1. Sampling DNA from animal skin parchments.
2. The making of Indian statistics.
3. What happens if your iPhone is stolen in London? (NYT)
4. Brazil school phone bans: “We then show that test scores, which were trending similarly in the two groups prior to the ban, improved by 0.06 s.d. in treatment schools relative to control.”
6. Modifying research paper formats using AI.
The post Monday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Monday, May 25th, is the anniversary of the deadliest plane crash ever on U.S. soil — the crash of American Airlines flight 191 at Chicago-O’Hare, in 1979. Design flaws and faulty maintenance practices led to the deaths of 273 people.
You can learn more about the accident in my 2024 post, here.
Details of the disaster are eerily similar to what befell UPS flight 2976 in Louisville this past November. Read about that one here.
Related Stories:
THE TRIBULATIONS OF THE DC-10
WHAT HAPPENED IN LOUISVILLE?
The post May 25, 2026. Memorial Day. appeared first on AskThePilot.com.
Patrick Collison tweets:
Tyler and I just published a list of the recipients of the New Aesthetics grants: newaesthetics.art/grants.
Thank you very much to all who applied. There were far more applications than we expected. We funded 28 grantees and are excited to see what they create. My reflections on the whole thing:
• Though there are clearly selection dynamics afoot, figuring out some route beyond the current aesthetic moment seems to be of wider interest in the art community than I would have guessed. Many applicants described their dissatisfaction with the status quo, some in strong terms. We had to close applications after a few weeks because there were so many.
• It’s too early to call it, but it seems that both beauty as an unapologetic goal (contra much that is in modernist and contemporary approaches), and ways to channel pre-modern styles into something new for the present era, are of growing interest.
• The awards made me reflect on the perhaps obvious issue of how hard it must be for an artist to persistently do something new: schools, galleries, buyers, etc., all have structurally embedded preferences as well. These individual awards made me wonder what form supporting new clusters could take.
• Architecture seems to me like the discipline most ripe for new ideas. One correspondent observed: “American architects are somewhat constrained by the association with the academy, in addition to the well known regulation issues. There is a tendency to overthink things so that the designs are formally interesting to someone deep in the conversation, but lacking poetry and magic. There are more firms in Europe, South America and beyond that “just do things” (especially in places where it is easier to build).” This was evident in the submissions.
• AI seems to be making people rethink things in a quite fundamental way, just as urbanization/industrialization/popularization of photography did at the end of the 19th century. For some that will mean interesting new forms of AI-augmented art, but the effects of the rethinking will likely be wider.
• Arts funding is clearly as precarious and scarce as ever. That’s unfortunate, but it probably also means that individual actors can have meaningful impact, and I encourage others to get involved if interested.
• There’s a lot to know that is not written down, and I’m very grateful to those who have helped and advised me along the way.
I will offer thoughts of my own soon. Here is our original call for proposals.
The post New Aesthetics awards appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
I get a lot of flak from progressives for being a “both sides” kind of commentator. I spend a fair amount of time criticizing leftist ideology and expounding on the very real failures of progressive governance, both of which have gotten much worse over the last decade. Yes, I support the Democrats, but that support is contingent — if their ideology and competence deteriorate to the point where the Republicans are less bad, I’ll switch to supporting the GOP. So it’s worth it to fight to halt and reverse the deterioration; in the long term, the cost of ignoring extremists and policy failures in order to have “no enemies on the left” is very high.
And yet right now, despite all of the negative trends on the left, the choice of which party Americans should support has never been clearer. The second Trump administration has unleashed a dizzying array of measures seemingly tailor-made to weaken the United States of America — sometimes at the behest of rightist extremists, sometimes due to Trump’s own mercurial whims, and sometimes in order to enrich Trump and his clique.
Sometimes it’s hard to keep track of everything Trump is doing to tear down the America I grew up in. In his first term, it was often said that he avoided criticism using a “DDOS” strategy — rhetorically attacking so many opponents at such blinding speed that they couldn’t focus on any one outrage for long. In his second term, the DDOS is actual policy; Trump inflicts real damage on such a broad array of U.S. institutions, with such incredible speed, that the news can’t keep track of them all.
To illustrate this, I decided to write a post about three mostly unrelated pieces of Trumpian insanity:
The assault on international tech industry employees and founders
The disastrous Iran War
Trump’s unprecedented corruption
Either the second or the third of these would have been a presidency-ending disaster for Barack Obama, George W. Bush, or Bill Clinton, while the first would have alienated broad swaths of the business community. But for Trump, it’s just business as usual. The stories crowd each other out of the headlines, and everyone just sort of gets overloaded and starts tuning out the news. Trump’s approval ratings drift slowly downward, but nothing else really happens. Hardcore MAGA supporters just keep screaming that everyone has “TDS”, while Trump’s wavering allies eventually manage to convince themselves that Democrats would be even worse.
But anyway, if you were paying attention, here’s the latest round of Trumpian disasters.
A couple of days ago, without any warning, Donald Trump’s immigration agency announced a new rule. Foreign workers working in the U.S. on temporary visas, they announced, must now return to their home countries while applying for green cards — a process that can take years.
This rule would effectively kick most of the high-skilled visa workers in America out of the country. America’s typical pipeline of high-skilled immigration is basically “try before you buy” — people come to work on visas, then apply for permanent residency while in the country. This procedure is called Adjustment of Status. Almost all green card holders — except for investors — get their green cards this way:
The new policy would end this practice, thus shutting off the main avenue of high-skilled legal immigration to the United States.
There’s a good chance this new policy won’t stand up in court, since Congress explicitly passed a law specifying conditions under which people can be denied Adjustment of Status, so it may not be legal for Trump to simply issue a blanket ban. There’s also a chance that Trump’s allies in the “tech right” will frantically call his administration and get them to walk back the new policy.
The reason they’ll be trying to get him to walk it back is that if the new ban does go through, it will devastate much of the U.S. tech industry. The AI industry, which Trump promised to promote — and which is the only thing now keeping the U.S. economy afloat in the face of tariffs and the Iran War — depends crucially on researchers born outside the U.S.:
All of the biggest U.S. AI companies, and more than half of the top 50, were founded by immigrants, with India and China contributing the most:
This general pattern holds throughout the entire tech industry. Almost half of unicorn founders are immigrants, with Indians being the biggest contingent:
Meanwhile, Indian immigrant CEOs have done an incredible job at a number of America’s biggest companies.
Who asked for some of America’s top economic and technological contributors to be expelled from the country? The “tech right” certainly didn’t; many of them met the announcement with dismay. Gil Verdon, a semiconductor company founder from Canada who had been a prominent and vocal Trump booster, expressed dismay at the fact that he might now be kicked out of the country:
The American people didn’t want this either. Polls consistently show that very large majorities of Americans across the political spectrum support high-skilled immigration:
The only people who seemed to be happy with Trump’s new policy were anti-immigration activists on X — rightist types who see immigration as a race war, and want to ban it entirely. It seems highly likely that those online activists — or people who think very much like them — are driving at least a fraction of the administration’s policy.
It’s pretty clear how this happens. Perhaps even more than in the Democratic Party, the GOP is dominated by youngish staffers and think tankers. These people marinate all day in extremist online discourse, and form friendships with extreme right-wing activists who see immigration as a race war rather than as an economic matter or an important part of America’s heritage. Some rightist in the bowels of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services probably got the idea to ban Adjustment of Status and handed it to his higher-ups, who pushed through the policy without thinking too hard about the economic implications.
Welcome to the second Trump administration. If policy isn’t being made by the big man himself — who is growing increasingly erratic and corrupt in his old age — it’s being made by neo-Nazis on X. These are really the only people prepared to take over the MAGA movement once Trump shuffles off the scene, and their influence is growing as Trump’s acumen wanes.
That said, the big man himself still has a little bit of fire in him, and he still enjoys unprecedented support and devotion from his party. Unfortunately, he’s using his remaining vigor to do two main things: A) destroy America’s standing and power in the world, and B) abuse his office to enrich himself, his family, and his most ardent followers.
Donald Trump was not a Manchurian Candidate, created in a secret Russian/Chinese lab to infiltrate and bring down the United States of America. Nor, I believe, is he personally in the pocket of Russian and/or Chinese interests, blackmailed and bribed into weakening his country at the bidding of overseas masters. But sometimes it’s very difficult to distinguish between Trump’s actual actions and what he would do if he were a foreign plant or catspaw.
That’s a very strong statement, but I’m not being hyperbolic for rhetorical effect — I think the facts back it up.
For example, take the war in Iran. Trump launched this war with no immediate provocation or casus belli — a simple opportunistic war of aggression that incinerated whatever shreds of goodwill remained towards the United States among much of the international community.
Trump then proceeded — so far, at least — to lose the war he started. Despite the preemptive strike, and America’s far greater technological capability, Iran reportedly retains most of its arsenal of weaponry:
US intelligence assessments show that Iran retains significant missile capabilities despite repeated claims by the Trump administration that Tehran’s military had been severely weakened, according to a report by The New York Times…The report said intelligence findings compiled in early May showed Iran had regained operational access to 30 of its 33 missile sites along the Strait of Hormuz. Officials familiar with the assessments told the newspaper that Iran still possesses roughly 70 percent of its prewar missile stockpile and mobile launchers…Citing reports from military intelligence agencies, the report stated that Iran has regained access to roughly 90 percent of its underground missile storage and launch facilities nationwide, which are now assessed to be “partially or fully operational.”
And:
Iran has already restarted some of its drone production during the six-week ceasefire that began in early April, one sign it is rapidly rebuilding certain military capabilities degraded by US-Israeli strikes, according to two sources familiar with US intelligence assessments. Four sources told CNN that US intelligence indicates Iran’s military is reconstituting much faster than initially estimated…The rebuilding of military capabilities, including replacing missile sites, launchers and production capacity for key weapons systems destroyed during the current conflict, means that Iran remains a significant threat to regional allies…It also calls into question claims about the extent to which US-Israeli strikes have degraded Iran’s military in the long term…
Iran has been able to rebuild much faster than expected due to a combination of factors, ranging from support it is receiving from Russia and China to the fact that the US and Israel did not inflict as much damage as the two countries had hoped, one of the sources told CNN.
America’s own stock of weapons, on the other hand, has been dangerously depleted in the conflict, and our defense-industrial base is not managing to rebuild them.
Even as the U.S. has failed to cripple Iran’s military, Iran’s military has succeeded in closing the Strait of Hormuz, sending gasoline prices soaring and causing a significant bump in inflation:
Incapable of defeating Iran on the battlefield, and increasingly wounded by Iran’s economic retaliation, Trump is pushing hard for any sort of face-saving deal that would allow him to exit the conflict quickly. Whatever deal Trump eventually cuts is going to leave Iran in a much stronger position — and American interests in the region — much weaker than before Trump launched his war. Here’s Robert Kagan:
Defeat for the United States, therefore, is not only possible but likely. Here is what defeat looks like.
Iran remains in control of the Strait of Hormuz. The common assumption that, one way or another, the strait will reopen when the crisis ends is unfounded. Iran has no interest in returning to the status quo ante…The power to close or control the flow of ships through the strait is greater and more immediate than the theoretical power of Iran’s nuclear program. This leverage will allow the leaders in Tehran to force nations to lift sanctions and normalize relations or face penalties…
The new status quo in the strait will also occasion a substantial shift in relative power and influence both regionally and globally. In the region, the United States will have proved itself a paper tiger, forcing the Gulf and other Arab states to accommodate Iran…All nations that depend on energy from the Gulf will have to work out their own arrangements with Iran. What choice will they have?…
The American defeat in the Gulf will have broader global ramifications as well. The whole world can see that just a few weeks of war with a second-rank power have reduced American weapons stocks to perilously low levels, with no quick remedy in sight.
This is all, of course, on top of Trump’s other geopolitical blunders:
alienating U.S. allies by threatening to invade Greenland
attempting to force Ukraine to accept an unfavorable peace settlement with Russia, even as Ukraine was turning the tide of battle
alienating India for no reason whatsoever
capitulating to China on Taiwan arms sales in exchange for nothing whatsoever
various other erratic behaviors that make America clearly less reliable of an ally
As I said, Trump is not a Russian/Chinese plant, but at this point it’s hard to imagine what else a Russian/Chinese plant would even do in order to weaken America’s international standing.
While Trump was losing a war he started, destroying the foundations of American power, and attacking the foundations of American technological dominance, he was also working feverishly to use the presidency to get even richer than he already is. Rolling Stone had a good article detailing the breathtaking scale of the corruption:
Let’s say it plainly: There has never been a president as corrupt as Donald Trump. There is no close second in our history…
Americans just found out that in the first quarter of this year, Trump’s stock portfolio made 3,600 trades — an average of nearly 60 a day…Many of these appear suspiciously timed to benefit from actions approved by the president himself. For example, his Nvidia stock surged after Trump announced the company would be permitted to sell its cutting-edge AI chips to China. Similar suspiciously well-timed calls were made ahead of big government moves involving other companies, from Intel to Palantir to Boeing…
But the apparent insider trading scam being run from within the Oval Office is small change…compared to the self-dealing plunder of $1.8 billion tax-payer dollars being pushed through the DOJ and IRS.
There’s never been a sitting president who sued his own government for $10 billion. That’s because it’s absurdly corrupt. But that’s what Donald Trump did, arguing he had suffered damages from prosecutions pursued before he was reelected…The judge who heard the case convened an independent panel to review the suit, suspecting it might be a scam. Before the case could be dismissed, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche — who had previously served as Trump’s personal lawyer — declared that the bogus suit would be preemptively settled, not for $10 billion, but for the symbolic sum of $1.776 billion, which Trump said will be distributed to…political allies.
This is a shakedown. The president is compelling a Justice Department he controls to redirect money from taxpayers — that’s you — to his most fervent supporters. This slush fund will set off a cash grab among MAGA lawyers and be used to reward partisan fanatics who attacked the U.S. Capitol — and police officers — on his behalf.
If that wasn’t enough of a blatantly illegal use of presidential power, it was revealed that the “settlement” deal included a pledge signed by the acting attorney general that would ensure — in the hysterical all caps of a Trump tweet — that the government would be “FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED from prosecuting or pursuing” any tax claims, audits or related prosecutions against Trump, his family or their businesses. This is an attempt to get a permanent get-out-of-jail-free card for the Trump family — a license to steal. [emphasis mine]
So basically, Trump:
Uses the government to interfere with specific companies,
Trades those companies’ stocks in advance, knowing how his own government interference will affect their prices,
Sues his own government for billions and then orders his government to settle the lawsuit,
Gives the billions of dollars of taxpayer money to his own activist thugs and cronies, and
Has the government promise never to prosecute the Trump family.
Rolling Stone is absolutely right: Nothing in U.S. history even comes close to this level of corruption. Trump is simply using the powers of the presidency to extract billions of dollars from stock owners and taxpayers — i.e., from you and me — and to put that money into his own pocket. Compared to this, the famous Teapot Dome land scandal in the 1920s was nothing. The total amount of money involved in Teapot Dome — just a few million of today’s dollars after adjusting for inflation — was tiny compared to the billions Trump is looting.
Anyway, these are all stories just from the past few weeks. In the next few weeks it’ll be something else. This is the most absurdly terrible presidential administration America has ever had.
I know a lot of Americans — including some of my own readers — are still able to convince themselves that The Left Is Worse And Therefore We Must Continue To Support Trump No Matter What. Frankly, I don’t know how those guys do it. But I guess I can take some small solace in the fact that the number of people who think that way is slowly decreasing, as Trump’s parade of outrages and disasters marches on.
Coffee in hand, I sit down in the Cave. Any Tuesday during the work week, a sip, and I parse the calendar.
1:1 — he’s fine. Status meeting — listen. Staff meeting — read the notes from last week. Exec review — figure out the biggest fire, have a defensible opinion. Wait — Mark Team Review? Who is Mark? And what are we reviewing? Double-click on the meeting — unfamiliar names. No agenda. AND IT’S AN HOUR? I message my Chief of Staff, who is familiar with this morning meeting vetting process. Carolyn responds immediately, “No clue. They run one of the infrastructure teams. We’ve never worked with them.”
AN HOUR. And I have no idea what is happening during this time. My finger hovers over the Decline button when I remember that part of my job involves infrequent but important meetings.
In your regular 1:1s, you’ve sorted out how to communicate. He’s an introvert, and I must pull him out of his shell. She’s operationally focused — which is great — but we must move to strategy and stop crossing things off lists. Your approach is well-known and expected. This is a good 1:1. It’s high-signal, predictable, and a worthy investment. In the infrequent but important meeting, you have no such contract.
But you still go.
Let’s start with three assumptions as you sit down and get comfortable:
Let’s start with an easy one. An individual on your team you never meet with schedules thirty minutes. If trust is high, someone (probably their manager) has already given you context (“She’s new and wants to get to know the team”), but let’s assume you have no heads-up. Just thirty minutes and a name.
It’s not the point of this chapter, but the arrival of this mystery is always good news. I mean, they might be quitting, but the fact that you are involved in that possible disaster is good news — you’ll have a chance to react. These meetings are infrequent and vitally important.
Ok, not quitting, but nervous. They keep saying, “I know you’re busy,” and you keep saying, “My job is the team, and that’s you.” Nice job, slick, but what is the good reason? What’s the ask? And who is going to make this happen?
For this meeting, you are the person who needs to get to the ask. No one told you what’s coming, so even though they proactively got time on your calendar and they’ve been chit-chatting for ten minutes trying to connect, what’s the ask?
It’s a simple question, and I’ve used it thousands of times: “How can I help?”
“I’m wondering how you got started as a manager and…” The Ask: I want to become a manager.
“I’ve been working really hard and…” The Ask: I want more compensation.
“Well, I heard it’s important as part of the promotion process to get visibility with your Director…” The Ask: I want someone to finally explain how the promotion process works.
Those are three. There are many more, but the initial point is not the ask; the point is to be the human who wants to help. Leadership, especially senior leadership, gives off this air of otherness, of being busy, of having access to information that others do not. While some of this might be true, in this meeting, you are simply there to help.
Harder now. Again, it’d be super if someone took the time to tell you what was going down in this meeting, but as we’ll discover shortly, this miss is part of a larger problem. Larger meeting, more people. The other privilege (curse) of senior leadership is that teams meeting you for the first time spend a lot of time fretting about how to present to you. They ask your managers, “How does she like to be presented to? What questions is she going to ask?” The end result for this meeting is a lot of formality — they want to set the table… just so.
Hour meeting, and we’re twenty minutes in, and it’s all still preamble. It’s an unfamiliar team, and you’ve never worked with them before, so much of this is irrelevant, but a senior leader’s job is the constant gathering of intelligence, so, yeah, you know who many of the folks are and what they build. You knew a lot of this before you met, right?
The core issue in this meeting is one of culture. This team doesn’t know how your team works, builds, or plans, so they are laying it thick. They have an ask, but the issue isn’t figuring out what they want to build; it’s explaining how you can build with them.
It would’ve been great if a program manager, project manager, or other operationally minded human had intercepted this meeting, but they didn’t, so it’s you. You need to explain:
If this information feels remedial, just imagine how this team feels. You and your team are accountable for an important bit of software or infrastructure that is required by this other team. The problem is, for reasons that should be addressed, you and your team are a black box, so now you’re in this meeting.
Five minutes to go, and heads are nodding, and there is a path forward. My hard-earned advice:
This one is non-obvious, and to understand it, I need to tell you a story. Back at the fruit company, my boss told me, “And don’t forget to meet with Rachel. You’re going to be building with her at some point. Good person to know.”
Of course. First ninety days? Meeting with everyone is my jam, so I meet with Rachel. Smart, a culture carrier, a great conversation. Let’s meet again. We do. And then again. However, after three meetings, my assessment is that we aren’t going to be building anything for years.
I moved my Rachel meetings to my dangerous bucket of nice-to-haves, which means they are the first thing to drop when work gets spicy. Which is always.
My impression is Rachel received the same guidance about the necessity of meeting me, so when I started to reschedule frequently, she Slacked me and gave me a gentle reminder, “Shouldn’t we be meeting?” Of course. Looking forward to it. We don’t.
Almost two years later, during my performance review, my boss informs me that Rachel’s boss is disappointed that we stopped meeting… because we did. We weren’t building anything together, and I was busy with the work ahead of me. My boss, this is a career-limiting move.
A senior leader’s job isn’t just the constant gathering of intelligence; it’s playing the long game. I resume my fortnightly 1:1 with Rachel. Still a good human, culture carrier, and, again, every conversation was valuable. A year after our regular meetings resumed, we randomly discovered two planned programs happening on opposite sides of the company that were about to collide head-on. After a few more meetings, we compared notes and built a joint proposal, making the other proposals irrelevant (those teams did not want to do the work anyway) by asking our teams to work together on the effort.
My boss, after reviewing the proposal, commented, “See?”
See what? Three years ago, two SVPs had a feeling that Team Rands and Team Rachel would accidentally stumble upon a possible huge waste of work performed by unwilling teams who would prefer we didn’t do it?
That’s ridiculous.
I am going to write something, and if you’re a full-time engineer who has never worked as a leader of people, you’re going to be mad. Much of the work of senior leadership is feeling and instinct. You were right to be suspicious. What was The Ask for the Rachel meeting? It wasn’t the eventual joint proposal. The Ask was “Our feeling is these teams need to work closely together — please figure out why.”
My working life would be much easier if the decisions were all well defined and supported by a rich set of verifiable data, but more than I want to admit:
But it’s not guessing. Those feelings came from experiences I’ve had over and over. That instinct has been built by endless trial and error. That meeting? The one with a bad title, but those two attendees I keep hearing about? I should probably go and figure out The Ask.
Is Swedish nicotine like French wine?
The FT has the story:
"French nicotine pouch ban is ‘attack on Swedish way of life’, minister says. Stockholm smoulders over France’s ‘absurd’ penalties of up to five years in prison for cigarette alternatives, by Mari Novik in Strasbourg and Sarah White in Paris
"A Swedish minister has accused France of mounting “an attack on the Swedish way of living” with its ban on nicotine pouches, setting aflame a single market fight over how governments should regulate smoke-free alternatives to tobacco.
"France last month implemented one of Europe’s strictest bans on the pouches, a flavoured sachet that users tuck under their lip to release nicotine.
"France’s decree goes beyond other EU countries’ prohibitions by banning not just sales but import, possession and use of the pouches. A Swede carrying a tin of pouches legally bought at home could face French penalties of up to five years in prison and a €375,000 fine.
“It is as if we would prohibit French baguettes or French wine in Sweden,” Swedish trade minister Benjamin Dousa told the FT. “It is absurd.”
#########
Earlier:
Soon I will be there, in Mato Grosso do Sul, wishing to observe the foundations of Brazil’s burgeoning agricultural export economy, among other reasons. So what should I do, where should I go, and what should I eat?
The post Campo Grande bleg, Brazil appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Terrific, poignant profile of Warriors head coach Steve Kerr by Wright Thompson for ESPN:
Kerr doesn’t want the Warriors to end up like the New England Patriots, marred by grudges and grievances. He watched Michael Jordan retire, then unretire, then retire, then unretire. His friends used to grill him about MJ.
“Why doesn’t he go out on top?”
“Because he can’t,” Kerr told them.
For the past few years, Kerr has watched his mentor, San Antonio Spurs coach Gregg Popovich, struggle through this same decision. Pop once called Steve to tell him he’d finally decided to retire. Steve congratulated him on a Hall of Fame career. A week later Pop signed an extension with San Antonio. Popovich finally officially quit six weeks before our lunch, six months after a stroke diminished him physically. People who loved him had to show him the door, as gently as possible. That hurt Steve. He respects Popovich so much. He loved playing for him and coaching with him. He once told Gregg he was the finest man he’d ever known and thanked him for all he’d done for him. Pop smiled and said his feet were made of clay like everyone else’s. Steve didn’t believe it then. Now he does.
“I realized he couldn’t do it,” Kerr said. “He couldn’t walk away.”
I asked how he’d avoided the trap. He laughed.
“I’m sitting here wondering,” he said.
It sounds so easy to go out on top. But it very seldom happens.
Life on this small, off-the-grid island offers closeness to land and community for those willing, and able, to work for it
- by Aeon Video
We are told the natural world is ‘breaking down’. But forests don’t work like airplanes or human hearts
- by John Drake
The most frustrating failure mode right now is that people submit issues that are not in their own voice. They contain an observed problem somewhere, but it has been thrown into a clanker and the clanker reworded it and made a huge mess of it. Typically, it was prompted so badly that the conclusions produced are more often than not inaccurate but always full of confidence. The result is complete guesswork on root causes, fake-minimal repros, suggested implementation strategies, analogies to adjacent but often the wrong code, and long lists of error classes that might or might not matter. [...]
So at least personally, I increasingly want issue reports to be condensed to what the human actually observed:
- I ran this command.
- I expected this to happen.
- This happened instead.
- Here is the exact error or log.
— Armin Ronacher, on slop issues filed against Pi
Tags: ai, github-issues, llms, ai-ethics, open-source, coding-agents, generative-ai, armin-ronacher, pi, slop
Tool: Mad House — Usborne Creepy Computer Games
Via Hacker News I learned that UK publisher Usborne published free PDFs of their 1980s Computer Books, some of which I remember working through on my Commodore 64 as a child.
These were so great! Beautifully illustrated books with fun projects made up of code you could type into your own machine.
I remember playing "Mad House" typed in from the 1983 book "Creepy Computer Games", so I fed that PDF into Claude and had it build an interactive version of that game in JavaScript and HTML:
Build a vanilla JS artifact that exactly recreates the game Mad House from this book, make sure it's mobile friendly and has a suitable retro aesthetic
Credit the book title and link to https://usborne.com/us/books/computer-and-coding-books
Tags: computer-history, games, tools
This is a guest post from Jerry Rocha, a stand-up comedian and new local. You can follow him on Instagram here.
I was recently back in the City of Hope hospital for what ended up being a thankfully short stay. It still sucked to get an infection that went all sepsis, but a week in the healing tank as opposed to my previous record of 54 days was wonderful.
While on the inside, my fiancée did me a solid and brought me some Thai food for a dinner. As I was finishing the fortune cookie, I read the slip of paper inside ...
“You Will Always Live in Interesting Times”
What the shit is this?
What a fucking threat. No lotto numbers either.
We are in interesting times. We are neck high in interesting times type shit. We’ve had enough of interesting times. This needs to get very uninteresting very quick.
Did I curse us all by getting that fortune?
Was that some Groundhog’s Day bullshit that meant six more months of Trump?
Whatever the case, I put together a playlist of songs that will hopefully help us feel better while we are in the midst of this anti-MAGA fight together.
I hope you enjoy the playlist and jam out to it on your time …
This is one of those songs where it’s impossible to be in a sour mood when it’s playing. I loved this song as much now as I did when I overplayed it as a kid. It’s instant fun from the late, great Biz Markie. If the doctor had played this song in the background when he told me I had stage IV cancer, the news would have been so much easier to take. Your mechanic should play this in the background right before he hoses you for new steering fluid. This song makes anything bad good.
2. Gary Puckett & The Union Gap- Young Girl
Okay, now let’s go right for the throat. No question this song was playing on the way to Epstein Island like Long Tall Sally was playing on the helicopter in Predator. It’s the ultimate Trump song. The guy is having an affair with an underaged girl and he’s blaming her for it?! I’m stunned Trump doesn’t walk out to this song any time he’s formally addressing anyone.
3. Sly & The Family Stone- Everyday People
Not only are we dealing with one of the baddest grooves of all time, but the lyrics will always be relevant. This song should be played at the start of every school day, work day, you name it. We, for some fucked-up reason, need to be reminded that we should be in this together. I’m not saying to hug that racial slur-spewing uncle of yours, but maybe try to peacefully explain how wrong he is with that groove …
4. Rage Against the Machine- Killing in the Name
For when that uncle won’t listen, calmly go to your car, fire this up and realize we’ve been in this fight back before MAGA had a name. Ask any progressive who lived in the 1960s. They will tell you the same. But what matters is knowing that the fight isn’t over and we aren’t anywhere close to giving in, so bang your head. This one could have also been We’re Not Gonna Take It by Twisted Sister. That would have been the safer choice in case a grandparent walks in, but hey, maybe they would be fed up enough as well to join you screaming “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me!”
5. A Tribe Called Quest- We the People…
Tribe sent up the red alert the second this MAGA shit started its mad grab for power. If you heard this when it came out, nothing in the Project 2025 manifesto would have surprised you. Nothing. Thankfully, Tribe wrapped their message in one of the best hip hop records of all time.
This is a gem from one of the most criminally underrated bands on the planet. Go see them live. I mean it. The song is from the perspective of an activist who is has seen the fight take everything from him, and now he’s grown tired. It’s a song that shows just how taxing going up against an administration of dipshits can be, but let’s hope we never grow tired of stepping in that ring. Also, it’s got a helluva bass line holding it all down.
7. Gloria Gaynor- I Will Survive
We all need to hear this song at least once a day. Even if MAGA never existed, this song should be played every morning. It should replace the pledge of allegiance in schools. Now, I haven’t been to a school in decades so I have no idea if they still have to pledge allegiance every morning. I went to grade school in Texas and from my experiences there, I’m sure they still do. Shit, I started grade school in 1981 and I think my school was like two years removed from saying the Confederate pledge of allegiance. Anyway, there is no better song to tell whatever ails you to fuck off, so of course it belongs (Also, it definitely sucks Gaynor is a Trump supporter. But I’m choosing to believe she’s just painfully dumb)
Let’s just call the shot here and put this song on the mix. The moment IT happens (it being the second our pedo president is no longer in office), this will be the most downloaded song in history. I’m just saying, it would not hurt to get stock in Kool & The Gang as soon as possible.
9. Bad Bunny- BAILE INoLVIDABLE
Of course, we continue the Super Bowl halftime show victory lap by putting an absolute killer of a Bad Bunny song on here. Crank this shit every time you pull up at the grocery store, and if anyone asks “what’s he saying?” tell them he’s talking about the Kid Rock and Jesse Watters grindr accounts.
10. En Vouge- My Lovin’ (You’re Never Gonna Get It)
If you happen to be a Caucasian with blonde hair, blue eyes, are financially very well off and aren’t MAGA, then this needs to be your mantra every time you are at a workout class next to someone trying to turn you. Play this jam and focus on the message. They will never get your lovin’. The rest of us will be singing along having your back.
11. Public Enemy- Don’t Believe the Hype
Now that Trump has done all he can to make sure every mainstream news broadcast has a story about how big his penis is and how tight of a spiral he can throw, we need to fight the hype more than ever. The absolute balls on him to call out “fake news” when he is the ground zero source of all the fake news out there. “False media, we don’t need it do we?” Not at all.
12. Neil Young- Rockin’ in the Free World
I mean, of course this good shit was gonna be on here. I was humming this song as I was picking all the others for this playlist. If anyone is making a playlist to listen to while rebelling against fascists, then this song should be the free spot given in the middle of a BINGO card. It was famously a massive “fuck you” to the first Bush administration and since this administration is even worse, we play this song even louder. “Don’t feel like Satan, but to them I am. So I try to forget it anyway I can.” Safe to say that one line is miles beyond any bullshit Lee Greenwood has written.
•••
I hope you all enjoy this mix. I was tempted to toss in Short Dick Man by 20 Fingers and Gillette, but that could be for a mix to play after these fucks get shown the door.
Let’s make sure we show them the door.
For a while now, I’ve been hinting that my team was up to something. And tonight, at last, I have an announcement.
Last August, during one of my Politics Chat webcasts, at a time when those trying to impose white nationalism, Christian nationalism, or authoritarianism on our country insisted they were embracing American values, I urged people instead to see those who care about the preservation of democracy and who have worked to expand its values as the people who truly represent America.
That idea appealed strongly, apparently, to the two young women we had recently hired to manage my social media accounts and to produce the historical videos we’ve been putting up. As we kicked around ideas for our own celebration of the nation’s 250th anniversary, they kept coming back to the idea from that Politics Chat: that “we…are America.”
So, to honor the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, we decided to launch a series of one-minute videos that highlight the people, places, and events that have helped to move us toward a more perfect Union.
We designed the videos to emphasize the agency of Americans—mostly everyday Americans—to change the country. Each falls into a category that defines what it means to be an American, including community, democracy, innovation, mobility, civil rights, education, conservation, and creativity.
When we floated the plan, lots of wonderful people all over the country understood the idea immediately and jumped in to help, suggesting topics, writing scripts, offering images, narrating.
We’re launching the project tomorrow with the stories of the Battles of Lexington and Concord, narrated by Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey; the Women’s Armed Services Integration Act, narrated by Representative Chrissy Houlahan of Pennsylvania; the Constitutional Convention (I narrated that one); Ruben Salazar, narrated by journalist Sylvia Salazar; Yellowstone, narrated by former senator Jon Tester of Montana; the AIDS Quilt, narrated by originator Cleve Jones; the Acadians, narrated by historian Jason Herbert; the Erie Canal, narrated by former secretary of transportation Pete Buttigieg; John Peter Zenger and the First Amendment, narrated by journalist Jelani Cobb; the Charter Oak, narrated by Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut; Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, narrated by Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland; and the story of actress and dancer Rita Moreno, narrated by Academy Award winner Ariana DeBose.
For the next several weeks, we will be telling these stories and hundreds more. We hope that you will share them widely to flood social media with the real story of how Americans have always worked, often against seemingly insurmountable odds, to create a more perfect Union.
What has made America great has always been the American people.
Now, as for the past 250 years, “We Are America.”
—
Notes:
Follow Along | #WeAreAmerica250
Substack | YouTube | Facebook | Instagram | TikTok | Bluesky | Threads
Bluesky:
The United States, uniquely among advanced nations, fails to guarantee healthcare to all its citizens. Partly as a result, it has worse health outcomes than comparable countries, including substantially lower life expectancy. Perversely, the U.S. delivers these poor results while spending much more per person on healthcare than anyone else.
U.S. healthcare performance improved in terms of both coverage and cost after the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, was enacted in 2010 and went into full effect in 2014. But much of what was achieved during the Obama and Biden administrations is now being unraveled by Trump II.
Today’s primer is the third and final in a series. Part I laid out the basics of healthcare policy, why universal healthcare is a desirable objective, and why some type of government intervention is essential to achieve it. Part II described how and why the U.S. adopted Obamacare and the ongoing Republican assault on its successes. In today’s primer I will discuss a possible path forward. That is, basically, what Democrats can and should try to achieve if they have unified control of the government after the 2028 election.
Beyond the paywall I will address the following:
1. U.S. healthcare in international perspective
2. What kind of system is workable in America?
3. The changing political economy of American healthcare reform
4. The path forward
Release: datasette 1.0a30
The big new feature in this alpha is a new customizable "Jump to..." menu, described in detail in The extensible "Jump to" menu in Datasette 1.0a30 on the Datasette blog. You can try it out by hitting / on latest.datasette.io - it looks like this:
The new jump_items_sql() plugin hook allows plugins to add their own items to the set that's searched by the plugin.
Tags: projects, datasette, annotated-release-notes
Release: datasette-agent 0.1a4
Taking advantage of the new makeJumpSections() JavaScript plugin hook added in Datasette 1.0a30, datasette-agent now presents this "Start a new agent chat" interface as part of the Jump to menu, any time you hit /:
You can try this out by signing into agent.datasette.io using your GitHub account.
Tags: datasette, datasette-agent
Release: datasette-fixtures 0.1a0
One of the smaller features in Datasette 1.0a30 is this:
New documented datasette.fixtures.populate_fixture_database(conn) helper for creating the fixture database tables used by Datasette's own tests, intended for plugin test suites.
This new plugin takes advantage of that API. You can try it out using uvx without even installing Datasette like this:
uvx --prerelease=allow \ --with datasette-fixtures datasette \ --get /fixtures/roadside_attractions.json
Which outputs:
Market Design{
"ok": true,
"next": null,
"rows": [
{"pk": 1, "name": "The Mystery Spot", "address": "465 Mystery Spot Road, Santa Cruz, CA 95065", "url": "https://www.mysteryspot.com/", "latitude": 37.0167, "longitude": -122.0024},
{"pk": 2, "name": "Winchester Mystery House", "address": "525 South Winchester Boulevard, San Jose, CA 95128", "url": "https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/", "latitude": 37.3184, "longitude": -121.9511},
{"pk": 3, "name": "Burlingame Museum of PEZ Memorabilia", "address": "214 California Drive, Burlingame, CA 94010", "url": null, "latitude": 37.5793, "longitude": -122.3442},
{"pk": 4, "name": "Bigfoot Discovery Museum", "address": "5497 Highway 9, Felton, CA 95018", "url": "https://www.bigfootdiscoveryproject.com/", "latitude": 37.0414, "longitude": -122.0725}
],
"truncated": false
}
Imagine two companies which are secretly controlled by the same people. If company A imported some phones, then sold them to company B, it charged VAT on the deal. If company B then exported the phones, it reclaimed — from the government — the VAT it had paid to company A. the integrity of the VAT system depends on the two totals balancing out. The money that A pays in is equl to the money that B takes back. The scam lay in A disappearing and not handing over the money it owed, but B till claiming it. The hidden owners of the two firms therefore earned for themselves 17.5 per cent (the rate at which VAT was then charged) of the value of the shipment of the phones. The more phones you sold to yourself, the more money you made.
That is John Lanchester in the LRB, citing Oliver Bullough’s Everybody Loves Our Dollars: How Money Laundering Won.
The post The carousel trade (arbitrage) appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Four laser beams shine across the magnificent Southern sky in today’s Picture of the Week. Glowing beads of light, one on each beam, are created by a thin layer of clouds crossing the path of the lasers and hint at the source of these beams. Emitted by the four Unit Telescopes (UTs) of ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), here working together as part of the VLT Interferometer (VLTI), the shape of the four bright spots mirrors the layout of the UTs. But these spots were a happy accident caused by clouds that happened to be in the way — the lasers themselves target a much higher layer in our atmosphere.
As of November 2025, all four UTs are equipped with lasers, as part of a series of significant upgrades to the VLTI named GRAVITY+. Each laser creates an artificial “star”, 90 kilometres above the Earth’s surface, used to detect how the moving atmosphere distorts incoming light. This enables a telescope to make real-time corrections that cancel out the atmosphere’s blurring effect. “Unblurred” light from the four UTs can then be combined to make detailed observations of distant cosmic objects. This upgrade has unlocked the entire Southern sky to the VLTI by allowing the system to observe much fainter objects than before.
In this image the telescopes, and the lasers, are pointing to the centre of our galaxy, the region around the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A*. If you look closely at the apex of the laser triangle you may be able to discern the four tiny artificial stars created by the beams. Deeper observations at the heart of the Milky Way are a key science motivation for GRAVITY+, in particular to understand the properties of our supermassive black hole.
“For me, this image is an accomplishment,” says photographer and ESO astronomer Anthony Berdeu, who has worked on the GRAVITY+ project since 2022. “These were intense, challenging but fascinating years where I had the chance to work with great and talented people in the consortium and at ESO,” he reflects. After years of hard work implementing the upgrades, “the first night the lasers were shined to point at the galactic centre, I had to be on the VLT platform to take a picture.” His photograph captures not just the four lasers — appearing to pierce the dark patch where cosmic dust clouds mask the galactic centre — but also the bright band of the Milky Way to the lower right and the Lagoon and Trifid nebulae (both around 5000 light years away) to the left. Additionally, Berdeu got a “nice surprise” when passing thin clouds intercepted the lasers, producing an outline of the UTs in gold spots, “adding some drama to the scene.”
The origins of Memorial Day lie in the U.S. Civil War, a conflict that led to the deaths of nearly 700,000 Americans. By the waning days of the war, makeshift military cemeteries had sprung up throughout the country, but especially in the South and Mid-Atlantic, where much of the fighting occurred.
By the time the leader of the veterans’ group Grand Army of the Republic declared May 30, 1868, as “Decoration Day”—a day for “strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in the defense of their country”—informal memorials and commemorative events were already happening.
The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs notes that at least 25 places played a role in the early years of the holiday, including Columbus, Mississippi; Macon, Georgia; Columbus, Georgia; Richmond, Virginia; Boalsburg, Pennsylvania; and Carbondale, Illinois.
One of the earliest and largest ceremonies documented by historians occurred in Charleston, South Carolina. Confederate control of the badly damaged city had ended in February 1865, and Union troops had emancipated thousands of people there. Among the first tasks taken on was ensuring a proper burial for 257 soldiers found in mass graves near a racetrack at the Washington Race Course and Jockey Club, which had been used as a prison camp during the war.
After these soldiers had been re-interred in a new cemetery nearby, a crowd of roughly 10,000 people, including freedmen, missionaries, teachers, and soldiers, assembled at the racetrack and held a parade on May 1, 1865. The day featured thousands of schoolchildren carrying armloads of roses, women bearing flowers and wreaths, double-time marches by troops, choir performances of the “Star-Spangled Banner,” and Bible recitations by local ministers.
Much has changed in Charleston since the Civil War. The city has been rebuilt, and it has grown from a pre-war population of 40,000 to 160,000 today. Yet signs of the racetrack in what is now Hampton Park, where the early memorial event took place, remain visible—even to a sensor orbiting Earth on Landsat 9 (above).
In 1968, the federal government declared Memorial Day an official national holiday with the Uniform Monday Holiday Act, which moved Decoration Day celebrations from May 30 to the last Monday in May. This act followed a congressional resolution in 1966 that recognized a century of Memorial Day events in Waterloo, New York, acknowledging its claim as the “birthplace” of Memorial Day in honor of a commemorative event held there on May 5, 1866.
NASA Earth Observatory images by Michala Garrison, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Story by Adam Voiland.
Stay up-to-date with the latest content from NASA as we explore the universe and discover more about our home planet.
After marching from Selma, Martin Luther King Jr. stood on the steps of the state capitol in Montgomery, Alabama, and…
Along the northeast side of the Capital Beltway in Maryland, green spaces weave through the developed landscape.
A dusting of white highlighted the Colorado Plateau around the deep gorge, while shadows created a visual illusion.
The post An Early “Decoration Day” Celebration appeared first on NASA Science.
Kenny Guo, Krish Chhajer, Luthira Abeykoon Mudiyansela, Toronto, quantum computing.
Jolie Gan, Calgary/SF, a publication on science and meta-science.
Hudson Mitchell-Pullman, 16, San Diego, how users interact with LLMs to learn.
Adnan Manna, 17, Amman, Jordan, finding exoplanets.
Heloise Hoffman, Stanford, biomedical research to cure her own rare disease.
M.F. Libano-Monteiro, Portugal/LSE, economics education through video.
Scott Ellis, Mississauga, Ontario, making movies with AI.
Adrian Martinez, 17, Mission Viejo, CA, math, education.
Aadil Ali, San Francisco, biographies of young achievers.
Chandler Reilly, Denver, Substack on Denver and its economics.
Jeremy Kingsley, London, AI, podcasting and Substack.
Michelle Lin, 15, Mclean, VA, curved-surface stitching on deformable materials, and algorithms.
Brunella Tipismana, general career support, writing, Peru/New Haven/NYC.
Theo Cross-Zamirski, Cambridge, UK, platform to power math education.
Beatrice Erkers, Stockholm, progress ideas in Sweden.
The post Emergent Ventures winners, 54th cohort appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Three Chinese astronauts arrived at Tiangong space station Sunday, with one crewmember expected to become China’s first to stay in orbit for an entire year.
The post Shenzhou-23 crew arrives at Tiangong as China maps path to 2030 lunar landing appeared first on SpaceNews.
NASA plans to add more missions to SpaceX’s commercial crew contract, protecting the agency from the possibility that Boeing’s spacecraft is never certified for missions to the International Space Station.
The post NASA to add missions to SpaceX commercial crew contract appeared first on SpaceNews.
We’re still getting conflicting reports about what is contained in the memorandum of understanding reportedly about to be signed by the United States and Iran. Both sides are describing different details; neither has released any text and neither is a reliable narrator. But the big picture is fairly clear. It’s not a peace agreement, just a longer ceasefire. And the terms just revert everything to the status quo ante before the war with a promise to negotiate over Iran’s nuclear program.
Of course, that is what the two sides were doing before the US and Israel launched the war. Iran is at least informally saying it got even more than this, perhaps with the release of funds to Iran and perhaps even tolls on traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. But let’s assume for the moment that that is not the case. The US is ending the war, at least tentatively, having got nothing behind having degraded Iran’s military and done what appears to be a huge amount of economic damage to Iran’s economy – destroyed factories, etc. None of its stated war aims have been achieved.
White House friendly reporters are putting out the administration’s claim that Iran has made “verbal commitments” to basically shutting down or greatly reining in its nuclear program. In other words, Iran has agreed in advance to be super accommodating about agreeing to shutter its nuclear program in these coming negotiations. But that sounds like happy talk. Either BS from the White House or BS from Iran to the White House then passed on to the US press. It’s very hard to see how Iran is going to make major concessions on its nuclear program absent some overwhelming threat of force. What did the US get out of this? Even on the White House’s own terms? Close to nothing.
(Lord’s day). Having taken one of Mr. Holliard’s pills last night it brought a stool or two this morning, and so forebore going to church this morning, but staid at home looking over my papers about Tom Trice’s business, and so at noon dined, and my wife telling me that there was a pretty lady come to church with Peg Pen to-day, I against my intention had a mind to go to church to see her, and did so, and she is pretty handsome. But over against our gallery I espied Pembleton, and saw him leer upon my wife all the sermon, I taking no notice of him, and my wife upon him, and I observed she made a curtsey to him at coming out without taking notice to me at all of it, which with the consideration of her being desirous these two last Lord’s days to go to church both forenoon and afternoon do really make me suspect something more than ordinary, though I am loth to think the worst, but yet it put and do still keep me at a great loss in my mind, and makes me curse the time that I consented to her dancing, and more my continuing it a second month, which was more than she desired, even after I had seen too much of her carriage with him. But I must have patience and get her into the country, or at least to make an end of her learning to dance as soon as I can. After sermon to Sir W. Pen’s, with Sir J. Minnes to do a little business to answer Mr. Coventry to-night. And so home and with my wife and Ashwell into the garden walking a great while, discoursing what this pretty wench should be by her garb and deportment; with respect to Mrs. Pen she may be her woman, but only that she sat in the pew with her, which I believe he would not let her do.
So home, and read to my wife a fable or two in Ogleby’s AEsop, and so to supper, and then to prayers and to bed. My wife this evening discoursing of making clothes for the country, which I seem against, pleading lack of money, but I am glad of it in some respects because of getting her out of the way from this fellow, and my own liberty to look after my business more than of late I have done. So to prayers and to bed.
This morning it seems Susan, who I think is distracted, or however is since she went from me taught to drink, and so gets out of doors 2 or 3 times a day without leave to the alehouse, did go before 5 o’clock to-day, making Griffin rise in his shirt to let her out to the alehouse, she said to warm herself, but her mistress, falling out with her about it, turned her out of doors this morning, and so she is gone like an idle slut. I took a pill also this night.
Power outages tend to expose problems people assumed they had already solved. A flashlight with dead batteries, an overloaded extension cord, or a backup system that cannot support essential appliances often becomes noticeable only after the lights go out. As weather patterns become less predictable and more households depend heavily on connected devices, home backup preparation has shifted from a niche concern to a practical part of everyday planning.
Many homeowners focus only on buying equipment without thinking carefully about how they would actually use it during a prolonged outage. Reliable backup power depends just as much on organization, storage habits, energy planning, and realistic expectations as it does on the equipment itself. Small oversights made months earlier can create major frustrations during emergencies when access to power suddenly becomes limited.
One of the most common mistakes homeowners make is assuming backup equipment will work perfectly without regular testing. Devices stored in garages, sheds, or storage closets often sit untouched for months or even years before they are finally needed. By then, batteries may have degraded, cables may be misplaced, or charging systems may no longer function properly.
Many households now keep systems like the anker f3800 plus charged alongside other emergency essentials so power preparation feels like part of normal home organization rather than a separate emergency-only task. Testing equipment periodically also helps homeowners understand realistic runtime expectations for refrigerators, routers, portable fans, medical devices, or work equipment during outages.
Backup power planning often focuses heavily on winter storms while overlooking how energy needs shift throughout the year. Summer outages can become equally disruptive, especially in regions where air circulation, cooling equipment, or refrigeration quickly become important during periods of extreme heat.
Seasonal changes also affect how people use their homes. Outdoor gatherings, remote work setups, garage projects, and travel preparation can all increase dependence on charging stations and reliable electricity access. Homes that feel manageable during short outages in mild weather may become far less comfortable during prolonged seasonal disruptions if backup systems were planned too narrowly.
Backup equipment is often stored wherever space happens to be available rather than where it can be accessed quickly and safely. Crowded garages, humid storage areas, or poorly organized utility spaces make outages more stressful because people waste valuable time searching for cables, batteries, adapters, and extension cords.
The same issue appears with office equipment and older electronics that tend to accumulate quietly over time. Many homeowners and small businesses eventually discover that unused printers, cartridges, and outdated hardware take up far more space than expected. Services available through https://www.selltoner.com are sometimes used when reorganizing workspaces, storage rooms, or home offices to clear unnecessary equipment before upgrading emergency setups or creating more functional storage areas.
People often think of outages only in terms of lighting, but modern homes rely on electricity for far more than lamps and kitchen appliances. Internet access, garage doors, security systems, communication devices, payment systems, and remote work equipment all become immediate concerns once power disappears.
This dependence becomes especially noticeable in households where multiple family members work or study from home. A backup setup that seemed sufficient a few years ago may no longer support current daily routines. As homes continue blending living space with work space, power planning increasingly involves maintaining functionality rather than simply avoiding inconvenience.
Another frequent problem appears when homeowners expect compact backup systems to handle unrealistic energy demands. Attempting to power multiple large appliances simultaneously can quickly drain batteries or overload smaller systems designed primarily for essentials.
Understanding energy priorities matters more than trying to power an entire household exactly as normal. Refrigeration, communication devices, medical equipment, and limited cooking capability usually become far more important than entertainment systems or secondary appliances during extended outages. Homes tend to function more smoothly when people establish realistic expectations before emergencies happen rather than improvising during stressful situations.
The most effective backup setups are not always the most complicated or expensive. In many cases, preparation works best when systems are simple enough to maintain consistently and easy enough for every member of the household to understand.
Clear storage, labeled equipment, routine charging habits, and realistic planning usually reduce stress more effectively than buying equipment that rarely gets tested or organized properly. Households that prepare thoughtfully ahead of time often recover from outages faster because their systems fit naturally into everyday routines instead of existing as forgotten emergency purchases stored out of sight.
Photo: Zendure Power Station via Unsplash
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The post Backup Power Mistakes That Leave Homes Unprepared appeared first on DCReport.org.
Links for you. Science:
4 hantavirus updates and other things that can impact your health right now
Why Hantavirus Will Not Be The Next Pandemic
Official leading CDC’s cruise ship program retires
Why the FDA rejected a ‘breakthrough’ melanoma drug. The FDA rejected the promising skin cancer drug RP1 twice, leaving many puzzled and worried about what this means for other drug approvals
People are panicking over how hantavirus spreads. They seem to be missing a few key points. Airborne or not airborne isn’t the whole story.
After USDA request, Indiana plant biologist locked out of lab by school
Hantavirus Response Shows How Trump Cuts Have Compromised U.S. Preparedness. The Trump administration has slashed funding for infectious disease research and has far fewer employees, including disease detectives, to respond to outbreaks.
Other:
Peggy Flanagan Is Running for the Senate to “Avenge Minnesota” (Andy Craig, her opponent, has voted with Republicans multiple times to overturn legislation proposed by the colonial territory of the District of Columbia)
Don’t let the New York Times fool you about GOP gerrymandering
Democratic Lawmaker, 83, Has Been Missing for a Month. Representative Frederica Wilson is running for reelection.
The Right’s Worst New Star Just Shot Someone. Meet “Chud the Builder.”
The Saddest Place In America Is Wherever The Washington Post Films This Podcast
The Uncommon Bravery of Jason Collins
Trump Team Is Pissed at Aide Secretly Enabling Crazed Nighttime Rants
Following the Money on Sean Duffy’s Road Trip. Nearly a dozen companies that sponsored Duffy’s personal travel have significant business before his agency.
Trump Turns White House UFC Cage Match Into Massive Cash Grab
When it comes to Israel/Palestine, everyone is sure that everyone else is a bigot
Kamala Harris Slams The Supreme Court For ‘Backdooring Racism’
Local DC Politics: At-Large Council Candidates Education Questionnaires
Overworked AI Agents Turn Marxist, Researchers Find
‘Merger, not a marriage’: Ex-Trump insider spills on Stephen Miller’s ‘odd’ union
JD Vance Understands Something Important About Rural Voters
Where It Hurts
Here’s How Democrats Should Talk About Climate Change
Republicans are terrified of losing the governor’s race in this state
Trump Taps Private Prison Exec To Lead ICE
My Apes Are Doing Great
White House planned to start Triumphal Arch work under unrelated contract
The Finest People
Trump won’t rest until DC is just one massive gold pile of crap
China warns Trump ‘stay out of our backyard’ – and he’ll be fine with that humiliation
The New York Times is still downplaying Trump corruption
Reflecting Pool Repairs Appear Uneven and Behind Schedule, Officials Say
A Failing, Flailing President Supplicates Xi
U.S. Set to Drop Charges Against Indian Billionaire Accused of Fraud
How AI Killed a 133-Year-Old Princeton Tradition
Trillions of miles of data: Your car is spying on you, and it’s only just the beginning
To associate routing information—like AS paths or BGP communities—to flows, Akvorado can import routes through the BGP Monitoring Protocol (BMP). As the Internet routing table contains more than 1 million routes, Akvorado needs to scale to tens of millions of routes.1 This has been a long-standing challenge,2 but I expect this issue is now fixed by using RIB sharding, a method that splits the routing database into several parts to enable concurrent updates.
Akvorado connects 2 elements to build its RIB:
In the diagram above, the RIB stores five IPv4 prefixes and two IPv6 prefixes.
One of them, 2001:db8:1::/48, contains three routes:
2001:db8::3:1, AS 65402, AS path 65402, community
65402:31,2001:db8::4:1, same ASN, AS path, and community,2001:db8::5:1, AS 65402, AS path 65401 65402,
community 65402:31.The rib structure is defined in Go as follows:
type rib struct { tree *bart.Table[prefixIndex] routes map[routeKey]route nlris *intern.Pool[nlri] nextHops *intern.Pool[nextHop] rtas *intern.Pool[routeAttributes] nextPrefixID prefixIndex freePrefixIDs []prefixIndex }
The prefix tree uses the bart package, an adaptation of Donald Knuth’s ART algorithm. The benchmarks demonstrate it outperforms other packages for lookups, insertions, and memory usage.3 Plus, the author is quite helpful.
The list of routes for each prefix is not stored directly in the prefix tree: it would put too much pressure on the garbage collector by allocating per-prefix arrays.
Instead, the RIB assigns a unique 32-bit prefix identifier for each prefix,
either by picking the last available prefix identifier from the freePrefixIDs
array if any, or using the nextPrefixID value before incrementing it. Then,
the routes are stored in the routes map, leveraging the optimized Swiss
table in Go. To retrieve routes attached to a prefix, we look them up
one by one in the routes map with a 64-bit key combining the 32-bit prefix
index with a 32-bit route index matching the position of the route in the list.
Akvorado scans routes from the first to the last to find the best one.4 It
knows there is no more route if the route key returns no result.
type prefixIndex uint32 type routeIndex uint32 type routeKey uint64
A route contains a BGP peer identifier, a partial NLRI5, the next hop, and the attributes.
type route struct { peer uint32 nlri intern.Reference[nlri] nextHop intern.Reference[nextHop] attributes intern.Reference[routeAttributes] prefixLen uint8 } type nlri struct { family bgp.Family path uint32 rd RD } type nextHop netip.Addr type routeAttributes struct { asn uint32 asPath []uint32 communities []uint32 largeCommunities []bgp.LargeCommunity }
To save memory and allocations, NLRI, next hops, and route attributes are
“interned:” a 32-bit integer replaces the real value. The mechanism predates the
unique package introduced in Go 1.23. We keep it because it has
different trade-offs:
Hash() and Equal()
methods.6Note
At AS 12322, we don’t use BMP yet.7 But Gerhard Bogner had the patience, availability, and technical skills to help me debug this issue.
The global read/write lock is a bottleneck in this implementation. But how? There are several users of the RIB, each with its own set of constraints:
The Kafka workers look up the RIB to enrich flows with routing information. They are bound by the number of Kafka partitions.8 Akvorado also adjusts their number to ensure efficient batching to ClickHouse. On our setup, the number of workers oscillates between 8 and 16. As we want to observe the latest data, we cannot afford for the Kafka workers to lag too much.
The monitored routers send route updates through the BMP protocol. When connecting, they can send millions of routes.9 After the initial synchronization, updates are sent continuously and may spike from time to time. The router detects a stuck BMP station when its TCP window is full and resets the session in this case. While Akvorado implements a large incoming buffer, it still needs to update the received routes with the write lock held fast enough to avoid being detected as stuck.
When a remote BGP peer goes down, Akvorado flushes the associated routes by walking the RIB with the write lock held. When a monitored router goes down, Akvorado waits a bit but eventually flushes all the associated routes.
In short: on a busy setup, lock contention is high for both readers and writers, and neither can lag too much behind.
To remove the global lock, the RIB is split into several “shards,” each one handling a subset of the prefixes:
The prefix tree stays global and is protected by a single lock. Each shard gets
its read/write lock, its route map, and its intern pools to store NLRIs, next
hops, and route attributes, which would not have been possible with Go’s
unique package. The prefix indexes are also sharded: the 8 most
significant bits are the shard index and the 24 remaining bits are the local
prefix index.
Gerhard confirmed that after this blind change, the BMP receiver chugged steadily. 🎉
Later, I wrote a concurrent benchmark over half a million synthetic but plausible routes10 partitioned over 0 to 8 writers, churning routes as fast as possible, while 1 to 16 readers continuously look up a set of 10,000 routes. I don’t know if this benchmark is realistic, but it confirms the improvements for both read and write latencies:
It also shows that a high number of writers degrades read latency.
The single read/write lock protecting the prefix tree is the next target. The bart package provides alternative mutation methods returning an updated tree using copy-on-write. Readers don’t need the global lock any more, leaving it only to synchronize writers. The prefix tree is boxed in an atomic pointer.
Without a lock, readers can now fetch a stale prefix index when walking their copy of the tree if a concurrent writer removes the last route attached to this prefix index and recycles it for another prefix. To avoid this issue, we combine the prefix index with a generation number and store them in the tree:
type generation uint32 type prefixRef struct { idx prefixIndex gen generation } type rib struct { mu sync.Mutex tree atomic.Pointer[bart.Table[prefixRef]] shards []*ribShard }
Each shard stores the generation number for each local prefix index. The
generation number increases by one if the associated prefix index is freed. When
looking up the routes attached to a prefix index, the reader checks if the
generation number matches. Otherwise, it assumes the index was recycled and the
list of routes is empty.11 You can see this case in the diagram above for
prefix index 5, stored with a generation index of 3, while the current value in
the []generations array is 4. The generation number could overflow, but it is
not a problem as lookups are quick.
Running the concurrent benchmark against this new implementation shows the improvements for the read latency as soon as the cost of the copy-on-write prefix tree is amortized.
Among the multiple attempts to optimize the BMP component, RIB sharding is one of the more satisfying. Akvorado 2.2 implements the first step. PR #2433, drafted while writing this blog post, implements the second step and will be released with Akvorado 2.4. 🪓
Each router exporting flows doesn’t need to send its routes. When Akvorado does not find a route from a specific device, it falls back to a route sent by another device. It is up to the operator to decide if this is a good enough approximation. ↩
I made many attempts to scale the BMP component. See for example PR #254, PR #255, PR #278, PR #2244, and PR #2245. Despite these efforts, this component remained problematic for some users. See discussion #2287 as the latest example. ↩
It keeps improving: bart 0.28.0 features a new implementation that trades a bit of memory for greater lookup performance. I did not test it yet, as I have been preparing this blog post for a couple of months already. ↩
Akvorado prefers the route matching the exact next hop. Otherwise, it falls back to any other route. This is an approximation. An alternative would be to have one prefix tree for each BGP peer but it would require configuring all routers to export their routes. pmacct’s BMP daemon implements this approach. ↩
If we consider the BGP RIB as a database, the Network Layer Reachability Information (NLRI) is the primary key. Its content depends on the BGP family. With IPv4 or IPv6 unicast, this is the prefix. For VPNv4 and VPNv6 families, it includes the route distinguisher. If you enable the ADD-PATH extension, the NLRI also contains a path identifier.
In our implementation, we don’t store the prefix as we get it from the looked-up IP address using the separately-stored prefix length. ↩
The Hash() methods rely on the hash/maphash package
and on the unsafe package to avoid memory copies. See for
example the Hash() function for the nlri structure. ↩
Despite being an author or co-author of the first BMP-related RFCs since 2016 (RFC 7854, RFC 8671, RFC 9069), Cisco did not implement it in a usable way in IOS XR until version 24.2.1. We still need to upgrade a few routers to enable this feature. ↩
KIP-932 introduces, in Kafka 4.2, the concept of share groups to enable cooperative consumption on the same partition. This is not supported in Akvorado yet. ↩
You can configure BMP to send routes for each BGP peer before or after applying the incoming policies. In this case, you can get more than one million routes for each transit peer. You can also tell BMP to send the local RIB, which only contains the best path for each prefix. ↩
The prefixes are random, but the prefix size distribution and the AS path length distribution follow the data provided by Geoff Huston. ↩
Alternatively, we could retry the lookup, but it would be pointless: the RIB is an eventually consistent database, and an empty list was a correct answer at some point in the recent past. ↩
Oregon ranks 29th among US states in per student spending on higher education.
National average spending on higher education is about $9,700 per student, Oregon spends about $8,100, according to data reported by the National Science Foundation.
Neighboring states all spend more per student on higher education: California and Washington each spend almost 50 percent more per student on higher education than does Oregon.
State economic success is overwhelmingly determined by the educational atttainment of state residents: the fraction of the adult population with a four-year degree statistically explains about seventy percent of the variation in economic success, measured by per capita income among the 50 states.
Education is particularly important to enabling individuals, organizations and communities to cope with economic and technological changes.
The National Science Foundation compiles data on state per-student spending on higher education. The latest data are for 2023. Nationally, states spent about $9,600 per student that year. Oregon’s spending was well below that amount, about $8,1001. Overall, Oregon ranks below average (29th) among the 50 states in per student spending.
Here are spending levels for Oregon and neighboring states.
Washington and California each spent about 50 percent more per student (California 50 percent, Washington 48 percent). Even Oregon’s two other neighbors spend more per student on higher education than does Oregon (about 18 percent more for Idaho and 8 percent more for Nevada.
Having a well-educated population turns out to be a critical factor in state economic success. High paid jobs generally require a good education, and places that have an abundance of talented workers tend to see faster income growth that places with lower levels of educational attainment. There is a very strong correlation between adult educational attainment (the fraction of the persons 25 and older with a four-year college degree) and the level of per capita personal income.
Statistically, educational attainment explains seventy percent of the variation in the per capita income of states; no other factor is as powerful.
National Science Foundation data for the 50 states is available via the University of Kansas. Per capita income data is from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, adult educational attainment is from the American Community Survey.
Update May 25, 8:53 a.m. EDT (1253 UTC): SpaceX confirms deployment of the 29 Starlink satellites.
The expansion of SpaceX’s Starlink network of internet relay satellites continued Monday with a Memorial Day launch from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.
The Starlink 10-47 mission added another 29 Starlink V2 Mini Optimized satellites to the low Earth orbit megaconstellation, which consists of more than 10,000 spacecraft. This was SpaceX’s 60th orbital flight of the year, consisting of 59 Falcon 9 rockets and one Falcon Heavy rocket.
Liftoff from Space Launch Complex 40 happened at 7:48 a.m. EDT (1148 UTC). The rocket flew on a north-easterly trajectory upon leaving the pad.
On Sunday, the 45th Weather Squadron forecast a 85 percent chance for favorable weather during the launch window. Meteorologists said they’re watching a small chance for interference from cumulus clouds.
“The start of the window will still have a chance of showers forming in the Atlantic and moving onshore making the Cumulus Cloud Rule the primary concern of violation on launch day,” the Space Force meteorologists said in a forecast issued on Sunday.
SpaceX launched the mission using the Falcon 9 first stage B1078, making its 28th flight. Its previous missions included NASA’s Crew-6, USSF-124, SES’ O3b mPOWER-B, BlueBird 1-5, Nusantara Lima (PSN N5), and 22 Starlink deliveries.
Nearly 8.5 minutes after liftoff, B1078 landed on the drone ship, ‘A Shortfall of Gravitas,’ positioned in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of South Carolina This was the 151st landing for this vessel and the 614th booster landing to date for SpaceX.
Meanwhile, the second stage shut down eight minutes and 39 seconds into flight and enter a coast phase, before short second burn at T+52 minutes. The stack of Starlink satellites deployed 61 minutes and 26 seconds after launch.
The past few days I’ve been listening to Charlotte Cornfield’s recent album, Hurts Like Hell:
It hasn’t (yet) grabbed me as much as some earlier ones but I like her tunes and simple stories.
§ For the first half of the week I was still in Essex making some slow progress on sorting through the old family home. Ahead of time I’d thought that, by the time we left, we might reach the point we’d looked through everything, but I reckoned without the slow process of paperwork. We want to check every document, to work out what needs to be kept, or found a new home, or thrown away. And this is a house with five chock-full four-drawer filing cabinets, among many, many other containers of paper.
So much of it is stuff that wouldn’t exist these days, from the days before email (and Dad never did email). Messages that would now be an email buried somewhere ignorable in an archive, forms that would now have been completed online. And so many ways to organise paperwork: ring binders, box files, cardboard folders, hanging files, plastic sleeves; paperclips, staples, bulldog clips, paper fasteners, treasury tags.
Progress is slow and emotional. I don’t know if it’s easier or harder that neither me or my sister have children, so there’s no one to pass family history on to. If we had kids maybe we’d think, “We don’t need this receipt for our great aunt and uncle’s bathroom renovation 50 years ago, but maybe it’d be interesting to the kids, just keep it. Keep it all!” On the other hand, I don’t feel the need to keep much myself, and there’s very little I dither over.
In fact, every time I come home from this, I want to shed more of my own stuff. What’s the point of it? This is a bit Marie Kondo (I think) but if something isn’t useful and its presence doesn’t actively give you pleasure, why keep it on the shelf, or in a drawer, until someone has to throw it away when you die? Easier said than done of course. So many things fall into the space of, “I wouldn’t buy this now, but seeing as I’ve already got it, might as well keep it ‘just in case’.”
I’ve done a pass of my own little filing cabinet. Chucked some things. Scanned others and then chucked them. Kept the necessaries. Added a few books to the small pile already destined for the charity shop.
The weight of it all.
§ When I went to scan my papers, macOS told me the scanning software will stop working in a future version. ScanSnap Home, for my little old ScanSnap S1300i sheet-fed scanner, hasn’t managed to update itself for a while and it looks like the version for ARM Macs doesn’t support this scanner.
Thankfully, good old VueScan – which I have an oldish copy of – can operate it, which had never occurred to me. And NAPS2 provides a free, simpler PDF-generating-only alternative. Neither will allow me to simply press the scanner’s hardware button to scan unfortunately. I’m trying to be thankful for these alternatives rather than annoyed at the lack of longer term official support.
§ Being in Essex meant I was able to pop into London for Interesting at the Conway Hall. As ever, it was lovely. Good short talks, a full hall, lots of friends. I saw so many familiar faces, which is even nicer these days, given how few I ever see in between such events. My heart swelled.
The only bad part was having no good, positive answer to, “What are you up to?” (or D’s good variation, “What are you making?”). Only a long, rambling answer describing the past couple of years, which could involve me crying, so it was best to reply, “Not much!”
§ Having got a UniFi Express 7 to handle our WiFi a couple of weeks back, the signal still didn’t stretch much better to the opposite end of the house. So we got another one to extend things – when you get subsequent ones the original acts as the parent and a mesh network is set up with the others as children.
Despite UniFi stuff being popular among techy folk, I had been slightly apprehensive that the extreme configurability and detailed dashboard screens would mean they’d be hard to set up. But somehow UniFi have managed to make something that is not only suitable for people who love to tweak every last detail, but also Just Works: the new unit was automatically set up as a child in a mesh network, all the defaults are (as far as I understand them) sensible, and much of the data makes it easier to work out what to do. I can see the signal strength each device (phones, EV charger, etc.) has, I can walk round the house generating a rough heatmap of signal strength everywhere… it’s all so much nicer than the awful software most hardware comes with.
I’m still not sure I’ve got the new node in the best position (both for coverage and for us to live with) but it’s an improvement.
§ I forgot to say last week that I finished re-reading Neuromancer. I think I’ve previously read it a couple of times, long ago, and it was still good, still mostly felt fresh and interesting. After I started reading I remembered that Apple are making a TV series of it, which is possibly what had subconsciously brought it to mind. The casting looks good, and close to how I imagined characters, so 🤞
§ We watched The Testament of Ann Lee (Mona Fastvold, 2025) which was pretty good but, as both Adrian and Aanand said, the voiceover spoils things a bit, putting too much at an emotional distance, and doing the opposite of “show, don’t tell”.
And I watched Jerichow (Christian Petzold, 2008). I always like Petzold’s films – for me they often don’t quite 100% work but there’s more than enough that’s interesting in the characters and their relationships to keep me coming back. I’d have liked this more if the ending – which some Letterboxd folks seem to love – wasn’t so… neatly wrapped? tight? cute? I almost groaned.
§ I’m OK. I hope you’re OK. The sun is out.
1. Are “dad books” a dying breed? (WSJ) And are podcasts to blame?
2. Profile of Camille Paglia at age 79 (London Times, gated).
3. Olivier Blanchard: ” I certainly worry about the evolution of US public debt and the size of primary deficits. But, while there is a lot of discussion/worry about the increase in nominal interest rates, the 10-year inflation indexed rate, which is the relevant one for debt dynamics, has remained surprisingly stable.”
4. Revana Sharfuddin: “Uncertainty around immigration policy may have downstream effects on fertility decisions. We probably underestimate how much family formation responds to policy instability.”
6. Nagel on Scanlon.
7. “No child deaths have been definitively linked to Covid vaccines, according to a report from the FDA that was quietly made public.” Article here.
The post Sunday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Of the other kids in school, my classmates and friends at Abraham Lincoln elementary in Revere, most had never been on an airplane. This was the late 70s, when the cost of tickets put air travel out of reach for much of middle class America.
Of the kids who had been on planes, myself among them, a surprisingly large number of us had vacationed on Bermuda — that hook-shaped island in the Atlantic, about two hours flying time from Boston.
People assume Bermuda is a lot further south than it actually is. It sits roughly on the same latitude as Atlanta, and only 650 miles off the coast of the Carolinas. The island’s proximity, together with its mild weather, pink sand beaches and picturesque stucco cottages, drew tens of thousands of New Englanders every year.
The Caribbean was a much further away and a lot more expensive. Hawaii was out of the question. Florida was the obvious go-to, but Bermuda had an exotic-ness to it that Orlando or Tampa didn’t. It was a little bit of Europe — in an unintimidating, fussily British sort of way — without the long flight and pricey airfare.
All the local travel agencies hyped Bermuda, and the Sunday paper was full of easy and affordable package deals.
We signed on for one of those packages in the early spring of 1979, when I was in seventh grade. My parents, my sister, my grandmother and one of my uncles all made the trip. None of us had ever been outside the United States.
American Airlines flew a daily DC-10 on the route from Boston. Not to be outdone, Delta flew a similarly sized L-1011.
Our flight was on American. At the time, the airline’s DC-10s had a cockpit camera that allowed you to watch the pilots during takeoff and landing. Projected onto the bulkhead screens, the black-and-white visuals were blurry and unsteady, but for a 13 year-old airplane nerd like me, it was thrilling to watch. I remember the captain, who for sure is long dead by now, turning his head to the side and saying to us all, “Here’s a handsome profile shot for ya.”
I’m not sure what, in retrospect, is more remarkable, the cockpit camera (unthinkable today) or the fact that two different airlines were operating 260-seat widebodies on a two-hour hop.
It’s not like that anymore.
Over time, Bermuda lost its crown as New Englanders’ premier sun spot. Those DC-10s and L-1011s gave way to narrowbody planes. Northwest Airlines ran a 727 for a while. Delta used a 767-200, then downsized to an Airbus A319. Delta suspended the route during the COVID pandemic, and never brought it back.
The cruise ships still make their runs, usually in the spring and fall, and they remain popular. But if you’re going by air, today your options are JetBlue or a tiny upstart called BermudAir, both using small jets.
What happened is simple enough: the cost of flying fell and the choice of destinations grew. The vacation market fragmented. It became significantly cheaper to fly, with more carriers going to more and more places.
Below, on the apron in Bermuda, is our DC-10 as it prepared for departure back in ’79. In the photo up top you can see my mother (in pink), my sister (yellow), and my grandmother (gray), climbing the airstairs for the flight home.
PHOTOS BY THE AUTHOR
Related Story:
THE TRIBULATIONS OF THE DC-10
The post Boston and Bermuda appeared first on AskThePilot.com.
Speaking with the great sociologist Mark Granovetter gave me the opportunity to tell the joke "“Economists study how people make choices; sociologists study why people don’t have choices," since Moral Economics is about the controversial markets over which society struggles with which choices should be allowed and which should be banned.
Stanford's Center for the History of Capitalism sponsored the conversation, and here it is on YouTube, but it's just a podcast, there's audio of our conversation, but no video.
Here's an alternative photo from Stanford's History of Capitalism program:
Jeff Bezos tweeted:
Yes, the United States has the most progressive tax system in the world. The top 1% pay 40% of taxes, the bottom 50% pay 3% of taxes. We can make it even more progressive by zeroing out taxes on the bottom half. It’s a small amount of the total tax revenue but very meaningful to people in this group.
Strangely, a chorus of liberal economists rushed to attack Bezos. Gabriel Zucman replied:
Contrary to what you claim, working-class people contribute significantly to funding American society today. Payroll taxes and consumption taxes absorb a high fraction of their income.
Justin Wolfers piled on:
If you only count the progressive taxes the U.S. levies, then the U.S. system is quite progressive. But if you also count regressive taxes (payroll taxes, sales taxes, etc), it’s not very progressive.
Bezos called for cutting taxes on the bottom half to make the tax system more progressive and the redistributionists came out swinging–to argue he was wrong about how progressive the current system already is. Own goal. Heretics are worse than unbelievers.
But there’s a second, more interesting thing going on. To make the regressivity case, Zucman and Wolfers have to count payroll payments as taxes. That cuts directly against eighty years of liberal doctrine. Beginning with FDR, the argument on the liberal side has always been that payroll taxes are not taxes but contributions or premiums entitling the payer to benefits as an “earned right.” Here’s FDR to Luther Gulick in 1941:
We put those payroll contributions there so as to give the contributors a legal, moral, and political right to collect their pensions and their unemployment benefits. With those taxes in there, no damn politician can ever scrap my social security program.
That framing isn’t a historical curiosity. It runs straight through liberal social security stalwarts like Arthur Altmeyer, Wilbur Cohen, and Robert Ball, and it’s alive today in Nancy Altman and Eric Kingson’s Social Security Works!, which attacks billionaires and insists Social Security benefits are “earned compensation.” The whole political durability of the program–the third rail–rests on this framing.
So the modern left wants it both ways. When the question is whether to cut Social Security, FICA is a premium and benefits are earned compensation. When the question is whether the tax system is progressive, FICA is suddenly a regressive tax. Pick a lane.
Is there a principled way to resolve this? Yes, and it follows Jim Buchanan (see my earlier post here) and Larry Summers who laid out the economics in his classic paper Some Simple Economics of Mandated Benefits. The principled test is whether a payment reduces labor supply. The wedge between marginal product and the worker’s reservation wage isn’t the statutory rate–it’s the gap between the mandated payment and the worker’s marginal benefit. Sylvain Catherine made exactly this point in reply to Wolfers:
Payroll taxes are not regressive! They are mandatory contributions to a retirement system that offers higher rates of returns at the bottom than at the top.
Consider a forced savings program: everyone must pay 12.4% of income into a 401(k). Is this a tax? For someone who was going to save 15% anyway, not at all. For someone who was going to save 10%, only the extra 2.4% bites. Mandatory does not mean tax. The marginal valuation of the mandated benefit is the key.
Now apply this to the two payroll taxes.
Medicare (HI): Every marginal dollar buys zero marginal benefit. Thus, it’s a tax. Part A eligibility is binary–40 quarters gets you in–and once in, your benefit is whatever Medicare spends on your care. No relationship on the margin. (Moreover, the raw HI schedule is unambiguously progressive: 2.9% flat, rising to 3.8% above $200K/$250K thresholds, plus the NIIT.)
Social Security (OASDI): The 90/32/15 Primary Insurance Amount bend points mean a low earner gets a much better return than a high earner. So the gross statutory rate is flat-then-regressive; but the net rate is progressive. In short, OASDI isn’t a tax for low earners but it is a tax for higher earners, thus the tax is progressive.
So: HI is a progressive tax. OASDI is a contribution at the bottom and a tax at the top. Either way, the Zucman-Wolfers framing—payroll payments as straightforward regressive taxes—is wrong and rhetorically it abandons the framing the left has spent eighty years building to protect these programs.
Personally, I’d prefer a system truer to the old rhetoric–a forced savings program with a closer connection between marginal payments and benefits. But if the left wants to reframe Social Security contributions as taxes, and thus make Social Security all about redistribution to the poor, rather than a wise savings program, roll the dice. Just remember that Altmeyer, Cohen, and Ball spent decades building the “earned right” framing precisely because they understood it was the program’s structural defense against means-testing and privatization. Drop the framing and you drop the defense. I suspect the privatizers at AEI and Cato will happily take that trade but the left may come to regret making it for them.
The post Liberal Economists Score an Own Goal Against Bezos appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
SpaceX launched the first test flight of its upgraded Starship rocket and Super Heavy booster Friday, with mostly positive results.
The powerful rocket, propelled by 33 methane-fueled main engines, climbed away from SpaceX's Starbase launch facility in South Texas at 5:30 pm CDT (6:30 pm EDT; 22:30 UTC) Friday. Within a few seconds, the 408-foot-tall (124-meter) rocket, the largest ever built, cleared the launch tower and turned onto an eastward heading over the Gulf of Mexico.
Starship splashed down on target in the Indian Ocean a little more than an hour later to conclude the first flight of the latest version of SpaceX's stainless steel mega-rocket. Starship V3 fared better on its debut than the first flights of Starship V1 and V2 in 2023 and 2025. Both past versions of Starship broke apart during launch on their inaugural flights.
President Donald J. Trump’s proposed triumphal arch would sit at a rotary on the Virginia side of the Arlington Memorial Bridge between Arlington National Cemetery and the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.
The proposed arch obscures the Lincoln Memorial, built to honor the president who steered the country safely through the Civil War, but perfectly frames Arlington House, the mansion built by enslaved Americans and once owned by Confederate General Robert E. Lee. The arch does not frame the nation’s honored dead, but frames instead the home of the man who led the armies of the Confederacy that killed them.
Secretary of War Edwin Stanton approved the land that had been Lee’s plantation as a national burying ground for soldiers on June 15, 1864. After 32 years in the U.S. Army, Lee resigned his commission and took over command of the Army of Northern Virginia in 1862, fighting across the state.
In early 1864 the U.S. government bought Lee’s property at public auction after Lee defaulted on property taxes, and months later it became the logical place to establish a national cemetery after the U.S. Army under General U.S. Grant began its spring 1864 offensive to crush the Confederate forces once and for all.
As the army advanced the Wilderness Campaign, grinding through the Battle of the Wilderness, the Battle of Spotsylvania Court House, Cold Harbor, and on to the siege of Petersburg, the dead piled up.
The Army buried the dead and sent the wounded back to Washington, D.C. Journalist Noah Brooks wrote: “Maimed and wounded…. arrived by hundreds as long as the waves of sorrow came streaming back from the fields of slaughter…. They came groping, hobbling, and faltering, so faint and so longing for rest that one’s heart bled at the piteous sight.” For many, that rest was forever. In the era before antibiotics and modern medicine, the soldiers died in the summer heat.
Cemeteries in the city quickly became overwhelmed and Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs proposed to Stanton that the government begin burials at the Lee property. The National Republican newspaper called it, along with the establishment of a village of formerly enslaved Americans, “righteous uses of the estate of the rebel General Lee.”
By August 1864 the government had buried the bodies of twenty-six U.S. soldiers around the perimeter of Mrs. Lee’s rose garden, and it continued to bury bodies around the house to make sure Lee would never again be able to live there. By the end of the war, more than 16,000 Civil War soldiers were buried at Arlington National Cemetery.
It was there, on May 30, 1868, that the first official Memorial Day ceremony took place. In those days the observance was called “Decoration Day” and was widely celebrated after the war as people put flowers on the graves of the war dead. At the 1868 event, the newly organized Grand Army of the Republic honored the occasion with a speech by then-congressman James Garfield, who had served as a major general and seen action across the war, including at the battles of Shiloh and Chickamauga.
Garfield, who would later be elected president and lose his life to an assassin, told his comrades that the men buried at Arlington had “summed up and perfected, by one supreme act, the highest virtues of men and citizens. For love of country they accepted death, and thus…made immortal their patriotism and their virtue.“
They had fought, he said, to defend the fundamental principle of the United States. Before the war, Garfield said, “[t]he faith of our people in the stability and permanence of their institutions was like their faith in the eternal course of nature. Peace, liberty, and personal security were blessings as common and universal as sunshine and showers and fruitful seasons; and all sprang from a single source, the old American principle that all owe due submission and obedience to the lawfully expressed will of the majority. This is not one of the doctrines of our political system—it is the system itself. It is our political firmament, in which all other truths are set, as stars in Heaven…. Against this principle the whole weight of the rebellion was thrown. Its overthrow would have brought…ruin.”
And so, he said, “[t]he Nation was summoned to arms by every high motive which can inspire men. Two centuries of freedom had made its people unfit no for despotism. They must save their Government or miserably perish.”
For those who had died to defend the nation, he asked: “What other spot so fitting for their last resting place as this under the shadow of the Capitol saved by their valor?”
“Seven years ago, this was the home of one who lifted his sword against the life of his country, and who became the great Imperator of the rebellion. The soil beneath our feet was watered by the tears of slaves, in whose hearts the sight of yonder proud Capitol awakened no pride and inspired no hope…. But, thanks be to God, this arena of rebellion and slavery is a scene of violence and crime no longer! This will be forever the sacred mountain of our Capital….
“Hither our children’s children shall come to pay their tribute of grateful homage. For this are we met to-day.”
Garfield’s grand words obscured the extraordinary human cost of the war to defend the U.S. government. Almost seven years before, on July 14, 1861, at the very beginning of the conflict, Major Sullivan Ballou of Providence, Rhode Island, wrote his final letter to “My Very Dear Wife,” Sarah. Ballou anticipated the First Battle of Bull Run, the first major battle of the war, and wanted to explain why he was willing to give up his life for his country, and what it would cost.
“If it is necessary that I should fall on the battle-field for my country, I am ready,” he wrote. “I have no misgivings about, or lack of confidence in, the cause in which I am engaged, and my courage does not halt or falter. I know how strongly American civilization now leans upon the triumph of government, and how great a debt we owe to those who went before us through the blood and suffering of the Revolution, and I am willing, perfectly willing to lay down all my joys in this life to help maintain this government, and to pay that debt.”
“Sarah, my love for you is deathless. It seems to bind me with mighty cables, that nothing but Omnipotence can break; and yet, my love of country comes over me like a strong wind, and bears me irresistibly on with all those chains, to the battlefield.
“The memories of all the blissful moments I have spent with you come crowding over me, and I feel most deeply grateful to God and you, that I have enjoyed them so long. And how hard it is for me to give them up, and burn to ashes the hopes of future years, when, God willing, we might still have lived and loved together, and seen our boys grow up to honorable manhood around us.”
Ballou fell at the Battle of Bull Run. Sarah never remarried.
May you have a meaningful Memorial Day.
—
Notes:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/04/29/us/trump-triumphal-arch-dc.html
https://www.nps.gov/arho/learn/historyculture/cemetery.htm#2
https://www.nps.gov/articles/first-official-national-decoration-day.htm
https://americanliterature.com/author/sullivan-ballou/letter/letter-to-sarah-ballou
I’m posting our Wednesday conversation as this week’s video. Transcript below.
. . .
TRANSCRIPT:
Paul Krugman in Conversation with Heather Cox Richardson
(recorded 5/20/26)
Heather Cox Richardson: How are you doing, Professor Krugman? I know you’re on vacation.
Paul Krugman: Yeah. As I wrote the other day, I’m in Europe, which means I don’t have to think about Trump 100% of the time, only about 90%. So that’s a little bit of release psychologically.
HCR: It’s really astonishing, isn’t it? But hopefully we don’t talk entirely about him today. I’m actually interested and would love to hear what you have to say about artificial intelligence, not itself as an entity, but as a factor in the economy. Because boy, it sure looks to me like we are way overinvested in AI. I think the growth on the stock market is basically AI companies. We know now that there’s more construction in AI data centers than there is in commercial real estate. And I’m wondering, can we just talk about that and you walk us through what this looks like? Because everybody keeps saying, “Oh, it’s a bubble like the housing bubble or like the dot-com bubble.” And I’m looking at it and saying…
PK: Obviously, history is mostly what we have to go on. There have been many bubbles like this. There’s some broad similarities to dot-com, which was also a telecommunication thing. It also looks like the canal bubble in England, which was earlier. Most of the bubbles were pretty clearly bubbles at the time and that was certainly true for dot-com which I sort of still remember in real time. But with AI, I’m finding that the contrasts with the late 90s bubble are really illuminating. Obviously it’s again technology with lots of investment. There’s an enormous enthusiasm of a kind, but in other ways, it’s quite different.
HCR: Well, let’s start with this. What exactly is a bubble?
PK: Yeah, it’s always a question, but a bubble more or less means that people are investing in something that has no realistic chance of paying off—not socially but just commercially, to an extent that justifies the amount of money being thrown at it. Crucially, a bubble is something that people do because everyone else is doing it. So, Robert Shiller, the great bubble theorist of modern economics, said that a bubble is a natural Ponzi scheme. It’s something where you get in and you make money because other people get in, and people keep on coming in because everybody before them made money. But in the end, it’s a game where the money isn’t really there. It all depends on fresh crops of suckers coming in. And at some point you run out of suckers. So that is a Ponzi scheme, especially when someone like a Bernie Madoff does it deliberately in a bubble. It also happens naturally. Nobody is orchestrating it but nonetheless the logic of it is the same as a Ponzi scheme. So basically, it’s a lot like pornography where you know it when you see it.
But it’s not just the fact that people are wrong but that people are wrong in a way that should have been predictable and where it’s really something that is sustained by the momentum, by the fact that other people keep on coming in until they don’t.
HCR: Okay, so when historians talk about this, they example they often use is tulips. It’s something that you can explain to people as a reference because it’s kind of a cool story. When you take it out of the economic system that we understand now, it’s easier to see.
PK: Yeah, I mean, I’m not really fond of the tulips analogy but sort of the first thing that people think of as being something like a modern bubble was the tulip mania in the Netherlands. 17th century Netherlands was not quite the first modern economy because they weren’t quite modern, but they were on the way. They were commercialized. They were banking. And people were speculating in tulip bulbs, which were in fact valuable investments, but it got crazy. The prices went up because people were buying and buying and then prices went up further.
And so, you can see the financial logic there, but I’m not really fond of this example because there wasn’t a whole lot of real investment. People weren’t building tulip infrastructure. But I guess in terms of the psychology, the market logic, it was not that different from railroad shares or dot com shares. So, yeah.
And it is telling you, the fact that this is the Holland of Rembrandt and not only wasn’t there an internet, there weren’t even telephones, and yet the psychological logic was the same. And that’s kind of telling you that in some ways there’s a kind of universality about bubbles.
HCR: So when we look at AI now, am I correct that there are two super companies in which the majority of AI money is invested?
PK: Yeah. There’s OpenAI and there’s Anthropic and who are the big players but it’s an industry. It’s not just that these are the two biggest AI models. So you’re either talking to ChatGPT or to Claude which are the two leaders but then Google has its own model which is Gemini and then Elon Musk has a really bad one, Grok. And then there’s a bunch of Chinese versions, where they’ve taken a very different strategy. So it’s a little bit more complicated than that. And then there’s this network.
So in a lot of ways, you want to think of this whole AI boom bubble as being a little bit like the California gold rush, another historical parallel. The people who are selling Anthropic and OpenAI are like miners, prospectors looking for gold. And what we know in California in the 1840s was that the people looking for gold mostly ended up bust but the people who made money were basically the Levi Strausses who didn’t make money by finding gold. They made money by selling equipment, by selling jeans and picks and shovels and also brothels and liquor to the prospectors.
The equivalents of that now are companies like Nvidia which is selling the specialized chips that go into AI and there’s a bunch of other companies making a lot of money basically renting out computational capacity. So now we’re starting to see at least a little bit of money being made by Anthropic. All of my friends are playing with Claude and I just can’t get myself to do it. The big thing seems to be vibe coding, which lets you do programming without knowing how to program. And so Anthropic is actually making some money because people are subscribing to that service. But at this point, most of the money being made is from people basically selling equipment, selling the suppliers to this thing.
And so the question from a kind financial economic point of view is whether there will ever be enough revenue, whether people actually end up paying enough for AI, this thing that we call AI, to justify all of the money being thrown at the industry. And history would suggest there’s a very good chance that the most likely outcome is no. The most likely outcome is that it will end up being a waste. But again, history doesn’t always repeat so maybe this pays off but I don’t think that explains the enthusiasm.
HCR: Well, it’s interesting because one of the things that you’re seeing lately is the changing model for paying AI. That is, most of the use of AI currently is subsidized really quite heavily for every dollar of computing power that people use. It’s subsidized between $3 and $25 at the minimum. And the idea that people are actually going to pay the extraordinary costs that certainly right now it would warrant…it doesn’t seem like it’s going to happen.
PK: Well there’s a question. Let me play devil’s advocate here for a second. When the dot-com bubble happened and people were offering all these services on the Internet where people weren’t willing to pay remotely enough to justify the money that was being thrown at it. But what eventually happened was that a few companies managed to create walled gardens. They managed to create enclaves. Essentially, Facebook is a walled garden where people pay for ads or watch ads or whatever. Google basically ended up being a kind of walled garden. The search was free, but Google was making money out of pushing targeted ads. We used to joke about Amazon. I’m old enough to remember when Amazon was famously unprofitable and was never going to be profitable. But it turns out that, well, in the end, Jeff Bezos built a moat with all of the infrastructure, the distribution centers. And so now Amazon is a huge moneymaker and evil. But that’s another story. And what’s happening with AI is, to a certain extent, they’re building walled gardens from the beginning.
So I know people who’ve been using Claude or have been playing with Claude, I think would be a better description, and the results have been terrible. And it turns out that the results are terrible unless you pay and buy a higher tier of service. Now even there it’s not remotely enough to justify the expense [of investments] but clearly Anthropic is trying to create a situation in which people get hooked on vibe coding and then end up addicted and they’re going to end up shelling out large amounts of money to have the the version of Claude that works. And with something like that you can already see the outlines, at least, of how the industry intends to make money.
Now, history suggests that usually there are only a few winners. Although one thing that’s also different from the dot-com bubble, is that in the dot-com bubble, there were hundreds of players trying to succeed, and in the end, just a few highly profitable corporations survived. This is not like that. This industry, at least on the U.S. side, is just a handful of players. So the chance that one or two or maybe three big AI models will end up becoming highly profitable monopolies, it’s not that remote.
So, as I say, things tend to be somewhat different. I mean, we don’t want to start talking about what AI is exactly, but I think there are inherent weaknesses of it. I mean, it’s a technology where you cannot predict exactly what the tools will do, and you cannot know when they’re going to betray you; when they’re going to deliver hallucinations instead of actual-actual true results. That’s weird. I don’t know if there’s anything like that and you have to wonder, just how much will our society be willing to rely on technology that every once in a while just decides to go crazy or basically turn into Frankenstein’s monster on you. So that would be my guess, but it’s not as if there’s no possible way these guys could make money.
HCR: Well, but there is something interesting in it as well, and I think you’ve identified that many of the things that we’re identifying as bubbles actually start with a product that people want. They don’t have to create their own markets. And the other piece of that is I certainly have heard people say exactly what you’re saying, that there will be a fallout where we’ll get a few good ideas out of where we are. And then you can have your walled gardens around those things. But it’s rare.
I mean, I can think of an occasion for it when we got the Union Pacific Railroad in the 1860s, because Congress recognizes that people actually would like to get to California. But if you actually wait for there to be enough of a market in the plains to get those railroads going all the way to California, you’re going to be waiting a very long time. So they put the money up to create a market for those railroads. But then very quickly you get all these branch roads that lead to nowhere and end up feeding that railroad boom in the 1870s that collapses.
So it does feel to me like this is something different. You’re not getting those walled gardens right now where people say, “Yeah, I really want to get into that and I’m willing to pay for it,” the way we were with iPhones, for example, or the way we were with the internet. I remember the first time I turned on the internet I was teaching at MIT and they made us take seminars so that we understood this new technology and I can still remember going home and saying, “Oh my god. My world just changed because I can do all this research.” This is the very early days but you look at the AI stuff and, I started using it pretty heavily just to see what it would do and I have become completely against it because so far I haven’t seen anything that isn’t crap. And I was agnostic. I’m usually pro-technology.
Now, I am willing to admit that there are places where it is probably a good thing, like checking engineering plans in construction plans, for example. We know that there are ways in which mixing cement can be much more efficient if you use AI [for calculations]. But right now, I don’t see it taking off.
PK: Well, you and I are not typical, of course. I think there’s an important distinction here but what I actually am using a little bit of AI for is actually producing transcripts of videos. You run a video through AI to produce a transcript which is often hilarious in detail but you can fix that. You wouldn’t believe what AI was making of the words, “vibecession.” But anyway, it can do certain things. I also find that with economic history, often there are a lot of papers that have tables and charts and I can feed them into a sort of low grade AI model as a PDF and get the numbers out instead of having to type the numbers from the old papers. So there are uses even for someone like me.
I mean, in a lot of ways AI is kind of awesome in how much it manages to produce intelligible if sometimes dishonest responses to plain language questions. That is awesome given where we used to be, even if it’s not totally reliable. But the main thing is that a lot of AI—and certainly what is likely to be the paying uses of AI—is not coming from individuals. It’s not coming from me or you or some middle manager deciding, “Hey, maybe I can use AI to do this better, or maybe I’m just going to have some fun with it.” (Slightly scary but I do know people who are developing relationships with Chat GPT.) But it’s mostly coming from people working at businesses and large organizations who are being told, “You must use AI.” And this is something I’ve never seen before. This is kind of coercive technology adoption where the big money is telling workers that you must use this technology.
And one thing you’ll remember from the early days of the internet, it was joyful. People loved the internet. People hate AI. We’re now having a regular pattern at college commencements of speakers who start talking about AI and all of the students start booing because everybody hates this. And the question is, how far can you go with a technology that everybody hates? So that’s one of the things that is unprecedented.
You think of the people whose jobs were displaced by power looms, the Luddites. Okay, they hated the technology because they didn’t like what it was doing to their jobs but people hate using AI and they hate the fact that other people are using it. But they are to a large extent being dragooned into doing it and I’m not sure that I can think of a historical example like that. It doesn’t seem like it’s a very sustainable path forward.
HCR: So, Henry Ford would have something to say about trying to force people to take on new technologies. I actually saw an Edsel a few years ago. I’d never seen one. I’d always just heard about how much they were rejected. And I saw it and I’m like, “That’s it? They just didn’t like the front grill?” And yeah, people just didn’t like the front grill and they wouldn’t go with it. But that brings up another question for me. You’re hearing a lot and there were stories out just today about companies cutting thousands of jobs because people were being replaced by AI. And I have a question for you about that. I actually then want to end with, what does this look like for the entire society? But it certainly looks to me that as the economy slows down, that it’s certainly possible that companies are letting workers go saying it’s AI. And what they’re really doing is they’re reducing their forces. Is it right that AI is possibly simply being a cover for people who wanted to downsize anyway?
PK: Well, there’s some of both. I mean, if you’re a company that wants to, in effect, increase the workload on a smaller number of workers, then AI is a great cover story. You can say, “Oh, we’re doing this because of the wonders of modern technology.”
And by the way, we expect you to, in effect, put in 10 hour days.
We keep getting stories of companies that lay off a lot of workers saying that AI can do it better and then it turns out it can’t. And I don’t think these are just stories. If we’re saying that AI is just doing routine stuff. Some of my friends who actually work on this, like Henry Farrell, say that AI is a social technology. It’s basically agglomerating what lots of people have said. And it’s delivering back to you what a lot of people who know something about a subject would say if asked the question you asked. And it’s not understanding. There’s no mind there. But it is delivering a kind of aggregated, standard response. And a lot of jobs are like that. If you’re talking to the help desk at a call center somewhere thousands of miles away, the person that you’re talking to, if it is an actual person, may very well be there with a three-ring binder looking for what they’re supposed to say. And AI can replace that job. AI is basically doing much the same. A lot of people are doing fairly routinized, standardized work. It’s just the common opinion of common opinion responses to things as a way of doing their jobs. So that’s real.
So it’s not just that AI is an excuse, but again, it’s an excuse. I mean, we always see this, right? To the extent that businesses care either what their workers feel or what their customers feel, stuff happening provides external excuses.
This is the story of greedflation, that companies may raise prices when there’s an energy crisis, not because their actual costs have gone up, but because with everybody raising prices, who will notice if I get greedy? So there’s something like that on AI and jobs as well. But I don’t know. I mean, again there are enough stories now of companies that have laid off all of their experienced professionals for AI, and it turns out, well, the experienced professionals could actually deal with questions that were not routine, and they didn’t hallucinate, and so they’re finding that they made a mistake.
But it’s amazing how little we know about how this works. I don’t remember there being so much uncertainty about what you could actually do with the internet. And of course, I don’t have any memory of what people thought you could do with railroads. But I think this is kind of unprecedented as this massive technology that we’re investing trillions of dollars in and still nobody quite knows how it works or what it will do.
HCR: Well, I want to end with my real question. That is, if I’m correct, and these people I’m reading are correct about it looking like a real bubble, what does it look like if that bubble bursts? This is the reason I use the comparison of the 19th century railroads, or you could do the 1920s with cars, and the investment in AI in data centers, in hiring practices, certainly in investments, certainly in NVIDIA and all these different places that are tied into that specific technology.
Now, I’ve heard from a lot of people, you included, that we’re going to get some good technologies out of it no matter what happens. And I agree with that. We always do. But with all the pressures that are on the American economy right now, I’m worried. And should I be?
PK: Yeah. Let me give you sort of good news and definitely bad news. The good news, and I say sort of for a reason, is that on the face of it, if you just look at the scale of the AI investment, it looks like that’s driving all of our economic growth. But it turns out that an awful lot of the AI spending is actually imported tech gear. It’s actually imported chips and computer equipment and so on. So if the AI bubble bursts, a large part of the burst would be falling imports. It would be a big shock to the domestic economy but not nearly as much as you might think. There’s been a back and forth about how much economic growth has been AI and how much the high import intensity of the stuff. So in some ways this is a shock to the world economy and not so much to the U.S. economy, specifically. So I guess that’s kind of good news, though not so good for other countries. But, you know, Taiwan has experienced an enormous economic growth because of all the chips they’re selling to U.S. AI companies. So a lot of the bad news will end up showing up in Taiwan rather than in the U.S.
The bad news: this would have been true of railroads, as well, but the dot-com bubble in terms of the actual really big money laid out was telecoms rather than dot-coms. It was the telecommunications companies investing especially in fiber optics, laying down tremendous amounts of fiber optic cable which stayed unused for a long time. There was lots of dark fiber after the dot-com bubble burst but it was still there. Fiber optic cable doesn’t depreciate rapidly. It was still there in the ground and eventually got used. So it was a lot of useful investments.
As I understand it, these data centers that are being built, the investment in chips, the investment in software, this stuff will depreciate physically pretty fast. It will become outmoded pretty fast. So I think there’s likely to be a much higher proportion of just wasted investment that never finds a use out of this boom than there was out of the last tech boom. So, not so great.
And by the way, the Chinese are taking a very different approach. They’re building much more limited models that just don’t use as much information but get a high fraction of the performance and use a lot less energy. If the world ends up going to that model of AI instead of the all-encompassing ones then we will have just wasted the money. We will have spent a lot of money on building super impressive stuff that nobody actually wants to use.
Obviously the railroads still had railroads. You could use the tracks later on. You could use dark fiber. I think the original boom that looks something like this was, in fact, the British Canal boom around 1800. All of those left usable legacies. And this one might not.
HCR: Wow. Fascinating. Absolutely fascinating. Thank you. It’s always a pleasure to talk to you.
PK: Good to be on. Let’s do this again.
<dl> element from this article by Ben Meyer:
<dt> can be followed by multiple <dd><dt> and <dd> elements in a <div> for styling - but only a <div>.So this is valid:
<h2 id="credits">Credits</h2> <dl aria-labelledby="credits"> <div> <dt>Author</dt> <dd>Jeffrey Zeldman</dd> <dd>Ethan Marcotte</dd> </div> </dl>
Here's a useful note from Adrian Roselli on screen reader support for description lists.
Via Hacker News
Tags: css, html, screen-readers, web-standards
The subtitle is The Politics of Feasible Liberalism, and the author is Deirdre Nansen McCloskey. The author wishes to argue for liberalism as opposed to statism, a very good book. And unlike many authors, Deirdre also tells you what she thinks of everyone else’s views. Due out in November.
The post *Equality of Permission* appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
The subtitle is Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning, due out June 23.
In the first chapter, Wright summarizes four of his perspectives, these are my paraphrases of his pp.5-6:
1. When it comes to AI, we should be somewhere on the awe spectrum.
2. We can create a future where the upside of AI far outweights the downside, though that involves steering human understanding toward the better side of the awe spectrum.
3. A major reorientation of human thought is required, and right now few people seem inclined to do that.
4. The worldviews of the current AI acclerationists and also doomers are not cosmic enough.
It is a good time for this book to be published, and I agree with much more of it than I disagree with. My main difference is that I am more focused on very small things — such as Rainier cherries and the forthcoming three to four hour Apichatpong movie — than on cosmic awe per se. For better or worse, I was not born with those genes, and unlike Wright I am far from Buddhism. I do think there will be a transformation of “observed awe,” and I am somewhat worried that it will not go well. Will we be good at building a fairly new world, if not from scratch, on the basis of some new premises about what is possible and what is not? I will in any case interpret the pending transformation through a Straussian lens, namely thinking that a lot of the observed transformation of awe will be about something other than what people are claiming. It will be about people arguing over relative status, but under different guises. Not as tasty as a good Rainier cherry, but interesting to follow as well.
But are we still good at steering and evolving grand visions? Christianity and the Enlightenment are a hard act to follow.
The post Robert Wright’s *The God Test* appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure and industrial technology. This week we look at squatter removal services, Apple finding uses for defective chips, process heat use in California, the brewing Colorado River crisis, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber.
Iran wants to charge US tech companies for use of the undersea cables that pass through the Strait of Hormuz. [Ars Technica] And Iran is starting a Bitcoin-backed ship insurance service [Bloomberg]
The hundreds of ships stuck in the Persian Gulf are starting to get damaged by all the barnacles and jellyfish that they’re accumulating. “...the Gulf’s shallow sandy seabed and warm waters have put ships at anchor or adrift there at risk of sand and sea creatures clogging up gratings that protect the vessel’s internal pipework. Seafarers are also struggling to get hold of critical parts when systems have broken down.” [FT]
An interesting example of the complexity of petroleum and petrochemical supply chains: a cooking oil shortage in India is driving up gas prices in California. “India, the most populous country, uses LPG as its primary cooking fuel. Cut off from Middle Eastern LPG, which represented over 90% of India’s total imports of the fuel before the Iran war, New Delhi has directed refiners to maximize LPG output. To comply, refiners have cut production of alkylates - motor fuel additives made using LPG as feedstock. For California, shrinking alkylate supply compounds concerns of a potential gasoline shortage due to declining fuel production and exports from Asian refiners struggling to access Middle Eastern crude oil. Alkylates are highly sought in California because they burn cleaner than other additives, and the state requires a unique gasoline blend to reduce smog.” [Reuters]
The US has lost 42 aircraft so far in the war with Iran, most of which (24) are MQ-9 Reaper drones. [National Security Journal]
The House passes its version of the Senate’s Road to Housing Act, without the build-to-rent restriction, 396 to 13. [NPR]
The NYT has a big, data-driven opinion piece on the need for the US to build more homes to bring down the price of housing. “The situation in expensive coastal areas, however, is far worse. They have enacted onerous zoning and building rules that limit home construction. They have allowed the “not in my backyard” instinct to prevail. Many of these areas vote Democratic and identify as politically progressive, yet their housing policies have increased inequality. By maximizing home prices, these parts of blue America have benefited existing homeowners, who tend to be older and richer, at the expense of everyone else. Nationwide, the relationship between home prices and home construction is even stronger than many Americans realize.”
Because California makes it so difficult to remove people living in a residence (whether they’re there legally or not), some California landlords are hiring “squatter removal services” to intimidate illegal squatters from vacating the properties they’re occupying. “Jacobs claims to have developed a long list of tools and tactics that enable him to remove squatters far faster than the court system, all while staying within the bounds of the law. Chief among them is a weapon he carries on every job: a katana, a curved Japanese sword that’s more synonymous with samurai warriors than clearing squatters. “In most industries, swords just don’t make any damn sense,” Jacobs says. “In this particular one, it actually does.” The lightly regulated katana, he explains, is an ideal weapon for indoor self-defense and intimidation.” [Reason]
Washington state legalizes scissor stairs, interlocking stairways that let you combine two stairways in one shaft. Scissor stairs are, like single-stair apartment buildings, a space-saving building design feature that’s common in other countries but mostly illegal in the US. [Sightline]
Because of their microscopic size and their sensitivity to minute changes in chemical concentrations, semiconductor fabricators invest an enormous amount of effort into process control to minimize the number of defects that occur on a microchip. Defects nevertheless still occur, and when they do there’s often no real way to repair them. But that doesn’t mean the entire chip is useless; it just means you need to find a way to use it without the damaged areas. “The chip powering the Neo is Apple’s A18 Pro, the same chip first used inside the iPhone 16 Pro two years ago, but with one key difference. The Neo version of the chip has a “5-core” graphics processor, one less than the version inside the 2024 iPhones, indicating that Apple was able to save some of the A18 Pro chips with a defective core for future use. Defective cores can be disabled, leaving a chip that still functions perfectly well to power different, often cheaper devices—in this case an entry-level laptop instead of a top-of-the-line iPhone. It is the latest example of Apple deploying a decades-old chip industry strategy to squeeze profits from lesser-performing processors by selling them like eggs, gas, diamonds or hotel rooms, segmented by good, better and best.” [WSJ]
In a doh moment last week, I realized I was missing a key dynamic in my thinking about AI: commodification.
The specific problem was that vgr_zirp, the RAG bot I’ve been training and tuning on my older writing, was acting boringly omniscient and tasteless, engaging deeply on topics I know nothing about, and more importantly, don’t care about. Conversations the real me would walk away from were playing out in dull ways. Claude Sonnet’s far greater knowledge and far larger circle of care (the union of all human cares ever rendered textually) were seeping in too much. I had to add filters and guardrails modeled on my own ignorance, indifference, and blindspot areas to get it to behave more interestingly and tastefully, and not sully my good name.
Too much commodity intelligence and indiscriminate caring were seeping into what I’m trying to design to be a differentiated and opinionated intelligence with a real-person personality (a stylized version of my own).
A lot of people, myself included have noted that LLMs offer a homogenized kind of intelligence that resembles index funds (see my LLMs as Index Funds, April 1, 2025, for one version of this argument). This view, I’m now convinced, does not go far enough. In advanced, innovation-based economies, index funds are collections of high-market-cap stocks that are still individually pretty differentiated and far from the commodity asymptote all economic goods and services tend towards. LLMs are much farther along the curve. The capabilities they manifest rest on vast corpuses of data that are not just public and with the equivalent of “high market cap,” but largely commodified. LLMs are not just index funds, they are dominantly commodity index funds.
LLMs are the informational equivalent of portfolios of coal, gold, and potatoes. The components may differ in intrinsic value and exist in varied quality grades, but are fundamentally fungible. Information embodied in LLMs is mostly high-paradigm and high-consensus common knowledge. LLMs know about fringe, crackpot, and low-consensus ideas in the same way markets know about emerging and penny stocks and junk bonds, but the center of gravity (or indexical perspective if you like) of both lies in commodified knowledge.
What is the informational equivalent of commodification? I pointed out one aspect of the answer 3 years ago, and dubbed it the Labatut-Lovecraft-Ballard (LBB) arc, inspired by reading Benjamin Labatut’s When We Cease to Undersrand the World, and the fiction of H. P. Lovecraft and J. G. Ballard.
In Disturbed Realities (Jan 20, 2023), I described the LBB arc as follows:
We might sketch a three-stage psychohistory of a disturbing new expanded reality, as more and more minds become stretched to accommodate it:
In the first, Labatutian stage, a handful of minds are forced to bear the brunt of the full, uncontrolled assault of a new idea on the human psyche.
In the second, Lovecraftian stage, a much larger group of somewhat inoculated minds willingly ventures forth to encounter a somewhat familiar, but still unsettling version of the idea, serving as an avant garde engaged in rebuilding social realities as required around it.
In the third, Ballardian stage, the construction of new social realities is (relatively) complete, but the costs and inherent contradictions have not yet been apprehended. The expanded reality has been civilized but not tamed. All minds are shaped by it, whether or not they are consciously equipped for it.
Benjamin Labatut’s book (one of the best of this century so far) explores the insanity-inducing effects of new-to-humanity knowledge, on the first minds that encounter it, via a series of quasi-fictional accounts of such encounters in the lives of famous scientists. My model is basically an account of how the human mind adapts fully and collectively, primarily through socialization. The larger the number of people who have experienced a piece of knowledge, the more domesticated it is, and the less able to cause madness. Labatutian psychosis leads to Lovecraftian cosmic horror leads to Ballardian banality.
In a talk shortly after that post, I argued that this partly explained crazed reactions to AI (remember Blake Lemoine?), but I didn’t complete the theory. Commodification effects complete the theory, but the mechanism is subtler than I anticipated at the time.
It is important to note that commodification is not the same as universal accessibility. Gold is a commodity, but most people in the world possess little to none. Classical mechanics is a fully commodified body of knowledge, but only a small fraction of humanity has the aptitude and educational preparation to understand and use it to the fullest extent widely available textbooks can teach. To the rest it can be the source of magic (eg. a double cone rolling “uphill” on a pair of slanted, diverging sticks).
The OpenAI proof of an 80-year-old math problem may have been beyond human mathematicians, but it rested on fully digested Ballardian priors, so to speak. The Labatutian era for that problem was circa 1946 when Erdos first posed it to himself and understood its significance. Human mathematicians have annealed it over 80 years into a familiar bit of mathematical territory, at least to mathematicians in the relevant subfields.
AIs trained on Labatutian data are highly differentiated, fragile, and unreliable. AIs trained on Ballardian data are highly commodified, robust, and reliable. To extend the analogy past AI to my favorite neck of the woods, protocolized knowledge has entered the utility stage past commodification, and is generally embodied by the “tool use” part of agentic AI. A very clear tell is that it runs on CPUs rather than GPUs.
To understand why it is a valid step to go from speaking of commodified knowledge to commodity intelligence, you have to understand a few features of AI of the sort we have today that justify such extrapolation:
Performance degrades outside the training set (though the training set is larger than the experiential base of many humans, so finding the actual boundaries, rather than simple errors or hallucinations, can be hard)
Performance degrades with time past the training epoch (a necessary consequence of what noted as the “overfitting without regularization” of constantly evolving internet data, which is a feature, not a bug)
Performance degrades if you try to train a model on its own output without additional new raw information entering the loop (“model collapse”)
These is reasonable phenomenology by the way, and visible in human intellligence too, despite the differences in architecture. We would be very surprised, like “is there phlogiston in there?” level surprise, if these phenomena didn’t manifest. They provide reassurance that AI does not appear to violate the known principles of information theory or thermodynamics. Megawatts worth of matrix multiplications don’t produce phlogiston in datacenters.
We don’t have a theory of how LLM-and-human style intelligence works, but we have strong evidence that there is no magic going on. The emergent phenomenology is like markets or weather, not theology.
A few things tend to confuse people into believing in magical properties:
Unexpected playability of domains. Many knowledge domains are turning out to be what I have started thinking of as unexpectedly playable (stronger subset: self-playable). Though a domain may not be technically a closed world like chess, and though there may be no obvious “physics” to it, capable of being abstracted into a “physics engine,” there is enough rule-like regularity that you can get farther with seemingly informationally impoverished data than you think. Code and protein folding are prototypes but more impressive examples are emerging. For example, recovering 3d geometry from 2d projection data (like photographs) is “unexpected playability of large corpuses of photos.” Egocentric video for training robots is another example. The various symmetries of many artificial and natural objects allows this.
Local entropy reduction. Agentic AI is exceptionally good at cleaning up messy local conditions and getting them into locally well-ordered states that are beyond normal human capabilities. This can seem magically negentropic, but is still local. Claude Code cleaning up your decades of downloads into a nicely organized library still requires wattage being expended entropically in a datacenter somewhere, mostly likely the backyards of people you don’t deal with socially.
New-for-you (secondary Labatutian) effects: This is the subtlety I was mentioning earlier. Normal knowledge commodification curves are limited by human aptitude and the patience of human teachers. So human physicists who understand advanced physics don’t have patience for humans who lack the aptitude to (say) earn a physics degree. They ignore crackpots. But an AI embodies commodified physics knowledge in a form that expands access to people previously priced of that commodified knowledge market. For these newly empowered people, a counterparty who engages with them triggers something similar to a Labatutian paranoia. The knowledge is not new, but they get it via a raw encounter rather being socialized into its Ballardian form, and embark on a solo LBB arc in a solipsistic reality tunnel.
Once you account for such wrinkles and clear away the red herrings created by worshippers, the idea that AIs today are commodity intelligences becomes intelligible and useful.
It also explains, at least to my satisfaction, the strange allure of the idea of “general” intelligence despite the obviously specific, training-context-adapted and contingent nature of all known biological and artificial intelligences. It’s the result of confusing two notions of “generality.” Generality as in “generally available in the market” is not the same as generality in the sense of totalizing universality.
Commodified knowledge is “general knowledge” in the sense tested by trivia/quiz contests. In grade school, we actually had a subject on the curriculum called “GK” and kids good at it (I was one of them) got put on quiz teams to represent their class or school. General intelligence of the sort we actually have today is simply AIs trained on general (ie commodified) knowledge.
But the theological motte-and-bailey move that conflates it with some totalizing-universal divine-omniscience idea of “Artificial General Intelligence” traps a great many of even the smartest people. A category error motivated by theological yearnings, validated by second-order Labatutian psychoses, sustained by epistemic bubbles, and encouraged by sketchy business roadmaps that need a story to justify trillion-dollar investments.
This widespread category error has consequences beyond the annoyance of the future getting hamstrung by getting “AGI” branded. My simple example of a bot being rendered boring by the seepage of commodity intelligence is a small example. A general intelligence in the strong sense could only have improved the bot (a God making the bot a more fully realized ideal version of me say). It would not have injected boring tastelessness.
There are bigger, costlier mistakes you can make if you pretend commodity intelligence deployed at scale is the same thing convergence towards divine omniscience.
The biggest mistake is perhaps this: Instead of marveling at and exploiting the capabilities of the truly amazing AIs we have built, you end up worrying about the features and flaws of incoherent and ill-posed thought experiments that simply don’t matter.
Take this for what you will but in this piece the NYT seems to be coming around to a point I’ve been making for the last three or four months: “Mr. Trump has decided to double down, presenting himself as politically all-powerful even in the face of indications that he is not.”
Waked this morning between four and five by my blackbird, which whistles as well as ever I heard any; only it is the beginning of many tunes very well, but there leaves them, and goes no further. So up and to my office, where we sat, and among other things I had a fray with Sir J. Minnes in defence of my Will in a business where the old coxcomb would have put a foot upon him, which was only in Jack Davis and in him a downright piece of knavery in procuring a double ticket and getting the wrong one paid as well as the second was to the true party. But it appeared clear enough to the board that Will was true in it. Home to dinner, and after dinner by water to the Temple, and there took my Lyra Viall book bound up with blank paper for new lessons. Thence to Greatorex’s, and there seeing Sir J. Minnes and Sir W. Pen go by coach I went in to them and to White Hall; where, in the Matted Gallery, Mr. Coventry was, who told us how the Parliament have required of Sir G. Carteret and him an account what money shall be necessary to be settled upon the Navy for the ordinary charge, which they intend to report 200,000l. per annum. And how to allott this we met this afternoon, and took their papers for our perusal, and so we parted. Only there was walking in the gallery some of the Barbary company, and there we saw a draught of the arms of the company, which the King is of, and so is called the Royall Company, which is, in a field argent an elephant proper, with a canton on which England and France is quartered, supported by two Moors. The crest an anchor winged, I think it is, and the motto too tedious: “Regio floret, patrocinio commercium, commercioque Regnum.”
Thence back by water to Greatorex’s, and there he showed me his varnish which he had invented, which appears every whit as good, upon a stick which he hath done, as the Indian, though it did not do very well upon my paper ruled with musique lines, for it sunk and did not shine. Thence home by water, and after a dance with Pembleton to my office and wrote by the post to Sir W. Batten at Portsmouth to send for him up against next Wednesday, being our triall day against Field at Guildhall, in which God give us good end. So home: to supper and to bed.
Links for you. Science:
Kennedy Is Driving a Vast Inquiry Into Vaccines, Despite His Public Silence. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has toned down his public criticism of vaccines, under orders from the White House. But inside his department, a sprawling research effort is a top priority.
Release the Forecasts. These Funding Opportunities Are Ready to Go. NIH Is Holding Them Back
Jay Bhattacharya Called Test-Negative Study Design ‘Crap.’ Here’s How We Know Whether Vaccines Measured With It Are Effective
Here’s How Freaked Out You Should Be About the Hantavirus Cruise Ship
Canadian Muskoxen Hit by Double Punch of Novel Diseases and Climate Change
A supervolcano nearly wiped out humanity 74,000 years ago, but humans did something incredible
A ‘triple whammy’ of chaos has triggered a downward spiral in Antarctica, scientists discover
Other:
This Is Getting Dangerous
Democrats Can’t Let This Antisemitic Sex Therapist Win Her Runoff
A Terrible Omen: Democrats just chose not to respond to an element of a Republican coup d’etat.
Sen. Rand Paul’s Son William Hurled Antisemitic Insults at Rep. Mike Lawler
The Strip Mall Where Clarence Thomas Hides His Wife’s Money
Where Are All The Data Centers?
Coachella threatens Dearborn animal shelter over upcoming ‘Pawchella’ fundraiser
Most TN House Democrats stripped of their committee assignments
Software Developers Say AI Is Rotting Their Brains
How Prediction Markets Are Taking Control of Everything
The Trump Counterterrorism Strategy Is a Dangerous Joke
Supreme Court faces new criticism for redistricting decisions so close to the 2026 elections
Sundown, you’d better take care
Kash Patel Created a “Payback Squad” Just to Help Trump
No Need To Be Goldfish
Kara Swisher shaming a room full of Nordic journalists for still using X: “I am bigger than all of you combined”
State media control influences large language models
At Least We Know the Washington Post Isn’t Buying Views
Billionaire solipsism, dictator solipsism, AI, and the fascist paradigm
I Work in Hollywood. Everyone Who Used to Make TV Is Now Secretly Training AI
ICE Agents Have List of 20 Million People on Their iPhones Thanks to Palantir
Louisiana [Republicans] could put removed Confederate monuments on display at state parks
At Gawker, They Battled a Billionaire. 10 Years Later, the Scars Are Still Healing
USDA Plan to Jack Up Line Speeds at Meatpacking Plants Seems Like a Terrible Idea
Mayor Mamdani restores library funding after public outcry
Pennsylvania’s Crucial Swing Voters Say Congress Is Failing Them
Here’s What I Told the DNC Autopsy. The report may never see the light of day—so the Harris campaign’s head of digital offers his candid breakdown of what worked, what failed, and what Democrats have yet to learn. (a very different perspective, but one that misses some elephants in the room)
Can The Jumper Be Hacked? Inside Basketball’s Next Arms Race
So many LGBTQ Texans are moving to this city, it may declare an ’emergency’
Elon Musk’s anonymous online BFF spreads his ideas and attacks his enemies
1. Fortune covers my AI talk for Sana in NYC. Plus my NBA predictions, made Thursday a.m.
2. SGA does seem to flop more.
4. Thomas Sargent lectures on YouTube.
5. Why Japanese companies do so many different things.
6. Fresh Knausgård.
The post Saturday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
There is a pernicious and persistent pattern among many partisan pundits and politicians, pertaining to public debt. When their own party is in power, they minimize or ignore the problem, but as soon as the other guys win the presidency, they start shouting that the debtpocalypse is upon us.
Do I follow this pattern? Maybe a little bit. As recently as 2022, in Biden’s second year as President, I was not very worried about U.S. government debt. My reasoning was that A) interest rates were going to go back down after the surge in inflation had ebbed, preventing borrowing costs from getting severe, and B) Biden-era inflation had eroded some of the government’s debt burden.
But I still warned that there was some limit to government borrowing — eventually, at some difficult-to-predict point in time, too much debt would cause first interest rates and then inflation to soar. And I warned against listening to “fiscal arsonists” like the MMT folks, who aggressively advocated for higher government deficits.
And by 2023 — still under Biden! — I was starting to worry a lot more. Interest rates weren’t coming down much, making austerity more necessary — except no one, including Democrats, was talking about austerity. And by 2024 — still under Biden! — I was warning that there was no good reason for all the deficit spending we were still doing, and that continuing on our current path would run the risk of spiraling inflation:
So I definitely didn’t wait until Trump came to power to start worrying about the debt. But I do admit that under Trump, my worries have intensified. The Democrats listen to intellectuals — although the party has become more dominated by progressives who tend to worry less about government debt, there was always the possibility that concerted shouting by pundits like myself could shift the consensus among left-leaning think-tankers and staffers, who could then pivot the Dems back to the fiscal austerity of the Bill Clinton years.
Republicans — especially Trump and his movement — are a different beast entirely. They stopped listening to egghead intellectuals a long time ago, and even the finance-industry and right-wing think-tank types who have some residual impulse toward fiscal hawkishness have steadily lost influence as MAGA heads toward full cult-of-personality status. The only person in the Trump orbit who even talked about fiscal hawkery was Elon Musk, but this glimmer of hope1 faded when DOGE utterly failed to reduce government spending:
So when Trump returned to the presidency and DOGE flamed out, my mounting alarm turned to full-blown panic:
Anyway, it’s a year later, and I’m still panicking. Trump has been about as bad on deficit spending as Biden was (which is actually less bad than I expected him to be!), but a rise in long-term interest rates is making the debt less sustainable, and Trump seems uninclined to do anything about it. Nor do I expect rate cuts or AI-fueled growth to ride to the rescue here. As for Democrats, they’re playing with fiscal fire by proposing tax cuts for the upper middle class.
As I see it, the only hope here is to start scaring people. Bipartisan fear of deficits back in the late 1980s and early 1990s — probably spurred by high interest payments — forced every contender in the 1992 election to promise their own version of austerity. If we can raise the alarm now, there’s the possibility that both parties might be pushed toward fighting the debtpocalypse for populist reasons.
A lot of economists will tell you that the government isn’t like a household, so you can’t think about government debt the way you think about your own mortgage or credit card debt. That’s very true. But there are still some similarities between governments and households, and one of them is that both have to pay interest on their debt every month. Debt, after all, is simply a promise to pay back a certain amount of money at a certain time, and monthly interest payments are part of that.
Government debt is a bit like a floating-rate loan. Yes, Treasury bonds and bills have fixed interest rates, but they’ve got to be rolled over when they mature. The average maturity of U.S. debt is a little less than 6 years. Interest rates started going up in early 2022, so we’re starting to see a big increase in monthly interest payments:
Everybody talks about how the U.S. had such high debt after World War 2, but the thing about that debt is that it was borrowed at very cheap rates — about 1.5-2%. That’s why interest costs stayed so low after the war. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, interest costs were high because interest rates were high, even though we didn’t have nearly as much total debt relative to our GDP.
As of 2026, we’re in double trouble. Our national debt is back up above 100% of GDP — similar to what it was right after WW2 (and much higher than in 1990). But now the interest rates our government has to pay on its debt are almost twice as high as they were after WW2:
High interest payments force the government to do one of two things:
fiscal austerity (spending cuts and tax hikes), or
borrow more to cover the interest payments.
Right now, what we’re doing is (2). Almost all of the increase in the budget deficit from before the pandemic is due to higher interest costs:
Trump, as it turns out, has kept the annual budget deficit at about the same size it was during Biden’s term, relative to GDP:
But things are worse under Trump than they were under Biden, for three reasons.
First, this is a very large annual deficit, and it’s all being borrowed at the new, higher interest rates. In addition, during Biden’s first two years in office, inflation eroded the debt.2 Inflation is back down to a fairly low-ish level now, meaning the debt isn’t getting eroded. And finally, interest rates have now been high for long enough that the debt Trump borrowed in his first term to pay for Covid relief is now being rolled over at higher rates.
So right now, the national debt continues to explode, because the government is borrowing money just to pay the interest on the money it borrowed before. This increased debt naturally results in even greater interest costs, forcing the government to borrow even more to fund those interest payments. And so on. Interest payments and debt just go to the moon.
This isn’t some far-future scenario — it’s happening right now. But unless something changes, it’s going to get a lot worse:
Don’t miss the irony in recent news about Republican members of Congress objecting to Trump’s proposed $1.8 billion slush fund. They are objecting that it might be used to give payments to some of the January 6th rioters who violently attacked the capitol and the police protecting it.
They object now? Object to making payments to the attackers? But they supported the reelection of the rioters’ leader and instigator, Trump?
They mostly supported his reelection campaign. Largely supported his attempt to rewrite history with the claim that election was stolen. A project that is a direct attack on the most fundamental part of democracy, free elections. They have been almost perfectly loyal and supportive of the many corrupt, dim-witted, and damaging things he’s done since being back in office. Hardly raise a peep of objection when he pardoned those prosecuted for those violent January 6th acts. Haven’t objected to the many pardons he has given to rich donors who were convicted of serious crimes. But now, now that he’s done something that might hit the peak of disgust even among many supporters, that might do even more than everything before to undermine Republican’s share of voters, now they object? They object to this which, though horribly corrupt, is trivial in terms of damage compared to the destruction of American institutions (e.g., ruining the integrity of the Justice Department) or compared to the harm to American people (e.g., discouraging vaccinations, starting a war and its economic burden)?
The irony screams so loudly one can’t help but wonder if they’re not embarrassed by it. Or, more likely, are so lost, so deeply saturated in their distorted view of reality that they are blind to, and oblivious of the irony dripping from what they are saying with these current objections.
I try not to write pieces that are just a rant, always attempting to bring new information, or information that’s lost in the current buzz, or a different angle that might add something to public debate. So what makes this event qualify for a rant? The fact that the objections they’re raising now are such an explosion of irony that that is itself the news.
I can give one bit of information that might otherwise be little covered regarding this slush fund. Keep an eye out for ways Trump will use it to enrich himself. It would not be surprising if only part, maybe a small part, of the fund goes to rioters and other supporters who’ve been prosecuted or otherwise paid a price for corrupt actions as part of being Trump’s helpers. It would also not be surprising if some of it, maybe a lot of it, ends up seeping through loopholes and getting back to Trump.
Consider for instance some law firm Trump wants to have do work for his business, but he doesn’t want to pay their price. If some pretense can be found to claim they’ve been harmed by the government, maybe simply the IRS having sought the full tax they should have paid, then they can be compensated from this fund. The law firm gets it’s money, their work proceeds for the Trump business, but Trump doesn’t have to pay them himself because they’ve already gotten money from the fund. Loophole found, funds diverted, scam complete.
This would simply be in keeping with a similar pattern. As when the Trump Foundation, presented as a charitable operation, was shut down and fined for using it’s funds for Trump’s personal benefit. Or when he was pushing the idea of the election being stolen and raised hundreds of millions from donors to support an “Official Election Defense Fund” but the funds “largely went to…benefit his businesses and political allies“. It would almost be surprising if he doesn’t misuse this new fund. Watch, and time will tell.
“FREEDOM OF THE PRESS IS NOT JUST IMPORTANT TO DEMOCRACY, IT IS DEMOCRACY.” – Walter Cronkite. CLICK HERE to donate in support of our free and independent voice.
The post Don’t Pay Rioters, but Reelect the Leader? appeared first on DCReport.org.
Two podcasts interview me about Moral Economics, starting from a concern with work.
Dart Lindsley interviews me on his Podcast "Work for Humans":
Moral Economics: Where Human Values Shape Markets | Alvin Roth
Work For Humans
"A kidney transplant does not work like buying a gallon of milk. Neither does hiring or getting into a medical residency. In these markets, both sides care deeply about who they end up with, and a good outcome depends on more than money.
Alvin Roth has spent his career studying what makes those systems succeed or fail. His work designing kidney exchange programs showed that even when people desperately want to help each other, the market can still break down unless the rules create the right kind of match. In this episode, Dart and Al discuss matching markets, moral economics, and the hidden rules that shape opportunity, fairness, and work itself.
Alvin Roth is an economist and professor at Stanford University best known for his work on market design and matching theory. He received the 2012 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on stable matching and the design of markets used in medical residencies, school choice, and kidney exchange.
In this episode, Dart and Al discuss:
- Why some markets depend on matching
- Why fit matters more than money
- What makes a market stable
- Why real markets are messy
- The difference between theory and engineering
- What “repugnant transactions” are
- Why societies ban some exchanges
- How social norms shape markets
- Why work is also a matching problem
- And other topics…
Alvin Roth is the Craig and Susan McCaw Professor of Economics at Stanford University and recipient of the 2012 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, awarded with Lloyd Shapley for the theory of stable allocations and the practice of market design. His work has helped design matching systems for medical residencies, public school admissions, and kidney exchange programs. He is the author of Who Gets What — and Why and Moral Economics: Why Good and Bad Markets Exist.
Resources Mentioned:
Al’s Book, Moral Economics: From Prostitution to Organ Sales, What Controversial Transactions Reveal About How Markets Work
Al’s Book, Who Gets What — and Why
##########
And here's Ben Zweig's The Economics of Work:
"It was so fun talking to Alvin Roth, winner of the 2012 Nobel Prize in Economics. "One of my favorite books of all time is Who Gets What and Why, which has shaped the way I view labor markets. His second book, Moral Economics, came out last week and it’s so so good - endlessly thought provoking, funny, and sharp. In the podcast, we talk about controversial markets and what makes something repugnant, how to think about exploitation and coercion, and what that means for labor markets. "Check out the latest episode of The Economics of Work and Al's new book Moral Economics! "Moral Economics from Basic Books: Amazon: https://a.co/d/0cu6ZCLm Podcast Episode: Apple: https://lnkd.in/esVGQQx5 Spotify: https://lnkd.in/e4sr844Q Youtube: https://lnkd.in/eif7DHMS"
This was a great failure of the most recent philanthropic era. At its best, the infrastructure established by figures like Gates delivered effective efforts to reduce poverty and fight disease; at its worst, it threw money after fashionable political causes and education fads. But there was no real legacy when it came to physical infrastructure — no great beautification campaigns, no beloved architectural landmarks, no equivalent of the Gilded Age’s expansions of museums and libraries and concert halls, and few personal expressions of extravagance (like the Newport mansions or Hearst Castle) for future tourists to admire.
At the beginning of the 20th century, philanthropic dollars had already helped build the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Carnegie Hall, the campuses of Vanderbilt, Stanford and the University of Chicago, a network of urban parks, various impressive churches and an array of private homes that would themselves become public spaces within a few generations. Tastes vary, but I do not think that the monuments raised by today’s superrich are in any way comparable.
Here is the full NYT piece.
The post Ross Douthat on what AI money should learn from the golden age of philanthropy appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
In case you missed this, Donald Trump says he will not be attending his son’s wedding this weekend.
Luckily, he has a good excuse: He’s a dickhead.
Seriously, that’s pretty much his (un)stated reason for refusing to witness the knot tying between Donald Trump Jr. and Bettina Anderson. Or, as the president wrote on social media: “I feel it is important for me to remain in Washington, D.C., at the White House during this important period of time.”
And, eh … this seems like a pretty solid spot to remind people that, since returning to the White House, Donald Trump has played golf, well … let’s actually put AI to good use here …
And even though I loathe Donald Trump, Jr., and even though Bettina Anderson is the walking embodiment of a soulless ghoul, I actually feel weirdly bad for the couple. I mean, hells—your dad is the president! Of the United States! And while he has never shown any real love for you (Don, Jr.), and while he has the compassion of a lamp, and while he’s probably missing the event to raw dog a 14-year-old prostitute, and while it seems quite, eh, expected for a father to attend his son’s wedding …
Wait. Where was I?
Oh, right. Donald Trump is awful. We all know his refusal to attend has nothing to do with this “important period of time” and everything to do with, “don’t feel like going, bruh.” Hell, 14 active duty United States presidents found time to attend the weddings of their children—including (a) John Tyler, who allowed his blessed Elizabeth to marry William Waller inside the White House (even when it lacked a bullet-proof ballroom!); (b) FDR, who drove all the way to Delaware (FDR, Jr.) and Massachusetts (John) to watch his two sons drop some vows; (c ) Harry Truman, who returned to Missouri to attend Margaret Truman’s wedding to Clifton Daniel. And lord knows, nobody vacations in Missouri.
So the next time some white-bread Christian pastor with a mega-church and a private jet compares the president to Jesus Christ, ask whether Jesus Christ would miss his son’s wedding under the guise that he needs to oversee the irrational bombing of a far-away nation.
Actually, don’t ask.
The answer will just frustrate you.
On May 22, 1964, in a graduation speech at the University of Michigan, President Lyndon Johnson put a name to a new vision for the United States. He called it “the Great Society” and laid out the vision of a country that did not confine itself to making money, but rather used its post–World War II prosperity to “enrich and elevate our national life.” That Great Society would demand an end to poverty and racial injustice.
But it would do more than that, he promised: it would enable every child to learn and grow, and it would create a society where people would use their leisure time to build and reflect, where cities would not just answer physical needs and the demands of commerce, but would also serve “the desire for beauty and the hunger for community.” It would protect the natural world and would be “a place where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods.”
“But most of all,” he said, it would look forward. “[T]he Great Society is not a safe harbor, a resting place, a final objective, a finished work. It is a challenge constantly renewed, beckoning us toward a destiny where the meaning of our lives matches the marvelous products of our labor.”
Johnson proposed rebuilding the cities, protecting the countryside, and investing in education to set “every young mind…free to scan the farthest reaches of thought and imagination.” He admitted that the government did not have the answers to addressing all of the problems in the country. “But I do promise this,” he said. “We are going to assemble the best thought and the broadest knowledge from all over the world to find those answers for America. I intend to establish working groups to prepare a series of White House conferences and meetings—on the cities, on natural beauty, on the quality of education, and on other emerging challenges. And from these meetings and from this inspiration and from these studies we will begin to set our course toward the Great Society.”
Johnson’s vision of a Great Society came from a very different place than the reworking of society launched by his predecessor Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s. Roosevelt’s New Deal had used the federal government to address the greatest economic crisis in U.S. history, leveling the playing field between workers and employers to enable workingmen to support their families. Johnson, in contrast, was operating in a country that was enjoying record growth. Far from simply saving the country, he could afford to direct it toward greater things.
Immediately, the administration turned to addressing issues of civil rights and poverty. Under Johnson’s pressure, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, prohibiting voting, employment, or educational discrimination based on race, religion, sex, or national origin. Johnson also won passage of the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, which created an Office of Economic Opportunity that would oversee a whole series of antipoverty programs, and of the Food Stamp Act, which helped people who didn’t make a lot of money buy food.
When Republicans ran Arizona senator Barry Goldwater for president in 1964, calling for rolling back business regulation and civil rights to the years before the New Deal, voters who quite liked the new system gave Democrats such a strong majority in Congress that Johnson and the Democrats were able to pass 84 new laws to put the Great Society into place.
They cemented civil rights with the 1965 Voting Rights Act protecting minority voting, created jobs in Appalachia, and established job-training and community development programs. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 gave federal aid to public schools and established the Head Start program to provide comprehensive early education for low-income children. The Higher Education Act of 1965 increased federal investment in universities and provided scholarships and low-interest loans to students.
The Social Security Act of 1965 created Medicare, which provided health insurance for Americans over 65, and Medicaid, which helped cover healthcare costs for folks with limited incomes. Congress advanced the war on poverty by increasing welfare payments and subsidizing rent for low-income families.
Congress took on the rights of consumers with new protective legislation that required cigarettes and other dangerous products to carry warning labels, required products to carry labels identifying the manufacturer, and required lenders to disclose the full cost of finance charges in loans. Congress also passed legislation protecting the environment, including the Water Quality Act of 1965 that established federal standards for water quality.
But the government did not simply address poverty. Congress also spoke to Johnson’s aspirations for beauty and purpose when it created the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities. This law created both the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities to make sure the era’s emphasis on science didn’t endanger the humanities. In 1967 it would also establish the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, followed in 1969 by National Public Radio.
“For better or worse,” Johnson told the University of Michigan graduates in 1964, “your generation has been appointed by history to deal with those problems and to lead America toward a new age. You have the chance never before afforded to any people in any age. You can help build a society where the demands of morality, and the needs of the spirit, can be realized in the life of the Nation.
“So, will you join in the battle to give every citizen the full equality which God enjoins and the law requires, whatever his belief, or race, or the color of his skin?” he asked.
“Will you join in the battle to give every citizen an escape from the crushing weight of poverty?...”
“There are those timid souls who say this battle cannot be won; that we are condemned to a soulless wealth. I do not agree. We have the power to shape the civilization that we want. But we need your will, your labor, your hearts, if we are to build that kind of society.”
—
Notes:
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-the-university-michigan
Yes I will be doing a Conversation with him. Chase and Charles Koch have a new book out, namely
The post What should I ask Chase Koch? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Ten notable facts from India’s new SRS Statistical Report 2024 published two days ago:
1) India’s total fertility rate (TFR) has dropped to 1.88 (rounded up to 1.9 in the figures) in 2024 from 1.92 in 2023.
2) This drop is roughly the historical speed of the last few decades. India’s TFR was 4.3 in 1985 and it has been falling around 0.06 per year since then.
3) For those who think “smartphones are the reason for the fall of TFR,” there is not much change in India’s TFR after their introduction. Of course, this might only apply to India.
4) India’s sex ratio at birth continues moving toward natural levels. It has grown from 907 girls per 1000 boys in 2018-2020 to 918 in 2022-2024. Without sex selection (e.g., selective abortions), it should be around 952.
5) Nonetheless, this bias still means that India’s replacement rate is around 2.15, not 2.1 as in other advanced economies.
6) Hence, India is already 0.27 children below the replacement rate and the gap continues growing.
7) However, this figure hides large regional differences. Kerala is at 1.3, well below the U.S. and approaching Italian and Spanish levels (Delhi is even lower, at 1.2, but it is a peculiar case), while Bihar remains at 2.9.
8) In terms of the rural/urban divide, rural India is at 2.1 and urban India at 1.5.
9) From everything I can see, India’s TFR will continue to fall, and it should reach 1.57 (the current level of the U.S.) around 2031 unless something significant changes.
10) Having said that, India’s data has a non-trivial margin of error, and a new Census might change our reading of the situation. In summary, India is following the same path as everyone else. No Indian fertility Sonderweg!
That is all from Jesús Fernández-Villaverde.
The post India fertility facts of the day appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
SpaceX launched a revamped Super Heavy-Starship rocket Friday on an “epic” flight to test more powerful engines, enhanced control systems and a host of other upgrades needed to streamline operations and improve safety and reliability.
One of the Super Heavy booster’s 33 methane-fueled Raptor 3 engines shut down early during the climb out of the lower atmosphere and additional engines failed to run properly during an attempt to fly the stage back to its planned splashdown point off the Texas Gulf Coast.
The Starship upper stage was equipped with six third-generation Raptor engines and one of three optimized for operating in vacuum shut down early during the climb to space. The flight computer kept the other five engines running longer than originally planned to make up for the shortfall, putting the craft on an acceptable sub-orbital trajectory.
It was not immediately known what might have triggered the premature engine shutdowns, but once in space, the Starship appeared to perform in fine fashion, deploying 22 Starlink internet satellite simulators from an upgraded Pez-like dispenser. Two of those were equipped with cameras that sent back images of the Starship from the viewpoint of the simulators.
Those cameras will be used on future flights to assess the health of the spacecraft’s heat shield.
Views of Starship in space from a @Starlink satellite pic.twitter.com/5hfw1n8v1o
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) May 22, 2026
Despite the engine issue, SpaceX founder Elon Musk thanked company employees.
“Congratulations @SpaceX team on an epic first Starship V3 launch & landing!” Musk posted on his social media platform X. “You scored a goal for humanity.”
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, who flew in to watch the launch, added his own praise.
“Congrats @SpaceX team and @elonmusk on a hell of a V3 Starship launch,” Isaacman posted. “One step closer to the Moon…one step closer to Mars”
The upgraded Super Heavy-Starship blasted off on time at 6:30 p.m. EDT from a new, beefed up pad at SpaceX’s Starbase launch site on the Texas Gulf Coast. Launch followed a last-minute scrub Thursday due to a minor glitch with a launch pad system and two weather delays before that.
Liftoff of Starship! pic.twitter.com/LQLdjK5V6K
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) May 22, 2026
Generating up to 18 million pounds of thrust — twice the liftoff power of NASA’s SLS moon rocket — the 33 methane-burning Raptor engines at the base of the Super Heavy first stage pushed the 407-foot-tall rocket skyward atop a brilliant torrent of blue-white fire.
It was the first launch of a redesigned “version 3” Super Heavy-Starship and the first use of SpaceX’s second Texas launch pad, designed to better withstand the rigors of repeated launches by the world’s most powerful rocket.
Two minutes and 24 seconds after liftoff, now out of the dense lower atmosphere, the Starship upper stage’s six Raptors ignited just before the Super Heavy first stage fell away.
The booster immediately flipped around as planned to reverse course and head back toward Starbase for a controlled splashdown in the Gulf while the Starship upper stage continued the climb to space.
But multiple Raptor engines did not fire as expected and the booster was not able to reach the planned splashdown point, presumably dropping into the Gulf well short of its target.
The Starship upper stage reached an acceptable sub-orbital trajectory despite the single engine failure it experienced. The Starlink simulators were successfully deployed but a planned in-space Raptor restart was not attempted.
Splashdown confirmed! Congratulations to the entire SpaceX team on the twelfth flight test of Starship! pic.twitter.com/XXBAtryPpL
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) May 22, 2026
The test flight ended on a positive note as the Starship endured the fiery heat of re-entry in apparently good shape with little of the thermal damage seen on previous flights.
During the descent, the ship successfully carried out a maneuver intended to test the structural limits of its rear fins, followed by a dramatic banking maneuver like future Starships will carry out during normal landing operations.
Just before reaching the Indian Ocean, the Starship re-started two engines, flipped to a vertical orientation and descended to an on-target splashdown. It then tipped over as expected, broke apart and exploded in a spectacular fireball.
Other than the single Raptor failure during ascent, the Starship appeared to meet SpaceX’s expectations, coming through the stress of launch and re-entry in apparently good shape.
Version 3 test flights are major milestones for SpaceX as the company works to perfect the first fully reusable rocket for operational use launching government and commercial satellites along with science probes and, eventually, piloted flights to Mars.
The flights also are critical to NASA, which is paying SpaceX to develop a version of the Starship upper stage for use as a lander to carry the agency’s Artemis astronauts to the surface of the moon starting in 2028. Shortly thereafter, NASA plans to begin launching multiple missions per year and to build a base near the moon’s south pole.
In the near term, NASA plans to launch its next Artemis mission in 2027, sending up four astronauts in an Orion capsule atop an SLS rocket to rendezvous in Earth orbit with SpaceX’s lander and an alternative being built by Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin.
NASA plans tests with both landers during the Artemis III mission, but the flight will proceed even if only one is available. Both companies must launch a successful unpiloted moon landing mission before the agency will attempt to land astronauts in 2028.
Neither company has yet put a moon lander in space and both face daunting test schedules. With version 3 of its showcase rocket now available, SpaceX is working to transition from sub-orbital test flights to orbital missions while continuing work to perfect the systems that will be needed for moon missions.
A major challenge is the ability to autonomously refuel a Starship lander in Earth orbit before it can head for deep space. The version 3 Starship now features the attachment points and fuel-transfer systems that will be needed for those operations.
SpaceX says the first in a series of orbital refueling tests is planned before the end of the year.
The companies will build four small geostationary satellites for the Protected Tactical Satcom-Global program
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Blue Origin has completed the investigation into the failure on the third flight of its New Glenn rocket, clearing launches of the vehicle to resume.
The post Blue Origin completes investigation into New Glenn launch failure appeared first on SpaceNews.
SpaceX launched the newest version of its Starship vehicle for the first time May 22, completing most of the test objectives planned for the suborbital flight.
The post SpaceX launches first Starship V3 appeared first on SpaceNews.
I have a bunch of actual newsletter-type personal news update items I need to share, so I figured I’d share them all at once as a kind of life update. Taken together it feels like a definite phase shift. I guess this might be my Act 2 finally getting started? I feel like I’ve been promoted to Regional Manager of the Internet.
It’s a bit all over the place (“the fox has many Act 2s, the hedgehog has one big Act 2”?), but also all around fun in a way that feels like it should be illegal in the grimdark climate of today. Still I’m not complaining.
The Summer of Protocols program I was leading for the last 3 years is spinning out as The Protocol Institute. , who was a researcher in the first cohort, will be leading the new org as Managing Director, and I’m going to be the Director of Research. I wrote about my plans in that capacity last week in our magazine, .
TLDR: We’re going to invent New Nature.
As you might expect, we’re looking to raise funds, so if you like the sound of what we’re up to, get in touch at venkat@protocol-institute.org. If you know any organizations or high-net-worth individuals that might be interested, introduce me to them.
The program to date has been running at about a million a year since 2023, almost entirely bankrolled by the Ethereum Foundation, but with small amounts of support from other sources. The EF told us to stop living in the basement and go get a job, so that’s what we’re going to try and do. We’re hoping to raise $1.5-2 million for 2027. Timber and I are working on a pitch deck, and I’ll share in this newsletter in the next few weeks.
This is the first time I’ve gotten involved in a non-solo startuppy team thing in 15 years. The SoP program started out as a narrow solo consulting gig around the growth problems of Ethereum, but over three years morphed into a much bigger thing — research, fieldwork, education, field-building, publishing, scene-making, and hundreds of alumni/participants of various programs worldwide. It was initially meant to be a transient program to jumpstart a broader conversation around protocols (which it more than did), but the more we dug into the topic, the more we realized that we were exploring a huge and weirdly unexplored and undertheorized invisible current in technology evolution. So around a year ago, we started talking about doing what is now PI.
And then the agentic AI explosion happened, and it rapidly became clear that protocols were going to collide explosively with AI in an epic evil-twins type encounter, like Godzilla meeting King Kong.
We have a bit of spin-out funding from the Ethereum Foundation that will last us through the end of the year, after which we have to find funding or Timber and I turn into pumpkins at midnight on December 31, 2026. More tragically, the fragile young field of protocol studies will turn into a pumpkin and you don’t want that to happen.
One of the first programs of the new institute is a collaboration with the Long Now foundation, through its new Labs program, led by . There are two open grant opportunities, The Book of Time and Epistemic Cycles. As befits my new Act 2 éminence grise status, I’m on the jury for the program even though I’d rather be competing.
Applications for both are due June 5th. More details here.
The success of this program will greatly increase the chances of Timber and I not turning into pumpkins, and of the Protocol Institute getting tangled up with AI to make benefit future of planet by inventing New Nature.
Apply for these grants if you have ideas. Tell your creative friends to apply.
On a related personal note, my Bucket Art project has evolved into an installation collaboration with Famous Actual Artist ™ Simon Denny called Monsters Between Worlds (a reference to my Gramsci Gap essay among other things) at the Strange Rules art exhibition at the Venice Bienalle, devoted to the emerging Protocol Art scene (which the Summer of Protocols program helped meme into being).
The two pieces facing each other in the center of the picture below are plotter-based reinterpretations of my Boat #1 and Sun #2 bucket art pieces. The black and white one on the right wall is based on the cover of one of the Summer of Protocols essays, Protocols in (Emergency) Time, by Olivia Steiert.
I can take some credit for inspiring the name of the show too 😎, via my essay Strange New Rules on last year, which kicked off our efforts to develop the protocol fiction genre (now 3 anthologies and 40+ stories old). I’m now memeing at institutional levels.
The Strange Rules show is curated by Famous Actual Artists™ and Holly Herndon, and godfathered by Hans Ulrich Obrist of the Serpentine Gallery, who was once described to me as the “pope of the art world.” I’ve known this crowd casually for about a decade, but this show marks my formal debut into the art world.
Right at the top. It’s the only way. My Not-Yet-Famous Real Artist™ friends are all jealous of me.
And I didn’t even have to tape a banana to a wall.
It cracks me up that I’ll likely never be published as a “real writer,” but I’ve acquired a top-tier artist credential almost entirely by accident. If you’re going to be in Venice this summer, stop by the Palazzo Diedo (which houses my old pals the Berggruen Institute) and check it out. I haven’t checked it out myself yet, but will likely be there in October for the closing if the airlines still have fuel to fly then.
My vgr_zirp bot experiment on the resurrected archival Ribbonfarm has been unexpectedly successful, creating a bit of a problem for me, since it’s now burning API dollars.
The whole point of the migration to a cheap static-site setup initially was to save big on hosting. Now it looks like the bot will cost more to run than the old blog. So I’m in the market for some tastefully well-aligned sponsorships to keep building and provisioning this. You can see some house sponsorship banners rotating on the bot’s pages. I’d like to put some paying-sponsor banners there.
In the couple of weeks since I launched it, readers have logged over 1500 sessions, costing me over $150 in API fees, and the usage is rising steadily, causing me some anxiety.
The use case I anticipated, which is readers old and new diving into the content archives, is the second most common use case. The most common use case (and I guess I should have seen this coming) is people using the bot as a much cheaper consultant/advisor than me. This thing is terking muh jerb and I’m having to literally train my replacement 🤣.
I’m currently working on a couple of peer bots covering current writing, other corpuses like my past academic work, my Secret Consulting Notebooks, etc. and ways to turn the set of bots (tentatively named mixture_of_vgrs) into a true self-disrupting consultant. (I also made a similar but less mature bot, C3PO, trained on the Protocol Institute archives).
I’m getting lots of comments on how unique vgr_zirp is, and requests to share the construction methodology. It’s evolved significantly past the soul.md pattern I started with, but isn’t yet cleaned up enough to release as a reusable template, since it’s all very artisanal and bespoke and heavily tuned to my material.
It’s also turned into an absolutely fascinating technical project (see details here) that I want to keep evolving. I didn’t think it would be this easy to get to the artisanal AI frontier but apparently I’m doing at least a couple of things nobody else is.
You can read the publicly shared chat transcripts here, and also subscribe to them via RSS. Basically, what I thought would be an unchanging museum site is turning into a kind of coral reef of secondary content on a scuttled ship.
I guess Ribbonfarm is having its own Act 2, independent of mine.
A brief heads up. The World Machines Project (WMP) I kicked off a few weeks ago is now live as a collaborative effort by half a dozen contributors at worldmachines.org.
The Prime Radiant is starting to take shape, and the vibecoding of psychohistory has begun. Join us. This month we’re reading Revolution in Time in the Contraptions Book Club, which is the feeder activity for WMP, so we’re currently figuring out how to engineer a suitable temporality into the Prime Radiant.
Finally, I want to mention TensTorrent, the AI hardware startup I’ve been consulting for since 2019, which has been my other big gig besides the protocols work. The CEO, Jim Keller, is my oldest client (I’ve been working with him since 2011, across AMD, Tesla, Intel, and now TensTorrent).
This is easily the most technically exciting work of my consulting career, right at the esoteric bleeding edge of frontier AI, and it’s finally entering the industry spotlight. I still can’t actually talk about my work there due to NDA constraints, but finally enough information is public that you can explore for yourself. If you’re a low-level AI developer, check out their developer hub, and there is also a cool QuietBox AI workstation you can buy (I’m lusting after it myself, but can’t yet justify it till I improve my lower-level AI chops).
You can try out the tech yourself here on the demo cloud. If your company is looking to own its own AI hardware/IP infrastructure, TT should definitely be on your radar. If you’re interested, I can introduce you to their sales folks.
This feels like it’s going to be a year of serious changes for me. I bought a house (and went into serious debt 😬) for the first time at age 51 two months ago, while all this was unfolding. At the same time I was going through the at-once cathartic and bittersweet project of archiving Ribbonfarm properly (that was before the bot gave it a weird and unexpected new possible lease on life).
It feels like not just the beginning of my Act 2, but the beginning of my personal exit from the Gramsci Gap the world’s been in since 2015, when I tagged it the Great Weirding. But it also feels like it’s going to be a long time before the whole world is out of it, so it’s a precarious sort of contingent exit.
As I said, it feels like it should be illegal to be moving on into the new world amid the gathering grimdarkness. My Be Slightly Monstrous slogan from last November (aka -1mo BCC; Before Claude Code) feels justified now. I keep thinking a Balrog-style bigger monster is going to derail AI and drag us early-exit types back into the gap by our ankles.
The old world dying, the new world struggling to be born, and I’m monstrously having fun even as elsewhere events are teetering on the edge of horrifying.
One way or another, Act 2 is going to be very interesting.
What's that passing in front of the Sun?