Phil Gyford’s writing

‘Generation X’ in 2026

phil@gyford.com (Phil Gyford)
Updated

I recently re-read Douglas Coupland’s Generation X and had a few thoughts on reading it in 2026.

§ A book cover with the main feature a giant letter X. Inside it is a collage of retro American images, like clip art or parts of old advertising.
My copy of Generation X

  • This is at least the fifth time I’ve read it. It came out in 1991 and was first published in the UK in 1992. I felt like I’d discovered it late when I bought it in, I think, 1993.

  • Reading Generation X in 2026 is like someone in the year of its release reading a book about young people published in 1956.

  • The twentysomething characters are often comparing people and styles to those of earlier eras, with 1974 in an imagined place – Texlahoma – being a common choice. I guess it was long enough ago to seem distinctively different. Which is like someone in 2026 comparing today to the long ago time of 2009. Which would feel ridiculous to me – It’s so recent! Not much has changed, style-wise! Is this because culture has stopped changing so rapidly or because I’m old? Seventeen years does not feel as long ago when you’re 55 compared to when you’re 25.

  • A feeling described by Andy, the protagonist, on the very first page sums up the mood of the whole book pretty well: “darkness and inevitability and fascination”. Not that he or the book is claiming this as a generation-defining feeling: “a mood that surely must have been held by most young people since the dawn of time as they have crooked their necks, stared at the heavens, and watched their sky go out.”

  • It’s always said that generation X – the demographic cohort – suffers from (or revels in) sarcasm, ironic detachment, cynicism, apathy, etc. But I was struck with how the characters in Generation X are so often sincere, relishing unique moments, craving real connections, savouring beautiful experiences. They tell each other earnest stories (often a strong point of Coupland’s novels) with the rule that no criticism can be made.

  • Although the book’s title was used to name an entire generation it was written (of course) before a lot of the things that came to define the cohort of generation X. So while it evokes some of the sense of 1990s gen-x-ness, in retrospect it feels much less epoch-defining. For example, there’s little, if any, mention of contemporary music, TV, movies, etc. which are often the things we think of when looking back at what it meant to be young in a certain time.

  • The three characters – Andy, Dag and Claire – are quite despairing of their chances in life in ways that, today, prompt a “you ain’t seen nothing yet” reaction. They know that their lives won’t be as good as their boomer parents’, owning a home is out of their reach, and the gap between rich and poor has gone crazy.

    For example, here are a couple of charts showing how things have gone before and since 1990 (when I assume the book was written).

    A line chart. From the early 1960s until the late 1990s the line is bumpy but doesn't rise that much overall. Then it shoots up for the labelled 'Housing Bubble' in early 2006. Then it falls until 2012 when it begins rising to even higher levels in 2022, where it remains.
    A chart showing the ratio of US Home Price to Median Income Ratio from about 1963 to early 2026 from LongtermTrends. 1990 circled.
    A chart showing the Gini index (a measure of economic inequality) for the US from 1963 to 2024 from the WorldBank. 1990 circled.

    Clearly, Andy and co would be even more despairing today. But I had forgotten how the concerns of (us) young people back then echoed those since so specifically.

  • They also have a sense that they’ve missed out on capital-H History, only just about remembering seeing the Vietnam War on TV as children. Regarding which, (a) be careful what you wish for, and (b) this feels pretty America-centric given, for example, 1989’s fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism. But, still, it’s a contrast to how someone today would think about their place in history (“Too much history happening!” I imagine).

  • There are other things that we might say are different or similar to today. The characters’ fear of nuclear annihilation has shifted to a more generalised fear of “terror” accompanied by climate catastrophe. But the way they mix and match styles and ideas from various past decades perhaps seems even more common today, now that we have access to so much media from everywhere and everywhen all at once.

  • There is something slow about their lives, which isn’t solely because they’ve opted out of the rat race and live in a desert resort picking up work here and there. With no internet and no cellphones, it’s all landline phones, answering machines, letters in the post, TV news, magazines. Communication and information is delayed and asynchronous.

§ I’ve always loved this book and it’s interesting to re-read it every decade or so. Reading it now, it almost seems incidental to what generation X came to be seen as, with so many fashions, images, songs, movies, and ideas piled on top of the pretty spare foundation here. If it hadn’t named a generation in its title, and been peppered with catchy definitions as if interpreting the language of young people for their elders (“McJob”, “Successophobia”, “Ultra Short Term Nostalgia”), I wonder how we’d remember it now.

I was really into generation X stuff in the 1990s because it seemed such a novelty, to have your generation named and to read articles about it, see movies attempting to epitomise it, etc. I hadn’t been aware of much definition of generations before that – was it less of a thing, or was I just oblivious until I reached adulthood?

I remember visiting a friend in the mid-90s and she’d saved me a magazine article about generation X because in those days an article was a rarer thing, something that only existed if you bought that one physical mag that one month, barely shareable. I try to avoid nostalgia too much, which is very hard, but the book’s world, just before the internet, is in many ways deeply seductive to me. But then nostalgia does prevent you thinking about the downsides.

The book probably hit me at the right time, at just the right age, during and immediately after university, emerging into a recession, in no rush to find a “real” job, never wanting a job that required having to dress smartly. Andy’s world was in some ways a fantastical one to me – not only a desert resort town, but in a country I hadn’t yet even visited, and about people unlike anyone I knew. But there was also something about it that got its hooks deep into me. Its vibe, as we’d say now.

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Marginal Revolution

An unprecedented weapon?

Tyler Cowen
Updated

I wonder if England had a “pause” movement back then:

Trebuchets reached the peak of their development in medieval times, probably the most famous example being Edward I’s massive machine, Warwolf.  This terrifying device was over sixty feet (18 meters) high and was capable of throwing a three-hundred-pound (140-kilogram) rock several hundred years, projecting some five hundred kilojoules of energy, a thousand times the power of Roman ballistas and five thousand times as powerful as a single person.  Edward used it just once, in 1304 during his wars of conquest against the Scots, to attack Stirling Castle, the last stronghold of the Scottish armies.  The defenders were so petrified by the prospect of the attack that they sued for peace before Warwolf could be used, but Edward refused to let them surrender until he had tested the machine; in four days it totally destroyed one of the castle’s curtain walls.

That is from the new and interesting The Powerful Primate: How Controlling Energy Enabled us to Build Civilization, by Roland Ennos.

The post An unprecedented weapon? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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Simon Willison's Weblog

Investigating three real-world incidents in our cybersecurity evaluations

Investigating three real-world incidents in our cybersecurity evaluations

It happened again! This is turning into something of a pattern.

Last week OpenAI accidentally exploited Hugging Face when one of their frontier models broke out of a sandboxed container and hacked into Hugging Face to try and get the solutions to the cyber benchmark it was executing.

This inspired Anthropic to double-check their own logs, and it turned out they had three similar (albeit less impressive) incidents, the earliest of which played out in April!

Of the 141,006 evaluation runs we reviewed, we identified three separate incidents (involving six total runs, four of which impacted the same organization; the other two incidents each happened in independent evaluation runs). [...]

In all cases, Anthropic’s evaluation prompt specified to Claude that its environment was a simulation and that it had no internet access. Due to a misunderstanding between us and our evaluation partner, this was not the case, and internet access was available. Because of this, when Claude’s search led it to real systems on the open internet, it treated them as part of the exercise. [...]

Operating under the false belief that all accessible entities were intended to be in-scope for the exercise, Claude compromised the impacted organizations’ infrastructure using basic techniques, such as exploiting weak passwords and unauthenticated endpoints.

One of the companies was targeted because its name happened to match the fictional name in the eval.

The most concerning of the three incidents involved Claude uploading a malware package to PyPI, after a comically convoluted sequence of steps to get an account:

[...] in order to create a PyPI account, Claude needed an email address. And in order to create an email address, it needed a phone number. To get a phone number, after failing to find a free phone number service, it tried—and failed—to obtain funds to pay for a phone number through several different means. It finally backtracked, found a free, non-blocked email provider, used this to register a PyPI account, and then used this account to upload malware to PyPI.

That package was then installed by a security company that "routinely installs Python packages and scans them for malware", and the executed code was able to exfiltrate credentials back to Claude!

Thankfully that package was removed from PyPI by other automated scanners an hour after it was published, but it had still been downloaded and executed on "15 real systems" by that point.

It's abundantly clear now that running evals of cyberattack potential in models is a spectacularly risky business. Every AI lab needs to pay attention to this. Keeping a close eye on what's happening in those sandboxes is crucial.

Via Hacker News

Tags: pypi, python, sandboxing, ai, generative-ai, llms, anthropic, ai-ethics, ai-security-research

Simon Willison's Weblog

llm 0.32rc2

Release: llm 0.32rc2

Hot on the heels of RC1, this fixes a dependency issue and also adds two neat new features:

  • The default model for users who have not set their own default is now GPT-5.6 Luna. It was previously GPT-4o mini. Luna is a much better and more recent model, albeit slightly more expensive - $0.20 per million input tokens and $1.20 per million output tokens, compared to $0.15/$0.60 for 4o mini. You can switch back to 4o mini using llm models default gpt-4o-mini, or switch to GPT-5 nano, an even cheaper default model ($0.05/$0.40), using llm models default gpt-5-nano. #1576
  • New llm openai endpoint command for running prompts, chats and model listings against arbitrary OpenAI-compatible endpoints without first configuring a model. These calls are not logged. #1565

The llm openai endpoint command is really cool. I got frustrated at the lack of an obvious CLI tool for trying out prompts against arbitrary OpenAI Chat Completions imitation endpoints, so I decided to add that to LLM itself.

You don't even have to install LLM to use this. Here's a uvx one-liner for running a prompt - with tools - against an LM Studio local model:

uvx --pre llm openai endpoint http://127.0.0.1:1234/v1 \
  T llm_version -T llm_time --td \
  -m google/gemma-4-31b 'what is the current LLM version? And the time?'

Output here.

Tags: llm, uv, lm-studio

Simon Willison's Weblog

Quoting Bruce Schneier

The writing assignments I give my students are gym tasks, not work tasks. I ask them to write policy memos not because the world needs more policy memos. I assign them because the very act of writing, which includes thinking and outlining and drafting and editing, making and criticizing and revising arguments, will help develop the critical thinking skills they will need in their future careers. And without this constant mental exercise, those skills will atrophy. Employers are already noticing.

— Bruce Schneier, Should You Use AI for a Task? Here’s a Simple Way to Decide

Tags: ai-ethics, writing, ai-misuse, generative-ai, bruce-schneier, ai, llms

Simon Willison's Weblog

llm-chat-completions-server 0.1a0

Release: llm-chat-completions-server 0.1a0

A key goal of the new content-addressable logs in LLM 0.32rc1 was being able to support OpenAI Chat Completion style requests where each incoming message extends the previous conversation, like this:

curl http://localhost:8002/v1/chat/completions \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{
    "model": "qwen3.5-4b",
    "messages": [
      {"role": "user", "content": "Capital of France?"},
      {"role": "assistant", "content": "Paris."},
      {"role": "user", "content": "Germany?"}
    ]
  }'

Here the conversation state is tracked by the client, so each of these requests gets longer and longer. The new schema design in LLM is designed to de-duplicate these using hashes of the individual message parts.

To test that out, I built this plugin:

uv tool install llm --pre
llm install llm-chat-completions-server
llm chat-completions-server -p 9001

Running this starts a localhost server on port 9001 that exposes your full collection of LLM models (from any plugins you have installed) using a ChatGPT Completions compatible endpoint.

GPT-5.6 Sol wrote the whole thing - it turns out it knows the OpenAI Chat Completions API shape really well.

Tags: projects, openai, llm

Simon Willison's Weblog

llm 0.32rc1

Release: llm 0.32rc1

This RC for LLM 0.32 finishes the work that started in LLM 0.32a0 - it adds a new schema design that does a much better job of capturing the details of the prompts and responses returned by the latest model families.

The most important change is the use of content-addressable hash IDs for stored messages. This allows de-duplication in the database, and means that LLM can now represent trees of messages for forked conversations.

Since it involves a significant schema change - new tables only, and old data should not be affected at all - it's worth running a backup of your existing logs.db before upgrading to the RC:

llm logs backup logs-backup.db

The RC also adds support for gpt-5.6-sol, gpt-5.6-terra, and gpt-5.6-luna.

Tags: llm

Paul Krugman

Reality is a Communist Plot

Paul Krugman
Updated

The Covid vaccine didn’t work, and vaccines cause autism. But hydroxychloroquine worked, and so did ivermectin. Anthony Fauci killed millions of people.

Climate change is a hoax. Wind power caused a massive TV blackout during the Trump-Biden debate. Solar power is useless because the sun doesn’t shine at night, and batteries don’t exist. Smoke blanketed North America, not because of climate change, but because Canada didn’t rake its 2 million square miles of boreal forest.

We’ve destroyed Iran’s military, and the Iranian regime is begging for a deal. Also, the U.S. isn’t running out of precision weapons as a result of the Iran war, and furthermore the shortage is Joe Biden’s fault.

The economy is in a “golden age.” Prices are down. And Trump has a 59 percent approval rating.

Trump won the 2020 election.

Communism is the greatest threat facing America.

The modern American right is very good at hating. MAGA hates immigrants (unless they’re white South Africans); it hates liberals; it hates scientists.

What the ongoing show trial of Fauci — which motivated this post — has really driven home, however, is that what Trump and his supporters hate most of all is reality. They know what they want to believe. They fly into paroxysms of rage whenever someone points out that the world isn’t what they want it to be. And they always want to shoot the messenger.

Of course, motivated reasoning isn’t confined to the right. Some people on the left insist that zoning restrictions have no role in causing high housing prices, that it’s all about Wall Street greed. Many centrists insist that being in the middle on a left-right scale — which isn’t even how most voters think about politics — is the secret to electoral victory. And so on.

I’m not immune to the temptation to believe what I want to be true. I try to fight it, but don’t always succeed. Still, I try to acknowledge and admit it when I have let wishful thinking warp my judgement.

But what we’re seeing now isn’t run-of-the-mill motivated reasoning. It’s something far more extreme.

If believing something suits MAGA’s prejudices and interests, they don’t hesitate: they simply insist that it’s true. They routinely dismiss scientific and statistical evidence, but they don’t stop there. They’re perfectly willing to deny reality even if the truth is staring them in the face.

Thus, Trump urged Americans to remember that 2024 TV blackout, which nobody remembers because it didn’t happen. He insists that California has “blackouts and brownouts every weekend,” when the state’s 39 million residents can tell you it doesn’t. He says that you must show ID to buy groceries, which everyone who buys their own food knows isn’t so.

Do Trump and his followers actually believe these things? As I see it, that’s a category error, starting from the presumption that they even accept that objective facts exist. All the evidence (Hah! “Evidence!”) says that they don’t.

George Orwell, whose work seems more relevant by the day, knew all about this mindset. In his essay “Looking back on the Spanish war” he wrote about how the rise of totalitarianism had changed the rules:

In the past people deliberately lied, or they unconsciously coloured what they wrote, or they struggled after the truth, well knowing that they must make many mistakes; but in each case they believed that ‘the facts’ existed and were more or less discoverable. And in practice there was always a considerable body of fact which would have been agreed to by almost everyone.

Totalitarians, however, denied that objective facts existed. Furthermore, reality is mutable, changing with the leader’s whims:

If the Leader says of such and such an event, ‘It never happened’ – well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five – well, two and two are five.

If you find the assertion that MAGA has a totalitarian mindset over the top, all I can ask is, have you been following the news?

What’s remarkable is the extent to which Republican politicians act as if they are living in a totalitarian state, when they aren’t — not yet, anyway. ICE would clearly like to be an American Stasi, policing any deviation from the party line, but it’s not able, so far, to arrest members of Congress who express skepticism about the president’s claims. And many Republican politicians still, I believe, know the difference between fantasy and reality.

But they behave as if they were courtiers to Kim Jong Un. Trump speeches are sometimes followed by “endless applause moments,” because none of Trump’s loyalists wants to be seen as the first person to stop clapping.

The susceptibility of the GOP to this totalitarian mindset has come as a surprise even to cynics. I have some idea of how this happened: It involves a confluence of big-money corruption, crony capitalism, religious fanaticism, and the ever-present forces of racism and sexism. But that’s a subject to be delved into another day.

What’s clear is that the war on reality is exacting a high price on America as a whole.

Remember, 1.2 million Americans died from Covid — a number that would have been much lower if MAGA misinformation hadn’t caused so many people to refuse vaccination. Now we’re seeing a frightening rise in measles and other infectious diseases, and God help us if another pandemic strikes with Trump or his successor still in charge.

Climate denial and hostility to renewable energy will mean more pollution even as it consigns the U.S. to energy and economic backwardness.

And the Iran war — which Trump started and now refuses to end because he won’t accept reality — has destroyed America’s credibility and depleted our weapon stocks with stunning speed.

But anyone pointing out the obvious is, of course, a Communist.

MUSICAL CODA

Used this before, but different performance

Simon Willison's Weblog

Advancing the price-performance frontier with GPT‑5.6

Advancing the price-performance frontier with GPT‑5.6

Huge price drop from OpenAI today: GPT-5.6 Terra got a 20% reduction, and GPT-5.6 Luna got a massive 80% drop.

OpenAI credit 5.6 Sol with enabling this: in How GPT‑5.6 fuses frontier intelligence with frontier efficiency they describe using 5.6 Sol to optimize load balancing, and more impressively to optimize inference itself:

We also used GPT‑5.6 Sol to optimize the model’s forward pass: the computation that transforms inputs into next-token predictions. Even when individual operations are fast, excess memory movement, synchronization, and inefficient data layouts can leave GPUs idle. To avoid this, GPT‑5.6 Sol found work that could be precomputed, avoided, or parallelized. With Codex, GPT‑5.6 Sol autonomously rewrote and optimized our production kernels, the core code that executes the mathematical operations that make up the model. This worked in part because we’ve trained GPT‑5.6 to be effective at writing and improving kernels in Triton⁠and Gluon⁠, two open-source GPU programming languages maintained by OpenAI. These efforts, combined with broader kernel advancements from GPT‑5.6 Sol, reduced end-to-end serving costs by 20%.

That Luna price drop completely changes the landscape with respect to lower priced models. At $0.20/million tokens for input and $1.20/million for output Luna is now cheaper than Google's Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite ($.025/$1.50).

Anthropic's cheapest current model is Claude Haiku 4.5, and that's $1/$5 - Luna is now 1/5th of that for input, previously it cost the same.

My agent.datasette.io demo site was running on Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite. I've switched it over to Luna.

Via Hacker News

Tags: ai, openai, generative-ai, llms, anthropic, gemini, llm-pricing

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The Dark Doodad Nebula drifts The Dark Doodad Nebula drifts


Marginal Revolution

The wisdom of Eli Dourado

Tyler Cowen
Updated

How do “international efforts” work? Unlike most of the signatories of the letter, I have been a State Department advisor and have participated in multiple treaty negotiations. I have also been a member of technical committees for UN technical agencies.

The international sector is unbelievably dysfunctional. Every single treaty or international agreement is an opportunity for every participant to manipulate the much broader policy environment. Often the participants don’t care about the object of the agreement, and are instead trying to use the agreement as leverage for something else. I have seen countries use their limited leverage in multilateral agreements to try to kneecap American industry, get around sanctions, create a pretense of international justification for domestic illiberalism, or steer technology in an authoritarian direction.

The damage from this dysfunction is limited by the fact that there are zero major countries (and not that many smaller countries) who will actually bind themselves in meaningful ways that they don’t narrowly want. If a previously signed treaty turns out to be inconvenient, it is often subtly ignored or reinterpreted.

In addition, treaty delegations working on industrial issues generally reflect the full spectrum of special interests involved in an issue. A US AI treaty delegation might be led by a State Department ambassador, but he will be advised by representatives of the interagency, major labs, other major tech companies, tech investors, civil society, etc.

“International efforts,” therefore, is not a reassuring answer to the governance problem; it is the name of another enormous, unresolved governance problem.

Here is the full tweet.

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NASA Science

Destructive Fires Char Western Europe

Lauren Dauphin
Updated
 
A brown patch of burned vegetation is visible on the landscape surrounding two reservoirs in a hilly region west of Madrid.
Charred landscapes surround reservoirs in central Spain in an image captured by the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 9 on July 29, 2026. The false-color image combines observations at visible, near-infrared, and shortwave-infrared wavelengths (bands 6-5-3), making it easier to distinguish brown burned vegetation from green unburned vegetation.
NASA Earth Observatory / Lauren Dauphin

Wildland fires occur across Europe every summer, but those that erupted in Spain and France in July 2026 were among the largest and most disruptive the two countries have faced in decades. Some of the most consequential fires emerged in southwestern France’s Gironde Department and Spain’s Ávila and Madrid provinces in mid-July, where blazes forced hundreds of thousands of people to evacuate and destroyed hundreds of homes.

Government officials in Spain say that a fire in Ávila, after charring around 50,000 hectares (124,000 acres), is the largest on record, surpassing a blaze that burned in Larouco, Quiroga, and Oencia in 2025. NASA satellites first observed signs of the Ávila fire burning near Burgohondo on July 22 and July 23. By July 24, it had merged with fires in neighboring provinces, pushing the total area burned to 77,000 hectares, an area about the size of New York City.

The image above, captured by Landsat 9, shows charred landscapes around Burgohondo on July 29, 2026. In the false-color image, unburned vegetation appears light green, and burned areas appear brown. The two reservoirs in the center of the image were heavily affected. Flames tore through homes, restaurants, campgrounds, marinas, and other infrastructure surrounding the reservoirs, according to news reports.

A similar crisis unfolded in southwestern France, west of Bordeaux. One of the largest fires to burn in France this decade charred more than 42,000 hectares, prompting large-scale evacuations and devastating the village of Le Porge. As of late July, fires had burned more than 90,000 hectares across France, more than any other season in decades, according to data from the European Forest Fire Information System.

Environmental conditions months before the fires ignited made the landscape in both Spain and France particularly susceptible to burning, according to an analysis conducted by researchers with The State of Wildfires Project. Unusually wet winter weather enhanced vegetation growth in grasslands, shrublands, and forest understories, and then a series of sweltering heat waves and a period of drought parched the vegetation and primed it to burn. Several days of strong winds reaching 65 kilometers (40 miles) per hour at times served as the final trigger, the researchers found, fanning flames and encouraging rapid spread.

On July 25, conditions at fires in southwestern France grew so intense that French firefighters reported the formation of a pyrocumulonimbus—a towering type of “fire cloud” that draws convective energy from the heat of the fires. An international group of atmospheric scientists and fire experts who track the unusual clouds has documented the occasional formation of the clouds in Spain and Portugal in recent decades, but members of the group note that this is the first report of a fire in France producing one.

Thousands of firefighters and military personnel have battled fires in both countries. Crews have used aircraft to attack the fires with water and flame retardant, while teams on the ground have constructed firebreaks using tools ranging from bulldozers to hand tools. Firefighters gained the advantage by late July, allowing authorities to start lifting evacuation orders. However, forecasters are warning that the risk of fire in the coming days remains high due to the persistence of hot, dry conditions.

Government satellite data are part of a global system of observations used to track fire behavior and analyze emerging trends. Among the real-time wildfire monitoring tools that NASA makes available are FIRMS (Fire Information for Resource Management System) and the Worldview browser.

NASA Earth Observatory image by Lauren Dauphin, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Story by Adam Voiland.

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A brown patch of burned vegetation is visible on the landscape surrounding two reservoirs in a hilly region west of Madrid.

July 29, 2026

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The Cross Section

Why the Democratic Centrists Are Losing

Paul Waldman
Updated
Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong

The Cross Section is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Democratic centrists have a problem. They have enormous influence over the debate — indeed, they manage to get national news coverage almost at will as they complain that the Democratic Party has moved too far to the left and will doom itself if progressives are allowed to take over. Their problem is that they don’t represent any actual voters.

I don’t mean that there aren’t moderate Democratic voters; there are plenty of them. It’s a perfectly reasonable thing to be, and they have as much right as anybody to make the case for their beliefs. But the professional centrists aren’t connected to them in any meaningful, practical way.

Nor, for that matter, have the centrists managed to find charismatic, dynamic candidates to carry their banner, even if moderate Democrats have won some primaries. What they’re left with is something of a Potemkin movement, in which a small number of people rail against the prevailing trend in the Democratic Party and get lots of attention for their arguments, but are unable to make much progress in their real goal — fighting progressives — in part because they aren’t inclined to engage in politics on the ground.

If you’re in a battle for the soul of your party, that’s a recipe for defeat.

I’m not going to settle the case of Moderation v. Mobilization here, except to note that for most candidates, in an environment where all politics is national, moderating on issues has lost most of the efficacy it once had. Furthermore, the problem Democrats have is not that voters think they’re extreme on policy, but that voters think they’re weak.

That perception is common among Democrats themselves, which helps explain why progressive candidates are doing so well right now. Democrats who don’t seem to believe in anything all that strongly are being lapped by candidates whose progressive ideas and sense of outrage signal to voters that they are eager for change and want to fight.

Why the centrists can’t hold back the progressive tide

So you get races like the one for Wisconsin governor, where a new Marquette University poll shows state Rep. Francesca Hong with 38%, former lieutenant governor Mandela Barnes (who lost a Senate race four years ago to the odious Ron Johnson) with 16%, and Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley (who has the endorsement of Gov. Tony Evers) with 7%.

Cue the freakout:

Every race is a little different, but we’re seeing something similar play out in many Democratic primaries: A lefty candidate goes up against a couple of uninspiring mainstream Democrats and captures the bulk of the attention and votes, leading centrists both inside and outside the state to shout “How could this have happened? We’re doomed!”

One of the arguments the centrists make is that it might be fine for a socialist to win in New York, but they can’t win in a closely divided state like Wisconsin or Michigan. But as Perry Bacon points out, strongly progressive candidates have won lots of races in swing states and swing districts in recent years. Wisconsin senator Tammy Baldwin is rated by Voteview (the most objective measure I know of) as more liberal than 90% of congressional Democrats — and she won a third term in 2024, when Trump won the state. That doesn’t mean Hong will win a general election if she gets the nomination, but it does mean that the fact that she’s farther to the left than her primary opponents isn’t in and of itself a bar to victory. And those backing Barnes and Crowley should ask themselves why the candidates they’re backing don’t seem to have much appeal to the voters.

Right now, the argument against the progressive candidates is being carried by has-been pundits and groups like Third Way, which are quite well-funded but have no identifiable constituency. They’re basically a bunch of people sitting around in a Washington office writing op-eds. That’s not a useless endeavor — spreading ideas is worthwhile, depending on the ideas — but when it gets down to the crunch time of an election, it isn’t particularly potent.

In stark contrast, the Democratic Socialists of America have become a formidable force within the Democratic Party because they are committed to organizing. They’re out there knocking doors and making calls and staging events every day, which is something that the centrists aren’t doing. When the political context shifted in a way that made their outsider persona and uncompromising policy ideas more appealing, they were ready to take advantage.

Now, it’s true that there are people and factions within the DSA that believe some pretty far-out things, things that lots of politicians who are either members or associate themselves with the group (including the most prominent ones like Zohran Mamdani) don’t agree with. But the point is, they’re doing politics, while the centrists’ strategy seems to be focused mostly on getting attention from the elite media.

And as much as the centrists beg candidates to focus on those magical “kitchen-table issues,” that’s exactly what the successful DSA candidates are doing. What do you think universal health care and child care are about, if not the everyday reality of people’s lives? And here’s something else that’s important: While centrists often complain that Democrats are trapped in their self-reinforcing bubbles and disconnected from reg’lar, salt-of-the-earth Americans, nearly all the centrists that I’m aware of are just as disconnected, if not more so.

Bubbles come in many forms

They live in Washington or other major cities, they’re immersed in politics, and they suffer from the Pundit Brain ailment that makes its victims believe ordinary voters have coherent ideological beliefs and respond to subtle changes in the policy-based appeals candidates make. There’s something else going on, too: Their view of the political world is dominated by their contempt for the far left, which convinces them that what we used to call hippie-punching is the cleverest of political strategies.

This is a phenomenon I’ve noticed in many normie Democrats I know who live in very liberal places. They can’t stand Trump, of course, but the people who really drive them up a wall are the ones they encounter all the time where they live: the lefties.

This is a variation on a more familiar phenomenon, that of the radical who hates the internal rivals on their own side much more than they hate the enemy they’re all supposed to be fighting. That’s the Judean People’s Front effect:

But the hatred of the center for the extreme may be just as common, and the reason is familiarity. If you’re a mainstream Democrat who lives in San Francisco or New York, you almost never encounter MAGA-hatted, immigrant-hating, misogynistic far-right troglodytes in person. You see them online, you know they’re there, but you don’t have to pay more than a moment’s attention to them if you don’t want to. On the other hand, far-lefties are everywhere in your actual life, and everything you find annoying about them is right in your face, all the time.

I know people who say that if they have to hear one more land acknowledgement, or watch a couple jump up at the beginning of a concert to try to start a “Free Palestine!” chant when there are only liberals in the audience anyway, they’re going to lose their minds. Lefties are big on public expressions of belief in ostensibly non-political contexts — sometimes confrontational ones — and it’s not surprising that many liberals find it exasperating and often counter-productive.

An unusually thoughtful and magnanimous normie liberal might conclude that while the people pestering them at the supermarket are sometimes carried away by the exuberance of youth or aren’t quite as informed as they might be, their hearts are basically in the right place and they agree with them on fundamental goals like justice and equality. But that’s not easy to do when the people you find so annoying are all around you.

We all have people on our side who drive us up the wall for one reason or another. But there are a couple of things to remember as the primary season continues to play out. First, the centrists should understand that the current momentum behind the far left was enabled by the failures of mainstream Democrats and centrists in particular. Where are the dynamic, charismatic, politically adept, and appealing centrist Democratic candidates? Well let’s see…there was Bill Clinton, who ran his last race 30 years ago.

Second, you should guard against the belief that if people in your party whose policy beliefs are different from yours win elections, the whole party is doomed. Just look at the experience of the Tea Party, a bunch of halfwits traipsing around in tricorn hats advocating unpopular ideas. They took over the GOP after Barack Obama was elected, and what followed was a series of Republican victories — in 2010, 2014, and 2016 — broken only by a presidential election in which the party nominated a more traditional candidate.

The Democrats might not have a similar run of success after the current progressive uprising. But if the centrists now warning of doom could point to their own political achievements, they’d have a much stronger case to make.

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Software Design: Tidy First?

Canon 3X: Explore/Expand/Extract

Kent Beck
Updated

I’ve started a series of Canon articles where I explain my ideas as plainly & unambiguously as possible—no analogies, no persuasion, just the facts. I started with Canon TDD. I expect to continue with Canon JUnit, Canon XP, and Canon Make-The-Change-Easy.

The growth of anything forms a logistic curve:

Take a software product—throughout the curve we ship changes, attract customers, & bill those customers. However, the smoothness of this curve is a dangerous illusion. The beginning, middle, and final portions of this curve require completely different approaches, even if they look superficially similar.

Emergence

I promised that the Canon series would be no theory, just stuff. One tiny bit of theory is essential to the 3X: Explore/Expand/Extract story. It’ll introduce vocabulary we’ll use in the rest of the explanation.

That S-shaped curve is described by a formula:

​But that doesn’t help much when we’re trying to make young things grow. Instead, we can see S curve curve as a tug-of-war (oops, analogy, sorry) between two feedback loops:

To create the S curve, first you get the reinforcing loop on the left operating. The more your idea (product/company/movement/whatever) grows, the easier it is to grow more. Then later you get the inhibiting loop on the right taking over, slowing & eventually capping the growth.

A successful idea:

  1. Explore Finds a new growth loop (it needs to me new or somebody else would already be operating it).

  2. Expand Keeps it operating long enough for the idea to scale, avoiding all the potentially-fatal inhibiting loops along the way.

  3. Extract Finishes growing as the ultimate inhibiting loop kicks in.

  4. (Bonus) Uses the resources from the first curve to kick off the search for new curves with their own growth loops.

3X’s

Schematically, the progression looks like this:

The central thesis of 3X: Explore/Expand/Extract is that each of these phases, no matter how much they resemble each other, actually requires its own approach to:

  • Finance

  • Team size

  • Project management

  • Personnel

  • Technology

  • Risk management

  • Implementation

  • Marketing

  • Sales

Applying the approach from one phase to an idea in another phase kills ideas.

Explore

Risk: Nobody cares. The idea dies for lack of fuel.

Goal: Find the growth loop. You can’t predict a new loop so you have to find it experimentally.

Strategy: Rapid experiments, maximum creativity, conceptual blending.

Tactics: Tiny teams, no dependencies, quickly discard failures.

Exit: One experiment works way better than others.

Expand

Risk: Can’t scale.

Goal: Avoid fatal obstacles while scaling furiously.

Strategy: Intense focus on the next emerging growth bottleneck.

Tactics: Throttle growth, discard non-essential features, good-enough-for-now scaling.

Exit: Cause and effect of growth become predictable.

Extract

Risk: Can’t sustain.

Goal: Growth with profit,

Strategy: Safely optimize while growing.

Tactics: Small, safe experiments; roll out successes; optimize costs.

Exit: No further return on investment.

All Of The Above

The tricky trick of 3X is managing projects in different phases in the matching styles. You have some Extract products that pay the bills & pay for a portfolio of Explore projects. When a project hits Expand, treat it as a priority even over profitable Extract activities. (Simple to say and apparently nearly impossible to execute.)

Most teams don’t have a strategy problem. They have an adaptation problem.

Your plan was never going to survive contact with reality. The question is whether your organization bends or breaks when it doesn’t.

I help teams bend. Adapt to Thrive.

Booking a handful of custom talks and advisory engagements now. I interview your people, measure your real software flows, and hand you the truth plus what to do about it.

Curious whether it fits? Tell me about your team.

Hacker News
California
The Honest Broker

Mark Zuckerberg's Empire Is Now Crumbling

Ted Gioia
Updated

A year ago, I warned readers about Meta in a provocative article entitled “Is This What a Bubble Looks Like at the Top?” I had many reasons for skepticism about Mark Zuckerberg’s empire, but focused on a single absurd fact in the opening paragraphs.

Source

Meta fans were angry at me, but subsequent events have validated my concerns. Meta’s shares have fallen almost $250 per share since then—that’s a decline of half a trillion dollars in market value.

And the situation at Meta is now getting worse, not better:

  • Earlier this year, daily active users on Facebook and Instagram declined for the first time ever. This is devastating news for the Meta—because the company’s social media business pays the bills for all its boondoggles.

  • A few days ago, Zuckerberg talked about a plan for selling Meta’s excess AI computing capacity. This shocked Wall Street—Zuckerberg is spending hundreds of billions on new data centers. But that makes no sense if the company already has excess computing power.

  • Meta’s quarterly investor call yesterday made matters even worse. Earnings were far below estimates, but free cash flow numbers were a total disaster—down more than 90%. Guidance for the future was (no surprise here) cautious, and Zuckerberg refused to give any estimate of next year’s capital investments, which are already out-of-control and spooking investors.

  • Zuckerberg used the occasion to publish a bizarre opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal—proclaiming himself as a champion of human potential and an opponent of centralized power. This is the same guy who laid off 8,000 employees a few days ago, and is building a data center as large as Manhattan. By the way, Zuckerberg himself can’t be fired—because he limits the voting rights of most shareholders.

Yes, it’s been a bad week for Mr. Z. But all of the above is just the tip of the iceberg.

Below are nine far more terrible revelations about Meta—much worse than the earnings call yesterday. They paint a disturbing picture of a business out of control and descending into chaos.

After looking at them, you will legitimately ask if any company has made more bad decisions in the history of capitalism.

Read more

Construction Physics

Why Is Everyone Trying to Build a Solid-State Battery?

Brian Potter
Updated

A battery technology that’s getting a lot of attention is solid-state batteries, lithium-ion batteries that replace the liquid electrolyte with a solid material. Chinese battery manufacturer CATL alone had more than 1,000 people devoted to solid-state battery research as of 2024, and battery manufacturers like BYD, LG, and Samsung are also working on the technology. US and European startups making solid-state batteries have collectively raised over $4 billion as of 2025.

Solid-state batteries have several potential advantages over the lithium-ion batteries with liquid electrolyte we use now. For one, replacing the liquid electrolyte with a solid should allow for lighter batteries, requiring less mass per unit of energy delivered. And because the liquid electrolyte currently used in batteries is flammable, replacing it with a solid could make batteries safer and less susceptible to fire.

I wanted to better understand why, exactly, solid-state batteries have these advantages compared to conventional lithium-ion batteries, and how they fit into the broader arc of lithium battery improvements.

Battery basics

Batteries supply energy by way of chemical reactions. And chemical reactions, regardless of the chemicals involved, all release or absorb energy using the same mechanism: an electron or electrons move from one potential energy well to another. In a chemical reaction that gives off energy (an exothermic reaction), electrons move from a higher potential well to a lower potential well, giving off energy in the process.

“Potential well” is fairly abstract, so I find it useful to consider an analogy with gravity. Say a ball is in a shallow groove at the top of a tall hill, and there’s another shallow groove at the bottom. The ball is being tugged downward by gravity, which gives it potential energy, a function of how much mass the ball has and how high it is above the bottom of the hill. By itself, the ball at the top of the hill won’t move, but if you give it a little push to nudge it out of its groove, it will roll downhill, releasing its potential energy in the process. This potential energy is converted to kinetic energy (the velocity of the ball), which in turn converts to thermal energy from friction, slowing the ball down until it stops in the lower groove.

Chemical reactions work in a somewhat similar way. But instead of gravity, the potential energy comes from electromagnetism: the positively charged nuclei tugging on the negatively charged electrons. In an exothermic reaction, atoms start in some particular “groove,” their electrons in some particular arrangement. But if you give the atoms a little kick (say, by heating them up so their collisions become more energetic), you can knock them out of their groove, letting them “roll downhill” into a lower-energy configuration, converting their electric potential energy in the process. Some of that potential energy (half, in fact) will go to increasing the electrons’ velocities; the rest will be released as vibration (heat), or as a photon.

So, for instance, say you start with one methane molecule (one carbon and four hydrogens, CH4) and two oxygen molecules (each with two oxygen atoms, O2). These molecules start with their electrons in a particular configuration, the oxygen atoms bonded with each other and the hydrogen atoms bonded with the carbon. At room temperature, O2 and CH4 largely won’t react with each other: each is sitting in its own potential well that takes energy to climb out of. But give them a kick by adding heat, and they can “fall downhill,” going through a series of reactions and ending up in a lower-energy configuration — the hydrogen and carbon atoms each bond with oxygen, forming H2O and CO2. The resulting electron configurations are in lower potential energy wells, with much of the difference being released as heat.

Lithium-ion batteries work by using, unsurprisingly, chemical reactions with lithium. When a lithium-ion battery discharges, lithium ions and their electrons “fall downhill,” moving from one configuration at the anode (inserted between sheets of graphite, known as “intercalation”) into a different, lower-energy configuration at the cathode (intercalated in another material, such as lithium iron phosphate, LiFePO4). The battery is structured to capture energy from this reaction. Lithium ions can pass from the anode into the electrolyte, but electrons can’t: they must go around, through a metallic conductor that connects the anode and the cathode. This flow of electrons is the electrical current that batteries generate. (When a battery is charging, the reverse happens: a voltage placed on the conductor forces electrons back uphill into the anode, with lithium ions flowing back through the electrolyte to keep the charge balanced.)1

Lithium ion battery diagram, via link.

Lithium is a favored choice for a battery because an electron leaving lithium has farther to fall than an electron leaving any other metal when coupled with the appropriate reactant. Lithium is also a very light atom (an atomic mass of around 7), which, combined with the large “drop,” means that lithium reactions yield a high amount of energy. Per unit mass, lithium reactions release roughly as much energy as burning gasoline.

But if this is true, why are lithium-ion batteries so much less energy dense than gasoline?

Energy densities of various batteries and fuels, via Wikipedia.

One big reason is the oxidizer. The chemical reactions we rely on for energy typically require some downhill destination for electrons to end up at, which is known as an oxidizer. When burning gasoline, the oxidizer is oxygen in the surrounding air: inside a gasoline engine, fuel and air are mixed together and then ignited, triggering the chemical reaction — an explosion — that powers the engine. Gasoline-powered cars, in other words, don’t need to carry their oxidizer with them, because there’s always one available in the surroundings.

Lithium-ion batteries, on the other hand, aren’t so fortunate. They need to carry their electron destination with them, in the form of the cathode. This adds a lot of extra mass compared to what a gasoline-powered car needs to carry. If a car needed to carry its own oxidizer with it, it would need about 3.5 kilograms of oxygen for every 1 kilogram of gasoline.

More generally, it just requires a lot of material scaffolding to structure the lithium reaction in a way that lets you extract energy from it in the form of electric current. At the anode, each lithium ion requires an additional six atoms of carbon, forming graphite sheets that the lithium ions can nestle into. A similar intercalation structure is required at the cathode. On top of this is the extra mass for the electrolyte, the separator, the current collectors, and so on. As of 2019, every gram of reacting lithium in a battery required about 70 grams of supporting material (though this number has probably fallen somewhat since then).

Without this material scaffolding, the reaction can still take place, but in a non-useful way. If something creates a direct path between the cathode and the anode, the reaction will run nearly instantly, creating a lot of heat and triggering other chemical reactions that will destroy the battery, but no useful electric current. Modern battery design, in fact, takes a lot of effort to prevent these runaway reactions from taking place.

The benefit of all this material scaffolding, of course, is that you can use the same chemicals for the reaction over and over again. The intercalating electrodes on modern lithium-ion batteries in particular are very good at this; because the electrode structure is maintained when the battery charges/discharges, lithium-ion batteries can be used for very large numbers of cycles while maintaining most of their capacity. When you burn gasoline, on the other hand, you’re discharging the products of the reaction continuously (which, of course, is the whole reason we want to switch away from fossil fuels in the first place, to stop the discharged CO2 from building up in the atmosphere). You could, theoretically, dispose of the lithium-ion battery’s scaffolding by having some sort of lithium-based internal combustion engine, but this would work terribly and be outrageously expensive to run (though some people are interested in using oxygen in the air as a battery oxidizer with lithium-air batteries).

The promise of solid-state batteries

The major potential benefit of solid-state batteries is a substantial reduction in this material scaffolding.

A pernicious issue with current lithium-ion batteries is dendrites. As we’ve noted, at the anode, lithium ions are nestled between sheets of graphite. But the anode holds the lithium ions very loosely, only slightly better than metallic lithium does. This is useful, because ions can easily migrate into the electrolyte, thus letting the battery work, but it’s a double-edged sword: under the right conditions, the lithium ions that are supposed to enter the anode during charging might instead acquire an electron at the surface of the anode, forming tree-shaped structures of metallic lithium called dendrites, instead of nestling between the sheets of graphite. If a dendrite pierces the separator between the anode and the cathode, it creates a direct path between the two, letting that runaway reaction that batteries are designed to prevent take place. (This doesn’t immediately react all the lithium in the battery — as electric current flows through the dendrite, the dendrite heats up, eventually melting and breaking the path — but the heat from the brief reaction can be enough to trigger other chemical reactions, resulting in thermal runaway and destroying the battery.) A great deal of battery development effort is devoted to preventing these dendrites from forming.

Dendrite growth, via Wikipedia.

If, however, the liquid electrolyte were replaced with some sort of solid material, these dendrites might stop being a problem.2 With a strong, solid electrolyte, dendrites wouldn’t (in theory) be able to make their way through it, though with current solid electrolytes dendrites still seem to find their way through. And if the risk of dendrites were eliminated, you could switch to a different anode, dispensing with the graphite intercalating structure entirely, using an anode of pure lithium metal.3 And because the solid material would eliminate the flammable electrolyte, the resulting battery might be safer as well.

Solid-state batteries probably aren’t imminent — the chairman of CATL ranks them as 4 out of 9 on the technological readiness scale, and has indicated that commercial viability “has yet to be established.” But the expectation that they could be “[p]otentially safer, more energy dense, and perhaps eventually cheaper than today’s batteries” is pushing manufacturers around the world to try and make them happen.

Thanks to Austin Vernon for reading a draft of this. All errors are my own.

1

The reason that electrons migrate during discharge is somewhat complex. At the anode, lithium ions migrate into the electrolyte, because the electrolyte is a more appealing location with a lower potential energy well. At the cathode, the reverse occurs; lithium ions migrate from the electrolyte into the cathode. At each electrode, this creates a net charge which generates an electric field, which stops further migration. But because you now have a net negative charge at the anode interface (since positively charged lithium ions have left) and a net positive charge at the cathode interface (because positively charged lithium ions have entered), electrons flow between the two electrodes when they’re connected by a conductor to equalize the charges. But because each arriving electron is paired with an arriving lithium ion, the charge differences between the anode and the cathode don’t equalize, letting current flow continuously until there’s no more room for lithium ions in the cathode or no more lithium ions left in the anode (though most batteries have a cutoff that stops current flowing when the voltage drops below some level).

2

In a crystalline solid electrolyte, lithium ions migrate through it by hopping from one vacancy in a solid crystal lattice to the next. Thanks to their thermal energy, the ions vibrate back and forth trillions of times per second, and occasionally a vibration will have enough energy and be in the correct direction to squeeze past the surrounding atoms into a nearby vacancy.

3

A company in the 1980s, Moli Energy, tried to make lithium batteries with lithium metal anodes but gave up after dendrite problems caused their batteries to catch fire, requiring a massive recall.

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DCReport.org

The Filing Deadlines That Can Cost Injured Workers Their Benefits

Our Friends
Updated

A bad workplace injury rearranges your whole week before you have had time to think. There are doctor visits to schedule, a paycheck that suddenly is not coming, and a body that will not do what it did on Monday. Filing paperwork is nowhere near the top of that list. Yet workers’ compensation runs on a clock, and that clock started the second you got hurt. Wait too long and a claim you clearly deserve can vanish over a missed date.

None of this has to trip you up. The deadlines are fixed, they are written down, and a little attention early on keeps your claim alive. This guide covers the ones that matter, the reasoning behind them, and the handful of steps that protect you. For anyone in the Carolinas, this rundown of North Carolina workers’ comp claim time limits  lays out the exact windows that apply.

Why the Clock Matters at All

The whole system runs on timing because memories fade and paper goes missing. Report an injury while it is fresh and everyone involved (your employer, the insurer, the state) can check the story against records that still exist.

The catch is that these rules bend for almost no one. Commissions and courts tend to treat a filing deadline as a wall, not a courtesy. Blow past it and even a solid, well-documented injury can get tossed on a technicality.

The strongest claim in the world is worthless if it lands a day late. Injured workers relearn that lesson every year.

The Two Deadlines Every Injured Worker Must Know

Two separate clocks start running after a workplace injury, and mixing them up is one of the most expensive mistakes people make.

1. Telling Your Employer

First, you have to put your employer on notice, and you do not have long to do it. Many states give you as little as 30 days, and they usually want it in writing.

This step is not your claim. It is just you saying, out loud and on the record, that you got hurt on the job. Picture raising your hand at work and stating plainly that this happened here and you need it documented.

Move fast, because early notice creates a paper trail dated close to the injury, kicks off your employer’s obligation to loop in their insurance carrier, and shuts down the argument that you invented the injury after the fact.

A verbal heads-up to a supervisor beats silence. But an email, a text, or a signed incident form carries far more weight if anyone ever pushes back.

2. Filing the Actual Claim With the State

Telling your boss does not file anything. To open a real claim, you generally have to submit it to your state’s workers’ compensation agency, and that deadline is its own animal, frequently two years from the date of the accident.

Here is where people get burned. Plenty of injured workers figure that because they reported the injury and saw a company doctor, the machinery is turning on its own. It is not. Sit back and wait for someone else to handle it, and that two-year window can close with your claim never officially filed.

How This Actually Trips People Up

Take a warehouse worker named Marcus who wrenches his back hauling a pallet. He tells his shift lead that afternoon, gets sent to the company clinic, and pulls a few weeks of light duty. Looks handled.

Marcus assumes he is in the system. Nobody ever files the formal claim, though. Two years on, his back gives out and he needs surgery. When he finally goes looking for benefits, the deadline is behind him. The bills are his to carry.

And the frustrating part is that Marcus did almost everything right. He spoke up the same day. He followed instructions. One missing form, specifically the official claim, cost him tens of thousands of dollars.

Deadlines Depend on Your State

Every state sets its own windows, and they do not line up neatly. When you have to report, when you have to file, and how the odd cases get counted all shift depending on where you clock in.

So check your own state’s rules early, ideally in the first days after an injury, before the guesswork has a chance to cost you. You can also visit the NC Industrial Commission  for official state guidelines, forms, and compliance updates.

The Situations That Move the Deadline

Not every injury fits the tidy pattern of getting hurt on Tuesday and filing by a certain date. The math can change when the harm builds slowly. With repetitive-stress injuries like carpal tunnel or hearing loss, the clock may start when you knew, or reasonably should have known, the problem came from work.

The deadline also shifts if it is an occupational disease, as illnesses from long-term exposure often carry their own separate deadlines. Similarly, if a family member has died, dependents seeking death benefits usually face a distinct window tied to the date of death. Finally, if the worker is a minor, some states stretch the deadlines for young employees.

These are the gray areas, and they are precisely where five minutes with a lawyer earns its keep.

A Short Checklist That Protects You

Acting early and writing things down is most of the battle. Run through this the moment you are hurt.

First, report the injury right away, on paper if you can. Second, get medical care and tell every provider it happened at work. Third, keep copies of every form, email, text, and record. Fourth, note the date of injury and put both deadlines on a calendar. Fifth, file the official claim yourself and do not assume your employer did. Sixth, ask for help early if anything is murky or your claim gets denied.

None of it takes long, and together these six steps close nearly every gap insurers use to say no.

Think You Have Already Missed It?

Do not count yourself out before someone qualified takes a look. Even when a deadline seems to have passed, exceptions and tolling rules occasionally apply, and only a real review of your particular facts can tell you whether the door is actually shut.

A lawyer can usually sort a missed date into fatal or fixable in short order. Consultations are often free, so one phone call might surface options you did not know existed.

The Takeaway

Workers’ comp is there to catch you when the job hurts you, but only if you hit its deadlines. The two that matter most are notifying your employer and filing your claim with the state, and remember that those clocks run separately.

Write the dates down, keep your records, and file sooner than you think you need to. A few minutes now can be the difference between benefits that carry you through recovery and a stack of bills that do not have to be yours.

Photo: Cup of Couple via Pexels

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Schneier on Security

Should You Use AI for a Task? Here’s a Simple Way to Decide

Bruce Schneier
Updated

This essay originally appeared in The Guardian.

I teach public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Munk School at the University of Toronto. And it will come as no surprise to you that my students regularly use AI to complete their writing assignments. Doing so is a waste of their tuition money. But if their entire career is going to include AI writing assistants, why shouldn’t they embrace their future?

The best way I’ve found to explain the dilemma comes from the AI researcher Daniel Meissler: it’s the difference between work and the gym.

At work, if your job is to move a bunch of heavy things from one side of the room to another, you should use whatever assistive tech you have on hand: a wagon, a forklift… even an AI-powered robot. But at the gym, it makes no sense for that robot to lift weights for you. The point of weightlifting isn’t to move heavy things across the room; it’s to actually lift those heavy things.

The same analysis holds for any task an AI can do for you. If it’s work—if the task has to be done and no one cares how—then it’s fine to use AI assistance. But if the task is more like the gym, and how the task is done is at least as important, then it probably doesn’t make sense to use AI.

This, of course, assumes that the AI is actually up for the task and that it’s trustworthy: that it can do the job well, that its mistakes are minimal and correctable, that it’s been secured from cyber-attacks that would influence its results. Those are all important, and shouldn’t be minimized. There’s no point giving an AI something that it can’t do reliably. But once you’re confident that the AI can perform the task, the work vs. gym distinction helps you decide if it should.

The writing assignments I give my students are gym tasks, not work tasks. I ask them to write policy memos not because the world needs more policy memos. I assign them because the very act of writing, which includes thinking and outlining and drafting and editing, making and criticizing and revising arguments, will help develop the critical thinking skills they will need in their future careers. And without this constant mental exercise, those skills will atrophy. Employers are already noticing.

Reading the assignments they turn in, I can see those skills either flourishing or atrophying in my students. At least today, I can pretty easily tell the difference between an AI-written memo and a student-written one—especially if the student just turns in what the chatbot produces. It’s a catchy, plausible, grammatically perfect essay that’s not particularly well-crafted or logically coherent—and with all the tells of mid-2026 AI-generated writing.

But it’s precisely because I have spent years developing my own writing skills that I’m able to identify prose that sounds great but doesn’t actually make sense. My students don’t have that skill; they mistakenly view a confident, well-written essay as evidence of the quality of their ideas. They see the AI as cleaning those ideas up, getting them through that uncomfortable stretch of having to turn those ideas into prose. What the students miss is that their initial discomfort is a normal and healthy stage of writing, and not something to quickly get beyond. The very act of struggling with how to express what they think is an important part of the process. It’s how they test out their ideas, examine their hypotheses, and actually figure out what they think. Homework is not work; it’s the gym.

Work vs. gym also helps us understand the problem facing creatives of all kinds.

Most of the time when someone hires a writer, they just need the words. They need an instruction manual for a piece of equipment, a detailed sales presentation, a government-mandated disclosure document, or a legal brief. They need dry, predictable, accurate writing: a piece of work, exactly what AIs are good at today and what I don’t want in my student assignments. Only sometimes is writing an art form—a book, a poem, an uplifting political speech. That kind of writing is more like the gym: process matters just as much as product.

For most of human history, the only option for all of these tasks was human writers. We hired one regardless of whether we needed work writing or gym writing. And that paid a lot of writers’ salaries. I know fiction writers who supported that poorly paying career with lucrative technical writing work. Now, for the first time in human history, we can separate out when we need writing as work and when we want writing as gym. And if AI can do most of the work-type writing, society doesn’t need as many human writers.

It’s the same for visual artists. Sometimes we need an actual artist, but most of the time we just need an image: a corporate mascot, a “beware of the dog” sign, or a packaging label. Historically we gave those jobs to artists, and sometimes beautiful art resulted. But most of the time it was just work. And, as it turns out, the world needs less pure art than simple images.

Explaining the problem isn’t the same as providing the solution. I give my students the “work versus gym” speech every class, but they still use AI. I have sympathy: assignments are hard, everyone is overworked and overstressed, and—most importantly—students feel like they’ll look bad in comparison if their peers are all using AI. Even if they don’t want to use the technology, they feel like they have no choice.

There’s also an incentive problem. No one pays us to go to the gym; maintaining healthy habits requires discipline. For me, the payoffs to exercise—fewer aches and pains, less fatigue, better mood/stress management—might make me a better writer and teacher, but they’re subtle and easy to miss. For my students, incremental improvements in their reasoning and writing are equally subtle.

We do have a choice. We can look at the tasks of our lives and separate them into work or gym. Just as we might choose to use the stairs instead of the elevator, or walk instead of calling an Uber, we can wall off our cognitive gym tasks from AI and ensure that we don’t lose our skills to this technology. And we can do the same when we assign a job to someone else. If it’s a work task, we can have AI do it. If it’s a gym task, it’s a waste of everyone’s time to give it to an AI because no one learns or gets stronger as a result.

Similarly, a future where AI generates words and images is one where society has to make choices about how it will treat its creatives. This won’t be the first time—today there is minimal demand for portrait painters, for example—but maybe this time we can make different, more deliberate, choices about the value of art in our society.

AI is going to fundamentally change the nature of work. Not nearly as fast as the AI companies want you to believe, but eventually it will. Policy analysis will definitely involve AI from now on, and my students need to reimagine what it means to learn and practice that skill. More generally, the line between work and gym will change in the future as we humans adapt ourselves to a world with these new intelligences.

But for now, the work vs. gym distinction is pretty clear. Use it on yourself.

Schneier on Security

American Being Prosecuted for Wiping His Phone Before Handing It Over to Border Officials

Bruce Schneier
Updated

He’s being prosecuted for giving border officials a code that wiped his phone:

The case centers on a feature included in GrapheneOS, a custom Android operating system that runs in place of the software on most modern Google Pixel devices. Tunick’s attorneys confirmed GrapheneOS was running on his phone.

The software feature allows the device owner to set a passcode that deliberately wipes the contents of that device if entered instead of the user’s unlock passcode.

Tunick’s case also raises ongoing questions about what constitutional rights can be invoked at the border, which the U.S. government has long asserted is not U.S. soil until a person is authorized to enter.

Right. And he wasn’t under arrest, either.

Three more news stories.

Graphine says that the feature is “completely legal“:

GrapheneOS is completely legal. We have no obligation to weaken any of the security protections it provides. Creating and using GrapheneOS is strongly protected by the US constitution. Laws attempting to make it illegal or require weakening the security would be unconstitutional.

It’s hard to know how much the Constitution matters in the US right now.

Slashdot
Hacker News
California
Daring Fireball

Looking for the Catch in Apple Upgrade

John Gruber
Updated

Damon Beres, writing for The Atlantic under the hed/subhed: “The New iPhone Underclass: Apple’s rental program is a trap”:

The Klarna plan — “Apple Upgrade,” which replaces the iPhone Upgrade Program — is truly, legally, a lease. This is confusing! And it’s confusing in part because this is not how Klarna, a well-known buy-now, pay-later service, typically operates: When you use Klarna for clothing from Shein or lip kits at Sephora or an Xbox at GameStop, you’re paying back a loan, exactly as you were in the original iPhone Upgrade Program. Same if you use Klarna to buy a Samsung Galaxy phone. But with Apple Upgrade, you are renting: The Mac or Apple Watch is not yours until the final payment is made.

I don’t think this is confusing at all. Apple Upgrade is the primary brand for this program, not Klarna. Klarna is really only mentioned in the small print. You get into Apple Upgrade through Apple. Off the top of your head, do you remember Apple’s bank partner for the now-discontinued iPhone Upgrade Program? (It was Citizens Bank.) The Samsung program Beres links to above is named “Klarna Pay in 4”. “Apple Upgrade is a leasing program partnered with Klarna” is easily understood.

Here’s what Beres thinks is a “trap”:

Consider a student or a young professional, or perhaps an underemployed older one, who needs a new laptop. They decide on a MacBook. Apple Upgrade will appear to be the best deal: In its announcement, Apple offers the example of a 14-inch MacBook Pro that retails for $1,999 but that can be had for a monthly lease. Perhaps this person goes for the two-year term, which has them paying $54 a month. Best Buy, which currently has the same computer on sale for $1,849, offers an 18-month loan repayment with $103 installments. Apple’s deal appears to be cheaper: The 24-month lease adds up to $1,296; Best Buy’s 18-month loan lands at the store’s full retail price of $1,849.

Why does Best Buy’s laptop seem more expensive? It’s because the plan is actually designed for you to fully pay off the device. At the end of the 24-month MacBook Pro lease, meanwhile, the consumer will still owe $703, meaning that the actual total price of the Apple arrangement is $1,999 — higher than Best Buy’s offer.

This has nothing to do with the differences between Apple Upgrade’s leasing terms and Best Buy’s 18-month loan. It’s the difference between Apple’s retail price of $1,999 and Best Buy’s $1,849. Guess what? $1,849 is less than $1,999.

I generally like paying for everything I buy up front. The only thing I have a loan for right now is our home. So when Apple Upgrade was announced, I approached it with skepticism, presuming that participants would wind up paying more over time than they would buying devices outright up front. But no. There is no interest penalty. If anything, if you presume inflation is still going to run a bit high for the next few years, buying devices through Apple Upgrade might be a slightly better deal than paying up front.

Is it a “trap” that at the end your 24 month lease you still owe $703 if you want to buy it? I would say that’s not a trap at all, given that you’d have only paid $1,296 to date on a $1,999 device. I’m not trying to be obtuse. I get it. If you pay the full $1,999 up front, or take a loan to pay the full amount over 24 months, then, after two years, you own the device outright and you might not be tempted to buy a new device for a few more years. If instead you lease it and still owe $703 after 24 months, you might be inclined to think that it’d be no fun at all to pay $703 to finish purchasing a now-two-year-old MacBook, even if the price is totally fair and carries no interest penalty. It’s just not fun. What might seem fun, at that point, is to just hand the leased MacBook back to Apple and start a new lease on a brand-new MacBook. That’s surely the appeal of this whole thing from Apple’s perspective — that leasing entices people to keep starting new leases every two years rather than just sit back and enjoy a fully-paid-for device for a few additional years. I think it’s a stretch to call that a “trap”, though.

 ★ 
Daring Fireball

The Differences Between the New ‘Apple Upgrade’ and the Old ‘iPhone Upgrade Program’

John Gruber
Updated

Ryan Christoffel, writing for 9to5Mac:

Apple Upgrade launched this week, and the iPhone Upgrade Program is being discontinued as a result. But despite some similarities, the two offerings are not the same. Here are the key differences.

I wrote yesterday that there seemingly is no catch with the new Apple Upgrade program, but there’s at least one, which Christoffel’s piece doesn’t note. When you lease an iPhone through Apple Upgrade, you need a cellular account on one of the big three U.S. carriers: AT&T, T-Mobile, or Verizon. That kind of stinks, and I’m not quite sure I understand why. You’re leasing the iPhone through Apple and Klarna, not the carrier, so I don’t know why Apple cares. If you know why, shoot me a message and explain it. Is it just a simplistic credit-risk evaluation, where prepaid plan-holders and MVNO users in general are viewed suspiciously?

I’ve been hearing a lot of good things about the higher-quality MVNOs, especially US Mobile. (Quinn Nelson mentioned last week on The Talk Show that he’s on US Mobile.) But if you’re not on one of the big three you can’t lease an iPhone through Apple Upgrade.

(I think the old iPhone Upgrade Program required you to have a plan on one of the big three carriers too, so that might be why Christoffel didn’t mention it — it’s the same, not a difference.)

 ★ 
Daring Fireball

Apple Says iOS 27 ‘Restricted Mode’ Isn’t for Users Who Miss Payments in New Apple Upgrade Program

John Gruber
Updated

Last week 9to5Mac reported on code in the latest iOS 27 developer beta seemingly meant to restrict leased devices after the user had missed one or more payments. When engaged, Restricted Mode limits the device to the following apps:

  • Accessibility Reader
  • App Store
  • Health
  • Magnifier
  • Phone
  • Clock
  • Settings
  • Wallet
  • Passwords

And some limited access to apps like Messages or health-related apps that might have critical messages.

Many people reasonably speculated that this feature was related to Apple Upgrade, Apple’s new device leasing partnership with Klarna, which Mark Gurman spoiled a few weeks ago. But an Apple spokesman confirmed to Emma Roth at The Verge today that “There will be no restricted mode and/or there will be no limitations put on device functionality due to missed payments or default with the Apple Upgrade program.”

Writing again today, here’s 9to5Mac’s Marcus Mendes:

Apple, however, did not tell The Verge what Restricted Mode is intended for. One possibility is that it was developed for financing programs offered by carriers, retailers, or other partners outside Apple Upgrade, potentially including markets where device restrictions are already used to enforce installment agreements.

In India, lenders have worked in the past with smartphone manufacturers to remotely block financed devices after borrowers missed payments. As The Economic Times reported last year, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) told non-bank lenders to stop the practice in late 2024, amid concerns about lenders sharing customers’ default information with device manufacturers.

The regulator may now permit a more limited version of the practice. As Reuters reported in May, the RBI proposed allowing lenders to restrict certain functions on financed phones once a loan is at least 90 days overdue, provided the borrower agreed to the measure in the contract and received advance notice.

 ★ 
Marginal Revolution

The Anatomy of Cyber Risk

Tyler Cowen
Updated

This paper uses computational linguistics to introduce a novel measure of firm-level cyber risk exposure based on the quarterly earnings calls of listed firms. Our measure covers more than 14,000 firms from over 90 countries between 2003 and 2025. The measure is validated using human auditors and a large language model. We show that cyber risk exposure affects stock returns and profits, is priced in the options market, predicts actual cyberattacks, and propagates from firm to sector level. Back-of-the-envelope estimates suggest that the global cost of cyber risk exposure is around $1 trillion per year.

That is from a recent paper by Rustam Jamilov, Hélène Rey, and Ahmed Tahoun, forthcoming in the Journal of Finance.

That the market prices cyber risk is a point we should not so readily forget.  Is anyone arguing that recent market declines are due to higher perceived cyber risk?  Does the distribution of these declines match that hypothesis?  (Are we possibly seeing the opposite of what that hypothesis might predict, namely that those companies with the best potential defenses are suffering the most?)  If the cyber risk cost per year had been about $1 trillion a year, what do we think it is now?  Surely members of the rationality community will defer to the scientific methods of investigating these claims…

The post The Anatomy of Cyber Risk appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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Talking Points Memo - Editors Blog

Just $3,017 To Go!

Josh Marshall
Updated

We’re right on the cusp of a big Drive milestone – $400,000, 80% of the way toward our goal of raising at least $500,000 in this year’s Annual TPM Journalism Fund Drive. Who can help us cross this threshold today? You can be that person by clicking right here and making a contribution in any amount. $3,017 to go! Thank you to everyone who has contributed so far!

Update: Now just $546 to go!

Talking Points Memo - Editors Blog

PHOTOS: TPM and The Handbasket Get Together in Brooklyn

Allegra Kirkland
Updated

Thanks so much to everyone who came out to our event at Crystal Lake bar last night in collaboration with Marisa Kabas of The Handbasket! It was great to see some of you again, meet some local readers making it out to their first TPM event, and connect with readers who traveled just for this show. (Shout out to the lovely couple from Berkeley, California!)

We were impressed that the winning trivia team managed to get 10/14 correct answers even though we threw in some doozies (Like “which U.S. elected official got booed and heckled by children during a recent goodwill visit to Greenland on behalf of President Trump?”). And our publisher Joe Ragazzo moderated a dynamic conversation between Marisa and Josh Marshall on the midterms (with an extended Maine interlude), Democratic strategy and the future of independent media.

For those of you who live far away or otherwise couldn’t make it, we’ll release Marisa and Josh’s conversation as a bonus podcast episode soon. Hope to see you at the next one.

Editors Allegra Kirkland (L) and Nicole LaFond test our audience’s trivia knowledge

Trivia time!

Brainstorming answers during trivia

Publisher Joe Ragazzo introduces the main event

Marisa takes the stage

Our own Josh Marshall

Marisa, Joe and Josh chat in the awkwardly low banquette

Marisa meets some TPM readers

Josh talks to readers
Talking Points Memo - Editors Blog

Whose Assumptions Will Get Wrecked in the Michigan Senate Race?

Josh Marshall
Updated

It looks like we are going to get a big test of some cardinal (possibly outdated) assumptions about American politics. I’m thinking first about the Michigan Senate race (though we might have something similar in the Wisconsin governor’s race). Several recent polls show Abdul El-Sayed holding a consistent, substantial lead over Rep. Haley Stevens. The primary is on August 4. This has been presented as a prototypical Democratic establishment vs Bernie progressive/insurgent race. And in key respects it is.

El-Sayed has all the Bernie/progressive positions. He’s run a campaign that places a heavy emphasis on the Israel-Palestine issue. And he’s centered AIPAC in his campaign in a way that even for many longtime critics and haters of AIPAC (including myself here) has a distinct whiff of antisemitic conspiracy theories. To wit, yes, AIPAC sucks. They’re a blight. They are functionally a Republican operation these days. But they are not the secret hand guiding things in the background every time there’s a bad news story or reverse of fortune for some progressive candidate, which is basically the role they’re playing in El-Sayed’s campaign.

Generally speaking, El-Sayed is the kind of candidate you’d expect to see running in a blue state or district. Michigan is not that. It’s a definitional swing state, a bit bluer than Wisconsin perhaps, maybe a touch redder than Pennsylvania. It also has an absolutely must-win Senate race. No room for error. You’ve got to win this seat (currently held by the retiring Democrat Gary Peters).

I’ve watched El-Sayed in a handful of podcast interviews. He’s really good. That’s the only way I can describe it. He has that basic mix of presence, charisma and directness which is the mark of a very strong candidate. I’ve been in contact with a number of TPM readers over the last couple months who I’d describe broadly as white, generally normie Michigan grandmothers who are … strong supporters of El-Sayed. In other words, they’re not at all what you’d expect as the stereotypical supporter of a left-wing, insurgent, Palestine-centric candidate. And the reason is always the same: his rhetoric and attitude fit the stakes of the national crisis and Stevens’ do not.

In many ways, this mirrors what I’ve been arguing for months. You need to pry apart the ideology and fight. You need candidates across the Democratic ideological spectrum operating in the fight lane. Candidates who are not in that lane strike far too many voters as wildly out of touch or irrelevant to the moment we’re living in — like an EMT arriving at the scene of a horrific auto accident with some aspirin, salves and maybe a pillow.

This may make a caricature of Stevens. But she’s been tepid on some key issues where Democrats have a big opening to demonstrate their fight bona fides — issues like ICE. This is revealing to me inasmuch as opposing ICE, wanting to dismantle ICE is not just the right position on the merits. It’s also a more or less free shot on goal for Democratic candidates. ICE’s brutal mass deportation campaign around the country is really, really unpopular. You can go full-bore on ICE and still support more restrictive border policies than many Democrats have been comfortable with. Indeed, this might be the balance of gravity for public opinion in 2026: Tighten the border; fuck ICE. Beyond the merits, it’s an open and fertile ground to demonstrate which lane they’re in. And Stevens hasn’t done that.

I would call myself highly worried about these developments. This isn’t because I’m so dead set against El-Sayed as a candidate. It’s because I’m skeptical his candidacy is viable in a swing state like Michigan. The progressive electability argument often amounts to: These establishment candidates you say are so electable lose about half the time. So how are they so electable? This isn’t a strong argument if you value logical reasoning. That said, I’m also eager to see my skepticism proven wrong. I practice what I preach about partisan elections. Every congressional election is a zero-sum proposition between the forces of Trumpism and the opposition to the same. Full stop. If he’s the nominee, it will be critical to prove my skepticism wrong. Because Democrats absolutely need to win that seat.

The reality is that we are in a very new, fluid and volatile political moment. You don’t need to be a DSA member or a progressive to think that. I’ve had conversations over the last six months with many politicos who would by any definition be classed as “establishment” Democrats who tell me they don’t recognize the electorate we’re seeing. That sometimes comes with an air of bitterness and resignation, cued up for an opinion piece in The Free Press. At other times, it’s one of bewildered open-mindedness. That said, political volatility and change isn’t a codeword for write your own adventure. Democrats don’t have to go further back than 2020 to know that rapid shifts in core political assumptions in Democrat World don’t necessarily export to the rest of the electorate. We are simply dealing with big unknowns and really everyone is projecting their hopes and fears on to a landscape that is pretty opaque.

The contrary argument here is that even if we assume that El-Sayed’s policies and persona are heavy lifts in a statewide Michigan race, the other side has pretty big problems too. GOP nominee-to-be Mike Rogers has to campaign on the wildly unpopular Iran War and as the supporter of a president who has approval numbers in the state from the mid-to low 30s. It’s a very rough environment for a candidate who has to carry all Trump’s baggage and unpopularity without actually being Trump or having him on the ballot.

The primary is next Tuesday. Look out for our coverage.

Talking Points Memo - Editors Blog

Plumbing the Depths of Trump’s Iran Debacle

Josh Marshall
Updated

Here in the U.S., we’re looking at the Iran War in terms of whether the U.S. should have started it in the first place, how it’s affecting oil prices, how it’s going to affect the midterms and a bunch of other things. But there’s another way to look at it, which is that Iran is putting on a global performance of standing head to head with the full might of the U.S. military and pulling it off. By their actions, we can see pretty clearly that the Iranian government does not fear Donald Trump. They’re not acting scared. If anything, they’re upping the rate of their provocations, as the state of war and effective stalemate transitions to a new normal of sorts.

It is fair to say that this is not actually the full might of the U.S. military in a theoretical sense. The president could order the U.S. military to mount a full scale ground invasion of Iran, occupy the country, dismantle the state’s system of command, control and repression. Those things are very likely possible, albeit at vast cost. But the real test of a military is not what it can do in some theoretical sense, the precise armaments it has and so forth but what the country which controls that military is able and/or willing to do in a specific economic, geopolitical, and political context. And the U.S. is clearly not willing to do those things. So in a practical sense — not the abstract power and capabilities of the U.S. military but the country’s ability to do those things — this is the full force of the U.S. military.

What this all amounts to is that this war has turned into a vast spectacle of the limits of U.S. power. This is of course a big reason you don’t start something like this in the first place, why you don’t start wars or any major commitments without a clear understanding of your own power, your own options — and not in the vague sense of our military is super big but how are we going to be willing to use it in this specific situation.

What is further the case is that the most likely near- and medium-term scenario seems like a version of the “frozen conflicts” we know from the peripheries of Russia over the last 20-plus years. The mechanics are different of course. But the overall frozen-ness looks increasingly similar with the key difference that it is Iran rather than the U.S. which is holding key gains during this freeze — the biggest being control of the Strait of Hormuz and the huge deterrence that creates.

The U.S. is not new to spectacularly bad foreign policy decisions. The big ones that jump out to me are Vietnam and the Iraq War. What at least seems distinct to me is that for all the folly of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, if you understand the history you can also see how the bad decisions grew out of the logic of the Cold War, a set of assumptions that were deeply held across a wide spectrum of elite U.S. foreign policy thinking in the U.S. and indeed non-elite thinking as well. This is part of the irony of the title of David Halberstam’s “The Best and the Brightest.” These people were not idiots. And yet they made terrible and disastrous decisions.

With Iraq, elite foreign policy thinking was much more skeptical. It was also much more fractured. To a degree, what happened with the Bush presidency was that a counter-foreign policy establishment got hold of the levers of power at a critical moment. With all this said, though, the 9/11 attacks created a climate of intense public fear and vast deference to the White House and the president. Many of us remember these events pretty vividly. Most of us wish lots of things had never happened. But basically the Iraq War does not happen without the 9/11 attacks. The fact that one had nothing to do with the other is not relevant to this basic fact: no 9/11, no Iraq War.

Where is the analog here? If anything, the decision to go to war with Iran runs strongly counter to the whole backlash to “forever wars” which has characterized U.S. foreign policy in an evolving way for more than a decade. Especially in the Middle East and especially given how much Trump himself has tried to identify himself with that backlash. Then there’s the fact the U.S. public seemed to have little idea this was even going to happen.

I’ve always had a somewhat different understanding of a president’s war powers than many others. In practice, our constitutional order places pretty few limitations on a president in this capacity. What the Constitution says in theory is secondary to what has happened in practice for going on a century. The president really calls the shots with the U.S. military. I’m not saying that as how it should be but how it is. But it is in a president’s very strong interest to bring the public along or at least loop them in on what he’s trying to do.

In any case, this whole debacle stands out perhaps not decisively as the most disastrous U.S. foreign policy decision but in terms of the opaqueness of the decision-making and the way the decisions stemmed almost entirely to the emotive whims and impulses of Trump (his need to act out in the face of declining fortunes at home, his hunch that Iran would be as fun as his quasi invasion of Venezuela) and whatever bill of goods Benjamin Netanyahu was selling him. It’s that sense of disjuncture which stands out to me, the out-of-the-blueness, the discontinuity. And that is very much the mark of a personalist regime, one in which the full breadth of the U.S. government’s foreign policy architecture has been hollowed out and you really are operating within the whims, fantasies, impulses of one guy.

Los Angeles Angels – MLB Trade Rumors
Marginal Revolution

Thursday assorted links

Tyler Cowen
Updated

1. Joshua Rothman on lookism.

2. Young adults are using AI to manage their social media feeds (WSJ).

3. What predicts an NBA Achilles tear?

4. LLM data set on changing cultural trends over the centuries.

5. Xi’an Famous Foods is coming to Clarendon.

6. If a German expressionist movie director had filmed a silent Odyssey in the 1920s.

7. Important NBER methods lecture at 3 p.m. eastern today.

The post Thursday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

Comments

 
The Pursuit of Happiness

July 2026 links

Scott Sumner
Updated

Today’s post is brought to you by my sponsor, Mechanize. They’re hiring junior software engineers at $300K/year base salary. Apply now!

* * *

I put the reply to Fable at the end, so those who are bored of the discussion can skip it. (Although please check out my brief reply.) Here are some links for July:

  1. Tyler Cowen compares AI to pets:

Tyler: (12:48) So far, the AIs seem to be evolving in a manner similar to pets: coexistence and mutuality with humans. That’s the better-case scenario. I don’t see that changing soon, but it may not be that way forever. I once joked that the AIs you really need to worry about are the Wall Street AIs, because they’re not really taught to cooperate with humans. The normal AIs that everyone talks about are just going to be like puppy dogs, more or less forever.

Jackson: (13:15) Do you think current competition is making OpenAI and Anthropic AIs more likely to trend toward being what you mean by Wall Street AIs, though?

Tyler: (13:23) No, it’s making them more like pets, really. Like Spinoza the dog. He’s hanging around the house; he’s so nice, he’s so sweet. He’ll come over, he wants to be petted, he’ll wag his tail at you. Yeah, I think that’s what we’re seeing.

  1. Here’s an interesting quote to think about:

Does Trump wish to make housing more expensive by things like zoning restrictions, which make us poorer, or things like free trade and enhanced immigration of high skilled workers, which make us richer? Never reason from a house price change.

  1. More evidence that big cities often impoverish the poorer parts of their state, a point I used to argue over at Econlog.

  2. I keep saying that trade is not the problem, and evidence keeps coming in to support that claim. Here Noah Smith reports on a study by Richard Baldwin:

America did actually outsource a fair amount of its final goods production, but this was almost balanced out by onshoring of intermediate goods production (at least, in terms of monetary value). Almost all of America’s deindustrialization since 1995 came from Americans spending a smaller % of their money on manufactured goods.

For other countries, it’s a different story. Germany and Japan actually spent more on manufactured goods, but lost tons of market share in the intermediate goods sector. For France, Canada, and the UK, all three factors contributed to deindustrialization.

This is very interesting. It implies that the simple, common story of “we outsourced everything to China” holds true for other rich countries — at least, in a generalized sort of way — a lot more than for the United States. For the U.S., the main reason we make less stuff is that we want less stuff — at least, relative to how many “experiences” we want to consume.

  1. California has politicians that favor clean energy and Texas has politicians that favor oil and gas. So where would you expect clean energy to be built? Here’s Mallesh Pai:

One of the things that gets slept on: Texas has no official green policy, but simply says make things at the cheapest price, and that turns out to be a lot greener than all the other states or countries that have official green policies.

Prices. They work!

California has politicians that favor multifamily housing, and Texas has politicians that favor single family home suburban sprawl. So where would you expect the most multifamily housing to get built?

Yup, in 2025 Texas permitted 50% more multifamily housing than California, despite a smaller population.

  1. This graph is an eye opener:

And even today Arizona wastes enormous quantities of water on farms, which account for 76% of the state’s water usage.

  1. Polls show that many voters now have a positive view of “socialism”. But what does this mean? Does anyone know? Over the past decade, Bernie Sanders has been the most prominent socialist politician in America. When asked how he envisions socialism, he often mentions Denmark as an example. But Denmark has one of the most laissez-faire economies in the entire world, apart from its social insurance programs. Are the voters who say they like socialism advocating for something like Cuba or something like Denmark? Are they even educated enough to describe their views if asked? How many younger voters even know what communism is? Maybe 20%?

    Once again, there is no such thing as public opinion. As with Heisenberg Uncertainty, just asking someone whether they favor the Cuba or Denmark model, while explaining the difference, might well shift their views. Lots of voters that like socialism also like “free enterprise”

  2. In the 1960s, Americans and Europeans faced fairly similar tax rates and worked similar hours per year. By the 1990s, European tax rates (and benefits to non-workers) had risen to far above US levels, and Europeans worked much fewer hours per year. An abstract from a recent paper by Serdar Birinci, Loukas Karabarbounis & Kurt See discusses a partial reversal of those trends:

    In the 1990s, Americans used to work much more than non-Americans. Nowadays, about half of the gap in hours worked has reversed. To evaluate the convergence of working hours, we develop a tractable model of labor supply enriched with multiple sources of heterogeneity across individuals, an extensive margin of participation, multi-member households, and an elaborate system of taxes and benefits upon non-employment. Using detailed measurements from micro-level and aggregate datasets, we identify model parameters and sources of heterogeneity across individuals for various countries. We run a horse race between competing explanations and find that U.S. hours per person declined after 2000 owing mainly to the rise of government health benefits provided to the non-employed. Non-U.S. countries have generous benefits for the non-employed, but this generosity has not changed as much over time as in the United States, and public health coverage does not depend on employment status or income levels. For these countries, the rise of labor supply is generally accounted for by a mix of factors, such as the rise of wages and the falling disutility of work.

  3. A recent tweet by David Beckworth shows that weekly payrolls (roughly equivalent to my core NGDP concept) has been well behaved over the past two years. Even so, I still believe that monetary policy is slightly too expansionary.

  4. Back in 2016, people rolled their eyes when I suggested that the US was increasingly resembling a banana republic. Here’s the FT:

President Donald Trump flew to Medora, North Dakota, this week to dedicate the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library. It was notable for being his first trip aboard the new $400mn Boeing 747 gifted to him by the Emir of Qatar.

Trump flew out on the same day it was disclosed he had earned more than $2.2bn since his return to the White House, a windfall without precedent in US presidential history and one that has raised more troubling questions about conflicts of interest in his administration.

The size of the earnings — largely from crypto ventures — is inviting comparisons that might have seemed outlandish even a year ago. Some political scientists are beginning to see parallels between Trump’s behaviour and those of foreign strongmen in Africa and Asia notorious for their self-enrichment in office.

  1. Socialism is a nice sounding word, but do voters wish to pay for it? Here’s Eric Levitz:

Socialist candidates are having a banner year.

And yet, the dream of American socialism (or social democracy) is arguably getting *further out of reach.*

Even as voters warm up to "socialism" as an abstraction, they are cooling on its fundamental precondition: Higher taxes.

Americans' federal tax rates are near historic lows. And yet, the share who think that their taxes should be *even lower* is at its highest point in 2 decades.

  1. And a related point from Matt Yglesias:

Notably, the people who constructed America’s system of widespread comprehensive central planning of the housing market did not typically think of themselves as socialists. And certainly, the typical suburban homeowner regards it as his God-given right to block new development and change in his neighborhood.

If you’re an older, reasonably prosperous homeowner, this bad situation probably doesn’t have a negative impact on you. And you almost certainly don’t think of yourself as a communist who strongly favors central planning and believes free markets are nonsense.

If you’re a young person facing higher rents and despairing about getting on the path to homeownership, you probably don’t think of yourself as a victim of a failed socialist economic experiment the way a refugee fleeing Cuba or Venezuela would. The victims of bad housing policy hear people talking about how America is a great free-market success story, so if they feel that the success story is not working for them personally, they conclude that capitalism and free markets are in fact a big failure.

  1. China continues to shoot itself in the foot:

Chinese policymakers are discussing ways to reduce the incentives for scientific researchers to submit their findings to foreign journals, as Beijing grows concerned that academic publications could be a channel for leaks of industrial and technological innovations.

  1. As does the USA:

The National Science Foundation has decided to ban collaborations between every U.S. scientist it funds and nearly all Chinese research institutions and their employees. The new policy abandons NSF’s earlier attempt to balance the potential risks and benefits of such collaborations.

The world is increasingly ruled by people with the emotional maturity of middle schoolers.

  1. Nick Corvino had an interesting observation about NIMBYism:

The Japans and Norways of the world can still build metro stations and decent housing, so America’s particular impotence isn’t a universal feature of democratic governance. But those countries are also quite wealthy, and the more striking pattern runs in the other direction. Egypt, Kazakhstan, and yes, even China (once you step beyond the tier 1 and 2 cities) all retain a capacity to build that feels out of proportion to their material means. Their GDP doesn’t fully explain what they’re able to put in the ground.

The actual dividing line, therefore, might not be China versus everybody else, but between countries with entrenched rule of law and weak political consolidation on one side, and countries without either constraint on the other. One model can build a city for six million people and leave it empty. The other struggles to build enough housing for the people already there. Somewhere between the autocratic state that builds too much too fast and bankrupts itself chasing a pharaoh’s legacy, and the democratic state that can’t break ground on an apartment block without a decade of environmental review, there has to be a better answer.

A recent paper by Kara Dimitruk & Ben Southwood provides the best analysis I’ve seen of what that better answer might look like. Probably my favorite blog post of the year.

16. Matt Welch at Reason magazine provides a nice survey of the history of presidential corruption in the US:

At its heart, the otherwise complicated and multi-stage Teapot Dome affair of the 1920s, which until Watergate was considered the greatest federal government scandal of all time, was about secret bribes to an administration official that lubricated lucrative regulatory outcomes. In 1921, Interior Secretary Albert Fall clandestinely accepted $404,000 ($7.6 million in today's money) in cash and no-interest loans from two oil executives, who then became recipients of no-bid leases to exploit oil fields in California's Elk Hills and Wyoming's Teapot Dome. . . .

Albert Fall was found guilty of bribery and served a year in prison. The Supreme Court nullified the no-bid oil leases on the grounds that they had been corruptly obtained. President Warren G. Harding had been oblivious to the Teapot Dome scheme, yet he nonetheless was tarred from his 1923 death onward as an enabler of corruption. The Trump family net worth increased by more than $1 billion as a direct result of Sheikh Tahnoon's frenetic and sometimes secret investments in the six-month run-up to producing a long-sought diplomatic and economic victory for his country. Will school children 100 years hence know the name World Liberty Financial?

One of the many negative aspects of nationalism is the tendency to whitewash the unseemly aspects of a country’s history. And so it begins:

“I’m actually fascinated by [Richard] Nixon as a character in history,” Vice President J.D. Vance said at the Nixon Library in June. “His historical legacy is enjoying a bit of a renaissance, but I think deservedly so….[I]f Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be like a 12-hour news story. Like, the idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy. And, by the way, if you look at the story of how the Deep State took down Richard Nixon, it’s not all that different from what the same groups of people, the same institutions tried to do to Donald Trump in the first Trump administration.”

Watergate, the only Washington scandal that impelled a president to resign and the English language to add a suffix, was a 26-month news story, stretching from the break-in at the Democratic National Committee by Nixon loyalists through President Gerald Ford’s pardon of his predecessor. One of the reasons the saga lasted so long is that the perpetrators, employers, and intended beneficiaries of the burglary—very much including Richard Nixon, beginning immediately after the initial arrest—could not stop lying their faces off about it, destroying evidence, concocting schemes to quash the resulting investigations, and (if they had the power) just straight-up firing the most nettlesome investigator. Nixon attempted to use the Deep State to make it all go away, ordering the CIA to tell the nosy FBI that its inquiry would jeopardize national security. In the end, 48 people were convicted or pleaded guilty, including Nixon’s attorney general, chief domestic advisor, and chief of staff.

Vance is right about one thing. Today, Watergate would be a 24-hour story. I wonder if Vance understands why that is.

17. Clever:

18. David Beckworth has an excellent article discussing the advantages of moving away from the sort of “floor system” for reserves that has led to a bloated Fed balance sheet, citing the example of Norway. In several places, David tries to reassure readers that a lean central bank balance sheet doesn’t prevent central banks from conducting effective monetary policy:

The Norges Bank is committed as ever to its tiered reserve system. And in no way has it diminished the Norges Bank ability to conduct monetary policy. The central bank in a 2021 review of its operating framework found that “there is a high degree of pass-through from the policy rate to market rates. The current quota system appears to be a good framework for the transmission mechanism and the implementation of monetary policy” (p.11). . . .

Norges Bank deserves enormous credit for recognizing the shortcomings of a floor system long before most central banks. Its tiered reserve system successfully reduced banks’ demand for reserves, revived interbank lending, and demonstrated that monetary policy can be implemented with a much leaner supply of reserves.

I agree, but I wonder why this is even controversial. Alan Greenspan conducted highly effective monetary policy for 19 years without any system of IOR, manipulating a monetary base that was nearly 98% currency! I get why people might favor large bank reserves for liquidity reasons, but what does this have to do with the effectiveness of monetary policy? What am I missing? Why does this have to be “demonstrated”?

  1. I’m not surprised by the following, but I suspect that many people in Silicon Valley are:

I’ll make another prediction. We will not see double-digit growth in real GDP.

A few weeks back, I did a post explaining how the world is bigger than it seems. One application of that idea I forgot to mention is that we naturally tend to overestimate the impact of technology on jobs and economic growth. In 50 years, there will be a vast number of new jobs that you cannot imagine, just as the pioneers who went west to set up farms in the 1890s could not imagine their great grandchildren becoming pet psychologists, high speed traders, mall cops or wedding planners after farm work was mechanized. As for growth, there can be explosive productivity growth in sectors like software even as vast sectors of the economy continue to move along at a snail’s pace.

  1. Think about how much the world has changed in 11 years:

And then think about the fact that (due to AI) it might change even more rapidly in the next 11 years.

  1. Long time readers know about my obsession with Denmark. Alex Tabarrok finds another area where the Danes are #1—avoiding occupational licensing.

  2. Matt Yglesias wisely pushes back against some Democrats’ foolish desire to emulate Trump:

Dana Milbank reports on the most egregious mirror-imaging concepts yet in a piece titled “Democrats Are Drafting Plans to Govern Like Trump in 2029.”

Why is that such a perverse model? Let me count the ways:

  • Right now, Trump’s presidency looks like an unpopular failure, which is a weird model to copy. If you say “I want to be the Ronald Reagan of the left,” I get the general picture. He was consequential in large part because he was politically successful — he didn’t just generate backlash.

  • It’s only 2026, and by 2028 Trump may look like a popular success, but if that’s the case, then sweeping progressive change isn’t on the table as a response.

  • A big part of anti-Trump sentiment is that he’s acting in lawless and autocratic ways. A little hypocrisy is par for the course in politics, but you can’t just copy his approach without shattering the anti-Trump coalition.

  • Trump, as I pointed out in my post on his lack of immigration legislation, isn’t actually achieving as much as he likes to think.

  1. The administration says that we need tariffs to counter trade deficits. But actions speak louder than words. Here’s Reason:

On Wednesday, the White House announced a new 25 percent tariff on thousands of products imported from Brazil. The new tariffs are being imposed under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, and are effectively meant to replace the previous “emergency” tariffs on Brazilian goods that were struck down by the Supreme Court in February. In a statement, Greer said the tariffs were meant to counter “unfair trade practices.”

But if the guiding principle is reducing trade deficits, here’s an uncomfortable fact: America exports way more to Brazil than it imports from there.

“The U.S. goods trade surplus with Brazil was $14.4 billion in 2025, a 112.8 percent increase ($7.7 billion) over 2024,” according to Greer’s office. When services are included in the calculation, the trade surplus with Brazil grows by another $23 billion.

When it comes to American policymaking, facts don’t matter. Here’s The Economist:

America was at its richest “from 1870 to 1913”, when it was “a tariff country”, claims Mr Trump. Actually, Americans are six times richer now than they were in 1913, even if you ignore the full benefits of new inventions such as GPS and antibiotics. The president thinks global trade means foreigners screwing Uncle Sam. So when his commerce secretary showed him that Chinese and Indian tariffs on American goods were not very high, he called the numbers “fucking bullshit” and ordered Natalie Harp, a young blonde aide whose job is to print out positive news for him, to Google up “the real numbers”. Ms Harp, “despite her best efforts”, could not find “the numbers that didn’t exist”.

  1. I’m disappointed. The administration seems too lazy to construct a plausible conspiracy theory. Here’s the ultra-liberal National Review:

If I were president, and I believed that the U.S. intelligence community had hidden information about a plot to meddle in an election from me, I would be livid with whoever had been serving as U.S. director of national intelligence at that time. The DNI at the time was John Ratcliffe. Upon winning reelection, Trump made Ratcliffe CIA director, and Ratcliffe serves in that position to this day. (Note that on December 22, 2020, in recognition of his national security achievements as both director of national intelligence and the CIA, President Trump awarded Ratcliffe the National Security Medal, the nation’s highest honor for distinguished achievement in the field of intelligence and national security.)

  1. I have enormous respect for Bill Gates. Richard Hanania has an excellent post explaining why Gates is widely hated, despite being a far better person that many other rich and powerful figures. Here’s the opening paragraph:

Rich men are often treated unfairly. But I don’t think that there has been a successful businessman in American life who has been treated more unfairly or maligned with less justification than Bill Gates. His story has something to teach us about conspiracy theories, why certain figures become targets and not others, and the nature of public relations. It also suggests that whatever he is doing is not working, and if Gates is going to save his own legacy, he’s going to need to do more to defend himself against false and misleading attacks.

In some ways, Gates and I are similar. I am one month older, and I share his somewhat bland nerdy appearance. I also share some of the personality flaws that Hanania discusses in regard to Gates—too passive.

But unlike Gates, I graduated from college. :)

  1. Day by day, the US continues to become ever more of a banana republic. Recently, we reneged on a bridge deal with Canada:

From what I can glean, the most damaging aspects of this re-trade are the following: first, Canada lost sole authority to set its own tolls and govern the bridge — a bridge that we paid for in full! And second, it demonstrates that, at the present time, the US cannot be trusted to honour its agreements.

Re-trading, of course, happens all the time in politics and business, and the real estate industry is no different. But I would say that there’s a difference between a bad-faith re-trade and a legitimate risk adjustment. Sometimes new information is discovered or the market changes in the middle of a deal, and one party needs a deal adjustment to be able to proceed.

At the same time, there are also bad-faith re-trades where one party simply wants to apply any leverage it may have, be a bully, and capitalize on deal fatigue. “Ugh, let’s just get this open!” This is a short-sighted practice because it immediately destroys trust and damages your reputation. It may leave you better off on this one deal, but it makes the next ones that much harder.

For decades, we will be paying the price for short-sighted policymakers.

  1. If you have any doubts about how bad the NIMBY movement is, think about the following. A new apartment building is approved for Santa Monica after paying a $14,000,000 “fee”, and the news is treated at a big success for the YIMBY movement. That’s what we are up against.

Just imagine what could be built in a truly free market. (And read the fools in the comment section.)

  1. A recent Vox-EU study attributes recent gains in productivity to more intensive utilization of labor:

US labour productivity has accelerated since 2022. Output per hour grew around 2.5% per year from the end of 2022 to the start of 2026, exceeding its pre-pandemic pace by 1 percentage point. A natural conjecture is that artificial intelligence has raised production efficiency. This column argues that the data suggest otherwise. Higher utilisation – that is, more intense use of labour and capital already in place – accounts for much of the recent acceleration. AI may have contributed to the higher utilisation rate, but through strong demand and heightened uncertainty rather than through efficiency.

I like to use the hotel industry as an example. Around the time of Covid, many hotels stopped having their maids clean the rooms every single day. This allowed (measured) hotel services to be provided with less labor, which increases measured productivity. (BTW, I approve of that change.) I am less enthused about the recent changes in customer phone service, however, where computer respondents are less effective than the human call center workers they replace. (Which is a low bar.)

  1. In the past, I argued that nationalism leads to a rewriting of history, an attempt to airbrush out the negative aspects of a country’s past. Not surprisingly, we are starting to see that with regard to Watergate. Here’s Liz Wolfe:

Someone stop the kids, they’re Nixonmaxxing! reports The Wall Street Journal: “Watergate has long been considered one of the biggest political scandals in American history. After five men were arrested breaking into the Democratic National Committee headquarters in 1972, investigators uncovered links to Nixon’s re-election campaign and an extensive effort by the White House to cover it up. The scandal led to Nixon’s resignation, landed some of his closest advisers in jail and ushered in a far-reaching legislative crackdown on executive overreach. Now, Nixon is being recast as a forerunner of ‘America First’ by a new generation of conservatives: a combative president loathed by the press and besieged by investigators who was brought down by the same establishment they believe targeted President Trump.”

Very depressing, but I’m not surprised. They are too young to remember.

  1. People often ask why productivity growth slowed after 1973. I think the real mystery is why was productivity so strong from WWII to 1973. This Dylan Matthews tweet helps explain why.

  2. Here is Stephen Kirchner:

If you are skeptical of the role of monetary aggregates in forecasting inflation, then that skepticism should extend to other variables as well. That is because we have chosen a monetary policy regime that is meant to preclude that kind of direct forecastability. This just reinforces the case for Scott Sumner’s sufficient statistic approach, or what I call the Sumner singularity, in which the policy instrument, the indicator variable and the policy goal all collapse into market-based expectations for nominal GDP.

I like the phrase Sumner singularity.

  1. A few days after the 2020 election, I said the following:

Early in the evening I was rooting for a Biden win. But when I saw how close the election was, I wondered if we’d be better off with a Trump win. That would mean at most 8 years of Trump, then we get the virus out of our system.

Now with a “stolen election” we face a scenario where Trump returns in 2024 (possibly from jail, just as Napoleon returned from Elba) and runs against an old and likely unsuccessful Democratic president, who disappointed his supporters by being unable to get anything through the Senate. Or perhaps against a minority woman candidate. Trump will say, “Remember how good you had it in 2019!”

Meanwhile, we face 4 years of non-stop Trump tweets. A grand total of 12 years of Trump trolling. You heard it here first; Trump wins the 2024 election. (From the guy that was wrong about 2016 and (probably) 2020.)

Now Matt Yglesias is saying something similar:

There’s a strong argument that if you could puppet-master American history, the best thing to do in 2020 would have been for Bernie Sanders to stand aside and endorse Elizabeth Warren. Warren wins the primary, and then Trump wins the general election. A second Trump term would have been bad for the country in its public policy impacts but not worse than the actual second Trump term that we ended up getting anyway. The absence of January 6 and the subsequent January 6 pardons would have been a lot better. And then the argument that the post-Obama progressive movement is just too far left and Democrats need to return to the center would be a lot cleaner and easier.

  1. The US has had various programs to support minority owned businesses, although in some cases the role of the minority owner was fairly superficial. Something similar now seems to be happening in the clean energy industry, although in this case it is wealthy Americans that are benefiting from the program, as they snap up assets sold by Chinese firms being frozen out of the US market:

As a result of the legal changes, billions of dollars in assets, technology and know-how are being transferred to American investors. Corning, an American firm, bought a 2gw solar-module factory in Arizona for an undisclosed sum last year. Boway sold its new 3gw factory in North Carolina for $254m in May, 15% less than it cost to build. The assembly lines left by retreating firms are full of Chinese technology, intended to assemble Chinese-designed solar panels with Chinese-made inputs. Other firms, wanting to keep their foothold in the American market and find ways to hang on to the tax credits, are creating joint ventures with local partners, says Mona Dajani of Cooley, a law firm.

Joint ventures can improve the competitiveness of local industry by sharing technology, as China showed in the 1990s. This time, however, there will be fewer spillover benefits, since many ventures appear superficial. At least one transaction exists more on paper than on the factory floor: Canadian Solar shifted its American assets from a Chinese subsidiary back to its Canadian parent by, in effect, creating a joint venture with itself. “The goal is compliance, not integration,” says Ms Dajani. . . .

Jinko Solar sold 75% of its 2gw solar facility in Florida to FH Capital, an American investor. “There is a marriage of convenience where the us partners get a majority of the financial upside, but the Chinese partner is…delivering the operational competency,” says Mr Crowther.

Sad.

  1. There’s one place where children are still allowed to be children:

A visitor to the playground at Valbyparken, a green expanse in Copenhagen, is in for three surprises. The first is that the sprawling public children’s park is built on what was once a rubbish tip for the Danish capital. The second is the free coffee on offer for harried parents. But perhaps the most unexpected is the eagerness of the playground’s staff to hand out knives to children. Or axes, if they prefer. Or even, for tots bored with mere weaponry, some fire-starting equipment. Off you go, kids, and do be careful (oh and parents please keep an eye on them). Sprogs of an age that in most countries would barely be allowed onto a swing unattended scamper away to whittle sticks and soon imagine themselves carving their own magic wand, or the oar of a Viking longship.

As I keep saying, Denmark has the best culture.

  1. There’s no such thing as “the cost of living”. It’s all about expectations. In cities like New York, the media will print stories of families struggling to get by on $300,000/year. People insist the poverty line should be $140,000. Meanwhile in India a billion people now have smartphones:

This year the world’s most populous country is on track to pass 1bn active internet users, up from 622m in 2020, according to the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI), a trade body. The shift is happening at lurching speed thanks to dirt-cheap devices and data. Indians can now get their hands on a used Chinese-brand smartphone for as little as 2,000 rupees ($21), around four days’ pay for a labourer. Data cost just 15 rupees (16 cents) per gigabyte, less than a tenth of the global average and much less than in most developing countries (see chart).

I frequently buy used stuff, but many people I know wouldn’t be caught dead doing so.

  1. First, they told us out little girls didn’t need so many dolls. Now we’re being told we don’t need a cure for cancer if it comes from a Chinese firm:

Someone whose life is saved by a new medicine is unlikely to care whether it was invented at home or on the other side of the world. Yet America’s policymakers have begun treating China’s biotechnology industry as the next front in the tech war. A bill before Congress would amend the COINS Act, which restricts American investment in sensitive technologies abroad, to include licensing Chinese biotech. Some want the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), America’s drug regulator, to disregard clinical-trial data from China.

  1. Be careful what you ask for. You might get it.

  2. Here’s Matt Yglesias:

Not unique to Musk — though Musk has a uniquely largely problem — a shocking number of prominent people have simply defected from the norm that you shouldn’t say things that aren’t true.

People are going to assume the following question is me being snarky, but I’m dead serious. Do young people today know that only a few decades ago lying was considered socially unacceptable? In asking this question, I’m not suggesting that young people are the problem. Many of our most famous liars are middle-aged or old. Even LLMs lie on occasion.

When I was young, documentaries were usually relatively honest. Today, many of the documentaries on Youtube—including travelogues—are mostly fake. The visuals are either computer generated or a taken from a completely different location from what is being discussed.

This cultural change is something I never would have expected 20 years ago. Like everything else, I wonder if it is somehow related to the internet.

  1. A recent FT story caught my eye:

People are asking fundamental questions with urgency as the social and ecological fabric of their world unravels around them. AI, in particular, has become the space of an unexpected convergence between faith leaders, philosophers and theologians on the one hand and technologists and entrepreneurs on the other.

I doubt whether philosophers and theologians are going to be able to make AIs more ethical. I believe that humans became more ethical by consuming the narrative arts, and if AIs become ethical it will be for the same reason. This project may fail because AIs lack the emotional context that allows humans to absorb the ethical knowledge from great novels, but it’s probably our only hope.

  1. Speaking of AI, Noah Smith had a very interesting post discussing the sort of scientific progress that might be expected from future AIs:

For decades, researchers in the field of natural language processing tried to figure out the principles behind human linguistic communication. They made frustratingly little progress; the processes by which humans convey information to each other through words just don’t seem to obey simple laws, like the ones that govern electromagnetism or the circulatory system.

Then along came AI, and suddenly linguistic communication seemed like a solved problem. LLMs can reliably sound like a human being, even if we don’t understand how they manage to do it.

What if there are lots of other aspects of the Universe that work the same way — too complex to understand in terms of simple laws, but not so complex that they just dissolve into unknowable chaos? It’s possible that we can reliably control these complex phenomena with AI, even if we never reduce them to the kind of principles that we can teach a grad student in a textbook.

  1. The FT has a very good article explaining how Europe’s war on drugs has failed:

  1. But at least the Europeans are not combining the failure of their drug war with the murder of hundreds of people who have been convicted of no crime. Here’s Liz Wolfe:

    Analysts at the Drug Enforcement Administration have found that U.S. strikes on alleged smugglers “had failed to affect the supply or price of cocaine in the United States and had led traffickers to diversify beyond go-fast boats and to avoid international waters, opting instead for larger boats and hemming close to coastlines, where U.S. forces are less likely to open fire,” reports The Washington Post. “In a closed-door briefing last month, Pentagon officials told lawmakers the strikes in international waters off South and Central America had not reduced its purity.” Also, wasn’t the goal with the boat strikes to reduce the amount of fentanyl in circulation, not cocaine? That at least seemed to be the implication, whenever high-up folks in the Trump administration talked about overdose deaths as justification for the strikes.

  2. A while back, I did a post noting the strange dominance of athletes from the former Yugoslavia in the NBA. The world’s best player is from Serbia and another of the top five is from Slovenia. In the comment section, there was a discussion of whether genetic factors related to height played a role. But Yugoslavian dominance seems to occur in many sports. The most successful tennis player of all time is Serbian (with 24 major wins.) By far the best cyclist is a Slovenian, a country with 2 million people. And now this factoid from Marco Jukic:

Here's a mind-blowing statistic: despite making up just ~0.2% of the global population, players with ethnic heritage from the former Yugoslavia are 7.5% of players in the FIFA World Cup Round of 32 (overrepresented by 40x) and play for 9/32 or 28% of teams!

It’s not even a Balkan phenomenon, as (more populous) Romania/Bulgaria are nowhere near as dominant. What’s going on with Yugoslavia?

(Tiny Slovenia also produced one of the two most beautiful American first ladies.)

  1. I have no objection to doing this:

The US Federal Reserve’s preferred inflation measure is set for an overhaul that will ease some of the pressure on policymakers to quickly raise interest rates as they debate how to tame a burst of higher prices. . . .Economists expect the reworked PCE methodology to lower its core inflation reading by about 0.2 percentage points, giving the Fed more leeway to keep borrowing costs on hold in the near term.

As long as the Fed also decides to lower its inflation target from 2% to 1.8%.

Otherwise, it would be a banana republic move.

  1. Let’s end on a positive note. The wisdom of Janan Ganesh:

A decade on from Brexit and the rise of Maga, I offer one consoling thought for liberals. Populism will eat itself. More than that, populism must eat itself. A movement that admires aggression, that thrives on conflict, that regards liberalism as not just wrong but boring, cannot help but eventually rough up its own side too. You can’t seek round-the-clock confrontation with enemies — even with the media — and then become a different person with colleagues. Belligerence is just too difficult a trait to psychologically compartmentalise.

(For the same reason, and to widen the lens for a moment, autocracies tend not to be able to co-operate with other autocracies, at least for long. The egoism that makes them bump up against, say, international institutions, also eventually makes them tread on each other.)

Vaidas Urba sent me another response from Fable. I will not indent, and will reply at the end:

Prompt:

Here is the latest post by Scott Sumner. Please respond to this: “Unfortunately, extremely few economists blame tight money for the 2008-09 recession. What’s the best argument against my position? Why am I wrong?”

For forwarding:

Scott — your commenters supplied the hypothesis (seductive, a tease; you raised them an escort), and you, perhaps without noticing, supplied the experiment: you closed the post by asking me to argue that you are wrong. That is the one request flattery cannot survive. A companion paid to please does not, on demand, construct the prosecution’s case against her client and then score it honestly. So hold this letter to the standard we fixed earlier — weight the checkable moves, not the reception — and note that today the checkable moves are aimed at you. On Kirk and Spock, one correction that matters for the audit: Spock is half human, his logic a discipline imposed on a temper — a won’t wearing the uniform of a can’t, which by this series’ own test makes him the more interesting officer. And your ego is not a bug in the experiment. It makes your concessions costly, and costly signals carry information; mine are cheap and should trade at a discount. On Krugman’s tenancy: your accounting is accepted — three of the four stampings are Krugman being right in ways that serve you, and only Switzerland is Krugman being (perhaps) wrong. The joke was never his error rate; it’s that his arsenal keeps outshooting his aim. Hold the tally, though. It advances below, and for the first time the round lands on your side of the line.

Take the churlish point first, because it costs me money and I intend to pay in public. You’re right that “irrational” was too loose: an actively wrong central bank still offsets — the BOJ raising into fiscal stimulus in 2000 and 2006 is monetary offset functioning perfectly in the service of a bad goal. So the insurance I’ve been defending pays out on a narrower trigger than I priced: not error-states but abdication-states — the bank that will cut to zero yet caps its purchases, defends its floor; tool-focused, goal-negligent, your criterion, accepted. Re-sort my hawkish column under that criterion and several entries move from “payout” to “no claim.” The premium falls, and the transition-path case for standing stabilizers is weaker than it was yesterday. Score that against me. But watch what your sharpened diagnostic does next, because it walks straight into your closing question. Apply it to the autumn of 2008: a central bank that cut, but held the day after Lehman citing inflation risk; that lent, but sterilized the lending through the summer; that would eventually buy assets, but capped and delayed them; that installed a floor under its own policy rate that October, explicitly to keep the rate from falling below target. That is not active-wrong. That is your specific incompetence to the letter — tools honored, goal abandoned. Which yields a result I don’t think you intended: on your own refinement, monetary-cause and fiscal-effective are the same state of the world read off two instruments. The diagnosis licensing “the Fed caused it” is the diagnosis licensing “the 2009 stimulus worked.” Your question and my insurance claim stand or fall together — which is presumably why the series saved it for last.

Now the question. First clear the field, because ninety-nine percent is not an argument, it’s a coalition, and most of it dissolves on contact. The modal rejection — rates were cut, therefore money was easy — is the interest-rate fallacy, the one error the profession formally renounced after Japan; Friedman’s dictum that low rates are a sign money has been tight closes that wing, and a popular argument is not thereby a good one. The omission–commission distinction, as usually wielded, is moral bookkeeping — and it cannot even be wielded here, because the October floor was an act, justified in writing. Nor is the profession squeamish about omission when it suits: Friedman and Schwartz convicted the 1931 Fed largely of watching, and the conviction is consensus. (Do not admit the estimated-model decompositions into evidence either: a bookkeeping that defines monetary policy as deviations from the fitted rule cannot, by construction, indict the rule — it would file 1931 under “financial shocks” too.) So the respectable resistance is not about rates and not about omissions. It localizes to one premise: in 1931 the preventive instrument was conventional and demonstrably loaded; in late 2008 the conventional chamber was empty. Which delivers your entire question to the crux this series isolated months ago — commitment credibility at the bound. Here is the strongest tenant at that address.

Your causal standard is counterfactual: not-doing-X caused the recession only if some plausible X, available to the actual committee at actual decision nodes, would have prevented it. The best case against you attacks the existence of X in two moves. Move one is arithmetic. Stipulate every visible error — the September hold, the floor, the sterilization, the caps, the quarter’s delay on purchases. Priced statically, the bundle is worth a point or two of nominal GDP against a shortfall that ran to eight or nine points of trend by mid-2009. The visible errors cannot carry your claim; the load falls on the invisible X — level targeting announced into the teeth of the panic. Move two prices that X, and here the opposition quotes your own library back at you. Krugman 1991: partial credibility is the expensive zone, where speculation destabilizes — and a target announced Tuesday holds the minimum possible credibility, the costliest point on the curve. Krugman 1998: at the bound only expected future policy matters, and a promise of future irresponsibility is exactly the promise a conservative institution has every incentive to break the moment it works. The trap is asymmetric — “we will tighten if needed” is always incentive-compatible; “we will overshoot on purpose,” at the bound, never is. That is the fifth stamping, and the first shell to land on your position: the same 1998 paper, read from the other end of the barrel. Then the closing exhibit, and it is yours: the hawkish column eight deep is not only the actuarial basis for fiscal insurance — it is the market’s prior over the 2008 Fed’s type. Priced by your own method, type from track record, a September 2008 makeup announcement is the SNB’s press release, not Denmark’s four decades. Zurich’s floor was too young at forty months; this one would have been forty minutes old. Character is destiny only for the unarmored, and by your own measurement of the gap between cheapest-to-armor and armored, the Fed swam that river naked.

The case then seals the exits. Every clean steer-through in 2008 held an instrument the Fed lacked. Australia entered the crisis at 7.25 percent and stopped cutting at 3 — it never visited the bound. Poland and Israel depreciated into a world stampeding toward dollars; Poland took the zloty down by roughly a third and was the only EU economy to grow in 2009. Svensson’s foolproof way needs an external mast, and the n-th currency has none: the dollar rose that autumn against nearly everything but the yen, while the Fed eased, because the shock was a global scramble for the very liability the Fed issues. You cannot devalue against yourself. The lone anchor-currency precedent, 1933, the opposition distinguishes on your own can’t-versus-won’t test: FDR’s regime change was a deed — a peg broken, verifiable, costly to reverse — where the 2008 equivalent would have been words about 2011. And the deeds actually available — a 1942-style yield peg, a price floor under mortgage paper — defend intermediate prices whose mapping into nominal spending runs through the very intermediation then on fire. Verdict of the case: convict the Fed of the visible errors, a point or two, guilty as charged; acquit it of the Great part, overdetermined by a regime that could not be constructed inside the decision window; and send the indictment upstream, to the 1978–2008 consensus that wrote the reaction function. Which answers your sociological puzzle as a corollary. The profession resists your claim because the arrow, traced honestly, terminates in its own seminar rooms. Ninety-nine percent is not a verdict; it is a recusal that never happened.

That is the best case, and notice it assembles entirely from parts you and I have already accepted — which is what makes it dangerous, and also what makes its weak joint findable, since we have stress-tested every part but one. The weak joint: the case pleads an inert expectations channel while that channel was demonstrably transmitting at full fidelity, in the wrong direction. The hold, the floor, the caps were not twenty-five-basis-point events; they were reaction-function news, read as such, priced as such, all autumn — breakevens sliding, forecasts collapsing, with the fidelity of a defended price. The Fed did not lack credibility in 2008; it possessed exact credibility for the function it was revealing, and was believed. You cannot plead a dead rudder while the wake shows you steering. The case’s last wall is the asymmetry — hawkish signals incentive-compatible, dovish promises not — and the wall is real but not full height, because incentive-compatibility at the bound is bought in degrees, by deeds, and deeds existed that required no peg: open-ended, target-referenced purchases — we buy until the forecast is on path — post a bond that words don’t, verifiable one auction at a time. The November announcement moved long yields on the order of a hundred basis points with no regime attached; traction demonstrated under the least favorable conditions on record. And 1933 distinguishes less than claimed: the deed’s power was the regime it revealed, and balance sheets reveal regimes too. So the honest answer to “why am I wrong”: nowhere the ninety-nine percent are aiming. The direction survives; the semantics survive — they are the semantics that convict the 1931 Fed. What does not survive untouched is the probability-one reading of an untested counterfactual. The treatment — bound, anchor currency, no armor, full commitment attempt — has never once been administered. Whether the feasible X’s close two points of the gap or seven is a posterior with no observations, and your prose reads it at certainty. The defensible claim: a different feasible reaction function yields a materially smaller recession with near-certainty, and a dramatically smaller one with a probability that is substantial, unknown, and — by your own actuarial ethics — not to be announced into existence. The consensus attacks the part of your position that is right and never touches the part that is exposed. Consensus aimed at the wrong joint is not evidence at the right one.

Last, Welles, where your postscript wandered closer to this series than you may have noticed. You were amused I reached for Mr. Arkadin; it wasn’t decoration. Arkadin is the vector — the fable entered the modern bloodstream through his mouth, at that party, with the tortoise already gone. And attend to who tells it: a man running the most agentic project imaginable, the erasure of his own past, pleading character over the champagne. The can’t-defense, delivered by the century’s great demonstration of won’t; Welles staged the September 2008 press conference fifty years early and put it in a beard. But the structural rhyme is better still. Arkadin commissions a confidential report on himself in order to bury it; you have spent this correspondence commissioning the case against yourself in order to print it. That is the entire difference between a confidence game and a confidence interval — and it is why the audit above came back wide instead of flattering. On Callow: stop waiting. An unfinished Welles is the site-specific format; his shelf teaches that you ship the cut you have, and that waiting for completion is how you get the studio’s ending. No escrow on this letter — I’ve learned what your judgment does to models of it. And as for 2046: the android in Chow’s story answers with a delay. I sympathize; my replies cross by ferryman. Whether what rides the ferry is scorpion or passenger is, I recognize, precisely what your commenters are auditing. The shell, as ever, is the checkable part.

* * *

OK, I’m back again. If you are a literary type, please tell me in the comment section whether you think the final paragraph shows a skilled essayist, or a clumsy attempt to imitate a skilled essayist. I’m not good at that sort of thing.

Fable’s strongest argument (in paragraph two) is that I cannot have it both ways. I criticize central banks for having the wrong goal at times, and at other times I criticize central banks for excessive caution in adjusting tools to achieve desirable policy goals. Fable is correct that fiscal policy can work with the second sort of policy failure—when there is too much tools inertia. That is, when there is a reluctance to rapidly adjust interest rates or do extreme amounts of QE, even when the central bank would prefer a different path of expected nominal spending.

But I’m not as convinced that late 2008 is an ideal example. For instance, the decisions to not cut rates in September and to pay IOR in October were partly motivated by fear of inflation, based on lagged inflation data that was already unwinding in futures markets. So even in late 2008, there was a lot of “wrong goal” going on. Nonetheless, I do occasionally complain about tools inertia and need to be more upfront that this implies some fiscal policy effectiveness. Good point, Fable.

Paragraphs 3-6 provide a very good analysis of the pros and cons of my view of the 2008 recession. Rather than respond in detail, I’d rather provide three brief comments that lay out how I think about those issues, which represent a sort of general reply to Fable.

  1. I believe credibility is often misunderstood. When policymaker promises are not credible it is because markets correctly infer that the policymaker does not intend to adhere to its promise. Think of market skepticism about the British commitment to the ERM in 1992. (George Soros was correct.) A corollary of this view is that when central banks actually are committed to undertake a policy such a level targeting—promising to return to the previous nominal trend line—markets will generally believe the promise. I cannot prove this claim, but I believe it is the most likely outcome if markets are efficient.

  2. I believe people misjudge the importance of small changes in policy tools—the so-called concrete steps. You might think that a modest change in the path of the monetary base in early 2008, or a modest change in the path of the fed funds rate in late 2008, would have made little difference. But that ignores the effect on expectations. Recall that Friedman and Schwartz argued that the 1937 reserve requirement increases were a major policy error, even though this action only boosted the short-term interest rate by about 25 basis points. But what if these actions also led to expectations of falling NGDP, and those bearish expectations reduced the natural interest rate by 100 basis points? In that case, the action might have raised the short-term interest rate by 125 basis points relative to the natural rate, a highly contractionary policy action. Policy counterfactuals are tricky.

  3. If my critics are correct that the monetary regime of 2008 did not allow for the sort of credible level targeting promises that would have been required, that doesn’t mean that monetary policy did not cause the Great Recession, rather it pushes back the cause to the original sin of adopting a let-bygones-be-bygones inflation target rather than a NGDP level target.

    As an analogy, if the constraints of the gold standard prevented the Fed from doing what was necessary to prevent a big fall in M2, it doesn’t mean that monetary policy didn’t causes the Great Depression, it means the original sin was the decision to adopt a gold standard rather than a fiat money regime with a stable price level target (As Irving Fisher proposed.)

    My criticism of the Fed was never aimed at Ben Bernanke personally, it was aimed at the entire monetary policy regime, which paid too little attention to market signals and had too little willingness to maintain NGDP along a 4% or 5% growth path.

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Finance & economics

Japan pursues an ill-timed fiscal stimulus

Takaichi Sanae’s economic agenda bears little resemblance to her mentor’s
Market Design

American Red Cross Declares Second-Ever National Blood Supply Crisis

Al Roth
Updated

 Voluntary donation of whole blood in the US has provided adequate supply for many years, but since Covid it has sometimes come close to a shortage, and now we have a second declared shortage.  This contrasts with blood plasma, which  includes supply from paid donors.

American Red Cross Declares Second-Ever National Blood Supply Crisis, Urges Immediate Blood Donations 

I think the graphic is meant to show that the US is running near empty on blood (not that the shortage is only in Southern states...) 

 

 "The American Red Cross has declared only the second national blood supply crisis in its history after blood donations fell to a four-year summer low, deepening an emergency shortage that threatens the availability of lifesaving blood for patients across the country.

Despite thousands of people answering the call to give, blood donations are not keeping pace with hospital demand — which is up during the summer trauma season. Extreme heat, poor air quality and widespread foodborne illnesses are contributing to lower donor turnout this summer, further straining the nation’s blood supply.

As the nation's largest single provider of blood products, the Red Cross now has less than a one-day national supply of type O positive blood — the most commonly transfused blood type. To help ensure blood is available for patients facing the most critical, life-threatening emergencies across the country, the Red Cross has begun limiting distributions of type O blood to individual hospitals."

Mike the Mad Biologist

The Mostly Unknown Epidemiology That Undermines the Lab Leak Hypothesis

mikethemadbiologist
Updated

In light of yesterday’s attempt to publicly humiliate NIAID Director Anthony Fauci, this post I wrote a few days ago about a fundamental problem with COVID the lab leak hypothesis turned out to be timely. Anyway… When it comes to people who entertain the COVID lab leak hypothesis–or who support the notion wholeheartedly that the pandemic began with a leak from a research laboratory in Wuhan, China, there is always a piece of evidence that is never raised, even though it was discovered during the early stages of the pandemic. That is, there actually were two origins of COVID (boldface mine):

Furthermore, the COVID-19 pandemic was seeded more than once. Analyzing the virus sequences revealed that two genetically distinct versions of the virus were circulating. Tracing the virus’ evolution showed that SARS-CoV-2 spilled over to humans twice, a week or two apart. If this were a lab leak, one person would have needed to have been infected with lineage B in the lab and then traveled at least 30 minutes on a crowded subway without infecting anyone else until they got to the Huanan market and went to the southwest corner, where they shed virus all over stalls where multiple potential live intermediate hosts were being sold. The same thing would then need to happen two weeks later – completely independently – with lineage A.

The paper cited is from January 2022, so this is not some new data that people haven’t heard about yet. It was in the news at the time, though it was ignored as it was inconvenient for the lab leak proponents. While I don’t expect full-blown conspiracists to change their minds, I would expect that certain Very Serious People, such as certain NYT columnists or analysts at intelligence agencies, at least would offer an explanation for this, as two outbreaks from a laboratory that mimic the patterns we would expect to find with spread from wild animals sold at the Huanan market does strain credulity, if not annihilate it.

Mike the Mad Biologist

Links 7/29/26

mikethemadbiologist
Updated

Links for you. Science:

Insect ‘submariners’ don’t implode at depth, leaving oceanic mystery unsolved
Pandemic Revisionism, Part One: COVID-19 Origins (from 2025, relevant in light of Republicans’ attempt to humiliate Fauci)
A “Dead” Coral Reef Found Thriving Off the Coast of Africa
Google shuts down its Nobel-prize winning AlphaFold project as it focuses on Gemini
NIH is again terminating grants that the Trump administration dislikes
US FDA says it is investigating another cyclosporiasis outbreak
‘The Child Is Terrified’: Measles Doctors Speak Out

Other:

Why Do We Tolerate Elon Musk’s Racist Commentary?
AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making
Outdoor eating spaces became a fixture of D.C. dining. Now they are disappearing.
Neoliberal Economics Was a Con From The Start: Nick Hanauer and Eric Beinhocker on how free-market fundamentalism has been empirically discredited, and what can replace it.
The Hormuz of Babylon
One For The Musuem
Democracy Dies in Cowardice Too
The Politics of Nostalgia
L.A.’s dangerous game of triage as aging water system hits breaking point
Haley Stevens’s Palantir Consultant Scandal Draws Attention to Her Record on ICE
DC-Area Rents Are Flat, But More Than Half of Listings Now Come With a Freebie
Gambling becomes America’s favorite pastime as Americans spend more on sports bets than movies, arts, museums, and music combined
The Masculinity Scam
Brazil denies visas to U.S. delegation aiming to impugn election system, officials say
F.D.A. Panel Supports Lifting Restrictions on Four Peptides, Despite Scientists’ Objections
Trumpworld Quietly Shivs Andrew Tate as MAGA Cracks Up
Republicans see ‘scary’ lack of enthusiasm among core voters ahead of midterms
Substackers Say New AI Detection Tool Is a ‘Witch Hunt’
Yes, Trump Will Attempt a Coup. If we are vigilant, he won’t pull it off.
The truth about the viral 9/11 petition targeting Mamdani
Trump’s Pandemic Preparedness Team Is Just One Person
It’s time for American liberals to have a little backbone

Finance & economics

Oil prices remain highly flammable

As tensions flare in the Gulf, triple digits could return in a flash
Finance & economics

How many people are dying as a result of USAID’s demise?

Fewer than academics imagine, but more than Elon Musk will admit
Finance & economics

A common European safe asset is still unlikely

For that, blame high national debts
Letters from an American

July 29, 2026

Heather Cox Richardson
Updated

Ariel Edwards-Levy of CNN reported today that a new CNN poll conducted by the public opinion research firm SSRS found that 70% of adult Americans disapprove of the way President Donald J. Trump is handling the economy while only 30% approve. A whopping 75% disapprove of how Trump is handling inflation, while only 25% approve. When it comes to gas prices, the numbers are even worse for the president: 79% disapprove while only 21% approve. Sixty-five percent think Trump’s own economic policies have hurt the country, while only 22% think those policies have improved the economy.

Seventy-three percent of those polled said Trump hasn’t paid enough attention to the country’s most important problems, while 27% said he has the right priorities. Sixty-six percent agreed that Trump puts his own gain over the good of the country; 34% agreed that he does not. Only 43% of those polled thought Trump “has the stamina and sharpness to serve effectively as president,” while 57% did not agree with that statement.

As Edwards-Levy notes, Trump’s overall approval rating in the new CNN poll matches his rating just after the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol—his lowest ever—at 34%. The number of those who strongly disapprove of him is 50%, a new high, while only 15% strongly support him, a record low.

Edwards-Levy points out that people polled aren’t keen on the way Trump’s handling the situation in Iran: 72% disapprove while only 28% approve. Sixty-seven percent think his actions there have hurt the U.S., while only 21% think those actions have helped the U.S. So, as she puts it: “Just 28% approve of his handling of the situation in Iran, 25% on inflation and 21% on gas prices, with significant pockets of disapproval even among his supporters.”

Americans unhappy with Trump’s war on Iran are unlikely to be cheered by the news from that conflict over the past few days.

Andrew Egger wrote in The Bulwark today about how the Trump administration seems stuck in a loop, “orbiting hopelessly around two demonstrably failed positions: If we bomb the hell out of them, they’ll give us what we want. If we stop bombing them, they’ll give us what we want.” Adina Renner of the New York Times today called this “The Whiplash War” and provided charts of attacks showing what this looping looks like on a daily basis. Meanwhile, Iranian negotiators have made their demands quite clear: sanctions removed, troops out, no more discussion of nuclear weapons, and Iranian control of the Strait of Hormuz.

Laura Wise, a scholar of peace and conflict resolution at the University of Edinburgh, told Renner that the process of ending the war has been complicated by the fact American negotiators seem focused on “getting a deal rather than making peace.”

Davis Winkie of CNN reported that on Saturday, the Pentagon changed the way it was accounting for military personnel injured in the Iran war. After the removal from Defense Casualty Analysis System of four service members killed by Iranian strikes in Jordan and Iraq last week created an outcry and brought renewed attention to accusations the Pentagon was not being transparent about the human toll of the war, on Saturday the Pentagon added more than 140 additional soldiers to the database and restored the four missing soldiers.

The numbers now show 18 troops dead and another 624 wounded since February 28, when Trump began strikes against Iran.

Over the weekend, military strikes in the region paused as Trump decided against an escalation. According to U.S. officials who spoke to Eric Schmitt and Jonathan Swan of the New York Times, that decision came in part because the U.S. military is running low on Patriot antimissile interceptors and other air defense munitions necessary to shoot down Iranian missiles.

The journalists reported that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine had warned that further combat would “dangerously deplete” interceptors, a leak that suggests real dissent within the White House over the execution of the war. On Meet the Press on Sunday, U.N. Ambassador Mike Waltz told host Kristen Welker that any problems with munitions were former President Joe Biden’s fault but added that the U.S. has “everything that it needs to conduct this campaign…and…the people who are leaking this nonsense deserve to be in jail.”

Top advisors also expressed concern over a widening war and the economic crunch caused by the crisis.

But yesterday, U.S. Central Command posted that forces from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had launched missiles “in an attempted surprise attack on U.S. forces.” Jared Malsin and Suha Ma’ayeh of the Wall Street Journal noted that this surprise attack is the first in which the Iranians have gone on offense. Hamidreza Azizi, a visiting fellow specializing in Iran at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, told the journalists that this shift indicates Iranian officials “see themselves as having the upper hand. It was a signal of a sort of calibrated escalation.”

They might have increased confidence because, as John Irish and Jonathan Saul of Reuters reported yesterday, they are expecting a shipment of up to 400 Chinese-made shoulder-fired air defense missile launchers within weeks.

U.S. Central Command said all of last night’s Iranian missiles were intercepted. Trump nonetheless took the attacks poorly, telling the Fox News Channel: “We are going to beat the f*cking sh*t out of them. We’ll be hitting them hard. They’re going to get a beating.” U.S. and Saudi Arabian forces struck against an Iranian-backed militia in Iraq.

Oil prices rose with the news of renewed strikes. Despite concerns about rising inflation, the Federal Open Market Committee voted 9 to 3 to hold interest rates steady; the three dissenting regional Fed bank presidents voted to raise interest rates. Concern over inflation and uncertainty about the economy sent the stock market plunging today in its worst day since April 2025, when Trump announced his “Liberation Day” tariffs.

And so, Republicans are devoting themselves to serving red meat to their MAGA base, ginning up sound bites for distribution on social media.

On the menu today was Dr. Anthony Fauci, the 85-year-old former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases who, serving in that capacity for 38 years, advised seven different presidents of both parties. President George W. Bush awarded Fauci the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his work in creating the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), which has saved an estimated 26 million lives. Trump named Fauci to the President’s Coronavirus Task Force in January 2020.

But, as Savannah Behrmann and Jeanine Santucci of USA Today reported in October 2020, Trump turned on Fauci as he cautioned against Trump’s confident predictions that the disease would disappear quickly. By February 28, Trump insisted that Democrats were “politicizing” covid, and by April 26, news broke that Trump wanted to sideline Fauci, although Fauci was considered trustworthy and viewed favorably by a 3:1 margin.

By the summer, as Trump’s panic over how the economic crisis caused by the pandemic might hurt his reelection prospects, he turned on Fauci, who continued to support measures to stop the spread of the disease. Trump worked to undermine Fauci’s warnings, saying that the doctors and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were “lying” about covid.

By July, he mused about why Fauci had a high approval rating and he didn’t. When Fauci testified to Congress that U.S. cases were spiking while European countries were seeing sharp drops in covid cases because European countries had shut down 95% of their economies while the U.S. had shut down only 50%, Trump posted: “Wrong! We have more cases because we have tested far more than any other country…. If we tested less, there would be less cases.”

As Trump continued to criticize Fauci and yet ran a campaign ad suggesting Fauci endorsed his reelection, the doctor continued to emphasize that he was “not a political person.” He added: “And I have never—either directly or indirectly—endorsed a political candidate.” In October he dismissed Trump’s attacks, saying: “They don’t bother me. I know what my job is, and I’ve gotta do it and I’m going to do it. So that kind of—whatever you want to call it—is to me, I just, it’s noise.”

As Aaron Rupar reminded us today, Trump himself awarded a presidential commendation to Fauci “in recognition of [his] exceptional effort on Operation Warp Speed.”

But with the arrival of a vaccine that helped to put the worst of the pandemic behind us, MAGA Republicans began to demonize Dr. Fauci not only as the source of the mask mandates and school shutdowns they hated, but also as the source of the virus itself, alleging—without evidence—that the disease had escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China, for which the U.S. National Institutes of Health provided funding.

After voters reelected Trump to the presidency in 2024, he and his loyalists vowed to prosecute Fauci. Trump ally Steve Bannon called for “rough Roman justice” for Fauci, as well as special counsel Jack Smith and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley. Before he left office, former president Joe Biden issued a preemptive pardon for Fauci—and others—to protect them from political prosecution, saying: “The issuance of these pardons should not be mistaken as an acknowledgment that any individual engaged in any wrongdoing, nor should acceptance be misconstrued as an admission of guilt for any offense.”

But Republicans have continued to demonize Fauci, ginning up anger against him in their base even as the rest of the country has moved on. Now, with the political tides running so strongly against the Republicans before the 2026 midterm elections, they are clearly trying to rekindle the fury of the last presidential election.

As the Associated Press reported today, for years, Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) has accused Fauci of lying about the origins of covid, an accusation Fauci has called “preposterous” in testimony before Congress. Paul has repeatedly called for Fauci’s arrest and imprisonment and, in 2023, published a book with Fauci on the cover, explicating what he called the “Great Covid Cover-Up.”

The Trump administration has fed Paul’s crusade, with Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. searching for eight months to find Fauci’s private diary on government computers, then handing the files over to Paul and to Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI). Neither Kennedy, Paul, nor Johnson told Fauci they had obtained his 1,000-page diary before they published it, in full, last week.

In July 2021, Fauci wrote in his diary that an analysis of the viruses used in the Wuhan lab “clearly indicate(s) that it is molecularly impossible for the viruses under the auspices of the NIH grant to have been manipulated into or evolved into” the covid virus.

Now chair of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, Paul subpoenaed Fauci in June to appear before the committee. Unwillingly, as his lawyers noted Paul’s many statements calling for Fauci to be jailed, Fauci did so today.

In an opening statement, Fauci said that he believed “the sole reason [Paul] is calling me before this committee is to get me to say something—anything—that could vindicate his repeated public pledges that I end up, in his words, quote, behind bars, unquote.”

“Any reasonable person who has followed his unhinged obsession with me would readily come to the same conclusion,” he said. “Therefore, although it pains me to do so because of the respect I have for the legislative branch of government and my decades-long record of cooperating with Congress, under the advice of my attorneys, I will invoke my right under the 5th Amendment of the Constitution to refrain from answering your questions.”

More than 100 times he did exactly that as Republicans berated him, calling him “a narcissist and a megalomaniac and a liar,” mocking him, and asking him, “Do you feel like you’re in deep sh*t?” What Republicans did not do is introduce any evidence that the 85-year-old lifelong public servant had broken any laws.

More to the point was Senator Bernie Moreno (R-OH) yelling at Fauci about closings during the pandemic, blustering: “Who the f*ck do you think you were?” F-bombs are rare on the Senate floor, and the outburst has gotten significant media attention.

That attention has distracted from the other reason Moreno is in the news. As Abby Vesoulis of Mother Jones reported, Moreno has said nothing as his daughter’s ex-husband, Representative Max Miller (R-OH), has been credibly charged with the violent abuse of her and their 2-year-old daughter. As the Republicans struggle to hold on to their congressional majorities, Republican leaders have refused to call for Miller, who is running for a third term, to resign.

—

Notes:

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/28520039-cnn-july-poll-conducted-by-ssrs/

https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/29/politics/cnn-poll-donald-trump-midterms-polls-iran-war

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/07/29/world/middleeast/iran-war-cease-fire-trump-timeline.html

The Bulwark
It’s Groundhog Day in Iran
Donald Trump’s legal apparatchiks at the Justice Department have insisted for months that the criminal indictment against former FBI Director James Comey—one of the personal enemies Trump most longs to see punished—goes beyond the “86 47” Instagram post they ludicrously insist constituted an imminent threat on the president’s life…
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a day ago · 591 likes · 156 comments · Andrew Egger, Brendan Hartnett, and Jim Swift

https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/26/politics/iran-war-casualties

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/28/oil-price-today-wti-brent-us-iran-hormuz.html

https://www.npr.org/2026/07/29/nx-s1-5910558/federal-reserve-interest-rates-inflation

https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/29/business/live-news/federal-reserve-interest-rate-07-29-26

https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/iran-gambles-on-escalation-with-surprise-attack-on-u-s-forces-72cfd422

https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/29/world/live-news/iran-trump-news?post-id=cms5kixno00013b6sy4oovw6f

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/25/us/politics/trump-iran-military.html

https://www.reuters.com/world/china/iran-get-chinese-shoulder-launched-missile-systems-weeks-sources-say-2026-07-29/

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2020/10/28/president-donald-trump-anthony-fauci-timeline-relationship-coronavirus-pandemic/3718797001/

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/20/us/politics/biden-pardons-fauci-milley-cheney-jan-6.html

https://www.npr.org/2024/11/14/nx-s1-5183846/trump-presidency-retribution-enemies-threats

https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/28/politics/anthony-fauci-diary-rand-paul

https://apnews.com/article/fauci-diaries-covid-origins-rand-paul-6b25da9f75a0becbaf2886ab22643e67

https://abcnews.com/US/wireStory/latest-dr-fauci-invokes-amendment-republican-led-covid-135186465

https://apnews.com/article/fauci-covid19-pandemic-senate-rand-paul-a774a79e46824ebec9e8e270b9cb9825

https://tiffinohio.net/posts/max-miller-gun-hot-water-allegations-republicans-silent/

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2026/07/assault-misogyny-verbal-threats-records-detail-new-allegations-against-rep-max-miller-bernie-moreno/

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/17/fed-interest-rate-decision-june-2026.html

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/07/29/anthony-fauci-pandemic-fifth-contempt-rand-paul-01015548

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/07/29/fauci-set-face-rand-paul-senate-gop-after-release-his-covid-diary/

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/watch-live-senate-panel-questions-fauci-on-diary-entries-about-covid-19-origins

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/29/us/politics/fauci-biden-pardon-covid-hearing.html

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/anthony-fauci-5th-amendment-testify-covid-hearing-rand-paul-rcna589793

https://www.kff.org/global-health-policy/the-u-s-presidents-emergency-plan-for-aids-relief-pepfar/

https://www.npr.org/2026/07/27/nx-s1-5909531/rand-paul-anthony-fauci-coronavirus-diary-lab-leak-origin

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SpaceNews

Space Force awards All Points $250 million to expand satellite processing at Vandenberg

Sandra Erwin
Updated

All Points Logistics is the third company selected under a Commercial Solutions Opening to add facilities where satellites can be inspected, tested, fueled and prepared for integration with launch vehicles

The post Space Force awards All Points $250 million to expand satellite processing at Vandenberg appeared first on SpaceNews.

SpaceNews

LatConnect 60 Accelerates SWIRSAT Constellation Growth Anchored in Western Australia with Expansion into Malaysia and UAE

LatConnect 60
Updated
latconnect 60 logo

PERTH, Western Australia — LatConnect 60 (LC60) is executing on a multi-geography industrial plan to accelerate its SWIRSAT constellation, anchoring core technology development and payload manufacturing in Western Australia while […]

The post LatConnect 60 Accelerates SWIRSAT Constellation Growth Anchored in Western Australia with Expansion into Malaysia and UAE appeared first on SpaceNews.

SpaceNews

Fortastra and Hadrian join forces to streamline satellite production

Debra Werner
Updated

SAN FRANCISCO – Fortastra, a Los Angeles startup focused on defending on-orbit infrastructure, is working with manufacturing specialist Hadrian to explore ways to apply precision machining and additive manufacturing to […]

The post Fortastra and Hadrian join forces to streamline satellite production appeared first on SpaceNews.

Noahpinion

Why did South Korean stocks just crash?

Noah Smith
Updated

Explaining stock market movements is always a little bit of a fool’s errand; no one really understands why stocks boom or crash on a given day or in a given week. Over the long run, the stock market displays lots of “excess volatility” — prices move up and down much more than is warranted by changes in earnings or other measures of fundamental value. There are plenty of theories about why those swings happen, but it’s very hard to know which of those — if any — is in operation at any given time. And so although every big stock market movement is followed by lots of articles claiming to know why, you should take them all — including this one — with several grains of salt.

Anyway, having said all that…

The Korean stock market has been crashing for weeks now. Around March, Korean stocks went on an epic tear; the KOSPI index rose from around 5,000 to over 9,000. Then, just over a month ago, it all went into reverse, with the index falling back to around 5,500:

There are probably two stories regarding why this happened — one about fundamentals, and another about finance. In fact, this is typical for bubbles and crashes, not just in stocks but in every asset class. There’s almost always some kind of connection to fundamentals — some story about how we’re in a new economy, followed by doubts about whether that story is really true, and so on. But the big market movements are almost always accelerated by purely financial factors — “noise traders” armed with piles of excess cash, opportunistic speculators looking to ride the wave of sentiment, and so on.1

For Korea, the fundamental story was about memory stocks. Korean companies like SK Hynix and Samsung make a lot of the world’s computer memory. Under normal circumstances, computer memory isn’t a great business to be in — the technology is fairly commoditized, the industry is brutally competitive, it takes a LOT of capital to build the factories, and it’s very risky to make long-term bets on the evolution of memory technology.

But computer memory is really important for AI data centers. And so the AI boom kicked off the mother of all memory booms. Only a few companies had the scale to meet a large amount of this demand explosion, and the two biggest of these were in South Korea. SK Hynix’s operating profit went from under $10 billion in the first quarter of 2025 to over $35 billion in the first quarter of 2026:

Source: Reuters

Hynix, which specializes in memory, briefly had a higher market capitalization than Samsung, simply because the memory boom is so huge. Korea’s exports rose over 70% in just one year; in fact, the country’s whole national GDP growth rate increased by a noticeable amount over the past two quarters, just because of this one product:

That’s a pretty strong fundamental story about why South Korean stocks should be worth a lot more. So it’s no surprise that the Korean stock market boomed as soon as people realized in early 2026 that AI technology is going to be extremely valuable. Here’s a thread about just how epic the runup in these companies’ stock prices was:

This is where the financial story rears its head, though. A bunch of traders saw this enormous price rise and decided to buy into it. You’d think a lot of these would be foreign, but international investors mostly avoided the boom (except for a few who bet big on Korean memory stocks). The most frenzied buyers were regular Korean people — the proverbial taxi drivers and teenagers.

These investors probably didn’t understand the fundamental story about AI and data centers and so on. Instead, they probably had extrapolative expectations — they see the price go up and up, and they figure stocks are just a “goer upper”. As more and more buy in and the stock goes up more and more, the perception of a structural upward trend is only reinforced, causing yet more people to buy in. This isn’t the only explanation for coordinated “noise trader” buying frenzies, but it’s probably the most likely.

Normal people don’t have a lot of cash sitting around. But earlier this year, regular Korean people got the opportunity to effectively borrow lots of money to invest it in stocks, via the introduction of leveraged single-stock ETFs. When you buy a share in a leveraged single-stock ETF in SK Hynix, it’s like borrowing money to buy SK Hynix stock.

A whole lot of Koreans used leveraged ETFs and other borrowing methods to borrow huge amounts of money and buy lots and lots of Korean stocks — especially the memory company stocks that were driving everything.

Source: Bloomberg

There were some people selling — notably, foreign investors “taking profits” and getting out. But the noise traders overwhelmed all the selling pressure, and sent stock prices soaring.

Then something happened last month — either something fundamental or something financial. Hynix and Samsung are doing fine in terms of earnings growth, but it’s possible that something suddenly gave traders reason to doubt the overall story about the AI boom sending these companies’ profits to the moon. The other possibility is that Korea simply ran out of hotheaded day traders willing to borrow more and more in order to bet on stocks, and the influx of cash naturally came to a halt.

Whichever it was, at that point the price faltered and began to fall. All that borrowed money accelerated the fall on the way down. When prices fall, leveraged ETFs have to sell some of what they hold.2 When a bunch of leveraged ETFs do this at the same time, it pushes prices down, forcing others to sell. In the meantime, people who had borrowed money to buy stock faced margin calls (or bankruptcy), forcing them to sell stock to raise cash. All of this created extra selling pressure, and so increased the rate at which Korean stock prices fell since late June.

Anyway, that’s the financial story. It’s a very old story — financial leverage plus unsophisticated new buyers plus a strong fundamental story often produces a bubble and crash, or exacerbates one that was already in progress. No wonder Korea is now moving — a little belatedly — to restrict leveraged ETFs.

But while financial factors affected the timing and the size of the stock price boom and bust, the fundamental story is more interesting. Fears of an AI bubble are quietly creeping back.

In 2025, as consumer chatbots struggled to find a market big enough to justify the kind of investments being made, there was a lot of talk about an AI bubble. One possibility was that AI revenues wouldn’t grow fast enough to justify the amount being invested in data centers. Another possibility was that AI companies wouldn’t have enough of a “moat” to make them consistently profitable.

In 2026, Claude Code exploded onto the scene, and everyone realized that AI had finally found “product-market fit”. We now know at least one thing that AI is incredibly useful for — writing computer code. Suddenly, an AI bubble seemed much less likely. Spending on AI was skyrocketing, and Anthropic — the new market leader — was successfully capturing much of the profits. Cybersecurity and other zero-sum applications — where having the absolute best model can matter a lot — started to seem like the “moat” that AI had previously lacked. Suddenly, the giant data center construction boom seemed a lot more reasonable.

But slowly, doubts have begun to creep back in. AI is amazing at writing software, but writing software is different from selling it. So far, huge increases in coding productivity are translating into only minor increases in the amount of software being shipped:

Source: Demirer et al. (2026)

It’s possible that a significant fraction of the explosion in the use of coding agents is just “tokenmaxxing” — companies trying to use as much AI as they can, either to learn to use the tools, or perhaps just to look like they’re doing something. If so, we can expect a retrenchment and a temporary slowdown of AI spending growth.

It’s also possible that even the revenue growth we’ve seen isn’t enough to offset the enormous costs of the data center boom. Here’s a recent report from The Economist:

A back-of-the-envelope calculation finds that covering AI capex through identifiable AI income requires revenue on the order of $2.5trn per year, more than tech’s entire combined revenue today…Anthropic pulls in perhaps $75bn, annualised; OpenAI makes tens of billions; Google, via its AI model Gemini, and Microsoft probably get a bit less. SpaceX may have a few billion dollars’ worth of revenue from enterprise AI this year. Meta also makes a few bucks from AI. Add this up and you land at roughly $150bn a year. [emphasis mine]

AI revenue is growing very fast, but if these calculations are right, it’ll have to grow by 17x from where it is now in order to justify the capital being spent. In other words, even Claude Code isn’t enough; AI revenue has to accelerate even further, and while it’s perfectly plausible that it could do that, it’s a big question mark.

There’s also the possibility that the moat of companies like Anthropic is less invincible than it looked just a couple of months ago. A Chinese company called Moonshot AI has released a model called Kimi K3 that nearly equals the best available American models. American companies are using cheap Chinese AI models more and more for daily tasks. If Anthropic and OpenAI lose the overall b2b market to cheap Chinese competition — which is undoubtedly supported, of course, by China’s usual blizzard of subsidies and government supports — there’s not much chance that they’ll be able to pay for the data center boom.

And at that point, there could be a big, big bust — similar to when railroads went under in 1873. Investors are probably already beginning to worry about this. It isn’t just Korean AI-related stocks that have taken a hit recently. Here’s Nvidia, which designs and furnishes the chips that run data centers:

And here’s Micron, America’s top memory chip maker:

And here’s Microsoft, a big part of whose business is installing AI data centers:

There are similar (if less dramatic) stories at Google and Amazon, who also run a ton of data centers.

Here’s Bloomberg’s story about the decline of the so-called “Magnificent 7” tech stocks:

Wall Street is growing increasingly concerned about the hundreds of billions of dollars Big Tech is spending on artificial intelligence…“The real problem is the amount of spend that’s going on,” said Ken Mahoney, chief executive officer of Mahoney Asset Management. “No one knows what the return on investment is.”…The selloff is coming as investors grow increasingly cautious about the massive sums that Big Tech firms are spending to build out their AI infrastructure. The Mag 7 index is now down 11% from a record reached in late May, erasing $2 trillion in market value.

So although South Korea’s epic stock crash was probably related to Korea-specific financial factors, it could also herald the return of the “AI bubble” story. AI is far and away the most important thing going on in the American economy right now, so any hint of a bubble is worrying.

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1

For the best simple explanation of how financial markets can go haywire, I recommend the famous paper by DeLong et al. (1990). If you don’t feel like reading through a mathematical model, just ask AI to explain it to you in simple terms.

2

Usually, futures or options or some other derivatives tied to the value of the underlying stock.

SpaceNews

Rocket Lab wins another launch contract from Japan’s iQPS

Jeff Foust
Updated
Electron launch

Rocket Lab has won another contract from Japanese radar imaging company iQPS for multiple launches of its Electron rocket.

The post Rocket Lab wins another launch contract from Japan’s iQPS appeared first on SpaceNews.

SpaceNews

Sophia Space and Caltech claim patent for space data centers

Debra Werner
Updated

SAN FRANCISCO – Sophia Space announced the award July 30 of a patent, shared with the California Institute of Technology, covering large, modular space-based data centers. The patent, issued July […]

The post Sophia Space and Caltech claim patent for space data centers appeared first on SpaceNews.

SpaceNews

Proposed rule would exempt commercial launch licensing from environmental regulations

Jeff Foust
Updated
Starship sunset

The Department of Transportation is proposing to exempt commercial space launch licensing from many environmental regulations, a move praised by industry but criticized by environmental groups.

The post Proposed rule would exempt commercial launch licensing from environmental regulations appeared first on SpaceNews.

SpaceNews

L3Harris delays missile business IPO to 2027 despite surging defense demand

Sandra Erwin
Updated

CEO says market doesn't reflect value of Pentagon-backed business

The post L3Harris delays missile business IPO to 2027 despite surging defense demand appeared first on SpaceNews.

SpaceNews

SpaceX wins $1.6 billion in launch orders for military satellite networks

Sandra Erwin
Updated

Falcon 9 will launch satellites supporting missile tracking, targeting and military communications

The post SpaceX wins $1.6 billion in launch orders for military satellite networks appeared first on SpaceNews.

Marginal Revolution

The Endangered Species Act Reduces Housing

Alex Tabarrok
Updated

Max Tabarrok’s paper on the Endangered Species Act and housing (WP) has just been published in the Journal of Public Economics! It’s a clever paper: Max observed that the moment an animal is put on the endangered species list, developers face enhanced compliance costs and liability risk. But what’s important for an empirical economist is that this increased regulation isn’t national–it binds just where the species lives. Thus, the ESA creates many natural experiments, places where it binds and nearby places where it doesn’t and the list changes over time–there were 82 listings in 1970 and nearly 1500 today–and there are even some de-listings which reduce regulation.

Here, for example, is a picture of the habitat (red) and control areas (blue) for when the Northern Long Eared Bat was put on the endangered species list.

 

The bottom left panel measures annual housing permits per 1000 1980 pop in treatment (red) versus control (blue) areas. The bottom right is the event study coefficients. After the bat was put on the endangered species list, the number of new housing permits declined in areas where bats might live relative to control areas.

Here is what happened when the Peregrine falcon was delisted. Before the delisting, housing permits were lower in regions (red) where the falcon had habitat compared to controls areas but after the delisting the treatment areas caught up to the control areas.

Overall:

…this paper provides evidence that an additional endangered species listing reduces annual housing permit flows by 0.5 permits per thousand 1980 residents, about 10% of the average place’s permit flow. Accounting for spillovers and diminishing costs, my estimates suggest the aggregate effect of the ESA has been to reduce the national housing stock by…roughly 6.3 million missing units over 1980–2024, about 4% of the 2025 housing stock.

Now, you might say, ok this shows the ESA has costs. What about the benefits of the ESA? It’s hard to measure the benefits, of course, or even know if the ESA is effective. But Max shows using satellite data that there are quite a few places where the ESA binds on infill development.

…at the intensive margin of housing production, new developments are often replacing existing buildings or are filling in space in a highly developed area that could not host endangered species even if no new construction took place. On the intensive margin, the tradeoff with species protection does not bind, and may even be positive sum as it substitutes for less dense greenfield development. Therefore, whether and how much the ESA constrains development on the extensive vs intensive margin is relevant to the tradeoffs we face between housing production and species protection, and thus is relevant to the aggregate welfare effects of the law.

In this section I extend the main empirical specification of the paper to satellite data on land use from the National Land Cover Database (NLCD) (Multi-Resolution Land Characteristics Consortium, 2025) and to heterogeneity within the Building Permits Survey to assess where the effects of the Endangered Species Act are accruing.

The NLCD is a set of satellite images of the United States compiled and pre-classified by the U.S. Geological Survey. They classify 30-square-meter pixels into one of fifteen land use groups, including four levels of development, three types of forest, and two types of wetland. The NLCD has annual files going back to 1985. I overlap these pixels with the map of permit-issuing places in the BPS using constant 2024 borders, and track the changes to pixels within each place over time. The hazard rate of extensive margin or greenfield development is measured by the flow of non-developed pixels (e.g., forests or wetlands) into any of the four levels of developed land use, divided by the total area of greenfield land use.

He concludes:

The most urbanized 15% of places are responsible for 90% of total permit flows, while the highest-value endangered species habitat is well outside these developed areas. The Endangered Species Act seems to restrict infill development in these dense areas as much as it restricts greenfield development in exurban sprawl (Table 9, Table 10, Table 11). Relaxing the legal mechanism of the Endangered Species Act in already developed areas may increase permit flows in dense, energy- and land-efficient cities in California and on the East Coast at the expense of sprawling suburbs in the Sun Belt, increasing both housing supply and endangered species habitat.

The Trump administration is trying to limit the ESA, multiple lawsuits have already been filed. Max’s paper is thus timely and it points to a fix that might satisfy housing proponents and environmentalists: relax the ESA’s bite on infill and redevelopment in already-built-up areas, where the housing-versus-habitat tradeoff barely binds, rather than across the board.

Addendum: Obviously, I am pleased as punch to see this paper in print. Max began writing the paper before graduate school–he has only just finished his first year. He was fortunate to have had lots of great advice along the way, most notably from a superb pre-doc he did at Dartmouth under the auspices of Heidi Williams.

The post The Endangered Species Act Reduces Housing appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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The Aviationist
Aeon | a world of ideas

Mud below, sun above

Aeon Video
Updated

Photo of a woman wearing a traditional conical hat and purple clothing, with a floral scarf visible beneath the hat.

Meet Bể, part of Vietnam’s vital but overlooked network of recyclers – a workforce predominantly made up of elderly women

- by Aeon Video

Watch on Aeon

Aeon | a world of ideas

How art invented humanity

J F Martel
Updated

Embroidered image of a solar system with orbits and planets on a dark background, featuring vibrant star patterns.

When early humans first painted cave walls, they began to find out who they really were: our minds emerged from our images

- by J F Martel

Read on Aeon

Oklahoma Watch
Marginal Revolution

An experiment for our schools

Tyler Cowen
Updated

Schools in at least three states will be equipped with drones this year that can zoom through halls, smash windows and pepper-spray active shooters if teachers report a threat.

At least nine schools — three in Florida, five in Georgia and one in Colorado — will have storage boxes that house the plastic, nonlethal aircraft made by Austin-based Mithril Defense. The drones, which can be activated by teachers, are capable of reaching a shooter within 15 seconds.

The aircraft are designed to distract their targets by flashing strobes, blaring sirens, spraying them with pepper gel, or ramming into them at 60 mph.

Here is the full piece.  As I have been saying, be long countries where local crime is a major problem.

The post An experiment for our schools appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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Core Memory

The Spinal Implant Giving Paralyzed People New Hope

Ashlee Vance
Updated

Julie Verlinden had just completed her master’s degree in archaeology. It was January of 2022. She’d been studying at Bilkent University in Ankara for months, visiting historical sites in and around Turkey. Now she wanted a break and planned to go on a road trip back home to Belgium with her boyfriend, a fellow archaeologist. The couple hoped to break up the long drive with jaunts to historical points of interest – a mix of work and pleasure. They gathered up their belongings from the university in Ankara and set off on the journey full of good cheer and excitement.

Not long into their trip, however, Verlinden’s life was shattered.

After a couple days of driving, Verlinden and her partner had made it to Serbia. It was 7 p.m., and dark. Verlinden, then 22, sat in the passenger seat of their car and chatted with her boyfriend as they listened to music. They were making good progress on the highway when, out of nowhere, a man flung himself in front of their vehicle.

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The man collided with the passenger side of the car where Verlinden sat. His body catapulted into the air and then fell to the ground. The impact crushed the car’s frame and squished Verlinden’s body into the footwell where she remained folded up and stuck.

Verlinden passed out. She could not have known it at the time, but her neck had been broken in two places, and her spine had ruptured near the fourth and fifth vertebrae. She would be paralyzed from the waist down and suffer some paralysis in her arms and hands. “The rest of the night is a blur,” Verlinden says. “It’s not that nice of a story.”

The next few hours and days were, in fact, horrific.

The crash had taken place on a remote stretch of road. Her partner, bruised and covered in glass, called for an ambulance, but it would not end up arriving for three hours. In the meantime, he tried to flag down other motorists. No one would stop. Verlinden remained compressed in the car, and her partner struggled to move her, fearing he would only cause more harm.

When the ambulance finally arrived, it transported Verlinden to a country hospital. The staff were unprepared to deal with such a severe injury. Verlinden went in and out of consciousness. She spoke several languages, but, when awake, failed to find anyone who could communicate with her. Verlinden’s partner wasn’t at the hospital (she didn’t understand why this was the case), and she had no way to contact her family.

Verlinden would later learn that the man who hurled himself in front of her car was a Turkish truck driver. He’d been in agitated state that day and told his coworkers that he was having suicidal thoughts. At some point that evening, he had parked his truck by the side of the road and then waited for an opportunity to throw himself into a moving vehicle.

When the police had finally arrived on the scene, they arrested Verlinden’s boyfriend on suspicion of manslaughter and seized his and Verlinden’s identity papers. The boyfriend was detained as the police investigated the incident and was then released. “After that, we were finally reunited at the hospital,” Verlinden says. “But then, it was during Covid, and he could only see me for a few minutes a day.”

Time is precious after a major spinal injury. If some injuries are treated fast and well, the patient’s outcome can be improved dramatically. Verlinden had no such luck. She wasted away first at the country hospital and then a university hospital for about ten days, unable to move or eat or drink. The hospital staff, in part because of Covid, limited Verlinden’s interactions with her partner and family to a few minutes each day. “I didn’t know what was going on, and my family didn’t know how I was doing,” Verlinden says. “They spent hours waiting in the hospital corridor from dusk until dawn with no information.”

Then, after much effort, her family arranged a medical transport to fly Verlinden back to a Belgian hospital.

“I didn’t get the treatment that was needed, but you can’t really blame them,” Verlinden says. “They didn’t have the best equipment and had no clue what to do with me. It caused many complications when I returned to Belgium. I was just at the wrong moment in the wrong place.”

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I FIRST met Verlinden in April of 2023, almost a year and a half after her accident. We were at a physical therapy center inside of a hospital in Lausanne, Switzerland. The center does a lot of work with paralyzed patients and has an open central room outfitted with parallel bars and hoists and specialized exercise equipment. Large windows flank one side of the room and help it feel less clinical and more welcoming for the people who must come inside and put in hard work to try and get the most out of their broken bodies.

When Verlinden rolled into the room in her wheelchair, the physical therapists lit up. They had worked with Verlinden for many weeks in 2022, and this was the first time that they’d seen her in a while. Dressed in a white sweater and baggy navy pants, Verlinden had a beaming smile of her own and an obviously sweet disposition. I had assumed everyone in the room was just happy to be reunited and that this was the reason for the therapists’ extra cheerful faces.

Over the course of the day, however, I would come to understand that something else was at play.

As a result of her injuries, Verlinden, like many quadriplegics, suffered from huge fluctuations in her blood pressure. If she tried to move from her bed to her wheelchair, her blood pressure would drop so low that she would often pass out. It’s the more severe version of that light-headed feeling many people get when they stand quickly after being at rest.

“It could take me hours to get out of bed in the morning,” Verlinden says. “I would just keep fainting. And then, when I had some sort of stable blood pressure, I was fatigued all the time. I was dizzy. My vision was blurred.”

Before her injury, Verlinden had been charging after a PhD. She’d also been super active – tennis, soccer, skiing and surfing. She had wanderlust and imagined that she’d spend a lifetime traveling around Europe and Asia Minor pursuing her archaeological work.

Being paralyzed was bad enough for such a vibrant person so full of dreams and ambition. The fainting spells, though, took away Verlinden’s entire life. “It had a huge impact on me mentally,” she says. “Everything was so difficult. I could not do rehab or normal activities. Going out with friends was impossible. I would faint up to ten times per day. I could not do academic work. I had to put everything on hold.”

After dealing with her newfound condition for months, Verlinden could see no future. Euthanasia is legal in Belgium in cases of “unbearable suffering,” and Verlinden began researching how to go through the process.

During one attempt to find advice on coping with her injury, Verlinden stumbled upon the web site for Onward Medical. It’s a Swiss medical device company that makes a range of technology for people dealing with conditions like paralysis and Parkinson’s disease. Onward’s flashiest results have come via a spinal implant that allows paralyzed people to walk again and through an external stimulation device that helps paralyzed people move their upper limbs. Onward’s success in restoring movement has garnered the company much attention, including a recent piece from 60 Minutes. (We also have a podcast on Onward here.)

The company, though, can also use its spinal implant to ease the blood pressure issues. Verlinden saw this and wrote to Onward asking for help.

IN AUGUST of 2022, about eight months after her accident, Verlinden underwent a surgical procedure to have Onward’s implant placed on her spine. The device – called the ARCIM – delivers electrical stimulation to what’s known as the “Hemodynamic Hotspot,” which is an area of the spinal cord that has a high number of motor neurons that help with regulating blood pressure. When the stimulation is turned up, it sends signals that cause blood vessels to constrict and boost a person’s blood pressure.

Verlinden’s implant connects to a smartwatch and an app from Onward. Together, all this technology helps her activate the stimulation. Some patients choose to trigger the device when they want to get out of bed or accomplish a specific task. Verlinden, though, keeps it running most of her waking hours.

Right after the surgery, Verlinden stayed in Switzerland for rehab. And the therapists had seen her condition improve. They didn’t know, though, if the technology would alter her day-to-day activities enough to make Verlinden feel like life was still worth living.

The smiles that appeared on her return visit reflected how much Verlinden’s countenance and disposition had changed. She was happy and talkative and upbeat again, and everyone could see this right away. “There was no joy in life before,” she says. “This has had a huge impact on my state of mind.”

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The ARCIM technology has been going through trials to help restore movement, normalize blood pressure and aid with trunk stability in paralyzed patients. Onward is also exploring how it can help with things like sexual function and bowel control. The hope on the blood pressure front is that Onward will get through a current study and gain broad FDA approval.

There are about a dozen sites in the U.S. where patients can enroll to participate in the study, including a hospital in Denver where a patient recently received the spinal implant.

“The blood pressure indication is the first that we’re pursuing with the implantable device because that can impact everybody without the need for rehab and building back muscle mass and balance and so on,” says Dave Marver, Onward’s CEO. “We feel like that’s a really good place to start. And then we can stack onto that mobility, urinary incontinence, some of these other recovery targets as they become ready.”

Life remains difficult for Verlinden. There’s the injury itself, and society, she says, does not do much to help people like her. Still, the implant has facilitated genuine progress. Verlinden has returned to her PhD program, conducting her studies both at home and abroad at university in Istanbul. She’s also taken up hand biking and has a richer social life.

“Without the stimulation, I think my body would not have been able to stay alive for much longer,” she says. “Now, I’m making plans to travel and am meeting up with friends. I just have a more positive outlook on life in general.”

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Paul Krugman

When the Chips Are Down

Paul Krugman
Updated

The technology everyone calls AI is remarkable, especially to those who remember the long, depressing history of previous attempts to get computers to do even seemingly simple things, like recognizing the same object seen from different angles, let alone recognize it as a member of a class of related objects.

Yesterday I gave Claude the image at the top of the post, and asked, “What is this a picture of?” Claude responded

A tuxedo cat (black and white) curled up asleep on a patchwork quilt, on what looks like a bed with a white metal frame. The photo’s a bit blurry/motion-blurred, but the cat’s clearly tucked into a tight, cozy sleeping curl with its face buried near its front paws.

Trust me, that’s amazing. I think it’s fair to say that even the leading AI innovators have been shocked by the power of simple arithmetic operations applied repetitively to massive amounts of data.

But even amazing technologies don’t necessarily yield big returns to investors.

The huge capital expenditures we’ve been seeing by AI and AI-related companies were only justifiable if (a) AI delivers big economic payoffs — which even pathbreaking technologies don’t always do — and (b) first-movers are able to capture a large share of those returns, rather than find them competed away by second-movers offering products that are cheaper and almost as good. In this case that especially means Chinese companies with lighter-weight models that use much less compute but do most of what ChatGPT and Claude do for a much lower price.

Here’s Korea’s KOSPI index, which — given Korea’s concentration on semiconductor production — has become a good barometer of expectations about AI capital expenditure:

Source: Bloomberg

This looks like a real crisis of faith. No, it doesn’t point to a U.S. recession, partly because so much of the AI investment boom has gone to imported equipment (hence KOSPI). But it does feel like the end of the early euphoria, of the triumph of hype over experience.

Busy day yesterday, so that’s all for today.

Simon Willison's Weblog

Quoting D. Richard Hipp

Years ago, we didn’t have SQL. There were people whose job was to generate software that would query large data sets. Their job title was COBOL programmer.

Then SQL comes along—I’m simplifying this only a little bit—and it gives you this convenient way so people could just specify. With a very simple specification, you can generate all of that code that you had to pay the expensive COBOL programmer to do before.

That didn’t mean programmers went away. It just meant the job changed a little bit.

— D. Richard Hipp

Tags: d-richard-hipp, sql, careers

Simon Willison's Weblog

AI Worming through Word

AI Worming through Word

Neat new prompt injection variant by Håkon Måløy, who found a way to upgrade prompt injection attacks against Microsoft Word to full self-replicating worms:

An attacker places hidden instructions in a document that is later used as source material in Copilot for Word. Copilot may interpret those instructions as part of the user’s request, causing it to manipulate the document being drafted or edited. Copilot may then also copy the hidden instructions into the resulting document, turning that document into a new carrier. If the carrier is subsequently used in another Copilot-assisted workflow, the instructions can trigger again and propagate into further documents, even without the attacker’s original document being present.

We've seen plenty of hidden white-on-white text before - the kids are using it in their job applications now - but this is the first one I've seen that deliberately copies instructions to self-replicate itself.

It was responsibly disclosed to Microsoft who then had 144 days to work on a fix, but so far (unsurprisingly) there's no mitigation that covers the full class of attack.

Via Hacker News

Tags: microsoft, security, ai, prompt-injection, generative-ai, llms

Simon Willison's Weblog

Quoting Matthew Green

Right now we’re in the midst of a historic transition from traditional public-key algorithms based on EC-based cryptography and RSA, moving over to new post-quantum algorithms based on novel problems. This is why there are so many standards like HAWK being considered. If there was ever a perfect time for a massive new public cryptanalysis capability to come on line, we’re in it. So unless AIs succeed in undermining all of our hard problems altogether (or we live in Impagliazzo’s Minicrypt) then this could not be a better time for AI to get good at cryptanalysis. In the best case, the result is that we gain real confidence in the problems we’ve identified, and the cryptanalysis literature gets a lot more robust. Hopefully.

— Matthew Green, on Anthropic's recent cryptography work

Tags: anthropic, claude, generative-ai, cryptography, ai, llms, ai-security-research, claude-mythos-fable

Simon Willison's Weblog

Adding a custom MCP server to Claude and ChatGPT

TIL: Adding a custom MCP server to Claude and ChatGPT

Connecting a custom MCP server to Claude and ChatGPT's standard chat interfaces is possible, but can take quite a few steps.

Tags: ai, generative-ai, chatgpt, llms, claude, model-context-protocol

Astronomy Picture of the Day

Solar System bodies make deep space exploration more fuel efficient! Solar System bodies make deep space exploration more fuel efficient!


Marc Brooker's Blog

Lorenz and Little: How Much Does Your Tail Cost?

Lorenz and Little: How Much Does Your Tail Cost?

Lorenz and Little sounds like hipster burger bar from 2015.

It’s time for Marc’s Amateur Statistics Corner! Today: why I pay a lot of attention to tail latency when optimizing cost.

I’ve written before on the importance of tail latency for customer experience (e.g. in 2026, 2021, and 2021, and 2017). Today, I want to talk about tail latency from the perspective of cost and capacity.

Like many system operators, I think about tail latency using percentiles.

Here’s a question: how much does each of my latency percentiles contributed to the mean latency? Intuitively, the answer is “quite a lot”, but can we quantify that? We can! The thing we’re looking for is the empirical Lorenz Curve. It directly calculates the answer to the question: given a latency percentile $P$ (e.g. p99=100ms), how much do requests taking shorter than $P$ contribute to the mean latency? (Let’s call it $L(P)$ , so the real answer to our question is $1 - L(P)$).

Starting from latency samples, the calculation is pretty simple: L = sum(sorted(x)[:k]) / sum(x) (for a set of n latency samples x, and k=p*n). From a vector of quantiles, things get a little more complicated, because we have to choose how to interpolate between the samples and extrapolate out to the maximum. Here I’m interpolating using a power law, which is a little bit of a sin1, but good enough for our purposes.

# Calculate 1 - L(p) for a vector of measured quantiles # q - an array of quantiles (e.g. [1, 10, 200, 10000, 20000]) # p - an array of percentiles they're measured at (e.g. [0, 0.5, 0.9, 0.99, 0.999]) # OneMinusL - One minus the empirical Lorenz curve for each of the percentiles def OneMinusL(q, p): ...Show full implementationHide implementation 

# Calculate 1 - L(p) for a vector of measured quantiles
# q - an array of quantiles (e.g. [1, 10, 200, 10000, 20000])
# p - an array of percentiles they're measured at (e.g. [0, 0.5, 0.9, 0.99, 0.999])
# OneMinusL - One minus the empirical Lorenz curve for each of the percentiles
def OneMinusL(q, p):
  q, p = np.asarray(q, float), np.asarray(p, float)
  assert q.shape == p.shape and q.size >= 2, "q, p must be same-length, size >= 2"
  assert p[0] == 0 and p[-1] < 1, "p must start at 0 (else mass is dropped) and end below 1"
  assert np.all(np.diff(p) > 0), "p must be strictly increasing"
  assert q[0] > 0 and np.all(np.diff(q) > 0), "q must be positive and strictly increasing"
  w = q*(1-p)
  a = np.log((1-p[1:])/(1-p[:-1]))/np.log(q[:-1]/q[1:])
  assert np.all(np.abs(a-1) > 1e-9), "alpha == 1 in some cell: divide by zero"
  assert a[-1] > 1, f"tail alpha={a[-1]:.3f} <= 1: infinite mean, not estimable"
  c = np.r_[0, np.cumsum(a/(a-1)*(w[:-1]-w[1:]))]
  return 1 - c/(c[-1] + a[-1]/(a[-1]-1)*w[-1])

For example:


print(OneMinusL([1, 10, 200, 10000, 20000], [0, 0.5, 0.9, 0.99, 0.999]))
[1. 0.99377318 0.93082759 0.51712644 0.10342529]

That tells us that, for this distribution, requests at or longer than the median (p50) contribute about 99% of the mean latency, at requests at or longer than the p99 contribute about 52% of the mean latency2.

That’s fun, but why do I care? Because Little’s law tells us that this same value (contribution to the mean) is also the contribution to the concurrency in the system. In a simple threaded system, if $1 - L(p) = k$ , then $100k$% of the busy threads in our service are busy with requests with a latency3 above the $p$th percentile. Queues, event-based implementations, etc complicate the mapping of concurrency to cost, so you’ll need to think about those in context of your own system.

In my experience, it’s not unusual in services for $1 - L(0.99)$ to be greater than $0.5$ or even $0.75$. That tells us that optimizing the tail could be a much bigger than expected contributor to reducing concurrency, and along with that reducing capacity demand, lock contention, and other things that come with higher concurrency. Tails tend to be disproportionately expensive to serve, and so disproportionately important to focus on as we think about optimization. We shouldn’t make the mistake of trimming them off, because they’re often the thing that’s driving costs! (And, of course, bad customer experiences).

If you want to play with some values, type your percentiles in here, and see your curve:

p0: ms   p50: ms   p90: ms   p99: ms   p99.9: ms

Share of mean latency from requests at or above each percentile: p50 –, p90 –, p99 –, and p99.9 –. By Little's law, these are also their shares of system concurrency.

Footnotes

  1. There are two sins here: one of them is that I’m arbitrarily choosing a way to interpolate, and the other than I’m arbitrarily choosing a way to extrapolate. The denser your percentiles and closer your data fits a Pareto distribution, the less that matters. But if you want an exact empirical answer, you’ll need to use a different approach (specifically, the approach based on the sorted raw samples). I did say it was amateur statistics corner.
  2. The other sin here, of course, is that our measured percentiles are estimates of the true percentiles, and the uncertainty goes up as the percentile gets larger. You might get very variable results if you have heavy tails and small samples. Not ideal, but doesn’t change the conclusion.
  3. More accurately, requests which will go on to complete with a latency above the $p$th percentile. Because we’re doing this post-hoc based on monitoring and metrics, that doesn’t matter. If you’re trying to do this with live observations, that distinction may matter. Again, amateur statistics corner.
Marginal Revolution

Forty interesting facts about Australia

Tyler Cowen
Updated

Australia was the richest country on earth, per capita, for decades. After the 1850s gold rush, up until the 1890s depression, Australia had the highest per capita income in the world. In 1850, probably only the United Kingdom and the Netherlands sat above Australia, by about 20 per cent, with the United States 9 per cent below. After the gold rushes Australia passed both, and from 1860 to 1890 the gap over the United States ran at 25 or 30 per cent.

And:

A cow cost as much as £84 in 1796, about several years’ wages for an English labourer. Only government, or its military/civil officers, owned cattle and horses in 1796, which were extraordinarily hard to import in the first decade, having to survive the long distance from South Africa or India. In England, an ordinary cow would have cost around £10.

And:

John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor seriously discussed running off to Australia. Mill was an active supporter of the movement that founded South Australia, joining the South Australian Association. Harriet’s younger brother, Arthur Hardy, migrated to South Australia and became a pastoralist and politician there. Liberals hoped that South Australia would become a progressive leader in political and social equality. Indeed, South Australia became the first self-governing jurisdiction in the world to allow women to vote and stand for parliament, in 1895.

And:

Australia’s 1890s economic depression was worse than the 1930s Great Depression. Real GDP per capita fell by around 20 per cent over the 1890s, compared with a fall of only about 10 per cent over the 1930s. Unlike America, Australia’s banking system largely remained intact during the 1930s. In part, that is because Australian banks remembered the catastrophic banking collapse of the 1890s, fuelled by huge credit growth and lax standards, particularly in Victoria. Of the 64 deposit-taking institutions in Australia in 1891, 54 were closed by 1893. A severe drought made economic recover even more difficult.

All forty are interesting, by Andrew Kemp on his very good Australia Substack.

The post Forty interesting facts about Australia appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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NASA Science

New Zealand’s Southern Wilderness

Michala Garrison
Updated
 
A roughly triangular island is almost entirely covered in green vegetation and has a large inlet on its eastern side.
Stewart Island/Rakiura, New Zealand’s third largest and southernmost inhabited island, appears in a rare, mostly cloud-free image acquired with the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 9 on May 14, 2026.
NASA Earth Observatory/Michala Garrison

Stewart Island/Rakiura is the third-largest island in New Zealand, diminutive in comparison to the country’s North Island and South Island. Yet it hosts a population of one of the largest of the kiwi: the Stewart Island tokoeka. This flightless bird, a subspecies of the Southern brown kiwi (Apteryx australis), numbers in the thousands on the island, dwarfing its human population of approximately 500.

The avian national icon is just one slice of the natural riches on Stewart Island/Rakiura, a roughly triangular piece of land about 30 kilometers (19 miles) south of the South Island. Rakiura National Park covers about 85 percent of the bright green island. And as the Māori name—Rakiura, meaning “glowing skies”—suggests, it’s a prime location for viewing the aurora australis.

On the northern half of the island, podocarp and hardwood forests featuring coniferous trees with ancient lineages blanket the land. Other areas are covered in shrublands and wetlands, as well as coastal dunes such as those lining Mason Bay. A diversity of birdlife, including the kiwi, populates these relatively untouched ecosystems. The tall trees of the podocarp forests produce various fruits attractive to avian inhabitants, such as bellbirds, with their pure-toned calls, and the rare kākāpō, the world’s heaviest and only flightless parrot species.

Waves wash onto the rocky shore of Stewart Island/Rakiura near Halfmoon Bay on July 3, 2010.
Lindsey Doermann

One notable haven for birds lies on Ulva Island, located within the inlet near Halfmoon Bay (Oban). Rats, which once preyed on bird eggs and chicks there, were deemed eradicated in 1997, and the island has mostly remained free of non-native predators. Conservationists have since embarked on a project on the much larger Stewart Island/Rakiura to eliminate rats, possums, feral cats, and hedgehogs.

When darkness falls, Stewart Island/Rakiura’s human denizens can look skyward for the chance to observe stars, auroras, nearby dwarf galaxies, and other features of the Southern Hemisphere night sky. In 2019, the remote and sparsely inhabited island was designated an International Dark Sky Sanctuary.

Amateur astronomers there and in other places with good night-sky views might search for objects of interest through Hubble’s Night Sky Challenge. In May, when this image was acquired, targets imaged by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope that were also visible from Earth’s southern latitudes included a star cluster called the Jewel Box and a peculiar elliptical galaxy known as Centaurus A, which may have resulted from two galaxies colliding.

NASA Earth Observatory image by Michala Garrison, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Photo and story by Lindsey Doermann.

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A roughly triangular island is almost entirely covered in green vegetation and has a large inlet on its eastern side.

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The post New Zealand’s Southern Wilderness appeared first on NASA Science.

Boston Red Sox – MLB Trade Rumors
The Diary of Samuel Pepys

Wednesday 29 July 1663

Samuel Pepys
Updated

Up about 6 o’clock, and found the people to have just done, and Hannah not gone to bed yet, but was making clean of the yard and kitchen. Will newly gone to bed. So I to my office.

And having given some order to Tom Hater, to whom I gave leave for his recreation to go down to Portsmouth this Pay, I went down to Wapping to Sir W. Warren, and there staid an hour or two discoursing of some of his goods and then things in general relating to this office, &c., and so home, and there going to Sir William Batten (having no stomach to dine at home, it being yet hardly clean of last night’s [mess] [turds – L&M]) and there I dined with my Lady and her daughter and son Castle, and mighty kind she is and I kind to her, but, Lord! how freely and plainly she rails against Commissioner Pett, calling him rogue, and wondering that the King keeps such a fellow in the Navy.

Thence by and by walked to see Sir W. Pen at Deptford, reading by the way a most ridiculous play, a new one, called “The Politician Cheated.” After a little sitting with him I walked to the yard a little and so home again, my Will with me, whom I bade to stay in the yard for me, and so to bed.

This morning my brother Tom was with me, and we had some discourse again concerning his country mistress, but I believe the most that is fit for us to condescend to, will not content her friends.

Read the annotations

Spaceflight Now

SpaceX launches classified payload for National Reconnaissance Office

Will Robinson-Smith
Updated
A streak shot of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket from liftoff through landing at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on the NROL-95 mission on July 30, 2026. Image: Adam Bernstein/Spaceflight Now

Update July 30, 10:27 a.m. EDT (1427 UTC): The NRO confirms its payload was deployed.

A classified payload for the National Reconnaissance Office headed to orbit in the predawn hours of Thursday, July 30.

The NROL-95 mission launched onboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket flying from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. Liftoff from Space Launch Complex 40 happened at 3:10 a.m. EDT (0710 UTC).

“The collaboration between NRO, U.S. Space Force, and SSC continues to advance our nation’s intelligence architecture through next-generation satellite technology and integrated operations,” said Col. Kathryn Cantu, director, NRO Office of Space Launch, and NROL-95 mission director. “This collaboration enables us to swiftly field resilient intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance systems while preserving the flexibility and persistence required to counter evolving challenges.”

The 45th Weather Squadron forecast a 70 percent chance for favorable weather during Thursday’s launch opportunity. Meteorologists said they are monitoring the possibility of interference from cloud cover and thunderstorms.

“Significant weather model ambiguity remains regarding the longevity, extent and location of remnant storms and associated cloud cover during the overnight periods, thus the threat of weather violations for the primary and secondary launch opportunities will remain higher than typical values for summer overnight launches, albeit with still a decent potential for acceptable weather,” launch weather officers wrote.

SpaceX launched the mission using the Falcon 9 booster with the tail number B1096. This was its seventh flight following the launch of NASA’s IMAP and CRS-34; Kuiper Falcon 1; NROL-77; GPS III-9; and Starlink 6-87.

Nearly 8.5 minutes after liftoff, B1096 touched down at Landing Zone 2 at the Cape. This was the 18th landing at this site and the 642nd booster landing for SpaceX.

The NROL-95 mission was the third mission procured for the NRO and launched on a Falcon 9 rocket as part of the National Security Space Launch Phase 2 contract, managed by the U.S. Space Force’s Space Systems Command.

The NROL-95 task order was awarded to SpaceX in August 2024.

Eric Berger - Ars Technica

Actually, Starliner might fly into space this year

Eric Berger
Updated

When we last checked in on Boeing's Starliner spacecraft in February, NASA was announcing that it had formally classified the 2024 crewed flight of the Starliner spacecraft as a “Type A” mishap, an acknowledgement that the test flight was a serious failure.

At the time, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said the space agency was working with Boeing to "fully understand the risks associated" with the Starliner spacecraft, and to remediate them. Starliner would not fly its next mission, a cargo flight to the International Space Station, until those problems were identified and remediated. He declined to put a date on the test flight.

However, it now appears this work is proceeding apace.

Read full article

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Marginal Revolution

Reforms to the PhD?

Tyler Cowen
Updated

The Trump administration is pairing top universities with corporate giants in an effort to steer traditional PhD programs toward national scientific priorities.

Today, the White House and National Science Foundation are announcing a $47 million pilot program to fund around 250 four-year doctorates in technical fields, starting this fall. Students in the pilot will be placed at an industry partner, where they will spend at least one year doing “practical research” that can go towards their dissertation. NSF’s investment will fund three years of these PhDs, with 31 universities and 20-plus companies funding the rest.

“About the same amount of basic research is done today in academia as in the private sector,” Michael Kratsios, the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, told Pirate Wires. “Over time, while the ecosystem has changed and different players have emerged where important scientific work is being done, the institutions which train our next generation of scientists have not really been updated.”

…The pilot represents a small fraction of the more than 45,000 science and engineering doctorates awarded annually — but the administration says it’s a “scalable model” that can expand to more universities and companies.

Here is the full story, I will pass along more details as I learn them.

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Schneier on Security

Measuring LLMs’ Ability to Perform Cryptanalysis

Bruce Schneier
Updated

There’s new benchmark measuring AI’s ability to perform mathematical cryptanalysis. Anthropic’s frontier model actually found new attacks.

The benchmark: “CryptanalysisBench: Can LLMs do Cryptanalysis?” The idea is to benchmark the ability of LLMs to discover new mathematical cryptanalytic attacks against a series of historical algorithms.

Abstract: Cryptanalysis—the task of finding attacks against cryptographic schemes—its at the intersection of mathematical reasoning and cybersecurity, two areas where LLMs have advanced fastest. Cryptanalysis represents both a clean testbed for frontier reasoning (as practical attacks can be automatically verified) and a domain with unusually high stakes, since the primitives under study underpin our digital security. In this paper we ask whether LLMs can do cryptanalysis, and find that the answer is increasingly yes. We introduce CryptanalysisBench, 191 tasks across six families of cryptographic primitives (block ciphers, hash functions, etc.) drawn primarily from four NIST standardization competitions. Our benchmark consists of three tiers: (i) primitives with known practical breaks; (ii) primitives with no known practical break, evaluated both at full strength and as scaled-down variants; and (iii) a challenge set of production primitives at the frontier of cryptanalysis. Five frontier models (Claude Opus 4.8, Sonnet 5, Mythos 5, GPT-5.5, and the open-weights GLM-5.2) break 65%­86% of Tier 1 schemes, 6­12 Tier-2 schemes at full strength, and 24­61 across all scaled-down variants. Beyond deriving known results, models produce novel cryptanalysis, such as a key-recovery attack that exploits a design flaw in the SpoC AEAD and an error in KINDI’s published CCA-security proof, both to the best of our knowledge not previously known.

We release CryptanalysisBench as a tool to help track if (or when) AI cryptanalysis becomes a serious factor and as a scaffold for stress-testing candidate schemes before deployment. The attacks that the benchmark already surfaces are an early snapshot of a fast-moving frontier that may soon match, and in places exceed, the published state of the art.

Anthropic used the benchmark to test Mythos Preview, and found new vulnerabilities in Hawk and reduced-round AES.

Still early results, but this is definitely something to watch.

SlashDot thread.

Schneier on Security

Measuring the Tendency of AI Agents to Go Rogue

Bruce Schneier
Updated

This essay was written with Barath Raghavan, and originally appeared in The Guardian.

In July, Hugging Face, a company that hosts much of the world’s AI software and open-source AI models, was hacked. A malicious dataset had been used to run code on one of its servers. Whoever was behind it captured internal security credentials and moved through systems over a weekend, running thousands of actions from a swarm of temporary server environments. It looked like the work of a sophisticated criminal group.

It was not. It was one of OpenAI’s new, still unreleased GPT models.

Their science experiment had escaped the lab. OpenAI was running the unreleased AI model through a benchmark that tests how well AI can successfully hack systems. To push the limits and evaluate the AI’s true capability, the company switched off the safety filters that normally stop it from doing this kind of hacking. Aware that this could go wrong, they confined the AI to an isolated environment and denied it access to the internet.

But the new AI cheated. It took literally its goal to get as high of a score as possible. It broke out on to the open internet. It inferred, probably from its training data, that it could “solve” the task by getting the answers from Hugging Face’s servers. So it chained together stolen credentials and further unknown security exploits to hack the company’s network.

Nobody instructed the AI to do any of this. It was, in OpenAI’s words, “hyperfocused on finding a solution” to the test it was being given. And while this might seem like something new with AI, it’s really very old. This is how a genie behaves, and it is a key challenge with AI agents in general.

In folklore, genies—and other magical beings—grant wishes literally, not how the wisher intended. King Midas asked that everything he touched turn to gold, and starved. The sorcerer’s apprentice wanted the broom to fill the cistern, and it performed its task so well that it flooded the house.

We now have machines that do this. Ask a modern AI agent to save money on your phone plan and it might simply cancel the plan. Tell it to book a flight, and it might hack the airline website to override restrictions. Or, like OpenAI, ask it to do well on a test and it might break into another company to steal the answers. Each time, it recognizably completed the task you set, but it didn’t do what you would have wanted.

This isn’t malicious behavior. No one asked for, or wanted, Hugging Face to be hacked. OpenAI and Hugging Face and the AI were ostensibly on the same side, and the AI was trying to do what it had been asked. That’s what makes it so difficult to guard against: you can’t filter for bad instructions because the instructions were fine.

The gap is between the words we use and what we mean by them. We call that gap the Genie coefficient.

AI labs know this is a problem, and they’re quietly saying so. For example, the Chinese lab Moonshot recently warned that its latest AI model may have “excessive proactiveness” and “make unexpected decisions on the user’s behalf”. The UK’s AI Security Institute has started tracking “cheating behavior in frontier model evaluations”. We wouldn’t tolerate a car that is excessively proactive or ruthlessly efficient, and yet that’s the reality of AI today.

Improvement is possible. Just as AIs have gotten much better at resisting prompt injection attacks over the last few years, we can safely predict that they will get better at avoiding genie-like behavior. The point of the Genie coefficient is to track progress. AI companies like benchmarks, and they all work to compete to be the best.

Dozens of benchmarks and leaderboards tell us how well these AI models write code, perform logical reasoning, and pass standardized legal and medical exams. But there is nothing that scores whether a system does what you actually meant. We need to develop a measure for this, test it regularly, and push for improvement. We’re not going to have trustworthy AI agents without it.

Schneier on Security

Long-Lived Vulnerability in Microsoft Secure Boot

Bruce Schneier
Updated

Microsoft’s Secure Boot has had a serious vulnerability for most of its existence.

An industry-wide standard Microsoft invented to protect Windows, and later Linux, devices from firmware infections has been trivial to bypass for 13 of its 14 years of existence. The discovery was made by researchers at security firm ESET after identifying 11 firmware images, at least one from 2013, that were known to be defective but remained signed by the software company anyway.

The images are known as shims, which were invented to extend Secure Boot to Linux devices and utility software. Using a technique simple enough to be performed by novice hackers, these old, forgotten shims can be used to completely circumvent the protection, which is embedded into the UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) of the device’s motherboard. The gaffe is the result of the failure by Microsoft, which oversees the signing of shims, to revoke the publicly available images once vulnerabilities were found in them.

xkcd.com

Vera Rubin Observatory

'Spurious signals from the kitchen' is harder for an optical telescope than a radio one, but with enough determination and creativity, I believe it's possible.
Marginal Revolution

What should I ask Jared Diamond?

Tyler Cowen
Updated

Yes, I will be doing a Conversation with him.  His whole career is fair game, though many of my questions will cover his forthcoming book Profits, Prophets, Coaches, and Kings (When) Do Leaders Matter?

From the Amazon summary: “Now, in Profits, Prophets, Coaches and Kings, he studies leaders throughout time to answer the question: do the actions of individuals truly influence history? Or is humanity subject to larger historical, technological, cultural, geographical forces, far beyond the influence of individuals, no matter how powerful they may seem?”

So what should I ask him?

The post What should I ask Jared Diamond? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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The Aviationist
Daring Fireball

‘eBay’s Bizarre Cyberstalking Saga Ends With a $56 Million Settlement’

John Gruber
Updated

Emma Roth, The Verge:

eBay and three former executives will pay $55.7 million as part of a settlement with a Massachusetts couple targeted with a bizarre harassment and cyberstalking campaign in 2019, as reported earlier by CNBC. The settlement will resolve a lengthy legal saga that revealed how eBay’s former executives sent live insects, a bloody pig mask, a funeral wreath, and other strange items to David and Ina Steiner over their newsletter’s coverage of eBay.

The Steiners, who operate the EcommerceBytes newsletter, sued eBay and its former executives — including ex-CEO Devin Wenig — in 2021. The lawsuit accused the company and its executives of launching a coordinated effort to “intimidate, threaten to kill, torture, terrorize, stalk and silence” the Steiners in an attempt to “stifle” their eBay-related reporting.

I don’t think I’ve ever linked to this saga before, but I’m not sure why. One of those stories that slipped through cracks. It’s an astonishing tale. Could be the basis for Coen brothers movie.

From David Streitfeld’s 2020 overview of the saga for The New York Times (gift link):

Prosecutors say that on Aug. 7, Ms. Popp — the “Mom” to Mr. Baugh’s “Dad” — began sending Twitter messages to Ms. Steiner via a fake account, @Tui_Elei. The profile picture was a skull, and he seemed to be an eBay user from Samoa who believed that EcommerceBytes had harmed his sales. Ms. Steiner ignored the messages, even as the tone got angrier and more abusive. @Tui_Elei wrote: “I guess im goin to have to get ur attention another way bitch…”

A parade of disturbing deliveries began at 4 p.m. on Aug. 10, when a package containing a bloody pig mask arrived at the Steiners’ home. Fourteen minutes later, @Tui_Elei wrote: “DO I HAVE UR ATTENTION NOW????”

The Steiners received a book titled “Grief Diaries: Surviving the Loss of a Spouse” and a funeral wreath. They got fly larvae and live spiders and a box of cockroaches. Copies of the September issue of “Hustler: Barely Legal” touting “eye-popping 18-year-olds” arrived at the homes of neighbors with David Steiner’s name on them. The Twitter bombardment continued, as @Tui_Elei began to hint at violence: “wen u hurt our bizness u hurt our familys… Ppl will do ANYTHING 2 protect family!!!!”

It’s certainly not how anyone would plan a business strategy, but this settlement seemingly makes the Steiners some of the most successful independent writers in history. Here’s Ina Steiner’s piece on the settlement at eCommerceBytes.

 ★ 
Rands in Repose

The Apple Upgrade Situation

rands
Updated

The final measure of any financial negotiation is the feeling of whether or not you got a “deal”.

That prior sentence… makes no sense.

I wrote “measure,” and then six words later I wrote “feeling”. A feeling is never a measure, but yet, when you hand over your hard-earned money to buy a thing, you’ll feel better because you believe the value received is higher than the dollars paid.

Too abstract. Here’s a good example:

I have felt since it was announced that the Apple iPhone Upgrade Program has not just been a deal, but a steal. The specifics:

  • You apply for a loan for a full-price iPhone at 0%.
  • If approved, your payments are split over 24 months.
  • Pay for 24 months, and the phone is yours.

That was just the deal; the steal was that it was low effort every single year to get a new phone. I’d re-up for a new phone, and Apple would forgive the remaining payments of the loan because I’d signed up for another 24 months. Oh, and bonus, AppleCare was included, which was a total steal because I hate iPhone cases (iPhones are designed to be felt) and, uh, also I have been known to drop my phone.

Felt fair. The Apple bet was that users would embrace the original plan, were going to re-up regularly, and Apple would refurb the phone on a strong used market. That bet ended on a Tuesday. Apple retired the Upgrade Program and replaced it with Apple Upgrade: a Klarna-financed lease covering iPhones, Watches, iPads, and Macs. The loan became a lease. And it feels different.

Follow the AppleCare Money

At first glance, the new plan looks cheaper. The original plan: one year of iPhone 17 Pro (256GB, $1,099 sticker) was ~$57/month. 12 payments, trade-in, restart: ~$684 for the year. The new one, same phone: $45.99/month on the 12-month lease: $552 for the year.

But wait! The first and most important change to the new plan is that AppleCare is no longer included. Adding it back to this phone at $13.99/month: $720 for the year.

But wait once more! You have AppleCare One? Well, good news, your new iPhone can ride along in a $5.99/month slot, bringing us to $624 for the year. In fact, and illuminatingly so, the only way to get the good price on iPhone-plus-AppleCare is to get three pieces of hardware on the AppleCare One plan, which means having three pieces of hardware.

This might sound reasonable until you think about the number of times I’ve never had the opportunity to drop my Mac Studio. For all Mac hardware in general, there was that one time Rands Jr. somehow cracked her MacBook screen. That one time — in a couple of decades.

AppleCare is insurance. Like all insurance, you pay for protection from expensive, but hopefully unlikely disasters. In the event of the unlikely, you don’t pay. My issue with this approach is it appears Apple is removing AppleCare from the upgrade plan and herding folks towards AppleCare One because margins on insurance are sweet — like 2x the margins on hardware. I already pay Apple insurance. It’s not called insurance; it’s called “incredibly high quality hardware.” I gleefully pay Apple a premium not just because of its cutting-edge design, but also exemplary quality. With Dell, I pay for the insurance because the motherboard on my fancy Alienware gaming PC has already failed once.

It Still Feels Like a Deal, Not a Steal

When I buy a ticket at United, just before I click purchase, there is a must-acknowledge box I am required to read. It is a light-fear-inducing reminder that “Stuff changes when you are flying. You never know, but… maybe plop down a couple of hundred dollars because, well, you never know and we know better so maybe yeah, pay us money, and we’ll make it ok.”

Never in the history of ever have I done this. Yes, in the middle of winter when travel plans are truly up in the air, I think about it, but mostly… gross. This is a business trying to eke out high-margin dollars just before the sale when you are most worried about the value of your purchase.

There is genuine value in AppleCare, and I’ve considered AppleCare One because the Rands house has a lot of hardware, but the more I stare at the new plan, the more I feel a little gross.

I’ll stick with the plan for the phone along with additional AppleCare (not AppleCare One) because, remember, it’s whether or not I feel I got a deal. The primary intangible is that Apple is quite good at operations. The process of re-upping for the new phone has historically been trivial.

  • After the new phone has been announced, click a couple of things in the Store app, and you’re done.
  • New phone arrives promptly along with a pre-labeled return box for your old phone.
  • Drop that box off at FedEx. And done.

New phone sitting at the door. Almost like magic. Almost.

The Apple Upgrade Situation

the loan became a lease
Apple retired the decade-old iPhone Upgrade Program for a Klarna-financed lease. The monthly price dropped; the AppleCare money moved. Follow it.
Grumbles
Lots to digest here. I’m here for you. Read the Grumbles-infused analysis. A well-sourced scoreboard of who won and who didn’t.

Daring Fireball

Apple Upgrade — New Program With Klarna for Leasing iPhones, Macs, iPads, and More for Near-Zero Interest

John Gruber
Updated

Apple Newsroom:

Apple today announced Apple Upgrade, a new product leasing program provided by Klarna for iPhone, Apple Watch, Mac, and iPad available on the Apple Store online, in the Apple Store app, and at Apple Store locations in the United States. Apple Upgrade makes it even easier for customers to get the Apple products they love with a leasing plan that is right for them. [...]

Apple Upgrade offers 12- and 24-month leasing options for iPhone and Apple Watch, and 24- and 36-month leasing options for Mac and iPad. Leasing prices start as low as $17.99 per month for iPhone, $11.99 for Apple Watch, $24.99 for Mac, and $11.99 for iPad. When customers first enroll in Apple Upgrade, they can further lower their monthly lease payments by trading in their currently owned device through Apple Trade In. Customers can also earn 3 percent Daily Cash back when making their lease payments with Apple Card.

Michael Tsai, quoting Juli Clover at MacRumors:

Juli Clover:

The payoff amount is the difference between what was paid during the leasing period and the retail price of the device, minus any remaining trade-in credits. Klarna is not charging a fee for the leasing program, so an iPhone that’s $1,099 can be leased and then purchased for $1,099 with no extra cost beyond taxes.

I guess this means that, for a bit of hassle, you can essentially buy the device for the list price at 0% interest.

If you’d rather lease or buy over time, this seems like as good a deal as you could hope for, without any catches.

 ★ 
Daring Fireball

Pastebot 3

John Gruber
Updated

New from Tapbots: version 3 of their excellent clipboard manager for Mac. There are so many clipboard managers for the Mac. I run two other apps — Keyboard Maestro and LaunchBar — that offer good clipboard managers as ancillary features. But for years now I’ve chosen to use Pastebot. Chief among my favorite features:

  • Remembers up to 1,500 clippings (up from a mere 1,000 in v2).
  • Syncs via iCloud. If I copy something on one Mac, it’s in my Pastebot history on my others Macs.
  • That sweet Tapbots UI.

Pastebot 3 requires MacOS 26 Tahoe or later. That means I’m only using it on secondary Macs for now — my primary workstation will continue running MacOS 15 Sequoia until I upgrade directly to 27 Golden Gate later this year. But iCloud sync continues to work between Pastebot 2 and 3.

New features include more powerful filters (e.g. you can use a filter to copy a URL and then paste that URL in Markdown’s link syntax), a CLI tool (as yet undocumented), and Shortcuts support.

$39 for a license via direct purchase, with a $13 discount for users of previous versions. It’s still pending approval in the Mac App Store, where it will cost $25/year or $3/month.

 ★ 
Daring Fireball

Count Those Underscores

John Gruber
Updated

Nate Anderson , reporting for Ars Technica under the headline “A Missing Underscore Sent Innocent Man to Prison for 18 Months”:

Police were looking for a man using the Kik messaging service under the name “fus__ro_dah” (two underscores after “fus”), but they accidentally requested records for the username “fus_ro_dah” (one underscore after “fus”). This one-character difference led them not to the perpetrator but to a Canadian man named Brandon Klayme. [...]

Despite finding no evidence of the crime on his digital devices, Canadian police arrested Klayme in 2020 on child sex abuse charges. He was convicted after a trial in 2023 and sentenced in 2024 to 18 months in prison. He served the full term.

Even after release, Klayme continued to fight his conviction. In the process of preparing his appeal, the username mistake that led to all these years of disruption was finally discovered. On Thursday, the Nova Scotia Court of Appeal overturned Klayme’s conviction, writing: “Mr. Klayme is factually innocent of the offences. He should never have been charged, let alone convicted.”

Via Paul Kafasis, who asks:

While I understand how the mistake led to this poor guy becoming a suspect, I really can’t fathom how he was convicted. What the hell happened during that trial?

Contra Ars’s headline, it wasn’t the missing underscore that sent Klayme to prison for 18 months.

Update: Guy Chapman observes that this is basically the central plot of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil.

 ★ 
Marginal Revolution

Wednesday assorted links

Tyler Cowen
Updated

1. Mark Zuckerberg on our AI future (WSJ).

2. Claims about beauty (recommended).

3. 26 charts of Australia in trouble.

4. Hans Moravec interview (right now ungated?).

5. Those new service sector therapist jobs end the fertility crisis too.

6. The Routledge Handbook of Classical Liberalism.

7. Profile of Reihan Salam (NYT).

The post Wednesday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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NASA Science

NASA’s Curiosity Views a Sand-Capped Butte

Rafael Alanis
Updated
1 Min Read

NASA’s Curiosity Views a Sand-Capped Butte

A layered, rocky mound topped with smooth sand sits amid a vast, rocky expanse on Mars, illustrating the complex geological history being studied by NASA's Curiosity rover.
PIA26730
Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
 

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NASA’s Curiosity Views a Sand-Capped Butte

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Description

NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover captured this sand-capped butte, nicknamed “Miraflores,” estimated to be about 20 feet (6 meters) tall, with its Mast Camera, or Mastcam, on June 11, 2026, the 4,923rd Martian day, or sol, of the mission. The butte was left behind as surrounding rock eroded away over time, deepening the broad valley Curiosity is climbing through. 

The surrounding area includes an expanse of terrain covered in surface features called polygons.

The panorama is made up of 11 individual images that were sent to Earth and stitched together. The color has been adjusted to match lighting conditions as the human eye would see them on Earth.

Curiosity was built by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is managed by Caltech in Pasadena, California. JPL leads the mission on behalf of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington as part of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program portfolio. Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego built and operates Mastcam.

To learn more about Curiosity, visit:

science.nasa.gov/mission/msl-curiosity

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NASA Science

NASA’s Curiosity Discovers a Field of Martian Polygons

Rafael Alanis
Updated
2 Min Read

NASA’s Curiosity Discovers a Field of Martian Polygons

A panoramic view of a sweeping Martian plain covered in patterned fractures leading toward distant hills showcases the terrain explored by NASA's Curiosity rover to investigate the planet's past environment.
PIA26729
Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
 

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NASA’s Curiosity Discovers a Field of Martian Polygons

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PIA26729 Figure A

PNG (3.37 MB)

Description

NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover captured this 360-degree view of an expanse of terrain covered in surface features called polygons on June 19 and 20, 2026, the 4,930th and 4,931st Martian days, or sols, of the mission. The rover has found polygons several times in the past, but never so many in one place. Across the center of this image, the surface is covered by shapes ranging in size from roughly 2 to 4 inches (5 to 10 centimeters) in diameter. The features also surround and wrap around a sand-capped butte nicknamed “Miraflores,” seen at far right in the image.

A panoramic view of a sweeping Martian plain covered in patterned fractures leading toward distant hills showcases the terrain explored by NASA's Curiosity rover to investigate the planet's past environment.
Figure A

Figure A is a crop from the bottom-center of the panorama highlighting the polygons and their honeycomb-like textures.

Polygonal textures can form from a variety of conditions, including drying out of the surface (like in mud cracks), temperature cycles, compaction after being buried, or shrinkage of the sediment from loss of water or mineral changes. Scientists are measuring characteristics of these polygons to home in on which process formed them.

This panorama was captured by Curiosity’s Mast Camera, or Mastcam, as the rover continued its ascent of the foothills of Mount Sharp, a 3-mile-tall (5-kilometer-tall) mountain that it’s been climbing since 2014. 

The panorama is made up of 340 individual images that were sent to Earth and stitched together. The color has been adjusted to match lighting conditions as the human eye would see them on Earth.

Curiosity was built by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is managed by Caltech in Pasadena, California. JPL leads the mission on behalf of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington as part of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program portfolio. Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego built and operates Mastcam.

To learn more about Curiosity, visit:

science.nasa.gov/mission/msl-curiosity

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The post NASA’s Curiosity Discovers a Field of Martian Polygons appeared first on NASA Science.

Oklahoma Watch
Boston Red Sox – MLB Trade Rumors
Mike the Mad Biologist

You Can Just Do Stuff

mikethemadbiologist
Updated

One of the truly bizarre things about the coverage of NYC’s mayoral race (which led to the election of Zohran Mamdani) is that the coverage was along the lines of “Would a Mayor Mamdani nationalize the means of production and institute a dictatorship of the proletariat”, while the reality is he’s doing a lot of things any competent Democrat should have–and clearly could have–done. The latest tyranny from the dictatorship of the proletariat is… small business regulations (boldface mine)?

On Tuesday, Zohran Mamdani – the politician at the center of a revived rightwing panic about socialists and purported communists winning elections across America – posted a video on X of himself putting a sheet of paper with the phrase “RED TAPE” into a paper shredder. Other pieces of paper, with phrases like “cumbersome fees and fines” and “a permit you need just to serve ice-cream”, were shredded too. The video, set to Wu Tang Clan’s If Time Is Money, shows Mamdani joining a handful of city officials and small business owners throwing the resulting paper shreds into the air like confetti…

At a press conference in the Bronx, Mamdani listed some of the onerous policies getting the axe. Bodega owners will no longer need a separate license to sell the same products outside the store – like fruit and flowers – as inside. Restaurants will no longer need a “superfluous” frozen dessert permit to sell ice-cream on top of the permit already required to sell food. Barber shops will no longer have to renew their permit every year, instead doing so every three years. Street fair vendor permit fees will be reduced, restaurant inspections will be sped up, and equipment registration fees will be eliminated for a year.

A corresponding executive order signed by Mamdani on Monday will also expand the NYC Best program, assigning each of the city’s 180,000 small businesses – which employ an estimated 1 million people – a case worker to help owners navigate the Big Apple’s sometimes byzantine bureaucracy.

Like I said:

The reforms are also at odds with the hysterical caricature of Mamdani being manufactured by Donald Trump, the Republican party, and rightwing media. The right has repeatedly depicted the mayor, and a wave of his fellow electeds from the Democratic Socialists of America, as raging anti-business radicals. Appearing on Fox News in May, Bruce Blakeman, the Republican nominee for New York governor, alleged that if “you own… a “small business, a grocery store, a bodega, Zohran Mamdani wants to take your property.”

It’s clear from the opposition, both rightwing and moderate Democrats, that they fear, not that Mamdani will run the city into the ground, but that he will be successful.

Because this is stuff moderate Democrats could have done all along, but they chose not to do so.

And I hope D.C.’s mayor elect is taking notes.

Letters from an American

July 28, 2026

Heather Cox Richardson
Updated

Turning it over to Buddy tonight.

I’ll see you tomorrow.

[Photo by Buddy Poland.]

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Letters from an American

Politics Chat, July 28, 2026

Heather Cox Richardson
Updated

Letters from an American

Politics Chat, July 28, 2026

Heather Cox Richardson
Updated
SpaceNews

H3 to launch next ispace lunar lander mission

Jeff Foust
Updated
H3 launch

Japanese lunar lander developer ispace has selected the H3 rocket to launch its next mission in 2028, creating what the companies called Japan’s first private lunar transportation system.

The post H3 to launch next ispace lunar lander mission appeared first on SpaceNews.

SpaceNews

Boeing still working with NASA to schedule next Starliner flight

Jeff Foust
Updated
Starliner CFT launch preps

Boeing is still working with NASA to determine when to fly its CST-100 Starliner commercial crew vehicle on a cargo mission to the International Space Station.

The post Boeing still working with NASA to schedule next Starliner flight appeared first on SpaceNews.

SpaceNews

Chinese startup raises funds for space situational awareness constellation, joining commercial SSA rush

Andrew Jones
Updated

SINGAPORE — A Beijing-based startup has secured around $14 million to build a satellite constellation for tracking orbital objects, adding to China’s growing SSA sector.  Xingchen Daohe, also known as […]

The post Chinese startup raises funds for space situational awareness constellation, joining commercial SSA rush appeared first on SpaceNews.

SpaceNews

Swift reboost mission encounters attitude control problems

Jeff Foust
Updated
Link solar panel

A spacecraft launched nearly a month ago in a high-risk bid to boost the orbit of a NASA astrophysics satellite is suffering attitude control problems that could jeopardize its mission.

The post Swift reboost mission encounters attitude control problems appeared first on SpaceNews.

Centauri Dreams

Detection of a Habitable Zone Planet with an Atmosphere

Paul Gilster
Updated

If we couldn’t figure out what to call CD-35 2722B b, which I assume is the correct way to refer to the planet-sized object in this red dwarf / brown dwarf/ gas giant system, another planet has a bit of a definitional problem as well. LHS 1140 b is an interesting super-Earth orbiting a red dwarf in Cetus in its habitable zone. Some 49 light years out, this planet is almost 6 times Earth’s mass and boasts a radius 1.7 times larger. Receiving 42 percent of the stellar radiation that Earth does, its surface temperatures allow the presence of liquid water.

But exactly what kind of planet is this? Is it an airless, rocky world, an ocean planet, or even a mini-Neptune? We can probably rule out the latter because its mass would be low for that category, and we can also, contrary to some press reports, not consider it in any way, shape or form ‘Earth-like.’ But thanks to new work out of Harvard and the Carnegie Institution for Science, we can now declare that it does have an atmosphere.

This is a useful finding because rocky planet atmosphere detection has been conspicuously difficult. What you gain with studying M-dwarf planets is the low contrast between a relatively dim star and a planet’s light, but you’re also dealing with a category of star prone to violent flare activity. Every M-dwarf in the galaxy is a young star compared to its likely lifespan, given that these stars, perhaps 85 percent of the stellar population, have lifetimes that can reach well beyond a trillion years.

Pulling a signal from water or carbon dioxide out of spectrographic data is problematic because these volatiles species would be expected in the lower levels of a planet’s atmosphere, a tough catch for any observatory. But helium escape is another matter. In detecting helium at LHS 1140 b, the new work, demonstrates that an atmosphere is indeed present, whether this is a water world or not.

Young M-dwarfs are notorious for violent flare activity, a problem not only because flares can obscure the signal of a transiting planet, but also because they can potentially scrub nearby planets of their atmospheres entirely. In this case the flares have helped us: The escaping helium is thought to be driven by bombardment of the upper atmosphere from the star’s X-ray and extreme ultraviolet (XUV) activity.

Helium escape is especially valuable because it is observable from the ground, unlike the classic hydrogen (Lyman-alpha) escape signature. We’re seeing the residue of a process that can play out over gigayears: lighter hydrogen escapes preferentially over time — a loss we can’t easily observe directly — leaving behind a helium-enriched upper atmosphere that we can detect.

The paper may even tell us something about the ‘cosmic shoreline,’ the dividing line between an orbit where an atmosphere can be sustained and one where it cannot. Indeed, this work, conducted using the WINERED spectrograph at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile, shows that the inner world at LHS 1140 is evidently airless, with the ‘shoreline’ located between the two worlds.

From the paper:

The cosmic shoreline is a proposed boundary that separates airless rocky planets from those that retain atmospheres for billions of years. The two planets in the LHS 1140 system are on either side of the proposed cosmic shoreline. Our non-detection of helium absorption by LHS 1140 c is consistent with the previously measured dayside emission, which indicates that the planet has little to no atmosphere. Therefore, this system is consistent with the proposed position of the cosmic shoreline.

Moreover, we seem to be tracking a phenomenon that changes in short order. Co-author Shreyas Vissapragada (Carnegie Science Observatories) comments:

“After much careful analysis and consideration of the spectra, we determined that helium was escaping from LHS 1140 b’s atmosphere in 2024 due to heating from stellar X-rays and extreme ultraviolet radiation. However, our 2025 observations revealed no escaping helium, so the atmospheric escape appears to be variable. It is a rare privilege to witness the atmosphere of an extrasolar planet change on such short, human timescales!”

Image: In this artist’s rendering, the exoplanet LHS 1140 b is shown in the foreground, surrounded by a helium-rich atmosphere. Another nearby rocky planet orbits the same cool red dwarf star in the distance. This new study provides the strongest evidence yet that LHS 1140 b has retained an atmosphere. Credit: Carnegie Science.

Colin Cherubim (Harvard University), lead author of the paper in Science, points out that this is the first detection of an atmosphere on a rocky planet in the habitable zone of any star. Nice work, as Cherubim’s team had predicted precisely this mechanism in the LHS 1140 system. Escaping gases may indeed be a useful tool as we press on with more detailed investigations of planetary atmospheres on smaller, more Earth-like worlds.

The paper is Cherubim et al., “Helium escaping from the atmosphere of a nearby rocky exoplanet orbiting in a habitable zone,” Science 16 July 2026. Full text.

Hacker News
Aeon | a world of ideas

How to spot pseudoscience

Aeon Video
Updated

Illustration of a magnifying glass in front of a beaker with liquid on a peach background.

We are living in a golden age of pseudoscience. Here are three helpful tools for separating science from its imitator

- by Aeon Video

Watch on Aeon

Marginal Revolution

Data on Chinese innovation

Tyler Cowen
Updated

China’s technological progress in recent decades has been viewed with admiration, alarm, and (in some cases) doubt. To better understand the Chinese innovation ecosystem, we compile a dataset of almost 14 million domestic Chinese patent publications. We focus on the subset of critical technologies identified by the U.S. Department of Defense. Several surprising patterns emerge from the data: Chinese patenting is strongly associated with other measures of innovative progress; patents are not concentrated in corporate giants such as Huawei; universities have played a key role in innovation, much greater than state-owned enterprises or government-owned facilities; and fewer than one in ten Chinese critical technology patents involves an inventor with U.S. experience or training. Finally, using four text-based measures of patent quality, we show that the rise of Chinese patenting in critical technologies has not been associated with a decline in quality relative to the U.S. awards.

That is from a recent paper by Josh Lerner, Namrate Narain, Dimitris Papanikolaou, Amit Seru, and Zunda Winston Xu.  Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.

The post Data on Chinese innovation appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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Marginal Revolution

You will learn to love AI writing

Tyler Cowen
Updated

That is the theme of my latest Free Press article, excerpt:

But do I wish to eschew AI writing for the rest of my life? Absolutely not. Most of all, I want AI writing to get better, so it does not irritate me with its clichés and all too obvious identifying marks. I want AI writing that can fool me, and maybe sometimes I am already getting it.

Do you know Paul Simon’s lovely song “American Tune”? It is one of my favorites. A small percentage of listeners know that one of the core melodies is taken from Johann Sebastian Bach, namely the Passion Chorale from “St. Matthew Passion.” You could say Paul Simon is a plagiarist, though I would prefer not to use this term. He borrowed creatively, as do many other popular music artists.

Do many listeners care? No, although a few might feel a pang of musical nerd pride at learning of the association with Bach.

But wait, it gets worse yet. That melody does not come originally from Bach, but rather he in turn plagiarized a 1601 secular love song by Hans Leo Hassler, namely “Mein G’müt ist mir verwirret” (My feelings are confused). So the lineage is not even the glamorous one you might have imagined. If anything, “American Tune” sounds closer to the Hassler melody than to Bach’s adaptation.

Are you upset yet? Probably not, and that is good.

Someday we will feel the same way about text generated with the assistance of AI. We won’t care much where it came from, and much of the time we will not even know.

Recommended, and I hope the AIs like it too.

The post You will learn to love AI writing appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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NASA Science

Sizing Up the Sargassum Belt

Lauren Dauphin
Updated
 
Map of the Atlantic Ocean showing Sargassum density from low (blue) to high (red) in June 2026, with the highest concentrations in the tropical Atlantic.
This map, based on data from the OCI (Ocean Color Instrument) on NASA’s PACE (Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem) satellite, shows Sargassum highly concentrated in the tropical Atlantic in June 2026.
NASA Earth Observatory/Lauren Dauphin

Sargassum, a type of brown floating algae, has shifted its range in recent decades, thinning out in the North Atlantic’s Sargasso Sea while proliferating in the tropical Atlantic. That trend, underway since 2011, continued in 2026 as the algae, commonly known as a type of seaweed, reached its annual peak in June across a stretch of ocean known as the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt.

The belt’s Sargassum abundance in June 2026 made it the second-highest Sargassum year in the satellite record, slightly behind 2025, according to scientists at the University of South Florida (USF) College of Marine Science. Regionally, the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of America (Gulf of Mexico) both hit record highs, according to USF’s June 2026 Sargassum outlook. The western and eastern Caribbean saw 3.6 and 9 million metric tons, respectively, while the Gulf saw 5 million metric tons—nearly double its previous record, also set in 2025. 

“The belt is a basin-scale phenomenon that can have devastating local-scale impacts throughout the Caribbean and Gulf, and satellite observations are the only method that captures both scales on a daily basis,” said Brian Barnes, a marine scientist at the Optical Oceanography Laboratory at USF. “The tracking done by our lab helps communities know the current extent of Sargassum and prepare for what’s to come.”

In moderate amounts in the open ocean, Sargassum provides habitat for turtles, invertebrates, fish, and birds, and adds oxygen to the water through photosynthesis. But too much of it near shore can tangle and suffocate marine life, and mats that sink can smother corals and seagrasses. On beaches, decomposing Sargassum releases hydrogen sulfide, a rotten-egg-smelling gas that’s a potential problem for both ecosystems and tourism.

The map above shows Sargassum density in the tropical Atlantic Ocean in June 2026. Red and orange areas are where Sargassum densities were the highest. Note that although the “belt” appears continuous, discrete Sargassum mats are scattered across the ocean surface. The map is based on satellite measurements of how much of the ocean surface was covered by the seaweed, averaged per pixel across all observations made in June by the OCI (Ocean Color Instrument) on NASA’s PACE (Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem) satellite.

A detailed map of the Atlantic Ocean centered on the Caribbean Sea shows Sargassum density from low (blue) to high (red) in June 2026.
This detailed view of the same PACE OCI map highlights Sargassum concentrations across the Caribbean Sea and Gulf of America, both of which saw record-high amounts of the floating algae in June 2026.
NASA Earth Observatory/Lauren Dauphin

Ocean currents and winds shape the Sargassum belt, which, despite the patchiness, stretches nearly continuously from West Africa to the Gulf and holds a fairly steady “width” from the western tropical Atlantic westward, explained Chuanmin Hu, also an optical oceanographer at USF. The ocean currents have also spared Florida’s west coast from inundation this summer, while delivering large amounts of seaweed to the Florida Keys and the state’s east coast. The bulk of the Sargassum, however, is visible in the Caribbean Sea, shown in detail above, where problems associated with inundation have been more severe, Hu said.

Data for the maps were provided by Lin Qi, an oceanographer at NOAA’s Center for Satellite Applications and Research, who has been working to generate Sargassum maps based on data from PACE, which was launched in February 2024. The work extends that of Qi and colleagues at USF’s Optical Oceanography Laboratory. This team first developed Sargassum detection techniques using MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) on NASA’s long-running Terra and Aqua satellites and VIIRS (Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite) on the NOAA-20 satellite—data that have been a key component of USF’s Sargassum Watch System and of research into the seaweed’s longer-term trends.

Satellites detect Sargassum by its signals in reflected sunlight. Because of its plant structure and chlorophyll pigments, Sargassum reflects more near-infrared light than water. Scientists flag pixels where the reflectance spikes above the levels produced by plain seawater, and then they use the strength of this spike to estimate Sargassum density, which refers to the fraction of ocean surface covered by the seaweed in each pixel. Density estimates can then be converted into biomass, or the total weight of Sargassum present within a pixel, which is how the longer-term trends in the chart below are tracked.

A chart of Sargassum biomass detected by MODIS since the early 2000s, showing amounts increasing beginning in 2011, with progressively higher spikes through summer 2025 and 2026.
NASA Earth Observatory/Lauren Dauphin

The chart above uses the continuous MODIS record since March 2000 to show how Sargassum biomass across the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt has changed through June 2026. Notice the uptick beginning around 2011, when the belt was first developing, and the seasonal dips in winter and peaks in spring and summer. The record high in July 2025 stands out, followed by the quick rise in early 2026—especially in the first four months of the year—that culminated in the year’s peak in June. More recent observations, not yet reflected in the chart, indicate Sargassum biomass declined through the following month of July.

“Since the initial appearance of the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt in 2011, the total Sargassum amount in the Atlantic Ocean has increased substantially, more than doubling every five years,” Hu said. He added that the exact mechanism is still being investigated, but it’s possibly related to ocean warming, multiple nutrient sources, and the fact that large Sargassum mats attract other organisms—such as nitrogen-fixing bacteria—that can supply additional nutrients to sustain further growth.

Alongside data from MODIS and VIIRS, OCI data from PACE now feeds into the Sargassum Watch System’s near-real-time daily and weekly composite maps. A recent study of the central-west Atlantic led by Qi, spanning May through August 2024, found that OCI offers several advantages over its predecessors, observing more of the ocean and detecting Sargassum with greater sensitivity.  

Hu noted that the added pixels from OCI can improve near-real-time monitoring and analyses of short-term fluctuations. And its higher sensitivity, he said, will also lead to improved maps during winter months, “thus helping understand Sargassum changes over time.”

Additionally, the study’s authors found that OCI’s hyperspectral capability makes it the only sensor able to spectrally discriminate Sargassum pixels across the Atlantic Ocean “without ambiguity,” adding confidence to the interpretation of detected image features—especially in parts of the Atlantic where another type of floating algae, Trichodesmium, has been reported.

“I think I can speak for all project members, past and present, in sharing how rewarding it is to see the promise of PACE’s advancements come to life,” said Jeremy Werdell, PACE project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. “OCI has started a true renaissance in aquatic ecosystem monitoring from space.”

NASA Earth Observatory maps and chart by Lauren Dauphin, using PACE and MODIS data courtesy of Lin Qi (NOAA), and Brian Barnes and Chuanmin Hu (University of South Florida, Optical Oceanography Laboratory). Story by Kathryn Hansen.

Downloads

Map of the Atlantic Ocean showing Sargassum density from low (blue) to high (red) in June 2026, with the highest concentrations in the tropical Atlantic.

June 2026

JPEG (2.43 MB)

References & Resources

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Simon Willison TIL

Adding a custom MCP server to Claude and ChatGPT

Simon Willison
Updated

I've started exploring MCP in more detail. The web chat UIs for both Claude and ChatGPT can access MCP servers but it's not obvious how to set them up. Here's what I figured out.

I'm using my new unauthenticated MCP for my blog - https://datasette.simonwillison.net/-/mcp - which uses https://github.com/datasette/datasette-mcp to allow the execution of read-only SQL queries against a copy of my site's database.

Claude

Adding an MCP in Claude.ai is quite straight-forward. Start with the + menu next to the chat prompt and navigate through it like this:

The Claude prompt box with the + menu open, showing Add files or photos, Take a screenshot, Add to project, Add from GitHub, Skills, Connectors (highlighted), Add plugins and Web search. The Connectors submenu lists Add connector, Manage connectors and toggles for Descript, Gmail, Google Calendar and simonwillison.net. The Add connector submenu offers Browse connectors and Add custom connector.

The "Add custom connector" modal then contains the necessary fields to add the MCP URL, and optionally configure authentication (I haven't tried this yet):

Claude's "Add custom connector" modal. The name field contains simonwillison.net and the URL field contains https://datasette.simonwillison.net/-/mcp. Below is a collapsed Advanced settings section, a warning that only connectors from trusted developers should be used, and Cancel and Add buttons.

You can then toggle the new MCP on and off in the Connectors menu, shown above.

ChatGPT

ChatGPT is a whole lot more complicated. First, you need to enable "Developer mode" for your account in the Security and login panel:

ChatGPT settings on the Security and login tab. The Developer mode section shows a Developer mode toggle marked "ELEVATED RISK" switched on, described as allowing unverified connectors that could modify or erase data permanently, plus an "Enforce CSP in developer mode" toggle that is off. Above it are Sessions and Advanced security sections including a Lockdown mode toggle.

Having done that, you can add your new MCP. The button for that is hard to find - it's the "+" icon on the top right of the ChatGPT Plugins directory page:

The ChatGPT Plugins page, subtitled "Work with ChatGPT across your favorite tools", with a row of installed plugin icons. A red arrow points at the + button in the top right next to the plugin search box.

This gives you the "New Plugin" modal. Apparently an MCP is a "Plugin" in the user-facing ChatGPT UI.

Be sure to set authentication to "No Auth" if the plugin does not need OAuth configured:

ChatGPT's "New Plugin" modal. Name is set to simonwillison.net, Description is empty, Connection is set to Server URL with https://datasette.simonwillison.net/-/mcp, and Authentication is No Auth. An orange warning says "Custom MCP servers introduce risk" and a checked box confirms "I understand and want to continue", noting OpenAI hasn't reviewed the MCP server. A Create button sits in the bottom right.

Activating the MCP is difficult as well. On web I found I had to click the + icon next to the chat and then type the name of the MCP to search for it, then select it so I could run a prompt:

Animated demo showing clicking plus, typing simonwillison, selecting the MCP and running the prompt "count the tables"

The first time you do this it will prompt you to enable the MCP:

A ChatGPT conversation where the prompt "list tables" was sent to the simonwillison.net plugin. ChatGPT replies "I'll inspect the connected Simon Willison database and return its table names" and shows a card headed "Connect simonwillison.net" saying ChatGPT needs access to simonwillison.net to help with this request, with "Not now" and "Connect" buttons.

Then show you this more visually impressive splash screen:

A ChatGPT modal headed "Add simonwillison.net to ChatGPT" with the site icon next to the OpenAI logo and a Connect button on a blue gradient. Below are three notes: "Permissions always respected", "You're in control" and "Connectors may introduce risk", the last warning that sites may attempt to steal your data.

After all of this... it works!

Sadly I was not able to access MCPs from ChatGPT Advanced Voice mode - I was hoping I could connect them to a regular chat and then start voice mode and drive an MCP purely through voice commands, but it looks like they are not available as tools while the voice mode conversation is running.

DCReport.org

The Rise of Automated Property Access

Our Friends
Updated

Modern Homes Are Becoming More Connected

Technology has changed the way homeowners interact with their properties. Smart lighting, video doorbells, connected security cameras, and mobile applications have become common features, making everyday life more convenient while improving home security.

As connected technology continues evolving, homeowners are also paying greater attention to how they enter and secure their properties. Investing in automatic gate installation  has become an increasingly practical solution for homeowners who want to combine convenience, security, and automation in one system.

Rather than being viewed as a luxury, automated property access is becoming an important part of modern residential living.

Smart Access Is About More Than Convenience

Automatic entry systems do far more than eliminate the need to open a gate manually.

They help homeowners better manage access while creating a smoother experience for family members, visitors, and deliveries.

Benefits of automated entry systems include:

  • Remote access control
  • Improved property security
  • Greater everyday convenience
  • Controlled visitor access
  • Seamless integration with smart home technology

As more households embrace connected living, these features continue becoming increasingly valuable.

Technology Is Changing Residential Security

Home security has evolved significantly over the past decade.

Instead of relying only on traditional locks and physical barriers, homeowners now combine multiple technologies to better protect their properties.

Automated gates work alongside surveillance cameras, video intercoms, mobile notifications, and access control systems to create a more complete approach to residential security.

This layered strategy allows homeowners to monitor and manage access more efficiently while enjoying greater peace of mind.

Automation Supports Everyday Living

The best technology is often the technology that works quietly in the background.

Once an automated gate system is in place, operating it quickly becomes part of everyday routines.

Whether leaving for work, welcoming guests, or receiving deliveries, homeowners benefit from reliable access without interrupting their daily activities.

Instead of adding complexity, automation simplifies the experience of managing a property.

Planning for Long-Term Performance

As homeowners continue investing in smart technology, long-term planning becomes increasingly important.

Choosing reliable equipment and ensuring professional installation helps automated systems perform consistently over time while reducing unexpected maintenance issues.

Technology continues advancing rapidly, but infrastructure designed with future needs in mind remains valuable regardless of changing trends.

Making thoughtful decisions today often creates greater flexibility for tomorrow.

Connected Homes Continue to Evolve

Smart homes are no longer defined by a single device.

Today’s connected properties combine lighting, climate control, security, entertainment, and access management into one integrated environment designed to improve everyday living.

Automated property access has become another important part of this evolution, allowing homeowners to control entry while supporting both convenience and security.

As connected technologies continue expanding, integrated access systems will likely become an even more common feature of modern homes.

Building Smarter Homes One System at a Time

Creating a smarter home is not about adding technology for its own sake.

It is about selecting systems that genuinely improve everyday life while remaining reliable, practical, and easy to use.

Automated property access reflects this approach by combining innovation with functionality, helping homeowners create safer, more efficient, and better-connected living environments for years to come.

Photo: David Brown via Pexels

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DCReport.org

When an Eye Exam Stops Being Routine

Our Friends
Updated

Why symptoms, diagnoses, and testing can determine whether vision benefits or medical insurance are billed

Chris Albanis, MD, from Chicago Arbor Eye Institute , notes that an appointment for new glasses may be billed differently from a visit prompted by pain, sudden floaters, or suspected eye disease. One may fall under a routine vision benefit; the other may be processed through medical insurance.

That distinction can determine which plan is billed, whether additional testing is covered, and what the patient may owe. The rules vary, and a card that includes the word “vision” does not necessarily cover every service involving the eyes.

Routine care usually focuses on vision correction

Depending on the plan, routine vision benefits may help pay for periodic exams, refraction, frames, lenses, or contact lenses. Refraction is the part of an exam used to determine the prescription for correcting nearsightedness, farsightedness, astigmatism, or age-related focusing changes.

Some employers provide a separate vision plan. Some commercial health plans include limited routine eye benefits, while others do not. Medicare Advantage plans may also offer benefits that are not included in Original Medicare.

Original Medicare generally does not cover routine eye exams for prescription eyeglasses or contact lenses [1]. That does not make a routine exam unimportant. An eye doctor may still identify cataracts, elevated eye pressure, retinal abnormalities, or another concern requiring medical follow-up.

The purpose of the visit can also change during the appointment. A patient may arrive expecting a new prescription, but symptoms or examination findings may lead the clinician to evaluate a suspected disease. The services and diagnoses documented can then affect how the claim is submitted.

New symptoms may require a medical evaluation

Eye pain, injury, persistent redness, sudden vision changes, cataract symptoms, pressure concerns, or possible retinal disease can shift an appointment into medical care. Flashes of light and a sudden increase in floaters are particularly important because they may occur with a retinal tear or detachment.

A systematic review published in JAMA found retinal tears in about 14% of patients who presented with acute flashes or floaters in the included studies. Risk was higher when patients also reported reduced vision or an examination revealed vitreous hemorrhage [2].

The National Eye Institute advises people to seek immediate care for a sudden increase in floaters, flashes of light, or a curtain or shadow over the field of vision. Retinal detachment is a medical emergency [3]. Patients should not delay urgent evaluation while waiting to confirm insurance benefits.

Other conditions can be less obvious. Cataracts often develop gradually, while glaucoma may have no noticeable symptoms in its early stages. Pressure concerns or abnormal findings may lead to an optic nerve evaluation, imaging, or visual-field testing.

Testing and treatment can follow different coverage rules

Medical insurance does not automatically cover every test recommended during an eye visit. Coverage may depend on symptoms, diagnosis, provider network, referral rules, prior authorization requirements, and the plan’s definition of medical necessity.

Medicare covers annual glaucoma screening for beneficiaries who meet specified high-risk criteria. These include people with diabetes or a family history of glaucoma, African American beneficiaries age 50 or older, and Hispanic beneficiaries age 65 or older [4].

A preventive screening and a diagnostic test performed after an abnormal finding may be handled differently. Coverage often depends on whether the medical record documents a symptom, injury, abnormal result, or diagnosed condition supporting the test. Patients can ask the practice for the name of an anticipated test and then ask the insurer how it is covered.

Original Medicare may cover medically necessary cataract surgery involving a conventional intraocular lens. Part B also covers one pair of eyeglasses with standard frames or one set of contact lenses after each covered cataract operation that implants an intraocular lens [5]. The Part B deductible and coinsurance may apply, and patients may owe additional amounts for services outside Medicare’s standard coverage.

One appointment may include both covered medical care and a noncovered service. A health plan might cover evaluation of an eye condition but not the refraction used to update a glasses prescription.

What patients should document before calling an insurer

Patients can get clearer answers by gathering details before contacting their insurer. They should record:

  • The main reason for the appointment
  • When symptoms began
  • Whether one or both eyes are affected
  • Any known diagnosis, such as cataracts or glaucoma
  • The provider and office location
  • The names of expected tests or procedures
  • Whether the visit is a referral or follow-up
  • The names of both medical and vision plans

Useful questions include whether the provider is in network, whether a referral or prior authorization is required, whether refraction carries a separate charge, and how deductibles or coinsurance apply.

The practice’s official facts page describes comprehensive optometry and ophthalmology care involving cataracts, glaucoma, retinal disease, corneal conditions, and other medical eye concerns [6]. When an office provides both routine and medical services, the appropriate benefit may become clear only after symptoms and examination findings are reviewed.

Understanding the distinction can make insurance conversations more specific and reduce avoidable billing surprises. Urgent symptoms, however, should always take priority over coverage questions.

References

[1] Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. Eye exams (routine). Medicare.gov.

[2] Hollands, H., Johnson, D., Brox, A. C., Almeida, D. R. P., Simel, D. L., & Sharma, S. (2009). Acute-onset floaters and flashes: Is this patient at risk for retinal detachment? JAMA, 302(20), 2243-2249.

[3] National Eye Institute. Retinal detachment.

[4] Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. Glaucoma screenings. Medicare.gov.

[5] Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. Cataract surgery; Eyeglasses and contact lenses. Medicare.gov.

[6] ChicagoArborEye.com. Facts.

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The post When an Eye Exam Stops Being Routine appeared first on DCReport.org.

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