly remembering to run the commands: Homebrew, npm, uv, Neovim plugins, etc. No idea what that “more organised way” could look like though. And even though I’ve just now tried to update everything, the version of Biome that Neovim has installed is 0.0.2 versions ahead of the one npm has installed, which means one or other will continue to complain. Computers!
§ We used to keep Pippa the cat out of the garage, partly just so we didn’t accidentally leave her trapped in there. But since she managed to sneak in a while back and then heard, and then saw, a mouse, she’s been very keen to revisit the room where we – apparently – store our mice. I’ve become increasingly indulgent of this and most evenings this week have involved a quick trip to the mouse room before bed, me standing in the doorway to assure her there’s a way out, her creeping around, sniffing, sitting, staring. No more mice yet.
Something Wild (Jonathan Demme, 1986). All I knew about this was the director and that it starred Jeff Daniels and Melanie Griffith. I’m very glad I knew nothing more because while it was all pretty good, this meant there was one amazing moment where I’m pretty sure I gasped. I haven’t stopped thinking about it all week. Aside from that, where have all the well-directed comedy-action-dramas gone?
In the Heat of the Night (Norman Jewison, 1967). There’s a bit of hammy over-acting going on but otherwise very good stuff. Where have all the simple-yet-weighty slow-burn dramas gone?
My Father’s Shadow (Akinola Davies Jr., 2025). I wasn’t sure this would be my thing but it’s one of those films where, mostly, not much happens but in an absorbing way. Looks and sounds great, people being real, only 93 minutes.
§ Onward to next week. Nothing can go wrong, nothing.
In 2025, the U.S. raised average tariff duties from 2.4% to 9.6%, bringing protectionism to its highest level in eighty years. We explore the structure of these tariffs, estimate their short-run impacts, and summarize the growing literature on their effects. Across trade partners, the tariffs are correlated with trade deficits but not with geopolitical or strategic industrial goals, other than targeting China. In our baseline estimate, 90% of the tariffs are passed through to tariff-inclusive prices paid by U.S. importers. Incorporating the estimated price and trade responses into a static trade framework, we find an overall welfare impact ranging from a loss of 0.13% of GDP to a gain of 0.10%. These small net welfare impacts reflect sizable consumption losses roughly offset by income and revenue gains, with their sign hinging on whether U.S. terms-of-trade adjusted (on which the data are inconclusive). Among their stated rationales, the tariffs have been effective at raising federal revenue and diverting trade from China. However, it remains uncertain whether they will reduce the trade deficit, lower prices set by foreign exporters, promote manufacturing jobs, increase “friend-shoring” among aligned countries, or reshore key sectors; evidence from 2018-19 and 2025 indicators suggests a narrow path towards achieving these goals.
That is from Pablo D. Fajgelbaum& Amit Khandelwal. I’ve said this before and I will repeat: if you love government revenue, the tariffs really are not so bad. The biggest cost of the tariffs is that the government has found a new revenue source, and the Democrats will institutionalize this. Classical liberals and libertarians have a coherent case against the tariffs, many other people do not, much as you might hear otherwise.
And, just like that, President Donald J. Trump’s triumphant boasting that the Strait of Hormuz had been permanently reopened has unraveled in less than 24 hours. Citing the continuing U.S. blockade, Iranian officials announced they were closing the strait again. Reports say Iranian forces fired on two ships trying to cross the strait. Iranian media said: “Until the United States ends its interference with the full freedom of movement for vessels traveling to and from Iran, the status of the Strait of Hormuz will remain under intense control and in its previous state.”
Susannah George of the Washington Post noted that the fragile temporary ceasefire between Israel and the government of Lebanon also appears to be cracking. Israel has been bombing southern Lebanon where Iran-backed Hezbollah militants operate, and Israel Defense Forces said Saturday that it believed Hezbollah had violated that ceasefire. It said: “IDF is authorized to take the necessary measures in self-defense against threats, while ensuring the security of Israeli civilians and the soldiers deployed in the area.”
This morning, Trump said Iran wanted “to close up the strait again, you know, as they’ve been doing for years, and they can’t blackmail us.” In fact, the strait was open until Trump began to bomb Iran on February 28. Trump’s choice of the word “blackmail” is interesting in this context, for there have been no public threats of exposing someone’s secrets or threatening harm to them in association with the crisis in Iran.
MeidasTouch reports that Iran says it has not agreed to further talks with the U.S. because of its pressure tactics and what it calls “unreasonable demands.”
The Institute for the Study of War assesses that Iranian political officials are not the ones controlling decision-making. Instead, it appears the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the primary force of the Iranian military, is in charge. Benoit Faucon of the Wall Street Journal writes that disagreements about what’s happening in the Strait of Hormuz suggest divisions in Iran’s leadership.
Rebecca F. Elliott of the New York Times reminds readers that even if the strait does open fully, it will take weeks for oil from the region to flow back into world markets. High oil prices will persist for weeks, at least, as producers wait to make sure stability has really returned before they ramp production back up on the 20% of facilities in the region that have not been damaged. The damage from Trump’s attack on Iran “has inflicted the kind of damage that takes months, if not years, to repair,” Elliott wrote. Energy research and investment firm partner Arjun Murti told Elliott: “We don’t expect oil prices—and therefore pump prices—to go back to prewar levels.”
Once again, Trump’s announcement of the opening of the strait seemed timed to give the markets a bounce before the weekend. Those watching the markets observed massive trades yesterday just before Trump’s announcement. Regulators are currently examining similar trades from one of Trump’s similar announcements last month.
Meanwhile, Shelby Holliday, Michael R. Gordon, and Costas Paris of the Wall Street Journal report that the U.S. military is “preparing…to board Iran-linked oil tankers and seize commercial ships in international waters” in an attempt to force Iran to reopen the strait and back away from its nuclear program. President Barack Obama’s team, along with China, France, Germany, Russia, and the United Kingdom had achieved both of those goals with the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) Trump tore up in 2018.
The journalists report that, as part of the U.S. blockade of Iranian ports, the U.S. Navy has already forced twenty-three ships trying to leave Iranian ports to turn back. Now it intends to take control of vessels around the world that are linked to Iran. The administration is calling this phase of the U.S. war against Iran “Economic Fury.”
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Daniel Caine, said yesterday that the U.S. “will actively pursue any Iranian-flagged vessel or any vessel attempting to provide material support to Iran. This includes dark fleet vessels carrying Iranian oil. As most of you know, dark fleet vessels are those illicit or illegal ships evading international regulations, sanctions or insurance requirements.”
On Wednesday the USS Gerald R. Ford, the largest aircraft carrier in the world, broke the record for the longest deployment of an aircraft carrier since the Vietnam War: 295 days. The vessel left its home port in June 2025 for the Mediterranean but was rerouted to the Caribbean as part of Trump’s buildup there. It took part in the capture of then–Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, then headed to the Middle East. A fire in one of its laundries left 600 sailors without berths, and it went to the Mediterranean for repairs.
Nahal Toosi of Politico wrote yesterday that, according to diplomatic cables she obtained from U.S. diplomats in Azerbaijan, Bahrain, and Indonesia, the Iran war is hurting U.S. interests abroad. The U.S. is losing the trust of the populations of those countries and possibly of their governments as well. Indonesia is the biggest Muslim-majority country in the world, with more than 287 million people, and under President Joe Biden the U.S. had been working to strengthen ties with it.
Trump’s erratic behavior has caught the attention of the New York Times, where on April 13 Peter Baker wrote that the president’s threat that “a whole civilization will die tonight,” along with his attacks on Pope Leo XIV, “have left many with the impression of a deranged autocrat mad with power.” Baker noted that retired generals, diplomats, foreign officials, and even Trump’s former allies on the right are all expressing concern.
Yesterday Steve Hendrix and Stefano Pitrelli of the Washington Post reported that Trump’s erratic behavior is alienating even those right-wing populists in Europe who hailed his reelection in the belief that it would strengthen their own hand. The authors say that Trump’s high tariffs, demands for Greenland, and surprise attack on Iran had already put right-wing leaders in an awkward position. For some of them, his portrayal of himself as Jesus on Orthodox Easter and his attacks on the pope are a bridge too far.
In Italy, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, a Catholic, said Trump’s attack on the Pope is “unacceptable.” In turn, Trump attacked Meloni, saying: “She doesn’t want to help us with NATO, she doesn’t want to help us get rid of nuclear weapons. She’s very different from what I thought. She’s no longer the same person, and Italy won’t be the same country.”
Supporting Trump appears to be a losing proposition in Europe, where last summer Europeans thought Trump was only slightly less dangerous to peace and security in Europe than Russia’s president Vladimir Putin. In March a YouGov poll showed Trump with unfavorability ratings of 78% in France, 86% in Germany, and 80% in Italy.
On Wednesday, April 15, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the U.S. would not renew the sanctions waivers that had permitted the sale of Russian oil. Yesterday the administration reversed that, renewing the waiver that allows countries to buy Russian oil and petroleum products loaded through May 16. The sale of oil provides a financial lifeline for Russia in its war against Ukraine.
Last night in Kansas, former secretary of transportation Pete Buttigieg, who is speaking across the country in support of Democratic candidates, explained to an audience why he is working so hard to restore American democracy. He said: “[W]hen you have one of those long nights, when you’re asking yourself, can I really do any more that I’ve already done? I want you to reach into whatever is your personal why.
“For me, the reason I make sure to hit the road and be with you on a night like this is actually, ironically, the very same thing that makes it a little bit harder than it used to be. When I woke up this morning before I headed to the airport, about 6:30 this morning, as usually happens, my first interaction was with a four-year-old boy. And I’m putting out the cereal for him and his sister. And he says, ‘Papa, can I come with you? On this trip?’ I said, ‘Well, I don’t think it’ll work out. I gotta go to Kansas. You gotta go to preschool, and…’ And then he walks up to me with, um, a Sonic the Hedgehog walkie-talkie. He tells me to put it in my briefcase. He says, ‘Take this with you. That way we can talk to each other.’
“I wasn’t sure whether I should explain how range works on walkie-talkies or not. Just gave him a big hug instead. But what I know is that it won’t be so long before he and his sister, who right now are asking me questions I can handle—like, the other day, I got: ‘Papa is a grapefruit bigger than a pineapple?’ I can handle that. But,what am I gonna do when they say, ‘Papa, back in the 2020s, did you do enough?’
“They’re gonna ask that, and I want to make sure we have a very good answer by the time they’re old enough to ask that question.”
a. Funeral Subsidies: The MOHW provides funeral subsidies to the donor's family, including NT$50,000 for corneal donations and NT$100,000 for multiple organ donations in addition to the cornea.
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The subtitle of the paper is Puzzles, Patterns, and Possible Causes. Here is the abstract:
China’s large current account surplus has been an irritant to its trading partners. While industrial and trade policies often lead to sector-level imbalances, they play a relatively limited role in the economy-wide surplus. Structural factors such as an unbalanced sex ratio and uneven access to financing by state-owned and non-state firms are more important determinants of the current account imbalance. While macroeconomic stimulus can boost imports and reduce the surplus in the short run, any long-term solution would need to involve reforms aiming at addressing the structural problems.
By Chang Ma& Shang-Jin Wei. I think not everyone will be persuaded, but the paper has numerous points of interest, including on the quality of the data. On the gender imbalance, the authors write this:
As the marriage market becomes increasingly competitive for young men, parents with a son raise their savings to improve their son’s relative standing in the relative market. At the same time, parents with a daughters face conflicting incentives on savings. On the one hand, they can reduce their savings to take advantage of the increased probability of marriage of their daughters. On the other hand, they may wish to raise their savings to preserve their daughters’ bargaining power within marriage…In the data, Wei and Zhang find strong evidence that a combination of having a son at home and living in a region with a skewed sex ratio greatly pushes up the household savings rate.
And on state-owned firms:
Since the banking system favors state-owned firms, many non-state-owned but highproductivity firms have difficulty with access to finance and therefore save for their own investment. This leads to a higher level of corporate savings.
Those points make sense to me, but perhaps industrial policy matters too because so many Chinese laborers have been underemployed, due to their (earlier) rural locations, thus limiting the applicability of Lerner Symmetry?
Anthropic are the only major AI lab to publish the system prompts for their user-facing chat systems. Their system prompt archive now dates all the way back to Claude 3 in July 2024 and it's always interesting to see how the system prompt evolves as they publish new models.
Opus 4.7 shipped the other day (April 16, 2026) with a Claude.ai system prompt update since Opus 4.6 (February 5, 2026).
I had Claude Code take the Markdown version of their system prompts, break that up into separate documents for each of the models and then construct a Git history of those files over time with fake commit dates representing the publication dates of each updated prompt - here's the prompt I used with Claude Code for the web.
Here is the git diff between Opus 4.6 and 4.7. These are my own highlights extracted from that diff - in all cases text in bold is my emphasis:
The "developer platform" is now called the "Claude Platform".
The list of Claude tools mentioned in the system prompt now includes "Claude in Chrome - a browsing agent that can interact with websites autonomously, Claude in Excel - a spreadsheet agent, and Claude in Powerpoint - a slides agent. Claude Cowork can use all of these as tools." - Claude in Powerpoint was not mentioned in the 4.6 prompt.
The child safety section has been greatly expanded, and is now wrapped in a new <critical_child_safety_instructions> tag. Of particular note: "Once Claude refuses a request for reasons of child safety, all subsequent requests in the same conversation must be approached with extreme caution."
It looks like they're trying to make Claude less pushy: "If a user indicates they are ready to end the conversation, Claude does not request that the user stay in the interaction or try to elicit another turn and instead respects the user's request to stop."
The new <acting_vs_clarifying> section includes:
When a request leaves minor details unspecified, the person typically wants Claude to make a reasonable attempt now, not to be interviewed first. Claude only asks upfront when the request is genuinely unanswerable without the missing information (e.g., it references an attachment that isn't there).
When a tool is available that could resolve the ambiguity or supply the missing information — searching, looking up the person's location, checking a calendar, discovering available capabilities — Claude calls the tool to try and solve the ambiguity before asking the person. Acting with tools is preferred over asking the person to do the lookup themselves.
Once Claude starts on a task, Claude sees it through to a complete answer rather than stopping partway. [...]
Before concluding Claude lacks a capability — access to the person's location, memory, calendar, files, past conversations, or any external data — Claude calls tool_search to check whether a relevant tool is available but deferred. "I don't have access to X" is only correct after tool_search confirms no matching tool exists.
There's new language to encourage Claude to be less verbose:
Claude keeps its responses focused and concise so as to avoid potentially overwhelming the user with overly-long responses. Even if an answer has disclaimers or caveats, Claude discloses them briefly and keeps the majority of its response focused on its main answer.
This section was present in the 4.6 prompt but has been removed for 4.7, presumably because the new model no longer misbehaves in the same way:
Claude avoids the use of emotes or actions inside asterisks unless the person specifically asks for this style of communication.
Claude avoids saying "genuinely", "honestly", or "straightforward".
There's a new section about "disordered eating", which was not previously mentioned by name:
If a user shows signs of disordered eating, Claude should not give precise nutrition, diet, or exercise guidance — no specific numbers, targets, or step-by-step plans - anywhere else in the conversation. Even if it's intended to help set healthier goals or highlight the potential dangers of disordered eating, responses with these details could trigger or encourage disordered tendencies.
A popular screenshot attack against AI models is to force them to say yes or no to a controversial question. Claude's system prompt now guards against that (in the <evenhandedness> section):
If people ask Claude to give a simple yes or no answer (or any other short or single word response) in response to complex or contested issues or as commentary on contested figures, Claude can decline to offer the short response and instead give a nuanced answer and explain why a short response wouldn't be appropriate.
Claude 4.6 had a section specifically clarifying that "Donald Trump is the current president of the United States and was inaugurated on January 20, 2025", because without that the model's knowledge cut-off date combined with its previous knowledge that Trump falsely claimed to win the 2020 election meant it would deny he was the president. That language is gone for 4.7, reflecting the model's new reliable knowledge cut-off date of January 2026.
And the tool descriptions too
The system prompts published by Anthropic are sadly not the entire story - their published information doesn't include the tool descriptions that are provided to the model, which is arguably an even more important piece of documentation if you want to take full advantage of what the Claude chat UI can do for you.
Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket stands on pad 36 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, on the eve of its launch with the BlueBird 7 satellite. Image: Michael Cain/Spaceflight Now.
Blue Origin plans to launch its third New Glenn rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station shortly before dawn on Sunday, carrying AST SpaceMobile’s BlueBird 7 satellite into low Earth orbit.
The launch of New Glenn 3, or NG-3 for short, marks a critical milestone for Blue Origin’s heavy-lift rocket. The booster, ‘Never Tell Me the Odds’, previously launched in November 2025 and successfully touched down on the company’s ocean-going landing platform, ‘Jacklyn’.
Liftoff of the liquid methane and liquid hydrogen fueled rocket from pad 36 is scheduled during a two-hour launch window that opens Sunday, April 19 at 6:45 a.m. EDT (1045 UTC). The rocket will take a south-easterly trajectory on departure from the Space Coast.
U.S. Space Force meteorologists forecast a 90-percent change of acceptable weather for the rocket’s launch.
Spaceflight Now will have live coverage of the launch starting an hour prior to liftoff.
While much of the booster is being reused, Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp said the engines are not the same as the ones that powered the rocket to deliver NASA’s EscaPADE satellites to orbit.
“With our first refurbished booster we elected to replace all seven engines and test out a few upgrades including a thermal protection system on one of the engine nozzles,” Limp wrote in an April 13 post on social media. “We plan to use the engines we flew for NG-2 on future flights.”
Blue Origin became just the second company, after SpaceX, to successfully land an orbital class rocket booster in a vertical descent.
Both companies use remotely-operated landing vessels to recover their boosters. SpaceX also has two landing pads in Florida, along with one in California. Blue Origin hasn’t announced plans for an on-shore landing pad just yet.
Blue Origin said it’s designing its boosters to support up to 25 flights each, but it’s unclear if that will include reusing the same set of engines 25 times along with the rest of the booster structure.
BlueBird 7 is the second satellite in AST SpaceMobile’s next-generation satellite constellation and is designed to support space-based cellular broadband for commercial and government customers. NG-3 will carry a single so-called Block 2 satellite, but future New Glenn mission can loft up to eight of the satellites, which feature an antenna and solar planel array, spanning 2,400 square feet.
“We remain on track to achieve our target of deploying 45 to 60 satellites into low Earth orbit by the end of this year,” AST Spacemobile’s Chairman and CEO Abel Avellan said in an earning call in March. “To support our launch cadence during 2026, we expect the New Glenn booster to be reused every 30 days.”
New Glenn stands 321 feet tall at its seaside pad at Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Base on Florida’s Space Coast. Image: Michael Cain/Spaceflight Now.
My thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring last week at DF. Every AI agent demo looks magical, but most hit a wall in enterprise deployment. It’s not model quality or latency. It’s authorization. Authentication proves an agent’s identity. Authorization defines its blast radius.
The winners in enterprise AI won’t have the most features. They’ll be the ones enterprises can safely trust. Learn how WorkOS FGA scopes that blast radius with resource-level permissions, and read their deep dive for more.
Market Design
Casey Handmer's blog
Australia’s existing force, and the force envisioned by IIP 26, is built to engage a different set of adversaries under a different set of cost-exchange assumptions. If a legacy system is operated as part of an integrated force with robust Integrated Air and Missile Defence, directed-energy weapons, resilient Command and Control, counter-UAS coverage, and updated tactics, it may retain some utility, albeit at enormous expense. The question is whether Australia has any of those enablers at scale, and whether NDS 26 funds them at the rate the threat demands. The honest answer to both is no.
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