Here are some questions I wish “Pause” and “Stop” advocates would address:
1. Assuming we achieve the desired policy goal through a bilateral US/China agreement, what would be the specific metric or objective we would say needs to be satisfied in advance? Who decides whether we have satisfied them? What if one one party believes we have satisfied them but the other does not?
2. If the goal is achieved through a bilateral US/China agreement, would we need capital controls to ensure that U.S. investors cannot fund semiconductor fabs, data centers, or AI research labs in countries other than the U.S. and China?
3. Would we need to revoke the passports of U.S.-based AI researchers and semiconductor engineers to prevent them leaving America to join AI-related ventures elsewhere? How else would the U.S. and China keep researchers within their borders?
4. How should we grapple with the fact that (2) and (3) are common features of autocratic regimes?
5. Do the above questions mean that this really should be a global agreement, signed by all countries on Earth, or at least those with the theoretical ability to host large-scale data centers (probably Vanuatu doesn’t need to be on board)?
William Shockley, John Bardeen, and Walter Brattain, winners of the 1956 Nobel Prize for their work on the “transistor effect.” Via Wikipedia.
As we’ve noted morethanafewtimesbefore, for most of the 20th century AT&T’s Bell Labs was the premier industrial research lab in the US. As part of its ongoing efforts to provide universal telephone service, Bell Labs generated numerous world-changing inventions, and accumulated more Nobel Prizes than any other industrial research lab.1 But the most important of its technical contributions proved to be useful far beyond the confines of the Bell System. Statistical process control, for instance, was invented by AT&T engineer Walter Shewhart to improve the manufacturing of AT&T’s electrical equipment at supplier company Western Electric. Since then, the methods have been successfully applied to all manner of manufacturing, from jet engines to semiconductors to container ships.
Interestingly, some of AT&T’s most important technological contributions — namely, the vacuum tube, the negative feedback amplifier, the transistor, and the laser — were (in whole or in part) the product of efforts to make new, better amplifiers for boosting electromagnetic signals. Amplifiers played a crucial role in the Bell System, making it possible to (among other things) connect telephones over long distances, but the value of these four amplifiers extended far beyond telephony. The vacuum tube became a crucial building block for electronics in the first half of the 20th century, used in everything from radio to television to the earliest computers. The negative feedback amplifier helped spawn the discipline of control theory, which is used today in the design of virtually every automated machine. The transistor is the foundation of modern digital computing and everything built on top of it. And the laser is used in everything from fiber-optic communications to industrial cutting machines to barcode scanners to printers.
It’s worth looking at why AT&T was so motivated to build better and better amplifiers, and why those efforts produced so many transformative inventions.
The vacuum tube
In 1876 Alexander Graham Bell placed the world’s first telephone call, summoning his assistant Thomas Watson from another room. By 1881, Bell’s company, the Bell Telephone Company (it wouldn’t become American Telephone and Telegraph, or AT&T, until 1899) had 100,000 customers. By the turn of the century AT&T was operating 1,300 telephone exchanges in the US, connecting over 800,000 customers with 2 million miles of wire.
The goal of the Bell System was “universal service” – to connect every telephone user with every other telephone user in the system. But by the early 20th century this quest was bumping up against technological limitations.
Telephones converted the sound of someone speaking to electrical signals, which were transmitted along wires until reaching a telephone on the other end, where they were converted back into sound. More specifically, in early telephones the sound from someone speaking would compress and decompress a chamber full of carbon granules, which would alter their electrical resistance, changing how much current flowed through them. At the other end, the electrical current would flow through an electromagnet, which pulled on a thin iron diaphragm; fluctuations in the electrical current would change the motion of the diaphragm, reproducing the speech.
But the farther electrical signals travelled, the more they would be attenuated. Resistance from the wire carrying them would convert some of the electrical energy into heat, and electrical current could “leak” between adjacent telephone wires. As the electrical signals got weaker and weaker, the sound would be less and less intelligible when reproduced, until it couldn’t be heard at all. If AT&T wanted to provide universal service, it would need a way to maintain the strength of the electrical signal as it traveled over long distances.
AT&T was able to partly resolve this problem using the loading coil, an invention of electrical engineer Michael Pupin. (Lines which had loading coils added to them were sometimes described as being “Pupinized.”) The loading coil added inductance (a tendency to resist changes in current) to telephone lines, which reduced signal attenuation. As a result, the loading coil roughly doubled the effective distance limit of telephone calls, from around 1000-1200 miles to closer to 2000 miles. But the loading coil merely reduced signal attenuation; the signal was still decaying as it traveled along the lines, just more slowly. Without some way of actually amplifying the telephone signals, the maximum distance for a telephone line was enough to connect New York to Denver, but not enough to reach the West Coast from New York and connect the entire country.
AT&T experimented with various mechanical amplifiers, which converted the electrical signals into mechanical movements and then back to electrical signals, but these were found to greatly distort the signal, and were not widely used. What was needed was an electronic amplifier, which could amplify the electrical signals directly, without the lossy and distorting effects of mechanical translation. In 1911, AT&T formed a special research branch to tackle the problem of long-distance transmission, and hired the young physicist Harold Arnold (who would later become the first director of research at Bell Labs) to research possible amplifiers based on the “new physics” of electrons.
Electronic amplification: the blue is the voltage of the input signal, which varies over time. The red is the amplified voltage of the output signal. The gain of this amplifier is three: output voltage is 3x input voltage. Similar amplification can be done for electrical current. Via Wikipedia.
At first, Arnold had little success. He looked at a variety of possible amplifying technologies, and experimented extensively with mercury discharge tubes (which initially seemed promising), but nothing appeared to fit AT&T’s requirements. But in 1912, Arnold learned of a new, promising amplifier known as the audion, which had been brought to AT&T by American inventor Lee de Forest. De Forest’s audion was, in turn, based on an invention of the British physicist Ambrose Fleming, known as the “Fleming valve.” Fleming was inspired by extensive experimentation with what was known as the “Edison Effect:” the observation that in an incandescent bulb, electric current would flow from the heated filament to a nearby metal plate. Fleming used this effect to create a diode, a device which lets electric current flow in one direction but not another. De Forest modified Fleming’s valve by adding a third element, a metallic grid, between the filament and the plate. By varying the voltage at the metallic grid, De Forest eventually discovered he could control the flow of electrical current from the filament to the plate. This allowed the device to act as an amplifier: a small change in the voltage could create a much larger change in the current flowing from the filament to the plate.
A radio receiver built with audions, via Wikipedia.
De Forest’s audion had uneven performance — notably, it couldn’t handle the level of energy needed for a telephone line. Moreover, it was clear that De Forest did not quite understand how the device worked. But Arnold, well-versed in the physics of electrons, recognized its potential, and realized that, with modifications, its various limitations could be overcome. Via “The Continuous Wave,” a history of early radio:
Arnold knew exactly what to do about the audion’s limitations. “I suggested that we make the thing larger, increase the size of the plate with the corresponding increases in the size of the grid but particularly at that time I suggested that we were not getting enough electrons from the filament.” What he wanted to do, in fact, was convert the de Forest audion into a different kind of device. He wanted a much higher vacuum in the tube, with residual gas eliminated to the greatest possible extent; and he knew the newly invented Gaede molecular vacuum pump made that possible. He wanted more electron emission from the filament without an increase in filament voltage; and he knew Wehnelt’s new oxide-coated filaments would do that.
After paying $50,000 (roughly $1.6 million in 2026 dollars) for the rights to the audion, Arnold and others at AT&T spent the next year turning it into a practical electronic amplifier: the triode vacuum tube. By June 1914, vacuum tube amplifiers were being installed on a transcontinental telephone line connecting New York and San Francisco, and in January of 1915 the transcontinental line was inaugurated at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition with a call between Alexander Graham Bell in New York and Thomas Watson in San Francisco. By the late 1920s, AT&T was using over 100,000 vacuum tubes in its telephone system, and triodes and their descendents (four-element tetrodes, five-element pentodes) would go on to be used in all manner of electronic devices, from radios to TVs to the first digital computers.
Via Hong 2001.
The vacuum tube, with its ability to amplify electronic signals, represented a sea change in how AT&T engineers thought about telephone service. Prior to the electronic amplifier, a telephone call was essentially a single diminishing stream of electromagnetic energy. The range of that energy could be extended farther and farther from the speaker at the steep cost of its fidelity. The amplifier made it possible to consider a telephone call as a stream of information, as a signal that was distinct from the medium that carried it. It could be ably renewed, translated, modified in new and exciting ways. As historian David Mindell notes:
…a working amplifier could renew the signal at any point, and hence maintain it through complicated manipulations, making possible long strings of filters, modulators, and transmission lines. Electricity in the wires became merely a carrier of messages, not a source of power, and hence opened the door to new ways of thinking about communications…The message was no longer the medium, now it was a signal that could be understood and manipulated on its own terms, independent of its physical embodiment.
The negative feedback amplifier
Thanks to vacuum tube amplifiers, AT&T could finally fulfill its dream of universal telephone service, connecting telephones to each other anywhere in the continental US. But vacuum tubes were far from perfect amplifiers. The ideal amplifier has a linear relationship between the input and the output, effectively multiplying the input current or voltage by some value. If this relationship is non-linear, some inputs will be multiplied more than others, and the signal will become distorted. This distortion can garble speech, and — on a wire carrying multiple telephone calls — can create cross-talk, with speech from one telephone call being heard on another.
The vacuum tube was a superior amplifier to anything that preceded it, but it wasn’t a perfectly linear amplifier; its amplification curve formed more of an S-shape, under-amplifying low values and over-amplifying high ones. For a line carrying a single telephone call, the resulting distortion could be mitigated by restricting inputs to the linear portion of the curve, but as AT&T adopted carrier modulation — carrying multiple calls at different frequencies on a single line — distortion became more of a problem.
In 1921, Harold Black, a 23 year old electrical engineer, joined AT&T. He soon produced a report analyzing the future potential of a transcontinental telephone line carrying thousands of carrier-modulated conversations. At the time, carrier modulation was being used to carry at most three calls on a single line. Black’s analysis showed that such a line would require an amplifier with far less distortion than existing vacuum tubes,and Black began to work on developing an improved amplifier as a side project.
At first, Black simply tried to create vacuum tubes with less distortion, a project that many others at AT&T were also working on. The efforts of Black and others produced higher-quality vacuum tubes, but nothing Black tried reduced the distortion to the degree he was aiming for.
After two years of failure, Black decided to pivot; rather than trying again and again to build a perfectly linear amplifier, he would accept that any amplifier he made might be imperfect, and instead find a way to remove the distortion that it introduced.
Black first tried to do this by subtracting the input signal from the amplifier’s output, leaving behind just the distortion, and then amplifying that distortion and subtracting that from the output signal. This method — the “feedforward amplifier” — worked, but not well. It required having two amplifiers (one for the original signal, and one for the distortion) that needed to have very precisely matched amplification characteristics, and maintaining that alignment over a wide range of frequencies and for a long period of time proved difficult. As Black noted later:
For example, every hour on the hour —24 hours a day —somebody had to adjust the filament current to its correct value. In doing this, they were permitting plus or minus 1/2-to-l dB variation in amplifier gain, whereas, for my purpose, the gain had to be absolutely perfect. In addition, every six hours it became necessary to adjust the B battery voltage, because the amplifier gain would be out of hand. There were other complications too, but these were enough! Nothing came of my efforts, however, because every circuit I devised turned out to be far too complex to be practical.
Black grappled with the problem over the next several years, until suddenly realizing the solution while taking the ferry to work one morning in 1927. An electromagnetic signal consisted of a wave, alternating back and forth between positive and negative voltage. If you took a fraction of the output from an amplifier, and subtracted that from the input signal before it got amplified — by modifying the input with negative feedback — you would cancel out the distortion. Because this would reduce the strength of the input signal, this would have the downside of greatly reducing the how much the signal would be amplified (known as the gain), but that was ok; the distortion would be reduced so much that you could get as much gain as you needed by stringing several such amplifiers together. And unlike Black’s feedforward amplifier, this negative feedback amplifier would be self-correcting: any unexpected change to the gain in the amplifier would become a change in the feedback signal, compensating for the change.
Black’s first publication of the negative feedback amplifier, via Archive.org.
By the end of the year, Black had built a negative feedback amplifier that reduced distortion by a factor of 100,000. But Black had a difficult time convincing others of the merits of his invention. At the time feedback was largely considered undesirable by electrical engineers. Feedback could cause an amplifier to “sing” and start generating its own output, known as self-oscillation, overwhelming the input signal. (Think of the high-pitched sound that you get when placing a microphone next to a speaker.) Engineers went to significant efforts to prevent feedback-related problems.
At the time it was also believed that an amplifier with high levels of feedback would be fundamentally unstable. Opposition to Black’s amplifier was so severe that securing a US patent required “long drawn-out arguments with the patent office,” and the British patent office treated the invention the way they treated perpetual motion machines, demanding a working model. Harold Arnold, who had since become director of research at Bell Labs, “refused to accept a negative feedback amplifier, and directed Black to design conventional amplifiers instead.”
In practice, keeping the amplifier stable (avoiding self-oscillation) while also stringing together amplifiers in sequence proved to be a complex problem. These issues were resolved in part thanks to the help of two other Bell Labs researchers, Harry Nyquist and Henrik Bode. Nyquist and Bode studied the behavior of the negative feedback amplifier, and created mathematical tools for analyzing it and determining the conditions under which it would be stable.
Taken together, these efforts turned Black’s invention into a mainstay of electronics. Within 25 years, thanks to the work of Black, Nyquist, Bode, and others, the principle of negative feedback was “applied almost universally to amplifiers used for any purpose,” and it continues to be used in the design of modern amplifiers.
The effects of the Bell Labs work on negative feedback resonated far beyond amplification. A parallel tradition of feedback-based devices existed in mechanical engineering, in the design of things like governors and servomechanisms. During WWII, these two traditions began to merge into the modern discipline of control theory, which studies how to control a dynamic system using feedback. Feedback loops designed using control theory methods are the foundation of virtually every sort of automated system: aircraft autopilots, robotic arms, chemical plants, and the entire electrical grid all use feedback-based control loops, and the tools that Black, Nyquist, Bode, and others created to analyze the negative feedback amplifier are still used by control engineers around the world today.
The transistor
Even with negative feedback reducing their distortion, vacuum tubes were still far from ideal amplifiers. A vacuum tube is essentially a highly modified lightbulb, and has similar drawbacks as early lightbulbs: heating the filaments consumed a lot of power, and over time the tubes would burn out and need to be replaced. Mervin Kelly, a Bell Labs physicist who was promoted to director of research in 1936, wanted to replace the vacuum tube amplifiers and mechanical relays in the Bell System with solid-state devices, devices whose switching or amplification was done by way of electrons moving through a solid chunk of matter. Shortly after his promotion, Kelly began to hire physicists who were familiar with the then-novel physics of quantum mechanics, and could help better understand the behavior of solid matter. In 1938 Kelly created a group specifically devoted to solid-state research, and the team began working on building a solid-state amplifier using semiconductors: materials such as silicon, germanium, and copper oxide whose conductivity could be greatly varied. The group made progress — most notably, in 1939 Russell Ohl discovered that small amounts of impurities in silicon could drastically affect silicon’s conductivity when he accidentally created a photovoltaic cell in a silicon rod — but the work was soon disrupted by wartime priorities.
As the war progressed, Kelly recognized that wartime scientific and technological advances had the potential to upend the communications industry, and that if AT&T wanted to stay on top it needed to master the relevant sciences. He conceived of a new, major research program into solid-state physics that would be led by William Shockley, a physicist Bell Labs had hired in 1936 and who since 1938 had been researching solid-state devices.
During the war Shockley had worked on a variety of problems unrelated to semiconductors, including designing tactics for submarine warfare and training B-29 crews to use radar bombsights. But he also found time to work on a solid-state amplifier. In April of 1945, a few months before the end of the war, Shockley began to sketch out a device made from doped silicon (silicon with small amounts of impurities). Shockley hoped to use external electric fields to modify the conductivity of the silicon, amplifying the current flowing through it. His initial experiments, however, were met with failure.
A few months later, Kelly reorganized the research program at Bell Labs, creating a new, larger group wholly devoted to solid-state physics and led by Shockley. Among those who joined the new group were Walter Brattain, a physicist who had joined Bell Labs in 1929 and had previously studied copper oxide semiconductors, and John Bardeen, a new researcher from the Naval Ordnance Laboratory. Both were part of a subteam of the new solid-state physics group devoted specifically to the study of semiconductors.
Shortly after Bardeen joined, Shockley asked him to check Shockley’s calculations for the silicon amplifier in the hopes of learning why it hadn’t worked. Bardeen studied Shockley’s work, and eventually theorized that electrons might be getting “trapped” on the surface of the material, preventing the electric field from penetrating it and thus altering its conductivity. The semiconductor group began studying these “surface states,” and after nearly two years of experiments a breakthrough occurred.
Brattain had been studying surface states in silicon and germanium by shining light on the materials; if surface states existed, the light would knock away some electrons via the photovoltaic effect, “ripping holes in the semiconductor fabric.” Brattain discovered that not only was this electron disruption taking place, but that by varying the charge in an electrode above the surface of a piece of silicon, the strength of the photovoltaic effect could be varied significantly. The surface states themselves could be manipulated.
On November 21st, 1947 — a few days after Brattain’s discovery — Bardeen suggested using this ability to manipulate surface states to build an amplifier. They placed a sharp metal point onto the surface of a piece of doped silicon, and surrounded it with an electrolyte. By placing a small wire into the electrolyte and varying its voltage, they believed they could alter the conductivity of the silicon, and thus how much current flowed through it from the metal point.
The experiment worked: applying a voltage to the electrolyte boosted the current flowing through the metal point by about 10%. When Brattain rode home that night, he told the other members of his carpool that he’d “taken part in the most important experiment that I’d ever do in my life.”
Over the next several weeks, Bardeen and Brattain iterated on their new silicon amplifier. Initially its performance was poor, amplifying current only marginally, not amplifying voltage at all, and only functioning at very low electrical frequencies. But they eventually found that replacing the silicon with germanium allowed the device to amplify both current and voltage, and removing the electrolyte allowed it to amplify voltage over a wide range of frequencies.
By the middle of December, Bardeen and Brattain were ready to apply what they had learned. They fashioned a new device consisting of two thin pieces of gold foil attached to the surface of a piece of doped germanium, separated by only a 500th of an inch. They connected one wire to each of the pieces of gold foil, and a third to the piece of germanium. They reasoned that varying the current in one of the gold foil wires should amplify the current flowing through the other gold wire.
It worked: both current and voltage could be amplified across a wide range of frequencies using the device. Bardeen and Brattain had fashioned a solid-state amplifier.
By early 1948, Bell Labs had fabricated nearly a hundred copies of Bardeen and Brattain’s amplifier (which would soon be named the transistor), and was testing how it could be used in various electronic devices. By the end of May, Bell Labs engineers had built a transistor-based telephone repeater. At a June 30th press conference, Bell Labs announced the transistor to the world:
We have called it the Transistor, T-R-A-N-S-I-S-T-O-R, because it is a resistor or semiconductor device which can amplify electrical signals as they are transferred through it from input to output terminals. It is, if you will, the electrical equivalent of a vacuum tube amplifier. But there the similarity ceases. It has no vacuum, no filament, no glass tube. It is composed entirely of cold, solid substances.
The rest, of course, is history.
Bell Labs worked out how to make the transistor more reliable, and by 1949 was manufacturing them by the thousands. William Shockley, irritated at not having taken part in Bardeen and Brattain’s discovery, worked to design an alternative semiconductor amplifier, the junction transistor. Shockley’s junction transistor, first successfully fabricated by Bell Labs physicists Gordon Teal and Morgan Sparks in 1950, was far more reliable than the point-contact transistor, and it would go on to be the most widely-used transistor until the MOSFET appeared in the 1960s. In 1956 Shockley, Bardeen, and Brattain would share the Nobel Prize in physics for the discovery of the “transistor effect,” by which time Shockley had left Bell Labs to found his own semiconductor company, Shockley Semiconductor Lab. In 1957, eight disgruntled employees would leave Shockley’s company to found Fairchild Semiconductor. Departing Fairchild employees in turn went on to found their own semiconductor companies, and the so-called “Fairchildren” (which include Intel and AMD) became the foundation of Silicon Valley. The world would never be the same.
The laser
As Shockley, Bardeen and Brattain were experimenting with semiconductors in the 1940s, another Bell Labs physicist, Charles Townes, was studying microwaves. Since the invention of radio in the late 19th century, the technology had progressed by steadily marching up the electromagnetic spectrum, finding ways to use shorter and shorter wavelengths. There were a variety of reasons for this: shorter wavelengths carried more information, there were limits to how many users could occupy a particular part of the electromagnetic spectrum, antennas for shorter wavelengths could be smaller, and radars with shorter wavelengths could resolve more detail. The shortest wavelengths in use in the 1920s were tens of meters in length, but by WWII this had fallen to centimeters in length; these were known as microwaves. During the war, at the behest of the military, Townes designed microwave radars of increasingly short wavelengths. When Townes designed a radar with a 10 centimeter wavelength, he was then asked to build a 3 centimeter one; when he built that, he was asked for a 1.25 centimeter wavelength.
But the pressure to achieve smaller and smaller wavelengths was bumping up against technological limitations. Generating and amplifying smaller and smaller wavelengths required smaller and smaller components; by the time wavelengths reached the millimeter range, the components to generate the signals became so small that manufacturing them, and putting enough power through them, became impractical. What was needed was a new way to generate and amplify radio signals that didn’t require fabricating microscopic components.
In 1948 Townes left Bell Labs for Columbia University, where he pursued research related to microwave spectroscopy. Townes hoped to use microwaves of increasingly small wavelengths, on the order of millimeters, to study the molecules and atomic nuclei. Because of his interest and expertise, and because shorter-wavelength radiation might prove valuable for radars or other military uses, Townes was asked by the Navy in 1950 to form an advisory group on millimeter wave radiation, so the Navy could keep abreast of any promising developments in the field. As there was not yet any good method of generating millimeter waves, most of the group’s efforts were focused on thinking of ways to generate them.
In April of 1951, on the morning of a day-long meeting of the committee, Townes awoke early and sat on a bench in a nearby park, and began to consider ways to generate millimeter wave radiation. Certain molecules, Townes knew, radiated energy at microwave wavelengths: perhaps instead of small electronic components, he could use molecules to generate the short millimeter waves he and everyone else were looking for?
The idea was not initially very promising. Molecules would certainly radiate after absorbing energy, but they would necessarily emit less energy than they absorbed — you couldn’t simply shine a light or send a signal through a collection of molecules, and get a stronger signal back. Heated molecules would radiate energy, but to generate microwaves they would need to be so hot that they would break apart into individual atoms.
Townes did know of one way to get a molecule to boost an electromagnetic signal: stimulated emission. Normally, when an atom or molecule is struck by a photon, its energy level will be raised. Later, when it falls back to its normal state, it will emit a photon. However, if it’s struck by a photon while it’s already in an elevated energy state, it will emit a second photon of the exact same frequency: one photon becomes two.
Stimulated emission.
Most molecules are usually in low-energy states, not high energy states, which means that any amplification would quickly peter out as excess photons were absorbed. But Townes realized that if a collection of molecules could be coaxed so that most of them were in high energy states — known as a “population inversion” — a cascade of stimulated emission could take place. One photon striking a high energy molecule would become two; each of those could strike another high energy molecule, becoming four, then becoming eight, then becoming 16. A small amount of electromagnetic radiation could be amplified enormously. With enough molecules in an elevated state, Townes realized that in principle there would be “no limit to the amount of energy obtainable.”
Sitting in the park, Townes took an envelope from his pocket, and worked through how such a device might work. By feeding a stream of appropriately stimulated molecules into a resonator (a cavity that would reflect electromagnetic radiation of the appropriate wavelength), any electromagnetic radiation generated within the resonator would bounce back and forth, gaining energy each time it passed through the molecules as more and more photons were generated. The device would amplify any incoming signal as an electromagnetic wave passed through the population inversion molecules. And because the resonator would reflect the wave back and forth through the molecules (a form of feedback), it could also act as an oscillator — a generator of electromagnetic signals. Power would only be limited by how quickly molecules carried energy into the resonator.
A few months later Townes assigned Jim Gordon, one of his graduate students, the task of building the device, assisted by another graduate student, Herb Zeiger. Over the next several years Gordon worked diligently to realize the ambitious concept. Many physicists considered the idea unpromising: at one point, several years into the project, the current and former heads of Townes’s department, Isidor Rabi and Polykarp Kusch, exasperatedly stated to Townes that “you should stop the work you are doing. It isn’t going to work. You know it’s not going to work. We know it’s not going to work. You’re wasting money. Just stop!” But finally in 1954, a few months after Kusch insisted the device wouldn’t work, Gordon succeeded, demonstrating both amplification and oscillation in a collection of stimulated ammonia molecules. They called their device the maser, an acronym describing the device’s Microwave Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation.
The maser, once developed, eventually proved to be “the world’s most sensitive radio amplifier,” an order of magnitude more sensitive than existing microwave amplifiers. Bell Labs, which hired Gordon in 1955, used masers to amplify the signals from its Echo and Telstar satellites launched in the early 1960s. The maser also found use in radio telescopes for astronomy. But the maser had drawbacks — most notably, it had to be cooled to a few degrees above absolute zero — and it was gradually relegated to increasingly niche uses as other low-noise amplifiers were developed.
The biggest impact of the maser was likely the invention that it inspired. In 1957, Charles Townes, still attuned to the problem of generating shorter and shorter electromagnetic waves, began considering how the maser might be adapted to such a task. Historically, radio had advanced into shorter wavelengths gradually, one step at a time. But Townes realized that with the maser it might be as easy, or perhaps even easier, to skip from microwave wavelengths (roughly 1 meter to 1 millimeter) all the way down to infrared or even optical wavelengths (roughly 0.000000380 to 0.000000750 meters). By this time, Townes had re-joined Bell Labs as a part-time consultant, and Townes and another Bell Labs physicist, Art Schawlow, worked through the physics of what they referred to as an “optical maser.” In 1958, they published a paper outlining the idea.
After Townes and Schawlow’s paper was published, the race was on to build the optical maser, which soon began to be referred to as a laser, for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation). The first successful laser was built by Theodore Maiman at Hughes Aircraft in 1960 using a ruby crystal, but other successes quickly followed. It was soon discovered that a wide variety of materials could be made to “lase,” and before long there were lasers made from gasses, dye, glass, semiconductors, and more. In 1964, Townes would receive the Nobel Prize in physics for his work on the “maser-laser principle.”
While the laser could amplify signals that were passed into it, it proved much more useful as an oscillator, a generator of original signals. In 1959 Art Schawlow, believing that the laser would be more useful as an oscillator than an amplifier, jokingly suggested that it be renamed the LOSER. Unlike the maser, which was limited to niche uses, the laser proved to be useful for a wide variety of tasks. Within just two years of Maiman’s demonstration, a laser was used for eye surgery. By 1968, the US Air Force was dropping laser-guided bombs in combat. By 1971, Xerox PARC researchers built the first laser printer, and in 1974 the first laser-based barcode scanners were being installed. In 1980, the first commercial fiber optics lines using semiconductor lasers were made available. It’s the lasers ability to generate coherent light — light all of the same frequency, and in the same phase — that made it possible to continue to advance up the electromagnetic spectrum, and use optical wavelength electromagnetic radiation for communication.
Conclusion
Why did these various amplifiers, so many of them deriving from work at Bell Labs, end up being so valuable?
Partly it’s because an electronic amplifier is a very useful information processing device. An amplifier can amplify an electromagnetic signal, but it can also act as an electronic switch. And if the output of an amplifier is fed back into its input, an amplifier can also act as an oscillator: a generator of electromagnetic signals. Those are all useful information processing tasks, and each time a new, better amplifier was created, it extended the kinds of information processing that could be done. So these amplifiers were valuable because electronic information processing is valuable, and these amplifiers all greatly expanded the scope of information processing.
But a broader, somewhat more abstract reason is that many important technologies often act as amplifiers in one way or another. One of the most important inventions in biology, for instance, is the polymerase chain reaction, or PCR. PCR is essentially a DNA amplifier: it makes millions of copies of DNA sequences, making it far easier to study them and enabling things like the dramatic reduction in the price of genetic sequencing. The inventor of PCR, Kary Mullis, shared the 1993 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his invention.
Examples of important amplifiers abound, because amplifiers themselves help produce abundance. Chemical catalysts, which can be thought of as amplifiers of chemical reactions, are used in everything from catalytic converters in cars to petroleum manufacturing. Simple machines like the lever or pulley amplify force, microscopes and telescopes amplify visual details. Industrial fermentation, nuclear reactors, the printing press, the Xerox machine, fractional reserve banking — all can be thought of as a type of amplifier.
So these four amplifiers were important in part because amplifiers in general are important. Amplifiers take something useful — an electromagnetic signal, a segment of DNA, a copy of a book — and make it possible to get a lot more of it, and technologies that do that are often particularly useful themselves.
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Up betimes and at my office all the morning, at noon to the Exchange, and there by appointment met my uncles Thomas and Wight, and from thence with them to a tavern, and there paid my uncle Wight three pieces of gold for himself, my aunt, and their son that is dead, left by my uncle Robert, and read over our agreement with my uncle Thomas and the state of our debts and legacies, and so good friendship I think is made up between us all, only we have the worst of it in having so much money to pay. Thence I to the Exchequer again, and thence with Creed into Fleet Street, and calling at several places about business; in passing, at the Hercules pillars he and I dined though late, and thence with one that we found there, a friend of Captain Ferrers I used to meet at the playhouse, they would have gone to some gameing house, but I would not but parted, and staying a little in Paul’s Churchyard, at the foreign Bookseller’s looking over some Spanish books, and with much ado keeping myself from laying out money there, as also with them, being willing enough to have gone to some idle house with them, I got home, and after a while at my office, to supper, and to bed.
Again, I do not like either candidate, Mills or Platner, and I find it galling that Maine, with twice the population of D.C. and far more elected officials, which serves as a farm league system, cannot find a couple of good anti-filibuster Democratic candidates who are able to get on the ballot.
While Mills sucks because she is committed to keeping the senate filibuster, Platner’s Totenkopf tattoo opens him up to general election coverage like this:
This also is catnip for lazy and incompetent political reporters who will jump at the chance to ask other Democratic candidates, including those not in Maine, about the tattoo. It allows reporters to appear balanced, and it also breaks up the tedium (do not underestimate the roles boredom and the need for novel copy play in campaign coverage).
I hope I am wrong about this, but there are some real potential problems here.
In short, the Maine Democratic Party should be better than this, and D.C. still needs statehood.
You must imagine Sam Altman holding a knife to Tim Berners-Lee's throat.
It's not a pleasant image. Sir Tim is, rightly, revered as the genial father of the World Wide Web. But, all the signs are pointing to the fact that we might be in endgame for "open" as we've known it on the Internet over the last few decades.
The open web is something extraordinary: anybody can use whatever tools they have, to create content following publicly documented specifications, published using completely free and open platforms, and then share that work with anyone, anywhere in the world, without asking for permission from anyone. Think about how radical that is.
Now, from content to code, communities to culture, we can see example after example of that open web under attack. Every single aspect of the radical architecture I just described is threatened, by those who have profited most from that exact system.
Today, the good people who act as thoughtful stewards of the web infrastructure are still showing the same generosity of spirit that has created opportunity for billions of people and connected society in ways too vast to count while —not incidentally— also creating trillions of dollars of value and countless jobs around the world. But the increasingly-extremist tycoons of Big Tech have decided that that's not good enough.
Now, the centibillionaires have begun their final assault on the last, best parts of what's still open, and likely won't rest until they've either brought all of the independent and noncommercial parts of the Internet under their control, or destroyed them. Whether or not they succeed is going to be decided by decisions that we all make as a community in the coming months. Even though there have always been threats to openness on the web, the stakes have never been higher than they are this time.
Right now, too many of the players in the open ecosystem are still carrying on with business as usual, even though those tactics have been failing to stop big tech for years. I don't say this lightly: it looks to me like 2026 is the year that decides whether the open web as we know it will survive at all, and we have to fight like the threat is existential. Because it is.
What does the attack look like?
Calling this threat "existential" is a strong statement, so we should back that up with evidence. The point I want to make here is that this is a lot broader than just one or two isolated examples of trying to win in one market. What we are seeing is the application of the same market-crushing techniques that were used to displace entire industries with the rise of social media and the gig economy, now being deployed across the very open internet infrastructure that made the modern internet possible.
The big tech financiers and venture capitalists who are enabling these attacks are intimately familiar with these platforms, so they know the power and influence that they have — and are deeply experienced at dismantling any systems that have cultural or political power that they can't control. And since they have virtually infinite resources, they're able to carry out these campaigns simultaneously on as many fronts as they need to. The result is an overwhelming wave of threats. It's not a coordinated conspiracy, because it doesn't need to be; they just all have the same end goals in mind.
Some examples:
Publishers who still share their content openly, either completely free for their audience, as advertising-supported content, or with a limited amount of content available until they ask for some form of payment, are being absolutely hammered by ill-behaved AI bots. These bots are scouring their sites for every available bit of content, scraping all of it up to feed their LLMs, and then making summaries of that content available to users — typically without consent or compensation. The deal was always simple: search engines had permission to crawl sites because they were going to be sending users to those sites. If they're hitting your site half a million times for every one user they send to your site, all they're giving you is higher costs.
LLM-based AI platforms that have trained their AI models on this content gathered without consent typically have almost no links back to the original source content, and either bury or omit credits to the original site; as a result, publishers in categories like tech media have seen their traffic crater by over 50%, with some publishers seeing drops of over 90%.
As publishers see the danger from AI bots expand, they retreat to putting more and more content behind either password protection or payment walls or both, leaving the only publicly-accessible content to be AI-generated slop; open resources like research work, scientific analysis, and fair use of content all suffer as a result of people responding to the bad actors, since legitimate uses of open content are no longer possible. We're seeing this already as publishers block archival sites like the Internet Archive, even though we've already seen examples where the Internet Archive was the only accurate record of content that was disappeared by authoritarians in the current administration.
Open APIs, a building block of how developers build new experiences for users, and for how researchers understand people's behavior online, are rapidly being locked down due to abuse from LLMs, as well as the extremist CEOs not wanting anyone to understand what's happening on their platforms. The clamping down doesn't just affect coders — the people who were best poised to help monitor and translate what's been happening on platforms like Twitter have seen their work under siege, with over 60% of research projects on the platform stalled or abandoned just since Musk shut down their open API access.
Independent media based on open formats, like podcasts, are also under siege as platforms like Apple's podcasts move to closed infrastructure which means that content creators are now required to work with Apple's approved partners. Meanwhile, others like Spotify and Netflix leverage their dominant positions in the market to coerce creators to abandon open podcasts entirely, in favor of proprietary formats that require listeners to be on those platforms — locking in both creators and their audiences so they are stuck as they begin the enshittification process. The net result will be podcasts moving from being an open format that isn't controlled by either any one company or any manipulative algorithms, to just another closed social platform monetized by surveillance-based advertising.
Open source software projects, which power the vast majority of the internet's infrastructure, are now beleaguered by constant slop code submissions being made by automated AI code agents. These submissions attempt to look like legitimate open source code contributions, and end up overwhelming the largely-underpaid, mostly-volunteer maintainers of open source projects. Dozens of the most popular open source projects have either greatly limited, or even entirely closed their projects to community-based submissions from new contributors as a result. In addition to slowing down and disrupting the open source ecosystem's collaboration model, there's also collateral damage with the destruction of one of the best paths for new coders to establish their credentials, build relationships, and learn to be part of the coding community.
The most vital open content platforms, like Wikipedia, are under direct attack from bad-faith campaigns. Elon Musk has created Grokipedia to directly undermine Wikipedia with extremist hate content and conspiracist nonsense, by siphoning off traffic, revenues, and contributors from the site. All of this happens while launching spurious attacks on the credibility of the content on Wikipedia, which have led to such radical rhetoric around the site that gatherings of Wikipedia editors now face interruptions from armed attackers. Meanwhile, Wikipedia's human traffic has dropped significantly as AI platforms trained on its content answer users' questions without ever sending them to the site — a pattern that threatens the volunteer contributions and donations that keep it alive.
The open standards and specifications that underpin the Internet as we know it have always succeeded solely on the basis of there being a shared set of norms and values that make them work. In this way, they're like laws — only as strong as the society that agrees they ought to be enforced. A simple text file called robots.txt functioned for decades to describe the way that tools like search engines ought to behave when accessing content on websites, but now it is effectively dead as Big AI companies unilaterally decided to ignore more than a generation of precedent, and do whatever they want with the entirety of the web, completely without consent. Similarly, long-running efforts like Creative Commons and other community-driven attempts at creating shared declarations or definitions for content use are increasingly just ignored.
Open source software licenses, which used to be a bedrock of the software community because they provide a consistent way of encoding a set of principles in the form of a legal contract, are now treated as a minor obstacle which can be trivially overcome using LLMs. This means that it's possible to clone code and turn community-driven projects into commercial products without even having to credit the people who invented the original work, let alone compensating them or asking for consent. Many of these efforts are especially egregious because the reason the tools are able to perform this task is because they were trained on this open source code in the first place.
The human cost
The threat to the open web is far more profound than just some platforms that are under siege. The most egregious harm is the way that the generosity and grace of the people who keep the web open is being abused and exploited. Those people who maintain open source software? They're hardly getting rich — that's thankless, costly work, which they often choose instead of cashing in at some startup. Similarly, volunteering for Wikipedia is hardly profitable. Defining super-technical open standards takes time and patience, sometimes over a period of years, and there's no fortune or fame in it.
Creators who fight hard to stay independent are often choosing to make less money, to go without winning awards or the other trappings of big media, just in order to maintain control and authority over their content, and because they think it's the right way to connect with an audience. Publishers who've survived through year after year of attacks from tech platforms get rewarded by… getting to do it again the next year. Tim Berners-Lee is no billionaire, but none of those guys with the hundreds of billions of dollars would have all of their riches without him. And the thanks he gets from them is that they're trying to kill the beautiful gift that he gave to the world, and replace it with a tedious, extortive slop mall.
So, we're in endgame now. They see their chance to run the playbook again, and do to Wikipedians what Uber did to cab drivers, to get users addicted to closed apps like they are to social media, to force podcasters to chase an algorithm like kids on TikTok. If everyone across the open internet can gather together, and see that we're all in one fight together, and push back with the same ferocity with which we're being attacked, then we do have a shot at stopping them.
At one time, it was considered impossibly unlikely that anybody would ever create open technologies that would ever succeed in being useful for people, let alone that they would become a daily part of enabling billions of people to connect and communicate and make their lives better. So I don't think it's any more unlikely that the same communities can summon that kind of spirit again, and beat back the wealthiest people in the world, to ensure that the next generation gets to have these same amazing resources to rely on for decades to come.
Taking action
Alright, if it’s not hopeless, what are the concrete things we can do? The first thing is to directly support organizations in the fight. Either those that are at risk, or those that are protecting those at risk. You can give directly to support the Internet Archive, or volunteer to help them out. Wikipedia welcomes your donation or your community participation. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is fighting for better policy and to defend your rights on virtually all of these issues, and could use your support or provides a list of ways to volunteer or take action. The Mozilla Foundation can also use your donations and is driving change. (And full disclosure — I’m involved in pretty much all of these organizations in some capacity, ranging from volunteer to advisor to board member. That’s because I’m trying to make sure my deeds match my words!) These are the people whom I've seen, with my own eyes, stay the hand of those who would hold the knife to the necks of the open web's defenders.
Beyond just what these organizations do, though, we can remember how much the open web matters. I know from my time on the board of Stack Overflow that we got to see the rise of an incredibly generous community built around sharing information openly, under open licenses. There are very few platforms in history that helped more people have more economic mobility than the number of people who got good-paying jobs as coders as a result of the information on that site. And then we got to see the toll that extractive LLMs had when they took advantage of that community without any consideration for the impact it would have when they trained models on the generosity of that site's members without reciprocating in kind.
The good of the web only exists because of the openness of the web. They can't just keep on taking and taking without expecting people to finally draw a line and saying "enough". And interestingly, opportunities might exist where the tycoons least expect it. I saw Mike Masnick's recent piece where he argued that one of the things that might enable a resurgence of the open web might be... AI. It would seem counterintuitive to anyone who's read everything I've shared here to imagine that anything good could come of these same technologies that have caused so much harm.
But ultimately what matters is power. It is precisely because technologies like LLMs have powers that the authoritarians have rushed to try to take them over and wield them as effectively as they can. I don't think that platforms owned and operated by those bad actors can be the tools that disrupt their agenda. I do think it might be possible that the creative communities that built the web in the first place could use their same innovative spirit to build what could be, for lack of a better term, called "good AI". I think, if given the choice, people will pick home-cooked, locally-grown, heart-felt digital meals over factory-farmed fast food technology every time.
Most elements of a major NASA event this week that laid out spaceflight plans for the coming decade were well received: a Moon base, a focus on less talk and more action, and working with industry to streamline regulations so increased innovation can propel the United States further into space.
However, one aspect of this event, named Ignition, has begun to run into serious turbulence. It involves NASA's attempt to navigate a difficult issue with no clear solution: finding a commercial replacement for the aging International Space Station.
During the Ignition event on Tuesday, NASA leaders had blunt words for the future of commercial activity in low-Earth orbit. Essentially, they are not confident in the viability of a commercial marketplace for humans there, and the agency's plan to work with private companies to develop independent space stations does not appear to be headed toward success. Plenty of people in the industry share these concerns, but NASA officials have not expressed them out loud before.
Welcome to Edition 8.35 of the Rocket Report! The headlines this week are again dominated by the big changes afoot in NASA's exploration program, with the announcement of a Moon base and a nuclear-powered rocket to Mars. The shakeups come as the agency is just a week away from launching Artemis II, a circumlunar flight carrying a crew of four around the Moon. The Ars space team will be writing extensively about this mission in the days ahead, and we may skip the Rocket Report next week to focus on our Artemis II coverage.
As always, we welcome reader submissions. If you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets, as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.
NASA announces nuclear rocket demo. NASA's announcement Tuesday that it will "pause" work on a lunar space station and focus on building a surface base on the Moon was no big surprise to anyone paying attention to the Trump administration’s space policy. But what should NASA do with hardware already built for the Gateway outpost? NASA spent close to $4.5 billion on developing a human-tended complex in orbit around the Moon since the Gateway program’s official start in 2019. There are pieces of the station undergoing construction and testing in factories scattered around the world. The centerpiece of Gateway, called the Power and Propulsion Element, is closest to being ready for launch. NASA’s rejigged exploration roadmap, revealed Tuesday in an all-day event at NASA headquarters in Washington, calls for repurposing the core module for a nuclear-electric propulsion demonstration in deep space, Ars reports.
Donald Trump’s threat last night to sign an executive order to pay TSA workers was, perhaps, a signal of where things were headed. “If the White House believes they have the authority to pay these workers, then every day for the past 41 days, they have been making a conscious decision not to pay them,” House Appropriations ranking member Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) said last night, which was about right.
Overnight, as Emine Yücel reports, the Senate followed suit, approving a Democratic bill to fund all of DHS except ICE and CBP. Notably, that means funding the TSA, giving away Republicans’ only point of leverage, airport chaos (a dubious point of leverage, to be sure).
The Democratic Party, seemingly having learned lessons from standoffs past, held firm on its commitment to withhold its votes until CBP and ICE accept reforms. Both agencies remain unfunded, though they each have significant slush funds from which they can continue to draw.
Senate Republicans are trying to spin this vote as Democrats losing their ability to make demands: Republicans will, they say, now fund ICE and CBP through budget reconciliation. But how fast — and even if — that reconciliation bill will come together is an open question.
I had a moment of insight or perhaps revelation early in this war when the blockage of the Strait of Hormuz first became central in the news and President Trump was publicly debating whether he would use the U.S. Navy to escort ships through it. Would he, won’t he? Will it happen tomorrow? What will he decide. Then I was watching a YouTube show about maritime shipping. In passing the host, Sal Mercogliano, noted that, at that time at least, there weren’t any U.S. naval vessels in the Persian Gulf at all. And the kind of ships you need, in the numbers you’d need, were hundreds of even thousands of miles away. That made perfect sense since for the kind of war the U.S. is currently fighting we don’t need naval vessels anywhere near that close to the combat zone, and when they are that close they become much more vulnerable to attack. But the point is that the whole debate about whether Trump was about to do that any time in the near future was entirely contained within Trump’s Truth Social world. It wasn’t connected to any of the hard realities of whether any of that was even possible.
I said it was a moment of revelation because I saw how much of an alternative reality Trump was able to create with his constant Truth Social broadsides and general chatter. If that is what’s being discussed I want to hear a mention, even in mainstream non-news-junkie reporting that basic and publicly knowable facts like this mean that none of this can even happen in the time frame Trump was talking about. It shifted my view of the entire situation.
This also connects to the points I’ve made about the economic repercussions of this conflict. One part is that everyone who needs to make plans about economic repercussions is really clear that significantly higher inflation and lower growth is already baked into the global economy. Even if everything stopped today on a dime, a huge amount is already baked in. I heard from someone in the basic-necessities consumer goods space recently, and they’re already building significantly higher inflation into their planning models. Today the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development released a new report which projects that U.S. inflation will be 4.2% this year, up 1.2 percentage points from what was predicted in December. (There are similar downward revisions for growth, both globally and in the U.S..)
They also note a significant “downside” risk if the conflict goes on longer. In other words, this still assumes the conflict will wind down pretty quickly — something that is pretty uncertain even though the White House clearly wants to wind it down. Or at least the part of the White House brain that is focused on the economy and the midterm elections. That said, it’s not really clear that the different White House brains are talking to each other. They further note that they expect that central banks will be able to contain a lot of the effect. But those revisions assume this relative containment.
Some of this is just in the nature of above-the-fold news reporting. Big mainstream media news organizations aren’t reporting for news obsessives. They’re reporting for people with relatively casual connections to the news. That’s how it works. They’re not going to go into nitty-gritty details. But there’s more going on here than that. Trump is still able to mostly operate in this fake world of his own conversations with himself. And it carries a lot of the media with him. Joke’s still ultimately on him. The public is mad and getting madder about inflation. And this case is unique or nearly so inasmuch as this isn’t about unfolding trends in the global economy or the disjointed unclogging of supply lines and employment trends in the aftermath of COVID. Trump did this. Trump started this war as entirely a war of choice and largely on impulse, because Venezuela was fun for him and he wanted more. As I’ve written, he’s also doing all of this as a kind of elaborate presidential self-soothing, running wildly with his more or less unconstrained military powers while he sinks deeper into unpopularity at home. But here it’s crystal clear where this started, how and why it started, as something he did. And, as the public mostly sees, for no good reason.
It’s important to see the realities this war has created with clear eyes. If you had a war in southern Michigan, it would have a big impact on the car industry. If you have a war in the Persian Gulf, that’s going to have big impact on global energy supplies. That’s just how it is. That’s why U.S. presidents have always been wary of doing what Trump just did. Politically and electorally, the joke is on Trump. But the collateral damage is everyone’s. All of us need to stretch and exercise the muscles it takes not to be spellbound by Trump’s spectacle of drama.
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Kate and Josh talk airports in crisis, Trump’s bewildering political calculus and, believe it or not, an optimistic vision of what a post-Trump world could look like.
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A fascinating illustration in this Times article and the included chart of what has happened over the last four weeks. In essence, oil has shot up; equities markets have declined. That trend has been interrupted a handful of times when President Trump has created what are essentially fake news moments. Those temporarily capture markets’ attention before reality set back in. It’s a powerful illustration of the both the power and the limits of what I yesterday referred to as Trump’s “drama-of-the-day spell.”
This image captured by U.S.-Indian Earth satellite NISAR on Nov. 10, 2025, shows Washington’s Mount Rainier. The image is cropped from a much larger swath spanning the Pacific Northwest on a cloudy day; NISAR’s L-band SAR instrument is able to peer through the clouds at the surface below.
In Pacific Northwest imagery from the NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar mission, some areas are dotted in magenta due to radar signals strongly reflecting off flat surfaces like roads and buildings, combined with the orientation of those surfaces relative to the satellite’s ground track. The yellow can be produced by a range of different factors, including land cover, moisture, and surface geometry. Yellow-green in the imagery generally indicates vegetation, such as the forests and wetlands covering the region.
Relatively smooth surfaces, including water and — as is most likely the case in this image — vegetation-free clearings on the mountaintop, appear dark blue. Near the foot of the mountain are patches of purple squares cut into the lighter green vegetation. Their precise right angles show that they’re clearly man-made; they’re likely the effect of forests being thinned or possibly vegetation growing back after having been thinned in the past.
A joint mission developed by NASA and the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), NISAR launched in July 2025 from Satish Dhawan Space Centre on India’s southeastern coast. Managed by Caltech, JPL leads the U.S. component of the project and provided the satellite’s L-band SAR and antenna reflector. ISRO provided NISAR’s spacecraft bus and its S-band SAR..)
The NISAR satellite is the first to carry two SAR instruments at different wavelengths and will monitor Earth’s land and ice surfaces twice every 12 days, collecting data using the spacecraft’s giant drum-shaped reflector, which measures 39 feet (12 meters) wide — the largest radar antenna reflector NASA has ever sent into space.
This image captured by U.S.-Indian Earth satellite NISAR on Nov. 10, 2025, shows Washington’s Mount St. Helens. The image is cropped from a much larger swath spanning the Pacific Northwest on a cloudy day; NISAR’s L-band SAR instrument is able to peer through the clouds at the surface below.
In Pacific Northwest imagery from the NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar mission, some areas are dotted in magenta due to radar signals strongly reflecting off flat surfaces like roads and buildings, combined with the orientation of those surfaces relative to the satellite’s ground track. The yellow can be produced by a range of different factors, including land cover, moisture, and surface geometry. Yellow-green in the imagery generally indicates vegetation, such as the forests and wetlands covering the region.
Relatively smooth surfaces, including water and — as is most likely the case in this image — vegetation-free clearings on the mountaintop, appear dark blue. Near the foot of the mountain are patches of purple squares cut into the lighter green vegetation. Their precise right angles show that they’re clearly man-made; they’re likely the effect of forests being thinned or possibly vegetation growing back after having been thinned in the past.
A joint mission developed by NASA and the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), NISAR launched in July 2025 from Satish Dhawan Space Centre on India’s southeastern coast. Managed by Caltech, JPL leads the U.S. component of the project and provided the satellite’s L-band SAR and antenna reflector. ISRO provided NISAR’s spacecraft bus and its S-band SAR.
The NISAR satellite is the first to carry two SAR instruments at different wavelengths and will monitor Earth’s land and ice surfaces twice every 12 days, collecting data using the spacecraft’s giant drum-shaped reflector, which measures 39 feet (12 meters) wide — the largest radar antenna reflector NASA has ever sent into space. To learn more about NISAR, visit:
In the later ’80s through to the early 2000s Iran was becoming a more moderate country. Then we brought war to the region and they pretty quickly went back to being more radical. Their interest in nuclear weapons tracks to some extent with this same sequence.
This is a simplified description of the chain of events but it’s also one true thread among many factors that have affected their radicalness and their efforts to have nuclear weapons.
Of course, to back up to their earlier radical phase, we have to look at ourselves there too. The familiar story is of our backing of the Shah, Shah Pahlavi, after WWII and our participation in overthrowing of the Iranian Prime Minister in the ’50s, because he wasn’t as cooperative with us and our interest in Iranian oil as the Shah was. The Shah remained oppressive and disliked which eventually led to a rebellion in the ’70s. That rebellion having been led by Ayatollah Khomeini and extremists, that became the new government. All our efforts to have a supportive leader in place blew up in our face.
But in the years that followed, starting about a decade after the rebellion, relatively moderate presidents and leaders were elected. The country was becoming more a part of the global economy. That mutual dependence, the world needing them and they needing the world because of the interdependent economic interests, was a moderating force. Culture began to soften too. Women could wear and do many things not permitted in more radical times.
Then George W. Bush and his administration decided to attack Iraq, despite there being no justification that had anything to do with the 9/11 attacks. They threatened Iran as well though they didn’t end up invading then.
The U.S. had just attacked and waged war on Iraq, Iran’s neighbor, and the U.S. was threatening the same on Iran. Iran could almost guarantee it would not be attacked in that way if it had nuclear weapons. If it had them then it’s ability to do horrible destruction in retaliation would make attacking them impossible. If you were them, wouldn’t you try to get nuclear weapons too?
How many other countries are going to react to Trump’s attacks on countries, and threats against others, by deciding they need nukes too?
At the same time that we threatened Iraq and Iran we also threatened North Korea. They already wanted to have nuclear weapons but their efforts greatly increased and now they have them.
The dynamics of war and threats and various ways of damaging neighbors that Iran has carried out, actually the dynamics of wars and strife across the whole Middle East, have thousands of factors and massive amounts of foolishness, hell, outright idiocy, on all sides. Our part is just one factor, but it’s a big one, and it’s repetitive and wrong headed and invariably both backfires and damages us.
If you are Poland and Hitler is invading, or Ukraine and Putin is invading, yes, you have to fight. There are few other times when war is the right step. When it doesn’t end up costing more in the long run than any gain. When the damage to ourselves, not to mention to whomever the current target is, not to mention to all the ordinary people just trying to live their lives, few other times that it doesn’t have long and horrible repercussions.
But this one is particularly ignorant. It is a lesson and a place we have inflicted harm on ourselves over and over again. While it’s possible Iran’s indirect warring on its neighbors and being a danger might have risen to the need for an attack to try to stop it, we weren’t at that point. Trump’s kicking of the entire hornet’s nest of the Middle East and of the mess and repercussions that wars create has set back chances for even a partial peace in the region by many years. There will be all sorts of unpredictable consequences and costs we and the world will have to live with for a long time to come.
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Most people know just how much the internet has changed our world. We use it for everything from shopping to accessing medical care. Yet it has also been responsible for securing many people’s livelihoods by making it easier than ever to earn income. Learn how below:
Quick Access to Short-Term Funds
There may come a time when you realize that an unexpected cost has left you short at the end of the working week. While you undoubtedly have friends and family you can rely on to bridge the financial gap, you don’t necessarily have to turn to them.
Not only can you use the internet to find out what to know about payday loans and welfare, but you can also use it to access payday loans, as well. Many trusted loan companies provide a seamless, fast, and easy online application process in which you can receive the short-term funds you need the same day you apply for them. In the past, it may have taken days to secure a loan, and you would have needed to visit a physical business.
Low Startup Business Costs
Just decades ago, no one could have dreamed of having a side hustle or opening their own business if they didn’t have access to tens of thousands of dollars. You needed a significant upfront investment for a physical store, inventory, and marketing. Now, all you need is a laptop, a bit of business knowledge, and a dream.
The internet has meant you don’t need a physical store to run a business, and you don’t even need to keep stock on hand. You can create a website, sell digital products, or even provide dropshipping. This means that you sell products from a third-party supplier without ever having to hold the inventory yourself.
Freelancing
When you’re a parent or have other daily obligations, finding a job in a physical location that matches your skillset and offers flexible working hours can feel nearly impossible. Very few employers want to work around school drop-off and pick-up times while allowing time off for running errands and attending school events.
However, the internet has enabled many people to stop looking for those rare jobs that just don’t seem to exist. Instead, they can leverage their online skills to provide freelance services to multiple businesses. There is high demand for a range of roles, including graphic design, digital marketing, content writing, and software development.
Multiple Income Streams
There’s no denying that the nine-to-five working life is still the norm in our modern world. Most of the workforce consists of office, service, professional, and trade workers. However, those who have learned they can make money online have also found they can enjoy multiple income streams.
Rather than relying on a single employer to provide your paycheck, you can explore multiple money-making avenues. For example, some people freelance, invest, produce content, and dabble in e-commerce. You can even build passive income sources such as digital products and affiliate marketing. Diversifying income sources can help increase stability.
There will always be ways to make money in our physical world, but how we build wealth and access funds in the online space is growing exponentially. If you want to bolster your bottom line, now might be the right time to explore some of these income and funding strategies above.
So, just to put the issue to rest, a few hours ago, Esther Kim Varet’s efforts to have Joe Kerr’s ballot ID changed from RETIRED FIREFIGHTER CAPTAIN to THIRD MILLI VANILLI MEMBER were struck down. A judge, Stephen Acquisto, denied the Petition for Writ of Mandate, and life moves onward.
And I just wanna add a few thoughts:
First, I wish Lisa Ramirez were running a better campaign, because—on paper, at least—she strikes me as the best available Democratic candidate. But the buzz isn’t there.
Second, I wish Perry Meade hadn’t dropped out, because he had something snazzy going dowm.
Third, I wish I could go back in time, to the first moment I interviewed Esther Kim Varet. She was smart and reasonable and armed with a plan. She was fun and engaging. I didn’t see the thin skin, the bite, the weird IG posts. There was reason to believe. I long for that.
Fourth, Prop 50 is a great thing for America.
Fifth, Prop 50 makes this election a super longshot for Democrats.
Sixth, I might have discounted Joe Kerr far too early. If the vote were held today, you’d probably have Ken Calvert and Young Kim fighting for the top two positions, then Kerr five or six points back.
Seventh, sometimes elections aren’t for winning, so much as positioning. Like, Lisa Ramirez will walk away from this with greater name recognition. If she chooses to run for something else down the road, that will help. “Oh, I remember you …”
For Joe, however, this feels like a last-gasp shot. For better and for worse.
Joe Kerr: Factually, a retired firefighter captain.
So I recently decided I would be largely done with chronicling the wacky and wild exploits of Esther Kim Varet on this website.
The CA-40 congressional candidate and one-time presumptive frontrunner has run what I would describe—politely—as an erratic campaign, and even though one of this site’s major purposes is to bring down Orange County’s zaniest Republicans (We see you, Gracey Van Der Mark!), it’s been hard to ignore Esther’s remarkable real-time implosion from, “Maybe she can do this!” to “Dad, why is that person trying to eat our muffler?”
But, well, I kinda figured enough was enough was enough, and the time had come to move on.
Technically and legally, Esther is probably right. Kerr has, it seems, held other positions since wrapping his career battling blazes. Wrote Schallhorn: “According to the court filing, Kerr served as director and secretary for Rapid Response to Carbon Ignition, a Nevada-based company that works in emergency wildfire consulting, from 2020 to 2023. Kerr said this was a startup company to which he provided subject matter expertise on wildfire cameras in California. This was in correlation to the work he did as a fire captain, Kerr said.”
So … yeah. Maybe Esther will win this one. Maybe Joe Kerr will have to change his ballot ID designation and lose the buzz of being viewed by voters as a firefighter.
But at what further cost to Esther’s reputation?
Truly, at what cost?
Upon initially being forwarded the Register article, I turned to my dog Poppy and muttered, “You must be fucking kidding me.” Like, it’s just so tacky. So rinky-dink and lame and tone-deaf. I get it: Esther’s campaign has sputtered, the post-Prop 50 CA-40 isn’t what she signed up for, and she’s worried about losing votes to someone (appealingly) identified as a “retired firefighter captain.” But to accuse Joe Kerr of wrongdoing—when Esther literally relocated (aka: carpetbagged) to Orange County to run for (what she thought would be) a winnable congressional seat—is the height of hypocrisy and inanity. Also, not for nothing, Kerr isn’t lying, per se. He is, factually, a retired firefighter captain. A pretty bad-ass job. The debate here isn’t his history, it’s political semantics.
But, for the sake of this website, it’s once again the saga of an out-of-her-depths vagabond candidate desperately trying to tear opponents apart, without having the political savvy to understand the wise way to do so. If the matter is really so important to Esther; if she genuinely believes Joe Kerr shouldn’t be identified on the ballot as “retired firefighter captain”—for Christ’s sake, don’t allow the stench to stick to your clothes. Have someone else handle it. An operative. An intermediary. Anyone but you. Because now, you’re (correctly) tarring yourself as the out-of-towner trying to come around and besmirch a well-known public servant for personal gain.
It’s not kind, it’s not generous, it’s not civic-minded and it’s not politically intelligent.
In an interview with Reuters on Monday, Singapore’s minister for foreign affairs, Dr. Vivian Balakrishnan, put in bald language the change in the world order instigated by President Donald J. Trump.
“For 80 years,” Balakrishnan explained, “the US was the underwriter for a system of globalisation based on UN Charter principles, multilateralism, territorial integrity, sovereign equality.” That system “heralded an unprecedented and unique period of global prosperity and peace. Of course there were exceptions. And of course, the Cold War was still in effect for at least half of the last 80 years. But generally, for those of us who were non-communists, who ran open economies, who provided first world infrastructure, together with a hardworking disciplined people, we had unprecedented opportunities.
“The story of Singapore, with a per capita GDP of 500 US dollars in 1965. Now, [it is] somewhere between 80,000 to 90,000 US dollars. It would not have happened if it had not been for this unprecedented period, basically Pax Americana and then turbocharged by the reform and opening of China for decades. It has been unprecedented. It has been great for many of us. In fact, I will say, for all of us, if you look back 80 years.
“But now, whether you like it or not, objectively, this period has ended…. Basically, the underwriter of this world order has now become a revisionist power, and some people would even say a disruptor. But the larger point is that the erosion of norms, processes, and institutions that underpinned a remarkable period of peace and prosperity; that foundation has gone.”
In its place, as scholar of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder said to me in a YouTube conversation yesterday, Trump is aligning himself with international oligarchs like Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Saudi Arabia’s Mohammad bin Salman (MBS), and China’s Xi Jinping. Because of his position as the president of the United States of America, this means he is aligning the United States of America with this oligarchical axis as well, abandoning the country’s democratic principles and traditional allies.
On February 28, Michael Birnbaum, John Hudson, Karen DeYoung, Natalie Allison, and Souad Mekhennet of the Washington Post reported that Trump initially launched the strikes on Iran at the urging of MBS and Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, despite the assessment of U.S. intelligence that Iran did not pose an imminent threat to the U.S. and would not for at least a decade. Both countries see Iran as a threat to their power and want it weakened. Netanyahu has been eager to get rid of the Iranian regime for decades and has urged previous U.S. presidents to attack without success.
On Tuesday, March 24, Julian E. Barnes, Tyler Pager, and Eric Schmitt of the New York Times reported that MBS sees a “historic opportunity” to remake the Middle East and so has been pushing Trump to continue his war against Iran. MBS, the journalists report, has urged Trump to use troops to seize Iran’s energy infrastructure and drive the regime out of power. He has assured Trump that the jump in oil prices will be temporary, although most observers disagree.
Judd Legum of Popular Information notes that the Saudi Public Investment Fund (PIF) controlled by MBS invested $2 billion in the private equity firm of Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, one of Trump’s volunteer Iran negotiators, before the war. A report by Democrats on the Senate Finance Committee and House Oversight Committee released on March 19 says that “since 2021, Mr. Kushner has collected more than $110 million from the government of Saudi Arabia for investment management services that have reaped little to no return.”
The fallout from the Iran war has also benefited Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Despite reports that Russia is aiding Iran in the fight, the Trump administration dropped sanctions on Russian oil that was already at sea, giving Russia an injection of up to $10 billion a month into its cash-strapped war effort against Ukraine.
Today Trump reposted Russian propaganda claiming that Ukraine discussed funneling money to Biden’s reelection campaign. Also today, four Russian lawmakers arrived in Washington, D.C., for the first such visit since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022 to talk with lawmakers and officials, “part of the normalization of relations with the United States of America,” as one of the Russians told the Russian press.
Trump declared he was determined to achieve peace between Russia and Ukraine, but this week, according to Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky, administration officials said the U.S. would not guarantee Ukraine’s security unless Ukraine withdraws from its own land in Donbas. Ceding the region to Russia would essentially give Putin what he launched the war to grab. It is the same region that was at stake in 2016, when Russian operatives told Trump’s 2016 campaign manager they would help Trump’s presidential candidacy if he would look the other way as Putin installed a puppet over the region.
This afternoon, Noah Robertson and Ellen Francis of the Washington Post reported that the Pentagon is considering diverting weapons intended for Ukraine to the Middle East. They also noted that on Monday, Pentagon officials told Congress that it was going to divert about $750 million in funding provided by NATO countries for Ukraine to restock military weapons in the U.S. instead. About allocating weapons, Trump told the reporters, “we do that all the time. We have them in other countries, like in Germany and all over Europe. Sometimes we take from one and we use for another.”
Last week, the U.S. eased sanctions on banks in Russia’s ally Belarus, and today Trump announced he would ease further sanctions on Belarus to try to get fertilizer into the U.S. since Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz has stopped the transportation of about 20% of the world’s fertilizer. Also today, Belarus’s president Alexander Lukashenko signed a treaty with another of Putin’s allies, North Korea’s president Kim Jong Un, announcing a “fundamentally new stage” of the relationship between the two countries as they “oppose undue pressure on Belarus from the West.” Both Belarus and North Korea support Russia in its war on Ukraine.
Trump has openly endorsed Orbán for reelection in Hungary’s April 12 elections, posting on social media yesterday: “Relations between Hungary and the United States have reached new heights of cooperation and spectacular achievement under my Administration, thanks largely to Prime Minister Orbán. I look forward to continuing working closely with him so that both of our Countries can further advance this tremendous path to SUCCESS and cooperation.” Urging Hungarians to vote for Orbán, Trump continued: “He is a true friend, fighter, and WINNER, and has my Complete and Total Endorsement.… I AM WITH HIM ALL THE WAY!”
The framers of the Constitution tried to set up a system that would make it impossible for a president to go to war for private interests or the benefit of other countries, establishing that Congress alone can declare war. The framers wanted the American people to weigh in on whether they wanted to dedicate their lives and their fortunes to a war.
But Trump simply began the Iran war without consultation with Congress, and administration officials have refused to appear at hearings, instead briefing Congress behind closed doors. At an annual fundraising dinner for Republican members of Congress, Trump appeared to acknowledge he was violating the Constitution. He spoke of the “tremendous success” of what he called his “military operation” in Iran. He continued: “I won’t use the word war ’cause they say if you use the word war, that’s maybe not a good thing to do. They don’t like the word war because you are supposed to get approval. So I will use the word military operation.”
Now, as the war costs at least $1 billion a day and Trump’s declarations fluctuate wildly from saying the war is over to suggesting he is considering deploying ground troops to posting this morning that Iranian negotiators “better get serious soon, before it is too late, because once that happens, there is NO TURNING BACK, and it won’t be pretty!” even Republicans are starting to have misgivings. The war has pushed Trump’s approval rating down to just 36%, while a new Reuters poll shows that only 25% of Americans approve of how Trump is handling the cost of living. Today the stock market, which has generally trended downward since the invasion, dropped sharply as traders apparently recognized that the cost of oil is not coming down anytime soon.
Yesterday, after a classified briefing, House Armed Services Committee chair Mike Rogers (R-AL), who backed the Iran strikes, told reporters that Congress members “want to know more about what’s going on, what the options are, and why they’re being considered,” adding, “And we’re just not getting enough answers on those questions.” Chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee Roger Wicker (R-MS) commented: “I can see why he might have said that.”
In an in-depth interview with Hunter Walker and Josh Kovensky of Talking Points Memo yesterday, Representative Joe Morelle (D-NY), who sits on the House Appropriations Committee, explained how Trump’s Iran incursion has become a “mess” for the president. The administration has suggested it is going to ask for $200 billion for the war, and Morelle noted that we are already closing in on $30 billion in spending on it and that“when you consider all the things that Trump rejects or the Republicans reject as too costly, the fact that they have now spent $30 billion in effectively the span of a month without even talking to Congress about this expenditure is really somewhat staggering.”
Morelle noted that even if the White House or the Pentagon did start to provide specifics, “I’m not sure it would matter anyway because the president changes his mind so frequently. He might say something and literally without exaggeration, a half hour later say something completely different, or even sometimes within the same press conference, give two wildly different answers.”
Morelle told Walker and Kovensky: “They fight us on things that will help American families be able to pursue dreams, take care of the food, housing, and healthcare needs of millions of families that they can’t afford”—precisely the things that, as Minister Balakrishnan noted, the post–World War II international order enabled people around the world to attain. “But,” Morelle said, “they can go into an ill-conceived military action that has neither the support of Congress nor the support of American families, which has no clear objectives, shifting goals, and has alienated our allies and made us less safe.”
He is one of the world’s leading art critics, all of his books are excellent, and he has a new and very good work coming out titled Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found. He also has a well-known book on Caravaggio, on Michelangelo, and I am especially fond of his book on British art.
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman; CSA (Canadian Space Agency) astronaut Jeremy Hansen, Artemis 2 mission specialist; NASA astronaut Christina Koch, Artemis 2 mission specialist; NASA astronaut Victor Glover, Artemis 2 pilot; and NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman, Artemis 2 commander, participate in a press conference as NASA’s Artemis II SLS (Space Launch System) rocket and Orion spacecraft roll out to Launch Complex 39B, Saturday, Jan. 17, 2026, at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Image: NASA/John Kraus
The four astronauts of the Artemis 2 mission head to the Sunshine State on Friday for their much anticipated mission to loop around the Moon and back. The quartet will depart from the Johnson Space Center in Texas, flanked by colleagues from NASA and the Canadian Space Agency.
Commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, and mission specialists Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen are set to fly to Florida on T-38 jets, touching down at the Launch and Landing Facility — formerly the Shuttle Landing Facility — around 2:30 p.m. EDT (1830 UTC).
Spaceflight Now will have live coverage beginning about 10 minutes prior to their anticipated arrival.
The crew will be the first humans to venture out beyond low Earth orbit since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972. When the Artemis 2 mission takes flight, it will begin a ten-day journey around the Moon and back.
Artemis 2 is scheduled to launch no earlier than Wednesday, April 1, at 6:24 p.m. EDT (2224 UTC). There is a six-day launch window that extends through April 6.
The mission features a free-return trajectory, meaning their Orion spacecraft, named ‘Integrity,’ will not enter lunar orbit. Five days into the mission the crew will make their closest approach to the Moon.
They could also pass the record for the furthest humans have traveled from Earth, which was set by Apollo 13 at 248,655 miles, depending on the time and day they launch.
This will be the second mission to space for Wiseman, Glover, and Koch. Artemis 2 will not only be Hansen’s first spaceflight, but also the first time that a non-American will fly to the vicinity of the Moon.
The Artemis 2 mission is a test flight on the road towards establishing av sustained human presence on the Moon. During a day-long series of presentations this week, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman and other members of agency leadership outlined the plans for establishing a Moon Base.
Isaacman’s administration made the decision to move away from a Moon-orbiting space station, called Gateway, and instead focus on surface operations. The administrator made a point to note that Gateway was “paused,” not “cancelled,” and that they may revisit the idea in the future.
As part of the revamping of the Artemis program, intending to increase flight cadence and preparation for a lunar landing no earlier than 2028, Isaacman also announced last month that the Artemis 3 mission will take place in Earth orbit and focus on docking with one or both of the landers from SpaceX and Blue Origin.
The new Artemis 3 is scheduled to launch in 2027 on a Space Launch System rocket. However, Isaacman said NASA is still working through the mission specifics, stating that the agency may not need to use their last remaining Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage, the upper stage of the SLS rocket.
On March 12, Isaacman told Spaceflight Now that mission specifics should be made public within the next 60-90 days.
Callum McMahon reported the LiteLLM malware attack to PyPI. Here he shares the Claude transcripts he used to help him confirm the vulnerability and decide what to do about it. Claude even suggested the PyPI security contact address after confirming the malicious code in a Docker container:
Confirmed. Fresh download from PyPI right now in an isolated Docker container:
The malicious litellm==1.82.8 is live on PyPI right now and anyone installing or upgrading litellm will be infected. This needs to be reported to security@pypi.org immediately.
I was chuffed to see Callum use my claude-code-transcripts tool to publish the transcript of the conversation.
Sam Rose continues his streak of publishing spectacularly informative interactive essays, this time explaining how quantization of Large Language Models works (which he says might be "the best post I've ever made".)
Also included is the best visual explanation I've ever seen of how floating point numbers are represented using binary digits.
I hadn't heard about outlier values in quantization - rare float values that exist outside of the normal tiny-value distribution - but apparently they're very important:
Why do these outliers exist? [...] tl;dr: no one conclusively knows, but a small fraction of these outliers are very important to model quality. Removing even a single "super weight," as Apple calls them, can cause the model to output complete gibberish.
Given their importance, real-world quantization schemes sometimes do extra work to preserve these outliers. They might do this by not quantizing them at all, or by saving their location and value into a separate table, then removing them so that their block isn't destroyed.
It looks like 16-bit to 8-bit carries almost no quality penalty. 16-bit to 4-bit is more noticeable, but it's certainly not a quarter as good as the original. Closer to 90%, depending on how you want to measure it.
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There are few things politicians love more than dashing to the front of a parade, so there will be plenty of Democratic officeholders joining No Kings rallies this Saturday. It’s the third installment in what has become the most visible expression of grassroots resistance to the Trump presidency, and it could be the biggest; the organizers say they already have 3,000 rallies scheduled in every corner of the country, more than either of the two previous No Kings events that occurred last June and October. But the protest is more than an indication that Democrats have the wind at their back heading to November’s midterms (though they do). It also contains important lessons Democrats would do well to understand.
The first and most obvious one is that people are mad, and anger is one of the most powerful motivators in politics. Don’t let the festive costumes and funny signs mislead you; millions of people won’t turn out to protest unless they’re seriously fed up.
So Democrats need to speak to that anger, to show they understand it and share it. There’s been a lot of talk about “fighting,” which is certainly something the Democratic base wants. But that’s more than just trying to sound belligerent (or swearing more, which some Democrats have decided is the way to communicate their resolve). Sometimes it means refusing to confirm a Trump nominee (or all Trump nominees), and sometimes it means refusing to give ground on a matter of principle, like when political consultants advise betraying marginalized people in the quest to inhabit the political center. Sometimes fighting is loud, and sometimes it’s quiet. But Democrats have to communicate that voters can trust them to be strong, even when it’s risky. And keep in mind, the word voters most associate with the national Democratic Party right now is “weak.”
The second lesson of the No Kings rallies is that this moment isn’t just about Trump — but in the short term it’s still mostly about Trump. It can’t be denied that without a president so horrid in so many ways, this kind of mobilization wouldn’t be possible. We’ve seen large protest movements before, but never one focused so intently on the issue-spanning idea that the inhabitant of the White House is a danger to the country. The closest thing in recent history was the Tea Party, which was motivated by anger at the election of a Black president — and was nowhere near as large as No Kings.
As Rachel Maddow recently pointed out, Trump has committed an extraordinary number of abuses of power just since the last No Kings event, including bulldozing the East Wing of the White House, trying to arrest six members of Congress for explaining the moral and legal obligations of servicemembers, slapping his name on the Kennedy Center, waging war on the city of Minneapolis, and starting what increasingly looks like it will be a disastrous war in Iran. Anyone who was angry and frustrated before has even more reason to be so now.
That puts Democrats in a position to ride to victory in November, almost regardless of what they do. According to The Downballot, since Trump took office, Democrats have flipped 30 seats in special elections from red to blue; Republicans have flipped zero. While some of those 30 Democrats were surely wonderful candidates, a sweeping result like that transcends individual districts and contenders; it means that voters are upset and motivated everywhere, and are ready to punish the president’s party.
Which leads to the next lesson of No Kings: Act like you’re the majority, because you are. The last No Kings event drew 7 million participants, according to the organizers; other estimates put the figure only slightly smaller. Either way, it was the biggest one-day protest in American history. While that may be a minority of the public, you don’t get that many people out in the streets unless they represent tens of millions more who didn’t participate. That’s why Republicans try so hard to delegitimize all liberal protest, to argue that it’s “paid” or phony or too organized to be real. But its size and scope shows how many people are on the Democrats’ side. Meanwhile, Trump’s approval has dipped into the 30s. Yet all too often, Democratic politicians are timid about what they believe, as though they expect to lose. But in politics as in life, confidence can be powerful.
The next lesson is that as mad as they are at Trump, people are after something deeper. In a recent NBC News poll, 59% of voters said the economic and political systems are stacked against people like them, and 84% agreed that “the very rich and powerful are above the law when they do something wrong, they look out for each other, using their power and connections to get special treatment.” It matters to people that this president is so nakedly corrupt, that the Supreme Court is controlled by partisan hacks, that America’s image around the globe lies in tatters, and that the entire federal government has been degraded. They can see the connections between the way power operates and the fact that they don’t have affordable health care or better wages. Politicians have to show they understand that too.
A final lesson of No Kings is that people want a participatory politics. At a time when we’re all hunched over our phones and feeling disconnected from one another, No Kings demonstrates the yearning people feel to connect with one another in a common effort to improve their country. Politicians have a role to play here, since successful campaigns give people things to do, and make them feel like they’re part of something meaningful. Campaigns that just send 50 texts a day asking for money, on the other hand, engender nothing but resentment.
And this is where the effort has to move beyond protest. In recent years, Democrats have been better at mobilizing, while Republicans have been better at organizing; the former is about getting people out to something like a protest, while the latter means bringing people into movements that become part of their identity, so they become citizen activists. Turning mobilization into organization is difficult and labor-intensive, but it creates a much more powerful movement.
There are other lessons all of us can take from these events. For instance: The small protests are just as important as the big ones, if not more so. As great as it will be to see thousands upon thousands of people take to the streets in New York and Los Angeles, it takes much more courage for someone in a small conservative town like Bottineau, North Dakota (population 2,000 or so) to protest in public, knowing that they might get some dirty looks the next day down at the post office. But there will be a protest in Bottineau! And as Alan Elrod argues, we should embrace the earnestness of these protests, because cringe is good; unlike the snark and detachment favored by social media, it’s empowering.
If Democratic politicians can understand these lessons, they can take them into governing the next time they win power. Then maybe they’ll actually make progress on creating the change all those protesters are demanding.
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Donald Trump’s impulsive decision to deploy large numbers of ICE agents to hang out at America’s airport Cinnabons — there’s no indication that they are actually helping demoralized, unpaid TSA employees deal with long lines at airport security — may have unintended political consequences: it will remind Americans about how much they dislike ICE and the great harm that it’s doing. Nonetheless, recent data show that the administration’s crackdown on immigration is working. Immigration to the United States is plunging and may be about to go into reverse.
And that plunge is making America poorer and weaker – now and in the long-run.
Trump believes, or pretends to believe — it’s impossible to tell the difference — that ICE is popular, posting on Truth Social that
The Public is loving ICE. They are Great American Patriots, they just happen to have much larger, and harder, muscles than most — which is what they’re supposed to have.
Ahem. Anyway, two new polls show how delusional it is to assert that the public is “loving ICE.”
First, G. Elliott Morris reports that ICE commands so little public trust and respect that “it’s in a category of its own”:
And a new PRRI poll shows that public support for Trump’s anti-immigration agenda, which was never particularly strong, has cratered as the public sees the cruelty and destructiveness of that agenda in action. It finds sharply declining approval of Trump’s handling of immigration, even among Republicans:
And the PRRI poll shows very little public support for ICE’s tactics, such as its habit of hanging out near schools looking for parents (and sometimes children) to arrest:
A casual observer might look at this polling and imagine that the crusade against immigrants was faltering, especially when one takes into account the effectiveness of the popular resistance in Minnesota and a string of legal defeats for ICE. Most recently Trump officials admitted that their claims that ICE had the right to make arrests at immigration courts were based on “a material mistaken statement of fact,” which is known in plain English as a “lie.”
But the reality is that as unpopular as the administration’s actions have been, they have “succeeded” in essentially stopping immigration into the United States. The chart at the top of this post shows the latest estimates from the Census Bureau of movements of people into and out of the U.S., where “2026” actually refers to an “estimates year” that runs from July 2025 to June 2026. The numbers for calendar year 2026 will almost surely be lower. The Census declares that
Currently, the estimates of NIM [net international migration] are trending toward negative net migration [that is, more people are leaving than entering the country]. If those trends continue, it would be the first time the United States has seen net negative migration in more than 50 years.
Why is this happening? After all, to look at a seemingly analogous case, Trump’s tariff policy, which is similarly chaotic and has been reeling from legal challenges, has failed to cause any significant decline in net imports, aka the trade deficit. Why, then, has the Stephen Miller/Trump attack on immigrants been so successful at ending immigration inflows?
Because imports aren’t people, but immigrants are. Now, for those immigrants that are already here, it’s unlikely that we will actually deport a large percentage. And while thousands have been sent to America’s new gulags — sorry, but that’s what ICE detention centers are — their number probably won’t rise into the millions. But millions of potential immigrants are being deterred by the fear of detention, deportation, and the breakup of families.
And this will hurt all of us. There has already been a thorough debunking of the false claims that immigration hurts the native born. But I will add two more points.
First, let me address the claim that Trump’s anti-immigrant vendetta led to a surge in native-born employment. As everyone who actually understood the numbers realized from the beginning, this surge wasn’t real — there was a quirk in the way the numbers were estimated that created a phantom bulge in native-born employment that would vanish once new Census estimates were in. Justin Fox has a good explanation.
And sure enough, official numbers show a plunge in native-born employment over the past few months. Both the surge and the plunge were statistical artifacts, not reality:
This didn’t happen
So, no – waging war against immigrants is not resulting in higher employment of the native-born. In fact, it’s contributing to a stalling of the economy in construction and in the service industries. And even the Trump administration has admittedthat the immigration crackdown is hurting America’s farmers and the food supply.
Second, let me say a word about the fiscal impacts of immigration. Trump officials have said remarkable things about that— remarkable in their falsity and their unadulterated xenophobia. Stephen Miller recently asserted that
The extraction of wealth from American taxpayers to people who don’t belong here is the primary cause of the national debt.
But, aside from the raw nastiness of this statement, it’s helpful in prompting us to think about the fiscal impact of immigration. It’s useful to recognize that the federal government is, in a widely used expression, basically an insurance company with an army. Specifically, the federal government largely collects taxes from working-age adults to pay either for defense or for social programs that spend most of their money on the elderly — that is, Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.
Immigration expands the base of taxpayers, which means more people to share the burden of paying taxes to pay for defense. This includes undocumented immigrants, because their employers collect payroll taxes out of their wages, with the added fiscal payoff that they will never collect benefits. And because immigrants are relatively young and healthy, they increase the amount going into government coffers while having a delayed impact on outlays. The Social Security Administration does sensitivity analysis of factors affecting its projections, and consistently finds that higher immigration improves the system’s financial health, while lower immigration worsens it.
I could go on and on, but the point should be clear. Trump, Miller and company are succeeding in their anti-immigrant crusade, despite many failures of implementation, because they are managing to scare away millions of people who wanted to live and work in the United States, contributing to our society. And this “success” will leave us poorer and weaker.
Bit of a hyperbolic framing but this looks like another case study of vibe porting, this time spinning up a new custom Go implementation of the JSONata JSON expression language - similar in focus to jq, and heavily associated with the Node-RED platform.
As with other vibe-porting projects the key enabling factor was JSONata's existing test suite, which helped build the first working Go version in 7 hours and $400 of token spend.
The Reco team then used a shadow deployment for a week to run the new and old versions in parallel to confirm the new implementation exactly matched the behavior of the old one.
I’m very quick to complain online about something annoying but sometimes slower when something is good. So here’s something good.
I was reminded recently about the alarm pendants we got for our mum when she was still living at home. I’m usually prepared for, and accepting of, a few minor technical hiccups when setting up technology – it’s hard to make things work smoothly for everyone, everywhere, every time – but I was amazed at how well thought out the process of setting up these pendants was.
We ended up with two slightly different pendants, both from Taking Care.
First was their “Digital Personal Alarm”, I think, a small white pendant with a single, soft grey button that connects to a rectangular mains-powered unit that connects to Taking Care using a cellular connection (3G or 4G, I’m not sure which network(s)). If the button is pressed on the pendant or the main unit, it calls the service and someone’s friendly voice appears to ask if everything’s OK. In advance you give them the numbers of family/neighbours who they can call, or emergency services if necessary. They do a similar pendant that can detect falls, and a wrist-wearable version. It works up to 300 metres from the base station (although the wearer’s unlikely to hear the helpful voice from that distance).
We also had a “Taking Care Anywhere” pendant which is bigger but doesn’t need the main base station. It was the most magic-feeling technology I’ve seen in a while because it’s so small and simple. It can track the wearer’s location anywhere using GPS and if it detects a fall, or you squeeze the two buttons together, it calls directly to the support team and you speak to them through the pendant. I was surprised how loud and clear the voice was through the pendant.
The little white pendant has a battery that lasts for years and the larger pendant needs to be charged every couple of months by placing it on a clear, round charging unit that brightly glows useful colours.
The Taking Care Anywhere pendant on its charging station, and the base station for the smaller white pendant (not pictured).
The little white pendant was included as an extra when we got the larger one – a “backup” for while the larger one is charging. In retrospect I think it would have been simpler to not use the smaller one at all, and only charge the larger one occasionally at night. This all currently costs £37.79 per month which isn’t nothing but in the scale of costs-associated-with-getting-old, it felt like money well spent.
The main thing is that it all Just Worked from initial set-up onwards. I can’t remember the exact process of setting up each device but I do remember thinking that it couldn’t have been any simpler. There was none of the expected, “Oh, hmm, I’ll try it again,” turn-it-off-and-on-again false-starts you get with so many things these days. It shouldn’t have felt remarkable but it did.
And every time we spoke to a voice at the call centre they were helpful and friendly. Thankfully we only had accidental calls – no real falls – but every time they were reassuring and not at all put out that nothing was actually wrong. Having both the hardware, its invisible software, and the human part of the service all working well was so good.
The only slightly awkward thing: It was harder to remember that the larger pendant required squeezing its buttons from both sides, which was a bit more fiddly than pressing the only button on the small white pendant.
There are many pieces of hardware associated with healthcare and being elderly that feel utilitarian and clunky, and so many services that feel stretched and only-just-working. Yes this is a pay-for service as opposed to the underfunded NHS but, still, it was as good as you hope everything should be.
And, importantly, although Mum wasn’t very enthused about the idea of a pendant initially, she ended up diligently wearing them and was reluctant to give them up when moving to a care home.
But otherwise, amazing: technology and services that work really well! Who’d have thought?!
These particular devices are apparently also known as the Chiptech GO and Chiptech Pearl so are probably available through other services in other countries too. Good work everyone.
macOS Tahoe 26.4 includes a new slow charger indicator that tells
MacBook users when their charging setup isn’t delivering full
power. As described in an updated Apple support document, a
“Slow Charger” label now appears in orange text in the battery
status menu and above the Battery Level graph in Battery settings.
The indicator is accompanied by an info button for more details.
This might be especially useful in Europe, where MacBooks no longer come with power adapters. Regular people often have no idea how power adapters work, and presume one charger is as good as another, if it works at all. After I posted this item back in October about the new MacBook Pros not shipping with chargers anywhere in Europe (not just the EU, even though it’s an EU law that requires products to be available without included chargers), a bunch of readers regaled me with tales of a family member complaining about their MacBook losing battery life even while plugged in, only to discover that they were using wimpy 5- or 10-watt USB-C adapters.
Jennifer Daniel, on her “Did Someone Say Emoji?” blog:
First came Melting Face 🫠, our collective surrender to the
liquid state.
Then Dotted Line Face 🫥, the visual representation of sublimation:
turning from a solid into a gas just to escape a conversation.
Now, we have Distorted Face (U+1FAEA), a moment defined by
tension: where you aren’t just feeling an emotion — you are being
physically altered by it.
I’ll live, but it feels a tad spiteful that Apple only adds new emoji to the current-year OS updates. So this year’s 8 new emoji are in MacOS 26.4, but not MacOS 15.7.5, despite both being released this week.
One more nugget from last night’s 7-0 Yankees win over the Giants:
During the sixth inning of Wednesday’s Opening Night matchup
between two historic franchises, the Giants and Yankees,
all-time home run leader Barry Bonds joined the Netflix
broadcast booth at Oracle Park and told an incredible story about
just how close he came to signing with the Yankees in 1992. [...]
“Well, I would’ve been a Yankees [player],” Bonds said, “but
Steinbrenner got on the phone and they called us and they told me,
‘Barry, we’re gonna give you the money — [make you] the
highest-paid player … but you have to sign the contract by 2:00
this afternoon.’”
One thing you don’t do is give Bonds an ultimatum.
“And I said, ‘Excuse me?’” Bonds said. “And I just hung the
phone up.”
The Yankees went on to play in six World Series from that moment until the end of Bonds’s playing career, winning four championships. Bonds played in one World Series with the Giants, losing a seven-game series to the Angels in 2002.
Nice 7-0 win last night over the San Francisco Giants.
The game was on Netflix, and it was the worst baseball broadcast I can recall watching in the HD era. The picture quality was just awful, with embarrassing dynamic ad injection. Yes, there was haze, but it’s not like crappy weather in San Francisco is a surprise. The game had the first Automated Ball-Strike (ABS) challenge in MLB history, but the broadcast missed it while it happened. And Netflix’s scorebug is without question the worst I’ve ever seen — as one guy on Reddit quipped, it was somehow “too big and too small at the same time”. I’d have to stand within arm’s reach of my TV to read those player names.
If this is the level of attention Netflix is going to pay to sports broadcasts, they should stick to bumfights.
Last month I posted an item (linking to a post from Rob Griffiths) explaining how to hide the prompts in System Settings to upgrade to MacOS 26 Tahoe. The technique I posted involved hand-editing a device management profile.
This video from Mr. Macintosh shows how to do the same thing, but using the free iMazing Profile Editor to create the device profile instead of hand-editing the XML Property List. If you were spooked or put off by the original technique, but want to stay on MacOS 15 Sequoia and hide all the prompts related to Tahoe, watch this video.
Disney has now ended its partnership with OpenAI, which included
plans for the media conglomerate to take a $1 billion stake in the
artificial-intelligence company led by CEO Sam Altman.
A Disney rep said in a statement to Variety: “As the nascent AI
field advances rapidly, we respect OpenAI’s decision to exit the
video generation business and to shift its priorities elsewhere.
We appreciate the constructive collaboration between our teams and
what we learned from it, and we will continue to engage with AI
platforms to find new ways to meet fans where they are while
responsibly embracing new technologies that respect IP and the
rights of creators.”
Allow me to translate from PR-speak into plain English:
We love children, and children will always be the primary audience for Disney’s theme parks, movies, and other entertainment. But we don’t do business with children.
Most PR statements would be more effective in plain English.
Today, we are proud to celebrate a major milestone: Android is now
the fastest mobile platform for web browsing.
Through deep vertical integration across hardware, the Android OS,
and the Chrome engine, the latest flagship Android devices are
setting new performance records, outperforming all other mobile
competitors in the key web performance benchmarks Speedometer and
LoadLine and providing a level of responsiveness previously unseen
on mobile.
Three unnamed Android “flagship phones” scored higher than an unnamed “competing mobile phone platform” (presumably an iPhone 17 Pro) in two benchmarks, Speedometer 3.1 and LoadLine. Speedometer is a longstanding open source benchmark whose development is governed by representatives from WebKit (Apple), Blink (Google), and Gecko (Mozilla). LoadLine is a benchmark from Google and Android OEMs. Speedometer is a benchmark anyone can run just by visiting the benchmark’s website. Running LoadLine, especially on an iOS device, is an enormous hassle that involves two USB-C-to-Ethernet adapters, enabling Remote Automation and the Web Inspector in Safari, installing custom certificates on the iOS device, and installing custom software on an attached Mac.
You will be shocked to learn that the three unnamed Android phones outscored the “competing mobile phone” by significantly larger margins on LoadLine than Speedometer.
Claiming that these results make Android “the fastest mobile platform for web browsing” is ridiculous. It boggles the mind how many publications parroted Google’s braggadocio — MacRumors, 9to5Google, Android Authority, PhoneArena — without even mentioning that the results can’t possibly be verified because none of the devices (and none of the software versions) are named. This guy at Notebookcheck even had the audacity to put in his headline that Google “shows the receipts” for its claims. What kind of receipt doesn’t say what you bought? I would love to wager real money with the authors of any of those stories on what the Speedometer 3.1 results show for 100 random real-world Android users vs. 100 random real-world iPhone users. Or how about the average scores from the three best-selling models on each platform from the last year.
Jessica E. Lessin, Amir Efrati, and Erin Woo, reporting for the paywalled-without-gift-links The Information:
While we have reported that Apple can tweak, or fine-tune, a
version of Google’s Gemini AI so that it responds to queries the
way Apple wants, the agreement gives Apple a lot more freedom
with Google’s tech.
In fact, Apple has complete access to the Gemini model in its own
data center facilities. Apple can use that access to produce
smaller models that power specific tasks or are small enough to
run directly on Apple devices so they can run the tasks faster,
said a person who has direct knowledge of the arrangement.
The process of producing such models is called distillation,
which essentially transfers knowledge from one large language
model, which acts like a teacher, to another model that acts as a
student.
That Apple negotiated this level of access is interesting, but not surprising. The biggest tell that this deal runs much deeper than simple white-labelling is that Apple will — or at least has the right to — run these Gemini-based models in Apple’s own Private Cloud Compute datacenters.
Katie Notopoulos, my favorite Sora user, at Business Insider (paywalled, alas, but available via News+):
Eventually, my friends all seemed to get bored with the app.
As I do at most parties, I stuck around longer than everyone else,
but eventually I, too, found that the novelty had worn off. I
rarely opened the app after the second week.
This was, I imagine, a problem: making videos of yourself is fun,
but watching videos that strangers make of themselves is not fun.
The idea of a social feed of AI-generated videos is simply not
something that people are interested in. Around the same time,
Meta also tried this with an app of AI videos, and it was even
more boring.
It’s hard to see how anyone thought Sora would have staying power, or could ever justify the apparently exorbitant cost of running it. OpenAI burned a ton of money on what was effectively a stunt.
I mentioned the other day that I was mildly irked by a change in iOS 26.4 that moved the list of available updates in the App Store app one additional screen further into its hierarchy. Good news (via Nate Barham on Mastodon): you can long-press on the App Store app on your Home Screen and jump right to the Updates screen from the contextual menu. Nice!
Alternatively, you can create a Shortcuts shortcut that jumps you to the Updates screen. Just one action: open the URL itms-apps://apps.apple.com/updates. Save it as an “app” on your Home Screen or an action in Control Center. Me, I’m just going to use the tap-and-hold contextual menu item on the App Store app.
Axel Ockenfels forwards the good news. He
writes: "It passed! The Bundestag voted today to permit kidney exchange
in Germany. The CDU/CSU, SPD, and Greens voted in favor."
(More steps will have to be taken before kidney exchanges occur regularly in Germany, but this is a giant step forward.)
"On Thursday, March 26, 2026, the Bundestag expanded the possibility of living kidney donations to increase the circle of possible organ donors and organ recipients. A corresponding bill of the Federal Government "to amend the Transplantation Act – Amendment of the regulations on living organ donation and further amendments" (21/3619) in the version amended by the Health Committee was adopted by the majority of the CDU/CSU, SPD and Bündnis 90/Die Grünen against the votes of the parliamentary group Die Linke, with the AfD abstaining. In the future, this will also enable so-called cross-over living kidney donations between different couples.
...
"Despite numerous initiatives to promote organ donation, there has been no trend reversal so far. At the end of 2024, around 6,400 people were waiting for a donor kidney, according to the information. At the same time, the number of kidney transplants fell to 2,075. A total of 253 patients died in 2024 who were on the waiting list for a kidney.
"Opening up further therapy options "Therefore, it is important to open up further therapy options that have long been established internationally. The goal of countering the danger of organ trafficking remains decisive in the amendment of the regulations, according to the draft.
"In the future, living kidney donations will be possible "crosswise" by another organ donor partner in the case of immunologically incompatible organ donor couples. The organ donor couples do not have to know each other. However, the so-called close relationship of the respective incompatible partners should remain mandatory.
"Principle of subsidiarity is repealed "The so-called principle of subsidiarity, according to which organ removal from living persons is only permitted if no suitable organ from a deceased donor is available, will be repealed. Non-directed anonymous kidney donation, i.e. a donation to an unknown person, is also made possible. The donor should have no influence on the recipient.
"The plan is to establish a program for the mediation and implementation of crossover living kidney donation, including anonymous kidney donation. A center for the placement of kidneys is to be established. The conciliation procedure is laid down by law.
"Care in the transplant center mandatory "Mandatory independent psychosocial counselling and evaluation of donors before a donation will be introduced. In addition, care in the transplant center will be mandatory throughout the entire donation process.
"If a living kidney donor later falls ill himself and needs a kidney transplant, this should be taken into account when arranging kidneys donated postmortem. Institutions that remove tissue postmortem should be able to be connected to the Register for Declarations of Organ and Tissue Donation (OGR) so that they can clarify for themselves whether there is a willingness to donate tissue in a potential donation case."
##########
It's been a long campaign, and Axel and a number of others played a critical, tireless role, both in public and in private consultation with lawmakers and interested parties. It's notable that the legislation looks forward to allowing nondirected donors (not every European kidney exchange program does.) It's also notable that the current bill expects that compatible pairs will not be eligible to participate in kidney exchange to seek a better match. That's a battle that hasn't yet been won, despite the fact that compatible pairs are important in a number of ways in U.S. kidney exchange.
Still, this is a significant victory in a campaign that has been going on for at least a decade. I may have written the first German newspaper editorial on the need to legalize kidney exchange in Germany, almost exactly ten years ago:
Here's one of the more recent editorials, which I was privileged to coauthor with Ockenfels and two other heroes (or in this case heroines) of this struggle, Agnes Cseh and Christine Kurschat:
There will be more steps to take to establish effective regulations and institutions to make kidney exchange readily available in Germany, but this is a big step in that direction.
There is a growing movement to eliminate the wage cap on Social Security taxes while capping benefits. The argument, often from the center-right, is that Social Security is insolvent and that “tough” choices are needed to save it. But this moves the system in exactly the wrong direction.
One of the better features of Social Security is that it has never been purely redistributive. It has also functioned, in part, as a forced-savings program. The Social Security Administration itself emphasizes that benefits depend on earnings history: earn more, retire with more. Why do some people receive large Social Security checks? Because they paid a lot more into the system.
Eliminating the wage cap while capping benefits weakens, and in the limit destroys, that connection. It turns Social Security away from forced saving and toward retirement welfare financed by a broader tax on earnings. That is a bad idea.
The problem is not just that this creates another welfare program. It also worsens marginal incentives. A tax that buys you a claim on future benefits is not the same as a pure tax. Suppose 10 percent of your salary goes into a 401(k). That reduces current consumption, but it is not simply money lost to the state. You receive an asset in return. It is closer to a purchase than to a tax–a reason to work more not a reason to work less.
Social Security is not a personal retirement account, but it does contain that logic. There is a connection between taxes paid and benefits received. To the extent that workers understand that connection, the payroll tax is less distortionary than an ordinary tax of the same size. Part of what workers pay is offset by the expectation of future benefits.
Gut that connection, however, and the tax becomes more distortionary even if total taxes paid and total benefits received stay the same. The averages can remain unchanged while the marginal incentives deteriorate. Once additional taxes no longer generate additional benefits, the system looks much more like a straight tax on work.
A much better reform would move in the opposite direction: strengthen the link between contributions and benefits. Make Social Security more like what many people already think it is—an individual account that accumulates benefits over time. The stronger that link, the lower the effective tax wedge.
This would also improve the politics of the system. A welfare program invites zero-sum conflict: my benefit comes at your expense. A claim-based system is less divisive. It ties benefits more clearly to contributions and makes rising prosperity good for everyone. In that kind of system, we can all become richer—including low-wage immigrants—without treating retirement policy as a fight over who gets to pick whose pocket.
Marginal Garfield generates an original Garfield cartoon every day based on posts from Marginal Revolution! Here is the first strip. You can guess the post. Is there now any reason to come to MR? What a world.
There is however a slightly scarier version of this story yet. Maybe our intuitions about the world, including the economic world, were never so strong in the first place. Maybe we put so much value on “intuitive” results, in 20th century microeconomics, as a kind of cope and also security blanket, to make up for this deficiency. But our intuitions, even assuming them to be largely correct, always were just a small corner of understanding, swimming in a larger froth of epistemic chaos. And now the illusion has been stripped bare, and the true complexities of economic reasoning are being revealed.
Tyler calls Paul Gillingham’s new book, Mexico: A 500-Year History, the single best introduction to the country’s past—and one of the best nonfiction books of 2026. Paul brings both an outsider’s eye and ground-level knowledge to Mexican history, having grown up in Cork — a place he’d argue gave him an instinctive feel for fierce local autonomy and land hunger —earning his doctorate on the Mexican Revolution under Alan Knight at Oxford, and doing his fieldwork in the pueblos of Guerrero.
He and Tyler range across five centuries of Mexican history, from why Mexico held together after independence when every other post-colonial superstate collapsed, to why Yucatán is now one of the safest places on earth, what two leaders from Oaxaca tell us about Mexican politics, how Mexico avoided the military coups that plagued the rest of Latin America, what Cárdenas’s land reform actually achieved versus what it promised, whether the ejido system held Mexico back, why Mexico worried too much about land and not enough about human capital, how Mexico’s fertility rate fell below America’s, why Guerrero has been violent for two centuries, why the new judicial reforms are a disaster, where to find the best food in Mexico and Manhattan, what a cache of illicit Mexican silver sitting on a ship in the English Channel has to do with his next book, and more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: Now, after independence in 1821, why did not the rest of Mexico fragment the way Central America did a few years later, where it splits off from the Mexican empire? What determines the line? What sticks together with Mexico, and what does not?
GILLINGHAM: That’s a very good question because it’s one of the things that really makes Mexico stand out in that period, those histories, is that after independence, the rest of the Americas, you get a series of super-states. You get Gran Colombia, which is most of the Andes, and going across what’s now Venezuela. You get the United Provinces of the Rio Plate. These are huge, very difficult to conceive of super-states, and they fail within a decade. Elsewhere, you look at other post-colonial states, thinking particularly of India, within a couple of years, you’re fragmented and failed. Mexico doesn’t. Mexico actually stands up with the exceptions you put of Central America, which is formally part of it, in fact, but leaves within short order.
It’s one of these questions of what Álvaro Enrigue calls the miracle that Mexico exists. To explain it is a paradox. To make a try at it, I think that there is a common theme in Mexican history, which runs across most of those five centuries, which is a remarkable degree of hands-off government. It’s imposed. Mexico has a lot of mountains. It’s very difficult to rule from any central pole. Savvy governments, or governments with no choice, which are quite often the same thing, are very hands-off. Federalism is built into Mexico’s soul. I think that’s one of the reasons, from early on, Mexico actually out-punches the rest of the Americas in terms of sticking together as a territorial unit.
COWEN: As you know, in the early 19th century, there are rebellions in Yucatán, the Caste Wars, but Yucatán does not split off from Mexico. What keeps that together?
GILLINGHAM: Yucatán has always felt itself to be a different country, effectively, and that runs through to the present. You can see the cultural reasons, obviously, and the Maya and the other great, sophisticated urban culture of the 16th century and before. It makes sense that they should feel themselves very different from the rest of what becomes Mexico. In fact, it comes through in small but revealing ways. Back in the 20th century, people find themselves being asked whether they want a Yucatán beer or a foreign beer, and a foreign beer being anything in Mexico outside Yucatán.
Why doesn’t Yucatán leave? I think that it came extremely close. In fact, there’s a moment in the 1840s when Mexico and Texas form an alliance, and Texas is chartering warships out to Yucatán to try and prevent any naval incursions. Why on earth does Yucatán stay? I think it’s because of the absence of an alternative capital, because Yucatán is profoundly racially divided. It’s one of the few places in Mexico where you could say that really is a fairly stark racial divide. You have a plantocracy, in some ways, like the US South before the Civil War.
You’ve got a relatively small white plantocracy centered in Mérida. They have no interest whatsoever in leading an independent struggle. While the Maya achieve an underestimated level of sophistication as a state, it’s still not at the point where you would get, for more than a couple of years, a really joined-up independence movement spanning all races, all areas, and the entire peninsula.
Recommended, interesting and substantive throughout. In the United States at least, Mexico remains a greatly underdiscussed nation.
Water along the coast of Vancouver Island is brightened by a herring spawn in this image acquired on February 19, 2026, by the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 9.
NASA Earth Observatory/Lauren Dauphin
Spawning season has sprung for Pacific herring (Clupea pallasii)in the waters off British Columbia, Canada. From mid-February through early May each year, thousands of the small, silvery fish congregate in shallow coastal areas around Vancouver Island and create a spectacle sometimes visible to satellites.
Sheltered waters in Barkley Sound, on the southwestern side of Vancouver Island, are regular sites for spawn events. On February 19, 2026, the Landsat 9 satellite caught a glimpse of early-season activity underway along the shore near Forbes Island. In these events, female herring produce eggs that stick to a variety of materials, from kelp and seagrass to rock surfaces. Males release a sperm-containing fluid called milt into the water, giving it a cloudy green or turquoise look.
A herring spawn clouds the water along the coast of Vancouver Island near the village of Salmon Beach on February 19, 2026.
Photo by Ryan Cutler
Spawns near Forbes Island have been observed most years since the 1970s, according to Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) records. “Herrings prefer spawning locations that are more protected, have rocky substrate, and allow them to select areas with reduced salinity,” said Jessica Moffatt, biologist with the Island Marine Aquatic Working Group (IMAWG), which works to strengthen First Nations fisheries through traditional knowledge, modern science, and management guidance. “Barkley Sound hits the sweet spot” in many of these regards, she said, adding that collective memory, predation pressure, and other factors also play a role in spawn size and location.
Spawning events last from several hours to several days. At Forbes Island in 2026, local observers saw that fish were staging in the area by February 13 (schools can arrive up to two weeks before spawning, Moffatt noted), and activity was reported to IMAWG from February 19 to February 21.
Along with changes in water color, spawns often come with increased wildlife presence, which can include whales and sea lions swimming nearby and eagles, wolves, and bears lurking on shore. After spawning, the fish will migrate back to summer feeding areas in deeper, more nutrient-rich waters, sometimes sticking with their same large school for several years.
A herring spawn event near Forbes Island in Barkley Sound brightens nearshore waters on February 19, 2026.
Photo by Ryan Cutler
Records of spawn activity have historically been constrained by the timing of aerial and dive surveys, the availability of reports from remote locations, and fisheries priorities. But observations by satellites, including Landsat, can help monitor herring activity over larger areas and longer periods of time. Researchers at the University of Victoria in Canada have used decades of satellite observations to augment historical spawn records and develop methods to streamline future detections.
Herring and their roe are valuable both as a cultural food source and harvest practice by First Nations and for British Columbia’s commercial fisheries. As a forage fish species, Pacific herring are vital to salmon and other marine life, and a fuller picture of the locations of spawning areas could provide clues about changes in the marine ecosystem.
NASA Earth Observatory images by Lauren Dauphin, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Photos by Ryan Cutler. Story by Lindsey Doermann.
I was on a large call the other day when someone came on & said, “Whew! I’m so glad I’m not the only one having problems. Everybody else is about where I am.” And I thought, “Well, yes & no.”
While often described as a moonshot for missile defense, the Golden Dome for America mission is in reality something even more challenging: an exercise in disciplined systems engineering under threat. Hypersonic glide vehicles, maneuvering ballistic missiles and complex decoys are compressing timelines while raising the stakes for any gap in accuracy. In this environment, the […]
NASA’s new exploration strategy includes the rapid development of a nuclear-powered mission to Mars in 2028, leveraging hardware originally built for the lunar Gateway.
While the space economy is expanding across multiple fronts, questions remain about how some of its most promising opportunities could translate growing demand into sustainable profits.
China conducted a pair of launches in recent days, adding new satellites to the SuperView and CentiSpace low Earth orbit infrastructure constellations.
WASHINGTON – Satlantis reported revenues of 47.8 million euros ($56.4 million) in 2025, with more than 50% of the Spanish company’s income derived from small-satellite sales and operations. Audited earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization were 14.4 million euros. The results show remarkable evolution of a company focused primarily on developing and manufacturing high-resolution […]
Paris, France – March, 2026 – Novaspace’s latest High Throughput Satellites (HTS) report shows global demand reaching 218 Tbps by 2034, while service revenues are set to more than double to $76 billion over the same period. The findings […]
Commercial space tracking data shows U.S. satellites coordinating maneuvers to maintain proximity and continuous observation of a pair of Chinese spacecraft in geostationary orbit.
While government agencies are increasingly turning to commercial contracting mechanisms for space capabilities, that does not necessarily translate to additional business opportunities for the companies offering them.
It’s the end of an era: Apple has confirmed to 9to5Mac that the
Mac Pro is being discontinued. It has been removed from Apple’s
website as of Thursday afternoon. The “buy” page on
Apple’s website for the Mac Pro now redirects to the Mac’s
homepage, where all references have been removed.
Apple has also confirmed to 9to5Mac that it has no plans to
offer future Mac Pro hardware.
The Mac Pro has lived many lives over the years. Apple released
the current Mac Pro industrial design in 2019 alongside the Pro
Display XDR (which was also discontinued earlier this
month). That version of the Mac Pro was powered by Intel, and
Apple refreshed it with the M2 Ultra chip in June 2023. It has
gone without an update since then, languishing at its $6,999 price
point even as Apple debuted the M3 Ultra chip in the Mac
Studio last year.
In the Power PC era, the high-end Mac desktops were called Power Macs and the pro laptops were PowerBooks. With the transition to Intel CPUs in 2006, Apple changed the names to Mac Pro and MacBook Pro. But unlike the MacBook Pro — which has seen major revisions every few years and satisfying speed bumps on a regular basis, and which has thrived in the Apple Silicon era — the Mac Pro petered out after a few years.
After its 2006 introduction, there were speed bumps in 2008, 2009, 2010, and lastly in 2012. So far so good. But then came the cylindrical “trash can” Mac Pro in 2013. Perhaps the fact that Apple pre-announced it at WWDC in June before releasing it in October put a curse on the name. The cylindrical Mac Pro was never updated, and Apple being Apple, where the price is part of the product’s brand, they never dropped the price either. This culminated in a small “roundtable” discussion I was invited to in 2017, where Phil Schiller and Craig Federighi laid out Apple’s plans for the future of pro Mac desktops. Step one was the iMac Pro, a remarkable machine but a one-off, that arrived in December 2017. Then came the rejuvenated Mac Pro in 2019, the last Intel-based model and the first with the fancy drilled-hole aluminum tower enclosure. After that, there was only one revision: the M2 Ultra model in June 2023.
So after 2012, there was one trash can Mac Pro in 2013, one Intel “new tower” Mac Pro in 2019, and one Apple Silicon Mac Pro in 2023. No speed bumps in between any of them. Three revisions in the last 14 years. So, yeah, not a big shock that they’re just pulling the plug officially.
Up betimes and to my office, leaving my wife in bed to take her physique, myself also not being out of some pain to-day by some cold that I have got by the sudden change of the weather from hot to cold.
This day is five years since it pleased God to preserve me at my being cut of the stone, of which I bless God I am in all respects well. Only now and then upon taking cold I have some pain, but otherwise in very good health always. But I could not get my feast to be kept to-day as it used to be, because of my wife’s being ill and other disorders by my servants being out of order.
This morning came a new cook-maid at 4l. per annum, the first time I ever did give so much, but we hope it will be nothing lost by keeping a good cook. She did live last at my Lord Monk’s house, and indeed at dinner did get what there was very prettily ready and neat for me, which did please me much.
This morning my uncle Thomas was with me according to agreement, and I paid him the 50l., which was against my heart to part with, and yet I must be contented; I used him very kindly, and I desire to continue so voyd of any discontent as to my estate, that I may follow my business the better.
At the Change I met him again, with intent to have met with my uncle Wight to have made peace with him, with whom by my long absence I fear I shall have a difference, but he was not there, so we missed. All the afternoon sat at the office about business till 9 or 10 at night, and so dispatch business and home to supper and to bed.
My maid Susan went away to-day, I giving her something for her lodging and diet somewhere else a while that I might have room for my new maid.
Smart people have recently asked: What is the aesthetic vision of the 21st century? What are the stylistic markers of our time? What are the core values driving the creative process? What is our zeitgeist?
At first glance, that’s a hard question to answer. We are more than a quarter of the way through the century, and very little has changed since the 1990s.
Music genres have barely shifted in that time. The songs on the radio sound like the hits of yesteryear—in many instances they are the hits of yesteryear, played over and over ad nauseam.
Movies are in even worse shape. Hollywood keeps extending the same tired brand franchises you knew as a child. SoCal culture feels like an antiquated merry-go-round where the same tired nags keep coming around in an endless circle.
Publishers still put out new novels, but when was the last time you read something really fresh and new? Even more to the point, when was the last time you went to a social gathering and heard people discussing contemporary fiction with enthusiasm?
The same obsession with the past is evident in video games, comic books, architecture, graphic design, and almost every other creative sphere. Everything is a reboot or retread or repeat.
It’s not aesthetics, it’s just arteriosclerosis.
Even so, I see a new dominant theory of art—and it’s sweeping away almost everything in its wake. It already accounts for most of the creative work of our time, and is still growing. Nothing else on the scene comes close to matching its influence.
So if you’re seeking the most influential aesthetic vision on the 21st century, this is it. It’s simple to describe—but it’s ugly as sin.
I call it Flood the Zone. It happens in four steps.
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FLOOD THE ZONE IS NOW THE DRIVING FORCE IN THE CREATIVE ECONOMY
STEP ONE: TURN ART INTO CONTENT FOR MONETIZATION
The most noticeable thing in culture today is the replacement of aesthetic values with financial targets. In the creative economy, money is now the starting point, the endpoint, and everything in-between.
The artists aren’t doing this, it’s the overseers and the dominant platforms. They view everything as content that exists solely for monetization.
In all fairness, I must admit that record labels and movie studios have always sought profit—but not long ago they also sought prophets. So when talent scout John Hammond signed Bob Dylan (at age 20) or Bruce Springsteen (at age 23) or even earlier launched the recording career of Billie Holiday (at age 17), he obviously wanted his employer Columbia Records to make money. But that was secondary—his real goal was promoting artistry and boosting talent.
Hammond didn’t need money. He was born rich. What he sought was genius. And there were many other true believers like him in the culture businesses of that era.
That was then. And what about now?
“Record labels and movie studios have always sought profit—but not long ago they also sought prophets.”
Take some time and read interviews with the CEOs of the dominant music companies today, and look for even a hint of aesthetic vision. It’s missing in action.
Years ago, the MGM studio declared its motto was Ars Gratia Artis—which translates as Art for Art’s Sake. They still show those words at the start of every MGM film. You can read them above that roaring lion.
How quaint—a Hollywood studio with a motto in Latin.
But that lion is now roaring in pain. Ars Gratia Artis no longer passes the sniff test. What might be a more honest motto today? I’d suggest something I heard years ago—and it shocked me at the time. In fact it shocked me so much I still remember today.
I had just criticized a talented musician who had sold out, releasing an embarrassing crossover album. It was an obvious money grab, made without conviction but with hopes of a hefty payday. And I said so—but a teenager disagreed with me, pushing back with a simple rebuttal.
He told me that it was impossible to sell out because: “The art that sells best is best.”
Mull that over for a second: The art that sells best is best.
That, my friends, is the first demand of the new aesthetic—defining artistic quality in terms of profit margins. Put those sad words up above that suffering lion. Picasso had his Blue period (1901-1904) and his Rose period (1904-1906), but the culture czars of today prefer a never-ending Green period. Everything is made subservient to the almighty dollar.
That brings us to the second plank of the dominant cultural program of today.
STEP TWO: FLOOD THE ZONE
Greed can only take you so far. At a certain point you need to decide on how to make money in your creative field.
This has been a challenge for the tech platforms, because the people running them lack artistic talent and aesthetic sensitivity. But the rise of AI has given them a glimmer of an idea. Instead of making clear artistic decisions, they will just flood the zone with AI-generated content.
Dump everything on the market—then see what happens.
Under this scenario, you don’t even try to create good art. You don’t apply distinctions and criteria. You don’t exercise taste or good judgment. You don’t even try to learn one damn thing about the art form.
You just dump millions of pieces of content on the public—with predictable, but devastating results.
Visual artists see their careers destroyed because their online galleries get taken over by AI. The platforms they need to make a living turn into a toxic dumpster fire, and they have no recourse.
A new zombie internet arises—where bots conquer every available forum, every interaction, every outlet for creativity.
You can’t deny it. Flood the zone is the dominant strategy of arts creation in the current moment. And unless something happens to stop it, we will be living with the ruinous consequences for the rest of our lives.
This leads, of course, to the next defining element of 21st century aesthetics.
STEP THREE: LET THERE BE SLOP!
Creative works made in this way are inevitably slop. They are churned out willy-nilly by the millions, without the kind of scrutiny and care required to make great art. So the results are filled with pointless ingredients, stupid juxtapositions, and vapid notions.
This is, by definition, slop.
You would use that exact word if you went to a restaurant that cooked meals in this haphazard way—all possible flavors jumbled together in an inedible gruel. What is this slop? you would ask. And we now have the identical reaction when we see an image or video made with this same unappetizing recipe.
To get rid of slop, the tech companies would have to exercise discretion and good judgment. But that’s incompatible with their flood the zone strategies. So we have entered the Age of Slop, and will be lucky if we ever find a way out.
STEP FOUR: REFUSE DISCLOSURE AND PRETEND IT WAS ALL MADE BY HUMANS.
In the final step, the AI slopmasters insult our intelligence. They know how much the audience hates this stuff, so they avoid disclosure. They need deception because, without it, the whole AI business model collapses. So they pretend AI music, writing, etc. came from human beings.
This is the most revealing part of their entire strategy. It shows how ashamed they are of what they’re doing—if AI really was so great they would boast about using it. But instead they lie, and build their aesthetic vision on shamming, scamming and spamming.
We’ve now unveiled all four steps. The result is the single most destructive aesthetic vision in the history of human culture.
Are you disgusted by this? Of course you are.
But can you deny it? Is there another aesthetic movement happening right now that comes close to matching the power and influence of this four-point manifesto imposed by the technocracy on a helpless public?
This does not mean that real creativity disappears. This does not mean that great art will no longer get made.
But it does mean that
The real heroes of the creative world will be forced into operating as a resistance movement.
The actual artists will now form a counterculture.
The only sustaining work will come from the indie world, not the established order.
Those who care about culture absolutely must support this alt rebellion and indie vibe.
Our only hope is for this counterculture to rise up, and take the audience away from the technocracy. This is hard work, but I believe it’s possible. Even more to the point, it is absolutely necessary.
If you share these values, please support my work.
We must create islands of sanity and human flourishing in the flooded cultural zones. We need our own equivalents of Noah’s Ark.
Noah’s Ark by Edward Hicks, 1846
In other words, we will be creating parallel institutions. They will operate separately from the tainted platforms. The faster we make that happen, the better.
I will be writing more about this in the future. That’s necessary because this is the make-or-break challenge facing all creatives. We can’t afford to sit on the sidelines. The water is already rising and we must find higher ground. Let’s do it together.
[Why can't they give the # of votes each team received, like ESPN does? I mean, they're counting the fuckin votes, anyway.]
AL East: Blue Jays
AL East baseball will not be for the faint of heart this year; it has the look of the most competitive division in the Majors. But ultimately, our voters expect Toronto to hang on to its division crown following its worst-to-first turnaround in 2025. . . . Others receiving votes: Yankees, Red Sox and Orioles
AL Central: Tigers The 2025 season was still a pretty successful one for the Tigers, even after they squandered a 6.5-game lead in the AL Central over the regular season's final two weeks and limped into the playoffs as a Wild Card. . . . Others receiving votes: Royals
AL West: Mariners Is it finally Seattle's time? The Mariners were nine outs away from their first pennant last season before everything went awry in ALCS Game 7 against the Blue Jays. But this might be the best roster they have fielded since their record-setting 2001 team, which won 116 games. . . . Others receiving votes: Astros, Rangers and Athletics
AL Wild Cards: Yankees, Red Sox, Orioles Red Sox: Even though the Red Sox lost Alex Bregman via free agency, the inclusion of first baseman Willson Contreras and a full season of burgeoning star Roman Anthony could make this lineup more threatening than it was for much of last season's second half. Anthony, Wilyer Abreu, Ceddanne Rafaela and Jarren Duran make up one of the sport's best -- albeit crowded -- outfield groups. Boston's most noteworthy offseason moves were focused on the mound, however, as it stabilized the rotation behind AL Cy Young runner-up Garrett Crochet by trading for Sonny Gray and signing Ranger Suarez to a five-year contract. . . .
AL Champion: Mariners The Mariners finally get over the hump and win the American League for the first time in franchise history, according to our voters. Seattle received more than twice as many votes as any other club to be the champions of the Junior Circuit. Others receiving votes: Yankees, Blue Jays, Tigers, Red Sox, Orioles and Rangers
NL East: Mets Few teams experienced more roster turnover this offseason than the Mets. Change was needed in Queens after a three-month tailspin ended with the club missing the playoffs on the final day of the regular season. . . . Others receiving votes: Phillies, Braves and Marlins
NL Central: Cubs The Cubs re-established themselves as legitimate contenders last season, snapping a four-year playoff drought and winning the franchise's first postseason series since 2017. The next challenge? Dethroning the Brewers, who have won three consecutive NL Central titles and sent Chicago home in last year's NLDS. Others receiving votes: Brewers and Pirates
NL West: Dodgers This one shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone. The back-to-back defending champions have won 12 of the last 13 NL West titles, only failing to do so in 2021 -- even though they still won 106 games. With an admirable combination of depth and star power, the Dodgers are well-suited to overcome any obstacle in their path . . . Shohei Ohtani is returning to being a full-time two-way player, and the four-time MVP expects to be in the Cy Young conversation.
NL Wild Cards: Phillies, Padres, Brewers
NL Champion: Dodgers According to FanGraphs, the Dodgers are projected to win 96 games this season. The next closest team in the National League is projected for 88 wins.
World Series Champion: Dodgers If they win another championship, the Dodgers will be just the fifth team to claim three titles in a row. . . . Others receiving votes: Mariners, Cubs, Mets, Yankees, Red Sox, Blue Jays, Phillies, Tigers and Rangers
AL East: Yankees (16 votes), Blue Jays (8), Red Sox (6)
Despite the Blue Jays being the reigning AL champs, our voters favored the Yankees to win the division. What made New York the pick? . . . New York overhauled its roster over the course of last season, punctuated by a busy trade deadline. . . . The floor for this Yankees team is higher over 162 games as long as three-time MVP Aaron Judge stays healthy. . . . As for the Blue Jays, they had themselves a very busy offseason, adding Dylan Cease among others, but injuries to the rotation have already surfaced and Bo Bichette's departure is significant. . . .
The Red Sox shook off the Rafael Devers mini controversy and righted the ship last season to the tune of 89 wins. There's no reason they can't take the next step, possessing a well-rounded roster that also includes a really good top of the rotation in Garrett Crochet, Ranger Suarez and Sonny Gray. Not to mention Boston gets a full year of Roman Anthony. It's a sneaky good lineup behind him. The sum will be better than the parts for the Red Sox -- and the parts aren't shabby.
AL Central: Tigers (23 votes), Royals (6), Guardians (1)
AL Wild Cards: Blue Jays (21), Red Sox (19), Yankees (14) Royals (10), Orioles (7), Astros (5), Mariners (5), Tigers (4), Texas (3), Athletics (1), Guardians (1)
Our voters view the three most likely wild-card teams to all be AL East teams. What does that say about the state of that division? It's the best division in baseball -- and largely has been this decade, with four different division winners in the past five seasons (only the Red Sox haven't won) and all five teams having playoff hopes. . . .
AL Champion: Mariners (15), Red Sox (6), Tigers (5), Yankees (3), Blue Jays (1)
NL East: Mets (16 votes), Phillies (13), Atlanta (1)
World Series Champion: Dodgers (14 votes), Mariners (6), Red Sox (3), Tigers (2), Yankees (2), Phillies (1), Mets (1), Blue Jays (1)
AL MVP: Aaron Judge (11 votes), Bobby Witt Jr. (10), Roman Anthony (3), Vladimir Guerrero Jr. (3), Cal Raleigh (1), Junior Caminero (1), Julio Rodriguez (1)
AL Cy Young: Tarik Skubal (14 votes), Garrett Crochet (11), Hunter Brown (3), Framber Valdez (1), Max Fried (1)
AL Rookie of the Year: Kevin McGonigle (12 votes), Munetaka Murakami (5), Carter Jensen (4), Kazuma Okamoto (4), Trey Yesavage (2), Samuel Basallo (2), Tatsuya Imai (1)
NL MVP: Shohei Ohtani (21 votes), Juan Soto (6), Ronald Acuña Jr. (2), Bryce Harper (1)
Ohtani would tie the record for most consecutive MVP awards -- four, held by Barry Bonds -- with another MVP win this season. Can anyone stop him from making more history? With Ohtani gearing up for a full season of pitching, it might be impossible, but let's throw out three players who could challenge him -- two of which were MVP picks by some of our voters. Acuña had an 8.4-WAR season when he won his MVP award in 2023. If he does that, he'll be in the vicinity of Ohtani (who had 7.8 WAR last year). Soto had a career high 7.9 WAR with the Yankees in 2024. If he's the best hitter in the league, he'll have a shot. And how about Paul Skenes? If he can get some run support and lead the Pirates to the playoffs, you never know.
Red Sox: After a three-year playoff drought (tied for their longest in three decades), the resurgent Red Sox captured a wild card last season. Boston will now rely on a retooled rotation behind ace Garrett Crochet and a young offense that scored the seventh-most runs in the majors last year.
AL East
Blue Jays 95–67* Orioles 91–71* Red Sox 87–75* Yankees 86–76* Rays 73–89 *: postseason team
Red Sox: Chief baseball officer Craig Breslow seems to have the Red Sox on the right track. The veteran arms they've added greatly enhance their chances of advancing in the playoffs, and Alex Cora is one of just four active MLB managers with a World Series title.
Yankees: Fans are running out of patience with GM Brian Cashman and manager Aaron Boone. Cashman has won four World Series with the Yankees, but none since 2009 despite vast resources. New York has MLB’s third-largest payroll but little depth.
AL MVP: Julio Rodriguez, Mariners
AL Cy Young: Garrett Crochet, Red Sox
AL Rookie of the Year: Kazuma Okamoto, Blue Jays
AL Manager of the Year: Craig Albernaz, Orioles
NL MVP: Shohei Ohtani, Dodgers
NL Cy Young: Paul Skenes, Pirates NL Rookie of the Year: JJ Wetherholt, Cardinals
NL Manager of the Year: Tony Vitello, Giants
Postseason Predictions
AL Wild Card Tigers over Yankees in 3 / Red Sox over Orioles in 3
AL Division Series
Mariners over Tigers in 4 / Red Sox over Blue Jays in 5
AL Championship Series
Mariners over Red Sox in 6
NL Wild Card
Mets over Giants in 3 / Phillies over Brewers in 2
It's an annual tradition: My column explaining why I think your favorite team isn't going to win as many games as you think they are.
These predictions are for fun, not a demonstration of my deep-seated loathing for your favorite team, and not the product of a sophisticated machine-learning algorithm to produce impeccable forecasts. I make it all up, and then I talk about it. (I do, however, rely on FanGraphs' projections as a starting point for several things here, especially some individual player projections, and this piece would be far harder without them.)
I've done this for 15+ years now, and the reactions are always the same — people look for what I said about their favorite teams and then yell at me about it. I got two division winners right last year, counting the Dodgers (who shouldn't even count as getting it 'right'), and a team I picked to finish last ended up two outs away from a championship. I did get the NL Cy Young Award winner right, at least, but that’s not a whole lot to write home about.
American League East: The Yankees lead baseball's most competitive division
Yankees 91-71 Orioles 88-74 Red Sox 87-75 Blue Jays 85-77 Rays 75-87
The Yankees led the American League in runs scored by a wide margin last year, and I expect them to lead the league again, although they are so dependent on Aaron Judge that even a modest injury to the soon-to-be 34-year-old MVP could have a dramatic impact on their fortunes. . . . The rotation is in decent shape to start the year, but it'll get better when Carlos Rodón and Gerrit Cole return later this spring from their elbow surgeries . . .
The Red Sox were aggressive this winter, adding three starting pitchers, a first baseman and another infielder, although it looks like the Red Sox agreed that Johan Oviedo wasn't actually an upgrade over Connolly Early, and I hate that they're moving Marcelo Mayer out of position in deference to Trevor Story's dead-cat bounce year. There's still a lot of upside across this roster, though, enough that I think they can overcome some of this roster churn and end up with 90+ wins in many scenarios. . . .
The Rays are dancing on the edge of disaster with their roster, with several starters I do not trust to throw 120 innings this year, a left fielder who has less power than a dead AirTag battery, a second baseman who can't seem to field, a center fielder who can't throw or get on base and I dare you to name either catcher on their 40-man roster. They have three good hitters, and their pitchers throw a lot of strikes. . . . [LOL]
AL Central: Tigers, by 5 games over Royals, Guardians, Twins, White Sox
AL West: Mariners, by 9 games over Astros, Texas, Athletics, Angels
NL East: Mets, by 4 games over Phillies, Atlanta, Marlins, Nationals
NL Central: Cubs, by 2 games over Pirates, Brewers, Reds, Cardinals
NL West: Dodgers, by 15 games over Giants, Diamondbacks, Padres, Rockies
Four of five writers (Mike Axisa, Kate Feldman, Dayn Perry, Matt Snyder) pick Garrett Crochet for Cy Young winner. Alex Cora gets one pick (Perry) as Manager of the Year.
Feldman: I think Tarik Skubal will out-pitch Garrett Crochet but I also think Skubal will be traded at the deadline -- to a National League team (let's call it the Mets) so he'll be ineligible.
Snyder: Crochet can topple Skubal for the Cy too, and he wasn't far off last year.
W L
Yankees 86.6 75.4
Red Sox 84.8 77.2
Blue Jays 84.7 77.3
Orioles 83.5 78.5
Rays 79.8 82.2
Over 162 games, FanGraphs projects only a razor-thin margin of 1.9 wins to separate the top three teams and 3.1 wins to separate the top four teams. . . .
“Hi. Do you have a moment? I’m from the Cursed Microwave company. Our product is much better than a traditional microwave. Not only can it automatically and perfectly cook all your food, it also microwaves your whole body, so you and your family are paralyzed and unable to ever work again. Don’t worry, though, because when everyone has a Cursed Microwave, our society will probably implement Universal Basic Income, and you and your children can just go on welfare! Oh, by the way, we estimate that there’s a 2 to 25 percent chance that our microwaves will put out so much radiation that they destroy the entire human race.”
If a door-to-door salesman gave me this pitch, I would gently see him out the door, and then quickly call the FBI.
But this is only a modestly exaggerated version of the pitch that the big AI labs — OpenAI and Anthropic — are making to the world about their technology!
Our product might kill your whole species
Let’s start with the “destroy the entire human race” part. For reasons I’ll explain, I think this is actually the less dumb part of the pitch the AI labs are making, but it’s still wild to hear them say it.
Sam Altman, head of OpenAI, once told Mathias Döpfner that he believes the risk of human extinction from AI technology to be about 2%. More recently, he amended this to “big enough to take seriously”:
Back in 2016, Altman was considerably more alarmist:
Despite his leadership status, Altman says he remains concerned about the technology. “I prep for survival,” he said in a 2016 profile in the New Yorker, noting several possible disaster scenarios, including “A.I. that attacks us.”…“I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to,” he said.
Obviously, most human beings do not have big patches of land in Big Sur they can fly to, so it’s understandable why statements like this might cause alarm.
Anthropic’s Dario Amodei is even more apocalyptic. He has repeatedly stated that he believes there’s a 25% chance that AI dooms humanity, or that things “go really, really badly.” (One time he said 10% instead.)1 He has written a long essay, “The Adolescence of Technology”, explaining what he thinks these risks are. In addition to super-powered terrorism and fascism, the risks include autonomous godlike AI that decides to destroy or enslave humanity.
Dario is a bit more apocalyptic than the average person in the AI industry, but he’s not far out of the distribution. Here’s a chart of the responses of 800 published AI researchers on the question of AI’s impact, on a survey in 2023:
Presumably the left tail of the distribution consists mostly of AI safety researchers who are obsessed with the risks. But about a third of the researchers on this chart give a 10% or greater probability of human extinction or similar outcomes, and relatively few respondents give a number below 5%.
Let’s step back for a second and ask what seems like it should be a pretty basic question: Why on Earth would you make something that you thought had a 25% chance of wiping out your entire species? Or even a 5% chance? I don’t know about you, but to me that sounds like a pretty stupid thing to do!
In fact, I can think of two reasons to do it:
You think if you don’t do it, someone else will
You think if it doesn’t kill you, it’ll make you immortal
Let’s talk about the second of these, since it’s interesting, and I see almost no one talking about it. Throughout history, rich and powerful men have always sought out a technology that would grant them immortality, or at least vastly extended lifespan. Genghis Khan spent a good part of his later years searching for a sage to tell him the secret to eternal life. Modern rich and powerful people are no different, as evidenced by the large amounts of money thrown at highly speculative longevity startups.2
Now, with the potential advent of superintelligence, they’ve finally found a sage who actually might be able to give them the long-sought elixir. In his essay “Machines of Loving Grace”, Dario writes that the main upsides of AI are that it could radically accelerate progress in biotechnology and neurotechnology. He writes that this could make humans functionally immortal:
Doubling of the human lifespan. This might seem radical, but life expectancy increased almost 2x in the 20th century (from ~40 years to ~75), so it’s “on trend” that the “compressed 21st” would double it again to 150. Obviously the interventions involved in slowing the actual aging process will be different from those that were needed in the last century to prevent (mostly childhood) premature deaths from disease, but the magnitude of change is not unprecedented…[T]here already exist drugs that increase maximum lifespan in rats by 25-50% with limited ill effects. And some animals (e.g. some types of turtle) already live 200 years…Once human lifespan is 150, we may be able to reach “escape velocity”, buying enough time that most of those currently alive today will be able to live as long as they want, although there’s certainly no guarantee this is biologically possible.
A 25% chance of humanity dying is a lot. But from your personal perspective, the chance of personally dying within the next century, assuming no radical progress in longevity technology, is approximately 100%. So if the rest of the world didn’t matter to you, and it was either certain death in a few decades or a 25% chance of death in one decade with a 25% chance of eternal life, you might be willing to roll the dice.
Of course, most AI founders, including Dario, do care about the human race as a whole.3 They don’t just want to make themselves immortal; they’d like to make everyone else immortal too. From a certain perspective, this might be worth a roll of the dice on the whole future of the species.
But in fact, I don’t think immortality is the main reason the labs are pushing forward as hard and fast as they can with a technology they believe may kill us all. I think the first reason in my list — “If we don’t build it, someone else will” — is more important. Everyone at Anthropic and everyone at OpenAI knows that if they don’t build a superintelligent AI, Elon Musk will. Or the Chinese Communist Party will.4 And if that happens, our only futures are A) a machine god enslaved to the will of Elon Musk, B) a machine god enslaved to the will of the Chinese Communist Party, and C) an autonomous machine god that does whatever it feels like.
All three of those options sound bad. So despite their personal fears and reservations — and trust me, most of them do have a lot of personal fears and reservations about what they’re doing — they feel like they have no choice but to beat their less scrupulous competition to the finish line, in order to make sure that the machine-god-baby is raised with good values. I hear the term “Red Queen’s race” thrown around a lot in San Francisco these days. Few AI researchers would like to abandon the technology, but a lot would like to slow down or even pause its development, to give them more time to work on minimizing the dangers.
But that’s easier said than done. Examples of technologies slowing down from a small group of leading researchers refusing to push the tech forward are extremely rare — in fact, I can only really find one example in history (the gain-of-function research pause after bird flu in the early 2010s). But AI research is a huge enterprise, and a voluntary pause that was widespread enough to make a difference presents an utterly impossible coordination problem.
If a voluntary pause is out, that leaves regulation, either at the national level or by international agreement. Dario has publicly called for greater regulation of AI, and Anthropic has spent a bunch of money lobbying for greater government control. Even Elon Musk has called for an AI pause in the past. These calls are often dismissed as companies shilling for government protection for their incumbent positions, but I think their fears are sincere.
This is why I think “our product may kill you” is by far the less insane part of the pitch the AI labs are making. In fact, it’s more like “Our version of our product is less likely to kill you, and if you support our call for greater regulation, the danger can be minimized.” Some of the scientists who invented recombinant DNA definitely thought there was a chance it could wipe out humanity, as did many of the scientists who invented nuclear technology. They raised the alarm and pushed for responsible regulation.
Right now, the AI founders who are more worried about existential risk — for example, Dario and Elon — have pushed harder for a pause than the ones like Sam Altman who think the risk is lower. And even Altman is putting lots of OpenAI’s money toward a foundation dedicated to studying and preventing the risks of AI. That’s all reasonably rational, and it will probably play well with the public.
I still think this pitch could be greatly improved, though. Humans have an unfortunate tendency not to recognize risks before disasters actually happen — as an example, we didn’t treat fertilizer as a terrorism risk until Timothy McVeigh blew up a building with it, even though the chemistry of how to make a fertilizer bomb was widely known. Right now, everyone has seen Terminator and The Matrix, but no one thinks they’re real.
If the AI safety pitch is “superintelligence might kill us all”, we’re kind of screwed, because people won’t believe it until it happens, and then it’s too late. Instead, AI labs should focus their safety pitch on something regular people do believe in: terrorism. Talk about radicals using AI agents to vibe-code a super-Covid virus, and regular people’s ears might perk up, because that’s a danger that’s closer to things they’ve actually seen and experienced before.
But anyway, on to the second part of the AI pitch. This is the idea that AI is going to make humans economically obsolete. AI researchers and founders keep running around saying this, and I think it’s a huge own goal.
Our product will make you unable to feed your family
W-L TEAM ERA Paul H. 95-67 3.57 Benjamin B. 95-67 3.66 Rich G. 93-69 3.57 Jacob L. 92-70 3.43 Brett H. 92-70 3.45 Allan W. 92-70 3.75 Jeff M. 91-71 3.70 Eddie N. 90-72 3.69 Dave I. 90-72 3.90 Warren S. 90-72 4.50 Michael G. 87-75 3.62
There has almost always been a decent amount of optimism when it comes to the predictions. I note, however, that the Red Sox have not won 90+ games since 2021 (when they went 92-70 and lost the ALCS (2-4) to Houston), having secured 78, 78, 81, and 89 victories in the subsequent seasons.
The ERA guesses are all pretty similar, within 45 points of each other (eight of the 11 entries are within 27 points (3.43-3.70). I was curious how Boston had ranked ERA-wise since the pandemic season. Huge improvement since 2023.
In December, the Trump administration signed an executive order that neutered states’ ability to regulate AI by ordering his administration to both sue and withhold funds from states that try to do so. This action pointedly supported industry lobbyists keen to avoid any constraints and consequences on their deployment of AI, while undermining the efforts of consumers, advocates, and industry associations concerned about AI’s harms who have spent years pushing for state regulation.
Trump’s actions have clarified the ideological alignments around AI within America’s electoral factions. They set down lines on a new playing field for the midterm elections, prompting members of his party, the opposition, and all of us to consider where we stand in the debate over how and where to let AI transform our lives.
In a May 2025 survey of likely voters nationwide, more than 70% favored state and federal regulators having a hand in AI policy. A December 2025 poll by Navigator Research found similar results, with a massive net +48% favorability for more AI regulation. Yet despite the overwhelming preference of both voters and his party’s elected leaders—Congress was essentially unanimous in defeating a previous state AI regulation moratorium—Trump has delivered on a key priority of the industry. The order explicitly challenges the will of voters across blue and red states, from California to South Dakota, scrambling political positions around the technology and setting up a new ideological battleground in the upcoming race for Congress.
There are a number of ways that candidates and parties may try to capitalize on this emerging wedge issue before the midterms.
In 2025, much of the popular debate around AI was cast in terms of humans versus machines. Advances in AI and the companies it is associated with, it is said, come at the expense of humans. A new model release with greater capabilities for writing, teaching, or coding means more people in those disciplines losing their jobs.
This is a humanist debate. Making us talk to an AI customer-support agent is an affront to our dignity. Using AI to help generate media sacrifices authenticity. AI chatbots that persuade and manipulate assault our liberty. There is philosophical merit to these arguments, and yet they seem to have limited political salience.
Populism versus institutionalism is a better way to frame this debate in the context of US politics. The MAGA movement is widely understood to be a realignment of American party politics to ally the Republican party with populism, and the Democratic party with defenders of traditional institutions of American government and their democratic norms.
This frame is shattered by Trump’s AI order, which unabashedly serves economic elites at the expense of populist consumer protections. It is part of an ongoing courting process between MAGA and big tech, where the Trump political project sacrifices the interests of consumers and its populist credentials as it cozies up to tech moguls.
We are starting to see populist resistance to this government/big tech alignment emerge on the local scale. People in Maryland, Arizona, North Carolina, Michigan and many other states are vigorously opposing AI datacenters in their communities, based on environmental and energy-affordability impacts. These centers of opposition are politically diverse; both progressives and Trump-supporting voters are turning out in force, influencing their local elected officials to resist datacenter development.
This opposition to the physical infrastructure of corporate AI is so far staying local, but it may yet translate into a national and politically aligned movement that could divide the MAGA coalition.
Any policy discussions about AI should include the individual harms associated with job loss, as employers seek to replace laborers with machines. It should also include the systemic economic risks associated with concentrated and supercharged AI investment, the democratic risks associated with the increased power in monopolistic and politically influential tech companies, and the degradation of civic functions like journalism and education by AI. In order for our free market to function in the public interest, the companies amassing wealth and profiting from AI must be forced to take ownership of, and internalize, these costs.
The political salience of AI will grow to meet the staggering scale of financial investment and societal impact it is already commanding. There is an opportunity for enterprising candidates, of either political party, to take the mantle of opposing AI-linked harms in the midterm elections.
Political solutions start with organizing, and broadening the base of political engagement around these issues beyond the locally salient topic of datacenters. Movement leaders and elected officials in states that have taken action on AI regulation should mobilize around the blatant industry capture, wealth extraction, and corporate favoritism reflected in the Trump executive order. AI is no longer just a policy issue for governments to discuss: it is a political issue that voters must decide on and demand accountability on.
President Donald Trump is planning to bring the UFC into the White House later this year. But the brawl on the South Lawn is not the only way mixed martial arts has become a part of his administration.
Trump, like many other right-wing leaders before him, has a long history with combat sports.
In a 3 p.m. Substack Live, we’ll take a look at how martial arts has become right coded. It’s a cultural phenomenon with troubling effects that stretch from D.C., to Saudi Arabia, and the white supremacist fringe. Join here.
One of Layla A. Jones’ insights when she joined our team last year was that you could measure the destruction that DOGE wreaked on the federal workforce by looking at the D.C.-area economy, and, specifically, the housing market. Her first piece for us examined those indicators. Now, a year after Elon Musk and his youths began their slash-and-burn rampage through the executive branch, Layla finds the damage lingering — and, in some ways, worsening — with the middle class, once propped up by government workers and contractors, falling behind a growing wealthy elite. That story is here.
We’re starting to see House Republicans complain that, even as the administration prepares to ask for huge sums to keep the war in Iran funded, it’s leaving lawmakers in the dark about what, exactly, the money is for. “We want to know more about what’s going on, what the options are, and why they’re being considered,” House Armed Services Chair Mike Rogers (R-AL) told reporters yesterday. “And we’re just not getting enough answers on those questions.”
Rep. Joe Morelle (D-NY), the vice ranking member on House Appropriations and a member of its Defense subcommittee, goes into great detail this morning with Hunter Walker and Josh Kovensky about how bad it really is. “I don’t think the American public appreciates it, and it’s certainly not a way to conduct your conversations with Congress,” he says. “Even in classified briefings where we don’t talk about what we learn, there’s literally no actionable intelligence that you get from him.”
The Starlink 17-17 mission lifts off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on March 26, 2026. Image: SpaceX.
SpaceX launched another batch of satellites for its Starlink internet service Thursday.
Liftoff of the Starlink 17-17 mission occurred at 4:03:19 p.m. PDT (7:03:19 p.m. EDT / 230319: UTC). The mission was originally scheduled for March 24 but was delayed two days for unknown reasons, presumably payload or vehicle issues.
The Falcon 9, with 25 Starlink satellites inside its payload fairing, took a southerly trajectory on departure from Space Launch Complex 4E at Vandenberg Space Force Base, in California.
The first stage booster for this mission, serial number B1081 was making its 23rd flight. It entered service on the East Coast with the launch of the Crew 7 space station mission in August 2023. It went on to fly the CRS-29, PACE, Transporter-10, EarthCARE, NROL-186, Transporter-13, TRACERS, NROL-48 and COSMO-SkyMed Second Generation FM3 missions, plus 12 previous Starlink deliveries.
The Falcon 9 heads towards orbit in this long duration exposure. Image: SpaceX
About 8.5 minutes after liftoff, B1081 landed on the drone ship, ‘Of Course I Still Love You,’ marking the 186th touchdown on this vessel and the 591st booster landing for SpaceX to date.
The stack of Starlink satellites were deployed from the Falcon 9’s second stage just over an hour into flight.
The day before drafting this paragraph, I blogged a paper on confidence gaps between men and women. It was a paper written by economists, published in the prestigious American Economic Review, the profession’s number one journal. Is this actually sociology, or personality or social psychology, or part of some gender studies field? No one in the economics profession cares to discuss that anymore. It is not that there is a dogmatic attachment to what used to be called “economic imperialism,” rather the view is that if the paper is good enough … it is good enough to publish. I also recently read a paper on using cell phone data to estimate how many people actually were attending church. Freakonomics guru Steve Levitt wrote and published well-known papers on the choice of baby names and corruption in Sumo wrestling116See Exley and Nielsen (2024), and on cell phones see Pope (2024)..
The dirty little secret is that what distinguishes economics as a field, right now, is a mix of higher standards, harder work, better math, and higher IQs. That is the real (dare I say marginal?) contribution of “empirical economics today,” not marginalism per se, though of course contemporary models typically are consistent with marginalist reasoning…
One modest sign of all these changes is how many advisors, when speaking to individuals considering economics graduate school, recommend math or even computer science as a possible background undergraduate major. While most are still undergraduate economics majors, if only because that is where their interest in economics came from, no one seems to mind if they are not. These days, a background in mathematics or computer science is at least as useful for the graduate work to come. Once you get to graduate school, you will have to learn plenty of math and programming anyway, so why not start off in those fields? The prevailing attitude is that the economics you can figure out along the way, or for some topics you may not need to know much of it at all. How complicated are all those economic principles anyway? General skills of apprenticeship and plain ol’ hard work are growing in importance too, as top graduate programs increasingly want their incoming students to have done a “predoc” with an accomplished researcher somewhere along the way.
That is from the chapter on the future of economics in a world with advanced AI.
Addendum: On The Marginal Revolution book, I would most of all like to thank Jeff Holmes for the great job he did on the project, all of the actual work (other than the writing) is from him. He is also producer of CWT, I owe much to him!
Yesterday Trump told reporters that Iran “gave us a present and the present arrived today. It was a very big present worth a tremendous amount of money,” he said. “It wasn’t nuclear-related, it was oil and gas-related,” he added.
Today Katherine Doyle, Courtney Kube, and Dan De Luce of NBC News reported that U.S. military officials have kept Trump up to date on events in the war on Iran by showing him a two-minute montage video of “the biggest, most successful strikes on Iranian targets over the previous 48 hours,” or, as one put it: “stuff blowing up.”
Although Trump also receives briefings through conversations with military and intelligence officers, news reports, and foreign leaders, some of Trump’s allies expressed concern to the reporters that he is not “receiving—or absorbing—the complete picture of the war, now in its fourth week.” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt called their observation “an absolutely false assertion coming from someone who has not been present in the room,” but officials noted that briefings tend to focus on U.S. successes rather than Iranian actions.
The story of corruption in the Trump administration broke open after Trump fired Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem as stories about contracting irregularities have leaked into the media. The suspicious timing of trades in S&P 500 and oil futures on Monday about fifteen minutes before Trump announced his team had been negotiating with Iran—although it hadn’t—has raised public accusations of insiders trading on national security information and thereby endangering Americans.
Yesterday Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the top-ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, wrote a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi in response to a disclosure the Department of Justice (DOJ) had made, likely inadvertently. As part of the Republicans’ attempt to smear special counsel Jack Smith, who investigated Trump’s retention of classified documents when he left office after his first term, on March 13 the DOJ provided the House Judiciary Committee with documents related to Smith’s investigation.
Raskin noted that some of those documents potentially violate the gag order Judge Aileen Cannon placed on that material as part of the attempt to keep it from public scrutiny. This suggests, he wrote, that the DOJ appears to take the position “that it can violate Judge Cannon’s order and grand jury secrecy whenever it sees an opportunity to smear Jack Smith.”
The documents also “include damning evidence” against Trump. The documents show that highly classified documents from his time in office were mingled with material from after he left, suggesting he illegally retained documents.
The documents the DOJ provided to the committee, Raskin wrote, “suggest that Donald Trump stole documents so sensitive that only six people in the entire U.S. government had access to them, that the documents President Trump stole pertained to his business interests, and that Susie Wiles, then the CEO of Donald Trump’s super PAC, witnessed President Trump showing off a classified map to passengers on his private plane. This glimpse into the trove of evidence behind the coverup reveals a President of the United States who may have sold out our national security to enrich himself.”
A prosecutor’s memorandum provided to the committee by the DOJ suggested that “the disclosure of these documents represented ‘an aggravated potential harm to national security.’ The prosecutors also wrote that these were ‘highly sensitive documents—the type of documents that only presidents and officials with the most sensitive authority have.’ One ‘particularly sensitive document was accessible by only 6? people, including the president.’”
Raskin noted that Trump took classified documents on a flight to his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, possibly showing people on that flight, including now–White House chief of staff Wiles, a classified map. Raskin also pointed out that at about the same time, Trump was entering into business partnerships with Saudi-backed LIV Golf and a state-linked Saudi real estate company, and that Trump told a ghostwriter he had “classified records relating to the bombing of Iran.”
Raskin wrote: “It is now clear that DOJ is in possession of evidence that President Trump has already endangered national security to further the interests of Trump family businesses. It is time for you to stop the cover-up and allow the American people to know what secrets he betrayed and how he may have cashed in on them. Our country is at war, American lives are at stake, and the answer to these questions has never been more pressing.”
Raskin asked the DOJ to answer questions about what was on the classified map Trump showed people on his plane, which documents Trump retained were important to his businesses, which family members knew what was in the classified documents, which document was so sensitive that only six people had access to it, whether any of the documents Trump stole or showed to others related to plans for war in the Middle East, and which, if any, foreign actors tried to access—or succeeded in accessing—the documents. He gave it a deadline of March 31 to answer these questions, and a deadline of April 14 to produce “all remaining investigative files” from Smith’s investigations.
Zach Everson of Public Citizen’s Trump Accountability Project noted that when Trump left office in 2021, his businesses were mainly real estate and hospitality and he had massive amounts of debt coming due. At the time, he had no interests in crypto and Trump Media didn’t exist.
Today the DOJ announced a settlement with right-wing activist Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security official who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his conversations with Russian operative and ambassador Sergey Kislyak before Trump took office. Trump later pardoned him, and Flynn worked to overturn results of the 2020 presidential election to say Trump won.
In 2023 Flynn sued the DOJ for $50 million in damages, claiming he was wrongly prosecuted because of his association with Trump. A federal judge threw out the lawsuit in 2024, but Flynn’s lawyers renewed their case when Trump was reelected, and the DOJ engaged in negotiations. Today’s settlement notice did not specify a financial amount but said there will be a payment of “settlement funds.” Alexander Mallin of ABC News reported this evening that the amount was approximately $1.2 million.
In the New York Times yesterday, Lauren McGaughy reported that White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller is urging Republicans in state legislatures to pass extremist legislation on issues like immigration that Congress cannot, especially if one or both of the chambers in Congress flip to the Democrats in 2026. Texas House Republican Caucus chair Tom Oliverson told McGaughy that legislatures like that of Texas “can be a place where some of those ideas can be tried out because they’re difficult to do at the federal level.” Miller has called, for example, for Texas to pass a bill to end public education for undocumented children despite the 1982 Supreme Court decision striking down such a law.
But Democrats are also working at the state level to expand their own vision of equality before the law and government protection of ordinary people, including in places like Minnesota, where officials yesterday sued the Trump administration for access to information about shootings by federal officers, including the shootings that led to the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti.
Those state-level efforts to defend everyday Americans resonate tonight because today is the anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911, in which 147 workers, mostly girls and women, died either from smoke inhalation or from their fall as they jumped from high factory windows after their employer had locked the fire escape to prevent them from stealing the blouses they were making.
The horrors of that day led New Yorkers to demand the government stop such workplace abuses. “I can’t begin to tell you how disturbed the people were everywhere,” recalled Frances Perkins, a young social worker who witnessed the tragedy. “It was as though we had all done something wrong. It shouldn’t have been. We were sorry…. We didn’t want it that way. We hadn’t intended to have 147 girls and boys killed in a factory. It was a terrible thing for the people of the City of New York and the State of New York to face.”
Perkins joined a committee charged with investigating working conditions in New York, including long hours, low wages, the labor of children, and so on. It worked with a Factory Investigating Commission set up by the New York State legislature that examined working conditions around the state. They found children working in factories, women bending over poisonous chemicals, and overcrowded factories that workers could not escape in case of emergency.
New York City politicians like Al Smith cheered on the “do-gooders” but remained convinced that only political changes could make the deep and lasting changes to society necessary to improve the lives of everyday Americans. He worked to build a coalition to create those changes, and managed to usher 36 new laws regulating factories through the state legislature in three years.
Lawmakers in other states began to write similar measures of their own, and when voters elected New York’s Franklin Delano Roosevelt to the presidency in 1932, the nation was ready to take such legislation national. Roosevelt brought Frances Perkins with him to Washington, where as secretary of labor she helped to usher in unemployment insurance, health insurance, old-age insurance, a 40-hour work week, a minimum wage, and abolition of child labor.
Perkins later mused that the state efforts that led to national changes might have helped in some way to pay the debt society owed to those whose suffering brought horrified awareness that something in the nation had gone horribly wrong. “The extent to which this legislation in New York marked a change in American political attitudes and policies toward social responsibility can scarcely be overrated,” she said. “It was, I am convinced, a turning point.”
Matthew and Hannah Josephson, Al Smith: Hero of the Cities, A Political Portrait Drawing on the Papers of Frances Perkins (London: Thames and Hudson, 1969), pp. 129–140.
This is the second chapter of my SQLAlchemy 2 in Practice book. If you'd like to support my work, I encourage you to buy this book, either directly from my store or on Amazon. Thank you!
This chapter provides an overview of the most basic usage of the SQLAlchemy library to create, update and query database tables.
I was in virtual meetings all day yesterday, so no time to write anything substantive.
Let me mention, however, that one of the meetings involved closed-door presentations from strategic experts about the Iran conflict, and it was even more depressing than I expected.
I asked what the 6000 or so Marines and paratroopers on their way to the Persian Gulf can do to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and the answer was basically, are you kidding? Iran can fire missiles and launch drones against basically any target in the Gulf, from anywhere along its very long coast or from the rugged mountains behind that coast. Policing that area would be extremely difficult even for a force many times as large as what the U.S. is deploying.
Meanwhile oil price futures keep fluctuating in response to ever-changing messages from the White House — what Edward Luce calls Donald Trump’s “tornado of piffle.” The key point is that the prices everyone (me included) watches are financial instruments, claims on future barrels of oil rather than actual barrels. And they don’t mean much until physical oil starts flowing — which seems unlikely unless the Iranian regime decides to allow it.
But Trump’s aides keep him happy with daily video montages of “stuff blowing up.”
American greatness was nice while it lasted. See you tomorrow.
Here's an article about the "shidduch" (matchmaking) crisis being experienced in some parts of the orthodox Jewish community. It's interesting (in particular to readers of this blog) for several reasons. As it's title suggests, it is about both a particular institutional feature of a marriage market and about the use of secular science by religious communities.
The general problem is the "marriage squeeze" in communities in which husbands tend to be older than wives, when birth cohorts are growing (so there are e.g. more younger women than, say, two-year-older men). The author argues that the practice of asking new students in yeshiva to promise not to date during their first semester adds congestion to the mix, when they all come on the marriage market at the same time.
(A glossary may help: shidduchim is matchmaking, a shidduch is a match, a shadchan is a matchmaker, chochma is wisdom, a yeshiva bochur is a student, bochurim is the plural,
"There are several thousand more young women than young men currently in shidduchim. ... "We have girls who have not received a single shidduch call in months — if not ever.
...
"We cannot ignore the needs of half of Klal Yisroel. The time to act is now.
"The Midrash in Eichah Rabbah (2:13) teaches us: “Im yomar lecha adam: Chochma baGoyim — Taamin. If a person tells you that the nations of the world possess wisdom — believe it.
...
"We are instructed to take Chochma seriously. The empirical sciences, mathematics, economics, the study of how systems behave — these are chochma. And Chazal tell us: taamin. Believe it. Use it.
...
"Three of the world’s foremost experts in the science of matching markets and queue theory have produced findings that apply directly — with surgical precision — to the shidduch crisis and to the structural damage caused by the Freezer. The Torah tells us: taamin. Listen to what they have found.
"Winner of the 2012 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics for his foundational work on matching markets — Professor Roth devoted his career to studying the precise kind of system our shidduch world represents: a two-sided market where two groups must find each other, and where price alone cannot clear the market. He uses marriage itself as his primary model.
"In his landmark paper “Jumping the Gun: Imperfections and Institutions Related to the Timing of Market Transactions” (American Economic Review, 1994), Roth documented a phenomenon he calls “unraveling” — the destructive timing failures that occur in matching systems. He found that timing problems:
“…play an important and persistent role in a wide variety of settings” — explicitly including “marriage in a variety of cultures.”
"Roth further showed that when one side of a matching system is held back and then released in a synchronized wave — precisely what the Freezer does to bochurim — the result is “congestion”: a catastrophic overload in which a sudden surge of participants meets an accumulated backlog they cannot process equitably. In his research on the market for clinical psychologists, Roth documented that congestion left thousands of participants “stranded” without a match — assigned to no one — not because of a shortage of partners, but purely because of the structural timing failure.
...
"Professor John Little of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology published in 1961 what is now called “Little’s Law” — the foundational theorem of all queue theory, cited in virtually every textbook on operations research, supply chain management, and systems analysis. It is one of the most proven and universally applied mathematical theorems in modern science.
"Little’s Law states with mathematical certainty:
“An arrival rate exceeding an exit rate would represent an unstable system, where the number of waiting customers in the store would gradually increase towards infinity.”
...
"In plain language: once a timing imbalance is introduced into a matching system, the backlog will grow
...
"In their jointly published research, Roth and Xing documented what happens when a large matching system attempts to process too many participants in too narrow a window of time:
“Congestion is an issue whenever a large number of offers have to be made [simultaneously]. The system… stranded [thousands of participants] on waiting lists… assigned to no one or to options for which they expressed no preference.”
...
This is the precise mechanism the Freezer creates. By holding back an entire cohort of bochurim and releasing them at once into a pool of girls that has been accumulating for months, the system is flooded. Bochurim cannot adequately evaluate the full pool. They gravitate toward the newest, youngest entrants. The girls who have been waiting longest — those who entered the system months or years earlier — are stranded. They are not passed over because of any failing of their own. They are stranded by a structural timing failure
...
"To fix a problem, we must understand it. The primary cause of the crisis is well-known: bochurim generally marry girls a number of years younger than themselves. Since the Jewish population grows every year, Baruch Hashem, this age gap means more girls enter shidduchim each year than boys — and many girls are inevitably left behind.
"But there is a second, compounding structural factor: the timing distortion caused by the BMG Freezer. Any bochur who arrives for the winter zman, beginning Rosh Chodesh Cheshvan, must wait three and a half months until the Fifteenth of Shvat before he may begin dating. He signs a written agreement to this effect. The stated purpose was noble: to allow bochurim to become acclimated to their new yeshivah and learn without interruption."
A gas tax, and better yet, a comprehensive system of charging for parking everywhere in the city is a much smarter way to pay for roads than a monthly household fee.
A user fee ought to be based on use, and whether driving or standing still, cars are the most intensive, impactful and dangerous part of the transportation system, and they should pay for streets. A tax on houses or households isn’t fair to those who use the streets less intensely, and especially those who don’t own or drive cars.
An important set of users of Portland streets is non-residents: charging for parking or gas sales in the city puts a portion of the cost on them, rather than having Portland residents subsidize non-residents for driving in or through the city. A majority of workers in Multnomah County live outside the County, and thousands of vehicles on Portland streets are registered in other states–or not registered at all.
Portland, once again, doesn’t have enough money to pay to maintain its streets, make basic safety improvements, or do things that make biking, transit and walking easier and more commonplace.
Given voter antipathy of road taxes and fees of any kind, it’s likely that “none of the above” would win in a landslide if voters were asked to decide on a multiple choice ballot.
This same issue came up more than a decade ago when Steve Novick was transportation commissioner; he pushed for a while for a household utility fee, but in the face of opposition, ultimately decided to propose a gas tax increase, which was–surprise–approved by the voters and then renewed in second election.
But now, the gas tax again is deemed to be a political non-starter, and so the Council is searching for a new gimmick to help pay for roads. There are some very good reasons they ought not to use the household fee.
One of the arguments for the household fee is a legal/political one: fees are subject to the same legal restrictions as taxes, and the City Council can set fees without voter approval (which it would need for say, a gas tax increase). But there’s a rub here: many say they want to set lower fees for say, low income households, but conditioning fees on income, rather than on actual use of service, makes them look and act a lot more like a tax than a fee.
There are some good reasons for charging fees for street use. But in our opinion, the Council have overlooked the most obvious fee. Currently, the city charges nothing for vehicle storage on city streets in ninety percent of the city. Sure, there are meters in downtown and a few other neighborhoods, but for the most part, Portland is truly a socialist paradise–if you are a car. You get to live rent free on the city streets. Rather than sticking households with an inescapable fee, whether they have a car or not, the city should charge those who use the streets, especially for storing their cars. Whether by annual, monthly, daily, or hourly permit, everyone should pay for parking.
Free riders? Non-residents who use Portland Streets should pay, too.
And the interesting thing is that, as the hub of a two-and-a-half million person region, Portland’s streets are widely used by residents from other cities. A key problem with the household fee is that it is paid only by Portland residents, not by those who drive here from elsewhere. That’s especially true at rush hours, with many workers commuting into the city from surrounding jurisdictions. It turns out that most of the people who work in Multnomah County live outside the County. (We’re using Multnomah County data, because helpfully, it’s been compiled from Census Bureau data by the Oregon Employment Department). This is 2022–after the Covid pandemic.
Of the more than 500,000 workers in Multnomah County, 53 percent of them live outside the county. Probably 80 percent of them (or more) drive to their jobs, which are overwhelmingly in Portland. If they live outside Multnomah County, they already pay nothing toward the county’s special vehicle registration fee, nor will they pay the monthly “utility” fee to the City of Portland, and yet they’ll be straining the capacity of city streets, chiefly by driving at peak hours.
And another thing: It’s probably a good guess that somewhere between 5 and 10 percent of the cars on Portland streets are registered not just outside the city of Portland, but outside the State of Oregon. Just as an example, we took a quick tour around Portland’s eastside a couple of days ago, and found cars from 22 states and the District of Columbia. Every one of these was parked on a city street, none of them paid for parking.
Washington – California – Idaho – Nevada – Montana – Colorado — Utah – Iowa – Minnesota – Wisconsin
– Nebraska – Arkansas – Oklahoma – Texas – Louisiana – Alabama – Mississippi – Tennessee – Georgia
– North Carolina – District of Columbia – Ohio – New York
They may be visiting, or living here and delaying registering their vehicles here, but in any case, aren’t paying vehicle registration fees, like Multnomah County’s $61 annual registration fee for bridge replacement.
But out-of-staters aren’t the only free riders on Portland streets. Many cars simply haven’t bothered to renew their registrations. There are plenty of permanently parked vehicles on Portland City Streets. We may not have social housing for people, but at least we have free housing for garage-less cars on the city streets. Like dun-colored non-descript and utterly unmoving GM sedan or this 7-series BMW, apparently parked for months without moving judging from the debris underneath the car, and tags that expired in 2021–four and a half years ago.
And finally there are those who don’t even bother to display license plates, Oregon, or others, such as this late model Toyota Camry, or this aging Volvo Wagon with no plates front or rear, and no visible temporary stickers.
While the unhoused must pay rent to stay anywhere, the un-garaged can take up space of city streets almost indefinitely for free.
Let’s have the users pay.
If we’re really going to charge a fee for city streets, it ought to be levied on those who actually use the city streets, and the most impactful users–in terms of space, costs, pavement damage, safety and pollution–are cars. Carless households, about a sixth of the city’s population–make far fewer demands on Portland’s streets. Clark’s proposed household fee levies taxes on city residents who don’t own cars to effectively subsidize those who live outside the city (or register vehicles outside the city). There’s nothing equitable about charging city residents to continue to allow non-residents to use city streets for free, whether they’re traveling through town or parking their vehicles.
Fees are prices, and prices send important signals to consumers about how their decisions affect the city and others. A household fee is really a tax–it’s inescapable, and inequitable; it bears no relation to how much you use the streets. It would be far fairer to insist that everyone who uses city streets to store their vehicles should pay for the privilege, and contribute to the cost of upkeep of the city’s streets. The city could sell annual passes to residents, and use its existing “Parking Kitty” app to let people buy daily, weekly or monthly parking.
Seven Rules for Paying for Streets
How, how much, and who pays for streets is a key issue for every city. From an urbanist and public finance perspective, and as a guide to thinking about which—if any—of these approaches Portland should adopt, here are my seven suggested rules for paying for streets:
1. Don’t tax houses to subsidize cars. Despite mythology to the contrary, cars don’t come close to paying for the cost of the transportation system. The Tax Foundation estimates that only 30% of the cost of roads is covered by user fees like the gas tax. Not only do cars get a free ride when it comes to covering the cost of public services—unlike homes, they’re exempt from the property tax—but we tax houses and businesses to pay for car-related costs. Here are three quick examples: While half of storm runoff is from streets, driveways and parking lots, cars aren’t charged anything for stormwater—but houses are. A big share of the fire department’s calls involve responding to car crashes—and cars pay nothing toward fire department costs. Similarly, the police department spends a significant amount of its energy enforcing traffic laws—this cost is borne largely by property taxes—which houses pay, but cars don’t. If we need more money for streets, it ought to be charged on cars.
Adding a further charge on houses to subsidize car travel only worsens a situation in which those who don’t own cars subsidize those who do. One in seven Portland households doesn’t own a car, and because they generally have lower incomes than car owners, fees tied to housing redistribute income from the poor to the rich.
2. End socialism for private car storage in the public right of way. Except for downtown and a few close-in neighborhoods, we allow cars to convert public property to private use for unlimited free car storage. Not asking those who use this public resource to contribute to the cost of its construction and upkeep makes no sense and ultimately subsidizes car ownership and driving. This subsidy makes traffic worse and unfortunately—but understandably—makes it harder and more expensive to build more housing in the city’s walkable, accessible neighborhoods. If, as parking expert Don Shoup has suggested, we asked those who use the streets for overnight car storage to pay for the privilege, we’d go a long way in reducing the city’s transportation budget shortfall—plus, we’d make the city more livable. We should learn from the city’s success in reforming handicapped parking that getting the prices right makes the whole system work better.
3. Reward behavior that makes the transportation system work better for everyone. Paying for the transportation system isn’t just about raising revenue—it should be about providing strong incentives for people to live, work and travel in ways that make the transportation system work better and make the city more livable. Those who bike, walk, use transit, and who don’t own cars (or own fewer cars) actually make the street system work better for the people who do own and use cars. We ought to structure our user fee system to encourage these car-free modes of transportation, and provide a financial reward to those who drive less. The problem with a flat-household fee or an income tax is it provides no incentive for people to change their behavior in a way that creates benefits for everyone.
4. Prioritize maintenance. There’s a very strong argument that we shouldn’t let streets deteriorate to the point where they require costly replacement. Filling potholes and periodically re-surfacing existing streets to protect the huge investment we’ve already made should always be the top priority. Sadly, this kind of routine maintenance takes a back seat to politically sexier proposals to expand capacity. We need an ironclad “fix it first” philosophy. Also, we need to guard against “scope creep” in maintenance. There’s a tendency, once a “repair” project gets moving, to opt for the most expensive solution (see bridges: Sellwood, Columbia River Crossing). That’s great if your project gets funded, but a few gold-plated replacements drain money that could produce much more benefit if spread widely. We need to insist on lean, cost-effective maintenance.
5. Don’t play “bait and switch” by bonding revenue to pay for shiny, big projects. There’s an unfortunate and growing tendency for those in the transportation world to play bait-and-switch with maintenance needs. They’ll tell us about the big maintenance backlog to justify tax and fee increases. Then they bond two or three decades worth of future revenue to pay for a shiny new project; the Sellwood Bridge and the local share of the Portland-Milwaukie light rail have been funded largely by tying up the increase in state gas tax revenue, vehicle registration fees, and flexible federal funds for the next two decades. The state, which routinely financed construction on a pay-as-you-go basis, has also maxed out its credit card: in 2002 ODOT spent less than 2 percent of its state revenue on debt service; today, it spends 25 percent. Now it is pleading poverty on highway maintenance. Politically, this makes a huge amount of sense. You get to build the projects today, and pass the costs into the future. Unfortunately, in practice it leads to a few gold-plated projects now, while jeopardizing the financial viability of the transportation system in the long run.
6. Promote fairness through the “user pays” principle. We all want the system to be “fair.” In the case of general taxes, we often put a priority on progressivity—that taxes ought to be geared toward ability to pay. But for something like transportation (as with water rates, sewer rates, or parking meter charges), fairness is best achieved by tying the cost to the amount of use, or what economists call the “benefit principle.” Charges tied to use are fair for two important reasons: higher income people tend to use (in this case, drive) more than others, and therefore will end up paying more. Also, charges tied to use enable people to lower the amount they pay by changing their behavior.
7. Don’t write off the gas tax yet. There’s a widely repeated shibboleth that more fuel-efficient vehicles have made the gas tax obsolete. Despite its shortcomings as a revenue source—chiefly that it bears no relationship to the time of day or roadway that drivers use—there’s nothing wrong with the gas tax as a way to finance street maintenance that a higher tax rate wouldn’t solve. While other methods like a vehicle-miles-traveled fee make a lot of sense, the reason they’re popular with the transportation crowd is because they would be set high enough to raise more money. And there’s the rub: people are opposed to the gas tax not because of what is taxed, but because of how much they have to pay. As an incremental solution to our maintenance funding shortfall, there’s a lot to like about a higher gas tax: it requires no new administrative structure, it’s crudely proportionate to use, and it provides some incentives for better use of streets. So when very serious people gravely intone that the gas tax is “obsolete” or “politically impossible”—you should know what they’re really saying is that people simply don’t want to pay more for streets.
Transportation and urban livability are closely intertwined. Over the past few decades it has become apparent that building our cities to cater to the needs of car traffic have produced lower levels of livability. There are good reasons to believe that throwing more money at the existing system of building and operating streets will do little to make city life better. How we choose to pay for our street system can play an important role in shaping the future of our city. As Portlanders weigh the different proposals for a street fee, they should keep that thought at the top of their minds.
These days, rents are constantly rising, but your salary may not keep up. Therefore, you may find yourself priced out of a good rental unit. Rent ceilings are designed to solve that problem by setting a limit on how much a landlord can charge for rent and keeping rental units reasonably priced for renters.
There are many questions about how rent ceilings work in the real world. What do they protect? What do they not protect? If you are trying to keep your rent from increasing at a faster rate than your income without worrying about sudden increases in your rent, then read on. Read this article, as we will explain how you, as a renter, can benefit from a rent ceiling.
What is Rent Ceiling?
A rent ceiling is a legal limit on the rents charged for any property, set by the government to prevent them from increasing to exorbitant levels. This is particularly true in areas with high housing demand. In practical terms, this means that your landlord cannot charge you anything more than this maximum amount for the rental unit, regardless of how much the rental market is “hot” at that time. That cap may also control how much rent can increase over time, depending on the policy in place.
The goal of rent ceilings is to maintain housing affordability and reduce the pressure associated with sudden rent increases. When there’s a ceiling, you get more predictability. You can plan your finances without worrying that your rent will jump overnight. Rent ceilings do not necessarily apply to all rental properties, as they apply only to certain types of rentals.
If you familiarize yourself with how rent ceilings work, you will better understand your rights, what to expect, and the level of protection you have when rent increases. You can also work with a Washington DC rental manager to understand more about local rent laws and rights.
How Rent Ceilings Protect Tenants
Preventing Sudden Rent Increase
When there’s a rent ceiling in place, landlords cannot increase rents in response to market fluctuations or other factors. Tenants can create budgets, manage finances, and make long-term plans because of a rent ceiling, as they don’t have to worry about losing their apartments due to rent increases. Since they can plan ahead rather than react when rent goes up, tenants will also be able to live in the same apartments.
Promoting Housing Stability
Rent ceilings set limits on the amount a tenant must pay and alleviate anxiety caused by the potential for rent increases that may force a tenant out of their home.
Not having to worry about relocation during your lease period allows you to build a schedule and establish a community. Rent ceilings remove some of the uncertainties that may prevent tenants from staying in the same area. When demand for rental properties increases due to a lack of rental housing or rapidly rising rents, the likelihood of someone being forced out is lower with rent ceilings in place.
Real-World Impacts on Tenants
A rent cap can help stabilize your rent payments. When rent levels are capped, you can pay your monthly rent on time without worrying about the amount you will have to pay when your lease comes up for renewal. Also, you will know well in advance what your maximum possible rent will be, and you can plan for just that amount.
In addition to providing you with better long-term stability and fewer moves in your housing situation, having a consistent environment to live in can do wonders for you as a person. Many people do not understand how much more money they will have after paying lower rent versus paying higher rent. Rent ceilings can reduce your cost of living, let you breathe a little easier, and make it easier to make smart financial decisions without feeling pressured.
Importance of Balance Between Tenant Protection and Sustainable Property Management
It cannot be overstated how important it is to strike a proper balance between protecting your tenant and ensuring the property remains sustainable. If strong controls are placed on rent, it will keep rents affordable and keep tenants in their homes. However, if they are too strict, they may discourage you from maintaining the property and from making new housing investments.
As a result, the quality of the rental stock will decline over time, or fewer and fewer options will be available to rent. Conversely, if there are minimal to no protections in place for renters, then you are left exposed to huge rent increases at any time, along with uncertainty and insecurity about how long you will be able to stay in your current rental unit.
By achieving the ideal balance between protecting tenants and having sufficient incentives to maintain and upgrade your rental units, the entire rental market works. This allows your tenant to rent at a fair price and gives them the confidence to stay in the place where their life is based. It also provides enough incentive to maintain and upgrade your rental units for a better quality of life, while giving you access to more rental options and a rental market that is not ‘stacked against’ you.
Conclusion
Rent control does not solve every problem associated with high rents, but it does allow you to set reasonable expectations about how much you will pay each month, making budgeting easier. If rent control measures are implemented effectively, they will create a stable and affordable housing market, thereby allowing you to plan your future with greater security.
By understanding how the rent-controlled housing market operates relative to your region, you will be able to understand your rights and responsibilities as a tenant. With this knowledge, you will be able to make educated decisions about where you will live and how you will live there.
I am offering a new piece of work — I do not quite call it a book — online and free. It has four chapters, is about 40,000 words, is fully written by me (not a word from the AIs), and it is attached to an AI with a dual page display, in this case Claude. Think of it as a non-fiction novella of sorts, you can access it here. You can read it on the screen, turn it into a pdf (and upload into your own AI), send it to your Kindle, or discuss it with Claude.
Here is the Table of Contents:
1. What Is Marginalism?
2. William Stanley Jevons, Builder and Destroyer of Marginalism
3. Why Did It Take So Long for the Science of Economics to Develop?
4. Why Marginalism Will Dwindle, and What Will Replace It?
Here are the first few paragraphs of the work:
How is it that ideas, and human capabilities, become lost? And how is that new insights come to pass? If eventually the insight seems obvious, why didn’t we see it before? Or maybe we did see it before, but didn’t really know we were on to something important? Why do new insights arrive suddenly, in a kind of flood? How do new worldviews replace older ones?
And what does all of that have to do with the future of science, the future of research, and the future of economics in particular? Especially when we try to understand how the ongoing artificial intelligence revolution is going to reshape human knowledge, and the all-important question of what economists should do.
Those are the motivating questions behind this work, but I will address them in what is initially an indirect fashion. I will start by considering a case study, namely the most important revolution in economics, the Marginal Revolution (to be defined shortly). The Marginal Revolution made modern economics possible. What was the Marginal Revolution? How did it start? Why did it take so very long to come to fruition? From those investigations we will get a sense of how economic ideas, and sometimes ideas more generally, develop. And that in turn will help us see where the science, art, and practice of economics is headed today.
Washington has historically served not only as the political heart of the country but also as a powerful corporate magnet. However, in recent years, we have observed a troubling trend: major government contractors, lobbying firms, and even entire federal agencies are beginning large-scale migrations outside the District. Behind the scenes of beautiful press releases about tax optimization and the creation of “flexible office spaces” lie colossal financial flows that often end up settling in the pockets of a narrow circle of individuals…
The Price of Political and Corporate Migrations
When a large corporation decides to relocate its headquarters from the District of Columbia to Virginia or Maryland, the receiving state almost always offers generous tax incentives. To the unsophisticated voter, this appears as a victory for local government in attracting new employers. But the reality is far more prosaic: ordinary taxpayers are de facto subsidizing these moves from their own pockets through hidden municipal grants.
Growth in the tax burden on local residents through indirect subsidies;
Loss of stable budget revenues in the originating regions;
Increased infrastructure spending in the receiving states;
Intensification of social inequality between districts.
The abandoned municipalities lose millions of dollars in annual tax collections that were originally planned for maintaining schools, parks, and municipal hospitals. Transportation arteries in the receiving region also begin to experience critical overload due to the daily commuter migration of thousands of new employees to remote office centers, which requires fresh investments in road construction. This vicious circle of inefficiency benefits only a narrow layer of administrators who ignore long-term social consequences for the sake of short-term reports.
Infrastructure of Corporate Exodus and Security Concerns
The physical process of relocating a government contractor or large financial institution differs radically from an ordinary office move. Here, we are talking about the highly complex transportation of servers with encrypted confidential data, the carriage of antique furniture belonging to top executives, and the precise calibration of analytical equipment.
Such high-risk tasks require contractors with an impeccable reputation and special clearances. That is precisely why business relocations of this scale are entrusted exclusively to proven operators such as Elatemoving, which are technically capable of ensuring the strictest security, premium service, and most importantly, zero tolerance for operational downtime.
Impact on the Commercial Real Estate Market and Urban Environment
The mass exodus of solvent tenants leaves echoing, vacant Class A office buildings right in the heart of the capital. Developers and investment funds face unpredictable declines in the profitability of their flagship properties, which inevitably leads to the degradation of the urban environment. Attempts at emergency repurposing of these gigantic spaces into residential development run up against strict zoning regulations and outdated District laws, while requiring truly astronomical capital investments.
Economic indicator
D.C. Core impact
Suburban impact
Class A office vacancy
+5.2%
-1.8%
Corporate tax revenue
-3.4%
+4.1%
Infrastructure strain
High
Critical
Rental rate volatility
+2.1%
+4.5%
The figures presented above clearly demonstrate that the real beneficiaries in this game are only large suburban developers and elite transportation companies servicing the endless transit process.
It is obvious that the migration process of major businesses and government agencies requires uncompromising public oversight. Taxpayers have a legitimate right to know exactly how much budget funds each government agency’s relocation costs and who the true beneficiaries are of the hidden subsidies and service contracts.
In conclusion: The Demand for Absolute Transparency and Accountability
Without the introduction of transparent mechanisms for independent assessment of the feasibility of large-scale relocations, the capital region risks finally plunging into a protracted infrastructure and budgetary crisis. Economic policy must be dictated by strict calculations and care for citizens, rather than the short-term interests of shadow lobbyists profiting from the movement of capital. Only rigorous reporting and open tenders can prevent further erosion of the capital’s budget.
Speed is one of the most fundamental and measurable variables in athletic performance. Whether it is a baseball pitcher trying to add velocity to his fastball, a tennis player developing a more powerful serve, or a sprint coach analyzing a sprinter’s acceleration curve, precise speed measurement provides the objective data foundation that separates evidence-based coaching from guesswork. The radar gun made this kind of real-time measurement accessible to coaches and athletes at every level.
Baseball: Where Radar Culture Was Born
No sport has embraced radar gun culture more enthusiastically than baseball. Pitching velocity is tracked obsessively at every level of the game, from Little League showcases to the major leagues. Scouts carry handheld units to college and minor league games, and major league stadiums display radar readings on scoreboards for fans. A starting pitcher who can consistently reach 95 miles per hour or above is considered elite; the difference between 88 and 93 mph can be the difference between a minor league career and a major league one. Coaches use a high-accuracy radar gun throughout training to monitor velocity trends, identify fatigue patterns, and correlate mechanical adjustments with speed changes.
Tennis: The Serve Speed Arms Race
Tennis has developed its own radar gun culture centered on serve velocity. The fastest servers in professional tennis regularly reach speeds above 140 miles per hour. At major tournaments, serve speed readings are displayed for spectators and broadcast audiences as a measure of athletic power. In practice settings, coaches use radar guns to give players immediate feedback on their serves, helping them identify the grip, toss position, body rotation, and contact point adjustments that translate into measurable speed gains.
Football, Soccer, and Other Sports
American football scouts use radar guns at pre-draft workouts and training camp to measure receiver and defensive back speed. Soccer clubs track shot velocity, pass power, and sprint speed using radar and related sensor technologies. Cricket fans are familiar with the speed gun readings displayed during fast bowling, where velocities above 90 miles per hour mark a bowler as genuinely elite. Even in golf, radar technology is used to measure club head speed — one of the primary determinants of driving distance.
Choosing the Right Sports Radar Gun
For coaches and scouts selecting a sports radar gun, several specifications matter most. Accuracy — how close to the true speed the reading is — is the foundation. Range should comfortably exceed your working distance. Response speed (how quickly the reading updates) matters for tracking fast-moving objects like pitches and serves. Data connectivity, battery life, and durability round out the key considerations. Match the specifications to your sport and your budget.
Using Radar Data Responsibly
Radar data is a powerful coaching tool but must be applied with judgment. Athletes who become overly fixated on hitting a specific velocity number sometimes sacrifice mechanics, consistency, and overall effectiveness in pursuit of the number. The most skilled coaches use radar data contextually — as one input within a broader performance picture that also includes accuracy, movement quality, recovery time, and competitive results. When used with that broader perspective, the radar gun is an invaluable asset at every level of athletic development.
AL MVP: Julio Rodriguez, Mariners AL Cy Young: Garrett Crochet, Red Sox AL Rookie: Samuel Basallo, Orioles AL Rookie Pitcher: Payton Tolle, Red Sox AL Manager: Matt Quatraro, Royals
After missing the playoffs each year from 2022-24, the Red Sox have started moving in the right direction. Things were touch-and-go at times last year, but in the end, a pitching staff led by two major acquisitions and a burgeoning core of young position players carried boston to a postseason berth. Garrett Crochet and Aroldis Chapman are back to lead the rotation and bullpen, respectively, while even more homegrown hitters will be looking to make their mark in 2026.
The starting rotation is in a terrific spot, featuring what could be the best one-two punch in the league; facing Crochet and Sonny Gray on back-to-back days will be exhausting for opposing lineups. Alongside that top-end talent, the Red Sox have significant depth, including several MLB-ready (or near-MLB-ready) starters stashed away in the minors. Their bullpen is similarly loaded for the late innings, though the bridge from their starters to their back-end arms could be treacherous.
The outfield was this team's biggest strength last season, and it should be a strong point again, replete with athletic defenders and powered by Roman Anthony's thunderous bat. The infield is less predictable, as the Red Sox will be counting on injury-prone players to stay healthy and promising youngsters to progress. Ultimately, if the offense is going to be meaningfully better than average, at least one player in the infield mix has to exceed expectations.
More broadly, how far the Red Sox will go in 2026 hinges on how far their numerous breakout candidates will take them. This is a good team as-is, but for the Red Sox to be great, they need some new contributors to achieve greatness; it's not going to be thrust upon them.
Starting Pitching: Crochet was seen as something of a risk when the Red Sox added him last winter, but he quickly proved to be one worth taking. After signing a six-year extension, Crochet firmly established himself as a top-three pitcher in the sport. The paradoxical Sonny Gray (even his name connotes both youth and age) has been on the injured list 12 times in a 13-year career. Yet, since his debut, no MLB pitcher has started more games. The 36-year-old should be an excellent deputy for the ace 10 years his junior. With Brayan Bello, Kutter Crawford, Patrick Sandoval and Johan Oviedo, the Red Sox have a surplus of starters with mid-rotation credentials. . . . In a best-case scenario in which all six starters are healthy, either Crawford or Oviedo could be optioned to Triple A or placed in the bullpen. In a more realistic scenario, the Red Sox won't have the luxury of stashing anyone in the minors or the arm barn, but they'll be glad they stockpiled depth. Boston has further depth in the form of Peyton Tolle and Connelly Early. . . . Both will probably start the year in the minors, but few teams have such exciting options so far down the Opening Day depth chart.
Relief Pitching: Who ever sold old closers can't learn new tricks? Aroidis Chapman issued walks at the lowest rate of his career in 2025, and he did so without sacrificing velocity. While he did throw more strikes, what really helped was a massive increase in swings outside the zone. . . . Garrett Whitlock returns as Chapman’s set-up man. Moving to the bullpen full time was just what the injury-prone right-hander needed, and leaning more on his changeup should help him reach even higher heights. Justin Slaten . . . stuff looked just as good in his sophomore season, but the stats won't back that up: his strikeout rate plummeted, and he struggled to strand runners as a result. Aside from that trio, Alex Cora's circle of trust isn't wide. Greg Weissert has been effective in a low-leverage role, while Jordan Hicks will look to regain his triple-digit velocity now that his flirtation with starting is over.
Catching: Carlos Narváez was barely on anyone's radar before he earned an everyday role for the Red Sox in his rookie season. He'll be looking to prove his emergence was no fluke. A strong defender, his balanced (if unremarkable) skill set at the plate should allow him to be something like a league-average catcher. Connor Wong lost his starting job to Narváez in a disappointing 2025 campaign. He's yet to show any above-average skills at the big-league level . . .
Infield: New first baseman Willson Contreras has a swing that should generate lots of balls off the Green Monster, but he hits it too low (and runs too slow) to get the most out of his new home. There will be many long singles, and few added home runs. Trevor Story played the first full season of his Red Sox tenure last year, and while he hit 25 homers and stole 31 bases, his defense wasn't what it once was. . . . Marcelo Mayer has the inside track on third base. The highly touted prospect looked overmatched as a rookie, flashing plus bat speed (74.1 mph) on his swings but whiffing on far too many. His glove should be fine in the long run, though he needs to hone his instincts to compensate for a mediocre arm. The presumptive second baseman is Kristian Campbell, another prospect who struggled in the majors. His power, theoretically his defining trait, was AWOL, and his defense was disastrous. Romy González and Ceddanne Rafaela can also cover the keystone, but the lefty-mashing González has no business facing righties, and Rafaela's elite outfield glove would be wasted on the dirt.
Outfield: Roman Anthony already looks like his team's best hitter, and he still has room to grow. His power numbers were low in his rookie season, considering how hard he hit the ball, and he'd do even more damage with a less passive approach. On top of everything he does at the plate, he's a talented fielder as well, and he'll join Ceddanne Rafaela, Jarren Duran and Wilyer Abreu to form the best defensive outfield rotation in the majors. Rafaela's superhuman jumps enable him to cover swaths of ground in center field. His bat is weak, but his speed helps him reach base just enough to wreak havoc once he's there. Duran and Abreu are strong fielders themselves, with above-average bats to accompany their gloves. . . . The Red Sox could free up more playing time by moving on from Masataka Yoshida. Like Anthony, Duran and Abreu, Yoshida bats left-handed; and he's the worst defender of the bunch. Trading or cutting him would free up DH reps for whichever of Anthony, Duran and Abreu isn't playing the field.
Designated Hitter: Yoshida is the de facto DH, but he hasn't proved he deserves those at-bats over teammates like Anthony, Abreu, Duran and González. His contact skills thrived in Japan, but MLB pitching has limited his power and tested his discipline.
Organization/Management: None of Boston's top baseball people came away from last year's Rafael Devers drama looking great, but a strong second-half showing earned . . . some goodwill from their fanbase. Craig Breslow has already made several splashes in his brief tenure as chief baseball officer. Now, he needs the on-field results to confirm he committed to the right players — and the right manager. Breslow didn't hire Alex Cora, but the executive quickly gave the skipper he inherited his full support, extending Cora through the 2027 campaign.
This season, Cora will be tasked with finding playing time for all his guys; helping top prospects (and recently graduated top prospects) reach their ceilings; and keeping a pitching staff full of aging and injury-prone arms healthy. As for Breslow, he's likely going to have to make some tough decisions about who to keep and who to part with. The Red Sox have possible logjams at several positions, and fans will certainly expect a more active trade deadline.
YANKEES
The Yankees bounced back from their worst season since the early 1990s with a trip to the World Series in 2024. They weren't quite as successful in 2025 . . .
The pressure on the pinstripes will be unrelenting. Two of their top hitters, Judge and Stanton, are in their mid-30s while two more, Chisholm and Grisham, can be free agents after the season. None of Fried, Cole and Carlos Rodón is younger than 32 . . . The Blue Jays, Red Sox and Orioles all have younger cores, and Brian Cashman's payroll advantage isn't what it once was. . . .
Starting Pitching: Gerrit Cole and Carlos Rodón will miss the start of the season, while Clarke Schmidt will spend most (if not all) of it recovering from Tommy John surgery. That leaves a top four of Max Fried, Cam Schlittler, Luis Gil and Will Warren to open the year. . . . Warren, Schlittler and Gil are pitchers the Yankees want competing for back-end roles, not comprising the middle of their rotation. Gil was worryingly hittable . . . His velocity was down, and his strikeout rate paid the price. . . . Warren made a commendable 33 starts, but he wasn't dominant. . . . Cole is coming back from Tommy John surgery in March, and Rodón had loose bodies removed from his elbow in October. . . .
Relief Pitching: . . . Setting up for Bednar will be Camilo Doval and Fernando Cruz. Doval reintroduced his sinker last year, when his cutter couldn't cut the mustard . . . Neither the cutter nor the sinker stands out like they did when Doval could touch 102 mph . . . Veteran sinkerballer Tim Hill will be the go-to lefty, while Jake Bird and his breaking balls are a promising work in progress.
Catching: . . . There was a time when [Austin Wells] looked like a bat-first backstop, but . . . he hasn't proved he's anything more than average when he's standing at the plate instead of crouching behind it. . . .
Outfield: It wouldn't be enough to call Judge the backbone of the Yankees’ offense; he's more like the whole skeletal system. . . . [He] has scored or driven in 23.1 percent of his team's runs over the last four seasons. . . . Trent Grisham look a chance on himself by accepting a qualifying offer . . . His career numbers say he's due for regression, as does his lopsided 34:9 home runs-to-doubles ratio. . . . Jasson Dominguez shows power potential . . . but the player he's been is a mediocre hitter with a lot to learn in left field. . . .
Designated Hitter: Giancarlo Stanton is 36 and hasn't played a full, healthy season in eight years. . . .
Organization/Management: No longer are the Yankees the Evil Empire that wildly outspends the rest of the league. . . . No manager in Major League Baseball faces more criticism than Aaron Boone, but the Yankees' skipper has the backing of the front office. That has inevitably led to chirping that it's really Cashman calling the shots in the dugout. The simplest explanation is that Cashman hired a manager whose opinions align with his own.
Extreme heat lingers over the U.S. Southwest and Mexico on March 20, 2026, in this visualization based on GEOS-FP data.
NASA Earth Observatory/Michala Garrison
In March 2026, the first official day of the Northern Hemisphere’s spring felt more like summer across much of the southwestern United States. Numerous high-temperature records fell that day amid a bout of extreme heat.
The extent and severity of the heat are represented on this map, which shows air temperatures on the afternoon of March 20, modeled at 2 meters (6.5 feet) above the ground. It was produced with a version of the GEOS (Goddard Earth Observing System) model, which integrates meteorological observations with mathematical equations that represent physical processes in the atmosphere. The darkest reds are where the model indicates temperatures reaching or exceeding 104 degrees Fahrenheit (40 degrees Celsius).
Measurements from weather stations on March 20 pinpointed some of the highest U.S. temperatures in Arizona and California. According to the National Weather Service (NWS), Yuma, Arizona, reached a record high of 109°F, which is 28 degrees above the 1991-2020 climatological normal for that date. Four other locations—near Yuma and Martinez Lake in Arizona and Ogilby and Winterhaven in California—tied for the highest temperatures in the U.S. that day, reaching 112°F (44°C).
Several other U.S. states saw temperatures soar in late March. In Texas, Lubbock experienced several days in the mid to upper 90s. Sweltering temperatures extended into Mexico as well. A new March record was set in Hermosillo, for example, where temperatures reached 108°F (42°C), according to news reports.
The heat was driven by a persistent high-pressure system, which the NWS noted was similar in strength to conditions seen in summer. It remained over the region for more than a week, keeping the air dry and skies clear across a vast stretch of the U.S. and Mexico. The heat was expected to spread east into the U.S. Midwest and Southeast by the following week.
Authorities in Beijing have barred two executives from a Singapore-based AI firm from leaving China amid a review of the company’s $2 billion acquisition by U.S. social media giant Meta, according to a report by the Financial Times on Wednesday.
Xiao Hong and Ji Yichao — the CEO and chief scientist, respectively, of Manus — were summoned to Beijing this month and questioned over a possible violation of foreign direct investment reporting rules related to the acquisitionbefore being told they could not leave the country, the report said.
Here is more from The Washington Post. In my view, the American lead in AI is somewhat larger than a model comparison alone might suggest.
Market Design
the joy of sox
