Relatively flat US output growth versus rising numbers of US researchers is often interpreted as evidence that ideas are getting harder to find. We build a new 45-year panel tracking the universe of US firms’ patenting to investigate the micro underpinnings of this claim, separately examining the relationships between research inputs and ideas (patents) versus ideas and growth. We find that average patents per R&D input are increasing, the elasticity of patents to R&D inputs is flat or rising, and there is no systematic evidence of a secular decline in patenting after controlling for research inputs. We then document a positive, significant, and fairly steady relationship between firms’ growth in ideas (patents) and labor productivity. Average firm growth after controlling for idea growth, however, declines. Together, these results suggest that innovative efforts play a key role in sustaining growth that has not diminished over the last four decades.
Here is the paper by Teresa C. Fort, Nathan Goldschlag, Jack Liang, Peter K. Schott, and Nikolas Zolas.
For a decade, NASA promoted the idea of building a space station around the Moon known as the Lunar Gateway. It touted the facility as both a platform for exploring the lunar environment and testing the technology needed for deep-space habitation.
Like many major space projects, it faced delays. Originally, the first component of the space station was due to launch in 2022. Later, it was decided that this module, to provide power and propulsion, would launch in tandem with a habitable volume known as the Habitation and Logistics Outpost (HALO) in 2024. This core was slated to be joined by another pressurized habitation module contributed by international partners I-HAB in 2026.
These dates, of course, have come and gone. And in March, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman announced that the Gateway was being "paused" so the space agency could focus on the lunar surface.
Welcome to Edition 8.38 of the Rocket Report! The big news this week concerned the third launch of the New Glenn rocket. The first 15 minutes of the flight were exhilarating for Blue Origin, seeing a previously flown rocket take flight and then triumphantly land on a barge at sea. But then the highest of highs was followed by the company's first loss of an orbital payload, the AST SpaceMobile satellite being injected into a low orbit due to an upper stage failure. We've heard it was due to a valve problem, but that would be no scoop as it seems like it's always the valves that fail in this industry.
As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.
Canada's spaceport plans are not without critics. About a month ago, the Canadian National Defense Minister, David McGuinty, announced an “historic investment” of $200 million over 10 years to Maritime Launch Services for the lease of a dedicated “space launch pad” in Nova Scotia. But some local residents, including Marie Lumsden, are pushing back. Writing in the Halifax Examiner, Lumsden shares a photo of a small concrete pad at the end of a gravel road (the entirety of the spaceport). The residents have formed a group, Action Against the Canso Spaceport, because they have "genuine concerns about this project and the people behind it."
We all know the children’s story inside-out. Mole and Ratty and gruff Badger and conceited Mr Toad with his motorcars and all their adventures.
I picked up the book as an adult - I can’t remember why - and it wasn’t what I expected.
This week I have been reading it again and it is again astonishing.
I mean… let me share some of the prose with you.
This is when Mole encounters the river for the first time.
Green turf sloped down to either edge, brown snaky tree-roots gleamed below the surface of the quiet water, while ahead of them the silvery shoulder and foamy tumble of a weir, arm-in-arm with a restless dripping mill-wheel, that held up in its turn a grey-gabled mill-house, filled the air with a soothing murmur of sound, dull and smothery, yet with little clear voices speaking up cheerfully out of it at intervals. It was so very beautiful that the Mole could only hold up both forepaws and gasp, “O my! O my! O my!”
There’s a chapter where they’re looking back on the summer just gone, and a description of the plant-life soars:
The pageant of the river bank had marched steadily along, unfolding itself in scene-pictures that succeeded each other in stately procession. Purple loosestrife arrived early, shaking luxuriant tangled locks along the edge of the mirror whence its own face laughed back at it. Willow-herb, tender and wistful, like a pink sunset cloud, was not slow to follow. Comfrey, the purple hand-in-hand with the white, crept forth to take its place in the line; and at last one morning the diffident and delaying dog-rose stepped delicately on the stage, and one knew, as if string-music had announced it in stately chords that strayed into a gavotte, that June at last was here. One member of the company was still awaited; the shepherd-boy for the nymphs to woo, the knight for whom the ladies waited at the window, the prince that was to kiss the sleeping summer back to life and love. But when meadow-sweet, debonair and odorous in amber jerkin, moved graciously to his place in the group, then the play was ready to begin.
They go out in the boat at night looking for a lost young otter. (A whole other story but they encounter the divine spirit Pan who intercedes with a miracle and then wipes their memories lest they suffer the rest of their lives in the shadow of that awe.)
A description of moonlight:
The line of the horizon was clear and hard against the sky, and in one particular quarter it showed black against a silvery climbing phosphorescence that grew and grew. At last, over the rim of the waiting earth the moon lifted with slow majesty till it swung clear of the horizon and rode off, free of moorings; and once more they began to see surfaces-meadows wide-spread, and quiet gardens, and the river itself from bank to bank, all softly disclosed, all washed clean of mystery and terror, all radiant again as by day, but with a difference that was tremendous. Their old haunts greeted them again in other raiment, as if they had slipped away and put on this pure new apparel and come quietly back, smiling as they shyly waited to see if they would be recognised again under it.
It’s just… it’s…
O my! O my! O my!
I asked ChatGPT to calculate some readability stats for me: the average sentence length is 18.5 words.
But it’s not the lengthy sentences that makes this prose work for me. It’s the rhythm.
And I don’t really get that from reading it dead on the page. It’s because I’ve been reading The Wind in the Willows out loud.
Some years back I read Ursula Le Guin’s book about writing, Steering the Craft.
The first chapter is all about the sound of your words:
"The basic elements of language are physical: the noise words make and the rhythm of their relationships."
She recommends reading out loud.
So I started reading out loud.
I would take a page of prose from a novel that I really loved, and I would read it out loud, and out loud again, and again, and again, and again, until I could make it sound as wonderful as I felt it was when I was reading in my head.
It’s so hard to do. And you learn so much about words and meaning with this practice.
So I doubt you’re reading this post out loud.
But that passage about moonlight above…
For me, it doesn’t work in my head. It’s okay. But when I read it out loud - to my kid, which is my excuse right now - to make it make sense to her ears and for the words to carry her, I have to read it in a certain way, and when I do Kenneth Grahame’s words loft me into the sky, swinging clear of the horizon and right up there, free of moorings, just like his moon.
And when I read his words about the foliage on the riverbank, out loud, I’m right there too.
Do me a favour. Read that moonlight paragraph out loud. Even if under your breath, but pause right now, take a moment and do that, read it out loud.
Then read all of The Wind in the Willows because it’s free on Project Gutenberg in Kindle format and everything, and if you have an excuse to read it to someone else then do that, it is transporting and majestic and gentle all at once, and it is a joy to have his words in your mouth and in the air and in your ears.
Dutch journalist Just Vervaart, working for regional media network Omroep Gelderland, followed the directions posted on the Dutch government website and mailed a postcard with a hidden tracker inside. Because of this, they were able to track the ship for about a day, watching it sail from Heraklion, Crete, before it turned towards Cyprus. While it only showed the location of that one vessel, knowing that it was part of a carrier strike group sailing in the Mediterranean could potentially put the entire fleet at risk.
[…]
Navy officials reported that the tracker was discovered within 24 hours of the ship’s arrival, during mail sorting, and was eventually disabled. Because of this incident, the Dutch authorities now ban electronic greeting cards, which, unlike packages, weren’t x-rayed before being brought on the ship.
After several tests of unusual "nesting doll" satellites in low-Earth orbit, Russia is now fielding operational anti-satellite weapons with valuable US government satellites in their crosshairs, the four-star general leading US Space Command said this week.
Gen. Stephen Whiting didn't name the system, but he was almost certainly referring to a Russian military program named Nivelir, which has launched four satellites shadowing US spy satellites owned by the National Reconnaissance Office in low-Earth orbit. After reaching orbit, the Nivelir satellites have released smaller ships to start their own maneuvers, and at least one of those lobbed a mystery object at high velocity during a test in 2020. US analysts concluded this was a projectile that could be fired at another satellite.
US officials have compared the Nivelir architecture to a Matryoshka doll, or a Russian nesting doll, with an outer shell concealing smaller, unknown figures inside.
‘Big dumb objects’ (BDOs) appear to great effect in science fiction. They come in all manner of sizes and shapes and they fulfill a wide range of functions. An early favorite of mine was Cordwainer Smith’s “Golden the Ships Were Oh! Oh! Oh!,” which I snagged on a long ago trip to a Chicago newsstand, where it appeared in an issue of Amazing Stories. It’s probably found most easily these days in The Rediscovery of Man: The Complete Short Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith (NESFA Press, 1993), a collection that should be on every science fiction fan’s shelf.
Smith (a pseudonym for Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger, whose life was as remarkable as his fiction) goes to work on structures that are millions of miles long. I won’t say more for fear of spoiling the story for newcomers. More recent BDOs are better known, Dyson spheres and Dyson swarms are no strangers to these pages, and have been the subject of intense scrutiny by Jason Wright and his colleagues at Pennsylvania State University. The G-HAT (Glimpsing Heat from Alien Technologies) project scanned data from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer satellite looking at tens of thousands of galaxies for the waste heat signature of possible Dyson spheres. The idea that megastructures might interest a hugely advanced civilization is reasonable, but we have yet to find evidence that Dyson spheres exist.
Larry Niven’s Ringworld posits a structure that circles an entire star but does not encompass it. A transit signature might give this one away if ever found; imagine the lightcurve. Niven and Gregory Benford later come up with the ‘shipstar’ concept that Greg described some years back on Centauri Dreams. This was an unusual re-thinking of the original ‘Shkadov Thruster,’ a device that could be used to move an entire star. See the Bowl of Heaven trilogy for more.
The work of Russian physicist Leonid Shkadov in 1987, the thruster design used asymmetric light pressure from a huge mirror to move an entire planetary system to a new destination. The physics works, but we’re moving at slow speeds, on the order of 20 meters per second after a million years. On the other hand, a truly long-lived species might find waiting a billion years to reach 20 kilometers per second, with a whopping 34,000 light years shift in position, to be plausible. Shipstar would be able to move considerably faster.
Image: An artist’s conception of the Benford/Niven ‘shipstar’ concept. Think of the ‘bowl’ as half of a Dyson sphere curved around a star whose energies flow into a propulsive plasma jet that moves the entire structure on its journey. Here the notion of living space may remind you of Niven’s Ringworld, that vast structure completely encircling a star, though not enclosing it. The difference is that in the ShipStar scenario, most of the ‘bowl’ is made up of mirrors, with living space just on the rim. Credit: Don Davis.
In conversations with Benford about his shipstar concept a few years ago, I learned that a solid Dyson sphere is unstable, and would need constant adjustment to maintain its position. Concerns over stability plague BDOs. Colin McInnes (University of Glasgow) looks at the problem in a recent paper, noting this about the Shkadov design:
In its simplest form a stellar engine can be considered as a single ideal ultra-large rigid reflective disc in static equilibrium above a central star… As the disc accelerates due to radiation pressure from the star, the centre-of-mass of the gravitationally coupled star-reflector system accelerates, leading to a displacement of the star.
Image: This is Figure 1 from a paper by Duncan Forgan (citation below). Caption: Diagram of a Class A Stellar Engine, or Shkadov thruster. The star is viewed from the pole – the thruster is a spherical arc mirror (solid line), spanning a sector of total angular extent 2ψ. This produces an imbalance in the radiation pressure force produced by the star, resulting in a net thrust in the direction of the arrow. Credit: Duncan Forgan.
That seems straightforward, assuming a civilization so advanced that it could build mirror structures of the needed size. Here too, though, we have stability problems. The McInnes paper is highly interesting, examining megastructure concepts and the possible ways of stabilizing them. While a uniform, rigid reflective disk proves unstable as a star-moving engine, a disk with its mass concentrated at the edges can be stable. Instead of a flat disk, we are looking at something much closer to the shape of a ring. Here passive stability is what we want – i.e., the object does not need continual adjustment by other technologies to maintain its position and function.
In the case of the Schkadov engine, we have this consideration:
…for an ideal reflector subject to gravitational and radiation pressure forces the gradient of these forces across the reflector will induce stresses. While the direction of the radiation pressure force is always normal to the reflector, the direction of the gravitational force will vary across the reflector moving from the centre to the edge. Therefore, while the component of the gravitational force normal to the reflector can in principle be balanced by the radiation pressure force, there will be an in-plane component of the gravitational force which will generate a compressive stress. A thin reflector will clearly be unable to support such compression. However, in principle a zero-stress reflector can be configured for a non-homogeneous, partially reflecting rotating reflector…
The math for a stellar reflector and a stellar ring are laid out in the paper’s appendices.
McInnes thinks that stability is useful as we investigate possible technosignatures in our SETI work, whether they be star-moving thrusters or energy-gathering Dyson objects. The assumption is that passive stability will be sought after because it is efficient and economical, not requiring control systems that must continually adjust position. Remember, too, that in searching for technosignatures, we have the possibility of finding megastructures like these that have survived the demise of their creators. Passive stability is essential for these objects to remain intact and detectable.
What McInnes calls a ‘Dyson bubble’ can likewise be stabilized. Here we’re talking not about a solid Dyson sphere but a constellation of discs, a ‘power swarm’ that allows a civilization to exploit most of the output of its star. The terminology can be confusing but bear with me. The author distinguishes between a cloud of small reflectors in orbit around the central star – huge in number, these form a so-called ‘Dyson swarm’ – and a ‘Dyson bubble,’ by which he means a smaller number of large reflectors in ‘statite’ configuration, so that instead of orbiting, radiation pressure exactly balances gravity. In other words, the ‘bubble’’ components stay stationary relative to the star.
Self-stabilizing techniques are challenged not only by gravitational and radiation pressure but also collisions between the myriad orbiting disks as well as outside perturbing forces. Over large timeframes, passing stars can disrupt the gravitational dance, while interstellar comets, whose numbers are likely to be huge, present a similar risk of disruption. Even so, there are ways around this:
…the Dyson bubble can remain stable when its self-gravity and a simple model of a diffuse background of scattered radiation are included in the dynamics defined in Section 6.4. However, there are now regions of the parameter space where instability can occur, primarily at the edge of the Dyson bubble driven by the diffuse background radiation. In addition, it has been shown that the self-gravity of the Dyson bubble is in itself sufficient to ensure passive stability in the absence of the diffuse background radiation, and indeed it enhances the stability of the Dyson bubble when the diffuse background of scattered radiation is included.
A Dyson swarm if properly implemented can also ensure passive stability. Reflectors must always be configured ‘normal’ (perpendicular) to the central star “…using slighting conical reflectors with the centre-of-pressure displaced behind the centre-of-mass.”
So there are ways of doing these things as long as we abandon the Shkadov concept of a uniform reflector disc in favor of a ring supporting the reflector, or in the case of the two Dyson options McInnes looks at, a dense cloud of reflectors stabilized through orbital mechanics, or a smaller assembly of reflectors in static equilibrium with radiation pressure from the star exactly balancing gravity. But here I’m more interested in the consequences in terms of hunting for technosignatures:
A Dyson swarm can be expected to generate a different technosignature to a passively stable Dyson bubble discussed above. For example, the motion of the discs in a swarm would imply a flickering of the observed luminosity of the central star, with a larger variation expected from a small number of ultra-large discs relative to a large number of small discs. Finally, while an orbiting swarm of reflectors will be susceptible to collisions (B. C. Laki 2025), collisions within a Dyson swarm could in principle be minimised using families of displaced non-Keplerian orbits, where the orbit planes of the reflectors can be stacked in parallel rather than being inclined relative to each other (C. R. McInnes & J. F. L. Simmons 1992).
And what of Shipstar? A recent conversation with Jim Benford reminded me that his brother Greg had worked out a way to stabilize the induced flare on the central star through intense magnetic fields, but as far as I know, this concept has never been rigorously investigated. From the technosignature standpoint, McInnes’ paper reminds us that stability problems can be overcome should an advanced civilization choose to build Dyson-class structures, or undertake star-moving of the Shkadov variety. How to engineer the stability of BDOs should continue to provide insight into possible technosignatures, even if the lack of any trace of Dyson structures despite intensive work at G-HAT remains puzzling. Next week I want to look at an even more recent stellar engine concept as presented by Illinois State University’s Michael Caplan.
The paper is McInnes, “Stellar engines and Dyson bubbles can be stable,” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 546 (2026), 1-18 (full text). The Shkadov paper is “Possibility of Controlling Solar System Motion in the Galaxy,” presented at the 38th Congress of the International Astronautical Federation (IAF) in Brighton, UK. An English translation of the original paper was published in the Journal of Solar System Research Volume 22, Issue 4, pp 210–214 under the title “Possibility of Control of Galactic Motion of the Solar System.” The Forgan paper mentioned above is “On the Possibility of Detecting Class A Stellar Engines Using Exoplanet Transit Curves,” Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, Vol. 66, no. 5/6, 2013 pp. 144–154. Preprint.
Here are news reports on two kinds of insider trading on prediction markets: predicting what you are (or someone close to you is) going to do, or predicting a measurement you can control.
From the NYT:
Soldier Used Classified Information to Bet on Maduro’s Ouster, U.S. Says Federal prosecutors say that Sgt. Gannon Ken Van Dyke, who was involved in the operation to oust Nicolás Maduro from power in Venezuela, used the information to place bets on a prediction market. By Benjamin Weiser and Jonah E. Bromwich
"A U.S. Army special forces soldier who helped capture Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela has been charged with using classified information to bet on the mission on Polymarket, a prediction marketplace, federal authorities said on Thursday.
"The soldier, Master Sgt. Gannon Ken Van Dyke, who was stationed at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, made more than $400,000 by betting on different outcomes related to Venezuela after learning of the operation, federal prosecutors and the F.B.I. said. "
"France’s national weather service is investigating irregularities at a monitoring station at Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport after it reported anomalous temperature spikes. The spikes led to lucrative payoffs for some traders on Polymarket, the crypto-based betting platform.
...
"Every day, Polymarket lists contracts that allow its users to bet on the maximum temperature in dozens of cities worldwide. Its Paris contract is based on the reading at Charles de Gaulle airport, as reported by Weather Underground, an online weather data provider.
"On April 15, the temperature in Paris had reached 18 degrees Celsius in the afternoon and was cooling down in the evening when the airport gauge showed a brief, unexplained jump, hitting 22 degrees Celsius at 9:30 p.m. local time, Weather Underground data shows. Other nearby weather stations didn’t show a similar spike.
"Just before the anomaly, xX25Xx placed cheap, long-shot bets on Polymarket that the maximum temperature in Paris that day wouldn’t be 18 degrees Celsius, when other bettors were more than 99% sure that the day’s top temperature would remain at that level.
"The airport weather station also registered a temperature spike around 7 p.m. on April 6. That day, a Polymarket account with username “Hoaqin” made nearly $14,000 in profit by betting that Paris temperatures would peak at 21 degrees Celsius, Polymarket data shows. Temperatures at Charles de Gaulle had been hovering at around 18 degrees in the late afternoon, according to Weather Underground data.
...
"In March, an Israeli journalist said he had received death threats from Polymarket bettors demanding that he revise his article about an Iranian missile strike on March 10. The details of his article were used to settle bets on whether Iran had carried out a missile, drone or airstrike that day.
"Soon after the incident, Polymarket explicitly prohibited insider trading and market manipulation on its international platform for the first time. The amended rules state that Polymarket users can’t trade contracts where they can influence the outcome of the underlying event.
"A similar prohibition is in place in regulated prediction markets such as Polymarket’s main competitor, Kalshi, as well as at Polymarket’s new U.S. platform. "
Yesterday Secretary of the Navy John Phelan spent the day talking to lawmakers about the Navy’s plans for new ships and about the Pentagon’s huge budget request only to get a call from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth asking him to resign. Phelan is a billionaire businessman who had no previous military experience but who raised millions of dollars for Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign.
Haley Britzky, Zachary Cohen, Kristen Holmes, Natasha Bertrand, and Kaitlan Collins of CNN report that Phelan’s close relationship with President Donald J. Trump has irked Hegseth, who saw Phelan’s direct communications with the president as an attempt to go around him. And Deputy Defense Secretary Stephen Feinberg, a close ally of Hegseth’s, wanted to take over shipbuilding and Navy acquisitions, jobs that normally fall to the secretary of the Navy.
As the title of an article by Drew FitzGerald, Lara Seligman, and Marcus Weisgerber of the Wall Street Journal noted earlier this month, Feinberg is a billionaire thanks to his career in private equity and now is mounting “his biggest takeover yet: the Pentagon.” Feinberg is pushing Congress to pass the $1.5 trillion military budget Trump wants while at the same time overseeing the newly created Economic Defense Unit (EDU) in the Defense Department. The EDU is directing government investment in private sector defense contractors and has cut deals for the government to start taking equity stakes in those businesses.
Greg Jaffe and Helene Cooper of the New York Times reported that Trump has been frustrated by Phelan’s inability to fulfill his demand for the first of his new battleships by 2028, an inability caused by the fact that the U.S. shipbuilding industry doesn’t have the capacity to do it. At a Wednesday meeting with Trump, Hegseth and Feinberg convinced the president that Phelan had to go.
According to the CNN reporters, Trump told Hegseth to “take care of it,” prompting his phone call to ask for Phelan’s resignation. But Phelan didn’t believe Trump knew of the request, so he called officials at the White House to ask if they had heard he had been asked to resign and whether Trump knew. At about 5:30, Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell posted on social media that “Secretary of the Navy John C. Phelan is departing the administration, effective immediately.”
Still unconvinced, Phelan finally went to the White House to meet with Trump, who did not see him but later confirmed in a phone call that Phelan was out.
On social media yesterday, Trump posted two different New York Times pieces about the 2004 ratings for the television reality show The Apprentice, in which he starred as a business executive whose famous line was “You’re fired!” Today, on social media, Trump’s account posted: “John Phelan is a long time friend, and very successful businessman, who did an outstanding job serving as my Secretary Of The Navy for the last year. I very much appreciate the job that he has done, and would certainly like to have him back within the Trump Administration sometime in the future.”
Lara Seligman, Josh Dawsey, Alexander Ward, and Natalie Andrews of the Wall Street Journal noted today that Trump sided with Hegseth over Phelan, who was his friend and neighbor and raised millions of dollars for him. Phelan’s firing shows that Trump still supports Hegseth despite his missteps and high-level firings as Hegseth seeks to remake the Pentagon.
Dan Lamothe, Tara Copp, and Noah Robertson of the Washington Post note that Hegseth has purged the military of its most senior ranks, including “the top generals and admirals of every branch of service except for the Marine Corps and Space Force, several military lawyers and even the head of the Army’s chaplain corps.”
Today the Pentagon cracked down on the independence of Stars and Stripes, the newspaper charged with providing “independent news and information to the U.S. military community.” Stars and Stripes operates out of the Department of Defense. In order to make sure the paper protects freedom of the press and remains independent of the Pentagon rather than becoming a propaganda outlet, Congress provided for it to be overseen by an ombudsman who regularly reports to Congress. Today the current ombudsman, Jacqueline Smith, reported that she has been fired.
Smith has publicly criticized Hegseth’s crackdown on press freedom, and noted in a farewell column today that “[n]o one should be surprised that they’re kicking out the one person charged by Congress with protecting Stars and Stripes’ editorial independence. For nearly a year, Pentagon leadership has placed more and more restrictions on the mainstream media.” She said she “knew there would be perils for speaking out against Pentagon attempts to control the news” and urged Americans not to let Stars and Stripes “be controlled by Pentagon brass.”
While Hegseth is shaping the military to his own specifications and Feinberg is working to tie the government and an expanded military more tightly together, Republicans in Congress are trying to strengthen the power of the president over the American people for the next three years.
As Charles Tiefer of Talking Points Memo reported today, Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SD) has proposed funding Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the parent agency for Border Patrol, through budget reconciliation, a process that cannot be filibustered in the Senate. Because Republicans control both the House and the Senate, this means things tucked into a budget reconciliation measure can pass without any Democratic votes.
Senate Democrats refused to fund ICE and CBP for 2026 until Republicans agreed to reform the rules for the agents’ behavior, including requiring them to get a warrant from a judge before breaking into someone’s home—as courts have always required before this administration—and to take off their masks.
But Republicans have refused to agree to those reforms and are turning to funding through budget reconciliation so they don’t have to negotiate. And rather than funding ICE and CBP for the year, as the rest of the appropriations bills do, Thune is proposing to fund them for the next three years, taking away Congress’s power to reform ICE and CBP by withholding funds not just for 2026, but for 2027 and for 2028. Even if Democrats take control of the House or Senate after 2026, they could not reform ICE or CBP, which would remain a growing force under the president’s control.
Today Thune also teed up a vote on a bill to extend Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 for three years, until April 2029. Both Democrats and Republicans are concerned that the system for collecting information on foreigners who appear to pose a threat to the U.S. can also sweep in U.S. citizens, enabling the government to surveil citizens without a judicial warrant. They want to make sure there are stronger guardrails in place to keep the government within constitutional limits. The House has been trying to hammer out a measure with cosmetic reforms, but if it fails, Thune will try to pass a three-year extension of Section 702 with no reforms, taking away from Congress the ability to limit problematic government surveillance.
But the tide defending democratic values continues to rise.
On Tuesday, more than 100 former NASA astronauts announced they were launching Astronauts for America, a nonpartisan organization to protect American democracy. In an open letter introducing their organization, they noted that as astronauts, they “have sworn to defend the Constitution of the United States” and continued: “We are committed to science, evidence-based decision-making, public service, and the rule of law.” They vowed to speak out for American values and to work with lawmakers to protect those values: “the rule of law, constructive checks and balances, equal opportunity, and the peaceful transfer of power.” They reminded people that “[a] strong democracy makes all else possible: economic growth, national security, and our rights and freedoms.”
“I think we’ve all been getting concerned for quite a number of years about not being comfortable with the way some things are going,” Astronauts for America co-founder and former astronaut Linda Godwin told Adam Kovac of Scientific American. “It was powerful to find out that a lot of us felt the same way, and there’s a stronger voice together.”
On September 1 I’ll join the elite club (members Steve Wozniak,
Steve Jobs, Mike Markkula, and Bill Fernandez) who have worked
under a number of Apple CEOs ≥ our employee number:
“Many of these employees have spent years, and in some cases,
decades, shaping Microsoft into what it is today,” says
Microsoft’s HR chief Amy Coleman in a memo seen by The Verge. “For
those who may be considering their next chapter, we’re offering a
one‑time Voluntary Retirement Program.” Microsoft says it applies
to only a “small percentage of our US employees.”
US employees whose combined years of service added to their age
totals 70 or more will be eligible for voluntary retirement, and
Coleman says this will include “generous company support.” It’s
not clear if this is a precursor to more layoffs at Microsoft, but
it certainly looks like a method to avoid a bigger round of
layoffs ahead of Microsoft’s new financial year in July.
70 combined years? My god, when did Microsoft get so, well, soft? I just read about a guy at Apple whose age plus years of employment will hit something like 114 later this year. If I weren’t so lazy I’d double check the exact number with a calculator, but whatever it’s up to today, he hit 70 combined years back around the time the first iMac came out.
A small group of unauthorized users have accessed Anthropic PBC’s
new Mythos AI model, a technology that the company says is so
powerful it can enable dangerous cyberattacks, according to a
person familiar with the matter and documentation viewed by
Bloomberg News.
A handful of users in a private online forum gained access to
Mythos on the same day that Anthropic first announced a plan to
release the model to a limited number of companies for testing
purposes, said the person, who asked not to be named for fear of
reprisal. The group has been using Mythos regularly since then,
though not for cybersecurity purposes, said the person, who
corroborated the account with screenshots and a live demonstration
of the model.
The model was reportedly accessed illicitly on April 7th, the same
day that Anthropic announced it was releasing Mythos to a limited
number of companies for testing. The group that gained the
unauthorized access has not been publicly identified, though
Bloomberg reports that its members are part of a Discord channel
that seeks out information about unreleased AI models. [...] Other
unreleased Anthropic AI models have also been accessed by the
group, according to Bloomberg.
So on the one hand, Anthropic itself is the one describing Mythos as a dangerous national security threat. On the other hand, their own security is so sloppy that rando hooligans on Discord have had access to Mythos since the day it was announced, and regularly access other unreleased Claude models. This, just weeks after Anthropic screwed up and accidentally exposed the entire source code to Claude Code.
If Mythos is as dangerous as Anthropic (including CEO Dario Amodei) claims, this is a colossal screw up. If a Discord group of AI enthusiasts has unauthorized access, why should we not assume that Chinese, Russian, North Korean, and Iranian intelligence agencies do too? And if this is no big deal, then Anthropic (and Amodei) are full of shit about how dangerous Mythos is. One way or the other it looks like a total clown show over there.
Ephrat Livni, reporting for The New York Times (gift link):
Britain aims to raise a “smoke-free generation” by permanently
banning the sale or supply of tobacco to anyone born in 2009 or
after, with a bill that was approved by Parliament on Tuesday.
The bill applies to people currently 17 years old or younger and
aims to keep them from ever picking up the habit in their
lifetime. The proposal is expected to soon go into law after the
final formality of approval by King Charles III.
Lawmakers say that in practice, the measure means the age of sale
for tobacco products will rise over time as the targeted
demographic group grows older and could lead to a smoke-free
society. The law will apply in England, Scotland, Wales and
Northern Ireland.
I’ve never smoked and I’m strongly in favor of most — maybe all? — of the smoking bans and tobacco-related public health measures that have been passed in my lifetime. I can’t imagine going back to when smoking was permitted in restaurants, bars, airplanes, and public spaces. I’m also strongly in favor of stiff taxes on tobacco products to discourage their use.
But this U.K. law seems bonkers to me. To me, something ought to be either legal for adults or not. The idea that if you’re already 18 years old you can buy tobacco products for the rest of your life, but if you were born in 2009 or later, you’ll never be permitted to, is so contrary to my sense of fairness that I’m finding it hard to put my objection into words. All adults should be equals under the law. That’s my take in a nut. If smoking should be illegal, it should be illegal for everyone. I’ve never heard of a law like this anywhere in the world. It’s like they’re enshrining in law that everyone in the U.K. who is today a child is forever a child when it comes to tobacco. If there are examples of similar laws I’m unaware of, I’d love to hear about them. [Update: Brookline Massachusetts passed a town ordinance like this in 2021, and after it was upheld by the state supreme court in 2024, a few other MA towns have too. My cynical guess is that the only effect of this law is to annoy young Brookline smokers by making them drive a few miles to buy smokes, but if the actual effect is that fewer young Brooklinites (sp?) smoke, that’s great. But I also doubt that anyone in Brookline’s municipal government is going to commission a study to see if the law had any practical effect on smoking rates.]
Maybe the British are different, but there’s no way this law would work in America. First, I don’t think such a law would ever gain popular traction. But even if it did, it would just create a black market. At least when we banned booze, we banned it for everyone.
Devin Nunes was not an obvious choice to run a fledgling social
media network, but after $1.1 billion in losses, the former dairy
farmer and congressman is out as the head of Truth Social.
Donald Trump Jr., a board member at Trump Media + Technology, the
parent company of Truth Social, said on Tuesday night that
Nunes would be replaced by another executive who formerly worked
at Hulu. Nunes confirmed the move in a Truth Social post
of his own.
The company, which is majority owned by Donald Trump, has seen its
stock plummet 84 percent under Nunes’ leadership, from its debut
price of $58 back in 2024. The current share price of around $9.80
is arguably still optimistic for a company that has lost $1.1
billion since it went public, and recorded just over $10.6 million
in revenue in the same time.
Like a well-oiled Atlantic City casino.
When Trump Media was first announced as a concept, the Trump
family said it would include: Truth Social, streaming television
services to rival Netflix and Amazon and web-hosting that would
rival Amazon’s AWS business. And all of it would be devoted to
fighting the “woke” media and corporate culture that Trump said
had blacklisted him following Jan. 6. Truth Social would be a
redoubt for freedom of speech, the streaming services would have
wholesome non-“woke” content that America craved and the
web-hosting would provide a home for any company that dared to
challenge Amazon’s alleged anti-free speech motivations.
Nilay Patel, in a terrific essay (and Decoder one-sider) at The Verge:
In fact, the polling on this is so strong, I think it’s fair to
say that a lot of people hate AI, and that Gen Z in particular
seems to hate AI more and more as they encounter it. There’s
that NBC News poll showing AI with worse favorability than
ICE and only a little bit above the war in Iran and the
Democrats generally. That’s with nearly two thirds of respondents
saying they used ChatGPT or Copilot in the last month. Quinnipiac
just found that over half of Americans think AI will do more harm
than good, while more than 80 percent of people were either
very concerned or somewhat concerned about the technology. Only 35
percent of people were excited about it.
Poll after poll shows that Gen Z uses AI the most and has the most
negative feelings about it. A recent Gallup poll found that
only 18 percent of Gen Z was hopeful about AI, down from an
already-bad 27 percent last year. At the same time, anger is
growing: 31 percent of those Gen Z respondents said they feel
angry about AI, up from 22 percent last year.
A good friend texted me a few weeks ago that “the phrase ‘software is eating the world’ sure hits differently now” than when Marc Andreessen coined the term back in 2011. (Patel, in fact, references Andreessen’s seminal essay.) That same friend texted me a link to this piece by Patel this morning.
Something is profoundly off in the computer industry when it comes to software broadly and AI specifically. It’s up for debate what exactly is off and what should be done about it, but the undeniable proof that something is profoundly off is the deep unpopularity surrounding everything related to AI. You can’t argue that the public always turns against groundbreaking technology. The last two epoch-defining shifts in technology were the smartphone in the 2000s, and the Internet/web in the 1990s. Neither of those moments generated this sort of mainstream popular backlash. I’d say in both of those cases, regular people were optimistically curious. The single most distinctive thing about “AI” today is the vociferous public opposition to it and deeply pessimistic expectations about what it’s going to do.
You can’t advertise people out of reacting to their own
experiences. This is a fundamental disconnect between how tech
people with software brains see the world and how regular people
are living their lives.
So what is software brain? The simplest definition I’ve come up
with is that it’s when you see the whole world as a series of
databases that can be controlled with the structured language of
software code. Like I said, this is a powerful way of seeing
things. So much of our lives run through databases, and a bunch of
important companies have been built around maintaining those
databases and providing access to them.
Zillow is a database of houses. Uber is a database of cars and
riders. YouTube is a database of videos. The Verge’s website is a
database of stories. You can go on and on and on. Once you start
seeing the world as a bunch of databases, it’s a small jump to
feeling like you can control everything if you can just control
the data.
But that doesn’t always work.
“Software brain” is a good term — a tidy two-word encapsulation of a sprawling worldview that is currently very much in vogue. Take some time to read Patel’s whole piece carefully. It feels important, and it’s really well considered.
An FT poll of 4,000 workers in the US and UK shows adoption is heavily skewed towards the best-paid workers: more than 60 per cent use AI daily, compared with just 16 per cent of the lower earners.
Link here. Note also that the youngest workers are not those who use AI the most, rather it is workers in their 30s. Men in the workplace are using AI more than women are. A very good piece by Madhumita Murgia and John Burn-Murdoch.
The small robot has brushed past me five times in the last hour.
It runs loops around the perimeter of the third floor of this bio lab, serving as a courier. The machine’s job is to visit workstations and keep other robots - arms bolted to lab benches - fed with whatever they need be it pipette holders, sealed plates or something in a labeled bag. The little bot is relentless and unconcerned about me or much else beyond its job. Out of the corner of my eye, I spot chairs still rotating slowly on their bases from where it clipped them on the last pass.
About a hundred robotic arms fill this room, each one positioned beside a different scientific tool. The arms must deal with centrifuges, incubators, chambers and tubes. They run simultaneously and continuously. The small robot links them together, ferrying consumables between stations the way a junior scientist carries things between benches. Except the benches are robots. And so is the assistant.
All of this is the brainchild of Michelle Lee, the founder and CEO of Medra. And, at this moment, she’s rather proud that one of her robots has learned to open and close a glass door with ease.
MEDRA TODAY formally announced the opening of its 38,000 square foot warehouse in San Francisco. The company runs what it calls “physical AI scientists”: general-purpose robot arms with cameras mounted near their grippers and nine different sensors - all governed by software that lets the arms operate lab instruments the way a trained human would.
Standard lab automation gear, the kind that has existed for two decades, comes with dated APIs and rigid interfaces. Only about five percent of the instruments sitting on a scientist’s bench fall into the “can be automated” category. The rest — centrifuges you open and balance, pipettes you grip and tilt and time — were designed for hands. Medra thinks it has technology to automate the old and the new. Its software uses computer vision and manipulation models to adapt to the instruments that labs already own. Lee says that, if successful, Medra’s physical AI scientists can bump the overall automation number for bio-tech tasks from five percent to seventy-five percent.
THE PLATFORM works in two linked layers.
The first is physical: cameras are mounted on every arm and every lab bench with the nine sensors doing yet more monitoring. When an arm opens a centrifuge, for example, the wrist camera reads the rotor angle to balance the load. When a pipette misses a pick-up, the system catches the mistake and sends a notification. The sensor network logs the exact angle of every pipette tip, the exact depth of its insertion, the timing between reagent additions — all of it automatically. With humans in a lab, this layer of practice is tacit — an experienced scientist builds intuition for what to do over years, and once they leave or retire, their knowledge goes with them. Medra’s sensors would be among the first systems to put this information on the record. “The way science sometimes works is super subtle,” Lee says. “You vortex it thirty seconds more, shake a certain way, suddenly it starts working. How do you capture that? The robots just capture exactly what they do.”
The second layer is the AI scientist: a software agent that reads the results, identifies what’s going wrong, proposes protocol changes, and rewrites the protocol itself. It can run autonomously or hold for human approval. According to Lee, one customer ran an experiment to test whether their antibodies would bind to a target protein. The answer came back zero — meaning the antibodies weren’t sticking to anything. The AI scientist narrowed the problem to two hypotheses, designed a test to distinguish them, proposed adding a vortexing step mid-protocol, and watched binding jump from zero to more than seventy percent.
There was no automation engineer involved - just a chat interface and an arm. The doing and the thinking on one platform.
The arms are general-purpose hardware, sourced from the same manufacturer that supplies Toyota factories. The software is what makes them useful in a lab context.
“We adapt general robots for the reality we live in,” Lee says.
We’re in the midst of an AI-for-bio boom with a bottleneck problem. Companies like Chai Discovery can now design drug candidates at a pace that would have been unthinkable five years ago. But a designed molecule is not a validated one. Every drug candidate still has to be synthesized and tested in a physical lab by physical scientists who can only run so many experiments in a day. The software has sprinted ahead of the hardware.
Whether Medra is the company that closes the gap is another question. Lab automation and versions of “AI scientists” have been overpromised for two decades. But somebody has to build the throughput. A hundred arms running in San Francisco is a worthy attempt.
Medra’s old lab was 4,000 square feet and had a handful of robots in training. This new building has three floors of weight-bearing concrete and 38,000 square feet of space. Back in November, Medra had 15 employees. Now, it’s up to 45. Five customers have experiments scheduled to run across the robot army inside of the only autonomous lab in the city.
Customization is Medra’s moat. A new customer describes their protocol: instruments, throughput, consumables. An agent asks questions, builds a simulation from a JSON file, optimizes the layout, and runs the protocol virtually before the first arm moves. More than eighty-five percent of customers arrive with a request Medra has never fulfilled before. Because the software and hardware layer is consistent across protocols, reconfiguring from one setup to a hundred doesn’t require massive rebuilding. Over the last three months, Medra went from none of these systems in the building existing to a hundred arms running antibody binding.
Medra’s customers own their experimental data: the sequences, the targets, the candidates. What Medra retains is process knowledge – the pipette angle that produced good results, the vortex duration, the timing between reagent additions. The data edge compounds the more protocols the company runs.
One gap, though, remains. The system can detect a missing plate, catch a dropped tip, and read a centrifuge rotor. It cannot distinguish one colorless liquid from another. Humans still open boxes and load the consumables. For now, there’s no way around it.
LEE GREW up in Taiwan and came to America at fourteen. Her family worked in chemical engineering, and so, as one does, she studied chemical engineering, built a go-kart in undergrad, won a grant for an iPhone, and spent 2015 interning at SpaceX. You can hear traces of her time at SpaceX - and remnants of Elon Musk’s unwavering commitment to speed and infrastructure — in the conviction in her voice. Just ten years ago, everyone she knew at Google was praising Project Loon – Starlink seemed like insanity.
Now, she tells me, “Starlink feels inevitable.”
Lee was supposed to become a professor at NYU. Then, in 2021, AlphaFold 2 was released, and she started thinking through why it worked. Protein folding was solvable because fifty years of structural data existed to train on. Data for problems like drug target validation, antibody design and gene function is still limited, and the only way to get more data is to run more experiments. Labs can run only as many experiments as they have scientists, and scientists, like all humans, have limited working hours and, when they leave, take their technique with them.
From 2022 to 2024, Lee tried to build standardized cell culture boxes – something she could sell to multiple customers. She quickly learned that every lab wanted the work done differently and ended all the pilots in 2024. Then she rebuilt the hardware and software, this time designed to be reconfigured for each customer instead of sold as a fixed product.
The first Medra customer signed a six-figure contract on the basis of a PowerPoint and photographs of a robotic arm (the arm hadn’t even been hers — she had borrowed it from a friend with access to a lab.) The team had exactly one employee: Lee.
THE MODEL she uses to explain Medra is TSMC. TSMC manufactures the chips that make it possible for chip designers to exist. Medra wants to be what makes it possible for a drug discovery company to run experiments without building its own lab.
She grew up watching semiconductor manufacturing transform Taiwan into a geopolitical asset. Then realized early on that the infrastructure had to exist domestically.“Science is so critical to the United States’ — any nation’s — prosperity and also national security,” she notes. “If all our antibiotics come from abroad, what happens when there’s a national security crisis?” There’s urgency in her voice. “We need to move fast.”
The Chinese pharmaceutical industry has been moving fast for decades. Novo Nordisk, Eli Lilly, and most major American pharmaceutical companies manufacture extensively in China, where Chinese scientists, technicians, and — you guessed it — robots have been accumulating process knowledge at a volume no American lab has matched. As with more traditional manufacturing, the U.S. has fallen behind, which is not ideal as we head toward a century possibly full of bio-tech breakthroughs.
Medra offers the hope that the U.S. could play off its AI and software strengths and find a way to compete.
The arms are still running when you leave the third floor, and will still be running as you head to bed tonight. The small robot is still on its circuit – tip rack here, plate there – moving through the room on a schedule that doesn’t stop at five or take weekends. The jobs queue and clear. The arms complete their protocols. The chairs spin slowly in the corners.
“If we could cure cancer, Alzheimer’s, infectious disease – we have the ability to do that,” Lee says. “We just don’t have the throughput.”
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In the wake of the voters of Virginia blessing a mid-decade redistricting that could give Democrats four more seats in the House, a few moderate Republicans are ever-so-gently suggesting that maybe it wasn’t such a great idea for President Trump to start this mid-decade redistricting war last summer by ordering Texas Republicans to give him five more seats. “Chess players think three to four moves ahead,” said Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska. “It doesn’t appear this happened.”
Well no, it didn’t — Donald Trump is not a think-four-moves-ahead kind of guy, and he clearly didn’t anticipate that his opponents would fight back in the way they did. In fairness, that was not a crazy thing to believe, given Democrats’ long opposition to gerrymandering and their tendency to respond to procedural hardball with outraged harrumphing but not much in the way of action.
While it might be too much to say those days are over and Democrats will henceforth be a party of aggressive street fighters, it’s at least possible that this battle will wind up being a turning point for both parties. Should that happen, it will mean that the real defeat Republicans suffered wasn’t just about the number of seats that will or won’t swing their way.
More than one kind of victory
In the short term, it’s looking like the Great Gerrymandering War of 2025-2026 might be a wash. Republicans redistricted their way to five more seats in Texas, two in Ohio, and one each in North Carolina and Missouri, for a total of nine. Democrats will probably get five in California and four in Virginia; also nine. In addition, Texas Republicans might have made some seats more vulnerable, since if you try to squeeze out a few more seats you’ll have to do it by moving your voters around in ways that make some of those seats less of a sure thing.
Nevertheless, the most likely result is that all that gerrymandering and those referenda will just get us back to where we started. But it’s much more than that.
You don’t have to tell Democrats in Congress that their base is angry; they know it all too well, and you can see it in the fact that every Democrat now says they’re a “fighter” who will “fight” Trump with all the fightin’ fightingness they can muster. They’ve also started swearing a lot, which is meant to further communicate their pugilistic spirit.
This reflects a growing realization that despite the argument made by centrists that Democrats can solve all their problems if they shuffle to the center on policy issues, the real problem the party has with the public isn’t about policy. G. Elliott Morris explains:
…the Democratic brand is not predominantly woke, but weak. Respondents to our survey associated the Democrats with traits like honesty and caring about the working class, but they are seen as weak and not particularly effective. The Republican brand, by contrast, is a strong brand that a majority of the country finds extreme.
Anyone who heard about the Virginia ballot measure — which the news media did contextualize by explaining how Trump started the whole conflict in Texas — just watched Democrats give as good as they got, even to the point of being willing to temporarily cast aside a principle they had committed themselves to in order to fight back.
Playing political hardball can therefore not only get Democrats a practical victory, it can also help change the impression that they’re weak, among both their own voters and the broader electorate. And there’s a third effect, one equally important but less immediately obvious: By changing their own behavior, Democrats can change Republicans’ behavior as well.
While Republicans will bleat about what a bunch of terribly ruthless cheaters Democrats are, they know that in fact, Democrats are much more committed to established rules and procedures, and reluctant to violate longstanding norms. That has given Republicans an enormous freedom of movement, because they can do pretty much whatever they want without worrying that Democrats will respond in kind.
For example, Republicans packed the Supreme Court by refusing for nearly a year to allow Barack Obama to fill an open seat after Antonin Scalia’s death; in effect, they shrank the court, and then expanded it once Donald Trump took office and they had the power to fill the seat. Then when Ruth Bader Ginsburg died, they put Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination on a rocket sled through the Senate, taking her from nomination to confirmation in just one month.
And what did Democrats do in response? Joe Biden, following up on a campaign promise, formed a commission to examine Supreme Court reform and report its findings! Nothing says “You’re going to pay for what you did” like appointing an august panel of experts to carefully produce a 294-page white paper.
The importance of deterrence
Now imagine if, when Republicans sent Merrick Garland’s nomination to purgatory in early 2016, every Democratic leader said publicly and privately, “If you don’t immediately move this nomination through the process, we make you this promise: The second we have control of Congress and the White House, we will add four seats to the Supreme Court, all of which will be filled by the Democratic president.” And imagine if the threat was credible.
They didn’t do that, but it’s not too late. The redistricting battle showed that when Democrats want to play hardball, not only are they capable of it, their constituents will back them up. And the more they do it, the more their opponents will come to realize that they can’t count on Democrats lying down and letting themselves be rolled over. That will then change the strategic calculations Republicans make, by increasing the cost of transgressing the rules. It’s straightforward deterrence.
The next step in establishing that deterrence is to deliver accountability to Republicans for their actions — good and hard. An iron-clad promise to support genuine Supreme Court reform — including adding justices and imposing 18-year term limits — should be a litmus test for any Democrat running for president in 2028, as should sweeping change to the structure of the federal government to undo the damage done under this administration and vigorous corruption prosecutions for all the grifters and scammers currently slithering their way through the executive branch.
Republicans need to live in fear that if they violate norms, rules, and laws in the ways they have been for the last couple of decades, there will be hell to pay and they’ll be the ones paying it. Only then, once they know Democrats are serious, will they be brought to heel.
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Over the past couple of years, one of the more ambitious experiments in American manufacturing has been taking place in Central Texas. It is called Proto-Town, and it has been something of a secret. …
GPT-5.5 is out. It's available in OpenAI Codex and is rolling out to paid ChatGPT subscribers. I've had some preview access and found it to be a fast, effective and highly capable model. As is usually the case these days, it's hard to put into words what's good about it - I ask it to build things and it builds exactly what I ask for!
There's one notable omission from today's release - the API:
API deployments require different safeguards and we are working closely with partners and customers on the safety and security requirements for serving it at scale. We'll bring GPT‑5.5 and GPT‑5.5 Pro to the API very soon.
When I run my pelican benchmark I always prefer to use an API, to avoid hidden system prompts in ChatGPT or other agent harnesses from impacting the results.
The OpenClaw backdoor
One of the ongoing tension points in the AI world over the past few months has concerned how agent harnesses like OpenClaw and Pi interact with the APIs provided by the big providers.
Both OpenAI and Anthropic offer popular monthly subscriptions which provide access to their models at a significant discount to their raw API.
OpenClaw integrated directly with this mechanism, and was then blocked from doing so by Anthropic. This kicked off a whole thing. OpenAI - who recently hired OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger - saw an opportunity for an easy karma win and announced that OpenClaw was welcome to continue integrating with OpenAI's subscriptions via the same mechanism used by their (open source) Codex CLI tool.
Does this mean anyone can write code that integrates with OpenAI's Codex-specific APIs to hook into those existing subscriptions?
Anyone know whether OpenAI officially supports the use of the /backend-api/codex/responses endpoint that Pi and Opencode (IIUC) uses?
It turned out that on March 30th OpenAI's Romain Huet had tweeted:
We want people to be able to use Codex, and their ChatGPT subscription, wherever they like! That means in the app, in the terminal, but also in JetBrains, Xcode, OpenCode, Pi, and now Claude Code.
That’s why Codex CLI and Codex app server are open source too! 🙂
So... I had Claude Code reverse-engineer the openai/codex repo, figure out how authentication tokens were stored and build me llm-openai-via-codex, a new plugin for LLM which picks up your existing Codex subscription and uses it to run prompts!
(With hindsight I wish I'd used GPT-5.4 or the GPT-5.5 preview, it would have been funnier. I genuinely considered rewriting the project from scratch using Codex and GPT-5.5 for the sake of the joke, but decided not to spend any more time on this!)
Here's how to use it:
Install Codex CLI, buy an OpenAI plan, login to Codex
Install LLM: uv tool install llm
Install the new plugin: llm install llm-openai-via-codex
All existing LLM features should also work - use -a filepath.jpg/URL to attach an image, llm chat -m openai-codex/gpt-5.5 to start an ongoing chat, llm logs to view logged conversations and llm --tool ... to try it out with tool support.
And some pelicans
Let's generate a pelican!
llm install llm-openai-via-codex
llm -m openai-codex/gpt-5.5 'Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle'
That one took almost four minutes to generate, but I think it's a much better effort.
If you compare the SVG code (default, xhigh) the xhigh one took a very different approach, which is much more CSS-heavy - as demonstrated by those gradients. xhigh used 9,322 reasoning tokens where the default used just 39.
A few more notes on GPT-5.5
One of the most notable things about GPT-5.5 is the pricing. Once it goes live in the API it's going to be priced at twice the cost of GPT-5.4 - $5 per 1M input tokens and $30 per 1M output tokens, where 5.4 is $2.5 and $15.
GPT-5.5 Pro will be even more: $30 per 1M input tokens and $180 per 1M output tokens.
GPT-5.4 will remain available. At half the price of 5.5 this feels like 5.4 is to 5.5 as Claude Sonnet is to Claude Opus.
Ethan Mollick has a detailed review of GPT-5.5 where he put it (and GPT-5.5 Pro) through an array of interesting challenges. His verdict: the jagged frontier continues to hold, with GPT-5.5 excellent at some things and challenged by others in a way that remains difficult to predict.
[...] if you ever needed another reason to learn in public by digital gardening or podcasting or streaming or whathaveyou, add on that people will assume you’re more competent than you are. This will get you invites to very cool exclusive events filled with high-achieving, interesting people, even though you have no right to be there. A+ side benefit.
What is Gas City, you ask? It is Gas Town, but torn apart and rewritten from the ground up as an SDK for building your own dark factories. It enables you to deploy teams of collaborating agents in any topology, not just the hardwired original (and complex) Gas Town team shape.
Gas City released version v1.0.0 this week. It went to alpha test a few weeks ago and is ready for use today!
From Gas Town to Gas City
This is a pivotal moment in the Mad Max school of agent orchestration, a.k.a. Gaslandia, Gas Universe, Gas Nation, or the Gasosphere, depending on who you ask. It all began with Beads, which was like discovering oil. It continued with Gas Town, and we soon opened the Wasteland, a public commons board for federated work arbitrage and a budding private army. Gas City is the next step in that progression. I first predicted and described Gas City back in January, and it has finally arrived.
Disclaimer: I did not write Gas City. It was created by Julian Knutsen and Chris Sells, both of whom you can meet on the Discord. I am only lightly affiliated with the code, in the sense that I outlined my vision in a blog post, and they built it. But it’s exactly what I wished for, and it is being run by far more serious and disciplined engineers than me. I am all-in with Gas City, contributing myself, and this is our official new direction!
Gas City has deconstructed the entire Gas Town stack into composable, declarative building blocks called “packs”. You can use these to assemble arbitrary agent topologies, deploy them, sit back, and watch them work from a rich console. (Or tmux, if that floats your boat. That still works in Gas City!) Gas City is the supervisor plane that connects, manages, and coordinates these deployed mini-factories.
As its unboxing flex, Gas City comes with a fully functional “Gas Town” pack, which runs an exact replica of Gas Town. This is the default pack that runs on startup. So Gas City starts off as a drop-in replacement for the original Gas Town, and can import all your rigs and beads.
Both systems are backed by the powerful and peerless MEOW stack. MEOW, the Molecular Expression of Work, is a lightweight Beads-based framework that places Work front and center, as the first-class system primitive, creating a versioned knowledge graph of all your issues and tasks. Work is the currency that drives the Gas Universe ecosystem. It’s Beads all the way down, powered at the base of the stack by a unique git-versioned database called Dolt. Dolt was the magic that made our stack run smoothly.
Dolt is Gas City’s internal powerhouse
Gas City solves an enormous number of problems associated with spinning up long-running agentic worker “teams.” It builds atop the innovations and community contributions from Gas Town, giving you out-of-the-box, scalable, convenient access to agent identity, messaging, history, context, state, skills, roles, personas, and much more. And for coding agent maintainers, Gas City exposes a rich Factory Worker API. It’s a way to make your own agent the driver for Gas City.
Gas City is generally an improvement on Gas Town on all fronts, from code quality, to the services it offers. For instance it offers fine-grained model selection and switching at various levels, for cost control.
Gas City doesn’t aim to solve all your problems. You will need to wire it to your own sandboxing, MCP servers, and so on. But it provides you with a rock-solid and easy-to-use foundation to build on: one with a Discord community with thousands of active members.
This combination of tech stack and community makes Gas City, as far as I can tell, the only viable solution for building custom orchestrators backed by Git. You can build and run an entire business with it, tracking every step taken by any agent in a database with git version history. The forensics and auditing capabilities of Gas City are unparalleled, because of MEOW and Dolt.
What about maturity? Unlike Gas Town, which is an experiment run like a Wild West, Gas City is a rapidly maturing, enterprise-focused SDK for building and deploying autonomous agentic workflows. These deployments can be for anything: devops and monitoring jobs, ETLs, data pipelines, ticket queues, incident response, whatever you like.
Gas City is completely open-sourced and MIT-licensed. Built for enterprise, fun for tinkerers.
The rest of this post is about why you might want to try it yourself. This post is not about how to use Gas City; there is a ton of getting started material emerging, but a good start is the gastownhall.ai Discord general announcements.
The Light Factory
Everyone is buzzing about “dark factories,” so let’s start there.
A dark factory is any system in which coding agents are set up to work autonomously without humans watching. The name is frankly a little bit misleading. It just means background work. It’s only dark inside a dark factory because the work is happening in rooms where there are no humans present. But those rooms are allowed to have windows. Observability is a choice in dark factory design.
Gas City, like Gas Town, has chosen to maximize Observability. You can dive in and interact with any worker at any time, and nothing is ever hidden from you, nor from the agents, except for the guardrails you choose to install.
So then is Claude Code a dark factory? The terminology here, with factories and harnesses and so on, is all evolving fast, so there aren’t any reliable definitions yet. But Claude Code did not start life as a dark factory, because you were generally supposed to watch it while it works. It’s making overtures in that direction with subagents and agent teams, but they keep the lights off intentionally, presumably because it’s a consumer-facing product and it keeps it simpler.
Gas City takes a different approach: all agent workers are equally visible and addressable. The lights are on. Normally for the ephemeral “polecat” workers, you don’t bother looking at them. But unlike with coding-agent subagents, if you want to talk to your polecats, you absolutely can.
And so far, Gas City is the only dark factory that has been designed with the goal of creating other factories. The lights are 100% on when you’re working with the Mayor and Crew in Gas City, and you can dial them up as needed in the back rooms with the polecats and dogs. For this reason I have begun to think of Gas City as a Light Factory… or at least, a very well-lit dark one!
Gas City: The Light Factory
At first, dark factories were only used for writing code faster. They focused on the software development process, and basically replaced IDEs. And that’s still primarily how they are used today. I do see some shops making good headway into CI/CD pipelines and peripheral business processes. But dark factories are headed towards handling infrastructure, operations, and even core business processes.
Gas Town users soon realized that you could use Gas Town’s stack to create standalone orchestrators that had nothing to do with writing code. Gene Kim and I have talked to companies that are doing this, and I’ve also started myself. Running my online game Wyvern requires a bunch of routine maintenance that goes way beyond CI/CD.
For instance, when players in my game hit 25th level, a unique perk is they can upload custom images for that character. That perk is permanent operational debt that I’m saddled with. I have to monitor the “Hall of Fame” submission queue, visually scan the player-uploaded images for inappropriateness, and then approve and upload them into the game. I’ve automated much of it, but I still have to look at them and run the scripts to approve or reject.
A dark factory could totally do that. And it’s got nothing to do with writing code. It’s a business process.
So dark factories are a much broader concept than IDEs. They can automate and orchestrate any arbitrary process. But with what reliability?
Well, that depends on how robust your custom factories are, doesn’t it?
The Shape of Things to Come
In the very near future, devs will become shepherds, tending flocks of agents which do the ground-level work. It’s not really a manager job, because the workers are not humans; a coding agent’s cat doesn’t get sick and need to go to the vet in the middle of a sev-1 outage. But agentic workers do make human-like mistakes, and they respond well to being managed like people, by and large. They don’t need management. But they need guidance. Shepherding. Keeping-on-rails. That’s the new role for human builders and operators.
Engineers: Agent pack shepherds
As soon as I had this realization, the shepherd thing, I knew we’d discovered at least 2–3 new squares in my now-infamous “8 Stages of AI Adoption” diagram from Welcome to Gas Town:
Original 8-Stage Dev AI Evolution Chart (January)
At Level 8, you have mastered using an orchestrator to manage dozens of concurrent agents. As your experience grows, you begin to see the potential to use agent mini-factories everywhere.
After you deploy your first real one, you officially have a garden you’re tending. A tiny crew of agents, acting like employees. Your little factory team runs 24x7, which requires maintenance. You now have to keep it running, manage upgrades and patches, rotate the logs, and of course make sure it’s doing its job. But you don’t have to do the work yourself anymore! So it’s still a huge automation improvement… as long as you can keep it reliable.
You should almost never deploy a single-agent pack for a real business process. The reality is that any agent can go temporarily insane, at any time, and make a bad call. No matter how smart they are. We know now that hallucinations and false memories and forgetting are baked mathematically into all memory systems; there’s no avoiding it. So you should never just have one coding agent managing a piece of infrastructure. Not even for a low-stakes part of your business. You should always have at least two or three working together on a little crew.
This is exactly why dark factories are so attractive. With Gas City you can build any sort of adversarial group structure you like, for a team of collaborating agents. They can watch over each other. By catching each other’s mistakes, the agent group reaches a far more reliable consensus and outcomes than you can get from a single agent. That’s why we think of deployed orchestration as being fundamentally made of multi-agent teams: factories. Define your pack, deploy it, et voila — you are officially on the path to being an AI-native shop.
Orchestration-maxxing
Let’s look at what a specific small custom factory looks like in practice.
For my game’s player custom-image uploader, images are submitted via a website form, so it starts with an agent that wakes up on a hook and does the work. Then a second agent checks the first agent’s work. Perhaps the first agent makes a recommendation, and the second agent takes action.
I could add more agents to that pack, but I think two should be enough for this little workflow. It’s super low volume, low-stakes, not the end of the world if the agent crew messes up and approves a bad image. Adding that second agent, much like a second hash function, dramatically decreases the chance of some sort of collision. So in my pack, I declare the two agents, their identities, prompts, sandboxes, skills, and all the other stuff they need. Gas City can help you do this automatically, of course.
Two-agent pack handling Wyvern custom player image queue
A deployed Gas City pack is an AI-native business process automation. Once your pack is running, Gas City’s supervisor agent system will keep it going, even on remote machines.
At this point, with one deployment, you are officially at Level 9 on the AI Adoption Chart.
After you make your first one, you realize you want to use dark factories for everything. I want every damn NPC in my actual game to be an agent, yeah? Not first, obviously! I’ll have to build up to that gradually, just like you should, when you first start with AI factories. Pick low-stakes, easy wins, get them automated, and learn your lessons early on when getting burned isn’t so bad.
Level 10 of the AI Adoption is where you’ve deployed a bunch of agent packs, each with its own little world it’s managing. They have identities, consoles, you can check in on any of them, tweak their standing orders, you name it. They’re starting to be a handful. But you don’t need to build an orchestrator for them, since Gas City is the orchestrator. What exactly are you missing?
The problem is, in stage 10, you, the human, are the control plane. Once you have a few dozen of these deployed packs, you will start to become the bottleneck on curating them. Gas City manages them, and they’re all functioning correctly on their own, but how are they working together as an end-to-end system? They can all send messages to each other, but have you given them clear, practical guidance on when it’s appropriate to do so?
The answer to all your problems at Stage 10 is of course to slather on more Gas City. You build yet another crew, with a declarative Gas City pack, and its job is to manage a subset of your deployed packs. Maybe you spin up a couple of them, one for the cloud services, one for customer service. Area manager teams, basically. You evolve it into the shape of your problem.
Once you start building your way out of needing to hand-manage dozens of packs, you’ve officially graduated to Level 11, which is Factory Builder. You’re building a full custom orchestrator, a full dark factory, and you’re operating at the level of architect, curator, and shepherd.
The (currently) 11 Stages of AI Adoption
Your Gas City is the sum of those little factories you’ve created to run your business around the clock. No sick cats, no vets. Just the occasional wild worker hallucination. But your teams, if you build them right, will catch most mistakes. And all of it will be logged and auditable.
Reliability, friends, is a dial. You choose where to set it. More rounds of review, more backstops, more guardrails, more judges, and you can get agentic workers to be as reliable as you need them to be, at least up to some practical ceiling. I wouldn’t use it in situations where you could physically hurt people, e.g. in medical or navigation systems. Not in 2026. But we’ll build our way there, like engineers do, over the next couple of years.
That’s the new world. If you’re convinced already, then you’re done! You can just go play with Gas City. I’ll finish up by talking about how you can use Gas City to start chipping away at your SaaS problem.
Escape From SaaS Mountain
When I was a kid, my parents wouldn’t let me watch Escape From Witch Mountain (1975) for whatever dumb reason. Probably because it had “Witch” in the title and I was six. I’m still miffed about it, though. Who knows how much better-prepared I’d be for life if I’d watched it?
And now, I wonder, are investors and boardrooms watching Escape from SaaS Mountain? Or are their moms not letting them, too? Perhaps we’ll never know.
SaaS is in kind of a funny position right now. If you look at the pyramid from the top, at the SalesForces of the world, it looks like they’re fine, they just need to pivot to make their SaaS sexy to agents. Benioff did that recently with SF, exposing the whole platform headless and API-first, in exactly that: a bid to make SalesForce sexy to agents. That’s the new game for SaaS.
People look up there and say, oh it’s gonna be just fine, those are systems of record, nobody’s going to reimplement them. Nobody wants to pay the tax of maintaining those systems for security, compliance, performance, scalability, etc. Right? This is just the new Buy vs Build.
But then you look at the bottom of the SaaS pyramid and it’s like, oh crap, this stuff is disintegrating in real time. Just in this past month I was visiting an enterprise customer where the non-technical staff — non-technical! — have been rebuilding a $30k/year SaaS tool in-house on Gas Town. Their VP is now mapping out how to convert millions in annual SaaS spend into headcount, bringing those capabilities in-house as core competencies. The question they asked us was: how do we actually do this at scale?
From that perspective, it’s clear that some SaaS will be eaten, and the rest will have to pivot. The only question is how far up the pyramid people will be able to push, bringing it in-house. It’s going to take a few years to find out.
SaaS Mountain is showing some cracks
I’m going to share some stuff with you that will potentially change the way you think about SaaS forever. Much of it is credit to Brendan Hopper, Commonwealth Bank of Australia.
Atlassian, nominally, is an Australian company: a poster child for what the Aussies can accomplish when they put their mind to tech. But according to Brendan, it’s branding over substance. Atlassian is registered in Delaware, about half their devs are U.S.-based, and they have strong incentives to have engineers in the U.S. They serve pretty much all traffic out of the U.S. For all practical purposes, Atlassian is a U.S. company.
Much love to Atlassian, but they have to be, because there is no other option. The center of gravity on the U.S. west coast is inescapable.
Every dollar of SaaS spent outside the U.S. is extracted from a local economy and moved into California’s economy, which would now be the fourth largest economy in the world if it were a separate country. SaaS is moves money from the rest of the world into the U.S. And there’s no fighting it. If a big non-US tech company like Atlassian can’t, it’s going to be hard for everyone.
Another interesting thing about SaaS is that it grows to become the superset of all the features for all its customers. Over time, most customers gradually recede to using 20% of the SaaS’s features, while subsidizing the remaining 80% for the other customers.
The implication is that you don’t need to reimplement all of SalesForce, just the parts you’re using. If you want to bring SaaS in-house, you only need to build the 20% of the features you need. And you also only need as much security, scaling, and compliance as is appropriate for your company, which is not necessarily the same as you need for a Fortune 100 company.
So SaaS is extractive, and expensive. Almost nobody is getting full value out of it, and all that value is streaming into Silicon Valley.
Yet another funny thing about SaaS is that the Venn diagram overlap with your own needs is always incomplete. Not only are you subsidizing features you won’t use, you’re also failing to get features that you would use. And when SaaS becomes dominant it stops innovating.
In short, SaaS began life as a way for everyone to get savings through specialization and economy of scale. And it has evolved into an extraction machine that’s ideal for almost nobody.
So you shouldn’t feel bad about de-SaaSing your company. Just start at the bottom.
The bottom of the SaaS pyramid is a rowdy place, a rough place. A lot of it isn’t even SaaS, it’s software on disks in a closet that someone is paying an annual license for. Construction, paralegal, medical, farming, biotech, environmental, there are hundreds of domains where ancient SaaS is still holding companies hostage, and not meeting people’s needs.
So the people are fighting back! As the models and tools get more powerful, people are beginning to bring their SaaS back in house. I hear VPs of Eng say, “We are spending $X million/year on SaaS. Let’s convert that to salaries and bring it in as a core competency.”
But until this week, there hasn’t been a viable path forward, aside from experimenting with building your own orchestration on raw coding agents. That is a long journey, and most people need help with it. Most of the orchestrator vendors out there are off building agent brains and persona libraries — interesting research projects, but not what you need to replace a piece of SaaS in production. To replace SaaS, you need the unglamorous stuff: declarative deploys, audit trails, version history, identity, and a memory layer that survives the inevitable agent failures. Those are the primitives that make in-housing tractable.
Enter Gas City: The ultimate de-SaaSer. It’s like de-lousing your company. It makes Build and Maintain a pragmatic choice, particularly at the bottom end of the pyramid. You build the replacement software, then set up agent teams to run it for you.
A small team of three to five human engineers running Gas City packs can credibly replace seven-figure SaaS bills, and the capability stays in-house as a compounding asset instead of leaking out as recurring rent. Yes, you own the uptime, security, and compliance now. But you only need the level of each that fits your company — not Salesforce-grade everything for a 200-person business. And Gas City’s audit trail, with every agent action recorded in a git-versioned Dolt database, is frankly better than what most SaaS vendors can produce when you ask for theirs. That’s your SOC2 story, sitting right there in the database, already written.
That’s the problem with OSS SaaS replacements today, and it’s why few have adopted them: they don’t run themselves. ChatWoot is a full-featured ZenDesk replacement, but you have to run it, and most companies can’t afford the operational overhead. SaaS has to evolve to be AI-native! It’s not good enough to be OSS. It has to have agents in it, running it, just like ZenDesk the SaaS handles everything for you as a service.
This implies that all SaaS worldwide needs to be rewritten/reenvisioned from the ground up to be fully agentic.
But where do you start?
That’s where Gas City gives you a refreshing leg up. You can start building bespoke Gas City orchestrators today. You’re not going to rewrite your business overnight. In fact it’s going to take years. You should approach the whole endeavor with appropriate levels of caution and even trepidation.
But you might as well start eating the elephant a bite at a time.
Next Up For Gaslandia
I had a set of projects in flight that were banking at least Mythos-class models, which means they’re all on hold. Gas City will be the extent of my ambitions for a while. I plan to become a Gas City power user, not just for coding, but for running my own systems. I want to see that control plane emerge and understand how you can run a business with hundreds of collaborating agents.
Most other orchestrators I’ve seen have been able to be super high-ambition. Many lean heavily into the idea that agents, when put together, can just figure stuff out. And to a large extent, they can. But they are intentionally low-control systems. And when they fail, they go off-rails with no audit trail.
Gas City is a high-control system. It has high parallelism (Julian has had hundreds of concurrent workers in a city), but it uses structure to keep agent swarms organized. It’s still incredibly flexible and freeform when it needs to be; you can just tell a group of polecats to go solve any problem. But most work is spelled out, tracked, and governed carefully.
A key concept in MEOW is the formula — a reusable template for a unit of work. You write a formula once for a recurring workflow (triage an incident, review a player-uploaded image, rotate the logs, run the nightly ETL) and then pour it whenever you need that work done, instantiating a fresh molecule of beads that an agent crew can pick up and execute. Over time your library of formulas becomes a declarative inventory of every business process you’ve ever automated — version-controlled in Dolt, composable, and forkable by anyone on your team. That’s how Gas City turns undocumented workflow knowledge into a durable, shareable codebase.
When you express all your work in the MEOW stack, as Beads and Epics (typically harvested from an upstream system like Obsidian), and your agent actions are all recorded in both a database and version history, you wind up with infinitely more control over the outcomes.
In enterprises, controlling the outcomes is the holy grail. So I personally wouldn’t use any other orchestrator I’ve seen. They don’t have the federatable, versioned, queryable memory system that Dolt provides. They don’t have MEOW.
Everyone is suffering from tool overload. There are too many tools out there, and nobody can keep up with all of them. My life is so simple in comparison. I never look deeply at any new technology until it reaches a pretty loud public signal threshold. And I almost never have to, because the Gas Town ecosystem has solved so many of my problems.
The Gas Universe in general is a pretty reliable bet at this point. It integrates with everything. Beads has been out for six months, Gas Town for four months, and the Wasteland for two. We’ve got over two thousand on the Discord. The community has spoken: This is The Way. People love working with this system, despite its occasional quirks and frustrations. It’s more fun than anything else we know.
Should you switch from Gas Town to Gas City? Yes! Gas City aims to be better in every way. And Gas City hit 1.0 today, so you should be good to go. Make sure to complain loudly on the Discord if it’s not working for you! Help will be on the way.
Do you have to switch to Gas City? Nope, we have some new maintainers onboarding onto Gas Town this week to help with the load. We’re going to continue maintaining the O.G. Gas Town as long as people still need it.
This week's edition of my email newsletter (aka content from this blog delivered to your inbox) features 4 pelicans riding bicycles, 1 possum on an e-scooter, up to 5 raccoons with ham radios hiding in crowds, 5 blog posts, 8 links, 3 quotes and a new chapter of my Agentic Engineering Patterns guide.
The extension requires WAL mode, and workers can poll the .db-wal file with a stat call every 1ms to get as close to real-time as possible without the expense of running a full SQL query.
honker implements the transactional outbox pattern, which ensures items are only queued if a transaction successfully commits. My favorite explanation of that pattern remains Transactionally Staged Job Drains in Postgres by Brandur Leach. It's great to see a new implementation of that pattern for SQLite.
It turns out the high volume of complaints that Claude Code was providing worse quality results over the past two months was grounded in real problems.
The models themselves were not to blame, but three separate issues in the Claude Code harness caused complex but material problems which directly affected users.
Anthropic's postmortem describes these in detail. This one in particular stood out to me:
On March 26, we shipped a change to clear Claude's older thinking from sessions that had been idle for over an hour, to reduce latency when users resumed those sessions. A bug caused this to keep happening every turn for the rest of the session instead of just once, which made Claude seem forgetful and repetitive.
I frequently have Claude Code sessions which I leave for an hour (or often a day or longer) before returning to them. Right now I have 11 of those (according to ps aux | grep 'claude ') and that's after closing down dozens more the other day.
I estimate I spend more time prompting in these "stale" sessions than sessions that I've recently started!
If you're building agentic systems it's worth reading this article in detail - the kinds of bugs that affect harnesses are deeply complicated, even if you put aside the inherent non-deterministic nature of the models themselves.
One of Bluesky's most interesting features is that anyone can run their own custom "feed" implementation and make it available to other users - effectively enabling custom algorithms that can use any mechanism they like to recommend posts.
spacecowboy runs the For You Feed, used by around 72,000 people. This guest post on the AT Protocol blog explains how it works.
The architecture is fascinating. The feed is served by a single Go process using SQLite on a "gaming" PC in spacecowboy's living room - 16 cores, 96GB of RAM and 4TB of attached NVMe storage.
Recommendations are based on likes: what else are the people who like the same things as you liking on the platform?
That Go server consumes the Bluesky firehose and stores the relevant details in SQLite, keeping the last 90 days of relevant data, which currently uses around 419GB of SQLite storage.
Public internet traffic is handled by a $7/month VPS on OVH, which talks to the living room server via Tailscale.
Total cost is now $30/month: $20 in electricity, $7 in VPS and $3 for the two domain names. spacecowboy estimates that the existing system could handle all ~1 million daily active Bluesky users if they were to switch to the cheapest algorithm they have found to work.
LlamaIndex have a most excellent open source project called LiteParse, which provides a Node.js CLI tool for extracting text from PDFs. I got a version of LiteParse working entirely in the browser, using most of the same libraries that LiteParse uses to run in Node.js.
Spatial text parsing
Refreshingly, LiteParse doesn't use AI models to do what it does: it's good old-fashioned PDF parsing, falling back to Tesseract OCR (or other pluggable OCR engines) for PDFs that contain images of text rather than the text itself.
The hard problem that LiteParse solves is extracting text in a sensible order despite the infuriating vagaries of PDF layouts. They describe this as "spatial text parsing" - they use some very clever heuristics to detect things like multi-column layouts and group and return the text in a sensible linear flow.
The LiteParse documentation describes a pattern for implementing Visual Citations with Bounding Boxes. I really like this idea: being able to answer questions from a PDF and accompany those answers with cropped, highlighted images feels like a great way of increasing the credibility of answers from RAG-style Q&A.
LiteParse is provided as a pure CLI tool, designed to be used by agents. You run it like this:
npm i -g @llamaindex/liteparse
lit parse document.pdf
I explored its capabilities with Claude and quickly determined that there was no real reason it had to stay a CLI app: it's built on top of PDF.js and Tesseract.js, two libraries I've used for something similar in a browser in the past.
The only reason LiteParse didn't have a pure browser-based version is that nobody had built one yet...
Introducing LiteParse for the web
Visit https://simonw.github.io/liteparse/ to try out LiteParse against any PDF file, running entirely in your browser. Here's what that looks like:
The tool can work with or without running OCR, and can optionally display images for every page in the PDF further down the page.
Building it with Claude Code and Opus 4.7
The process of building this started in the regular Claude app on my iPhone. I wanted to try out LiteParse myself, so I started by uploading a random PDF I happened to have on my phone along with this prompt:
Clone https://github.com/run-llama/liteparse and try it against this file
Regular Claude chat can clone directly from GitHub these days, and while by default it can't access most of the internet from its container it can also install packages from PyPI and npm.
I often use this to try out new pieces of open source software on my phone - it's a quick way to exercise something without having to sit down with my laptop.
You can follow my full conversation in this shared Claude transcript. I asked a few follow-up questions about how it worked, and then asked:
Does this library run in a browser? Could it?
This gave me a thorough enough answer that I was convinced it was worth trying getting that to work for real. I opened up my laptop and switched to Claude Code.
I forked the original repo on GitHub, cloned a local copy, started a new web branch and pasted that last reply from Claude into a new file called notes.md. Then I told Claude Code:
Get this working as a web app. index.html, when loaded, should render an app that lets users open a PDF in their browser and select OCR or non-OCR mode and have this run. Read notes.md for initial research on this problem, then write out plan.md with your detailed implementation plan
I always like to start with a plan for this kind of project. Sometimes I'll use Claude's "planning mode", but in this case I knew I'd want the plan as an artifact in the repository so I told it to write plan.md directly.
This also means I can iterate on the plan with Claude. I noticed that Claude had decided to punt on generating screenshots of images in the PDF, and suggested we defer a "canvas-encode swap" to v2. I fixed that by prompting:
Update the plan to say we WILL do the canvas-encode swap so the screenshots thing works
After a few short follow-up prompts, here's the plan.md I thought was strong enough to implement.
I prompted:
build it.
And then mostly left Claude Code to its own devices, tinkered with some other projects, caught up on Duolingo and occasionally checked in to see how it was doing.
I added a few prompts to the queue as I was working. Those don't yet show up in my exported transcript, but it turns out running rg queue-operation --no-filename | grep enqueue | jq -r '.content' in the relevant ~/.claude/projects/ folder extracts them.
Here are the key follow-up prompts with some notes:
When you implement this use playwright and red/green TDD, plan that too - I've written more about red/green TDD here.
let's use PDF.js's own renderer (it was messing around with pdfium)
The final UI should include both the text and the pretty-printed JSON output, both of those in textareas and both with copy-to-clipboard buttons - it should also be mobile friendly - I had a new idea for how the UI should work
small commits along the way - see below
Make sure the index.html page includes a link back to https://github.com/run-llama/liteparse near the top of the page - it's important to credit your dependencies in a project like this!
View on GitHub → is bad copy because that's not the repo with this web app in, it's the web app for the underlying LiteParse library
Run OCR should be unchecked by default
When I try to parse a PDF in my browser I see 'Parse failed: undefined is not a function (near '...value of readableStream...') - it was testing with Playwright in Chrome, turned out there was a bug in Safari
... oh that is in safari but it works in chrome
When "Copy" is clicked the text should change to "Copied!" for 1.5s
[Image #1] Style the file input so that long filenames don't break things on Firefox like this - in fact add one of those drag-drop zone UIs which you can also click to select a file - dropping screenshots in of small UI glitches works surprisingly well
Tweak the drop zone such that the text is vertically centered, right now it is a bit closer to the top
it breaks in Safari on macOS, works in both Chrome and Firefox. On Safari I see "Parse failed: undefined is not a function (near '...value of readableStream...')" after I click the Parse button, when OCR is not checked - it still wasn't working in Safari...
works in safari now - but it fixed it pretty quickly once I pointed that out and it got Playwright working with that browser
I've started habitually asking for "small commits along the way" because it makes for code that's easier to understand or review later on, and I have an unproven hunch that it helps the agent work more effectively too - it's yet another encouragement towards planning and taking on one problem at a time.
While it was working I decided it would be nice to be able to interact with an in-progress version. I asked a separate Claude Code session against the same directory for tips on how to run it, and it told me to use npx vite. Running that started a development server with live-reloading, which meant I could instantly see the effect of each change it made on disk - and prompt with further requests for tweaks and fixes.
Towards the end I decided it was going to be good enough to publish. I started a fresh Claude Code instance and told it:
Look at the web/ folder - set up GitHub actions for this repo such that any push runs the tests, and if the tests pass it then does a GitHub Pages deploy of the built vite app such that the web/index.html page is the index.html page for the thing that is deployed and it works on GitHub Pages
I love GitHub Pages for this kind of thing because it can be quickly configured (by Claude, in this case) to turn any repository into a deployed web-app, at zero cost and with whatever build step is necessary. It even works against private repos, if you don't mind your only security being a secret URL.
With this kind of project there's always a major risk that the model might "cheat" - mark key features as "TODO" and fake them, or take shortcuts that ignore the initial requirements.
The responsible way to prevent this is to review all of the code... but this wasn't intended as that kind of project, so instead I fired up OpenAI Codex with GPT-5.5 (I had preview access) and told it:
Describe the difference between how the node.js CLI tool runs and how the web/ version runs
The answer I got back was enough to give me confidence that Claude hadn't taken any project-threatening shortcuts.
... and that was about it. Total time in Claude Code for that "build it" step was 59 minutes. I used my claude-code-transcripts tool to export a readable version of the full transcript which you can view here, albeit without those additional queued prompts (here's my issue to fix that).
Is this even vibe coding any more?
I'm a pedantic stickler when it comes to the original definition of vibe coding - vibe coding does not mean any time you use AI to help you write code, it's when you use AI without reviewing or caring about the code that's written at all.
By my own definition, this LiteParse for the web project is about as pure vibe coding as you can get! I have not looked at a single line of the HTML and TypeScript written for this project - in fact while writing this sentence I had to go and check if it had used JavaScript or TypeScript.
Yet somehow this one doesn't feel as vibe coded to me as many of my other vibe coded projects:
As a static in-browser web application hosted on GitHub Pages the blast radius for any bugs is almost non-existent: it either works for your PDF or doesn't.
No private data is transferred anywhere - all processing happens in your browser - so a security audit is unnecessary. I've glanced once at the network panel while it's running and no additional requests are made when a PDF is being parsed.
There was still a whole lot of engineering experience and knowledge required to use the models in this way. Identifying that porting LiteParse to run directly in a browser was critical to the rest of the project.
Most importantly, I'm happy to attach my reputation to this project and recommend that other people try it out. Unlike most of my vibe coded tools I'm not convinced that spending significant additional engineering time on this would have resulted in a meaningfully better initial release. It's fine as it is!
I haven't opened a PR against the origin repository because I've not discussed it with the LiteParse team. I've opened an issue, and if they want my vibe coded implementation as a starting point for something more official they're welcome to take it.
In February 1777 George Washington issued an order requiring that American soldiers be inoculated against smallpox:
Finding the Small pox to be spreading much and fearing that no precaution can prevent it from running through the whole of our Army, I have determined that the troops shall be inoculated. This Expedient may be attended with some inconveniences and some disadvantages, but yet I trust in its consequences will have the most happy effects. Necessity not only authorizes but seems to require the measure, for should the disorder infect the Army in the natural way and rage with its usual virulence we should have more to dread from it than from the Sword of the Enemy.
It was a wise decision. Smallpox was a debilitating, often fatal disease. And Washington’s army, which put many farm boys with little previous exposure to infectious disease into crowded encampments, was especially vulnerable. As Washington said, the situation “seems to require the measure.”
It was, nonetheless, a bold, enlightened move. And why not? Washington, like many of the Founding Fathers, was very much a man of the Enlightenment.
By contrast, Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense who insists on being called the Secretary of War, is a bloodthirsty religious fanatic. He’s more comfortable with fascism than with America’s founding principles. And in another attempt to prove his manhood, he announced on Tuesday that he was ending the sissy requirement that members of the military be vaccinated against the flu.
This was, he said, to “restore freedom” to our armed forces:
If you, an American warrior entrusted to defend this nation, believe that the flu vaccine is in your best interest, then you are free to take it. You shouldn’t. But we will not force you because your body, your faith, and your convictions are not negotiable.
Even before we get into the practical damage Hegseth’s move will inflict, note the bizarre framing. Personal freedom is great and should be granted wherever appropriate. But one place where it isn’t and never has been appropriate is in the military. When Americans sign up to serve the nation under arms, they agree to temporarily forego many of the freedoms of civilian life. They must wear uniforms, not street fashion. They must eat Army or Navy food. They must salute officers and obey orders. They must, in other words, adhere to military discipline.
It won’t surprise you to learn that Hegseth is completely hypocritical on this subject. He says that your body, your faith, and your convictions are not negotiable. But he has banned most beards from the U.S. military and cracked down on religious exemptions. After all, bearded men can’t be effective warriors:
He has also demanded that members of the military lose weight, because he doesn’t like how they look:
Frankly, it’s tiring to look out at combat formations or really any formation and see fat troops. Likewise, it’s completely unacceptable to see fat generals and admirals in the halls of the Pentagon and leading commands around the country and the world. It’s a bad look. It is bad and it’s not who we are.
But requiring that serving troops receive a vaccine that helps maintain their military effectiveness and also helps protect their comrades from infection? Tyranny!
This isn’t simply about vaccines and facial hair. These directives are part of a larger project, another step in Hegseth’s drive to cultify the US military.
What do I mean by cultifying the military? I mean creating an environment in which professional integrity, military discipline, and historical precedent are destroyed in service to the personality cult of Donald Trump and his enforcer, Pete Hegseth.
Think of these directives as loyalty tests. Hegseth can indulge his faux concerns about liberty while aligning himself with the science-hating right. If you are an officer concerned about the welfare of your troops and voice your concerns, you are out. Mention that the directive against beards is nonsensical and disproportionately harms black male soldiers with a common skin condition, then you are a woke weakling and are sent packing. If you are a general in possession of critical skills and hard-won experience, but served during the Biden administration, you will be unceremoniously fired.
Simply put, the method in Hegseth’s apparent madness is to destroy the integrity of the professional military corps through destructive and despotic behavior that drives out those – like Admiral Holsey – who hold to their principles.
And this should terrify every American. A powerful military always poses a potential threat to democracy. To keep that threat in check, the military must be presided over by an officer corps that understands that its duty is not to any one person, but to the Constitution and the rule of law. The U.S. military has been largely insulated from political influencesince the nation’s founding. But Hegseth is trying to subvert that.
Gratuitously exposing service members to disease isn’t a small issue. But it’s much more important as a symptom of the ongoing effort to corrupt the military and make it a servant of extremist politics and politicians.
Chinese AI lab DeepSeek's last model release was V3.2 (and V3.2 Speciale) last December. They just dropped the first of their hotly anticipated V4 series in the shape of two preview models, DeepSeek-V4-Pro and DeepSeek-V4-Flash.
Both models are 1 million token context Mixture of Experts. Pro is 1.6T total parameters, 49B active. Flash is 284B total, 13B active. They're using the standard MIT license.
I think this makes DeepSeek-V4-Pro the new largest open weights model. It's larger than Kimi K2.6 (1.1T) and GLM-5.1 (754B) and more than twice the size of DeepSeek V3.2 (685B).
Pro is 865GB on Hugging Face, Flash is 160GB. I'm hoping that a lightly quantized Flash will run on my 128GB M5 MacBook Pro. It's possible the Pro model may run on it if I can stream just the necessary active experts from disk.
So the pelicans are pretty good, but what's really notable here is the cost. DeepSeek V4 is a very, very inexpensive model.
Here's DeepSeek's pricing page. They're charging $0.14/million tokens input and $0.28/million tokens output for Flash, and $1.74/million input and $3.48/million output for Pro.
Here's a comparison table with the frontier models from Gemini, OpenAI and Anthropic:
Model
Input ($/M)
Output ($/M)
DeepSeek V4 Flash
$0.14
$0.28
GPT-5.4 Nano
$0.20
$1.25
Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite
$0.25
$1.50
Gemini 3 Flash Preview
$0.50
$3
GPT-5.4 Mini
$0.75
$4.50
Claude Haiku 4.5
$1
$5
DeepSeek V4 Pro
$1.74
$3.48
Gemini 3.1 Pro
$2
$12
GPT-5.4
$2.50
$15
Claude Sonnet 4.6
$3
$15
Claude Opus 4.7
$5
$25
GPT-5.5
$5
$30
DeepSeek-V4-Flash is the cheapest of the small models, beating even OpenAI's GPT-5.4 Nano. DeepSeek-V4-Pro is the cheapest of the larger frontier models.
This note from the DeepSeek paper helps explain why they can price these models so low - they've focused a great deal on efficiency with this release, especially for longer context prompts:
In the scenario of 1M-token context, even DeepSeek-V4-Pro, which has a larger number of activated parameters, attains only 27% of the single-token FLOPs (measured in equivalent FP8 FLOPs) and 10% of the KV cache size relative to DeepSeek-V3.2. Furthermore, DeepSeek-V4-Flash, with its smaller number of activated parameters, pushes efficiency even further: in the 1M-token context setting, it achieves only 10% of the single-token FLOPs and 7% of the KV cache size compared with DeepSeek-V3.2.
DeepSeek's self-reported benchmarks in their paper show their Pro model competitive with those other frontier models, albeit with this note:
Through the expansion of reasoning tokens, DeepSeek-V4-Pro-Max demonstrates superior performance relative to GPT-5.2 and Gemini-3.0-Pro on standard reasoning benchmarks. Nevertheless, its performance falls marginally short of GPT-5.4 and Gemini-3.1-Pro, suggesting a developmental trajectory that trails state-of-the-art frontier models by approximately 3 to 6 months.
I'm keeping an eye on huggingface.co/unsloth/models as I expect the Unsloth team will have a set of quantized versions out pretty soon. It's going to be very interesting to see how well that Flash model runs on my own machine.
Yes, I will be doing a Conversation with him. Excerpted (and edited) from a bio:
He is on the business faculty at Catholic University and has a background on both Wall Street and in the startup world, where he founded several companies. His first book, Wanting (2021), has been translated into 20+ languages and is selling more than copies than ever five years in. He is an expert on Rene Girard. His new book, The One and the Ninety-Nine, is out from St. Martin’s June 16 — a theory of how identity gets formed or deformed under conditions of technological social contagion. He has a third book with a major publisher (on “technology as soulcraft”) in the pipeline with a major publisher. He also lived in Italy and for a while was studying to be a priest. He remains a true Catholic, and is the founder and director of the Cluny Institute.
1. Mason Currey, Making Art and Making a Living: Adventures in Funding a Creative Life. The best overall book I know on the different methods top artists have used to keep themselves going financially. It is perhaps more anecdotal and less theoretical than I would prefer, still a nice work.
2. Mangol Bayat, Mysticism and Dissent: Socioreligious Dissent in Qajar Iran. A very good, clear, and useful book on different dissident religiouis developments in Iran, leading up to the Bahai faith. Recommended, one of the best books I have found for grappling with the history of current Iran.
3. Lena Dunham, Famesick: A Memoir. Not exactly my thing, so I did not finish it. But it is pretty good, so if you are tempted give it a try.
4. Iain Pears, Parallel Lives: A Love Story from a Lost Continent. A delightful story/indirect memoir, telling the tale of the lives and marriage of Francis Haskell, the British art historian, and Larissa Salmina Haskell, a Russian woman who survived the siege of Leningrad as a girl. Pears had the full cooperation of Larissa, at an age where she doesn’t give a damn any more. This story truly comes to life, and that is helped by Pears’s background as a writer of very good fiction.
5. Lázár, by Nelio Biedermann. An excellent novel of ideas, in the style of earlier Continental literature, by a 23-year-old Swiss phenom. It is very good in German, I have not sampled the translation.
The current debate over Oregon’s “economic crisis” taking place around the state’s Prosperity Council relies on a narrow reading of data while overlooking broader evidence of success. The Brookings Institution’s “Metro Monitor” continues to rank Portland in the top ten large metros for income and wealth growth, and Bend remains the top-performing mid-sized city in the country.
Contrary to claims that Oregon’s numbers are largely, or entirely the result of pre-pandemic trends, the latest data from the federal government–released this month– show that Oregon’s per capita income is still very near a 25-year high.
The most reliable and very recent indicator of prosperity—per capita personal income—shows that Oregon has steadily gained ground. In 2010, Oregonians earned just 88 percent of the national average; today, newly released federal data shows we are at 96 percent, the highest level in twenty-five years.
Oregon’s official econometric model predicts this trend will continue, forecasting that Oregon’s job growth will outpace the national average over the next ten years. While national risks like tariffs or global instability could certainly trigger a recession, these are external shocks rather than flaws in Oregon’s policy.
Any “prosperity” strategy has to start with an accurate and realistic assessment of where the state stands.
The Oregon Prosperity Council, an advisory group appointed by Governor Tina Kotek has been subjected to a withering barrage of complaints about the state’s economy, and in our view, some unduly negative claims about the state’s economic performance. As we’ve pointed out, Oregon, and in particular its metropolitan areas (Portland, Salem, Eugene-Springfield and Bend) have been among the nation’s best performing, according to the widely respected “Metro Monitor” released by the Brookings Institution. Portland ranks in the top ten of large US metro areas on key measures of prosperity, while Bend is the number one performing metro area between 250,000 and 500,000 population. Doomsayers don’t dispute the accuracy of the Brookings data, but tell us that they can’t be right because we should ignore ten-year trends, and only look at data from after the pandemic (because presumably everything is different now). We’re told that we’ve now reached a “inflection point” and that we’re in crisis.
Oregon Public Broadcasting essentially repeated this “ignore anything before 2020” point in its coverage of the Prosperity Council’s deliberations:
That argument relies in part on ratings by the Brookings Institution, which puts Portland in the middle of the pack of top metro areas when it comes to economic growth from 2014-24. The organization also rates Portland in the top 10 in terms of income and wealth growth. Notably, the decade Brookings uses to make those comparisons includes a period of surging pre-pandemic growth in the city.
The best single indicator: Oregon’s continued strong per capita income level
As every economist knows, shorter term changes in data series are less meaningful than longer term shifts, so looking at one or two years data is seldom indicative of an enduring trend. But if we look at one of the most basic and revealing measures of economic prosperity, it is clear that Oregon’s economy has done well, and is continuing to do well, relative to the rest of the nation. Our focus here is on per capita income–the total income earned by Oregonians, divided by the state’s population. We use this metric to compare Oregon’s per capita personal income to the United States. For those who demand “fresh” data on recent progress, these are the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis’s latest, revised estimates, released on April 9, 2026.
Ideally, we’d like to see Oregon have a per capita income at or above the US national average. For a long time, Oregon has lagged well below the US average. If we look at the record of the 21st Century, Oregon started out well below the US average, and through 2010, our per capita incomes lagged behind the US average. By 2010, we were at only 88 percent of the US average. Since then, we’ve reversed the relative decline in Oregon per capita incomes that happened in the first decade of this century Since 2011, our incomes have headed upward, and we’ve closed most of the gap with the nation. The latest federal data–for calendar year 2025–show that we’re at a bit above 96 percent of the US average, roughly as high as we’ve been any time in the past quarter century.
Looking ahead: the Oregon Economic Forecast
Moreover, if a weaker performance was in the cards, you would expect that to be baked into the state’s economic forecast. Instead, the latest state economic forecast is Oregon will maintain its relative position in terms of per capita personal income.
In addition, the state forecast calls for Oregon job growth to be faster than in the rest of the US for the next decade.
Now, of course, an economic model is just a projection. But it is important to note that the Oregon econometric model is largely driven by recent trends, i.e. data gathered and relationships since 2020, and not before. If anything, the model represents a conservative projection of the current trajectory of the Oregon economy, based on its performance relative to the nation. It’s also worth noting that in general, Oregon’s econometric model has consistently under-estimated the future performance of the Oregon economy (which is why we’ve had five “kicker” payments in the past five biennia–the Oregon economy has done better than the economic model predicted it would). That’s not so much an indictment of the econometric model as it is an indication that the Oregon economy has gotten steadily stronger and actually out-performed what any reasonable economic model calibrated backward-looking data would have predicted.
In short, if one were to look at the recent evidence on Oregon economic performance and its likely trajectory in the next few years, one would conclude that we’re likely to do well.
None of this is to say that there aren’t risks to the forecast. But, increasingly, these risks have to do with erratic and damaging federal policies, from an illegal and capricious system of tariffs, to an illegal and destabilizing war on Iran, to fundamental damage to immigration, science, education and the rule of law, all of which have underpinned long-term US economic growth. And plainly, Oregon’s economy has always been pro-cyclical–it goes up more in boom times and down more in troubled times. That means if—and likely when—we suffer a national recession, Oregon will likely see bigger job losses, and suffer more painful economic effects than other states. But these are problems of the national economy–not evidence of emergent flaws in Oregon’s economic policies.
Farms raising an array of crops form an agricultural mosaic across Yunlin County in this image captured by the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 9 on March 18, 2026.
NASA Earth Observatory/Michala Garrison
About 23 million people live in Taiwan, a Pacific island about the size of Maryland. Despite its size, the island produces a tremendous amount of agricultural goods per year—about $18 billion, according to Taiwan’s Ministry of Agriculture.
The average size of a farm in Taiwan (less than 1 hectare) is much smaller than in the United Kingdom (87 hectares) or the United States (187 hectares). Since much of the island is mountainous, only about one-quarter of Taiwan’s land is arable, and it is mostly located on the southwestern side of the island in the Chianan Plain. That amounts to 0.03 hectares of farmland per Taiwanese citizen—about half as much arable farmland as there is per person in the United Kingdom and one-tenth as much as in the United States.
The small plot size is apparent in this satellite image of farmland in Yunlin County in southwestern Taiwan, one of the island’s most productive agricultural areas. The modest scale is partly a result of past policies that limited the size of farms and partly a byproduct of cultural traditions that often lead to the division of farms into smaller parcels as property is passed from one generation to the next.
Located along the floodplains of the Zhoushui and Beigang rivers, Yunlin County is mostly flat, has fertile soils, and has easy access to irrigation water. The county, one of Taiwan’s main agricultural hubs, is known for producing a wide range of crops, including rice, sweet potatoes, peanuts, corn, sugarcane, garlic, scallions, coffee, fruit, and leafy greens. Farms in the county also raise millions of pigs, the most of any county in Taiwan.
Areas with large fields were generally once part of sugar plantations.
NASA Earth Observatory/Michala Garrison
Most crops in Yunlin County are grown in small rectangular plots defined by roadways and networks of irrigation canals. The exception is sugarcane, which was grown widely in the county in the early 1900s when Japan controlled Taiwan and established an expansive network of sugarcane plantations in the southwestern part of the country. These plantations were consolidated into the Taiwan Sugar Corporation after the conclusion of World War II, and the large plot sizes in the farmland north of Baozhong in the image above persist as a legacy of this period.
While the amount of sugarcane cultivated in Taiwan has declined in recent decades and many of the fields have transitioned to other crops, Taiwan Sugar Corporation still raises sugarcane around Baozhong. The company operates a railway that transports harvested cane to nearby Huwei, site of one of just a few remaining sugar refineries on the island. Although Taiwan also once had a large network of sugar railways that serviced thousands of kilometers of track and dozens of sugar refineries, the line that serves Huwei is the only one on the island that remains active.
Farmers around Xiluo often use shade nets to protect crops from the elements.
NASA Earth Observatory/Michala Garrison
Another area that stands out in the mosaicked agricultural landscape of Yunlin is located around Xiluo (above). Here the fields take on an unusual greenish-blue hue, largely because of the ubiquity of shade nets. Farmers use the nets to protect crops from heat, sun, heavy rains, and pests. They are generally deployed for specialty crops such as vegetables, fruit, and flowers. This area contrasts with the darker green region in the lower right of the first image, where rice is the dominant crop.
NASA Earth Observatory images by Michala Garrison, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey.Story by Adam Voiland.
Not long ago we looked at construction productivity trends for the US and for countries around the world. We found that in the US, and in most other large, wealthy countries, construction productivity is stagnant or declining. Unlike manufacturing and agriculture, or the economy overall, which generally show improving productivity over time, in the field of construction we find that productivity tends to at best stay constant, and at worst decline over time.
Understanding trends in productivity — how much output we get for a given amount of input over time — is useful, but it’s also useful to look at other metrics of construction industry progress. One particularly salient measure is construction costs: how much money it takes to build a house or an office or an apartment building, and how those costs have changed over time. Cost is a good improvement metric because it directly tracks what we actually care about: we would like the costs of building housing, buildings, and infrastructure to fall and become more affordable, and we basically care about more abstract measures like productivity to the extent that they’re a proxy for costs.
Unsurprisingly, when we look at construction costs we see similar trends to what we saw with construction productivity; construction rarely gets any cheaper over time, and construction costs tend to rise at or above the level of overall inflation. As with productivity, we see this when we analyze the data at different levels of granularity, and we see it in both the U.S. and in countries around the world.
Construction cost indexes
Changes in construction cost are generally tracked using cost indexes, measures produced by various organizations which collect and analyze data to try and capture large-scale changes in construction cost. At a high level, there are two broad types of index: output indexes, and input indexes. Output indexes try to measure changes in the cost of finished buildings or infrastructure: how much it costs to build a house, or an office building, or a segment of road over time. Input indexes measure changes in the cost of some basket of construction inputs: the price of different construction tasks, or materials, or labor.
It’s not always straightforward to tell whether an index is an output index or an input index, because exactly how indexes are constructed can be somewhat opaque. An index that initially appears as if it’s an output index, because it apparently tracks changes in a particular type of construction (like new apartment buildings), may actually function more like an input index if it is constructed from price changes in inputs specific to that type of construction. All else being equal, I prefer output indexes to input indexes, because they should more closely track what we actually care about (the cost of finished buildings), and should be less subject to distortion. For instance, the invention of some great cost-saving construction method might not be reflected in an input index that simply tallies up the cost of 10 hours of labor, 100 pounds of steel, and 1 ton of cement (which is how many input indexes are constructed). But in practice output and input indexes tend to track each other quite closely.
Cost indexes are resistant to some of the measurement difficulties that dog productivity metrics, because they’re typically constructed to try and mirror the cost changes of actual buildings. For instance, we’ve previously seen that productivity metrics are dogged by problems of “changes in the output mix” — changes in the type of construction that takes place in a given geography or during a particular collection period can mask actual productivity trends. But the producers of cost indexes will often monitor trends in the construction marketplace, and modify how their index is constructed by weighing some items more heavily and other items less heavily to try and reflect that. We should thus expect them to be more resilient to changing output mix problems.
But in some cases cost indexes share the same measurement issues as productivity metrics. In particular, it can be difficult to adjust cost indexes for quality; a modern building might cost more per square foot, but be built to higher standards or otherwise have higher performance than an older building, which looking only at changes in costs won’t capture. Some indexes, such as the Census Bureau’s Constant Quality Index, try to account for quality changes, but most don’t. (This is in contrast to, say, the Bureau of Labor Statistics’s sector-specific inflation measures, which try to take into account quality changes when calculating inflation trends for things like TVs or new cars.) Indexes that do try to adjust for quality changes likely can’t account for it completely. These issues are somewhat mitigated by the fact that we care about costs as such, and it’s valuable to know how those costs are changing — i.e., even if some proportion of rising costs is due to increased standards and we are getting more bang for our buck, it’s still useful to know how construction costs are changing with respect to other prices. Nonetheless, we should keep this point about quality changes not always being reliably captured mind when we’re looking at cost trends.
To look at trends in U.S. construction costs, we’ll use the following indexes:
Output indexes
The Turner Building Cost Index — Produced by Turner Construction, one of the largest general contractors in the US, this index tracks the price of non-residential buildings by considering such factors as “labor rates and productivity, material prices, and the competitive condition of the marketplace.” This is one of the oldest continuously produced construction cost indexes, going all the way back to 1915.
The Census Bureau’s Single-Family Constant Quality Index — Produced by the US Census Bureau, this index tracks changes in the price of single-family homes, and goes back to 1964.
Handy-Whitman — Produced by Whitman Requardt and Associates, data in this index tracks the cost of building reinforced concrete, brick-lined utility buildings (though there are also other data for other types of buildings). The index is constructed by looking at the price of various inputs (materials, labor, equipment) for these types of buildings, but the relative proportions are adjusted to ensure that they reflect “current construction practice,” so I’m classifying this as an output index. I was able to get data for this index from 1915 to 2002.
Craftsman single-family home costs — Craftsman’s National Construction Estimator, an estimating guide that has been published since the 1950s, includes an estimated cost per square foot to build a “typical” single-family home in the U.S. I was able to get these values going back to 1966.
The National Highway Construction Cost Index — Produced by the U.S. Federal Highway Association, this index tracks the cost of building highways over time, and is based on the price of winning bids for highway construction contracts. This public index goes back to 1915.
Input indexes
E.H. Boeckh Index — Produced by E.H. Boeckh and Associates, this index tracks the cost of a variety of different building types in cities around the U.S., based on “115 elements,” including labor costs, material costs, and tax and insurance elements. (I’m including this in the input indexes because I think it’s basically using the basket-of-inputs approach to construct costs, but depending on how they weighed these elements this might make more sense as an output index.) For many years this index was included in the Survey of Current Business produced by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. I look at this index for residential construction, for the years 1910 through 1991.
ENR Construction Cost Index — Produced by Engineering News-Record, this index tracks a basket of several different construction inputs — unskilled labor, steel, cement, and wood — the relative proportions of which are periodically adjusted. ENR also produces a virtually identical “Building Cost Index” that replaces unskilled labor with skilled labor. This index has been continuously produced since 1908.
RS Means Historical Cost Index — Produced by the RSMeans estimating company, this index tracks a basket of construction labor, materials and equipment costs. I was able to get data for this index going back to 1953.
Riggleman Index — Produced for an unpublished doctoral dissertation (by Dr. John R. Riggleman) in 1934, this index was made using several other indexes, such as the ENR construction cost index and the American Appraisal Company’s cost index for industrial buildings. This index is primarily useful because it goes back all the way to 1868.
Blank Residential Index — This is another composite index, which uses a weighted basket of construction inputs as well as the E.H. Boeckh index, to track the cost of residential construction. This index is useful because it goes back to 1889.
We’ll compare each of these indexes to the Consumer Price Index (CPI), a common measure of overall inflation. Because the Consumer Price Index only goes back to 1913, for earlier values we’ll use inflation conversion factors produced by Robert Sahr of Oregon State.
The graphs below show various cost indexes between 1870 and 1950.
And these graphs show cost indexes from 1950 to 2022.
We can see that regardless of time period, and regardless of whether we’re looking at input indexes or output indexes, construction costs are rising roughly as fast as, or faster than, overall inflation. When we looked at productivity trends, we saw that since roughly the 1960s U.S. construction productivity has been stagnant or declining. Cost data suggests that the problem extends even further back, and that U.S. construction costs have virtually never fallen with respect to overall inflation.
These graphs give us a good large-scale view of cost trends for different indices, but it makes it hard to see cost trends over specific time periods. So let’s look at the average annual growth rate for each index over 10-year periods, minus the average growth rate of CPI for the same period. This will let us see how construction costs are changing with respect to inflation over specific periods: positive values mean construction costs are rising faster than inflation, negative means construction costs are rising slower than inflation.
We see that in almost every period of time, construction costs are rising faster than overall inflation for virtually every cost index. The major exception is the period from 1975 to 1995, where most indexes show lower rates of increase or even declines against overall inflation. We also see that historic rates of cost increase seem to be as bad or worse than modern ones. For four of the five 10-year periods between 1915 and 1965, the Turner Cost index rose more than a percentage point faster than overall inflation, whereas for the periods from 1995 to 2025 it rose less than a percentage point.
Construction task costs
As with construction productivity, we can also look at more granular construction cost trends, by looking at how the costs of individual construction tasks have changed. We can do this using construction estimating guides, which provide estimates for the costs of various construction materials and tasks. By looking at the costs of the same, or similar tasks across various versions of estimating guides, we can see how the cost of those tasks are changing.
The chart below shows the cost of 40 different construction tasks taken from three different versions of the RSMeans estimating guide published in 1954, 1985, and 2023.
And this chart shows the cost of 20 different construction tasks taken from several different versions of the Craftsman National Construction Estimator published between 1967 and 2016.
We can see that cost changes in individual construction tasks aren’t uniform. Some have risen in cost faster than overall inflation; others more slowly. But on average, the cost of these construction tasks has risen at the level of overall inflation. So not only are buildings not getting any cheaper to produce on average, the cost of individual construction tasks isn’t falling either on average, at least for this collection of construction tasks.
There are issues with looking at changes in individual construction tasks. As we noted when we looked at construction productivity, all else being equal we might expect construction to improve by way of introducing new, improved processes, and thus looking at changes in older processes might not reveal very much. In the 19th century, nails got cheaper due to the introduction of new nailmaking processes - replacing hand-made nails with the cut nail process, and then the wire-nail process. If we looked only at improvements in hand-made nails, we might conclude that nails on the market hadn’t gotten any cheaper, even though what actually happened was that an older process had simply been replaced by a newer, better process. I’ve tried to avoid this by using construction tasks that I know are still in use, but this isn’t perfect. Unfortunately, this method may run into an adverse selection problem: picking tasks that appear in many versions of the estimating guide might deliberately select for ones that have been difficult to substitute. Nonetheless, it’s the best method we have for analyzing costs at the granular task level.
We can address this issue the same way we did when we looked at construction productivity, by looking at cost trends in broad categories of tasks. The chart below shows the cost per square foot for 32 categories of tasks required to build a single-family home from Craftsman’s National Construction Estimator. As we can see, task costs generally rise at roughly the same rate that overall home prices rise, and rarely change. (This is sort of mechanical outcome of the fact that task category prices are given as a percentage of overall costs, and for most task categories that percentage has changed little over time, but it’s nevertheless notable.)
Thus, at the level of construction tasks, we also see costs tending to rise at or above the level of overall inflation.
International construction costs
To see whether this trend is also observed internationally, we can look at similar construction cost indexes constructed for other countries. The cost indexes we’ll look at are below:
Eurostat Construction Producer Price Index for Residential Buildings — This cost index, produced by Eurostat for 36 different European countries, tracks the cost changes for residential buildings. (It’s not particularly clear to me how this was constructed: the website merely says that producer price indexes track “the average price development of all goods and related services resulting from that activity.”) For most countries this index goes back to 2000, but for some it goes all the way back to the 1950s.
The U.K.’s BIS construction output price index — This index tracks output prices for several different UK construction sectors (I used values from “All Construction”), going back to 1955. Because this index only goes up to 2011, I supplemented this with the similar Construction Output Price Index from the U.K.’s Office for National Statistics, which began in 2014.
Belgium’s ABEX index — This index tracks the price of building residences in Belgium. The Eurostat Producer Price Index includes data for Belgium, but it only goes back to 2000, whereas the ABEX index goes all the way back to 1914(!).
Japan’s Construction Cost Deflator — This index tracks price changes for several different sectors of Japanese construction, going back to 1960. I used the value for residential construction.
South Korea’s Construction Cost Index — This index tracks the change in construction costs for several different Korean construction sectors, going back to 2000. I used the index for housing construction.
Taiwan’s Construction Price Index— This index tracks the changes in construction costs in Taiwan, and is based on the prices of 115 different construction inputs. It goes back to 1991.
The graphs below show each of these indexes against the consumer price index for 12 major European countries, as well as the U.S. consumer price index.
And this graph shows construction cost trends for Asian countries.
We see the same pattern that we saw with U.S. construction cost indexes: construction costs nearly always rise at, or faster than, the level of overall inflation in the country.
We can also see this if we look at changes in construction cost minus changes in consumer price index in 10-year buckets, as we did for U.S. construction costs. The chart below shows decade-by-decade changes in construction cost minus CPI for 41 different European and Asian countries (including lots of smaller and poorer countries that I didn’t include on the above graphs).
There’s somewhat more blue on this chart than in the US construction costs, but we can still see costs are, more often than not, rising faster than overall inflation.
Conclusion
When we looked at trends in construction productivity — how much construction output we get for a given amount of input — we saw that it’s mostly either relatively unchanging, or declining over time. We saw this in the U.S. using a variety of different metrics of varying granularity, and we saw it in most other wealthy countries. With construction costs — how much construction output we get for a given amount of currency — we see something similar. Construction costs tend to rise at, or above, the level of overall inflation, and it rarely (if ever) gets cheaper to build houses, offices, or other buildings. We see this in the U.S. with a variety of different metrics, and we see it in countries around the world. With stagnant construction productivity, we could date the problem as far back as roughly the 1960s. With construction costs, we can push the problem back even further: outside of a few windows of time, construction costs have virtually never fallen with respect to overall inflation.
In today’s digital world, data loss from your PC has become a common and frustrating issue. Whether due to accidental deletion, formatting, system failures, or any other reason, losing important files and folders from your Windows computer can put you in trouble. Fortunately, there are several free data recovery software tools available that you can try to recover your lost files in Windows without spending money. Choosing the right recovery software depends on your data loss situation, device type, ease of use, recovery limits, and required features.
In this article, we will explore the top 5 free data recovery software of 2026, their features, pros & cons, and best use cases to help you choose the right tool. Let’s get started!
Why Do You Need Data Recovery Software?
While there are several DIY methods, like backups, which can help you recover deleted data, third-party recovery software offers a more powerful, reliable, and versatile solution. These free data recovery tools are popular because of certain features, including:
Cost-Effective Solution: Free tools let you recover lost or deleted data without any upfront cost, making them ideal for students and budget-conscious users.
Quick and Easy Recovery: Most free software offers simple interfaces and guided steps, which allow even beginners to recover files in a few simple clicks.
Supports Multiple Devices: Many recovery tools support data recovery from hard drives, SSDs, USB drives, memory cards, and even external storage devices.
Safe and Non-Destructive: Good recovery tools perform read-only operations, ensuring your existing data remains safe during the recovery process.
Preview Before Recovery: Many tools offer an in-built preview feature that lets you preview the recoverable files before restoring them, helping you recover only what you actually need.
2026 Guide: Top 5 Free Data Recovery Software Picks
Here are our best 05 free data recovery software tools which you can use to restore your deleted files on your Windows PC:
01: Stellar Data Recovery Free
Stellar Data Recovery Free is a versatile, free data recovery software that supports the recovery of files that are accidentally deleted or lost due to formatting and other reasons. The software supports recovery of deleted files of various types, including documents, photos, videos, and emails from multiple storage devices, including hard drives, SSDs, USB drives, and memory cards. The free version allows you to restore deleted files up to 1 GB without any additional cost. Its preview feature lets you preview the recoverable files before restoring them.
Pros
Offers a clean and intuitive interface, which allows you to perform data recovery easily without requiring any technical knowledge or expertise.
Provides preview feature before recovery, enabling users to verify files and recover only necessary data, saving time and storage space.
Compatible with both Windows and macOS systems, making it a versatile solution for users across different operating platforms.
Cons
The free version supports data recovery of only up to 1GB of data, which may not be sufficient for users with large data loss scenarios.
Some advanced features, like partition recovery and unlimited data recovery, are restricted to the paid version, limiting full functionality access.
Deep scan feature can be time-consuming, especially when scanning large drives or severely corrupted storage devices with extensive data.
Best Use Case
Ideal for recovering recently deleted files, documents, photos, or videos from laptops, desktops, USB drives, or memory cards efficiently.
02: EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard Free
EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard Free is a powerful data recovery software, mainly known for its simple interface and high recovery success rate. You can use this free data recovery tool to recover deleted, formatted, or lost files from multiple storage devices, including hard drives, SSDs, USB drives, and memory cards. It offers both quick and deep scan modes, allowing you to recover recently deleted files as well as data lost due to complex issues like partition loss or system crashes.
Pros
Supports recovery of deleted files of various types, including documents, photos, videos, and emails, from differen storage devices.
Compatible with multiple storage devices, including HDDs, SSDs, USB drives, memory cards, and even formatted or corrupted partitions.
High recovery success rate and reliable performance make it a trusted choice among users demanding data recovery.
Cons
Advanced features like unlimited recovery and bootable media are available only in paid version, limiting full functionality in free version.
You may sometimes find upgrade prompts, encouraging the purchase of the premium version during the recovery process.
Best Use Case
Suitable for beginners needing a simple, guided recovery solution with reliable performance for small-scale data loss situations without technical expertise required.
03: Disk Drill Free
Disk Drill is a modern and feature-rich free data recovery software that you can use to recover deleted files on both Windows and macOS devices. The software is widely known for its clean interface and powerful scanning algorithms that combine quick scan and deep scan methods. You can use this software to recover deleted photos, videos, documents, and other types of files from various internal or external storage media. It also offers a file preview before recovery, allowing you to verify data before saving it on your device.
Pros
Supports recovery of deleted files from multiple storage devices, including HDDs, SSDs, USB drives, memory cards, and even mobile devices.
Includes the Recovery Vault feature that helps protect deleted files and improves chances of successful data recovery in future situations.
Supports multiple file systems like NTFS, FAT32, EXT, and HFS+, ensuring compatibility with different operating systems and storage devices.
Cons
The free version limits data recovery size, which may not be sufficient for users with large data loss situations.
Advanced recovery features and unlimited data restoration require upgrading to the paid version, significantly limiting functionality in the free version.
Performance may slow down your system during scanning due to high resource usage, especially on older or low-performance computers.
Best Use Case
Ideal for quick recovery of recently deleted files, photos, videos, or documents from personal computers, USB drives, or memory cards.
04: PhotoRec (with TestDisk)
PhotoRec, bundled with TestDisk, is a powerful open-source data recovery tool which you can use to recover files deleted due to several reasons, including formatting, damaged storage device, etc. Unlike typical free data recovery tools, it works through a command-line interface, which may seem complex to beginners. It is the best option to recover files deleted from severely corrupted, formatted, or damaged drives. Since it is completely free and open-source, there are no recovery limits.
Pros
Completely free and open-source software with no recovery limits, making it ideal for unlimited data recovery without any cost or restrictions.
Works on multiple platforms, including Windows, macOS, and Linux, providing flexibility for users across various operating environments.
Supports a wide range of file systems and file formats, ensuring compatibility across different devices and operating systems.
Cons
Does not provide file preview feature, making it challenging to identify and select specific files before the recovery process begins.
Lacks modern graphical interface, which may discourage users who prefer visually guided recovery tools with step-by-step instructions.
Best Use Case
Suitable for advanced users or IT professionals who need powerful, unlimited recovery tool for deep scanning and complex data recovery scenarios.
05: Recuva
Recuva, developed by Piriform, is a lightweight and completely free data recovery software designed primarily for Windows users. The software supports data recovery from hard drives, USB drives, memory cards, and other storage devices. This tool offers a wizard-based interface that guides users through the recovery process step-by-step, making it ideal for beginners. It can also perform deep scan of your storage device for locating hard-to-find files. Unlike many competitors, Recuva provides unlimited free recovery, making it a great choice for users who want a no-cost solution.
Pros
Simple and beginner-friendly interface with a guided wizard, making file recovery easy even for users with minimal technical knowledge or experience.
Supports efficient recovery from multiple storage devices, including hard drives, USB drives, memory cards, and external storage devices.
Includes deep scan feature for locating hard-to-find files, improving the chances of recovering data that standard scans might miss.
Cons
Deep scan process can be slow, especially when scanning large drives or searching for files in complex data loss scenarios.
Limited advanced recovery capabilities make it less effective for recovering data from severely corrupted, formatted, or damaged storage devices.
Best Use Case
Ideal for recovering recently deleted files, photos, documents, or videos from Windows computers, USB drives, or memory cards quickly.
Conclusion
Data loss on your device can be a distressing experience, especially if the lost data is valuable. Thanks for the aforementioned free data recovery software tools, which allow recovery of data lost from any internal or external storage media. Whether you are a beginner or an advanced user, there is a suitable option available for every need. Carefully check the features of these tools and select the one that best fits your needs.
While free tools have limitations, they are often sufficient for recovering critical files. For larger recoveries, upgrading to a paid version may be necessary.
Genie Lessons from the Genie Sessions — every Friday I work on a real problem with an AI tool, live, for paid subscribers. Every Monday the lesson drops here, free.
Nobody wants agents. Nobody wants agent swarms. I have a system and I want it to change. That’s the whole thing.
This session I was using Intent by Augment Code — multi-agent, coordinator plus implementer plus verifier. Working on an adaptive radix tree in Go, optimizing for human readability. The coordinator delegates, the implementer runs off and builds things, the verifier checks. I called it the Freudian architecture: id, superego, ego. The id rushes ahead. The superego folds its arms. The ego negotiates. It kind of works.
But watching the swarm spin up, I noticed something. I was managing it. Watching which agent was doing what. Wondering when to interrupt. Holding state in my head that the system should have been holding for me. I’d said I wanted readable code and instead I had a coordination problem.
The mismatch is this: when I was working on performance last week, what I actually wanted was — how much faster can we make this? How hard would it be? How much would it cost? Outcomes. I don’t want to prompt-engineer my way toward an answer. I want to describe the result I’m after and have the genie tell me if it’s achievable and what it would take. I’ve never been able to get two agents working on the same codebase at the same time without my head exploding. So I’m not convinced the swarm is the answer.
Multi-agent is a feature. Outcome-orientation is the thing the feature is supposed to deliver. We keep getting those confused.
The other frontier nobody’s working on yet: multiplayer. Right now, five agents can work on this codebase simultaneously. Five people can’t. That’s backwards. The person who figures out real-time collaborative augmented development — where multiple humans actually steer together, not just watch — that person is solving the real problem.
Nobody knows what that looks like. But I’m pretty sure it’s not a coordinator with finger guns.
This Genie Session was sponsored by Augment Code.
Intent is the AI coding tool built for the way software actually gets written now. Describe what you want. Intent handles the rest — planning, implementing, verifying — so you stay focused on outcomes, not orchestration.
Members of the House Science Committee rejected a proposed fiscal year 2027 budget for NASA because of sweeping cuts as the agency’s administrator argued it could do more with less.
A Rocket Lab Electron launched a set of cubesats sponsored by the Japanese space agency JAXA April 22 on the company’s second dedicated mission for the agency.
French startup Univity has raised around $32 million to deploy a pair of 5G demonstrators into very low Earth orbit next year, ahead of plans for at least 1,600 VLEO satellites to help telecom operators extend 5G coverage from space.
The Federal Communications Commission has moved to lock down incumbent rights to Mobile Satellite Service spectrum, dismissing bids by SpaceX and others to access frequencies increasingly prized for direct-to-device connectivity.
In this episode of Space Minds, we head back to Space Symposium where SpaceNews’ Sandra Erwin moderated a panel on how optical communication links can provide warfighters and operators with […]
China and Russia may be the real beneficiaries of Washington’s latest Middle East conflict.
“Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.”
Napoleon Bonaparte’s maxim may well have been in the minds of policymakers in Moscow and Beijing these past weeks, as the U.S. war in Iran dragged on. And now that a 14-day ceasefire between Tehran and Washington is in effect – with both sides claiming “victory” – Russian and Chinese leaders still have an opportunity to profit from what many see as America’s latest folly in the Middle East.
Throughout the weekslong conflict, China and Russia struck a delicate balance. Both declined to give Iran – seen to a varying degree as an ally of both nations – their full-throated support or sink any real costs into the conflict.
As a scholar of international security and great power politics I believe that is for good reason. Beijing and Moscow were fully aware that Iran could not “win” against the combined military might of the United States and Israel. Rather, Iran just needed to survive to serve the interests of Washington’s main geopolitical rivals.
Below are four ways in which the U.S. war in Iran has damaged Washington’s position in the great power rivalries of the 21st century.
1. Losing the influence war in the Middle East
As I explore in my book “Defending Frenemies,” the U.S. has long struggled to balance competing objectives in the Middle East. During the Cold War, this meant limiting the Soviet Union’s influence in the region, while contending with the development of nuclear weapons by two troublesome allies, Israel and Pakistan.
By the 2020s, the priorities in Washington were aimed at restricting the influence of the U.S.’s great power rivals – China and to a lesser degree Russia – in the Middle East.
Yet under Presidents Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, China and Russia have sought to increase their footprintin the region through a variety of formal alliances and informal measures.
For Russia, this took the form of aligning with Iran, while also partnering with Tehran to prop up the now-ousted regime of President Bashar Assad during the Syrian civil war. Meanwhile, China increased its diplomatic profile in the Middle East, notably by acting as a mediator as Saudi Arabia and Iran restored diplomatic ties in 2023.
The irony of the latest Iran war is that it follows a period in which circumstances were unfavorable to Russian and Chinese aims of increasing their influence in the Middle East.
Trump’s decision to wage war against Iran directly contradicts the national security strategy his administration released in November 2025. According to the strategy, the administration would prioritize the Western Hemisphere and the Indo-Pacific, while the Middle East’s importance “will recede.”
In co-launching a war in Tehran with Israel, without any prior consultation with Washington’s other allies, Trump has shown a complete disregard for their strategic and economic concerns. NATO, already riven by Trump’s repeated threats to the alliance and designs on Greenland, has now shown further signs of internal divisions.
That offers benefits for China and Russia, which have long sought to capitalize on cracks between America and its allies.
The irony, again, is that the war in Iran came as Trump’s vision of the U.S. as the hegemonic power in the Western Hemisphere was making advances. International law and legitimacy concerns aside, Washington had ousted a thorn in its side with Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela and replaced him with a more compliant leader.
3. Disproportionate economic fallout
Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz, where some 20% of the world’s oil passes, was as predictable as it was destructive for U.S. interests.
But for Russia, this meant higher oil prices that boosted its war economy. It also led to the temporary but ongoing easing of U.S. sanctions, which has provided Moscow an indispensable lifeline after years of economic pressure over the war in Ukraine.
While a prolonged closure and extensive damage to oil and natural gas infrastructure in Iran and the Gulf states no doubt hurts China’s energy security and economy, these were risks Xi appears willing to accept, at least for a time.
And by building up a domestic oil reserve and diversifying energy sources to include solar, electric batteries and coal, China is far better positioned to weather a prolonged global energy crisis than the U.S. Indeed, Beijing has made strides in recent year to encourage domestic consumption as a source of economic growth, rather than be so reliant on global trade. That may have given China some protection during the global economic shock caused by the Iran war, as well as push the economy further down its own track.
The more the U.S. loses control over events in the strait, the more it loses influence in the region – especially as Iran appears to be placing restrictions on ships from unfriendly nations.
That provides a massive soft power boost for Beijing. It was China that pressed Iran to accept the 14-day ceasefire proposal brokered by Pakistan. Indeed, China has slowly chipped away at America’s longtime status as global mediator of first resort.
In general, the Iran war adds weight to Beijing’s worldview that the U.S.-led liberal international order is over. Even if China benefited at some level from the war continuing, its decision to help broker the ceasefire shows that China is increasingly taking on the mantle of global leadership that the U.S. used to own.
And for Russia, the Iran war and the rupture between Trump and America’s NATO allies over their lack of support for it, shift world attention and U.S. involvement from the war in Ukraine.
“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.
Bipolar disorder does not announce itself with a single, obvious sign. It builds gradually through shifting moods, disrupted sleep, and strained connections that slowly chip away at stability. Many people wait too long before reaching out, often because they are unsure whether what they feel warrants professional attention. The truth is, earlier support tends to produce better results. This post breaks down the specific moments when seeing a therapist becomes less of an option and more of a necessity.
Mood Episodes Are Becoming More Frequent
Everyone experiences emotional ups and downs from time to time. That is part of being human. But there is a meaningful difference between a rough week and a pattern of intense mood shifts that cycle with increasing speed. Manic highs that fuel sleepless nights, followed by depressive crashes that make getting out of bed feel impossible, point to something clinical. A mental health professional can evaluate these patterns and determine whether a formal treatment plan is needed.
Often, the people closest to someone notice these shifts before the individual does. A partner might point out erratic spending during a manic stretch, or a friend might flag sudden social withdrawal. That outside perspective matters. Working with abipolar disorder therapist gives individuals a reliable framework for managing these cycles. Specialists in this area use evidence-based methods to help clients recognize triggers, build coping mechanisms, and develop routines that promote emotional balance over time.
Relationships Are Suffering
Mood instability ripples outward. During manic periods, impulsive remarks or restless irritability can damage even the strongest bonds. Depressive stretches often bring isolation, leaving loved ones feeling shut out. Over months or years, these cycles create a pattern of rupture and repair that exhausts everyone involved.
A therapist offers a contained space to examine how these emotional extremes affect the people around us. Practical tools, like communication exercises and emotional regulation techniques, make a real difference. In some cases, joint sessions with a partner or family member help rebuild trust and establish healthier ways of supporting one another.
Daily Responsibilities Feel Unmanageable
Missed deadlines, ignored bills, and mounting household tasks are clear signs that symptoms have started affecting everyday functioning. Mania can produce intense bursts of activity that burn out quickly, leaving projects half-finished. Depression strips away drive entirely, turning even minor obligations into exhausting ordeals.
Work and Academic Performance
A noticeable drop in output at a job or in coursework deserves attention. Difficulty in concentrating, gaps in memory, and unpredictable energy levels all interfere with consistent performance. A clinician experienced with mood disorders can help design strategies for staying on track during difficult stretches, including structured scheduling and energy management techniques.
Self-Medication or Risky Behavior Has Started
Reaching for alcohol, substances, or other high-risk outlets to blunt emotional extremes is a serious red flag. These habits offer short-term numbness but deepen instability over time. They also raise the likelihood of developing a co-occurring substance use condition, which complicates treatment significantly.
Therapeutic intervention targets the underlying emotional pain that fuels these choices. Cognitive behavioral techniques, consistent mood monitoring, and coordinated medication management work together to reduce reliance on harmful coping habits. Seeking support before these behaviors become deeply rooted improves recovery outcomes considerably.
A Previous Diagnosis Exists, but Treatment Has Lapsed
It is surprisingly common for people to step away from treatment after a period of stability. Feeling good can create a false sense of resolution, as though the condition has somehow passed. Bipolar disorder, however, is a lifelong condition. Symptoms almost always resurface without ongoing care.
Re-engaging with a mental health provider after time away is a practical and encouraged step. Treatment plans can be adjusted to reflect new life circumstances, updated research, or changes in symptom presentation. Consistent clinical engagement lowers the risk of severe episodes and reduces the chance of hospitalization.
Suicidal Thoughts or Self-Harm Urges Arise
This is the most critical signal, and it calls for immediate action. Depressive episodes tied to bipolar disorder carry a heightened risk of suicidal thinking. No one should sit with those thoughts alone. Crisis hotlines, emergency services, and urgent therapy appointments all exist for exactly this reason.
After a crisis passes, sustained therapeutic support helps build a safety plan and identify warning signs before they escalate again.
Conclusion
Asking for help is one of the most grounded, self-aware decisions a person can make. Whether mood episodes are accelerating, personal connections are fraying, or basic responsibilities have become overwhelming, a qualified therapist provides clarity and direction. Each session offers a chance to learn new tools, process difficult emotions, and build a more stable foundation. That first appointment is not the end of a struggle; it is the beginning of a more informed, supported way of living with bipolar disorder.
There is a growing interest in medical red light therapy for improving health. Choosing the right device is not that easy. The effectiveness and potential use for home or clinic can be affected by several factors. Both individuals and healthcare providers need to evaluate their choices before acting on them.
Understanding Red Light Therapy
Red light treatment includes exposure to particular wavelengths of light. This therapy serves as an aid in recovery, minimizes pain, and enhances the appearance of the skin. Devices come in different sizes, power, and functionality. Understanding these distinctions allows users to make informed decisions about medical red light therapy systems.
Assessing Intended Use
Identifying the primary purpose for acquiring a red light therapy system is essential. Some units are suitable for home use, while others fit clinical environments. Home devices focus on convenience and ease of operation. Professional tools may offer higher intensity and advanced settings suitable for practitioners.
Evaluating Wavelength and Power Output
Wavelength is a critical factor in therapeutic efficacy. The majority of systems function in the 600 to 900 nanometer range. Each wavelength range targets varied tissues and conditions. Power output determines the depth and efficiency of what you’re treating; power output is measured in mW/cm2. Some systems have settings that enable users to customize sessions according to needs.
Examining Safety and Certification
When deciding on medical equipment, safety continues to be a primary concern. Therapy systems receive certification for their adherence to known health and electrical safety standards. Certifications from respected organizations can instill confidence in the user. By reading the product documentation, you can make sure the device can fulfil these needs. Check for components that enable heat regulation to ensure enhanced user safety.
Comparing Device Size and Design
There are different types of therapy devices that providers offer. Smaller units are for targeted treatments and ease of travel. Large panels are good for people looking for a broader treatment area or treating multiple regions at once. Design aspects, including adjustable stands or flexible arms, offer added ease and comfort while using the device.
Investigating Treatment Protocols
Many devices offer pre-defined protocols for some common issues. These settings can be used to simplify use and to help achieve reproducible results. Meanwhile, some devices allow you to manually adjust them, providing more control over session length and intensity to more experienced users. Glancing through the available settings allows users to find a system that matches their preferences.
Considering Ease of Use
User-friendly design ensures therapy remains accessible to everyone. Clear instructions, intuitive controls, and simple interfaces support effective operation. Devices with minimal setup and maintenance requirements save time and reduce frustration. Evaluating these aspects can improve the therapy experience for all users.
Reviewing Customer Support and Warranty
A dependable customer support can help with queries and concerns during the use of the product. Check the warranty coverage and ensure it protects you against defects or malfunctions. Manufacturers that offer responsive support when needed and set clear policies show that they are committed to customer service. Users get a sense of security in their purchase decisions once they browse through these services before buying.
Analyzing Cost and Value
Comparing models that are priced similarly helps when trying to identify what works best for your budget. Basic functions and durability might be sacrificed in favor of a lower price, or, on the other hand, you can pay more for a more sophisticated piece of technology, with a longer warranty. Maintain a balance between affordability and functionality, to guarantee a value-for-money investment.
Seeking Peer and Professional Guidance
Users and medical professionals provide valuable feedback. Expert opinions, evaluations, and endorsements tend to expose either positive or negative characteristics of individual models. Consulting with a medical professional also ensures that the selected system aligns with health needs and safety standards. Getting a variety of viewpoints helps make good choices.
Conclusion
Choosing a medical red light therapy system can be difficult. However, paying attention to safety, performance, usability, and support can help users figure out the right device that suits their individual needs. Selecting the right device optimizes therapy outcomes, which leads to more satisfaction. All in all, be it for personal or professional use, with an informed decision, people can leverage the positive effects of red light therapy, hassle-free.
“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.
Tuesday’s Senate confirmation hearing for Kevin Warsh, the recent forced resignations from the Cabinet and the poorly veiled entreaty to two Supreme Court justices to step down all point up anew the power of Donald Trump to name a team that is more committed to him than to doing the job.
Trump has a free hand, of course, in naming those who work in the White House and who offer direct counsel on policy and messaging. But things get messy fast when the job at hand is supposed to involve a certain distant expertise not governed by Trump’s expansive gut, whether health, education, defense or monetary policy.
The key question for senators at all the Cabinet-level confirmation hearings has been the same: Will you act independently of Trump or merely as his tool to dominate yet another area of government?
Despite a messy war with Iran that is goosing oil prices globally, Trump still expects that Warsh will bring about an immediate and significant drop in the basic borrowing rates that look to economists and financial experts as an invitation to sustained inflation or worse. Trump wants the investor class to have access to cheap loans and seems to ignore the predictable effect on consumer markets.
Quite apart from any judgments about Jerome Powell as Fed chair concerning monetary rates or economic forecasts, Powell will be remembered for standing up to Trump – which is why Trump wants him replaced even if any confirmation is delayed.
Upset in the Cabinet
By contrast, other than for their publicly embarrassing confrontations with Congress, no one really understands why Kristi Noem was ousted as Homeland Security Secretary or Pam Bondi was forced out as a willing accomplice at using the Justice Department to pursue Trump’s perceived political enemies. It’s not as if any policies suddenly changed as a result.
Nor does this week’s departure of Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer spell any policy change, though it eliminates some bad publicity for her behaviors, a fate that may consume Kash Patel’s time as director of the FBI as well.
From all that is publicly shared about Warsh, a prominent economist, investment banker and former Federal Reserve governor who worked on the navigating the 2008 financial crisis, he would be the type of candidate to sail through the Republican-majority Senate confirmation process, despite criticisms from ranking minority committee member, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.
The sticking point is his explanation of “independence,”
As with Todd Blanche, the former Trump defense lawyer serving as interim Attorney General, Warsh sees little wrong with Trump expressing strong opinions about how he, Warsh, would do the job at the Fed. Blanche says Trump should have opinions about who gets prosecuted by Justice, and that Justice should heed the advice. Warsh was seeking to be careful at his hearing about just how far to show deference to Trump as dictator of national monetary policy – an area set by law for review independent of the partisan concerns of a president.
Decisions by the Fed are supposed to reflect technical economic readings, not the political needs of a president facing an adverse mid-term election for a would-be quick-fix rate drop. But Trump wants the “lowest rates in the world” so badly that he has ordered the Justice Department to launch criminal investigation of Powell’s management of construction – and Fed board member Lisa Cook — in hope of forcing him out. Courts have ruled twice now that search warrants were unjustified because they reflected political concern, not crime. At least one senator, Thom Tillis, R-NC, says he won’t support Warsh while unjustified charges still loom for Powell, himself a Trump appointee to the Fed chair.
No economic measure has improved for an incoming Warsh. Indeed, the war with Iran, tariffs, a budget bloated for deportation and military adventurism, and global pricing and shipping uncertainties will make any legit reduction in Fed rates more difficult to achieve. So, we know now that Warsh will become a focal point for whether Trump gets his way.
Disdaining Expertise
The problem for senators was crafting a way to gauge protestations of “independence” by Warsh or even on the questions involving economic direction at a time of so much uncertainty. It was easier to focus on the White House’s vocal anti-Powell campaign.
Indeed, senators questioned Warsh’s undisclosed personal investments and whether he has complied with required ethics declarations, his willingness to back limits over cybercurrency and AI, and the pace of Fed decision-making, but the main question kept coming back to queries that tried repeatedly to get at the independence issue.
Warsh’s attempts to say that he would not routinely follow Trump’s open demands on interest rates drew a healthy amount of skepticism from senators who noted that Trump makes clear his expectation of appointees.
What does not get discussion is how Trump goes out of way to disdain expertise in reviewing appointments. The problem with using loyalty as the only measurement consistently is creating continuing problems for Trump in health policies that kick people off Medicaid and close hospitals, in deportation campaigns that overrun legal boundaries, in environmental policies that ignore pollution to promote more oil drilling and on through the Cabinet positions.
There is too little sustained focus on the aims of these agencies, and a lot on the willingness of agencies to reinterpret their own authority to evade accountability.
In monetary policy, as with other areas, Trump starts with the desired conclusion and then skips over the available evidence – much as seemed to have happened in launching this war with Iran. For the Fed, he has decided that lower rates are what he needs, without regard to the voluminous economic review that the Fed undertakes.
The “independence” of the Fed is supposed to guarantee that expertise, not political ends, govern.
“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.
I up betimes, and with my father, having a fire made in my wife’s new closet above, it being a wet and cold day, we sat there all the morning looking over his country accounts ever since his going into the country. I find his spending hitherto has been (without extraordinary charges) at full 100l. per annum, which troubles me, and I did let him apprehend it, so as that the poor man wept, though he did make it well appear to me that he could not have saved a farthing of it. I did tell him how things stand with us, and did shew my distrust of Pall, both for her good nature and housewifery, which he was sorry for, telling me that indeed she carries herself very well and carefully, which I am glad to hear, though I doubt it was but his doting and not being able to find her miscarriages so well nowadays as he could heretofore have done.
We resolve upon sending for Will Stankes up to town to give us a right understanding in all that we have in Brampton, and before my father goes to settle every thing so as to resolve how to find a living for my father and to pay debts and legacies, and also to understand truly how Tom’s condition is in the world, that we may know what we are like to expect of his doing ill or well.
So to dinner, and after dinner to the office, where some of us met and did a little business, and so to Sir W. Batten’s to see a little picture drawing of his by a Dutchman which is very well done.
So to my office and put a few things in order, and so home to spend the evening with my father. At cards till late, and being at supper, my boy being sent for some mustard to a neat’s tongue, the rogue staid half an hour in the streets, it seems at a bonfire, at which I was very angry, and resolve to beat him to-morrow.
In the Netherlands, not only is it legal to receive medical aid in dying (MAID), but a growing number of MAID patients are able to successfully achieve their desire to become deceased organ donors.
"Abstract: The number of organ donation after euthanasia (ODE) procedures in the Netherlands has grown substantially, yet their contribution to the lung-donor pool remains unclear. There is no clinical consensus on how these potential ODE lung-donors should be assessed. We aimed to describe the total contribution of ODE to the lung-donor pool in the Netherlands and describe the assessment of potential ODE lung-donors. We collected data from all ODE procedures performed between 2012-2024 in the Netherlands. We assessed the number of ODE-lungs offered, rejected, accepted, and transplanted, comparing characteristics of discarded and transplanted lungs. Of 1166 lung-donor, 664(60%) were DCD donors of which 154(23%) were ODE lung-donors. The total proportion of donor lungs from ODE lung-donors acceptable to offer for lung transplantation was 117 of which 104 (89%) were transplanted. Evaluation prior to donation was highly variable, with medical history and chest CT most affecting acceptance decisions. Short-term outcomes were excellent, with 1-year survival of 84%. Our findings indicate that ODE lung donors are increasingly important in the Netherlands, with high acceptance rates, despite highly variable evaluation methods. Standardizing the assessment of potential ODE lung donors could further improve acceptance rates and enhance the contribution of ODE to the lung-donor pool."
We had an illustration Tuesday night of one of the most crucial questions in our current politics and the one that will determine whether civic democracy can have a rebirth in the U.S. Gerrymandering is a bane to civic democracy because it dilutes the expression of the popular will by building district lines around partisan advantage or to diminish the power of disempowered minorities. Democrats spent much of the 2010s and 2020s fighting a legal and legislative battle against gerrymandering. But the Roberts Court has chosen to legalize every manner of gerrymandering, making the current a destructive race to the bottom.
Democrats had a choice. They could express effete outrage and a meaningless devotion to broken norms and principles and agree to wage elections on a permanently tilted plane. Or they could decide to play by the rules Republicans had forced on everyone. They did just that and it was unquestionable the right decision by every measure. It really never seemed to occur to Trump Republicans that Democrats would fight on the playbook Republicans created. There’s a special comedy to this because anyone familiar with the facts on the ground knew that Republicans had already used gerrymandering much more aggressively than Democrats. So there was much more juice in the gerrymandering lemon for Democrats if and when they decided to employ tactics Republicans have been using for more than a decade. It’s worth Democrats considering how deeply Republicans had internalized the belief that Democrats would simply never respond in kind.
If you’re worried about where this goes long term there’s a simple solution: Ask any Democrat who supports fighting the redistricting wars to vote for a national redistricting law. This isn’t some notional outcome. It should be and I believe is still at the top of any Democratic reform agenda: non-partisan electoral districts. What usually goes unreported is that even the Virginia gerrymandering referendum, which has caused MAGA tears to flood X, mandates that the state go back to the non-partisan rules after the 2030 census. (Voters passed the measure on Tuesday, but the state Supreme Court still has to hear several legal challenges against it). If Republicans now suddenly see the shortcomings of the rules they and their corrupt judicial allies created then they can join with the new Democratic majority next year and pass a national anti-gerrymandering law. It’s really so simple. You need to acquire power by every legal means in order to enact change.
This is a critical moment because it previews equally critical decision points in the future. There is no possibility of a civic democratic revival in the United States without abolishing the filibuster and reforming the corrupt Supreme Court. These both now exist as either substantial (in the first instance) or total (in the case of Supreme Court corruption) impediments to democratic self-government in the United States. I’ve been giving a lot of thought of late to just what kind of new social contract can be devised to succeed the ones created in the New Deal and early Cold War eras. I have only a very limited insight into what that might be. What I understand much more clearly are the structural changes required to create any rebirth of a civic democratic future in the U.S. We’ve spoken about them plenty before: abolish the filibuster and reform the corrupt Supreme Court. These are the sine qua non reforms without which small-d democratic self-government in the United States is really no longer possible.
The question now is whether Democrats can bring the same fight and clarity to these questions as they did, to the surprise of many, to redistricting. I’ve noted a number of times that it’s critical what kind of majorities Democrats elect if they elect them. The most important spectrum is not conventional left and right but clarity about the need for structural reform and indifference to kinds of false propriety that stand in the way. The irony is that it may be harder to get Democrats united behind these reforms even though the positive case is much more straightforward. Aggressive partisan gerrymandering is a bad thing which Republicans have forced on Democrats as the only path to maintaining and expanding political power. The filibuster is an affirmatively bad thing which primarily places limits on Democrats. Supreme Court corruption has remade the Court not simply into an effective veto on the kind of expansive government Democrats once championed but now, far more straightforwardly, on any Democratic government at all. The current Supreme Court is nothing more than another legislative filibuster, housed in the judicial branch, and crusted over with Harvard and Yale JDs to make it look pretty to the gullible.
What happened Tuesday night and which has happened more generally in the redistricting wars comes down to a simple question of aspiration: can the majority of Democrats learn how to acquire and use political power effectively and be willing to do so? The redistricting battles suggest the answer is yes, more than a lot of people thought. Killing the filibuster and reforming the corrupt Supreme Court are the next critical, sine qua non tests.
We have two noteworthy pieces for you this morning in TPM Cafe, both in different ways speaking to the state of the GOP.
Government agencies are normally funded for a year at a time, but Senate Republicans appeared poised, through the budget reconciliation process, to fund ICE and CBP for three years, depriving a potential, future Democratic House (or Senate) majority of a key check Congress can exercise over the executive branch: the power of the purse. A budget reconciliation bill lasting through the end of Trump’s term would insulate ICE from attempts at congressional reform of the type Democrats have been demanding since February. Charles Tiefer, former general counsel of the U.S. House of Representatives and a widely quoted expert on congressional oversight, sounds the alarm.
For history professor A.K. Sandoval-Strausz, Josh Kovensky’s recent reporting — on the far-right’s attempt to create a state and even nation-wide controversy about the presence of Indian immigrants in Texas — brought to mind a 2006 furor in Texas, which pit nativist figures like Rush Limbaugh against a more moderate GOP than the one we have today, inspiring Congress to attempt an immigration crackdown that was later derailed by pro-immigrant activism. It’s a fascinating story and one that underscores what has become a theme at TPM: The extent to which, two decades later, the fringe has won control — at least for now. Read that here.
I’ve grown reluctant to use the K word—because it’s so easily misunderstood.
As soon as people hear me say karma, they think I’m spouting off mystical gibberish. I might as well lay out tarot cards or peer into a crystal ball. I’m just a step away from joining a UFO cult.
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It’s true—I have a high tolerance for metaphysics. But when I refer to karma, I’m talking about hardheaded science. I’m drawing on empirical studies and historical evidence.
Yes, I believe karma can be demonstrated via psychology and social science, but also mathematically. It’s almost like Newton’s third law—actions in one direction create responses in the opposite direction—only applied to human behavior. Once you understand how it works, you see it everywhere.
For example, I find validation in the game theory competitions Robert Axelrod conducted in the 1980s. He invited experts to participate in contests based on the Prisoner’s Dilemma—but lasting 200 rounds. In each round, players were forced to choose between cooperation and betrayal.
But here’s the twist. In the Prisoner’s Dilemma, cooperation only wins if your adversary also cooperates. You lose if your opponent is willing to betray you. And everybody loses if both parties betray each other.
So what’s the winning strategy?
Participants tested various solutions in these competitions, some of them quite elaborate—drawing on advanced statistical analysis. But the simplest strategy was the winner.
This winning strategy was “tit-for-tat.” You did to others what happened to you in the previous round. If you encountered cooperation, you tried it the next time. But if you got betrayed, you mimicked that behavior in the following round.
It was amazing that a tactic so simple could defeat more sophisticated strategies. It suggested that there was something inherently powerful in reciprocity. Just as the proverb predicts: As you sow, so shall you reap.
This is what we call karma—the tendency of the universe to give you in return what you have given others. But now it was vindicated by game theory.
Temple decoration in Ranakpur, India. The knots depict the interlocking chain of karma.
I studied the results of Axelrod’s tournaments while I was a student at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. But at that very same moment, a brilliant thinker was reaching a similar conclusion a few hundred yards away inside Stanford’s Department of French and Italian.
While northern professions in 1600 did not require lengthy training in mathematics or science, there was popular interest in these topics. England’s first chair in mathematics was endowed by Thomas Gresham,61 who had founded London’s Royal Exchange and pledged the rents from that institution to fund seven professorships, who would not train student but would rather give two public lectures (in Latin and English) each week. As Gresham also gave chairs in astronomy and “physik,” this produced a cluster of scientifically minded individuals, who would later play an outsized role in the founding of the Royal Society. Robert Hooke was the Gresham Professor of Geometry, William Petty the Gresham Professor of Music, and Christopher Wren the Gresham Professor of Astronomy.
Perhaps because of Gresham’s public lectures, interest in mathematics grew. More professorships followed, including the mid-17th century Lucasian Chair in Mathematics (after William Lucas, member of parliament for Cambridge), for which Isaac Newton would be the second occupant (Clark, 1904). The popular interest in science also meant that teachers at urban universities could fill public lecture halls by teaching about chemistry, and even performing public chemistry experiments.
That is from a new NBER working paper by David M. Cutler and Edward L. Glaeser, “How Have Universities Survived for Nearly a Millennium?” Has any single individual funded three equally prestigious chairs or anything close to that?
During most of the Artemis II mission, the crew of four astronauts beamed back low-definition video, both from inside the spacecraft and from exterior views of the Moon. It was exhilarating stuff, but in a world in which we're all watching HDTVs, it also felt a little flat.
This is because Orion largely communicated with Earth via radio waves, picked up by large dishes sprinkled around the world. This is pretty much the same way the Apollo spacecraft talked to Earth more than half a century ago.
However, unlike Apollo, the astronauts on Orion would periodically send batches of much higher-resolution data, including the stunning photographs of the far side of the Moon and the Solar eclipse observed from there. This was made possible by optical laser communications, and not just those built by NASA. The mission included a commercial component that could pave the way for vastly more data returning to Earth from space than ever before.
The iPad should be radically (though obviously) touch-only. No keyboards. No pointers. No mice. No trackpads. Just your disgusting fingers flopping over the screen and mooshing into icons. It should not have any window’d modes. Each app should fill the whole screen and only the whole screen.
iPad apps should be weird as hell, unlike anything you find on a desktop operating system. PushPopPress began to illuminate this path fifteen years ago, and then they got slurped up — like so many other promising, young, talented designers and companies around that time — by Facebook, only to disappear into the wake of Mark Zuckerberg’s electric hydrofoil surfboard. Using an iPad should feel like a finger ballet. Your hands should be swooping and swiping and the whole OS should feel like skipping across a taut slackline, a bit bouncy and pleasing and physical but also precise and quick and focused taking you where you need to go, across some creative gulf. There should be no “hard edges” anywhere. iPadOS shouldn’t be anything like Windows or macOS or Linux, it shouldn’t be iOS made big, it should be only like iPadOS — a singular thing of finger-poking joy. When you pick up one of those magic slabs (and truly, the amount of engineering and power in those thin-as-heck slabs is something else) you should feel giddy, like you’re about to enter a whole ’nother computer-ing universe, one that is all about elegant multitouch tactility, worlds apart from your phone or your laptop.
7. “Argentina’s economy shrank 2.6 per cent in February compared to January, the largest monthly contraction since President Javier Milei took office in late 2023, as his inflation-busting economic programme weighed on major industries.” FT link here.
Soft power is notoriously hard to quantify, but it’s difficult to argue that global soft power has been shifting steadily toward East Asia in recent decades. A few years ago I wrote a post about how South Korea became a cultural superpower on purpose, while Japan became one by accident:
The big question then was: When does China get its turn? China is a lot bigger than either Japan or Korea, so you might assume that if the world loves East Asian stuff, we might eventually get a Chinese Wave. So far, it’s been slow to arrive. In my post about the Chinese Century last year, I argued that China’s closed political system meant that its cultural influence would lag its technological and geopolitical might:
In the cultural realm, I expect China to be more isolated and less influential than America was…China is a deeply repressive nation, with universal surveillance, fine-grained media and speech control, and ubiquitous censorship. That’s the kind of society where only anodyne, cautious artistry can flourish, except in tiny subcultural pockets too small for the government to worry about…China’s leaders will also...continue to use the Great Firewall to “protect” Chinese people from the memes and ideas produced by the rest of the world. So artistic and cultural ferment will arrive in China only weakly, and with a lag. It will be orphaned from the global discussion…So while I expect China to produce some hit video games and big-budget movies, I don’t think it will do much to push the boundaries of culture, despite the individual creativity of its people.
In a follow-up post on Sinofuturism, I reiterated this prediction:
But as I noted in that post, the past year has seen the rise of breathless “I went to China” videos by American social media influencers. Although so far the videos are pretty shallow stuff — mostly just breathless videos and photos of China’s grandiose infrastructure — there’s a possibility it could be the start of the long-awaited Chinese Wave of soft power.
The “Chinamaxxing” trend feels a bit fake
Fast forward a year, and some people are claiming the wave has begun. There has been a “Chinamaxxing” trend on English-language social media:
[T]he phenomenon of “Chinamaxxing” has swept feeds with videos of people sipping hot water, shuffling around the house in slippers and donning a viral Adidas jacket resembling historic Chinese fashion…These things, content creators joke, will help you “become Chinese” – reflecting a growing Western fascination with Chinese culture and aesthetics…“Morning routine as a new Chinese baddie,” one TikTok creator captioned a video in which he does a series of traditional Chinese exercises. Another video, viewed more than 2.4 million times as of late February, shows the creator boiling apples to make fruit tea – a supposedly old-school Chinese elixir for gut health.
On TikTok, a growing wave of Gen Z creators—American first, then European, then global—are declaring themselves to be in their “Chinese era.” They’re drinking hot water. They’re eating hotpot. They’re wearing slippers indoors and marveling at the electric buzz of Chinese city life. They’re calling it “Chinamaxxing.”…
Spend five minutes in the Chinamaxxing corner of TikTok, and a clear aesthetic emerges. The videos cluster into a few recognizable genres. There’s “wellness and longevity mode” — warm water with fruit, herbal teas, gua sha, early bedtimes, gentle morning exercises, all framed as ancient secrets to soft living. There’s “uncle core,” in which creators affectionately mimic Chinese retirees: tracksuits, sidewalk squatting, communal street-side beers, a whole visual argument against American hustle culture.
But despite all the stories about this trend (here’s Slate, NPR, the AP, and the BBC if you want some others), it doesn’t feel like the kind of soft power wave we’ve seen from Korea and other countries. There are few actual Chinese products or creations involved here. Western youngsters are not, in general, watching Chinese dramas or microdramas, listening to Chinese music, or playing Chinese video games. Adidas, with its viral Chinese-style jacket, is a German company.
The most trumpeted Chinese cultural products still don’t seem to be finding much purchase outside China. Ne Zha 2, often trumpeted as the highest-grossing animated film of all time, earned over 99% of its revenue in mainland China. Black Myth: Wukong, the most famous Chinese video game, got over three quarters of its Steam sales from China.1 Other than the rapper Skai Isyourgod, who has had several songs go viral on TikTok, there are not many Chinese musicians known in the West.
Instead, the “Chinamaxxing” trend seems to consist mostly of Western youngsters doing stuff they think of as stereotypically Chinese — drinking tea, doing exercises, etc. This is the kind of thing that might have gotten dinged as “cultural appropriation” eight or ten years ago. Today it’s more reasonably viewed as an expression of fascination and respect — but it’s fascination and respect from a great distance.
Then there are those videos of Chinese cities. I covered these in my post last year, but the trend is still going. There are also now a bunch of influencers who relentlessly post about how Chinese cities are the greatest. For example, there’s Jostein Hauge, an assistant professor at Cambridge who relentlessly posts about how China is ahead of the West in every regard. The alleged supremacy of China’s cities is a regular talking point:
Cynics have noted that these accounts are pretty one-note; it seems more like a deliberate publicity campaign, abetted by a few amateur enthusiasts, than an organic outpouring of enthusiasm for Chinese urbanism. The same is true of the continuing parade of breathless videos from Westerners traveling in Chinese cities — they tend to feature shots of the exact same grandiose train stations and architectural landmarks, or the insides of factories or restaurants or other buildings, rather than videos or photos of life at ground level.
That’s telling, because it stands in stark contrast to the videos and photos you tend to see from Tokyo, Paris, Hong Kong, or other popular older cities. And there’s a reason for that — as I wrote in my Sinofuturism post, Chinese cities were built incredibly quickly instead of growing organically over time. This means that they’re dominated by sterile gated tower blocks (called xiaoqu, or microdistricts), large surface streets, and huge shopping malls. There are relatively few walkable mixed-use streets lined with shops near to people’s homes. External shots of China’s newly built city centers tend to show vast concrete plazas and soaring towers — impressive, but fairly sterile.
In fact, there’s hard data to support the notion that the appeal of China’s megacities is still shallow. As of 2024, tourism to China was still way down from the years before the pandemic, and the number of Americans studying in China had collapsed even further:
Sources: US National Travel and Tourism Office, IIE Open Doors and National Bureau of Statistics of China, via GPT
Contrast this with Japan and Korea, which both get many more tourists from the U.S. than China does (despite being far smaller), and which have both seen a more complete rebound since the pandemic:
Sources: U.S. NTTO, Japan National Tourism Organization, and Korea Tourism Organization, via GPT
2025 numbers are harder to come by. Tourism to China is still recovering — up about 10% from 2024 — and American travelers are presumably part of this trend. But it’s still nothing compared to the tourism booms to Japan and South Korea, which are well above their pre-pandemic levels.
For all the breathless YouTube videos and glowing testimonials, Americans are still not going to China in large numbers, either to visit or to live.
So overall, the “Chinamaxxing” trend feels a bit fake and forced — the combination of a deliberate marketing campaign and social media influencers looking for a new niche. But there’s something else going on here as well — a statement about the declining appeal of America and the West.
Chinamaxxing is really about the decline of America
The subtext of every “very Chinese era” video isn’t really about China. It’s about what young Americans feel they’ve been denied. Chinamaxxing romanticizes things that feel structurally out of reach at home — compact, affordable-looking apartments; public transit that works; streets safe to walk at night; multigenerational households as an antidote to loneliness; communal meals as an antidote to atomization. The comparison is implicit but unmissable: they have this, and we don’t…
Slate‘s Nitish Pahwa captured the emotional logic cleanly: “You told us we couldn’t have a high-speed railroad and universal health care, and it turns out they have it across the street! I’m going to live at their house now!”…Shaoyu Yuan, a scholar who studies Chinese soft power, told NPR the trend operates on two tracks at once: one that “weakens American narrative authority by highlighting content that highlights U.S. dysfunction,” and another that “makes China look more attractive.”…
The American century was built on the world’s desire to be American…The question the turbulent 2020s is forcing is a simpler and more unsettling one: what happens when the generation that was supposed to inherit the American promise looks around at their student loans, their rent, their medical bills, and their crumbling train stations — and decides they’d rather be something else?
[E]xperts say the [Chinamaxxing] trend reveals deeper undercurrents like dissatisfaction among many Americans with life at home – from political turmoil, gun violence, immigration crackdowns and persistent racial tensions. All this has dulled the veneer of the US, driving curiosity for American youths to see what life is like on the other side…[I]t’s no coincidence the trend comes amid a broader decline in the US’ global image…
[V]ideos showing vertiginous skylines from Chinese metropolises…have gone viral for depicting a futuristic vision of urban life, replete with seemingly clean streets and low levels of violent crime.
In other words, American youngsters idealizing China — without actually engaging with China or knowing much about it — is really about expressing their dissatisfaction with America.
Chinamaxxing is mostly just Americaminning.
That mirrors a larger global reaction. Donald Trump’s tariffs, threats against allies, and reckless wars have turned most of the world against America. Traditionally, confidence in U.S. leadership was higher than in Chinese leadership, but this has reversed since Trump’s election:
But it’s not just Trump and the GOP. Stories about Chinamaxxing consistently mention the safety, cleanliness, and low crime rates of Chinese cities as part of the country’s appeal. And pro-China influencers repeatedly trumpet this advantage, often showing pictures of China’s immaculate new developments with pictures of homeless encampments in America.
This is no Potemkin comparison. America really does have much worse crime and public order than other countries, including China:
There are a number of reasons for this, but progressive ideology takes much more responsibility than MAGA insanity. Blue cities’ tolerance of public homelessness and drug use, the “progressive prosecutor” movement’s permissive approach toward crime, and the consistent failure of progressive local governments to allow housing construction all contribute to the breakdown in public order that has left America’s flagship cities feeling dirty and unsafe.
It bears saying that despite the safer cities, the superiority of life in China over life in America is more myth than reality. Jacobin, the socialist magazine, recently published a good article by Daniel Cheng debunking the idea that China is a youth paradise:
Most people in China suffer from similar social and economic crises that afflict Americans today. The United States’ extreme income inequality is well-known, but China’s is comparable. After accounting for taxes and redistribution, China becomes even more unequal because it falls under the US’s (very low) standards for redistribution. While Chinese inequality has gradually shrunk over recent years, this is mostly due to compression between the top and middle of the income distribution. Those in the bottom 30 percent have been left in the lurch…
[W]hile American higher education is exorbitantly expensive, the education affordability crisis in China is even more severe. Parents have to pay for high school, and tutoring is a de facto necessity to keep up with demanding curriculums…The bottom quintile of Chinese families spend a massive 57 percent of household earnings on their children’s education…
[H]omelessness and extreme poverty are also major problems in China. Chinamaxxing influencers are simply blind to them because the government has successfully criminalized homelessness and driven the “low-end population” out of sight…Age discrimination in hiring is legal in China…D]ismissal rates rise dramatically after workers turn thirty-five…[A]n unexpected layoff can permanently condemn someone to underemployment in the gig economy.
And youth unemployment is far worse in China than in America, even after the government redefined the numbers a couple of years ago to make it look smaller:
This is probably why we don’t see a lot of American “Chinamaxxers” put their money where their mouth is. It’s a lot easier to put on a bathrobe and eat some dumplings and pretend to be a Chinese uncle on TikTok than it is to actually move to China and make a living there.
In fact, China’s leaders probably don’t care. They’re not especially interested in getting American Zoomers to move to Shenzhen or Shanghai. Their own publicity campaigns, including all the gloating over the parlous state of American cities and the constant parade of photos of fabulous new infrastructure, are probably aimed at Chinese scientists and engineers living abroad. And in fact, this campaign is succeeding to some degree, helped along by Trump’s anti-immigration jihad and progressives’ mismanagement of big cities:
For decades…Many of China’s best and brightest saw the U.S. as a land of boundless opportunity underpinned by robust rule of law…Today, America’s allure is fading. More elite Chinese youths, businesspeople and scientists are gravitating back home. Some who have returned say they are turned off not only by the U.S.’s hardening immigration enforcement, but also by its faulty infrastructure, gun violence and living costs. Back in China, many cities have grown cleaner and more livable in recent years, linked together by efficient subways and high-speed trains…
In 2021, more than 1,400 U.S.-trained Chinese scientists left American jobs for roles in China, a 22% jump from the previous year, according to a survey published by Asian American Scholar Forum, an advocacy group. Most China-born Ph.D. graduates are still choosing to stay in the U.S., with close to 80% saying they intended to remain in 2024, according to the most recent available survey data from the National Science Foundation. But high-profile departures have continued steadily…
Frequent changes in immigration rules, combined with homelessness and perceptions of high crime rates in some of the coastal cities where Chinese immigrants tend to live, are also leading people to reconsider the appeal of the American dream, according to Chinese people who have spent time in both countries.
American leaders should be a lot more worried about losing Chinese talent than about Gen Z “becoming Chinese”.
Some real green shoots of Chinese soft power
All that having been said, I do see a few glimmers of real, organic Chinese cultural appeal. One is the rise of the Chinese micro-drama or duanju. These are serial shows with scripted 1-2 minute episodes, shown in a vertical scrolling feed. It’s a truly new art form, perfect for the age of TikTok and AI. The Economist explainer posits that these dramas have flourished precisely because the flood of content is too large for China’s censors to monitor and eviscerate:
Artsy film critics are unlikely to be impressed by China’s micro-dramas. Even so, the roughly two-minute episodes, which cram soap-opera plots into a short-video format, are wildly popular. Watched almost exclusively on mobile devices, viewers can scroll mindlessly through episodes as they would clips on TikTok. Revenue in China from micro-dramas is projected to nearly double this year…Chen Ou, the founder of Jumei Film Base, a leading micro-drama studio in Zhengzhou, says his company is starting to monetise its star power with live-streaming sales…[N]early all large tech companies in China are snapping up rights to micro-dramas…Many local governments are investing in micro-drama studios…
[F]or micro-dramas, which are chock-full of the kinds of taboo topics and comedic violence that usually irk censors, industry insiders say the sheer volume of content has resulted in looser or fewer checks.
This reminds me of how manga and anime developed in Japan — it flew under the radar of the conservative oligopolies that dominated movies and TV in the postwar period, making it a haven for political radicals,2 sexual deviants, and artistic auteurs.
It’s still early days, but Chinese microdramas are starting to catch on in America. This is from Wikipedia:
ReelShort and DramaBox, the two largest Chinese short-drama platforms operating overseas, entered the U.S. market in 2022 and 2023, respectively. By August 2025, DramaBox had surpassed 100 million downloads on Google Play alone, while maintaining an average of 44 million monthly active users. Meanwhile, ReelShort surpassed 370 million downloads and raked in $700 million in revenue. By 2025, the U.S. had become the single largest revenue market outside China for vertical drama, generating approximately $58 million in monthly in-app revenue and an estimated $1.3 billion for the full year. As of 2025, ReelShort and DramaBox are the top two duanju platforms in terms of downloads and active users.
Retail is a second strong point. As China’s economy diversifies and consumption rises, some Chinese shops are also starting to make inroads into cities in America and around the world. Chagee, Heytea, Mixue, and Luckin Coffee are high-quality drink shops that seem to have real and immediate appeal (Chagee is my personal favorite).3 The stores Miniso and Popmart are appearing all over global malls, selling toys, collectibles, and various other knicknacks. Chinese fashion is starting to make inroads overseas as well.
Food and design are inherently apolitical, so it’s a lot easier for Chinese creativity to reach the world through these items than through movies, TV, or music.
A third bright spot is the city of Chongqing. Unlike the sterile, formulaic videos of Shenzhen, the videos of Chongqing’s urban canyons and cyberpunk streets feel authentic and exciting:
Even the videos complaining about the difficulty of commuting to work showcase an urban landscape so unique that it has captivated much of the world:
In fact, tourists are actually flocking to Chongqing, to see the “cyberpunk city”. One reason for Chongqing’s appeal is that unlike Shenzhen or other “Tier 1” cities, Chongqing has more “old streets” adjacent to the newly-built downtown areas, giving it some of the kind of mixed-use walkable density that cities like Hong Kong and Tokyo have. Personally, I’d love to spend some time in Chongqing, while Shenzhen looks like somewhere I’d only go in order to tour some factories and see some robots.
So in fact, I do see some real signs of China’s soft power growing organically — finding ways to flow around the walls of censorship and official marketing campaigns, exposing outsiders to a more real, raw, authentic China. It would be astonishing if a newly developed country of 1.4 billion people didn’t have plenty of natural, organic appeal. Now, despite the best efforts of the country’s masters, that appeal is starting to show itself.
The most famous right-wing anime creator is probably Nishizaki Yoshinobu of Space Battleship Yamato, while the most famous left-wing creators is almost certainly Miyazaki Hayao (of Ghibli fame). There are many other examples.
The FBI was able to forensically extract copies of incoming Signal messages from a defendant’s iPhone, even after the app was deleted, because copies of the content were saved in the device’s push notification database….
The news shows how forensic extraction—when someone has physical access to a device and is able to run specialized software on it—can yield sensitive data derived from secure messaging apps in unexpected places. Signal already has a setting that blocks message content from displaying in push notifications; the case highlights why such a feature might be important for some users to turn on.
“We learned that specifically on iPhones, if one’s settings in the Signal app allow for message notifications and previews to show up on the lock screen, [then] the iPhone will internally store those notifications/message previews in the internal memory of the device,” a supporter of the defendants who was taking notes during the trial told 404 Media.
EDITED TO ADD (4/24): Apple has patched this vulnerability.
A report showing the efficacy of the covid-19 vaccine that was previously delayed by the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been blocked from being published in the agency’s flagship scientific journal, according to three people familiar with the decision who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. The report showed that the vaccine reduced emergency department visits and hospitalizations among healthy adults by about half this past winter.
The move, which has not been previously reported, has raised concerns among current and former officials that information about the vaccine’s benefits is being downplayed because they conflict with the views of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has been an outspoken critic of the shots. Kennedy’s vaccine agenda has received pointed questioning from lawmakers during budget hearings that began last week and conclude Wednesday.
The Washington Post reported two weeks ago that Jay Bhattacharya, who is temporarily overseeing the CDC, delayed publication of the report over concerns about methodology. The report had been scheduled for publication March 19 in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.
In recent days, a decision was made that the report would not be published, according to two of the people who spoke to The Post….
On Tuesday, Nixon described the decision differently: “The MMWR’s editorial assessment identified concerns regarding the methodological approach to estimating vaccine effectiveness and the manuscript was not accepted for publication,” a characterization that differs from accounts by people familiar with the report’s review…
Bhattacharya had concerns about a methodology that has long been used by the CDC to evaluate vaccine effectiveness for respiratory viruses, including influenza. A report about flu vaccine effectiveness this past winter — using the same methodology — was published in the MMWR a week earlier. An HHS official had previously said Bhattacharya was not in a position to review the earlier study and would have raised the same concerns.
A report using this methodology to gauge covid vaccine effectiveness in children was published in MMWR in December.
The methodology was also used in a 2021 study on covid vaccine effectiveness in clinics and hospitals published in the New England Journal of Medicine. Vaccine effectiveness estimates using the same methodology have also been published in other peer-reviewed journals, including JAMA Network Open, the Lancet and Pediatrics.
Freedom for me, but not for thee. And it is the height of arrogance for Bhattacharya to think that he, along with a plucky few iconclasts, have discovered a fatal flaw with the test-negative study design*. And at the upcoming NAS symposium where a bunch of COVID (and public health) contrarians will be speaking, I hope someone asks them about this.
*In a test-negative design study, the efficacy of the vaccine is evaluated by examining a pool of people with symptoms, and then determining if they actually have the disease (e.g., they might just have a bad respiratory infection that is not due to COVID). Then the vaccination rates between those with COVID and those without are compared. What vaccine denialists typically argue is that, if healthy people were recruited and followed, as was done initially for the COVID vaccines, there would be little effect, as healthy übermenschen don’t need no stinkin’ vaccine, while the genetic underclass does because healthy people gain very little from vaccination (even though with COVID vaccines, that was not the case). What this sort of requirement would do is make most vaccines that need to be updated annually nearly impossible to test in time. Because they are fucking evil people.
Under the directives of the President of the UAE, we launch a new government model.
Within two years, 50% of government sectors, services, and operations will run on Agentic AI, making the UAE the first government globally to operate at this scale through autonomous systems.
AI is no longer a tool. It analyses, decides, executes, and improves in real time. It will become our executive partner to enhance services, accelerate decisions, and raise efficiency.
This transformation has a clear timeline. Two years. Performance across government will be measured by speed of adoption, quality of implementation, and mastery of AI in redesigning government work.
We are investing in our people. Every federal employee will be trained to master AI, building one of the world’s strongest capabilities in AI-driven government.
Implementation will be overseen by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed, with a dedicated taskforce chaired by Mohammad Al Gergawi driving execution.
The world is changing. Technology is accelerating. Our principle remains constant. People come first. Our goal is a government that is faster, more responsive, and more impactful.
Here is the link. While there is typically a certain amount of PR in such pronouncements, I do not think this one is only PR.
This is the sixth chapter of my SQLAlchemy 2 in Practice book. If you'd like to support my work, I encourage you to buy this book, either directly from my store or on Amazon. Thank you!
The goal of this chapter is to use the concepts you have learned to build a web traffic analytics solution. This will serve as reinforcement of the techniques demonstrated in previous chapters as well as an example of a more complex and realistic database design.
So I was driving home last night, when I pulled off the La Paz exit and was greeted by the above monstrosity.
It’s a sign.
A big sign.
A HUGE sign.
A REALLY HUGE sign.
An (cough) unambiguously illegal sign.
The candidate, Gracey Van Der Mark, is a QAnon sympathizer and right-wing conspiracy theorist who fought to ban books on the Huntington Beach City Council and was all in on the MAGA library plaque. When I say she’s an unstable nut, I’m not exaggerating. To put it in the clearest terms: She’s a pro-ICE raids Latina. [In other words, support Chris Kluwe—a good dude with a normal head]
She’s also working her ass off to have voters forget she’s three pennies short of a dime, and wants everyone to see her as a pet-loving, sunshine-embracing populist.
Hence, the sign.
Which, again, is illegal.
Why?
Multiple reasons.
First, in the city of Laguna Hills, there is a (fairly standard) Public Right-of-Ways law. Meaning, signs may not be placed in public rights-of-way (like medians or sidewalks) if they obstruct traffic visibility or create a safety hazard. Which this 100 percent does.
Second, the sign is gimantic. I measured it, and it’s 34-square feet—far too beefy for signs along highways or in larger commercial areas.
Third, signs must be placed in a way that does not block the "sight visibility triangle" at street intersections. This one does exactly that.
Worst of all, again, Gracey sucks. Like, sucks in profound ways.
Virginia voters yesterday agreed to a constitutional amendment that would temporarily redistrict the state if any other state redistricted for partisan reasons: that is, in retaliation for the partisan redistricting President Donald J. Trump launched in Texas in 2025 in an effort to retain control of the House of Representatives.
As Matt Cohen of Democracy Docket noted, Trump supporters immediately insisted the voting was rigged, probably through mail-in ballots. Trump himself took to social media to attack the election, repeating charges of rigging and then adding: “In addition to everything else, the language on the Referendum was purposefully unintelligible and deceptive. As everyone knows, I am an extraordinarily brilliant person, and even I had no idea what the hell they were talking about in the Referendum, and neither do they! Let’s see if the Courts will fix this travesty of ‘Justice.’”
In fact, Trump himself began this mid-decade partisan gerrymander race with his pressure on Texas to rejigger its maps to give Republicans more House seats. That prompted California to retaliate with its own temporary redistricting to offset the new Texas Republican-leaning seats. Other states followed suit. Republicans redistricted Missouri, North Carolina, and Ohio, in addition to Texas, and expect those mid-decade redistricts will net them nine more seats. Democrats think their redistricting of California, along with a court-ordered redistricting of Utah, will get them an additional six seats. They are hoping that the temporary redistricting of Virginia will give them four more seats.
State lawmakers in Florida will convene a special session next week to consider redistricting that state, as well, to benefit the Republicans.
Journalist Brian Tyler Cohen noted that the Republicans have full control of the federal government and could pass a law to ban partisan gerrymandering any time they want to, as Democrats have called for, but they refuse. “Republicans aren’t mad gerrymandering exists,” Cohen notes; “they’re mad that they’re not the only ones using it.”
The Republican National Committee, now controlled by Trump, immediately sued over the Virginia election, and a Virginia judge ruled that both the constitutional amendment and the referendum voters approved were invalid. He said that “any and all votes for or against the proposed constitutional amendment in the April 21, 2026 special election are ineffective,” and prevented officials from certifying the results.
But, as Yunior Rivas of Democracy Docket wrote, Virginia attorney general Jay Jones is challenging the decision, saying: “Virginia voters have spoken, and an activist judge should not have the power over the People’s vote. We look forward to defending the outcome of last night’s election in court.”
Complaints about the Democratic push for a partisan gerrymander in Virginia have exposed a tendency to excuse Republican machinations to control politics while jumping on Democrats for similar behavior.
In August 2025, when Texas Republicans began this fight by redistricting their state after a brutal contest that drove Democratic legislators to leave the state and take refuge in Illinois and Massachusetts to deny Republicans enough legislators to pass a redistricting law, the Washington Post Editorial Board wrote: “What’s happening in the Lone Star State is not a threat to democracy.” “Even if Texas’s move triggers an arms race, the trend will not put American democracy on life support,” it said, dismissing the concerns of those fighting the Republicans’ attempt to game the 2026 elections.
But with last night’s Democratic partisan gerrymander—one that, unlike the Texas gerrymander, went before the people for a vote—the Editorial Board changed its tune. It called this redistricting plan “a power grab by Democrats.” “They’re right that the [Republicans] started this fight by trying to pick up five House seats in Texas through gerrymandering, but they can spare us the false sanctimony about democratic norms going forward,” board members wrote.
Their argument appears to be that the Democrats stand a good chance of winning the midterms even if the Republicans have gamed the system, so the Democrats should not push back. “The news will embolden Republicans in Florida to forge ahead with their own gerrymandering…, continuing the race to the bottom,” they write, seeming to excuse the behavior of Republicans by blaming Democrats for it.
This pattern—expecting Republicans to behave wildly and cheat to grab power while expecting Democrats to behave according to the rules of normal times—has been going on now for years, and it is a dynamic that reflects the political patterns of the years before the Civil War. Then, Americans expected southern Democrats to bully and bluster and rig the system while northerners tried to jolly them into honoring the laws.
In the 1850s, southerners championed their region as the one that had correctly developed the society envisioned by the Founders. In the South a few very wealthy men controlled government and society, enslaving their neighbors. This system, its apologists asserted, was the highest form of human civilization. They opposed any attempt to restrict its spread. The South was superior to the North, enslavers insisted; it alone was patriotic, honored the Constitution, and understood economic growth. In the interests of union, northerners repeatedly ceded ground to enslavers and left their claim to superiority unchallenged.
Then, on May 22, 1856, Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina beat Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts nearly to death on the Senate floor shortly after a speech in which Sumner had called out those who were forcing enslavement on Kansas and insulted a relative of Brooks. Southern lawmakers and newspapermen alike cheered the violence against an elected representative in the Capitol. Lawmakers refused to expel Brooks, and one newspaper editor wrote: “We trust other gentlemen will follow the example of Mr. Brooks…. If need be, let us have a caning or cowhiding every day.”
But the attack on Sumner was a bridge too far for his colleague, Massachusetts representative Anson Burlingame. On June 21, he stood up in Congress to call out as inferior Brooks and the system of enslavement he defended. Burlingame was sick and tired of buying peace by letting southerners abuse the North. Enough, he said, was enough.
Enslavement was not a superior system, he said; it had dragged the nation backward. Slavery kept workers ignorant and godless while the northern system of freedom lifted workers up with schools and churches. Slavery feared innovation; freedom encouraged workers to try new ideas. Slavery kept the South mired in the past; freedom welcomed the modern world and pushed Americans into a new, thriving economy. And finally, when Sumner had spoken up against the tyranny of slavery, a southerner had clubbed him almost to death on the floor of the Senate.
Was ignorance, economic stagnation, and violence the true American system? For his part, Burlingame preferred to throw his lot with the North, which he said was superior to the South in its morality, education, economy, loyalty to the government, and fidelity to the Constitution. Northerners were willing to defend their system, he said, with guns if necessary.
Burlingame’s “Defense of Massachusetts” speech marked the first time a prominent northerner had offered to fight to defend the northern way of life. Previously, southerners had been the ones threatening war and demanding concessions from the North to preserve the peace. Burlingame explained that he was willing to accept a battle because what was at stake was the future of the nation.
Forgotten now, Burlingame’s speech was once widely considered one of the most important speeches in American history. It marked the moment when northerners shocked southern leaders by calling them out for trying to destroy democracy. Northerners rallied to Burlingame’s call, and to the new Republican Party he was helping to build, because he had shown it would stand up for their rights.
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) echoed Burlingame today when a reporter asked what she thought of complaints about the Virginia vote. “Oh, wah, wah, wah,” she laughed. “Listen. Democrats have attempted and asked Republicans for 10 years to ban partisan gerrymandering. And for 10 years, Republicans have said no. Republicans have fought for partisan gerrymanders across the United States of America, and these are the rules that they have set….
“What they’re just mad at is that they have been accustomed to a Democratic Party that rolls over, doesn’t fight, and takes everything sitting down. And what they’re mad at right now is that we are here in a new day. And we have been asking the Democratic Party to stand up and fight, and now they did, and now the Republican Party doesn’t like the fact that they are fighting against someone who actually will stand up for the American people.
“So if Republicans decide that they would like to revisit a ban on…partisan gerrymandering, I welcome them. We have the bill right here to end this all today. But they don’t want to because they like pursuing and continuing to enact an unfair electoral landscape. And so we have an obligation to defend ourselves.”
A correction was made on April 21, 2026: Because of an editing
error, an earlier version of this article misstated which day the
New York Mets suffered their 11th straight loss. It was on Sunday,
not Monday. Even the Mets cannot lose on an off day.
This is to New York Times corrections what “Headless Body in Topless Bar” was to New York Post headlines — perfection.
Ben Thompson at Stratechery, “Tim Cook’s Impeccable Timing”:
Cook was, without question, an operational genius. Moreover, this
was clearly the case even before he scaled the iPhone to
unimaginable scale. When Cook joined Apple in 1998 the company’s
operations — centered on Apple’s own factories and warehouses — were a massive drag on the company; Cook methodically shut them
down and shifted Apple’s manufacturing base to China, creating a
just-in-time supply chain that year-after-year coordinated a
worldwide network of suppliers to deliver Apple’s ever-expanding
product line to customers’ doorsteps and a fleet of beautiful and
brand-expanding stores. There was not, under Cook’s leadership, a
single significant product issue or recall.
Cook also oversaw the introduction of major new products, most
notably AirPods and Apple Watch; the “Wearables, Home, and
Accessories” category delivered $35.4 billion in revenue last
year, which would rank 128 on the Fortune 500. Still, both
products are derivative of the iPhone; Cook’s signature 0 to 1
product, the Apple Vision Pro, is more of a 0.5.
I don’t think it’s worth discounting AirPods or Apple Watch as “derivative” of the iPhone. Yes, Apple Watch requires a paired iPhone, and while AirPods connect with Macs, iPads, and Apple TVs, they are of course primarily used paired with iPhones. But you can just as easily say that the iPhone was derivative of the iPod. And the iPod was derivative of iTunes. And iTunes was derivative of the Mac. And the iPhone was derivative of the Mac too, insofar as iOS and UIKit truly are stripped-down versions of MacOS and AppKit. Better, in my opinion, to simply give Tim Cook credit for overseeing the creation of two massively popular and successful new device platforms.
For Apple’s 2011 fiscal year, which covers the company’s last year under Steve Jobs, the company had $108 billion in total revenue. Inflation-adjusted that’s ~$159 billion in 2026 dollars. 2011 Mac revenue was $22 billion ($32 billion inflation-adjusted) and iPad revenue was $20 billion ($29 billion inflation-adjusted). iPhone revenue was $47 billion ($69 billion inflation-adjusted). So compared to where revenue was when Cook took the helm, the mostly-all-new-under-Cook Wearables category today is bigger than the Mac or iPad were under Jobs, and a very credible half the size of the iPhone.
Cook’s more momentous contribution to Apple’s top line was the
elevation of Services. [...]
Last year Apple Services generated 26% of Apple’s revenue and 41%
of the company’s profit; more importantly, Services continues to
grow year-over-year, even as iPhone growth has slowed from the
go-go years.
There was a legitimate widespread concern in the early years of the Cook era that the downside of the iPhone’s unprecedented success was that Apple’s financials were dangerously reliant on that single product. Even today the iPhone generates between 50–60 percent of Apple’s revenue each quarter, but it is quite obviously the growth of Services and Wearables that makes Apple’s overall revenue by product line look as balanced as it does. From Jason Snell’s report on Apple’s most recent quarter (the best in Apple’s entire history):
There’s a totally reasonable concern that the growth of Services will pervert Apple’s priorities away from hardware products. I think that’s why naming John Ternus, the head of hardware, as the new CEO is an important statement in and of itself regarding where Tim Cook sees Apple’s North Star: hardware products.
I believe that Cook’s focus on Services over the last decade was in no way about shifting the focus of the company away from its roots. Nor was it about growth for the sake of growth. I think it was about bringing balance to the balance sheet, to protect the company’s core mission of creating devices.
We construct a posttax, posttransfer income measure from 1963 to 2023 based on the Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement that allows us to consistently compare the economic well-being of five generations of Americans at ages 36–40. We find that Millennials had a real median household income that was 20% higher than that of the previous generation, a slowdown from the growth rate of the Silent Generation (36%) and Baby Boomers (26%), but similar to that of Generation X (16%). The slowdown for younger generations largely resulted from stalled growth in work hours among women. Progress for Millennials younger than 30 has also remained robust, though largely due to greater reliance on their parents. Additionally, lifetime income gains for younger generations far outweigh their higher educational costs.
Big claims from Qwen about their latest open weight model:
Qwen3.6-27B delivers flagship-level agentic coding performance, surpassing the previous-generation open-source flagship Qwen3.5-397B-A17B (397B total / 17B active MoE) across all major coding benchmarks.
I tried it out with the 16.8GB Unsloth Qwen3.6-27B-GGUF:Q4_K_M quantized version and llama-server using this recipe by benob on Hacker News, after first installing llama-server using brew install llama.cpp:
Kevin Warsh, the next chairman of the Federal Reserve, is Donald Trump’s sock puppet. But we knew that. The question during yesterday’s confirmation hearing was whether he was sufficiently brave, sufficiently good at acting to pretend that he was more than that. And the answer is no.
Hi, Paul Krugman here with a Wednesday update. I didn’t watch or write about the Warsh hearing because it seemed there wasn’t really that much at stake. He’s going to be confirmed pretty much regardless and there’s a whole lot else going on in the world. But I thought I should weigh in a bit on what we actually learned from the hearing.
Now about Warsh, he is smart. He is very good at saying things that sound thoughtful and impressive, but he is also, and it’s really very clear, a partisan hack. He’s for tight money when a Democrat is in the White House and for easy money when there’s a Republican. He has managed to claim that he was part of the great economic rescue that took place after the global financial crisis. But at the time, although he was on the Federal Reserve Board, he basically trashed his colleagues for trying to do their job.
And he has made a lot of criticisms over the years, but they’re always very selective.
Often when he makes a statement, you wonder, what exactly did he say? Because there tends to be lots of complex verbiage that sounds sophisticated, but when you try and distill it down to what it was all about, it’s very hard to figure out, except that, again, it’s always tight money if there’s a Democrat in the White House, easy money if there’s a Republican.
Recently, Employ America, which is a group that I follow, wrote about Warsh. They aren’t very partisan. They do mostly inflation analyses and inflation nowcasting, trying to predict what the next number will be. But they had a scathing survey of his positions over the years, which says that he is a partisan who has chosen to align conveniently with the current president, that he is someone who abandons his principles “for whatever might suit his personal and partisan interests.” That’s not very nice, but it seems to be quite accurate.
So there was a hearing, and everybody knows pretty much who he is.There are people, sort of centrist Democrats, who claim to find some virtues in him. But I think that’s all positioning. I think everybody understands what we’re getting with Warsh. The question in the hearing was, could he put on an act? Because he is usually a pretty slick customer. He’s not someone who simply rants and raves and spouts MAGA propaganda.
And he was asked a a question which isn’t about monetary policy, but is very much exactly a kind of litmus test for, not really for who he is, but what he’s willing to say, at least in the interest of appearing to be not a complete sock puppet. He was asked who won the 2020 election. which is not a question that is remotely in doubt. This is not something about which reasonable people can disagree. There is nothing to the claims of a rigged election except the fact that Donald Trump can’t admit that he lost that election.
And Warsh evaded. He said, well, this body certified that election, which is not the question. The question is basically, are you willing to challenge Trump on a completely obvious grotesque lie? And it would have been in Warsh’s interest, you would think, to say, well, no, I believe that Joe Biden won that election. But to do that would be to show some independence, even not in action, but some independence, at least rhetorically, from Donald Trump. And he wouldn’t do that.
He was also asked about the spurious prosecution of Lisa Cook, asked about the spurious charges being brought about Jay Powell and refused to take a stand in support of people who will be his colleagues once he gets to the Fed.
So what we got was not a test of how he will behave, not a test really of his policy views. I mean, there were no interesting policy arguments going on here. There are some discussions we could have about shrinking the Fed’s balance sheet and all of these things, where I do think that Warsh’s expressed views are quite wrong. But that’s kind of not what was on trial here.
What was on trial was, can he at least pretend to be not a total hack? And the answer is no. He’s afraid to even show a little bit of verbal independence without substance when it comes to Donald Trump, which is bad.
It should be utterly disqualifying for the position because being the Fed chair is important. It requires a lot of independent judgment and requires a lot of credibility because the Fed is mostly needed in moments of crisis. And in those moments of crisis, people need to believe, markets need to believe, but the general public needs to believe that we’re talking about people who are serious experts and seriously have the interests of the nation at stake rather than their partisan political views.
He failed that test with flying colors. And he will be confirmed anyway.
Americans hate, I mean really hate, the Trump II economy. A new Reuters/Ipsos poll puts Donald Trump’s net approval on the economy at -33 points, significantly worse than Joe Biden’s nadir in the aftermath of the 2021-22 supply-chain-driven inflation spike. A Verasight poll reported by G. Elliott Morris puts Trump’s net approval on prices and inflation at -46 points, which is just astonishingly bad. The venerable University of Michigan index of consumer sentiment has hit a record low. And the widely cited Conference Board index is well below its 2022-23 levels.
Yet standard measures of the economic situation don’t look that bad. Inflation is running at around 3 percent – above the Fed’s target rate of 2 percent, but relatively low by historical standards. Unemployment is a bit above 4 percent, also relatively low. These are, if anything, good numbers in historical perspective. So why are Americans so angry?
In a post last week I began a discussion of this phenomenon and pointed to new analyses by Jared Bernstein, a serious macroeconomics guru, and G. Elliott Morris, who is my go-to guy on polling. Both argue, with extensive statistical backing, that Americans are upset about the level of prices. That is, they’re not satisfied with inflation that’s down to 2 or 3 percent. Having been accustomed over the past several decades to low inflation, Americans want to see prices fall to the levels they were at before the supply chain shock. And because that isn’t happening (and basically can’t happen, but the public doesn’t know that), Americans are angry.
I have considerable sympathy for Berstein and Morris’s view and great respect for their economic and statistical work. And I believe they offer a plausible explanation for why Americans were angry with the Biden administration. Yet I believe that the price-level story is inadequate to explain the much higher levels of anger and pessimism that are present now under Trump II. To make sense of where we are, I’d argue, we need to take account of people’s anger over not just the price level but also what they perceive as Trump’s broken promises.
Let me explain why.
There are, as I noted last week, two big empirical problems with the story that Americans just want their old prices back.
First is the sharp decline in consumer sentiment under Trump II, and his catastrophic polling on economic issues. This decline is hard to understand as a reaction to the fact that consumer prices haven’t fallen back to where they were in 2020. Indeed, if nostalgia for past prices was the whole story, we would expect consumer sentiment to gradually improve as the “good old days” of low prices recede further into memory. But we don’t see that happening. In fact, Americans are getting angrier and more depressed about the economy over time.
So what explains the public’s anger? My hypothesis is that it has a lot to do with the fabulist promises Trump made during the 2024 campaign, when he asserted that grocery prices would come down “on Day One” and that he would cut energy prices in half.
Did people actually believe those promises? Yes, many did – Trump voters in particular. Expected inflation among self-identified Republicans dropped sharply to zero after Trump won the election:
Notably, expected inflation among self-identified Democrats went up substantially after Trump’s victory, which was closer to accurate.
It wasn’t just partisan affiliation. Expectations of inflation plunged after the election among voters without higher education, which suggests that many low-education voters believed Trump’s promise to reduce prices, as shown by the blue line below:
As you can also see, these voters’ expectations of inflation soared a few months into Trump’s term.
Morris has shown that low-information voters — defined as voters who don’t know which party controls Congress, but that is surely closely correlated with low education levels — pushed Trump over the top in 2024, but have turned hard against him since then. This is consistent with the view that a significant number of Americans believed Trump’s impossible promises about the economic miracles he would conjure into being, but now realize that they were lied to. And, in my view, this explains why Americans are so intensely angry and pessimistic about the economy now — significantly more so than under Biden.
It also doesn’t help that Trump can’t bring himself to admit that inflation was fairly low before he took office — he’s claiming that it was running at 5 percent and he brought it way down.
True, under Biden sentiment was also remarkably bad, although not as bad as it is now. Many economists, myself included, have argued, like Bernstein and Morris, that Americans were angry about the higher level of prices even after the rate of inflation came down. But as I noted last week, prices rose by almost exactly the same amount under Biden and during Ronald Reagan’s first term:
Why, then, was Reagan able to triumphantly proclaim Morning in America while Biden was vilified? A large part of the answer, surely, is that Reagan took office after years of high inflation — inflation that the public expected to continue, while Biden took office after years of low inflation:
So higher prices under Reagan didn’t come as a surprise. In fact, prices rose less than most Americans expected before he took office. The rise in prices on Biden’s watch, by contrast, came as a shock after decades of low inflation. Thus I think that, adjusting for expectations, Bernstein and Morris’s arguments are a good fit for explaining the Biden years.
Let me hasten to say that there isn’t any moral equivalence between Biden and Trump. Biden and his team did not deliberately mislead American voters. They genuinely didn’t expect the 2021-2022 bout of high inflation, caused by snarled supply chains and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. When Biden promised a “summer of joy” thanks to the new Covid vaccines, he and his staff truly believed that would happen. Contrast this with Trump’s promises of lower prices, which were cynical, dishonest bombast when he was down in the polls against Harris. He never had any plan, or even a concept of a plan, to bring prices down.
Many Americans were angered by what they perceived to be economic incompetence on the part of Biden. That is, they believed that he should have found a way to stop inflation from rising.
But Trump actively misled Americans in order to win the 2024 election. And to add insult to injury, a majority of Americans now believe that the economy under Biden was better than the current economy.
Thus I believe that what we are witnessing now is heightened rage about a president who lied to win office, and who, once in office, made the economy worse than it was.
And it’s reasonable to believe that Americans will only become angrier as Trump’s lies on other fronts, and the damage that they have done, become more and more apparent.
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I am occasionally asked for a recommendation of what book to read to learn about art. My art education began by reading Malraux’s The Voices of Silence, and I also took a few art history courses. But the single best place to learn about the art of painting is by visiting the world’s best art museum, which is located in Madrid. I visited the Prado in the 1980s, the 1990s, the 2000s, and again last fall—probably for the last time. In this post I’ll try to explain what makes the Prado so special.
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It’s not easy to explain the essence of any art form in words, whether it be painting, music or poetry. I’ve been working on this post for 6 months but cannot find a way to express in words what I see with my eyes. Therefore, I’ll mostly try to point you in the right direction and also use some film analogies that might make things easier to see.
Anyone with a PhD can be called a “doctor”, but (at least in America) the term ‘doctor’ is generally reserved for physicians and unusually vain people. Similarly, while Mozart, Dante and Flaubert are all “artists”, they are generally referred to as a composer, poet and novelist. In common everyday use the term ‘artist’ implies a painter or sculptor. An art museum is a museum of the visual arts.
Back in the 1970s, I took an intro course in art history at the University of Wisconsin. The course mostly ignored sculpture and architecture. It ignored the art of Africa, the Middle East, India, China and Japan. There was almost no coverage of women artists. This post will be even more reactionary. I plan to mostly ignore modern art, as well as genres such as fresco, watercolor, drawing, prints, photography, etc. I’ll focus on pre-modern oil paintings by European men, which was also the major focus on my art history course. Sounds like a bunch of boring old masters? Not for me.
In my view, the Prado has the most impressive collection of oil paintings to be found anywhere in the world. If it were destroyed by an asteroid, the loss would be greater than for any other museum on Earth—including even larger art museums in places like Paris and New York. This is mostly because it has by far the most important collections of some of the key figures in the development of oil painting, including masters of the Venetian Renaissance (Titian), the Mannerist period (El Greco), the early Baroque (Rubens), the later Baroque (Velázquez), and the Rococo/Neoclassical/Romantic periods (Goya).
Of course, there are many different types of art. Even within the art of painting, there are many different approaches. Some painters (such as Picasso) excel at drawing. Some excel at painting light (Vermeer.) Some excel at color (Matisse.) Some excel at brushwork.
Some of the greatest Renaissance paintings were done on fresco, including The Last Supper and The Creation of Adam. These paintings are known for their composition, not the quality of the brushstrokes. But during the 1500s, artists mostly switched from fresco to oil painting, which allows for far more subtle and complex effects, while slightly downgrading the importance of skill at drawing.
Between 1500 and 1660, a line of painters from Titian to Rubens to Velasquez perfected the art of oil painting from a technical perspective. Two other Spanish painters (El Greco and (later) Goya), produced some of art’s most startling images. The best collections of these five artists are in the Prado. In the case of Velázquez and Goya, it is almost impossible to fully appreciate their greatness without visiting Madrid.
You can view the history of art as a series of projects. Think of Japanese woodblock prints, Chinese ink landscapes, Persian miniatures, African tribal masks, Greek and Roman sculptures. I view the evolution of European oil painting from 1500 to 1660 as the most important project in the history of the visual arts, the project that produced the greatest works. And the best place to see that project is in the Prado.
Reproductions of all the great paintings are now widely available online. But in many cases the images are only a pale imitation of the original. Sort of like hearing a Wagner opera on a tiny transistor radio. Here’s a Wikipedia image of a relatively minor Prado painting by Titian, entitled Religion, Saved by Spain:
(BTW, try not to read this post on your phone, it works better on a larger screen.)
The Wikipedia doesn’t really do justice to the glorious color in Titian’s original. The Prado’s own website has a far superior reproduction, and users can zoom in on specific parts of the image:
Notice the subtle use of color that gets washed out in the Wikipedia image.
I certainly do not wish to argue that this relatively little-known Titian is a “better” painting than The Last Supper or The Creation of Adam in any overall sense. But it is far better at the specific thing that oil painting does best. To explain why, let’s take a brief digression into the art of filmmaking, an area where many readers may have more familiarity.
In a recent post I mentioned that Alfred Hitchcock came in number one in a ranking of the world’s greatest movie directors. But why is that? I imagine that lots of verbally oriented intellectuals might prefer the work of directors such as Bergman (#3), Scorsese (#6) or Kurosawa (#12), whose films seem to have greater psychological depth. Hitchcock’s reputation does not come from his screenplays, the performances of his actors, or even the excellent soundtracks, rather it is the visual style of his films that attracts cinéastes.
The intellectual world is mostly run by people with high verbal intelligence, and hence Hitchcock’s films were not taken seriously until the late 1950s. Critics saw them as light entertainment, which is why Hitchcock never won an Oscar for best director. (Not even nominated for Vertigo!) Not surprisingly, it was people who spoke an entirely different language—French intellectuals—who first noticed his greatness as a director. People tend to listen to films in their own language and watch films in a foreign language. When Hitchcock’s films were re-evaluated in the late 1950s, it was the way he used the camera that led people like Truffaut, Godard and Chabrol to declare him a supreme auteur.
I don’t believe that paintings by Rubens have anywhere near the psychological depth of those by some of his near contemporaries, including Caravaggio and Rembrandt. Rather it was his unsurpassed brushwork that led him to be regarded as the world’s best painter during his lifetime. This is why you cannot look at a small photo reproduction of these Baroque masterpieces and get any sense of what makes them special. When looking at a reproduction you are generally focusing on the composition, or perhaps the (occasionally insipid) facial expression of some of the figures. Why is that Rubens picture so interesting?
In fairness, paintings by Titian and even more so by Velázquez often do have real psychological depth combined with superb technical skill, which is one reason why Velazquez is my favorite painter:
During the period of 1400 to 1660, Western oil painting was progressive, in the sense of progressing toward a goal. Then, for a period of roughly 200 years, painters saw no way to push things beyond the perfection achieved by Velázquez and instead experimented with a variety of new styles and subjects, including rococo, neoclassicism, romanticism. These styles mostly employed techniques developed by 1660.
In the mid-19th century, art history resumed, but this time on a completely different project—modern art. Manet went to Madrid and was blown away by what he saw—calling Velázquez the “greatest painter”. We think of modern art as being less “realistic”, but Manet started out by using Velázquez’s techniques in a realistic style. Then he began to flatten the space in his paintings, which is probably the most important feature of modern art (even more so than abstraction.)
Titian’s Danaë and the Shower of Gold and Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus are both great nudes, but the Titian looks more “old-fashioned”, while the Velázquez seems very fresh and modern. Manet’s Olympia (1863) seems even more modern, because we subconsciously associate modern art with a flatter picture plane.
[BTW, the greatest painters often produce works that seem sort of timeless, as if they could have been done yesterday. Think of Dürer’s Young Hare or Carel Fabritius’s Goldfinch. In the 1600s, Velázquez produced landscapes that look like 19th century art.
Manet started the second great project in Western painting, which led to Cézanne, Picasso, and eventually to abstraction. (Or perhaps the Japanese came first?) But abstraction is not the essence of modern art. Indeed, Picasso’s paintings were almost never completely abstract:
Guernica is technically an oil painting, but it doesn’t utilize the qualities that traditional oil painting is associated with, such as expressive brushstrokes. Rather it looks more like a large woodblock print, where everything seems close to the surface. Picasso is doing something entirely different from the great baroque painters—his genius was in drawing expressive lines.
People often argue that modern art was a reaction to the camera. Once photographic accuracy could be achieved by a machine, there was no point in continuing the tradition of realism. I disagree. All forms or art became more “difficult” in the late 1800s and early 1900s, not just painting. Poetry stopped rhyming. Music became atonal. Sculpture became more abstract. You had deconstruction in architecture. None of those genres were directly impacted by photography. Turner was already close to abstraction by 1834, before the camera had impacted society.
But there’s an even stronger argument against the invention of the camera leading to modern art. Many of the very greatest artists—including Titian, Velázquez, Goya and Rembrandt, adopted less “realistic” styles as they aged—a style less like photography. Contemporaries often attributed this to a loss of visual acuity with old age, but it is now clear than these great artists gradually discovered that they could achieve their most powerful expressive effects by using more vigorous brushstrokes, often called “thick impasto”.
A highly detailed photorealistic style was first developed as early as the 1400s. Here’s a detail from a Jan van Eyck painting from 1436:
In the Titian painting shown above, the painter is not trying to be more photorealistic than van Eyck; he’s trying to be more expressive. (Even more so in this late work.)
Because the Prado has a huge collection of works by Titian, Velázquez and Goya, you can examine the way their painting style moved away from realism as they got older and sought more powerful expressive techniques. Studying the progression of their careers toward looser brushstrokes is a good starting point for learning about the art of oil painting. In the Prado, Goya’s so-called “black paintings” provide a good example of his late style. Contrast an early Goya in the elegant rococo style:
With a much later example of romanticism, The Executions of May 3, 1808:
Goya didn’t forget how to paint pretty pictures; he was trying to do something entirely different.
In this post, I’m not so much trying to argue that the Prado has the “best” painters, rather that they have the collection that best illustrates the most important project in the history of oil painting.
If we return to the cinema analogy, I have no problem with people that prefer Bergman, Scorsese or Kurosawa to Hitchcock. But if you wish to understand what makes cinema unique as an art form, what distinguishes it from other genres such as theatre, you need to study the visual style of directors like Hitchcock, Tarkovsky, Ozu and Kubrick. It would make no sense to do a theatre production of Vertigo, Stalker, Tokyo Story, or 2001—they are visually oriented films. Similarly, I have no problem with people that prefer Caravaggio, Rembrandt and Vermeer to Rubens—indeed I share this preference. But studying the development of oil painting from Titian to Rubens to Velázquez is the best way to educate yourself about what oil painting can do better than any other genre of art.
PS. When I lived in Boston, the Phoenix published a poll of art experts:
The Goya, the Rogier van der Weyden and the Velázquez are all in the Prado, and two others are not far away. By this measure, Madrid and nearby Toledo have nearly 1/4th of the world’s greatest paintings. (America has four of them.)
If you cannot get to Madrid, then here’s my suggestion. Get a 77-inch OLED TV set. After dark, go to the Prado website and put “Las Meninas” into their search box. The Prado’s reproduction is excellent. Even so, the image will be much smaller than the original (which is roughly 300cm or 10 feet square.) First look at the painting in full size and then use the zoom feature to put the entire bottom half of the painting on your widescreen TV. It’s still less than 2/3rds actual size, but big enough to get a good look at one of the most stunning images ever created by man.
Velázquez was a painter’s painter. Artists like Luca Giordano and Thomas Lawrence regarded Las Meninas as the supreme achievement in the art of painting. Picasso did no less than 58 interpretations of the painting. In The Order of Things, Foucault spends an entire chapter examining this painting. Here’s Wikipedia:
For Foucault, Las Meninas illustrates the first signs of a new episteme, or way of thinking. It represents a midpoint between what he sees as the two "great discontinuities" in European thought, the classical and the modern
PPS. The Prado also has the famous Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch (the Dutch painter, not the LA detective.)
PPPS. The final item in the Phoenix poll is Titian’s Rape of Europa, which is in Boston’s Gardner Museum. (Thank God the thieves had bad taste!) Rubens was so impressed by this painting that he produced a copy, which is in the Prado. And Velázquez was so impressed by Titian’s painting that he included a tapestry depicting this image in the background of his painting entitled The Spinners, another masterpiece in the Prado.
PPPPS. The Prado contains many masterpieces beyond the five artists I’ve discussed here. This mannerist gem is regarded as a minor painting by Parmigianino:
And here is an acknowledged masterpiece is by Fra Angelico:
My camera cannot even come close to capturing the actual color.
The Pursuit of Happiness is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
As AI sweeps into white-collar workplaces, old-timey hands-on jobs are getting a new look—and some of those professions even have shortages.
Consider tailors. Sewing is a vanishing skill, much like lacemaking and watchmaking, putting tailors in short supply when big retailers like Nordstrom and Men’s Wearhouse, as well as fashion designers and local dry cleaners, say they need more of them.
The job, which can take years to master, can be a tough sell to younger generations more accustomed to instant gratification. But apprenticeships that offer pay to learn on the job and new training programs are helping entice more people…
For the first semester of its program, which concluded in December, FIT received more than 190 applications for 15 spots. The nine-week course requires prior sewing experience. Nordstrom hired seven students from the inaugural class.
“It’s increasingly becoming more challenging to find people to fill these alterations jobs,” said Marco Esquivel, the director of alterations and aftercare services at Nordstrom, which employs about 1,500 tailors. Similar to other high-end retailers, Nordstrom offers free basic tailoring for garments purchased at the department-store chain and charges a fee for those bought elsewhere.
Tailored Brands, which employs about 1,300 tailors at its Men’s Wearhouse, Jos. A. Bank and other chains, is updating its apprenticeship program to include more self-guided videos with the goal of moving people through the training faster.
The MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) on NASA’s Terra satellite captured this hazy view of the city and the surrounding region on April 22, 2026.
NASA Earth Observatory/Lauren Dauphin
Chiang Mai, Thailand’s second-largest city, lies within a network of narrow valleys in the country’s northern highlands. Though the historic city is known for panoramic views of the surrounding mountains, clear skies have become less common. In recent decades, smoke has increasingly darkened the skies during the dry season, particularly in March and April.
A NASA satellite captured this smoky view of the city and the surrounding region on April 22, 2026, when haze partially obscured valleys and ridges typically visible under clearer conditions. Most of the smoke likely comes from small agricultural and forest fires lit to burn off crop debris or maintain forest ecosystems. In 2026, satellite sensors detected small numbers of fires throughout January, but fire detections became more numerous and widespread in February, March, and April. Fire activity typically peaks in March and fades by May as seasonal rains increase.
Research indicates that smoke from biomass burning is one of the largest contributors to poor air quality in northern Thailand during the dry season. By one estimate, about 70 percent of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) in Chiang Mai in April comes from biomass burning. Smaller contributors to the region’s hazy skies include vehicles, power plants and industry, and charcoal burning for cooking and heating. Geography also plays a key role; the surrounding mountains block air flow and encourage temperature inversions that trap both local pollution and haze from the broader region in the valleys.
On the same day the satellite image was captured, air quality sensors on the ground recorded “unhealthy” and “very unhealthy” levels of PM2.5 air pollution throughout Chiang Mai and the region, according to data from the World Air Quality Index project. Prolonged exposure to high levels of air pollution can contribute to respiratory and cardiovascular diseases and other health problems.
News reports suggest that the haze is affecting the tourism industry and has contributed to a decrease in the number of international travelers coming to Chiang Mai. After more than a month of persistent haze, the number of tourists arriving in the town of Pai, a popular destination for backpackers northwest of Chiang Mai, was down 90 percent, according to one local newspaper.
Unusually warm and dry conditions have gripped the region in recent weeks, according to meteorologists with the ASEAN Specialised Meteorological Centre (ASMC). On March 27, the group advised that there was a “high risk” of severe transboundary haze in the region and elevated its alert level to three, the highest on the scale.
In late March, the group noted that dry conditions were forecast to persist over most parts of the Mekong sub-region, with prevailing winds expected to blow mostly from the south or southwest. “Under these conditions,” ASMC noted, “the hotspot and smoke haze situation could escalate further.”
NASA Earth Observatory image by Lauren Dauphin, using MODIS data from NASA EOSDIS LANCE and GIBS/Worldview. Story by Adam Voiland.
Codex: For this thread, we’ve used a meaningful amount [of tokens] because we’ve done several code/read/test/commit cycles with large test outputs. The biggest token consumers today were the repeated full make test outputs and file/diff reads. If you want to conserve tokens going forward, I can keep using shorter command output caps and only surface sum…
Amelia Wattenberger didn’t want to be a developer — both her parents were, and from the outside it looked boring. Then she accidentally built a website, and everything changed. In this conversation, she and Kent talk about why play matters more right now than productivity, what we actually lose when every project has a KPI attached, and why the most important skill in augmented development might just be knowing when to step back.
NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is now scheduled for launch in early September as agency officials hail its early completion despite ongoing budget uncertainty for its science programs.
Space based nuclear command, control and communications (NC3) systems were developed as highly classified and sovereign systems, insulated from external influence and designed to survive in the most extreme circumstances. Constructed in the 1960s, the systems made sure that states were able to reliably identify and retaliate against threats, maintaining deterrence stability. Contemporary space-based capabilities […]
The Commerce Department is proposing to halt work on its space traffic coordination system while it develops a “new operating and financial structure” that may include user fees.
A Beijing-based space startup has secured early-stage funding and extensive credit backing as part of a broader Chinese push toward space-based computing infrastructure.
Northrop Grumman said April 21 it took a $71 million charge in its fiscal first quarter linked to an anomaly with a solid rocket booster that has grounded ULA’s Vulcan.
AST SpaceMobile received permission to provide direct-to-smartphone broadband services in the United States with up to 248 satellites, days after a botched launch complicated plans to ramp up deployments this year.
International Astronautical Federation (IAF)
Updated
Organized by the International Astronautical Federation (IAF) and hosted by the Rwanda Space Agency (RSA), the 2nd IAF Global Space Conference on Climate Change (GLOC 2026) will take place from […]
SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket launches from Space Launch Complex 4 East at Vandenberg Space Force Base on April 22, 2026, on the Starlink 17-14 mission. Image: SpaceX
Update Apr. 22, 11:52 p.m. EDT (0352 UTC): SpaceX landed its booster on the droneship.
SpaceX launched its 40th Starlink mission of the year when its Falcon 9 rocket took off from Vandenberg Space Force Base Wednesday night.
The Starlink 17-14 mission will add another 24 broadband internet satellites to the company’s low Earth orbit constellation, which consists of more than 10,200 spacecraft.
Liftoff from Space Launch Complex 4 East happened at 8:23:09 p.m. PDT (11:23:09 p.m. EDT / 0323:09 UTC). The rocket flew on a south-southwesterly trajectory upon leaving the pad.
SpaceX launched the mission using the Falcon 9 first stage booster with the tail number 1100. This was its fifth flight following the launches of NROL-105 along with three other batches of Starlink satellites.
A little more than eight minutes after liftoff, B1100 landed on the drone ship, ‘Of Course I Still Love You’. This was the 192nd booster landing on this vessel and the 602nd booster landing to date for SpaceX.
Up betimes and to my office very busy all the morning there, entering things into my Book Manuscript, which pleases me very much. So to the Change, and so to my uncle Wight’s, by invitation, whither my father, wife, and Ashwell came, where we had but a poor dinner, and not well dressed; besides, the very sight of my aunt’s hands and greasy manner of carving, did almost turn my stomach. After dinner by coach to the King’s Playhouse, where we saw but part of “Witt without mony,” which I do not like much, but coming late put me out of tune, and it costing me four half-crowns for myself and company. So, the play done, home, and I to my office a while and so home, where my father (who is so very melancholy) and we played at cards, and so to supper and to bed.
Vertical rhythm aligns lines to a consistent spacing cadence down the page. It
creates a predictable flow for the eye to follow. Thanks to the rlh CSS unit,
vertical rhythm is now easier to implement for text.1 But illustrations
and tables can disrupt the layout. The amateur typographer in me wants to follow
Bringhurst’s wisdom:
Headings, subheads, block quotations, footnotes, illustrations, captions and
other intrusions into the text create syncopations and variations against the
base rhythm of regularly leaded lines. These variations can and should add
life to the page, but the main text should also return after each variation
precisely on beat and in phase.
Three factors govern vertical rhythm: font size, line height and
margin or padding. Let’s set our baseline with an 18-pixel font and a 1.5
line height:
CSS Values and Units Module Level 4 defines the rlh unit, equal to the
computed line height of the root element. All browsers support it since
2023.2 Use it to insert vertical spaces or to fix the line height
when altering font size:3
We can check the result by overlaying a grid4 on the content:
Using CSS rlh unit to set vertical space works well for text. You can display the grid using Ctrl+Shift+G.
If a child element uses a font with taller intrinsic metrics, it may stretch
the line’s box beyond the configured line height.5 A workaround
is to reduce the line height to 1. The glyphs overflow but don’t push the line
taller.
code,kbd{line-height:1;}
Responsive images
Responsive images are difficult to align on the grid because we don’t know their
height. CSS Rhythmic Sizing Module Level 1 introduces the block-step
property to adjust the height of an element to a multiple of a step unit. But
most browsers don’t support it yet.
With JavaScript, we can add padding around the image so it does not disturb
the vertical rhythm:
Table cells could set 1rlh as their height but they would feel constricted.
Using 2rlh wastes too much space. Instead, we use incremental leading: we
align one in every five lines.
To align the elements after the table, we need to add some padding. We can
either reuse the JavaScript code from images or use a few lines of CSS that
count the regular rows and compute the missing vertical padding:
A header cell has twice the padding of a regular cell. With two regular rows,
the total padding is 2×2×0.2+2×0.4=1.6. We need to add 0.4rlh to reach
2rlh of extra vertical padding across the table.
One line out of five is aligned to the grid. Additional padding is added after the table to not break the vertical rhythm. 405 is divisible by 27, our line height in this example.
None of this is necessary. But once you start looking, you can’t unsee it. Until
browsers implement CSS Rhythmic Sizing, a
bit of CSS wizardry and a touch of JavaScript is enough to pull it off. The main
text now returns after each intrusion “precisely on beat and in phase.” 🎼
For broader compatibility, you can replace 2rlh with
calc(var(--line-height) * 2rem) and set the --line-height custom
property in the :root pseudo-class. I wrote a simple PostCSS
plugin for this purpose. ❦
It would have been nicer to compute the line height with
calc(round(up, calc(2.4rem / 1rlh), 0) * 1rlh). Unfortunately, typed
arithmetic is not supported by Firefox yet. Moreover, browsers support
round() only since 2024. Instead, I coded a PostCSS
plugin for this as well. ❦
The following CSS code defines a grid tracking the line height:
The country is beginning to wake up to the sheer level of strategic failure of Trump’s impulsive and unilateral war on Iran. Let me start with an extended quote from a weekend article in the New York Times …
The United States and Israel launched their war against Iran on the argument that if Iran one day got a nuclear weapon, it would have the ultimate deterrent against future attacks.
It turns out that Iran already has a deterrent: its own geography.
Iran’s decision to flex its control over shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, the strategic choke point through which 20 percent of the world’s oil supply flows, has brought global economic pain in the form of higher prices for gasoline, fertilizer and other staples. It has upended war planning in the United States and Israel, where officials have had to devise military options to wrest the strait from Iranian control.
The U.S.-Israeli war has significantly damaged Iran’s leadership structure, larger naval vessels and missile production facilities, but it has done little to restrict Iran’s ability to control the strait.
Iran could thus emerge from the conflict with a blueprint for its hard-line theocratic government to keep its adversaries at bay, regardless of any restrictions on its nuclear program.
This is what I’ve been saying for weeks. Control of the strait is a vastly powerful deterrent. It’s also much easier to use than any nuclear weapon, which is one of those threats that is powerful but also very hard to follow through on. I’m not claiming any great insight on this. You could see many other articles about this in the foreign policy press. But it’s only now that it’s really beginning to register in the broader U.S. news and politics discussion.
As someone pointed out to me a few weeks ago, Iran’s control of or at least leverage over the Strait of Hormuz has always been tacit in world affairs. The U.S. military has war-gamed a strait closure for decades; it’s a staple of predicted crises in the region. And it’s always been Iran as the country that was going to do it. That’s just down to simple geography and the fact that they’re the main adversary power to the regional hegemon, the United States. (It’s not something the Saudis or Kuwaitis are going to do. They’re allied to the regional Great Power.) But they’ve now shown they can close the strait without firing many shots. And the U.S. doesn’t seem to be able to do much about it.
For Iran it’s a deceptively elegant solution. Iran closes the strait with threats and perhaps some limited harassment of tankers. The U.S. could respond militarily. But the whole point is that the global economy is highly dependent on that region and that particular waterway not being a war zone. At least in the near-term U.S. military retaliation is more the problem than the solution. The only real solution would be for the U.S. to occupy a significant buffer zone in Iranian territory along the Persian Gulf. That’s probably militarily possible in the most basic sense. But how long do you occupy that strip of land? It’s not a workable solution on any long term basis.
We see something similar in the evolving press treatment of the war this morning. Donald Trump unilaterally extended the ceasefire to give the Iranians more time to respond (submit?) to his conditions. To the Iranians, though, this was Trump showing his cards. He’s in a weak position and he knows it. This has happened again and again over the last two or three weeks. But this morning the Times again says just that. “To Iran, Trump Blinked First by Extending the Cease-Fire,” the article reads. Again, the mainstream press is now saying more openly what’s been clear almost since the beginning of the conflict. Trump started this war on an impulse. In strategic terms he lost almost immediately, despite the vast damage he’s done to Iran. But he’s been unable to accept that fact. He has not made a painful but still manageable retreat or escalate. He’s stuck. He doesn’t know what to do. And he’s increasingly unable to hide that simple reality from anyone watching events unfold.
A little less than a year ago, Trump began his push for state legislatures in, first, Texas, then other red states, to redraw their congressional district lines, a gambit that, he had apparently been told, would help him hold onto the House in the midterms even as his poll numbers began the long march downward that continues to this day.
Democrats counter-attacked — and, as Khaya Himmelman reports this morning, they are succeeding. (Trump is now telling supporters he believes gerrymandering may be “not good.”) Virginia voters have followed California’s lead, authorizing new, bluer maps for their state. As things stand now, that puts Democrats slightly ahead in this fight.
The overall picture is quite a bit more complicated, however. Here’s some of what we’re keeping tabs on.
Depending on how you count — and on the extent to which Trump’s 2024 coalition votes Republican in the 2026 midterms — it appears that Democrats may have squeezed one or two more seats out of these fights than Republicans.
In Virginia, however, the story isn’t over. Republicans filed numerous challenges to the referendum. The state Supreme Court decided to allow yesterday’s election to go forward, and to see if the constitutional amendment was approved before ruling on those challenges. Now it will.
Florida will now attempt a gerrymander, trying to squeeze a few Republican seats out of its current map (while risking diluting those seats to the point that they become pick-up opportunities for Democrats).
Legal fights in Missouri and Utah could change things as well. In Utah, the White House is hoping to weaponize a judicial ethics scandal, creating a vehicle, Republicans hope, to undo a court ruling that had the effect of shifting one seat from Republicans to Democrats.
Republican state legislatures have redrawn their maps (or, in a few notable cases, refused to) amid bullying from President Trump and his top advisors. Democratic states, on the other hand, have put the question before voters, made their case, and let the democratic process choose the path forward. In both states, polling showed that voters initially were skeptical (normal, healthy people don’t typically like gerrymandering) but came around to the new map as a reasonable check on Trump’s red-state-legislature-fueled power grab. It’s a set of facts that considerably complicates the story that “both sides” have rushed straight into the mud. (Hat tip to Mother Jones’ Ari Berman, who made a version of this point last night.)
We’re moving into the second half of our Annual TPM Membership Drive. So we’re at the crunch time when we really need to be adding numbers. Let me be as direct as I can. If you’re not a member, your signing up today will make a big difference in the vitality and health of TPM. I would be so grateful if you could take a moment literally right now and click this link and sign up. We’ve made it super easy. I delay things I plan to do as much as anyone. But if you could take a moment literally right now and click that link we would all appreciate it so much.
Image: The handcart, equipped with a sail. Photo by Kris De Decker.
The human-powered handcart is the oldest of vehicles, and it will likely be the last one around in the future. Of all vehicles, it’s the cheapest and least complex to build and use. It offers a large advantage over carrying a load on your back or dragging it over the ground - the even older concept of the sled. On the other hand, the handcart is cheaper and easier to use than the animal-powered cart. Oxen and donkeys eat more than humans, and they have their own will, which can work against the driver.
Like any other wheeled vehicle, the handcart requires roads to drive on. This infrastructure has not always been available anywhere or at any time in history. For example, in medieval Europe, porters and pack animals were more common than handcarts because of poor roads. 1 In the West, the handcart only reached its heyday during the first decades of the Industrial Revolution, when it connected fast-growing cities to train stations and harbors. In China, on the other hand, the handcart was the backbone of the transport network for millennia. 2
Of all vehicles, the handcart is the cheapest and least complex to build and use.
There are still many human-powered carts in modern society: strollers, grocery carts, roller suitcases, and various utility and folding carts. However, these modern carts are to their predecessors what modern birds are to dinosaurs. They are small, often with very small wheels, and we use them for very short distances, usually inside buildings. In contrast, old-fashioned handcarts were often large and had big wheels, and they were pushed or pulled on roads and over longer distances. Many crafts and professions had their own type of handcart.
Image: Low-tech Magazine's handcart. Photo by Kris De Decker.
Why I need a handcart
People still use large handcarts in so-called “developing countries”. However, they can be just as useful again in the large cities of the industrialized world, as I can testify after using one for a couple of months. Last autumn, I received an internship application from Kozimo, who studies at the Design Academy Eindhoven. In his application, Kozimo sent a video of a large handcart he made, which he was driving on the streets of Rotterdam, the Netherlands.
I have always dreamt of a handcart. I have never owned a car, and the only times I miss one are when I have to move stuff, something which has become increasingly common lately. Consequently, I proposed to Kozimo to build a handcart for me.
Now, I can no longer imagine living without it. I have used the vehicle to move houses and offices, pick up materials and objects I bought online, new or second-hand, and transport workshop and event materials (bike generators, solar panels, solar ovens, books, sound systems). I have done the same for friends. During these trips, I often took home materials, furniture, or objects that I found for free on the streets of Barcelona.
Image: Kozimo and Kris De Decker with Low-tech Magazine's handcart, halfway through a 30 km trip along the coast of Spain. Photo by Linda Osusky.
Unlike a van or a car, my handcart doesn’t need gasoline, electricity, or batteries, making it entirely independent from energy infrastructures. Neither do I need to pay taxes and insurance. The handcart is a very democratic vehicle. It allows anyone to carry a load wherever they want, while older, less affordable cars and vans are no longer allowed to enter city centers due to the installation of Low Emission Zones.
A handcart doesn’t need gasoline, electricity, or batteries, making it entirely independent from energy infrastructures.
It would make a lot of sense to offer vehicles like this at community centers, where they are available for all neighbors to use when needed. Few people would need a handcart each day, and communal use would solve the parking problem. Although our handcart can also be parked vertically, it won’t fit in most apartments.
Description of the handcart
This article will not explain in detail how to build a handcart. We want to do that another time with a simpler handcart model, because the vehicle we present in this article is not one that most people can make themselves. You need good woodworking and metalworking skills, and in fact, two people made the handcart.
Kozimo designed and built the whole structure from wood, while Guilhem Senges - visual artist and one of my neighbors - designed and made several essential reinforcements from metal; the wheels, the brakes, and the handlebars are all connected to the wood structure with custom-made iron parts.
Image: The underside of the handcart. Photo by Kris De Decker.
Images: The front and back of the handcart. Photos by Kris De Decker.
Image: The lights are mounted in coconuts. Photo by Kris De Decker.
Load weight and volume
Low-tech Magazine’s handcart is 250 cm long and 100 cm wide, while the platform itself measures 210 by 85 cm. Assuming a load height of 50 cm, the cargo volume is roughly 1.55 m3 (37 cubic feet or 1050 liters). That’s two to four times the typical trunk space in a European car. We have transported cargo that is wider or longer than the cart: a large heated table measuring 140x140cm, and several loads of wooden beams, each three meters long.
The load weight is limited by the wheels, which come from a wheelchair. They can support up to 150 kg. 3 The cart itself weighs 32 kg, so the practical maximum cargo weight is about 120 kg. The loading platform consists of slats with gaps between them, making it easy to secure various types of cargo.
Images: The handcart with various cargoes. Upper left: a 6m2 wooden floor and a chest. Upper right: 3-meter-long wood beams. Below: A heated table ready for transport.
It drives itself!
Over the past few months, we’ve learned that people have many misconceptions about handcarts. For example, you may think that pushing a handcart takes a lot of effort, perhaps based on your experience pushing supermarket carts through parking lots or pulling heavy suitcases through city centers (which is how I moved stuff before I had a handcart).
However, using the handcart can be so effortless - even when it’s heavily loaded - that it feels like you are not pushing at all. Once in motion, you can often guide it with one hand, and it sometimes feels like the cart is pulling you forward. It’s no exaggeration to say that pushing the handcart with a 100 kg load is more comfortable than walking while carrying a 10 kg heavy backpack.
Using the handcart can be so effortless - even when it’s heavily loaded - that it feels like you are not pushing at all.
There are several reasons for this light operation, rooted in physics. Each vehicle has to overcome three forces: rolling resistance, air resistance, and gravity. Air resistance is negligible at walking speed, meaning that a handcart user on flat terrain mainly needs to overcome rolling resistance. That’s the friction between wheels and road surface, a factor that’s largely independent of speed.
In contrast, air resistance increases with the square of speed. A cyclist, going at 15-20 km/h, already spends more effort overcoming air resistance than overcoming rolling resistance, which is the same in both cases because both vehicles have similar wheels. In short, the handcart’s low speed minimizes air resistance, while its narrow wheels minimize rolling resistance.
Image: Driving the handcart. Photo by Linda Osusky.
Second, accelerating a vehicle requires more energy than maintaining a constant speed. You only need to sustain momentum, not build it. Our handcart is pushed by a person walking, so the effort to accelerate lasts no longer than one or two seconds. In contrast, a cyclist takes much longer to reach cruise speed, and because of the higher air resistance, it takes more effort to sustain that speed. If the handcart is heavily loaded, it also gains significant kinetic energy, even at low speed. That explains why it sometimes feels like the cart is pulling you forward - because it actually is.
Finally, our wheels are much larger than those used on modern pushcarts. That makes for comfortable driving on asphalt and sidewalks, which are not as smooth as airport or supermarket floors. Large wheels increase air resistance, but because of our low speed, that doesn’t matter.
Handcarts and gravity
However, an effortless ride requires two conditions: flat terrain and a well-balanced load. Both involve the third force any vehicle must overcome: gravity.
Balancing the handcart: distributing the load
A two-wheeled cart becomes heavy and difficult to use when too much weight is placed on the front or back. Consequently, you need to load the vehicle so that the weight is equal on both sides of the wheels. That’s easy to check: the cart should remain in a horizontal position for several seconds without you touching it. If there’s just one piece of cargo, place it above the center of the wheels. If there are more things to carry, the total weight should be divided equally over the two sides. Finetuning the balance often involves moving a backpack from the front to the back of the cart, or vice versa.
You need to load the vehicle so that the weight is equal on both sides of the wheels.
A two-wheeled cart also needs additional support to keep it horizontal when parked, for instance, when loading or unloading cargo. Otherwise, the cart may suddenly flip to the other side. Our handcart carries four support beams, two on each side. When the cart is moving, they are in a horizontal position. When the cart is parked, we remove one or more beams and place them in a vertical position. Each beam can be set to a different length, allowing us to stabilize the cart on uneven terrain. We tighten the beams with screws.
Image: The handcart is parked with four supporting legs. Photo by Kris De Decker.
Image: Detail of the supporting beam holder. Photo by Kris De Decker.
Many people have asked us why we didn’t build a four-wheeled cart that wouldn’t need to be balanced. However, four wheels would double the rolling resistance and thus the effort required to push the cart. Furthermore, a four-wheeled cart is less maneuverable and more difficult to drive on uneven terrain. You also need to get two extra wheels, and you need to build a steering mechanism. Throughout history, the two-wheeled handcart (or one-wheeled handcart in the case of China) was much more common than the four-wheeled cart. 1
Going uphill: you need help
An effortless ride also requires more or less flat terrain, which is what you get here in many parts of Barcelona. If you go up a steep slope, you suddenly feel the weight of the cart and its cargo. Climbing with a heavily loaded cart can be as strenuous as running up stairs or cycling at top speed. People tell us we should put an electric motor on the cart, and that’s perfectly possible.
However, we found a simpler solution: if necessary, we ask for help from another person. Our handlebars are wide enough for two or even three people to push together, which makes going uphill a lot easier. Adding an electric motor and a battery would significantly increase the vehicle’s weight, and it only makes sense if you regularly have to climb hills.
Going downhill: brakes
Going downhill, you have to counter gravity forces to prevent the handcart from hurling down a slope, which would be very dangerous. Rather than pushing the cart, you’ll have to pull it back instead. Here, cyclists have all the advantage, as they can use gravity to its full benefit during a descent.
We made going downhill a lot easier by adding bicycle brakes. In combination with the large wheels, the brakes also allow the handcart to be taken down sidewalk curbs or even stairs without damaging it. They double as a hand brake as well, by tightening two lashing straps around them. That allows leaving the cart unattended on a slope or in high winds.
Image: The brakes. Photo by Kris De Decker.
Handcarts go on the sidewalk
Many people assume that handcarts go on the road, with the cars, or on the cycling path. That’s not the case: you use it on the sidewalk. Legally, handcart users are in a similar position to other pedestrians pushing a smaller handcart, such as a stroller. The only difference is that, when they are forced onto the road because there’s no sidewalk or it’s blocked, handcart users should walk on the right side of the road, while other pedestrians should walk on the left. For now, the police have stopped us only once, and they were just curious.
Legally, handcart users are in a similar position to other pedestrians pushing a smaller handcart, such as a stroller.
We could find no traffic laws that limit the size of a handcart, at least not in the handful of countries we researched, including Spain. However, in practice, there are clear limits. If your vehicle is wider than the space between traffic bollards that keep cars out of pedestrian streets, all pedestrian zones will become inaccessible to you. You should also take into account other obstacles on the sidewalk, such as building scaffolding. Consequently, it’s rarely practical to build a handcart more than one meter wide.
Barcelona has very wide sidewalks in most of the city. We rarely have to share the road with cars or cyclists. Of course, that’s not the case in every city, and then the use of a handcart becomes less attractive. Using a handcart on the road or cyclepath is rather dangerous because other vehicles are much faster.
Image: Kozimo pushes the handcart through a narrow walkway. Photo by Kris De Decker.
Respecting other pedestrians
Driving a large handcart on the sidewalk demands your full attention. You don’t want to hit any infrastructure, and you surely don’t want to hit someone’s legs. You need to drive it with respect for other pedestrians and their pets (some dogs start barking at the vehicle). In general, the handcart is very safe to use because it travels at a very low speed. That makes accidents less likely in the first place and less impactful if they do happen. You also have a very good overview of your vehicle, much better than for a car or a bicycle. As long as you keep your eyes on the handcart, you are unlikely to hit anything or anyone.
However, our handcart is so silent that people don’t hear it coming. We added a bicycle bell to warn people, but we hope to find a better tune in the future: every vehicle needs its own type of sound. We also need a bell for oncoming pedestrians who are watching their phones while walking and expect others to make space. With the handcart, we cannot always make that space. Our handcart has front and rear lights as well, wired to a USB power bank mounted underneath the platform. Lights are very helpful on sidewalks, both day and night, as they make the vehicle more visible. Furthermore, lights are essential if you need to move onto the road after dark.
Images: Kris De Decker drives the handcart through Barcelona. Photos by Guillaume Lion.
Even in Barcelona, sidewalks can get crowded, and a busy sidewalk will slow down the vehicle considerably. With little chance to overtake someone, we tend to get stuck behind the slowest walkers.
A handcart is not a difficult vehicle to drive, but nowadays people in industrialized societies have no experience with it. Apart from driving it attentively, you also need to be careful when rounding blind corners (take the turn as wide as possible) and when you leave a garage or any other type of exit (pull rather than push the cart). By the time you see oncoming traffic, you already have 2 meters of your handcart on the road or around the corner.
Why not a bike trailer?
Almost everyone who sees the handcart for the first time asks the same question: how do you attach it to a bicycle? You don’t. You push it while walking. When we say that, there follows a silence. Pushing a handcart seems like one step too far back, even for people committed to living more sustainably. Why would you push a handcart if you could just as well use a much faster bike trailer, or a cargo bike?
In fact, there are several practical reasons to opt for a handcart rather than a bike trailer, and we have already mentioned many of them. First, a handcart lets you go anywhere a pedestrian can, while cyclists often need to get off their bikes and push them - just like a handcart. A handcart is also more agile. For example, although the cart is 2.5 meters long, it takes just two seconds and little space to turn it around and walk in the opposite direction from where you came from.
Why would you push a handcart if you could just as well use a much faster bike trailer, or a cargo bike?
A handcart can be built larger than a bike trailer as well. Although it’s perfectly possible to build a bike trailer the size of our handcart, its higher speed would pose much greater risk of accidents and damage, both to the cart and to other road users. As a bike trailer, it would also need to be made sturdier, and it would need a more elaborate mechanism to operate the brakes.
All this does not mean that bike trailers are a bad idea. We have used the handcart mainly for trips between 5 and 10 km, which comes down to one to two hours of walking. For longer distances, the bike trailer has the obvious advantage of speed. If you need to cover 40 km, you would need to travel eight hours with a handcart, compared to just two hours with a bike trailer.
Image: Guilhem Senges, who built the vehicle's metal parts, pushes the handcart to a welding job a few streets up in the neighborhood.
The merits of slow travel
However, when people ask us why we don’t use it as a bike trailer, we can also answer differently: why the rush? Deciding to travel with the slowest vehicle possible is subversive because it questions values we take for granted in the modern world, such as speed and utility.
To many people, walking a handcart seems like a waste of time, but our experience is exactly the opposite. Every trip is an adventure, and we always look forward to using it again. It’s a pleasure to drive the vehicle, more like steering a boat than driving a land vehicle. It’s easy to chat with other pedestrians, who tend to be very curious about our vehicle. Consequently, the trip takes even longer.
To many people, walking a handcart seems like a waste of time, but our experience is exactly the opposite.
Driving a handcart feels entirely different from using any other mode of transport. When people are walking, they usually cannot carry much with them, either in terms of weight or volume. In contrast, the handcart allows you to walk with a lot of stuff close at hand: drinks, food, a sound system, books, extra clothes. Furthermore, you have a large platform, which allows you to rest and invite others to do the same. It becomes a vehicle for wandering and roaming, and for connecting to other people.
Image: It's a pleasure to drive the vehicle, more like steering a boat than driving a land vehicle. Model: Rocío Sánchez. Photo by Kris De Decker.
Image: The handcart with rain protection. Photo by Kris De Decker.
Handcart Accessories
Once the handcart proved its utility as a cargo vehicle, Kozimo began designing and building additional structures to expand its uses. These objects make use of the slatted platform or the support beam design. Unfortunately, Kozimo’s internship ended before we could test all these extensions, but the little experience we gained by now shows that the handcart can be much more than just a cargo vehicle.
Passenger seat
The first, and perhaps most powerful addition, is a foldable seat. While our handcart can be - and usually is - operated by only one person, it’s ideally handled by two people, especially for longer voyages. Thanks to the seat, one person can push the cart while the other one rests in the vehicle.
As long as the road is flat, the extra weight of the passenger does not significantly increase the effort to push the cart. Consequently, two people can travel faster or farther in a single day. When climbing hills or bridges, the passenger gets off the seat. If necessary, he or she also helps to push the cart.
One person can push the cart while the other one rests in the vehicle, increasing the distance that two people can travel in a day.
An extra pair of eyes on the road is also handy. The seat can be put in two positions, so that both the passenger and the driver are either looking in the same direction or facing each other, which makes it easier to talk and allows the passenger to serve as the rear-view mirror.
We used the seat on a 30 km day trip along the coast of Catalunya, Spain, moving stuff from my old place to my new place. For one person, this would have been an exhausting trip. However, there were several people on the way there, and two people on the way back. The fact that we could rest from time to time - without stopping - made a great difference, especially on the way back. An extra person also proved useful when unexpected obstacles arose. For example, there was a bridge under repair, which forced us to carry the cart down the rocks, over the beach, and up the rocks again.
Image: A foldable seat on the slatted platform. Photo by Kris De Decker.
Image: Kozimo drives the handcart along the coast. Linda Osusky is filming while resting in the seat. Photo by Kris De Decker.
Images: Carrying the handcart over the rocks. Photos by Linda Osusky.
Digital nomad office
As a second addition, we combined the seat with a work table that doubles as a solar power plant, resulting in a digital nomad office. The table fits onto the sides of the handcart and slides back and forth. The solar panel can be in a horizontal position or at various tilted angles. It can charge a laptop or any other device requiring up to 100 watts of power.
If you’re two people traveling, one person can work at the table while the other drives. If you’re alone, you can wheel the vehicle to the nearest park or beach, set up the four support legs, and work all day. In 2016, I took my home office off the grid with solar panels on the window sills. 4 Ten years later, both the office and the solar panels have become mobile.
Images: Digital nomad office. Photos by Kris De Decker.
Image: Digital nomad office. Photo by Kris De Decker.
Renewable power plant
Although we built only one solar panel support structure, the handcart platform is large enough to support a total of four 100-watt solar panels. That would provide us with 400 watts of solar power for a concert or emergency power, for example. The handcart can also transport the two bike generators Low-tech Magazine has in Barcelona. 5Consequently, the cart enables us to quickly provide power within a radius of several kilometers, at any time of the day. The handcart could also be wheeled into a sunny spot during the day, charging a battery bank to power a household during the night and in bad weather.
Mobile home
If you want to get back home the same day, the handcart’s range is roughly 40-80 km (8-16 hours of walking, back and forth). However, at least in my case, nobody obliges me to come back home the same day. I could use the handcart for longer voyages, especially since it offers me a place to sleep.
The four supporting legs that make loading and unloading the cart more practical can also be used to turn the vehicle into a bed. After Kozimo went back to the Netherlands, I bought a foldable mattress that fits neatly on the platform. During a trip, I can store the other cargo under the cart at night. Alternatively, I could push a passenger who’s lying in the bed, turning the vehicle into an adult version of a baby stroller.
Images: A foldable sleeping mattress on the handcart. Photos by Kris De Decker.
Image: A mosquito net covers the handcart with a sleeping mattress. Photo by Kris De Decker.
Kozimo also made four supporting legs that are almost two meters long. I can use them to erect a tent around the bed, and cover the structure with modern tent materials, wool blankets, or a mosquito net. The large poles can also dry laundry. Furthermore, I could use the supporting legs in various combinations to convert the cart into a podium, expo stand, market stand, or a cinema or presentation screen.
The seat, table, solar panel, sleeping mattress, and longer poles can all be carried on the handcart simultaneously, leaving ample space for other luggage. That means that I could potentially work, live, and travel in the vehicle, turning it into a nomadic home. It fits somewhere between the tiny house on wheels, the tipi, and the homeless shack. Rents got very expensive in Barcelona, so I may as well give it a try.
Image: The handcart is packed for a longer trip. Photo by Kris De Decker.
Sailing and roller skating the handcart
Finally, Kozimo made a small sail for the handcart to help pull a heavy load in a good wind; the vehicle is sometimes used along the coast. Of course, we got the inspiration from the use of sails on the historical Chinese wheelbarrow. For a longer trip, the sail fits on the cart, so I could use it whenever the opportunity arises.
Images: The handcart with a 1m2 sail. Model: Iris De Decker. Photos by Kris De Decker.
We could increase the speed of the handcart by using a larger sail, and combining it with roller blades, inline skates, or a skateboard. In that case, the cart would pull the driver in good winds. It’s also possible to push the cart while using roller blades, inline skates, or an electric unicycle, without a sail. For now, we did a first small test on flat terrain using inline skates, with very good results. If you would take enough cargo, the kinetic energy of a skate-powered handcart would regularly pull you forward even without a sail.
The higher speeds of these configurations obviously introduce more risk and, most likely, trouble with the police. Higher speeds require ample space, free of pedestrians. That almost always pushes the handcart on the road, between the cars, as most cycle paths are not wide enough. However, it shows that sustainable vehicles could take many different forms if only we would give them the space to flourish. There are more than enough roads suitable for sailing and roller-skating handcarts; we need to empty them of cars and vans.
Images: Julia Steketee drives the handcart on online skates. Photos by Kris De Decker.
Handcart design and construction: Kozimo, Guilhem Senges.
Photos: Kris De Decker, Linda Osusky, Guillaume Lion.
You could build a handcart with stronger wheels, either heavy-duty wheelchair wheels (available up to 350 kg) or cargo-bike wheels. However, stronger wheels are likely wider, which increases rolling resistance. It would also become more difficult to push these heavier loads up a steep incline. ↩︎
It is legit good feedback. It is substantive, and it is 100% true, but they do not want to hear it.
How do you know this? You’ve provided the feedback several times. Three different variants of the critical feedback, and each time, the response is one of these:
“I know, I know. I’m working on it.” They are not.
An immediate, abrupt topic change. What?
(My favorite) Twisting the feedback and making it about you. Impressive.
This is not a bad employee, this is not a person incapable of changing, and this is most certainly not an adversarial situation.
They don’t want to hear it.
Not a Trick
I have a move. It’s not a guarantee, but if you’ve tried the obvious approaches, if you’ve tried straight talk, and if you’ve made no progress, I offer The Slide.
There are prerequisites for The Slide:
You’ve tried a couple of different approaches to giving this feedback. They’ve heard it, but they have not acted.
You have high confidence that if they actually absorbed the feedback and acted on it, they’d attempt to change. Somewhere in the back of their head, past the denial, you know they’ll get it.
You’ve had to learn the same lesson in your professional career.
I can not tell you when to deploy The Slide, the opportunity will present itself when the person who needs the feedback, once again, complains or otherwise comments on the by-product consequence of their negligence. Yes, it’s infuriating because if they just listened to you, they’d have a stronger set of tools to tackle the problem, but bury that and Slide ’em:
Them: “Yeah, and isn’t just the endless meetings, it’s the fact that I don’t have anyone on the team who can do the meetings. Francis is deep in backend debugging, Jake isn’t ready to run that meeting, and Jason, well, Jason doesn’t know what he doesn’t know.”
Sweet, sweet irony. Take a deep breath and Slide:
“Back at Pinterest, we didn’t have a CTO. I was the VP of Engineering, and had this loose collection of very bright senior engineers who wanted to help. Problem was… me. Whenever a CTO-class problem came up, I’d try to be the CTO, which meant I wasn’t being the VP of Engineering. After a bit, I was doing poorly at both jobs.”
Them: “Poorly, how? What’d you do?”
“It’s mostly the sense of ‘Is there enough time in the day?’ If the answer to that question is ever ‘no’, then I’m doing poorly. Doesn’t hurt when others point that out, too. After a few months of barely treading water, I gathered together the senior engineer leaders, and we built a small council. When CTO problems arrived, we gave it one of them. They drove, but they relied on the other members and me to get it done.”
So, what feedback had I been attempting and failing to give this mysterious former manager prior to this bearing of my soul? Correct. Delegation. The single biggest challenge for new managers — giving up the responsibility for the product… for the building. Learning how to give accountability for projects of significance to the team. It’s an essential set of complex skills involving trust, communication, and, most importantly, judgment. Failure to understand delegation is failing to be a leader. Senior or not.
My thesis is why this skill is hard to learn; the reason they don’t want to hear this feedback is that it contradicts the valuable core engineering skills that got them the role in the first place. The Slide is you gently sliding up right next to that discomfort, that contradiction, and not accusing, not lecturing, just telling the story of that time you learned the thing.
Not a Guarantee
Why won’t they listen? What is it about this particular habit or behavior that has this capable, smart, and reasonable human ignore the advice of a seasoned, well-informed, and trusted leader?
The answer is usually fear. The variants of fear that apply here are as numerous as the situations, but fear is fear. They have an inner monologue about this topic, “I will be less if I do this. I will have failed if I don’t achieve. I should have known. They will finally know I am a fraud.”
You will never diagnose the fear, but slide up next to them and tell them about the time you were scared, too.
The military will no longer require U.S. troops to receive the annual flu vaccine, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Tuesday, rolling back what he described as an “overly broad” mandate that had been in place for seven decades.
“We’re seizing this moment to discard any absurd, overreaching mandates that only weaken our war-fighting capabilities,” Hegseth said in a video posted to his social media channels. “In this case, this includes the universal flu vaccine and the mandate behind it.”
Hegseth said that under a new policy, soldiers would be able to take the vaccine if they believed it was in their best interest, billing it as an effort to “restore freedom and strength to our joint force.”
“But we will not force you, because your body, your faith and your convictions are not negotiable,” he said…
The U.S. military first mandated the flu vaccine in 1945, at the end of World War II — in part to hedge against the threat of biological warfare and because the great influenza pandemic of 1918 to 1920 had crippled American troop readiness during World War I, killing more than 26,000 American soldiers. The mandate was briefly withdrawn in 1949 but reinstated in the 1950s.
It is as if the entire Trump administration is full of Michael Browns (of “Heckuva job Brownie” infamy), though that is arguably unfair to Michael Brown, since he was just unqualified, not delusionally stupid. Snark aside, it is clear that the Republican Party line regarding vaccination is that, while there might be some very sick people who benefit from vaccination, everyone else is more at risk from vaccination than from the disease itself, which is foolish. Influenza is not fun, and it is not just a cold.
Meanwhile, if you think HHS is going to step in here, yesterday HHS Secretary Kennedy talked about “cleaning up the risk pool”, so eugenics is back on the menu, boys!
But there were no differences between the two parties, amirite?
VinNews: The Rockland County Legislature approved amendments to the Home Improvement Law, dissolving the existing Home Improvement Licensing Board and shifting primary licensing authority to the Legislature itself…Under the new rules, the former licensing board will be reduced to an advisory role, losing its power to issue or revoke licenses. Licensing responsibilities will now fall under the Rockland County Legislature…
This is an interesting change and worth studying. In the Licensing Racket, which I reviewed for the WSJ, Rebecca Haw Allensworth emphasizes that occupational licensing boards put the fox in charge of the chickens:
Governments enact occupational-licensing laws but rarely handle regulation directly—there’s no Bureau of Hair Braiding. Instead, interpretation and enforcement are delegated to licensing boards, typically dominated by members of the profession. Occupational licensing is self-regulation. The outcome is predictable: Driven by self-interest, professional identity and culture, these boards consistently favor their own members over consumers.
Ms. Allensworth conducted exhaustive research for “The Licensing Racket,” spending hundreds of hours attending board meetings—often as the only nonboard member present. At the Tennessee board of alarm-system contractors, most of the complaints come from consumers who report the sort of issues that licensing is meant to prevent: poor installation, code violations, high-pressure sales tactics and exploitation of the elderly. But the board dismisses most of these complaints against its own members, and is far more aggressive in disciplining unlicensed handymen who occasionally install alarm systems. As Ms. Allensworth notes, “the board was ten times more likely to take action in a case alleging unlicensed practice than one complaining about service quality or safety.”
Moving regulation out of the hands of the regulated could be an improvement but there are also advantages to self-regulation. See my review for other reform possibilities.
Earth Day is tomorrow, and Liza Donnelly and I are celebrating with a drawing!
And about the film I mention in the introduction: “Women Laughing.” It’s a look at the women who have drawn cartoons for the New Yorker throughout its history, and their cartoons, shown in the film, will get you laughing. But I was fascinated by the examination of art in the (quite short) film. As the cartoonists explained, their art reflected their own internal vision, and yet it speaks to huge audiences. That universality, in turn, creates a community that both reflects and changes society.
When I teach writing, I talk a lot about the relationship between writer and material, and how, if you think your work through well and manage to execute it even 80% as you envision it, a piece speaks to an audience. But I have never thought about those relationships for cartoons, which are more immediately influential than words (think of Herblock’s extraordinary commentary on Watergate in the Washington Post, for example). I have continued to think about the film since seeing it, and will teach it in the future. Anyone interested in these issues might want to take a look.
If I manage this right, information about it should be here: Women Laughing.
There is the unmistakable feeling that the wheels are coming off the MAGA bus.
Alayna Treene and Kevin Liptak of CNN reported last night that by the end of last week, negotiators for the U.S. and Iran appeared to be on the verge of hammering out an end to hostilities before the two-week ceasefire ends on Wednesday. Then Trump took to the media to crow that Iranian leaders had “agreed to everything,” including the removal of its enriched uranium, and that “Iran has agreed never to close the Strait of Hormuz again.” He promised that Iran had agreed to end its nuclear program forever and that talks “should go very quickly.” Trump declared the breakthrough was “A GREAT AND BRILLIANT DAY FOR THE WORLD!” and asked why media outlets questioning the alleged deal didn’t “just say, at the right time, JOB WELL DONE, MR. PRESIDENT?”
Iranian negotiators said Trump’s claims were false and that if he didn’t remove the U.S. blockade of Iranian ports, they would reclose the Strait of Hormuz they had just opened. “The Iranians didn’t appreciate [Trump] negotiating through social media and making it appear as if they had signed off on issues they hadn’t yet agreed to, and ones that aren’t popular with their people back home,” a source told Treene and Liptak.
Over the weekend, Iranians closed the strait and the U.S. fired on an Iranian vessel. On Sunday, even as two senior U.S. government officials were on television saying Vice President J.D. Vance would lead a new round of talks in Pakistan, Trump was on the phone telling reporters that he wouldn’t. On Monday, Trump told a reporter that Vance was in the air about to touch down in Pakistan just minutes before Vance’s motorcade arrived at the White House.
After Iranian officials said today they were not sure they would respond to U.S. positions or go to Pakistan for talks, Vance’s trip has been put on hold. Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson, Esmail Baghaei, complained of “contradictory messages, inconsistent behavior and unacceptable actions by the American side,” on Iran’s state media.
For his part, Trump blamed the Democrats for the chaos in U.S. diplomacy. “The Democrats are doing everything possible to hurt the very strong position we are in with respect to Iran,” his social media account posted yesterday. The post insisted “it will be done RIGHT, and we won’t let the Weak and Pathetic Democrats, TRAITORS ALL, who for years have been talking about the Dangers of Iran, and that something has to be done, but now, since I’m the one doing it, belittle the accomplishments of our Military and the Trump Administration. This is being perfectly executed, on the scale of Venezuela, just a bigger, more complex operation.”
As David S. Bernstein of Good Politics/Bad Politics noted, Trump’s account this morning reposted another account claiming that Iran was preparing to execute eight women, showing AI-generated images of them. Trump posted: “To the Iranian leaders who will soon be in negotiations with my representatives: I would greatly appreciate the release of these women. I am sure that they will respect the fact that you did so. Please do them no harm! Would be a great start to our negotiations!!!” As Bernstein put it: Trump urged Iran “to start peace negotiations by releasing non-existent, AI-generated women some rando posted about on X.”
Alan Rappeport of the New York Times reported today that Trump is considering using money from the U.S. Treasury to shore up the finances of the oil-rich United Arab Emirates, which have been hurt by the Iran war. After the story appeared, Zach Everson of Public Citizen pointed out that Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who controls the sovereign wealth of the United Arab Emirates, has directed hundreds of millions to Trump personally, buying 49% of the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial and investing $2 billion of WLF’s USD1 stablecoin.
Tonight, Trump announced he is extending the ceasefire with Iran until Iran comes up with a proposal to end the fighting permanently. Iran has responded by saying Trump’s extension “means nothing” and suggested it was a “ploy to buy time for a surprise strike.”
According to a new poll out today from Strength in Numbers/ Verasight, conducted between April 10 and April 14, just 35% of U.S. adults approve of Trump’s job performance. Sixty-one percent disapprove, a new low. Seventy-two percent of Americans disapprove of the way Trump is handling rising prices. In a generic ballot for Congress, voters prefer Democrats over Republicans by 50% to 43%, a margin of seven points.
Administration officials’ approach to the midterm elections seems to be to continue to sow distrust of elections. Following Patel’s claim, on Sunday, that there would soon be arrests stemming from the 2020 presidential election, Harmeet Dhillon, assistant attorney general of the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice (DOJ) released a letter from April 14 demanding that a Wayne County, Michigan, elections official give it records from Wayne County and Detroit from 2024 and alleging that there was fraud in 2020. Although Trump won Michigan, he lost Wayne County by almost 250,000 votes.
Michigan attorney general Dana Nessel and secretary of state Jocelyn Benson wrote in the Detroit Free Press that “this demand isn’t about election integrity—it’s about a weaponized DOJ trying to please a president who doesn’t want to be held accountable at the ballot box by voters tired of the chaos of his administration. It’s also about the upcoming elections in November and in 2028, which he is working to discredit by sowing doubt as to the security and fairness of the process. It’s not going to work with us, and it’s not going to hold up in court,” they wrote. “Michigan’s elections are safe and secure.”
Trump seems, though, to be courting the base that in 2021 attacked the U.S. Capitol to try to keep him in power. After offending his base first by posting an image of himself as Jesus Christ and then by insulting Pope Leo XIV, Trump is participating this week in an event called “America Reads the Bible.” Kaanita Iyer and Aleena Fayaz of CNN report that Trump is expected to read 2 Chronicles 7:11–22 from the Oval Office. The same verse was read by Cowboys for Trump founder Couy Griffin at the January 6, 2021, insurrection, and is associated with white evangelicals’ belief God sent Trump to heal America.
Trump’s vulnerability is showing on Capitol Hill. In Public Notice today, Noah Berlatsky examined House speaker Mike Johnson’s no good, very bad day last Thursday. With a Republican majority in the House of only three seats and a dramatically weakened president, Republican House members handed Johnson two embarrassing losses on Thursday.
First, Republicans joined with Democrats first to pass a discharge petition to force a vote on a measure to protect the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for 350,000 Haitian immigrants, and then they passed the measure itself.
Trump’s administration has left his claims to want to deport undocumented criminals far in the dust, working hard to get rid of legal immigrants as well. When she was homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem ignored the requirements for evaluating TPS and simply refused to agree to routine extensions of TPS for people from Venezuela, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua, Nepal, Ukraine, Afghanistan, and Cameroon.
Haitian TPS holders sued, noting Noem’s apparent racial animus as a driving factor in her decision and that Haiti remains dangerous in the wake of the 2010 earthquake that destabilized the country. In February, U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes paused the loss of Haitian immigrants’ TPS until the lawsuit works its way through the courts. Last month, Representative Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) brought a discharge petition to force a vote on a measure to restore TPS to Haitian immigrants.
Johnson has tried to do Trump’s bidding even though it means ignoring what members of Congress actually want. It is possible for members to force a measure to the floor even after the speaker bottles it up through something called a “discharge petition,” by getting a majority of members of Congress to agree to override the speaker, but such an action is exceedingly rare because it requires members of the majority to side with the minority against their own speaker. Or it was exceedingly rare before this Congress. Herb Scribner of Axios noted last year that there were seven successful discharge petitions in the 30 years between 1985 and 2015; there were the same number from 2023 to 2025.
Four Republicans, all of them from purple districts, joined all the Democrats to sign Pressley’s discharge petition. Then when the measure came up for a vote, six more Republicans voted in favor of it. As Berlatsky notes, the bill probably won’t pass the Senate, but not only did it demonstrate Johnson’s weakness, it also, as Jamie Dupree of Regular Order noted, was a real rebuke to Trump on immigration. And it was bipartisan.
That was not the end of Johnson’s bad day. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978 was scheduled to expire on April 20, and Trump and Republican loyalists wanted simply to renew it. But members of both parties have issues with Section 702 of that act, which allows the government to collect information about the communications of foreigners without getting a warrant from a judge. But there are increasing signs the government is also collecting data from Americans without a warrant, and members of both parties concerned about government overreach have refused to extend the law without reforms to 702.
Republican leaders tried to force through a five-year extension just after midnight on Friday, but while four Democrats voted in favor of the measure, twelve Republicans voted against it, sending the measure down to a loss by 20 votes. Then Johnson tried to push through an 18-month extension. Twenty Republicans voted against even considering it. Finally, the House agreed to extend the law for just ten days.
Today, Virginians passed a redistricting referendum that will boost the Democrats’ chances of winning four more seats in the U.S. House. Redistricting in the middle of a decade is rare, but after Trump pressed Texas to rejigger its maps to give Republicans more House seats, California retaliated with its own temporary redistricting to offset the new Texas seats. Other states followed suit. As David A. Lieb of the Associated Press explained today, Republicans currently believe that their redistricting of Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, and Texas will net them nine more seats. Democrats think their redistricting of California, along with a court-ordered redistricting of Utah, will get them an additional six seats. They are hoping that redistricting Virginia temporarily will make up the difference.
Zachary Roth of Democracy Docket noted that Trump ally Steve Bannon warned on his podcast Monday that “Democrats are demonic” and said that if allowed to have power, they will impeach Trump. “Not just, are they going to take power and use these four seats to impeach Trump?” he said, “But they’re going to use this as a template for the rest of the country. It’s coming.”
Rec League is a new app for sharing what you’re into. Catalog recommendations into tidy collections: your guide to Rome, your open tabs, your bookshelf. Follow people whose perspectives you trust, and discover brilliant, unexpected intel. Recently featured as the “Best New App” in the App Store. One user calls it “the only social media I feel better after using.” Download now to share what you love.
From Finbar Curtin and Matthew G. Burgess, here is the paper. Here is the thread, worth a read. Important stuff, I hope to hear more about this. The whole climate to gdp transmission thing does not seem to be working very well?
The Internet Archive copy from yesterday shows a checkbox there. Claude Code used to be a feature of the $20/month Pro plan, but according to the new pricing page it is now exclusive to the $100/month or $200/month Max plans.
Update: don't miss the update to this post, they've already changed course a few hours after this change went live.
So what the heck is going on? Unsurprisingly, Reddit and Hacker News and Twitter all caught fire.
I didn't believe the screenshots myself when I first saw them - aside from the pricing grid I could find no announcement from Anthropic anywhere. Then Amol Avasare, Anthropic's Head of Growth, tweeted:
For clarity, we're running a small test on ~2% of new prosumer signups. Existing Pro and Max subscribers aren't affected.
And that appears to be the closest we have had to official messaging from Anthropic.
I don't buy the "~2% of new prosumer signups" thing, since everyone I've talked to is seeing the new pricing grid and the Internet Archive has already snapped a copy. Maybe he means that they'll only be running this version of the pricing grid for a limited time which somehow adds up to "2%" of signups?
I'm also amused to see Claude Cowork remain available on the $20/month plan, because Claude Cowork is effectively a rebranded version of Claude Code wearing a less threatening hat!
There are a whole bunch of things that are bad about this.
If we assume this is indeed a test, and that test comes up negative and they decide not to go ahead with it, the damage has still been extensive:
A whole lot of people got scared or angry or both that a service they relied on was about to be rug-pulled. There really is a significant difference between $20/month and $100/month for most people, especially outside of higher salary countries.
The uncertainty is really bad! A tweet from an employee is not the way to make an announcement like this. I wasted a solid hour of my afternoon trying to figure out what had happened here. My trust in Anthropic's transparency around pricing - a crucial factor in how I understand their products - has been shaken.
Strategically, should I be taking a bet on Claude Code if I know that they might 5x the minimum price of the product?
More of a personal issue, but one I care deeply about myself: I invest a great deal of effort (that's 105 posts and counting) in teaching people how to use Claude Code. I don't want to invest that effort in a product that most people cannot afford to use.
Last month I ran a tutorial for journalists on "Coding agents for data analysis" at the annual NICAR data journalism conference. I'm not going to be teaching that audience a course that depends on a $100/month subscription!
This also doesn't make sense to me as a strategy for Anthropic. Claude Code defined the category of coding agents. It's responsible for billions of dollars in annual revenue for Anthropic already. It has a stellar reputation, but I'm not convinced that reputation is strong enough for it to lose the $20/month trial and jump people directly to a $100/month subscription.
OpenAI have been investing heavily in catching up to Claude Code with their Codex products. Anthropic just handed them this marketing opportunity on a plate - here's Codex engineering lead Thibault Sottiaux:
I don't know what they are doing over there, but Codex will continue to be available both in the FREE and PLUS ($20) plans. We have the compute and efficient models to support it. For important changes, we will engage with the community well ahead of making them.
Transparency and trust are two principles we will not break, even if it means momentarily earning less. A reminder that you vote with your subscription for the values you want to see in this world.
I should note that I pay $200/month for Claude Max and I consider it well worth the money. I've had periods of free access in the past courtesy of Anthropic but I'm currently paying full price, and happy to do so.
But I care about the accessibility of the tools that I work with and teach. If Codex has a free tier while Claude Code starts at $100/month I should obviously switch to Codex, because that way I can use the same tool as the people I want to teach how to use coding agents.
Here's what I think happened. I think Anthropic are trying to optimize revenue growth - obviously - and someone pitched making Claude Code only available for Max and higher. That's clearly a bad idea, but "testing" culture says that it's worth putting even bad ideas out to test just in case they surprise you.
So they started a test, without taking into account the wailing and gnashing of teeth that would result when their test was noticed - or accounting for the longer-term brand damage that would be caused.
Or maybe they did account for that, and decided it was worth the risk.
I don't think that calculation was worthwhile. They're going to have to make a very firm commitment along the lines of "we heard your feedback and we commit to keeping Claude Code available on our $20/month plan going forward" to regain my trust.
As it stands, Codex is looking like a much safer bet for me to invest my time in learning and building educational materials around.
Update: they've reversed it already
In the time I was typing this blog entry Anthropic appear to have reversed course - the claude.com/pricing page now has a checkbox back in the Pro column for Claude Code. I can't find any official communication about it though.
Let's see if they can come up with an explanation/apology that's convincing enough to offset the trust bonfire from this afternoon!
As part of our continued collaboration with Anthropic, we had the opportunity to apply an early version of Claude Mythos Preview to Firefox. This week’s release of Firefox 150 includes fixes for 271 vulnerabilities identified during this initial evaluation. [...]
Our experience is a hopeful one for teams who shake off the vertigo and get to work. You may need to reprioritize everything else to bring relentless and single-minded focus to the task, but there is light at the end of the tunnel. We are extremely proud of how our team rose to meet this challenge, and others will too. Our work isn’t finished, but we’ve turned the corner and can glimpse a future much better than just keeping up. Defenders finally have a chance to win, decisively.
On the same day as Claude Code's temporary will-they-won't-they $100/month kerfuffle (for the moment, they won't), here's the latest on GitHub Copilot pricing.
Unlike Anthropic, GitHub put up an official announcement about their changes, which include tightening usage limits, pausing signups for individual plans (!), restricting Claude Opus 4.7 to the more expensive $39/month "Pro+" plan, and dropping the previous Opus models entirely.
The key paragraph:
Agentic workflows have fundamentally changed Copilot’s compute demands. Long-running, parallelized sessions now regularly consume far more resources than the original plan structure was built to support. As Copilot’s agentic capabilities have expanded rapidly, agents are doing more work, and more customers are hitting usage limits designed to maintain service reliability.
It's easy to forget that just six months ago heavy LLM users were burning an order of magnitude less tokens. Coding agents consume a lot of compute.
Copilot was also unique (I believe) among agents in charging per-request, not per-token. (Correction: Windsurf also operated a credit system like this which they abandoned last month.) This means that single agentic requests which burn more tokens cut directly into their margins. The most recent pricing scheme addresses that with token-based usage limits on a per-session and weekly basis.
My one problem with this announcement is that it doesn't clearly clarify which product called "GitHub Copilot" is affected by these changes. Last month in How many products does Microsoft have named 'Copilot'? I mapped every one Tey Bannerman identified 75 products that share the Copilot brand, 15 of which have "GitHub Copilot" in the title.
Judging by the linked GitHub Copilot plans page this covers Copilot CLI, Copilot cloud agent and code review (features on GitHub.com itself), and the Copilot IDE features available in VS Code, Zed, JetBrains and more.
Despite legal pledges to reduce greenhouse gases to address climate change, Portland’s transportation greenhouse gas emissions are going up, not down.
State, regional and city governments have adopted climate goals that purport to commit to steadily reducing greenhouse gases, but we’re not merely failing to make progress, we’re going in the wrong direction.
In the face of these persistent failures, Oregon is moving forward with plans to billions and billions dollars into three Portland area freeway widening projects. As a result, April 22 isn’t so much Earth Day as a macabre Groundhog Day, where every year we’re reneging in a bigger and more expensive way on our climate pledges, even as the crisis grows worse.
For us at City Observatory, Earth Day has officially become the new Groundhog Day. Every year, we wake up to the same repeating script: the climate crisis accelerates, transportation-related greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions climb, and our public agencies double down on subsidizing automobile travel, in flat violation of state and local pledges to reduce driving to fight climate change.
Like Bill Murray’s character in the movie, we are trapped in a loop. Only this year, the script has taken a darker, more expensive turn.
An Abject Failure to Reduce Emissions from Driving
All of the objective data on greenhouse gas emissions shows we’re failing to meet our stated and legally adopted climate goals, chiefly because transportation emissions are increasing, and we’re driving more. ClimateTrace.org, which tracks transportation greenhouse gas emissions throughout the United States has data showing the Portland area emissions have increased substantially over the past five years, even as state law and local plans call for emissions to continuously decrease. Metro’s adopted regional Climate Smart Strategy calls for us to reduce greenhouse gases by almost 5 percent per year; instead, they are increasing, at more than three-fourths of one percent per year.
Compared to the promises made by the City, the region and the state, we’re not merely failing to make progress, we’re going rapidly in the wrong direction.
You’d think with the data showing that we’re falling far behind our planned and committed reductions in greenhouse gases and driving, that state and local officials would be re-doubling their efforts to lower greenhouse gases. Today, as in prior years, you would be wrong. Instead, the Oregon Department of Transportation is proposing to commit the region to spending tens of billions of dollars, largely to subsidize even more driving, and higher levels of greenhouse gas emissions.
As we describe below, Portland established its environmental reputation–and fostered dramatic economic improvements–starting in the 1970s by tearing out some freeways and choosing not to build others. The environmental legacy of freeway removal is not merely forgotten, its being actively demolished by a transportation department that is hell-bent on building wider highways and increasing traffic and greenhouse gas emissions. Between the $15.5 billion Interstate Bridge Replacement project, the $2.1 billion I-5 Rose Quarter Project, and a plan to rebuild and widen the I-205 Abernethy Bridge at $815 million, ODOT is embarked on a multi-billion dollar highway building spree. And that’s just the beginning, because these projects have almost invariably gone over budget, and more expansions (a wider I-205 on either side of the Abernethy Bridge, and plans to widen the I-5 Boone Bridge) will generate even more debt and traffic.
The math doesn’t add up. Oregon’s adopted climate plans explicitly call for a 10% reduction in aggregate vehicle miles traveled (VMT). You cannot achieve a 10% reduction while building projects predicated on a 25% increase in driving. Planning for all of these project’s is predicated on models that call for driving to go up, when state policy insists that driving will go down.
Four years ago, a New York Times story asked the question, “Can Portland be a climate leader without reducing driving?” The Oregon Department of Transportation is still answering that question with an emphatic “No.” In the face of increasing driving and greenhouse gas emissions, its planning a multi-billion dollar series of highway expansion projects that will only further increase greenhouse gas emissions. That’s how they really celebrate Earth Day..
The New York Times, April 22, 2022
The Oregon Department of Transportation’s plans to squander billions of dollars widening area highways plainly undermines State, regional, and city commitments to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Driving is the single largest source of climate pollution in Portland, and it has grown 20 percent, by more than a million tons per year, in the past five years.
Betraying Portland’s Legacy of Environmental Leadership
Five decades after the city earned national recognition for tearing out a downtown freeway, it gets ready to build more. Back in the day, Portland built its environmental cred by tearing out one downtown freeway, and cancelling another–and then taking the money it saved to build the first leg of its light rail system. In place of pavement and pollution, it put up parks. Portland made choice to remove the Harbor Drive freeway that blighted the city’s waterfront, and replace it with a beautiful and widely used park.
For decades, city and state political leaders have celebrated this legacy, and proudly touted our environmental leadership based on these bold and far-sighted steps. It is bitterly ironic, and tragic, that half a century after proving that removing freeways promotes livability, economic vitality and thriving cities, Oregon is now embarking on an unprecedented huge expansion of highway capacity, and exactly the time the climate crisis has come plainly into view.
Portland was smart enough to stop building freeways half a century ago, when environmentalism was in its infancy, and the prospects of climate change were not nearly so evident. Why aren’t we smart enough to do the same today?
Happy Earth Day, or actually Groundhog Day, everyone. We’ve squandered another year, and a planning to squander billions in the face of a growing crisis. Let’s all be ready for yet another long hot, smoky summer as we endure the increasingly obvious and unavoidable effects of climate change. See you next year.
Beyond the border of Washington, D.C., numerous suburbs spread across Virginia and Maryland. Many are accessible from the Capital Beltway (I-495), the highway that encircles Washington. An astronaut on the International Space Station captured this photo of the beltway’s northeast side where it passes through the historic city of Greenbelt, Maryland.
The photo was taken on July 30, 2023, a time of year when the region’s vegetation is lush and green. One of the more prominent green spaces in this image is Greenbelt Park. The park’s nearly 5 square kilometers (2 square miles) contain forested hiking trails, several picnic areas, and a campground. The land was once intended as a future extension of the city of Greenbelt, but it was acquired by the National Park Service in 1950.
Just north of the park, Greenbelt’s historic district is laid out in a crescent shape. The district is one of three planned communities that arose in the 1930s as part of the New Deal program, intended to provide work for the unemployed and to create affordable cooperative housing with accessible green space. Homes connect to walking paths, which in turn connect to one of the country’s oldest planned shopping centers.
A collection of buildings east of the beltway is NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, established in Greenbelt on May 1, 1959, as NASA’s first spaceflight complex. Several patches of forested land separate some of the buildings. The large green spaces north of Goddard are a mix of forested land and agricultural fields in the town of Beltsville, which include University of Maryland and USDA agricultural research sites. The main campus of the University of Maryland is visible just west of Greenbelt in College Park.
Other nearby tree-lined areas are visible as well. For instance, Hyattsville, just south of College Park, has been recognized as a “tree city” for more than three decades. In addition, trees line a large segment of the Baltimore-Washington Parkway (MD-295), which runs north-south between Baltimore and Washington and bisects Greenbelt Park.
Astronaut photograph ISS069-E-39302 was acquired on July 30, 2023, with a Nikon D5 digital camera using a focal length of 1150 millimeters. It was provided by the ISS Crew Earth Observations Facility and the Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit at NASA Johnson Space Center. The image was taken by a member of the Expedition 69 crew. The image has been cropped and enhanced to improve contrast, and lens artifacts have been removed. The International Space Station Program supports the laboratory as part of the ISS National Lab to help astronauts take pictures of Earth that will be of the greatest value to scientists and the public, and to make those images freely available on the Internet. Additional images taken by astronauts and cosmonauts can be viewed at the NASA/JSC Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth. Story by Kathryn Hansen.
We do not know whether technological unemployment swept across England in the wake of the British Industrial Revolution. In this paper, I propose an approach to quantify jobs lost to, and created by, creative destruction in the 19th century. Using over 170 million individual records from the full-count British census (1851–1911), I generate sub-industry “task” level occupational data. I apply this to the English bootmaking industry as it mechanized. The new data reveal sharp structural changes: 152,000 artisanal jobs disappeared as skills became obsolete, while 144,000 new jobs emerged. However, incumbent bootmakers were rarely displaced. Instead, the decline was driven by young men no longer entering the artisanal trade. These findings challenge assumptions about displacement, showing how slow adoption and persistent demand can shield existing workers, while opportunities vanish for new entrants.
Daring Fireball t-shirts and hoodies are back. Order now, and we’ll start printing shirts at the end of this week and shipping them out next week. The hoodies are a new model from Bella Canvas, the manufacturer. Our previous hoodies were “heather gray” and the fabric was a blend of 50% polyester, 37.5% cotton, and 12.5% rayon. That model is being phased out. So we’ve switched to a new model that’s 85% cotton, 15% polyester, and a darker “heather black” color. The old ones were good, but the new ones feel even better.
Market Design
