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Marginal Revolution

A new hypothesis (from my email)

Tyler Cowen
Updated

From Anonymous:

Hello Professor Cowen,

I hope all is well with you and that you have navigated the recent weather alright.

I have a thought that I wanted to run by you that related to phones and teen anxiety.

You have cited a variety of studies that say that phones and social media do not cause anxiety. As you may recall, I have taught junior high and high school for almost 30 years. I did see a big spike in anxiety for my students, especially females, around the years 2010-2017/18ish. I used to think “phones,” but now I’m not sure. The anxiety spike has declined. My last ‘anxious’ class of seniors are now seniors in college. Students today are on the phones as much as those in the past.

Here is my theory: Students started to feel more anxious around 2010 because they could sense the coming seismic cultural and political shifts coming, of which phones were a harbinger or carrier. They were mostly not conscious of this, and couldn’t express it, but they were trying to cope.

Now, they have coped. My current seniors have unusual political ideas but are mostly optimistic. I contrast them to a centrist friend of mine who does some DC work and constantly thinks the sky is falling.

Now, adults are more anxious, not students. Adults are starting to see these seismic shifts and they are trying to cope. Perhaps they are projecting their own anxiety onto their kids, and are behind the times with the cause. Phones may have helped drive anxiety 10 years ago, but maybe not anymore. Students have coped and adjusted to a new equilibrium.

It is also possible that phones serve as a good/useful “myth” (I mean this in a positive sense) for the shifts we are seeing and the anxiety many feel . We need something tangible to hold our thoughts on the shifts in culture, and we have chosen phones. Thus, the clash over phones today might be between those who think in mythic/symbolic ways, and those who think in more scientific ways. Both are right in their own perspective. The new cultural and political shifts over the last 10-15 years would naturally bring on anxiety. Phones are not the cause of the shift, but a good symbol of it.

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Noahpinion

Why America's extremes will both fail

Noah Smith
Updated
"Antifa (50840022832)" by Chad Davis from United States, CC BY 2.0

These days it seems like the only things to write about are politics and AI. I wrote about AI last time, so today I’ll write about politics.

Here is my basic theory of American politics in the 2020s: The United States is a nation of moderates ruled by a fringe of extremists. The extremists rule because they are more engaged than the moderates — they spend more time thinking about politics and doing political activism. In Martin Gurri’s terms, the extremists are the “public” and the moderates are the “populace”.

There are several reasons why American politics is dominated by extremists. The well-known one is the closed-primary party system. Republicans win primaries not by aligning with the median voter, but by aligning with the median Republican voter — usually in an area that’s already right-leaning to begin with. The same is true of Democrats.

But that has been true for a while. The fundamental reason why American politics is more extremist-dominated than in the past is technological. Modern social media bypasses traditional hierarchies and institutions and gathers together communities of like-minded extremists who then create challenges to traditional institutions; it also provides these extremists a platform in which their emotionally charged messages are more likely to go viral than messages of positivity and reason.

The moderate majority increasingly avoids the politically charged, extremist-dominated online spaces. That gives lots of Americans more peace of mind, but it also means that online spaces become more and more extremist as moderates leave.1 This is the conclusion of Törnberg (2025):

Using nationally representative data from the 2020 and 2024 American National Election Studies (ANES), this paper traces how the U.S. social media landscape has shifted…Overall platform use has declined, with the youngest and oldest Americans increasingly abstaining from social media altogether. Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter/X have lost ground, while TikTok and Reddit have grown modestly, reflecting a more fragmented digital public sphere….Across platforms, political posting remains tightly linked to affective polarization, as the most partisan users are also the most active. As casual users disengage and polarized partisans remain vocal, the online public sphere grows smaller, sharper, and more ideologically extreme. [emphasis mine]

In case you like charts, here’s one from the paper showing that extremists post more than moderates:

Source: Törnberg (2025)

If extremists remained online, shouting at each other or shouting into the void, this would be a good and healthy process for a nation weary of culture wars. But the people who dominate real-world politics are increasingly drawn from this pool of online extremists. I am talking not about elected politicians themselves, but about the activists who create and promulgate political ideologies, the think tankers who translate those ideologies into policy ideas, the lobbyists who promote those policy ideas to politicians, and the staffers politicians hire to decide which ideas to embrace, and how.

Let’s talk about those staffers for a moment. Staffers write legislation, advise elected officials on policy, and handle lots of public communications. While politicians are out fundraising, pressing the flesh, or giving speeches to increasingly outdated TV news networks, their staffers are busy with the business of running the country. These staffers are much younger than the politicians they ostensibly serve — the typical Congressional staffer is in their late 20s, while the typical Congressperson is in their late 50s.

This means staffers are more online, and thus spend their days lost in the extremist maelstrom of social media, mainlining rightist conspiracy theories on X and leftist tropes on TikTok. Staffers are also unelected, which means they don’t have to cater to regular voters; they are free to pursue radical ideologies, support radical movements, and put out extremist messaging unless their bosses explicitly act to rein them in.2 There are plenty of anecdotes about how staffers in both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party are more extremist than the politicians they serve — to say nothing of the country as a whole.

For a concrete example of this, take the recent contretemps over one of Donald Trump’s racist social media posts. Trump’s Truth Social account posted a video depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes:

After a general outcry, the racist video was taken down. A White House official stated — and Trump later confirmed — that the video was posted not by Trump himself, but by a staffer. Trump refused to apologize for the video, demonstrating how extremist staffers can essentially force the politicians who employ them to take more radical positions.

These 28-year-old extremely online radicals — along with the larger network of think tankers, lobbyists, and activists with whom they are deeply enmeshed — are a key part of America’s ruling class, invisible and unaccountable and unelected and more powerful than almost anyone realizes.

Anyway, regular Americans sense this and are distinctly unhappy with it. Majorities say both parties are too extreme:

Source: Pew

And voters are voting with their feet, leaving both parties and registering as Independents in record numbers:

Source: Gallup

But although this is a very natural way to express disapproval with the two parties, it ends up exacerbating extremism, just like when moderates abandon social media. Independents can’t vote in closed primaries, so the people who remain registered as Democrats and Republicans are going to end up nominating even more extremist candidates, forcing regular Americans to choose between two even more polarized extremes — and simply increasing their frustration and disaffection.

This is all very bad for America, and I don’t have a way to fix it, other than A) transitioning to open primaries and B) bringing back the Fairness Doctrine and applying it to social media — two things that nobody is going to do. But watching the behavior of America’s two extremist movements, I don’t think either of them is going to be durable and successful.

I think this is true for many reasons. American voters are unlikely to keep either party in power for long at the national level, and instead will more likely ping-pong back and forth between them as they grow disgusted with the performance of each. Social media activism and memes will push both parties toward unworkably extreme policies — stupid tariffs, unchecked government borrowing, and so on. Online spaces will make it ever harder for real leaders to emerge on either side, as reasonable moderates are quickly “cancelled” by mobs hunting for the smallest peccadillo.

But on top of that, I see some core tendencies that are particular to the American right and left — the MAGA movement and the progressive movement — that strike me as maladaptive and seem to portend long-term weakness.

On the right, a big problem is that the MAGA movement is relentlessly focused on shrinking its coalition. Winning coalitions in politics are built by gathering together various groups and aligning them toward shared goals. Trump did a good job of that in 2024, assembling a startlingly diverse, broad-based electoral majority. But MAGA insists on attacking every group it could bring into its tent.

As an example, just look at that video Trump’s staffer just posted — and which Trump defended, even though some Republicans condemned it. One way that Trump enlarged his coalition in 2024 was to persuade some Black voters to switch sides:

In 2024, Trump won 15 percent of Black voters — according to Pew Research’s widely cited validated voter survey — an increase from the 8 percent he won four years earlier. A pre-election Pew poll found that the economy and health care were the most important issues for the voting bloc[.]

15 percent doesn’t sound like much, but an 8 percentage point shift is big, and every vote counts. Does Trump think posting videos showing prominent Black people as apes will help him solidify that small Black conservative contingent as part of an enduring GOP coalition? It doesn’t seem like he cares.

Nor is this an isolated incident. James Fishback, a Republican primary candidate for governor of Florida, recently referenced “goy slop” — an antisemitic conspiracy theory that says that Jews are forcing gentiles to consume low-quality goods. This is just one example of a rising tide of antisemitism in the GOP, which party leaders like Ted Cruz have acknowledged. That will probably prevent a major exodus of Jewish voters from an increasingly anti-Israel Democratic Party.

Meanwhile, ICE’s racial profiling and raids on Hispanic-owned businesses are starting to drive away Hispanics who were a crucial part of Trump’s winning coalition in 2024. MAGA has not explicitly demonized Hispanics as a group, and many who voted for Trump believed that he would distinguish between citizens, legal residents, and illegal immigrants. But like every other big U.S. deportation effort since 1930, Trump’s current crackdown involves a significant degree of enforcers simply grabbing people who look Mexican and holding them on suspicion of being illegal.

And MAGA is attacking Indian immigration as well. A wave of anti-Indian sentiment among online Trump supporters has spilled over into the real world. Texas’ Governor Greg Abbott has stopped public universities and the state government from hiring H-1B workers (most of whom are Indian). This will hurt the state economy, which depends on Indian doctors and other professionals for essential services. Whether it will hurt the GOP with Indian-American voters remains to be seen, but I doubt it will help.

There are also signs that MAGA is starting to turn against East Asians. A couple of years ago, affirmative action in college admissions was struck down by SCOTUS after a MAGA-aligned group sued Harvard for discriminating against Asians. That raised the possibility that MAGA’s ostensible defense of meritocracy might win over some Asian voters to the GOP. But then right-wing commentator Helen Andrews went on a multi-day tirade against Asian immigrant culture, alleging that Asians threaten the American way of life by working too hard in school and succeeding too much, while also claiming (rather farcically) that Asians benefit from workplace DEI programs:

The idea that Asians are going to destroy American culture by working too hard is ridiculous — an obviously ad-hoc fabricated excuse to attack a minority group that succeeds financially, comes in legally, and tends to commit very little crime. It also happens to be wrong (Asian “grind culture” is simply another case of immigrant striver culture, which tends to fade by later generations). And if the rest of MAGA takes up this line, it seems likely to alienate the Asian voters who shifted toward the GOP in 2024, many of whom were alarmed at Democrats’ attacks on educational meritocracy.

It’s hard to think of a group of Americans — other than White Protestants — that the MAGA movement has not turned its outrage machine on. Indeed, the whole movement has come to resemble a roving Eye of Sauron that constantly looks around for a new racial enemy to attack, switching targets every year or so.

This is not a way to build an electoral coalition. There are far too few White Protestants to form an electoral majority in America, no matter how many people ICE deports or how many visa-seekers and refugees Trump turns away. Instead, Trump’s movement will simply drive away one ally or potential ally after another, shrinking the tent as they go.

My sense is that this is structural. MAGA leaders — politicians, pundits, and so on — energize their base by stirring up fear of racial “others”, but then back off when they receive sufficient pushback and accusations of racism. So they have to keep cycling through targets, so they can keep stirring up their core voters’ anxieties without having any one particular minority become the focus for liberals’ defensive efforts.

As a result, they just end up alienating everyone, one by one. At its core, MAGA is a xenophobic movement that gains a lot of its power from the fear of racial enemies; this is a poor long-term strategy in a diverse democracy.

As for progressive extremism, I think this will also fail, but for a very different reason.

Progressivism lost at the polls in 2024, but still dominates in many big cities and some states, and has had a chance to prove itself as a governing ideology over the last 10 to 15 years. It has failed. I highly recommend this article about the decay and decline of Portland, revered as a progressive mecca in the previous decade. Some key excerpts:

Last fall, after the city acquired a reputation for crime, homelessness, and dysfunction, Oregon politicians rushed to media outlets to assure the nation that the city was not literally on fire…[But] Portland is constantly on fire. In the year following July 2024, Portland had 6,268 fire-related incidents – and 40% of the fires in the city are a direct result of Portland’s out-of-control vagrancy…

[Jeff] Eager says one key reason why the city’s massive crime problem goes unaddressed is that it’s largely self-inflicted and driven by ideology. “Hard core progressivism has destroyed what old school Oregon liberals built – farmers markets, parks, walkable communities, transit, and all the good kind of Portlandia-era liberal lifestyle stuff,” said Eager. “This brand of progressivism is just so against the rule of law, it’s ruined all those institutions that made Portland a cool, trendy, quirky place. It's not really quirky anymore. It's dangerous.”

Portland now has the second-highest crime rate of any city in America, behind Memphis. About one out of every 16 people in the city is the victim of a crime every year…The lack of law enforcement became obvious to everyone during the summer of 2020…As part of the Defund the Police movement that year, Portland’s leftist city council cut $15 million from the city’s law enforcement budget, eliminating 84 jobs in the police department – with predictable results. By November 2021, [the mayor] acknowledged “many Portlanders no longer feel safe,” and the city council began the process of restoring some funding to the department – though the police are at loggerheads with local politicians and the department remains chronically understaffed. [emphasis mine]

Portland’s plight is especially notable because it contrasts with a pretty epic nationwide decline in crime. It’s obvious that progressive extremist ideas about tolerant approaches toward crime have prevented Portland from fully participating in that happy trend — murders fell in 2025, but property crime remained sky-high.

Another likely example of this is the epidemic of copper theft in Los Angeles, that is literally turning lights off across the city.3 The main impetus for the theft wave, of course, is the rising price of copper, which makes it more valuable to steal. But California has a pandemic-era law saying that theft of under $950 worth of goods is a misdemeanor, not a felony. That law has now been watered down, and some exceptions added, but it still makes it hard to prosecute petty thieves.

When a swarm of petty thieves is crawling all over your city stripping out the wires, prosecuting and penalizing petty crime is exactly what you need to do. But a progressive criminal-justice “reform” back in 2014 made that harder.

The frequent failure of progressive cities to crack down on crime — and the progressive movement to make America more tolerant of criminals in general — undermine the entire left. This can be added to a litany of other progressive local and state government failures — not building enough housing, bankrupting cities through excessive spending, outsourcing government functions to NGOs, spending way too much on transit projects, and so on.

In all of these cases, what progressivism is doing is parasitizing the liberal institutions that allowed progressivism to exist in the first place. Liberals built the public libraries; progressives are destroying them by turning them into ad-hoc homeless shelters. Liberals built trains, but now people don’t want to ride the train because of crime and disorder, requiring big bailouts from the state of California. Progressive tolerance of bad behavior by the few — open drug use and sales, theft, street harassment — has turned parks, streets, and other types of urban commons into no-go zones for the bulk of the citizenry.

The pattern repeats itself: Liberals build, progressives come in and demand more and more from the system liberals built, until the system collapses. As yet, liberalism seems to have evolved no defense against this; for at least a decade, nobody seems to be able to say no to progressive demands.

This is why I believe that both the American right and the American left will fail — and indeed, are already failing wherever they gain power. Extremist ideas are generally bad at actually governing, but good at winning hearts and minds in online chat groups. Of course, this provides cold comfort for those of us who will suffer from America’s two flavors of bad governance. A country with two broken ideological programs is a deeply dysfunctional country.

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1

Eliezer Yudkowsky calls this “evaporative cooling of group beliefs”. I quite like the analogy.

2

I did find one paper claiming that staffers are more moderate than politicians in general, but I don’t trust this measure of moderation.

3

It should be noted that L.A.’s problems with homeless people starting fires are even bigger than Portland’s by some measures.

California
Hacker News
Simon Willison's Weblog

How StrongDM's AI team build serious software without even looking at the code

Last week I hinted at a demo I had seen from a team implementing what Dan Shapiro called the Dark Factory level of AI adoption, where no human even looks at the code the coding agents are producing. That team was part of StrongDM, and they've just shared the first public description of how they are working in Software Factories and the Agentic Moment:

We built a Software Factory: non-interactive development where specs + scenarios drive agents that write code, run harnesses, and converge without human review. [...]

In kōan or mantra form:

  • Why am I doing this? (implied: the model should be doing this instead)

In rule form:

  • Code must not be written by humans
  • Code must not be reviewed by humans

Finally, in practical form:

  • If you haven't spent at least $1,000 on tokens today per human engineer, your software factory has room for improvement

I think the most interesting of these, without a doubt, is "Code must not be reviewed by humans". How could that possibly be a sensible strategy when we all know how prone LLMs are to making inhuman mistakes?

I've seen many developers recently acknowledge the November 2025 inflection point, where Claude Opus 4.5 and GPT 5.2 appeared to turn the corner on how reliably a coding agent could follow instructions and take on complex coding tasks. StrongDM's AI team was founded in July 2025 based on an earlier inflection point relating to Claude Sonnet 3.5:

The catalyst was a transition observed in late 2024: with the second revision of Claude 3.5 (October 2024), long-horizon agentic coding workflows began to compound correctness rather than error.

By December of 2024, the model's long-horizon coding performance was unmistakable via Cursor's YOLO mode.

Their new team started with the rule "no hand-coded software" - radical for July 2025, but something I'm seeing significant numbers of experienced developers start to adopt as of January 2026.

They quickly ran into the obvious problem: if you're not writing anything by hand, how do you ensure that the code actually works? Having the agents write tests only helps if they don't cheat and assert true.

This feels like the most consequential question in software development right now: how can you prove that software you are producing works if both the implementation and the tests are being written for you by coding agents?

StrongDM's answer was inspired by Scenario testing (Cem Kaner, 2003). As StrongDM describe it:

We repurposed the word scenario to represent an end-to-end "user story", often stored outside the codebase (similar to a "holdout" set in model training), which could be intuitively understood and flexibly validated by an LLM.

Because much of the software we grow itself has an agentic component, we transitioned from boolean definitions of success ("the test suite is green") to a probabilistic and empirical one. We use the term satisfaction to quantify this validation: of all the observed trajectories through all the scenarios, what fraction of them likely satisfy the user?

That idea of treating scenarios as holdout sets - used to evaluate the software but not stored where the coding agents can see them - is fascinating. It imitates aggressive testing by an external QA team - an expensive but highly effective way of ensuring quality in traditional software.

Which leads us to StrongDM's concept of a Digital Twin Universe - the part of the demo I saw that made the strongest impression on me.

The software they were building helped manage user permissions across a suite of connected services. This in itself was notable - security software is the last thing you would expect to be built using unreviewed LLM code!

[The Digital Twin Universe is] behavioral clones of the third-party services our software depends on. We built twins of Okta, Jira, Slack, Google Docs, Google Drive, and Google Sheets, replicating their APIs, edge cases, and observable behaviors.

With the DTU, we can validate at volumes and rates far exceeding production limits. We can test failure modes that would be dangerous or impossible against live services. We can run thousands of scenarios per hour without hitting rate limits, triggering abuse detection, or accumulating API costs.

How do you clone the important parts of Okta, Jira, Slack and more? With coding agents!

As I understood it the trick was effectively to dump the full public API documentation of one of those services into their agent harness and have it build an imitation of that API, as a self-contained Go binary. They could then have it build a simplified UI over the top to help complete the simulation.

With their own, independent clones of those services - free from rate-limits or usage quotas - their army of simulated testers could go wild. Their scenario tests became scripts for agents to constantly execute against the new systems as they were being built.

This screenshot of their Slack twin also helps illustrate how the testing process works, showing a stream of simulated Okta users who are about to need access to different simulated systems.

Screenshot of a Slack-like interface titled "DTU Slack" showing a thread view (Thread — C4B9FBB97) with "Focus first" and "Leave" buttons. The left sidebar lists channels including # org-general (182), # general (0) (shared×2), # it-support (0), # channel-0002 (0) (shared×2), # channel-0003 (0) through # channel-0020 (0), # org-finance (1), and a DMs section with a "Start" button. A "Create" button appears at the top of the sidebar. The main thread shows approximately 9 automated introduction messages from users with Okta IDs (e.g. @okta-u-423438-00001, @okta-u-423438-00002, etc.), all timestamped 2025-11-12Z between 18:50:31 and 18:51:51. Each message follows the format "Hi team! I'm [Name], joining as Employee in general. Key skills: [fictional skill phrases]. Excited to contribute!" All users have red/orange "O" avatar icons.

This ability to quickly spin up a useful clone of a subset of Slack helps demonstrate how disruptive this new generation of coding agent tools can be:

Creating a high fidelity clone of a significant SaaS application was always possible, but never economically feasible. Generations of engineers may have wanted a full in-memory replica of their CRM to test against, but self-censored the proposal to build it.

The techniques page is worth a look too. In addition to the Digital Twin Universe they introduce terms like Gene Transfusion for having agents extract patterns from existing systems and reuse them elsewhere, Semports for directly porting code from one language to another and Pyramid Summaries for providing multiple levels of summary such that an agent can enumerate the short ones quickly and zoom in on more detailed information as it is needed.

StrongDM AI also released some software - in an appropriately unconventional manner.

github.com/strongdm/attractor is Attractor, the non-interactive coding agent at the heart of their software factory. Except the repo itself contains no code at all - just three markdown files describing the spec for the software in meticulous detail, and a note in the README that you should feed those specs into your coding agent of choice!

github.com/strongdm/cxdb is a more traditional release, with 16,000 lines of Rust, 9,500 of Go and 6,700 of TypeScript. This is their "AI Context Store" - a system for storing conversation histories and tool outputs in an immutable DAG.

It's similar to my LLM tool's SQLite logging mechanism but a whole lot more sophisticated. I may have to gene transfuse some ideas out of this one!

A glimpse of the future?

I visited the StrongDM AI team back in October as part of a small group of invited guests.

The three person team of Justin McCarthy, Jay Taylor and Navan Chauhan had formed just three months earlier, and they already had working demos of their coding agent harness, their Digital Twin Universe clones of half a dozen services and a swarm of simulated test agents running through scenarios. And this was prior to the Opus 4.5/GPT 5.2 releases that made agentic coding significantly more reliable a month after those demos.

It felt like a glimpse of one potential future of software development, where software engineers move from building the code to building and then semi-monitoring the systems that build the code. The Dark Factory.

Wait, $1,000/day per engineer?

I glossed over this detail in my first published version of this post, but it deserves some serious attention.

If these patterns really do add $20,000/month per engineer to your budget they're far less interesting to me. At that point this becomes more of a business model exercise: can you create a profitable enough line of products that you can afford the enormous overhead of developing software in this way?

Building sustainable software businesses also looks very different when any competitor can potentially clone your newest features with a few hours of coding agent work.

I hope these patterns can be put into play with a much lower spend. I've personally found the $200/month Claude Max plan gives me plenty of space to experiment with different agent patterns, but I'm also not running a swarm of QA testers 24/7!

I think there's a lot to learn from StrongDM even for teams and individuals who aren't going to burn thousands of dollars on token costs. I'm particularly invested in the question of what it takes to have agents prove that their code works without needing to review every line of code they produce.

Tags: ai, generative-ai, llms, ai-assisted-programming, coding-agents, parallel-agents

Paul Krugman

My Head Talking to Hasan Minhaj

Paul Krugman
Updated

I didn’t interview anyone this week. So I thought I’d repost an interview I did a few months ago with Hasan Minhaj, which happens to include an airing of my Bitcoin skepticism, just after the 20 minute mark. Transcript follows.

Transcript

Miami isn’t for everyone

HM You like Miami?

PK No, I don’t like Miami.

HM Same. I don’t know what the is going on there.

PK: It’s not my favorite place. But, you know, there was a quote, there was an article about Wall Street types trying to move to Florida. One of them said that the problem with moving to Florida is that you have to live in Florida.

HM: Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman wrote for the New York Times for 25 years. But those stuffed shirts at the Times just couldn’t handle the heat from those Krugman takes, the fire he was spitting. So he left last year for Substack where he can let his freak flag fly. So I asked Professor Krugman to come on the show to help me make sense of the economic chaos President Trump is unleashing on the country and the world. I also asked him his thoughts on crypto. I think crypto is basically a scam. Whether the Nobel Prize for economics is basically just a kid’s choice award for intellectuals. You get a surfboard. And if he’s getting in touch with his inner Chapo trap house on Substack. Paul, you team Luigi or what?

You were at a huge institution for two and a half decades and now we get to see Kugman unleashed. This goes pretty hard in the paint. Uh the title of this on your Substack is “health insurance is a racket.”

PK: Um I think I would have been able to say that for 24 years at the Times. Not sure in the last year I would have gotten away with it.

HM I mean would they have let you run that photo? Well Christ I mean that is crazy.

PK I mean, I don’t approve of murder, but one of the rules of blogging and now substacking is picking an eye grabbing picture is part of the service.

HM Let’s zoom out literally. So, this is planet Earth. We live here allegedly. And the economy happens here.

What is the economy?

PK Alfred Marshall, great Victorian economist said that it’s the ordinary business of life. It’s if you like, it’s the least interesting part of what human beings do. It’s getting and spending, producing stuff, selling it, buying stuff. It’s the relatively materialistic side of life. There’s no hard and fast line between economics and other stuff, but generally speaking, if it involves producing or buying or selling, uh, then it’s economics.

HM Every time I listen to a president over the course of history, they always talk about economic growth. The fastest pace of economic growth in this country in nearly four decades. We’ve seen the fastest economic growth in over a decade. the fastest economic growth in more than 30 years.4% economic growth. Americans can be confident about our economic growth. But apparently the economy is supposed to just grow forever. But this same this stays the same size.

PK Yeah, that is less of a paradox than you think because we define economic growth by the value of stuff which is not the same as the volume of stuff. Britain emits less carbon dioxide per capita than it did in the 50s — the 1850s. A modern economy can run with very low emissions. We have the technology to do that and it produces all this valuable stuff. So there’s no one to one link between economic growth and consumption of resources or damage to the environment. In some ways economic growth makes it easier to have a clean economy because we can afford to do things to to clean it up. So when people say, finite planet how can we have infinite economic growth it’s missing the point that economic growth can be qualitative instead of quantitative. You know, we say economic growth, but we what we really mean is a rising standard of living, better quality of life. And there’s no reason we can’t keep on improving the quality of life on a finite planet.

Now, the problem is that that takes policies. You need to do it right. But it can be done.

HM Sometimes when I watch the news I’ll hear newscasters also say economists say economists say economists say many economists say economists say no economist say economist say economist say economist say so many economists say economists all say every economist in the country says when people hear economists say should they see it as fact or as opinion

PK Well that’s a favorite beef of mine and in general it really really depends. Unfortunately you need some guidance as to who to believe and who to trust. if it’s a economist who works for a highly politicized think tank, no. If it’s an economist who works for Wall Street, well, there are some to trust and some who are basically selling stock. So, there are certainly a bunch of really good economists in America, in the world. and the trouble I guess for everybody else is to know who they are.

HM Have you always felt a hesitance to make predictions as an economist? Because as you know, one of the famous Krugman memes uh was your meme about the internet in 1998.

PK What people don’t know is that that was partially a joke. If you read the actual article, I was assigned to write as if I was looking back from a hundred years in the future.

HM So, you were trolling

PK I was trolling a little bit. I was trying to get people’s attention.

HM No, no, no. Because Paul, I’ve had egg certainly splattered on my face. I don’t know if you’ve seen this meme with me. It says Sega Saturn is the greatest video game system ever. Nothing will ever beat it. Trust me, bro. With the zero.

PK Yeah. You know, I I was skeptical a bit about the potential of the internet. I was wrong on some of it. Although if you actually look at the rise in living standards since broadband became universal, it actually is kind of disappointing. The truth is that if you’re actually looking for the payoff to all of this high-tech, it’s a little elusive.

HM Meaning the actual payout for technology and the internet if you actually look

PK Yeah. If you actually look at how much can an average worker afford to buy, that hasn’t gone up all that much with all of this technology. Now, there are some things that were not available before. You know, I I spend a lot of my evenings watching live musical performances on NPR Tiny Desk, and then then I follow up the bands I like. Every weekday my Substack post ends with a musical clip. So there are some things that that the internet has made possible but you know a lot of people were expecting a real boom in manufacturing productivity or a real uh a real reduction in the cost of living relative to wages out of the internet and so far that hasn’t happened.

HM Let’s take a look in a snapshot of where we’re at right now. The President Donald Trump promised that he was going to make America more affordable again. How’s that going?

PK Yeah, that’s going badly. I mean inflation has picked up some. It will pick up more because all of all these tariffs are raising the cost of imported goods. Some of the other stuff we’re starting to see food prices tick up and it’s going to get worse because of the deportations because who do you think picks crops in America? He had no plan to do that. It was I’m going to magically make prices go down and in fact most of the things he’s doing are going to make them go up.

HM Can I ask a question? Do prices ever go down? So not to brag um I am a road comedian. I do both A, B, and C markets. No matter where I go in this great country, I’ll hear three things. The rent is too damn high. Have you seen the price of gas? And back in my day, a piece of candy used to be a nickel. Isn’t inflation always going to be a part of the equation? Meaning candy’s never going to be a nickel, you boomer. Yeah, it’s we haven’t seen prices go down ever, right? For well, you have to go back to the 19th century. We actually had deflation.

PK Well, we had deflation in the 1930s, which was not fun. And we had deflation in the late 19th century, which was not fun. Uh, in general, it’s kind of a consensus among economists that a little bit of inflation is actually good.

HM 2%, right?

PK Yeah. 2% is the official target. And a little bit of magic went into coming up with that number but that the economy runs a little bit better with 2% inflation than it would with zero inflation and falling prices is a really bad thing. Japan had falling prices for a couple of decades.

HM And that’s deflation

PK Correct, yeah ,so overall prices basically rise because in the end the Federal Reserve chooses to do its best to make sure that they rise a little bit.

HM So, when a politician repeatedly says, “I’m going to bring prices down.” Is it just safe to say, “Don’t believe it.”

PK Yes

HM The only minus gas for some reason, gas I’ve seen can skyrocket and then go back down and then skyrocket again. But pretty much everything else, look, a Snickers is going to be really expensive as time goes on. That’s what I’ve learned.

PK Yeah, I mean the price of soybeans or the price of wheat fluctuate and the price of eggs has been a real roller coaster up and down. So, they were up and then they were down and they’re going up again and that’s because that’s the kind of market they are. But it’s just not like the market for streaming services or something. Basically bird flu comes and goes and that’s what’s driving the price of eggs.

HM So, but the overall cost of living, uh, your best guess is that that’s going to rise 2% a year for the foreseeable future because the Federal Reserve wants it to rise 2% a year for the foreseeable future.

PK The only way that can change is if we get somebody like Donald Trump who gets his hands on monetary policy and decides that he wants to roll the printing presses. Any politician who promises to bring prices way down is either ignorant or lying or both.

HM I’m so glad that you mentioned the Fed and the president. Two-part question. What is the Fed and why is it important that the Fed is independent from the president?

PK Okay, so basically the Fed controls the amount of money in circulation.

HM Got it.

PK And that can have a tremendously powerful influence, right? It depends on the circumstances, but there have been times when the economy was terrible shape, 10% unemployment, and the Fed said, “Okay, it’s time to roll the printing presses.” And the economy went zooming up,.Or when the Fed decides that we should suffer, which it sometimes does because they want to bring inflation down, we suffer. So, the Fed is enormously powerful. The reason that we want to keep it quasi-independent, is that it’s too easy to use. The problem with monetary policy is it’s almost frictionless. Other stuff, if you want to spend money or raise taxes or whatever, you have to pass legislation through Congress. It has to be debated. There’s time to think about it. The way that the Fed loosens monetary policy, the way the Fed reduces interest rates is a group of people get together, have a meeting in Washington for two days.

HM How many people is it? So, it’s Jerome Powell and how many people?

PK Oh gosh, I should know the size of the open market committee and I don’t. Anyway, they call up the open market desk in New York.And the open market desk, uh actually at this point I think they just make a few clicks on their computers to buy or sell treasury bills from banks.

So, it’s absolutely the easiest thing in the world. There’s no friction.There’s no slowdown.

HM This sounds like this really does sound like some secret society stuff though because it’s it’s a small clandestine meeting and it can shape monetary policy and economics for the country if not the world.

PK Yeah. But it turned out that having a bunch of technocrats with a really strong professional ethos um managing this thing was a way to preserve a fair bit of stability while also preserving a fair bit of flexibility. Nothing is perfect, but that’s a solution that has served us pretty well for generations now. And we know what happens if you don’t do it. You get Turkey where you have a president who has people telling him what he wants to hear and Argentina as well.

The Turkish one is the most recent example. And by the time he finally said maybe these economists telling me I’m doing the wrong thing might know something, they had 80% inflation. Donald Trump is obsessed with the Fed and with interest rates. If it was up to him, he would basically have a thermostat on his desk in the Oval Office where he could just control interest rates. Why is it important that these two bodies be separate? Well, if you like, our system is designed to protect us against uh people like Donald Trump. Deciding what the interest rate should be is something that at least requires you to have read some history, paid some attention to how the whole thing works. You don’t want somebody who just believes what he wants to believe and is surrounded by people who tell him what he wants to hear to be free to set this very powerful policy tool wherever he feels like.

HM If Trump policies are so bad, I keep reading how awful his economic policies are. And clearly kind of in the vibes of our conversation right now, you’re not a fan of his economic policies. Why hasn’t the stock market crashed?

PK Stock market, first of all, does what it’s going to do. Paul Samuelson, one of my old mentors, famously said that the stock market had predicted nine of the last five recessions, right? You know, the stock market is psychological. And one thing that Trump is doing is he’s definitely cutting taxes on rich people, which is good for the stock market. And a lot of people believe that in the end he won’t follow through on some of the worst stuff. And that you can definitely look and say that markets don’t believe that he’s going to manage to take control of the Federal Reserve. Uh I think the markets are probably wrong on that, but that’s what the markets believe right now.

HM What does that mean “the markets believe”?

PK Well, we can look at interest rates. If you really thought that we were going to turn into Turkey or Argentina, then 10-year interest rates should be going through the roof, and they’re not. The main thing I think to say about the economy, you always need to remember that we’ve got something like 160 million workers. GDP is $30 trillion. It takes really major stupidity to really wreck an economy that size and we’re working on it.

HM So, if Donald Trump could control interest rates, what would that do to the stock market?

PK I think that the markets would uh panic pretty soon. I mean, I think the markets are insufficiently worried, but okay, more than you want to know, but right now

HM No, please tell me more more.

PK It’s looks like Trump is failing to fire Lisa Cook. He’s going to appoint somebody probably really not too bright as Federal Reserve chairman to replace Jay Powell, but the chairman is not a dictator. There is this committee that votes and whoever he appoints is very likely to be outvoted whenever he tries to do irresponsible stuff. So people are kind of betting that despite all of the craziness that they won’t actually go wild.

HM So is the Fed kind of like the Supreme Court, but he actually has less say on the Fed than he does on the Supreme Court.

PK Yeah. I I always used to say that the Fed is kind of like the Supreme Court that it’s designed to be, you know, ultimately accountable to the voters, but very ultimately and with a lot of insulation. And yeah, at this point the Fed is acting a lot more like what it’s supposed to be than the Supreme Court is, right? Because obviously presidents can famously get Supreme Court justices appointed, but the president can’t do that with the Fed. Correct. I mean, it’s a little complicated, but if you had a president who stayed in office for 20 years, he would eventually have a Federal Reserve board and open market committee, which is not quite the same thing, but eventually the whole Fed system would be at his beck and call, but it takes a long time.

HM I feel like there’s two conversations happening in regards to the economy. And I think it’s between the asset class, basically people who have enough money to own stocks, whether that’s fang or the S&P 500 or just basic index funds, and then the non-asset class, people that are literally putting together money for rent, a car note, and groceries. Is there a disconnect between the two people talking?

PK Look, the economy is not the same for everybody. In fact, one of the hallmarks of America since the 70s has been rising inequality where the top, you know, what we call the 1%, but when people say the 1% their mental picture is really like more the 0.01%, the very wealthy have had incredible gains. And then there’s the sort of typical worker who probably has over the last 40 years seen uh his or her wages grow faster than inflation, but not by that much. You know, during the Biden years when everybody was so angry, there was actually really big wage gains for workers near the bottom. Actually, the bottom half of US workers were doing really well. Now, that’s gone into reverse lately, but you know, there are periods when it’s not always the case that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Sometimes, uh, it goes the other way.

HM So you’re saying there are times where the poor do get richer.

PK Oh, yeah. I mean, of course, there there’s this miraculous thing that happened in the 1940s. I grew up in a middle class society. I grew up in the in the 50s and 60s and in a world where plumbers uh made as much or more than middle managers and where there were very few extremely rich people.

That society didn’t evolve gradually. That society was created rather abruptly by FDR mostly during World War II and it stuck for about 30 years. So that was a tremendous equalization the Great Compression we call it. I would love to see another great compression happen but it not under the current administration anyway.

HM Donald Trump promised that he would bring manufacturing back to the United States of America. How’s that going?

PK Well, manufacturing employment is declining so far on his watch. And look it fundamentally can’t be done. The main reason we don’t have a lot of manufacturing jobs anymore is that we’re just very efficient at producing manufactured goods and it doesn’t take a lot of people in manufacturing. Uh so we’re an economy where jobs are in other things that and that’s okay. You know what happened to farming? There are you know hardly any farmers left in America really. There’s a whole lot fewer cashiers than there used to be. That’s okay because people can find other stuff. It’s only making sure not that you have particular jobs, but that there are enough jobs in total and that they pay decent wages.

HM Hypothetically, would it be bad if the US dollar was no longer the world’s reserve currency?

PK For the US, it would matter hardly at all. People think people think that it’s a tremendous privilege and it’s not really worth all that much to the US. I mean, a lot of those Benjamins, a lot of those $100 bills are being held by drug lords and whatever around the world, and that’s like a zero interest loan. But it’s not that big.

HM Paul, I told you I like tipping people out with it. I am not a drug lord.

PK Okay. But, um, it’s not really all that important. You know, the British pound used to be a global currency and that sort of went away in the late 1960s and early 1970s. And you look for evidence that that hurt Britain and you don’t find it. But what is really important is it is really important for the world to have something that everybody accepts. Another one of my old teachers, Charlie Kindleberger had this great essay comparing the use of the dollar in world commerce to the use of English as an international language. It’s kind of nice for those of us who are monolingual in English. It’s kind of nice that everybody in the world sort of speaks English. But the main thing is it’s important that there be an international language. And the dollar plays a really important role because it is the universally accepted standard. You can put up US Treasury bills as collateral for anything. And that reduces friction, makes world business work. I mean, so it’s not in the best interest of the United States as a country if Bitcoin were to become the world reserve currency. That ain’t going to happen. Uh because the whole point about the dollar is it’s really easy to use and Bitcoin is not easy to use.

HM Paul, I don’t want to get memed. The Bitcoin boys have already come after me. I don’t want to get memed, please.

PK Yeah, I’ve I’ve made some money off off crypto because I get invited to crypto conferences as a designated enemy and get paid a fee.

HM In Bitcoin. In BTC?

PK No. In in in dollars. I am not going to take BTC on the speaking gig.

No, people who are serious about this stuff, which kind of includes me because it’s one of the things I worked at for decades, say that the real risk is not that something replaces the dollar, but that nothing does.

HM What is your take on crypto and where do you see it going?

PK I think crypto is basically a scam.

HM Oh, you agree with Taleb upon Ponzi, but Talib’s now adjusted his take on that?

PK No, we can document it. I mean, there is essentially no legitimate use for crypto and nobody’s using it for anything legitimate. Fewer than 2% of Americans have ever made a payment in crypto. It’s purely a speculative asset or a vehicle for crime. It’s used for money laundering and extortion and blackmail.

HM Blackmail?

PK Well, if you want to blackmail somebody, you want to be able to, you know, have a non or a difficult to trace payment, you demand that you be paid in Bitcoin.

HM But for real, you mean like organized crime? So you’re saying like ISIS …

PK Actually North Korea has made extensive use of Bitcoin to extract, to steal money.

HM So you’re saying al-Qaeda and Venezuelan gangs are just in their crypto wallets exchanging BTC.?

PK Well, actually they’re mostly using Tether. They’re mostly using stablecoins these days. `

I know a consulting firm that had their computers ransomwared and they paid and the payment was in BTC. So, it’s the most amazing thing. I’ve been in many many meetings where we — actually me and my friends, my economist friends as sympathetically as possible asked crypto guys to explain to us what function what legitimate function does this stuff serve and have never gotten an answer.

HM Well, if it’s so bad why will the comments of this video be filled with people screaming at us calling us idiots?

PK Oh, because it’s a cult. Um and the fact of the matter is the price has gone up. So people who bought in early feel very smart. My line about about crypto is that it’s technobabble plus libertarian derp and that’s pretty much it still but people are very passionate about it.

…

Every time a left-leaning politician suggests that raising taxes would be beneficial to the general public, a lot of business owners and people that live in Greenwich start screaming and say, “They are leaving. I’m out.” I suppose at sufficiently high tax rates, people would move. But, you know, part of what I I like to say when people say they’re going to leave and mostly they don’t.

HM Oh, is this like my friends in 2016 when Trump won and they said they’re going to Canada?

PK Some of that.

HM And I’m like, Brandon, you’re not going to Canada.

PK Yeah. I mean, there are a few very rich people who have left London for Milan because the Brits changed their their tax privileges. That sort of thing does happen. A few Wall Street guys have moved to Miami, although there were a lot of predictions that the whole thing was going to move down there.

HM Miami. What? You like Miami?

PK No, I don’t like Miami.

HM Same. I don’t know what the [ __ ] is going on there. I have a show in a couple weeks. I still don’t know what the [ __ ] is going on.

PK It’s not my favorite place. There was an article about Wall Street types trying to move to Florida. One of them said that the problem with moving to Florida is that you have to live in Florida. When people say, you know, oh, you got to keep taxes low for incentives. I like to talk about, you know, I live in New York City. And I’ve done well, so I’m in the top federal tax bracket, plus there’s this New York state tax, plus there’s the city tax, and put it all together, and I’ve got a marginal tax rate, on an extra dollar I make, probably about 55 cents of it goes to government. And that’s true of anybody who’s sort of upper upper middle class, anyone in the three or four top percent in New York City, um, who has earned income. I’m not talking about private equity or hedge fund guys, but you know, like in the movie Wall Street, 400,000 a year working wall street stiff. And you’ve all noticed how slow moving and lazy people are in New York because, you know, why bother to work hard given the tax? Well, obviously not, right? It’s obvious that tax rates at the level sort of 55% tax rate on upper income, earned income for New Yorkers is not enough to really make people stop working. I remember AOC getting a lot of grief because she said that the top tax rate should be 70%. She wasn’t ignorant, in fact she was talking to my friend Joe Stiglitz who’s one of the world’s greatest economists who has this very carefully sourced research paper on what is the optimal tax rate on top incomes and the paper actually says 73%. So actually good economics says that yeah we should you don’t want to soak the rich so much that it’s really not worth at all striving but when somebody says that terrible things will happen if you raise taxes on the rich you might want to consider the source.

HM I grew up [snorts] during a time when it was all about quote free trade and quote free trade agreements. What the [ __ ] is free trade?

PK Oh, no. That’s I don’t think free trade is a particularly abstract concept. It means that you don’t pay a tax when you cross the border, uh when you bring stuff across the border. I mean, uh there there’s free trade. Look, I just spent some time in the Netherlands. Lovely place, by the way. And Rotterdam is one of the world’s great ports and a lot of stuff is unloaded at Rotterdam and then taken by train or truck on into Germany. There’s no tax levied when a train or a truck crosses. In fact, there’s nothing when you cross the Dutch-German border. It’s just open and that’s that’s free trade. So there’s free trade between the Netherlands and Germany. Um there’s mostly or there was mostly free trade between the US, Canada, and Mexico. There no tariffs on most stuff that that crossed our borders.

HM So you see it as generally positive.

PK Yes. I mean with exceptions. The people who put together the system were not stupid. I think they may have been a little too optimistic but both in US law and in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade which we were which were massively in violation of but anyway um article 22 basically says that if there’s a national security concern, you can do what you need to do. We should have been protecting rare earths production and we shouldn’t have allowed to China to be producing all the rare earths for the world.

HM Um I mean there was been some pretty dark examples. I remember in the late 90s South Africa was trying to import cheap generic AIDS drugs, but a major pharmaceutical company backed by the American government fought to protect their patents through the World Trade Organization. Yeah. in a free trade agreement called the quote trade related aspects of intellectual property rights and as a result millions of people died.

PK But that wasn’t really about free trade.

HM but wasn’t it?

PK No, what’s happened is a lot of free trade stuff got perverted. I I used to teach about this.

HM But you supported free trade, right?

PK I support actual free trade but not this, this is protecting monopoly patent rights which is not about free trade. I taught about something called CAFTA, the Central American Free Trade Agreement and you take a look at it it turns out it has nothing to do with free trade it’s mostly about in fact pharmaceutical companies protecting their patents so no that’s not what I’ve ever been for.

HM So you’re making a distinction between free trade in these actual free trade agreement and there’s a lot of things that are called free trade agreements that are really not about free trade. Because it feels kind of [ __ ] up but some of them are and I [clears throat] don’t know is there another way to say that I don’t know it feels kind of [ __ ] up I don’t know how to even articulate it just feels …

PK No it is a lot of it is [ __ ] up but mostly it’s wolves in sheep’s clothing you have something that is really about protecting the interests of some interest group that’s being sold under the banner of free trade. You ask, do I think that Bangladesh ought to be able to sell garments in the United States without facing high tariffs? Yes, I do because Bangladesh is a desperately poor country and this is what they live on. Do I think that multinational pharmaceutical companies should be able to charge nosebleleed prices for drugs in the third world? No. And that’s not at all the same thing.

HM I have a question. Do capitalism and authoritarianism go together? Because in the 90s there was this narrative that China was going to open itself up to American markets and American businesses. And once there was economic freedom, political freedom would be right around the corner. Free trade, right? China, bam.

PK Yeah. Um, democracy. I never bought that. And I think I’m on record as having never bought that. And there was a lot of nonsense about all this. Now the real stuff is way back going all the way back to FDR, the US has had the belief that that international trade can be good for peace. That by binding countries together through lots of trading links you make it harder for them to go to war with each other and that it can be a force for peace. The European Union was originally about harnessing economic interests to basically make it very hard for France and Germany ever to have another war and that has kind of worked.

HM You really believe that? You think KFC is the path to peace?

PK Well, not so much KFC, but uh the coal and steel community making sure that that German steel relied on French coal and vice versa actually did help prevent wars in Europe.

None of this is guaranteed, and I think a lot of people underestimated the extent to which all the old evils are still possible. I mean who imagined Ukraine war as a real possibility in the 21st century? So all the old stuff can still happen but that doesn’t mean that it’s completely wrong either. I do think that Europe is a is a success story. Economic integration of Europe hasn’t worked for everybody, but Europe used to be always on the verge of another war and now it’s really hard to think of that in Europe. So I think I said before in this conversation you have to have some humility, but the idea that trade can be something that helps with peace is valid. The idea that free trade brings democracy sort of like mechanically and automatically of course not right.

HM So are you kind of saying that hey authoritarianism and capitalism can they can run both programs in parallel?

PK Oh no. Capitalism and free markets don’t guarantee democracy . Authoritarianism and free markets don’t mix but that’s the other way around. It’s not that free markets destroy authoritarianism, authoritarianism ends up destroying free markets. Any system where there’s really no kind of rule of law, any democratic process always ends up being crony capitalism.

HM But isn’t China incredibly successful over the past half century?

PK Yeah. But it is worth saying that China is still like a third of uh of our productivity. So it it’s doubtful whether they can get so far along. But it’s also true that it partially depends on the sophistication and you can see that happening in America right now. You know, corporate types who backed Trump because they think he’s going to cut their taxes and it’s good. They’re going to find out that uh they don’t own him, he owns them. And so they’re already starting to find that out. And uh you eventually end up with oligarchs who back an autocrat and then decide hey I’m an oligarch I am going to throw my own weight around and end up falling out of windows.

HM Well you don’t think that these oligarchs are going to stand up for democracy?. I mean Kamala Harris juswent on MSNBC and she had some pretty powerful words for Rachel Maddow.

But I’ve worked closely with the private sector over many years and I always believed that if push came to shove those titans of industry would be guardrails for our democracy for the importance of sustaining democratic institutions. And one by one by one they have been silent they have been you know yes I use the word feckless.

Wow. She dropped the f- word. Did you think those titans of industry were going to stand up and be the guardrails?

PK I guess I’ve read more history than she has. Well, sorry. But we know we know what happened with Putin and the oligarchs. We know what happened in Hungary. And the one thing, you know, is that the wealthy elite never stands up. They’re the last people you can count on.

HM Do you want to do the lightning round? What? We always end with the lightning round.

PK Okay. I don’t know what that is, but that’s fine. All right.

HM Do tax cuts pay for themselves?

PK No.

HM If rich people give money to poor people, does it make society as a whole more rich or more poor?

PK Mostly richer.

HM Why do Republicans only care about deficits and debt when they’re not in power?

PK They don’t care about deficits and debt. They care about trying to prevent Democrats from spending money on helping people.

HM What’s more important for economists? Being respected by other economists or being right?

PK Oh, some of both. I’m afraid. You know, we’re human beings.

HM Nassim Taleb says, “You’re a BS vendor that will not deadlift. Will you deadlift against him?”

PK It doesn’t seem to me to be a really good way to settle intellectual arguments.

HM I mean, what’s really great about deadlifting is you can do uh one rep max. You’re going to take four to five minutes off before you get to the next set. Have it out.

Yeah. Then get back to it. What is the best measure of whether an economy is working? Justice or efficiency?

PK Oh, I would say neither. I mean, efficiency is not enough. You can have an efficient economy where all the money goes to one person. Um but justice, you can have a very just but also very poor economy. The measure of the economy is does it give people good lives?

HM Why is it that when businesses get free stuff from the government, it’s called an incentive? But when poor people get free stuff from the government, it’s called a handout.

PK Yeah. Well, who pays? Who makes political contributions? Who’s on the other end of the revolving door for people in politics, you know, maximum cynicism is totally appropriate here.

HM Does economics deserve to have a Nobel Prize or is it basically a kids choice award for intellectuals?

PK I have mixed feelings about the Nobel in economics. I mean most of the Nobelprizes leaving out present company have been for actually valuable contributions. Some of them have been a little bit funny, but you know when I look at Claudia Goldin getting a Nobel really telling us the story about uh women’s work um that certainly deserves some kind of prize.

HM So you know why not? Can I make a pitch? So I have two Peabodies. I definitely don’t deserve them. It’s for excellence in radio and television. Two things that don’t exist anymore. But I would happily take a Nickelodeon’s kid choice award. Number one, my kids would think it’s so [ __ ] cool. Number two, the possibility of getting slimed on television. And number three, you get a surfboard.

Supreme Court Judge Lewis Brandeis once said, quote, “We may have democracy or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”

Do you think capitalism and democracy are compatible? Yes or no?

PK [clears throat] Modified limited uh capitalism.

HM Yes or no?

PK No. Capitalism, yes, but not without limits. I mean, we had for a good long stretch a combination of progressive taxation, estate taxes, strong unions.That was still capitalism, but it was also democracy. But no, I don’t think we can have people as rich as uh Elon Musk and Larry Ellison and still sustain a democratic system.

HM Are you optimistic about the future or not?

PK No, I’m actually quite terrified on multiple fronts. I’m terrified about the fate of democracy. I’m terrified about climate change. But you can’t just roll over and hide under the bed. But I’m extremely worried.

HM Paul, you got to start deadlifting and you got to start getting after it, big dog, cuz the fight continues and we need that dog in you.

PK Oh, I run. Does that do it?

HM No, I I need progressive weight training. Okay, Paul Krugman, thank you so much.

Thank you. Hurry right away. [singing and music] No delay. Make your daddy glad. You have your

[music] last

Wealth

Simon Willison's Weblog

Vouch

Vouch

Mitchell Hashimoto's new system to help address the deluge of worthless AI-generated PRs faced by open source projects now that the friction involved in contributing has dropped so low.

He says:

The idea is simple: Unvouched users can't contribute to your projects. Very bad users can be explicitly "denounced", effectively blocked. Users are vouched or denounced by contributors via GitHub issue or discussion comments or via the CLI.

Integration into GitHub is as simple as adopting the published GitHub actions. Done. Additionally, the system itself is generic to forges and not tied to GitHub in any way.

Who and how someone is vouched or denounced is up to the project. I'm not the value police for the world. Decide for yourself what works for your project and your community.

Tags: open-source, ai, github-actions, generative-ai, mitchell-hashimoto, ai-ethics

Simon Willison's Weblog

Claude: Speed up responses with fast mode

Claude: Speed up responses with fast mode

New "research preview" from Anthropic today: you can now access a faster version of their frontier model Claude Opus 4.6 by typing /fast in Claude Code... but at a cost that's 6x the normal price.

Opus is usually $5/million input and $25/million output. The new fast mode is $30/million input and $150/million output!

There's a 50% discount until the end of February 16th, so only a 3x multiple (!) before then.

How much faster is it? The linked documentation doesn't say, but on Twitter Claude say:

Our teams have been building with a 2.5x-faster version of Claude Opus 4.6.

We’re now making it available as an early experiment via Claude Code and our API.

Claude Opus 4.5 had a context limit of 200,000 tokens. 4.6 has an option to increase that to 1,000,000 at 2x the input price ($10/m) and 1.5x the output price ($37.50/m) once your input exceeds 200,000 tokens. These multiples hold for fast mode too, so after Feb 16th you'll be able to pay a hefty $60/m input and $225/m output for Anthropic's fastest best model.

Tags: ai, generative-ai, llms, anthropic, claude, llm-pricing, claude-code

Simon Willison's Weblog

Quoting David Crawshaw

I am having more fun programming than I ever have, because so many more of the programs I wish I could find the time to write actually exist. I wish I could share this joy with the people who are fearful about the changes agents are bringing. The fear itself I understand, I have fear more broadly about what the end-game is for intelligence on tap in our society. But in the limited domain of writing computer programs these tools have brought so much exploration and joy to my work.

— David Crawshaw, Eight more months of agents

Tags: coding-agents, ai-assisted-programming, generative-ai, ai, llms

The Diary of Samuel Pepys

Saturday 7 February 1662/63

Samuel Pepys
Updated

Up and to my office, whither by agreement Mr. Coventry came before the time of sitting to confer about preparing an account of the extraordinary charge of the Navy since the King’s coming, more than is properly to be applied and called the Navy charge.

So by and by we sat, and so till noon. Then home to dinner, and in the afternoon some of us met again upon something relating to the victualling, and thence to my writing of letters late, and making my Alphabet to my new Navy book very pretty. And so after writing to my father by the post about the endeavour to come to a composition with my uncle, though a very bad one, desiring him to be contented therewith, I went home to supper and to bed.

Read the annotations

Astronomy Picture of the Day

Supernova Remnant Cassiopeia A

Supernova Remnant Cassiopeia A Supernova Remnant Cassiopeia A


Mike the Mad Biologist

Links 2/7/26

mikethemadbiologist
Updated

Links for you. Science:

Veronika The Cow’s Record Scratch
Scientists Discovered a Cow That Uses Tools Like a Chimpanzee
Scientists Got Men to Rate Penises by How Intimidating They Are. This Is What They Found.
The Knotweed Factor: Reconsidering an invasive species
William H. Foege, Key Figure in the Eradication of Smallpox, Dies at 89
MAHA Gave Us MAGA 2.0. Remember the Enablers.

Other:

How Do You Justify Abducting A Child?
DC Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton terminates campaign, indicating she won’t seek reelection
There’s A Catch
Two women, detained by ICE, say they helped agent having seizure
America vs. the World
“What Is Going to Happen?”
Michele Tafoya Won’t Rest Until She Finds A Bigger And Better Way To Annoy Everyone
How Kristi Noem turned ICE into the Proud Boys
The consent of the governed has been withdrawn. One year into his second term, Trump has suffered the largest approval collapse of any modern president (except the one who resigned in disgrace). He is underwater on every major policy area.
Aliens and Angel Numbers: Creators Worry Porn Platform ManyVids Is Falling Into ‘AI Psychosis’
Not Out of the Woods. Will the National Parks survive this administration?
Will Democrats Impeach Kristi Noem?
Amateur Radio Operators in Belarus Arrested, Face the Death Penalty
The Greenland Mile: After claiming the “framework of a deal” to expand America’s presence on the world’s largest island, Trump has dropped his threats to invade Greenland. Thank God, because a direct assault on Greenland wasn’t going to be a cakewalk.
ICU Nurse Alex Pretti Killed by Feds in Minn. Held Phone, Not a Gun, Video Shows (notable because it’s People)
The Instant Smear Campaign Against Border Patrol Shooting Victim Alex Pretti
Pete Hegseth Should Stay Out of Minneapolis
Wanker of the Day: Megan McArdle. The Washington Post columnist is very annoyed that Trump turned out to be a fascist.
That Other American Tolkien
The killing of Alex Pretti is a grim turning point
Alex Pretti’s ICE murder is beyond politics. This is about good vs. evil
It doesn’t matter if Alex Pretti had a gun
DHS Shooting Victim in Minneapolis Was a ‘Sweet’ and ‘Principled Person’
Statement from the Minnesota Timberwolves team chaplain
Georgetown Law refuses to remove ICE from upcoming job fair despite student petition, employers pull out in response
Oglala Sioux Tribal Council Rejects 287(g) Deal, Votes to Ban ICE Activity on Pine Ridge
Two Major Studies, 125,000 Kids: The Social Media Panic Doesn’t Hold Up
Here are the signs the Trump administration removed from Independence Park
Hudson River Park Ending Decades-Long Parking Contract with ICE
ICU nurse fatally shot by Border Patrol in Minneapolis cared for veterans

California
Slashdot
Letters from an American

American Conversations: Representative Joe Neguse

Heather Cox Richardson
Updated
Letters from an American

February 5, 2026

Heather Cox Richardson
Updated

Software Design: Tidy First?

Labor Replacement is a Poison Pill

Kent Beck
Updated

I just published publicly that when thinking about the economic value of AI, “replace human labor” is a narrow-minded perspective. It’s worse than that.

I like to work backwards from “the good of society”. Economic success, in my model, is an extremely rough proxy for doing good things for other people, individually & collectively. (Yes, I know this is n…

Read more

The Truth OC: Because it's time to fight back.

Frank Ciano is what we need in Orange County

Jeff Pearlman
Updated
Ciano (left) with his untrained animal.

So earlier this week I took some shots at my ol’ hometown of Mahopac, N.Y., where an ICE agent serves as a trustee on the school board. It’s been quite the controversy (locally and nationally), and my thoughts were not appreciated by the area’s rabid, ignorant MAGA majority.

In particular, there’s a dude named Frank Ciano, who is apparently planning a second-straight run to serve as the town supervisor for Carmel, which neighbors Mahopac. And the 54-year-old Ciano … well, he’s a type. He likes recording bitch-session videos while driving his car.1 He’s fantastic at shouting. And spewing. And snarling. And puffing up. And sounding illiterate, in that special Fred Flintstone-at-the-quarry way. Though minimally educated and lightly informed and dim as a toothpick holder, Ciano behaves as one who knows e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g. The answers are simple. All the answers are simple. “What we gotta do is …” and “It’s, like, so obvious …”

In Ciano’s eyes, there appear to be three basic truths. Truth 1: America is the bestest country in the world—and if you disagree, leave. Truth 2: Protesting is bullshit—so go fuck yourself. Truth 3: Donald Trump is the greatest—and even if he pardoned every single 1.6 rioter, and even if he cheated on his wife with a porn star he paid off in hush money, and even if he’s trying to get $10 billion of taxpayer money via a bogus lawsuit, and even if he recently posted vile, racist images of the Obamas as primates, and even if the economy is tanking, and even if he mocks people (just like Frank Ciano) as “fat” and “dumb” and “retarded” and “ugly” … hey, it’s MAGA all the way, motherfuckers!

Oh, Ciano also posts videos.

Wildly entertaining videos …

And although morons-who-think-they’re-intelligent are my least-favorite human strand, I will give Frank Ciano this (sincere) credit: He is exactly who he says he is. The man is not pulling punches, or trying to win over moderates. He’s blunt and dumb and vocal and offensive, and he will ride that shit splatter to either an electoral triumph or setback. He will go down swinging as his authentically slow-witted self.

Again, he is exactly who he says he is.

Orange County, on the other hand, overflows with the duplicity of Republicans who talk of loving children, who talk of consensus, who brag about speaking with both sides, who know they need to woo Democrats while simultaneously not losing GOPers. You see this all the time in local elections—school boards, assemblies, water board, etc. “I’m a moderate” and “There are plenty of things I disagree with the president about.”

It’s all show.

If you’re at all paying attention to CA-40, for example, redistricting brought out the worst (but most honest) in Young Kim, Republican incumbent. She was as moderate (sounding) as strawberry ice cream—until she needed to be as conservative as a hunting trip. So now she’s all about Trump, all about ICE raids, all about red meat issues that’ll woo her increasingly right-leaning district. It’s gross—not because she’s conservative, but because there’s a complete lack of integrity. It’s only about winning. Whatever it takes, a soulless, spineless Young Kim needs to win.

Frank Ciano, again, is not my cup of tea. He’s stupid and basic and an easy mark for Donald Trump, succubus of the white, male working class.

But at least he’s not full of shit.

At least he’s real.

PS: For some reason, I never received my invite … :)

1

Seriously, man, just pull over.

Letters from an American

February 6, 2026

Heather Cox Richardson
Updated

Late last night, President Donald J. Trump’s social media account posted a video full of debunked claims about the 2020 presidential election that included an image of former president Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama with their heads attached to the bodies of apes.

Predictably, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt derided the “fake outrage” over the image, but as Tim Grieve of NOTUS explained, when Republican senators Tim Scott of South Carolina, Pete Ricketts of Nebraska, and Roger Wicker of Mississippi called out the racism behind the post, the president deleted the video and a White House official said that a “staffer erroneously made the post,” as if somehow a staffer could post random racist videos from the president’s account in the middle of the night. As soon as they could blame the post on a staffer, Republicans rushed to condemn the post’s racism.

Later tonight on Air Force One, Trump said that he had posted it himself. When a reporter asked if he would apologize, he said, “No, I didn’t make a mistake.”

While the post exhibited both the president’s vile racism and his failing impulse control, it also seems to have been an attempt to use racism to break the growing coalition against him. As when they arrested Black journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort as well as Black protesters at a church while leaving white protesters free, Trump and his allies are hammering on racial fault lines. As with the ape trope, the White House went so far as to digitally alter a photograph of church protester and civil rights activist Nekima Levy Armstrong, who appeared to be quite composed during her arrest, to make her look blacker and as if she is sobbing in terror.

“They couldn’t break me,” Armstrong told Nil Köksal of Canadian news interview show As it Happens. “And so they altered an image showing me broken.” “I thought, am I that much of a threat to the world’s greatest superpower?”

The answer is that the growing coalition of Americans from all walks of life standing against MAGA and defending American democracy is the United States of America at its best, and that coalition is absolutely a threat to the cabal trying to seize the assets of the nation for itself. And American history from Bacon’s Rebellion in the late 1600s forward has established a blueprint for breaking democratic coalitions that threaten those in power along racial lines.

Trump’s doubling down on racism reflects Americans’ growing disillusionment with him and his administration.

Bad news about federal agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol continues. In emails, Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino, who was removed from his oversight of Border Patrol operations in Minneapolis after agents shot and killed two U.S. citizens, said he did not report to Customs and Border Protection (CBP), Border Patrol’s parent agency. Bovino told a courtroom, under oath, that his boss was Secretary Kristi Noem of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the department in which Customs and Border Protection is housed.

But in an email, Bovino wrote that when acting director of ICE Todd Lyons told Bovino that he, Lyons, was in charge of the surge into Chicago, Bovino disagreed. “Mr. Lyons said he was in charge, and [I] corrected him saying i reported to Corey Lewandowski. Mr. Lyons seemed intent that CBP conduct targeted operations for at least two weeks before transitioning to full scale immigration enforcement. I declined his suggestion. We ended the conversation shortly thereafter.” Lewandowski is a special government employee who advises Noem and has a history of favoring political theater to project dominance. He has no experience in law enforcement.

A court transcript from Tuesday, February 3, posted online by Minneapolis lawyer Dan Suitor shows that the administration’s sweeps of immigrant communities have stretched the Department of Justice (DOJ) to the breaking point. As Chris Geidner of LawDork explained, U.S. District Judge Jerry Blackwell dug into why individuals he had ordered released from detention were not being released. “Detention without lawful authority is not just a technical defect,” he said, “it is a constitutional injury that unfairly falls on the heads of those who have done nothing wrong to justify it.” The DOJ, DHS, and ICE “wield extraordinary power,” he said, “and that power has to exist within constitutional limits.”

The government had an obligation to make sure that each arrest it made in its dramatic sweeps complies with the Constitution and with court orders for the release of those wrongly imprisoned, he said. “[W]hat you cannot do is to detain first and then sort out lawful authority later.” One of the government’s lawyers responded that the administration’s surge into Minnesota has “outpaced the system’s capacity to ensure that the Constitution is being complied with.” “Detain first, find authority later, this is exactly their strategy, and we’ve seen this from all of our cases where there’s no warrant, there’s no probable cause.” Authorities simply take people “for how they look or for where they are.”

A Marist poll released yesterday shows that 65% of Americans think that ICE has gone too far in enforcing immigration laws.

Even those who are not focused on that issue have increasing concerns about the Trump administration’s policies.

Measles is back in the United States with the biggest outbreak the U.S. has seen in decades. Now news has broken that Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. appears to have lied in his Senate confirmation hearings when he said that a trip he took to Samoa in 2019 had “nothing to do with vaccines.”

The Guardian and the Associated Press obtained emails from U.S. Embassy and United Nations staff saying that Kennedy was indeed visiting Samoa to spread his skepticism of vaccines. One email read: “The real reason Kennedy is coming is to raise awareness about vaccinations, more specifically some of the health concerns associated with vaccinating (from his point of view).” After his visit, antivaccine activists gained ground, and vaccination rates dropped. A subsequent measles outbreak sickened thousands of people and killed 83, most of whom were children under the age of five.

Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) told The Guardian: “Lying to Congress about his role in the deadly measles outbreak in Samoa only underscores the danger he now poses to families across America. He and his allies will be held responsible.”

The sprawling web being exposed by the Epstein files has ensnared not just Trump, but other members of his administration as well. Tonight, Daniel Ruetenik and Graham Kates of CBS News reported that U.S. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick was in business with the convicted sex offender as recently as 2014. Lutnick previously claimed he had cut ties with Epstein in 2005 after touring his New York mansion, saying, “I will never be in the room with that disgusting person ever again.”

Mike Stunson of Forbes reported today that the U.S. lost 108,435 jobs in January in the biggest cuts since January 2009 during the Great Recession. Despite Trump’s insistence that he would bring back masculine jobs like manufacturing, in 2025 the U.S. lost about 68,000 manufacturing jobs.

On Tuesday, February 3, a bipartisan group of 27 former Agriculture Department officials and leaders from farm and commodity groups wrote to the leaders of the agriculture committees of both chambers with a dire warning about “the damage that is being done to American farmers.”

Linda Qiu of the New York Times highlighted the letter, which noted that “just a few years ago,” farm export surpluses and farm incomes were at record highs. This year, “[f]armer bankruptcies have doubled, barely half of all farms will be profitable this year, and the U.S. is running a historic agriculture trade deficit.” The authors blamed this crisis on the fact that “the current Administration’s actions, along with Congressional inaction, have increased costs for farm inputs, disrupted overseas and domestic markets, denied agriculture its reliable labor pool, and defunded critical ag[ricultural] research and staffing.”

They warned of “a widespread collapse of American agriculture and our rural communities.” They noted that administration cuts to healthcare will add to the decimation of rural communities, wiping out a way of life. Rural voters tend to be an important part of Trump’s base.

Apparently concerned that even racism won’t help keep Republicans in office, Trump is trying to rig the system.

Yesterday the Office of Personnel Management issued a final rule to strip civil service protections from about 50,000 federal employees, enabling the administration to replace nonpartisan civil servants hired for their skills with loyalists. Trump tried to do this at the end of his first term, but his successor, President Joe Biden, reversed the plan immediately upon taking office. The United States has had a nonpartisan civil service since 1883. When the government proposed the reintroduction of the political system the U.S. had before then, 94% of 40,000 public comments opposed the change. Only 5% supported it.

The Republicans are also trying to pass the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) America Act, which would require a document proving citizenship in order to register to vote and in order to vote. Only Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Vermont, and Washington have “enhanced” driver’s licenses that would meet the requirement. In all other states, voters would need either a passport or a birth certificate.

Half of Americans don’t have a passport, others don’t have their birth certificates, and the names of married women who took their husband’s last name and transgender Americans would not match their birth certificates. All of these groups tend to vote for Democrats. The bill also calls for state officials to purge voter rolls. The Brennan Center for Justice found that if the measure passes, about 21 million Americans could lose their votes.

Trump is also trying to guarantee that Americans will remember him differently than they perceive him now. Last fall he withheld money for the $16 billion Gateway tunnel under the Hudson River, connecting New York and New Jersey. This major infrastructure project is important to the entire region. Jonathan Karl of ABC followed up on a story broken by Punchbowl News yesterday, explaining today that Trump told Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) last month that he would release the appropriated money if Schumer agreed to rename Penn Station in New York City and Dulles Airport outside Washington, D.C., after him.

Schumer refused, after which Trump’s social media account accused Schumer of “holding up” the project.

But House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), at least, appears to think the American people have moved too far from Trump for him to recover their loyalty. Now, rather than dividing Americans, Trump’s outrageous behavior is uniting Americans against him. Jeffries leaned into that anger in his own video responding to Trump’s vile image of the Obamas.

“This disgusting video, posted by the so-called president, was done intentionally. F*ck Donald Trump and his vile, racist, and malignant behavior. This guy is an unhinged bottom feeder. President Obama and Michelle Obama are brilliant, caring, and patriotic Americans. They represent the best of this country. It’s time for John Thune, Mike Johnson, and Republicans to denounce this serial fraudster, who’s sitting at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue pretending to be the president of the United States.”

—

Notes:

https://www.notus.org/final-notus-newsletter/this-post-is-no-longer-available

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-shares-video-includes-racist-depiction-obamas-sparking/story?id=129918626

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/nekima-levy-armstrong-doctored-image-9.7074411

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/22/white-house-ice-protest-arrest-altered-image

https://abc7chicago.com/post/operation-midway-blitz-emails-reveal-cbp-commander-bovinos-possible-boss-command-structure-chicago-immigration-enforcement/18543628/

https://static01.nyt.com/me newsgraphics/documenttools/acb735649572767d/01cc68db-full.pdf

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/03/us/politics/us-agriculture-warning.html

Law Dork
The unfathomable Minnesota transcript that must be read, as it tells the reality of America today
On Tuesday in Minnesota, a lawyer made headlines — including at Law Dork — for her shocking statement in court representing that government that the “system sucks…
Read more
3 days ago · 1273 likes · 65 comments · Chris Geidner

https://maristpoll.marist.edu/polls/the-actions-of-ice-february-2026/

https://punchbowl.news/article/white-house/trump-dulles-penn-station/

https://abcnews.go.com/US/trump-penn-station-dulles-airport-named-after-funding/story?id=129910999

https://federalnewsnetwork.com/workforce/2026/02/trump-administration-advances-plan-to-strip-job-protections-from-career-federal-employees/

https://www.forbes.com/sites/mikestunson/2026/02/05/us-jobs-disappear-at-fastest-january-pace-since-great-recession/

https://www.npr.org/2026/02/05/nx-s1-5698522/measles-south-carolina-ice-detention-facilities

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/what-to-know-about-south-carolinas-big-measles-outbreak-and-who-is-most-at-risk

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/06/rfk-jr-samoa-trip

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/howard-lutnick-jeffrey-epstein-in-business-together/

https://www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/gop-fast-tracks-monster-voter-suppression-bill-that-could-disenfranchise-millions-by-requiring-proof-of-citizenship-at-polls/

Bluesky:

factpostnews.bsky.social/post/3meaagiypsd2o

robertscotthorton.bsky.social/post/3me5h6u5qd22q

editorialboard.bsky.social/post/3me7xteo3y22i

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Arctic Air for the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic; Increase Moisture for Pacific Northwest; Active Pattern for Hawaii

Marginal Revolution

Sebastian Galiani on the Marginal Revolution

Tyler Cowen
Updated

The most successful economics blog in the world is called Marginal Revolution.
That is not an accident….

Consider a few common mistakes that reappear whenever marginal thinking is abandoned:

    • Treating the owner’s biography—wealth, identity, status—as if it entered the firm’s marginal conditions. It does not.
    • Confusing redistribution with allocation. Redistribution is a legitimate political choice, but it should not be smuggled into production decisions where it distorts incentives and blocks reallocation.
    • Ignoring opportunity cost. Resources used to sustain one activity are resources not used elsewhere. The relevant question is always: what is the next best alternative?
    • Believing that efficiency is static. In reality, efficiency is dynamic, and depends precisely on the ability of resources to move when margins change.

One of the most uncomfortable implications of marginal analysis is that reallocation is essential. Labor and capital must sometimes leave declining uses so they can enter expanding ones. That process is rarely smooth, and never painless. But blocking it does not make an economy more humane; it makes it poorer.

The twentieth century gave this insight a name. Joseph Schumpeter called it creative destruction. János Kornai warned that when losses are systematically covered—when budget constraints are soft—adjustment never happens, inefficiency becomes chronic, and stagnation follows.

Marginal analysis explains why. If losses have no consequences, margins lose meaning. Prices stop signaling scarcity. Productivity differences stop guiding allocation. The economy becomes a museum of preserved structures rather than a system that adapts.

Excellent throughout, here is the link.

The post Sebastian Galiani on the Marginal Revolution appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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Interconnected

90% of everything is sanding e.g. laundry

What mundane pleasures will I be robbed of by domestic robots?

Sometimes I feel like my job at home is putting things into machines and taking things out of machines.

I don’t mean to sound unappreciative about “modern conveniences” (modern being the 1950s) because I take care of laundry and emptying the dishwasher, and I love both. We have a two drawer dishwasher so that is a conveyer belt. And I particularly love laundry. We generate a lot of laundry it seems.

There was a tweet in 2025: "woodworking sounds really cool until you find out it’s 90% sanding"

And it became an idiom because 90% of everything is sanding. See this reddit thread… 90% of photography is file management; 90% of baking is measuring; etc.

So when I say that I love laundry I don’t mean that I love clean clothes (everyone loves clean clothes) but I love the sanding. I love the sorting into piles for different washes, I love reading the little labels, especially finding the hidden ones; I love the sequencing so we don’t run out of room on the racks, I love folding, I love the rare peak moments when everything comes together and there are no dirty clothes anywhere in the house nor clean clothes waiting to be returned. (I hate ironing. But fortunately I love my dry cleaner and I feel all neighbourhood-y when I visit and we talk about the cricket.)

Soon! Domestic robots will take it all away.

Whether in 6 months or 6 years.

I don’t know what my tipping point will be…

I imagine robots will be priced like a car and not like a dishwasher? It’ll be worth it, assuming reliability. RELATED: I was thinking about what my price cap would be for Claude Code. I pay $100/mo for Claude right now and I would pay $1,500/mo personally for the same functionality. Beyond that I’d complain and have to find new ways to earn, but I’m elastic till that point.

Because I don’t doubt that domestic robots will be reliable. Waymo has remote operators that drop in for ambiguous situations so that’s the reliability solve.

But in a home setting? The open mic, open camera, and a robot arms on wheels - required for tele-operators - gives me pause.

(Remember that smart home hack where you could stand outside and yell through the letterbox, hey Alexa unlock the front door? Pranks aplenty if your voice-operated assistant can also dismantle the kitchen table.)

So let’s say I’ve still got a few years before trust+reliability is at a point where the robot is unloading the dishwasher for me and stacking the dishes in the cupboard, and doing the laundry for me and also sorting and loading and folding and stacking and…

i.e. taking care of the sanding.

In Fraggle Rock the Fraggles live in their underground caves generally playing and singing and swimming (with occasional visits to an oracular sentient compost heap, look the 80s were a whole thing), and also they live alongside tiny Doozers who spend their days in hard hats industriously constructing sprawling yet intricate miniature cities.

Which the Fraggles eat. (The cities are delicious.)

Far from being distressed, the Doozers appreciate the destruction as it gives them more room to go on constructing.

Me and laundry. Same same.

Being good at something is all about loving the sanding.

Here’s a quote about Olympic swimmers:

The very features of the sport that the ‘C’ swimmer finds unpleasant, the top level swimmer enjoys. What others see as boring-swimming back and forth over a black line for two hours, say-they find peaceful, even meditative, often challenging, or therapeutic. … It is incorrect to believe that top athletes suffer great sacrifices to achieve their goals. Often, they don’t see what they do as sacrificial at all. They like it.

From The Mundanity of Excellence: An Ethnographic Report on Stratification and Olympic Swimmers (1989) by Daniel Chambliss (PDF).

But remember that 90% of everything is sanding.

With domestic appliances, sanding is preparing to put things into machines and handling things when you take them out of the machines.

This “drudgery” will be taken away.

So then there will be new sanding. Inevitably!

With domestic robots, what will the new continuous repetitive micro task be? Will I have to empty its lint trap? Will I have to polish its eyes every night? Will I have to go shopping for it, day after day, or just endlessly answer the door to Amazon deliveries of floor polish and laundry tabs? Maybe the future is me carrying my robot up the stairs and down the stairs and up the stairs and down the stairs, forever.

I worry that I won’t love future sanding as much as I love today sanding.

More posts tagged: laundry (4), robots (11).

kottke.org

Jason Kottke
Updated
How Edo (Tokyo) transformed from a city on the brink of ecological collapse 400 years ago to “one of the most sustainable and efficient cities in history”.
Marginal Revolution

Saturday assorted links

Tyler Cowen
Updated

1. Indeed the Turner watercolor went for 165k, well above the estimate.  The Hubert Robert for 53k.

2. Reason and Rationality program for middle school students.  High school program here.

3. In defense of hallucinations? Note that Princeton Law Review does not exist.

4. Economics of a Super Bowl ad.

5. Searchable database of every book mentioned on Conversations with Tyler.

6. Prophets of the Leopold Aschenbrenner.

7. David Pilling reviews Joe Studwell’s new Africa book (FT).

8. Are there just as many female autistics?

9. Brazil is still in better fiscal shape than is Argentina.

The post Saturday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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SpaceNews

‘People knew that they could come to us to figure out how to get things done.’

Debra Werner
Updated
Credit: Courtesy Shawn Phillips

In 2025, more than 322,000 civil servants left jobs voluntarily or were dismissed out of a workforce of roughly 2.4 million. The 13% drop in staffing is the largest single-year decline since the end of World War II. In total, more than 5,000 people who were part of the federal space workforce left their positions. […]

The post ‘People knew that they could come to us to figure out how to get things done.’ appeared first on SpaceNews.

SpaceNews

‘As far as I know, I’m still the assistant administrator of NESDIS.’

Debra Werner
Updated
Stephen Volz photographed in January 2026 in Washington, D.C. Credit: Jason Dixson Photography

In 2025, more than 322,000 civil servants left jobs voluntarily or were dismissed out of a workforce of roughly 2.4 million. The 13% drop in staffing is the largest single-year decline since the end of World War II. In total, more than 5,000 people who were part of the federal space workforce left their positions. […]

The post ‘As far as I know, I’m still the assistant administrator of NESDIS.’ appeared first on SpaceNews.

SpaceNews

‘Leaders can be replaced, institutional knowledge cannot’

Debra Werner
Updated
Charity Weeden photographed in January 2026 in Washington, D.C. Credit: Jason Dixson Photography

In 2025, more than 322,000 civil servants left jobs voluntarily or were dismissed out of a workforce of roughly 2.4 million. The 13% drop in staffing is the largest single-year decline since the end of World War II. In total, more than 5,000 people who were part of the federal space workforce left their positions. […]

The post ‘Leaders can be replaced, institutional knowledge cannot’ appeared first on SpaceNews.

SpaceNews

Exodus: The shrinking federal space workforce

Debra Werner
Updated

In 2025, more than 322,000 civil servants left jobs voluntarily or were dismissed out of a workforce of roughly 2.4 million. The 13% drop in staffing is the largest single-year […]

The post Exodus: The shrinking federal space workforce appeared first on SpaceNews.

SpaceNews

Viasat sees orbital data center partnership opportunity

Jason Rainbow
Updated

While Viasat has no plans to join the rush to deploy orbital data centers, the satellite operator sees a role providing the communications links needed to connect such systems with users on Earth and other spacecraft.

The post Viasat sees orbital data center partnership opportunity appeared first on SpaceNews.

SpaceNews

‘We helped usher in the modern era of AI in NGA.’

Debra Werner
Updated
Mark Munsell

In 2025, more than 322,000 civil servants left jobs voluntarily or were dismissed out of a workforce of roughly 2.4 million. The 13% drop in staffing is the largest single-year decline since the end of World War II. In total, more than 5,000 people who were part of the federal space workforce left their positions. […]

The post ‘We helped usher in the modern era of AI in NGA.’ appeared first on SpaceNews.

SpaceNews

‘Serving the country and pushing the boundaries of human existence is very purposeful.’

Debra Werner
Updated
MIT AeroAstro Department members Evana Gizzi (left) and Olivier de Weck (right) chat in front of the department’s exhibit on a game called GEOPatrol that simulates non-cooperative interactions in space between two space actors. Credit: Nicole Fandel/MIT Lincoln Laboratory

In 2025, more than 322,000 civil servants left jobs voluntarily or were dismissed out of a workforce of roughly 2.4 million. The 13% drop in staffing is the largest single-year decline since the end of World War II. In total, more than 5,000 people who were part of the federal space workforce left their positions. […]

The post ‘Serving the country and pushing the boundaries of human existence is very purposeful.’ appeared first on SpaceNews.

SpaceNews

‘I loved thinking about how to make science possible for America and for the world’

Debra Werner
Updated
Kartik Sheth photographed in January 2026 in Washington, D.C. Credit: Jason Dixson Photography

In 2025, more than 322,000 civil servants left jobs voluntarily or were dismissed out of a workforce of roughly 2.4 million. The 13% drop in staffing is the largest single-year decline since the end of World War II. In total, more than 5,000 people who were part of the federal space workforce left their positions. […]

The post ‘I loved thinking about how to make science possible for America and for the world’ appeared first on SpaceNews.

SpaceNews

‘You need competent people in the government to direct and make decisions.’

Debra Werner
Updated
Claire Leon

In 2025, more than 322,000 civil servants left jobs voluntarily or were dismissed out of a workforce of roughly 2.4 million. The 13% drop in staffing is the largest single-year decline since the end of World War II. In total, more than 5,000 people who were part of the federal space workforce left their positions. […]

The post ‘You need competent people in the government to direct and make decisions.’ appeared first on SpaceNews.

SpaceNews

‘Now it’s time to turn the baton over to others. I hope there’s somebody else to grab that baton.’

Debra Werner
Updated
Phil McAlister speaks at the 2025 SpaceNews Icon Awards in December 2025 in Washington, D.C. Credit: Jason Dixson Photography

In 2025, more than 322,000 civil servants left jobs voluntarily or were dismissed out of a workforce of roughly 2.4 million. The 13% drop in staffing is the largest single-year decline since the end of World War II. In total, more than 5,000 people who were part of the federal space workforce left their positions. […]

The post ‘Now it’s time to turn the baton over to others. I hope there’s somebody else to grab that baton.’ appeared first on SpaceNews.

SpaceNews

Space Force awards $54.5 million contract to Starfish Space for GEO servicing vehicle

Sandra Erwin
Updated

Starfish’s Otter spacecraft will support relocation and life extension of military satellites

The post Space Force awards $54.5 million contract to Starfish Space for GEO servicing vehicle appeared first on SpaceNews.

SpaceNews

China launches reusable spaceplane on fourth secretive orbital mission

Andrew Jones
Updated
Liftoff of the Long March 2F carrying Shenzhou-12 at 9:22 p.m. Eastern, June 16, 2021.

China launched its experimental reusable spacecraft for the fourth time late Friday, once again maintaining strict secrecy around the mission.

The post China launches reusable spaceplane on fourth secretive orbital mission appeared first on SpaceNews.

SpaceNews

NASA seeks to bolster workforce, reduce reliance on contractors

Jeff Foust
Updated
Isaacman at Ames

After losing about 20% of its civil servant workforce in the past year, NASA’s administrator says the agency plans to bring more expertise in-house and reduce its reliance on contractors.

The post NASA seeks to bolster workforce, reduce reliance on contractors appeared first on SpaceNews.

The Aviationist
Schneier on Security

I Am in the Epstein Files

Bruce Schneier
Updated

Once. Someone named “Vincenzo lozzo” wrote to Epstein in email, in 2016: “I wouldn’t pay too much attention to this, Schneier has a long tradition of dramatizing and misunderstanding things.” The topic of the email is DDoS attacks, and it is unclear what I am dramatizing and misunderstanding.

Rabbi Schneier is also mentioned, also incidentally, also once. As far as either of us know, we are not related.

EDITED TO ADD (2/7): There is more context on the Justice.gov website version.

Schneier on Security

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Fishing Tips

Bruce Schneier
Updated

This is a video of advice for squid fishing in Puget Sound.

As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.

Blog moderation policy.

Market Design

Are some applications of AI repugnant?

Al Roth
Updated

Here's a new HBS working paper on repugnance of A.I.

 Performance or Principle: Resistance to Artificial Intelligence in the U.S. Labor Market
By: Simon Friis and James W. Riley

Abstract
From genetically modified foods to autonomous vehicles, society often resists otherwise beneficial technologies. Resistance can arise from performance-based concerns, which fade as technology improves, or from principle-based objections, which persist regardless of capability. Using a large-scale U.S. survey quota-matched to census demographics and assessing 940 occupations (N = 23,570 occupation ratings), we disentangle these sources in the context of artificial intelligence (AI). Despite cultural anxiety about artificial intelligence displacing human workers, we find that Americans show surprising willingness to cede most occupations to machines. Given current AI capabilities, the public already supports automating 30% of occupations. When AI is described as outperforming humans at lower cost, support for automation nearly doubles to 58% of occupations. Yet a narrow subset (12%)—including caregiving, therapy, and spiritual leadership—remains categorically off-limits because such automation is seen as morally repugnant. This shift reveals that for most occupations, resistance to AI is rooted in performance concerns that fade as AI capabilities improve, rather than principled objections about what work must remain human. Occupations facing public resistance to the use of AI tend to provide higher wages and disproportionately employ White and female workers. Thus, public resistance to AI risks reinforcing economic and racial inequality even as it partially mitigates gender inequality. These findings clarify the “moral economy of work,” in which society shields certain roles not due to technical limits but to enduring beliefs about dignity, care, and meaning. By distinguishing performance- from principle-based objections, we provide a framework for anticipating and navigating resistance to technology adoption across domains. 

 

 

When AI use is morally repugnant

Researchers used a moral repugnance scale (1-7) to measure public resistance to automation across 940 occupations. They found widespread support for AI in some roles but others remain categorically off-limits, regardless of AI’s capabilities.

Occupation

Repugnance score

Clergy

5.91

Childcare workers

5.86

Marriage and family therapists

5.64

Administrative law judges, adjudicators, and hearing officers

5.62

Athletes and sports competitors

5.52

Biostatisticians

2.54

Switchboard operators, including answering service

2.52

Transportation planners

2.38

Search marketing strategists

2.31

File clerks

2.17

 

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Hacker News
Construction Physics

Reading List 02/06/2026

Brian Potter
Updated

Books to be destructively scanned by Anthropic, via the Washington Post.

Welcome to the reading list, a look at what happened this week in infrastructure, buildings, and building things. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber.

Housekeeping items:

  • No essay this week, but I’m working on a longer essay about US construction productivity that should be out next week.

  • Sending the reading list a day early this week.

Housing

Goldman Sachs has a report out on what’s driving the decline in US construction productivity. I’ll have more to say about this report later, but broadly I think at a high level it correctly identifies many of the issues at work — lack of technological progress, land use regulation, and mismeasurement — but on the whole the analysis isn’t very good. [Goldman Sachs]

The San Francisco Federal Reserve has a note out looking at the relationship between income growth and rise in housing prices, noting that the growth in house prices closely tracks growth in average (not median) income. “Average income, an indicator of housing demand (green dashed line), grew essentially one-for-one with house prices from 1975 to 2024, even though median income failed to keep up. In other words, house price growth may simply reflect growth in housing demand, driven in part by growth in average income, such that questions of housing affordability may primarily be about differences in income growth at the top of the distribution relative to the middle.” [SF Fed]

Renting is cheaper than owning in every major US metro. [Axios]

Several major homebuilders are working on pitching a large-scale homebuilding program — potentially on the order of a million homes — to the Trump Administration. [Bloomberg]

How big is the US housing shortage? [WaPo]

Energy

The Trump Administration has made no secret of its opposition to wind and solar projects. Several offshore wind projects were ordered to halt construction (though now all have been allowed to resume), and Energy Secretary Chris Wright has described solar as a “parasite” on the grid. Now the New York Times is reporting that the administration is delaying issuing the permits for hundreds of wind and solar projects. [NYT]

On the other hand, there’s some (some) evidence that administration opinion might be shifting. A recent survey commissioned by First Solar (a US solar panel manufacturer) found that Republicans were broadly in favor of solar energy. “The survey polled 800 Republicans, Republican-leaning independents and Trump voters. Of those surveyed, 68% said they agreed with the statement, “We need all forms of electricity generation, including utility solar, to be built to lower electricity costs.” [Utility Dive] Katie Miller, wife of top Trump advisor Stephen Miller, recently tweeted that “Solar energy is the energy of the future.” [Twitter]

Relatedly, a problem common to both the Trump Administration and the previous Biden Administration is the executive branch trying to halt energy projects that it doesn’t like. This injects a huge amount of uncertainty into the process of getting new energy infrastructure built, making it harder across the board. My IFP colleague Aidan Mackenzie has a piece out about a new bill, the FREEDOM act, that would limit these sorts of executive branch efforts. “Sponsored by Representatives Josh Harder (D-CA), Mike Lawler (R-NY), Adam Gray (D-CA), Don Bacon (R-IL), Chuck Edwards (R-NC), and Kristen McDonald Rivet (D-MI), the FREEDOM Act creates real certainty for developers by establishing clear timelines for issuing permits, stopping administrations from revoking permits for fully approved projects, and enforcing these mechanisms with a process of judicial review and clear remedies.” [IFP]

Tesla is now manufacturing rooftop solar panels for residential solar. [PV Magazine]

Something I wasn’t aware of, but once I was, seems like an obvious idea: landfills increasingly have solar PV installations built on top of them. [Utility Dive]

Read more

Spaceflight Now

SpaceX launches return to flight Falcon 9 mission following brief stand down

Will Robinson-Smith
Updated
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifts off from Space Launch Complex 4 East (SLC-4E) at Vandenberg Space Force Base on Feb. 7, 2026. This mission marked a return to flight for the Falcon 9 rocket following a brief stand down as a result of a mishap during the Starlink 17-32 mission on Feb. 2, 2026. Image: SpaceX

Update 5:02 p.m. EST (2202 UTC): SpaceX confirms deployment of the 25 Starlink satellites.

Update 12:10 p.m. EST (1710 UTC): SpaceX pushed back the T-0 liftoff time to the end of the window.

Update 11:23 a.m. EST (1623 UTC): Adding addition comments from SpaceX.

Update 10:45 a.m. EST (1545 UTC): SpaceX pushed back the T-0 liftoff time; adding comments from NASA.

SpaceX returned its Falcon 9 rocket flight mission with a Saturday afternoon launch, following a brief stand down period lasting less than a week.

The Starlink 17-33 mission adds 25 Starlink satellites to the company’s megaconstellation in low Earth orbit. There a more than 9,600 satellites currently in orbit, according to stats maintained by astronomer and expert orbital tracker, Jonathan McDowell.

Liftoff from pad 4E at Vandenberg Space Force Base (VSFB) happened Saturday, Feb. 7, at 12:58:09 p.m. PST (3:58:09 p.m. EST / 2058:09 UTC). The rocket flew on a south-southwesterly trajectory.

SpaceX launched the Starlink 17-33 mission using the Falcon 9 first stage booster with the tail number 1088. This was its 13th flight following the launches of missions, like NASA’s SPHEREx, Transporter-12 and two batches of satellites for the National Reconnaissance Office’s proliferated architecture satellite constellation.

Nearly 8.5 minutes after liftoff, B1088 landed on the drone ship, ‘Of Course I Still Love You,’ positioned in the Pacific Ocean. This was the 176th landing on this vessel and the 568th booster landing for SpaceX to date.

Return to flight

SpaceX is returning to its more typical pace of launch after a rare quiet period and some delayed missions.

Originally, following the launch of the Starlink 17-32 mission from VSFB on Monday, Feb. 2, the company was set to fly the Starlink 6-103 mission from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station (CCSFS) on Tuesday, Feb. 3.

However, later on Monday, SpaceX announced an in-flight anomaly after payload deployment.

The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket’s upper stage as seen during its first burn on the Starlink 17-32 mission on Feb. 2, 2026. Image: SpaceX via livestream

“During today’s launch, the second stage experienced an off-nominal condition during preparation for the deorbit burn,” SpaceX said in a statement on Feb. 2. “The vehicle then performed as designed to successfully passivate the stage. The first two MVac burns were nominal and safely deployed all 25 Starlink satellites to their intended orbit.”

While NASA conducted a fueling test of its Space Launch System rocket, SpaceX rolled the Starlink satellites for the Starlink 6-103 mission back from pad 40 to its Hangar X facilities at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. Hours later, it rolled the booster, tail number 1101, out to the pad to prepare for the forthcoming launch of Crew-12 set for next week.

On Friday evening, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) announced the closure of the SpaceX-led mishap investigation, allowing SpaceX to resume FAA-licensed flights.

“The FAA oversaw and accepted the findings of the SpaceX-led investigation. The final mishap report cites the probable root cause was the Falcon 9 stage 2 engine’s failure to ignite prior to the deorbit burn,” the FAA said in a statement. “SpaceX identified technical and organizational preventative measures to avoid a reoccurrence of the event. The Falcon 9 vehicle is authorized to return to flight.”

Crew members of NASA’s SpaceX Crew-12 mission, from left to right, Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev, NASA astronaut Jessica Meir, ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Sophie Adenot, and NASA astronaut Jack Hathaway, arrive Friday, Feb. 6, 2026, at the Launch and Landing Facility at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The Crew-12 mission is slated to launch to the International Space Station aboard SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft atop company’s Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station’s Space Launch Complex 40 at 6:01 a.m. EST on Wednesday, Feb. 11. Image: NASA/Kim Shiflett

Following the arrival of the Crew-12 quartet at KSC on Friday night, NASA published a statement noting its assessment of the mishap and whether or not it would impact the crewed flight to the International Space Station.

“As part of the agency’s Flight Readiness Review, NASA evaluated the findings from SpaceX’s review of a Starlink mission where a Falcon 9 second stage experienced an issue during preparations for its deorbit burn,” the agency wrote. “NASA and SpaceX have determined, since the Falcon 9 second stage flies a different deorbit profile for NASA’s crewed missions, there is no increased risk to crew safety during ascent. The agency and SpaceX are ‘go’ for Crew-12 to launch to the International Space Station.”

SpaceX also updated its launch page for the Starlink 17-32 mission to provide additional details about the anomaly.

“During launch, the second stage experienced an off-nominal condition caused by a failed ignition due to a gas bubble in the transfer tube ahead of the planned deorbit burn,” SpaceX wrote. “The vehicle then performed as designed to successfully passivate the stage, which reentered Earth’s atmosphere approximately 10.5 hours later over the Southern Indian Ocean. No reports have been received of debris sightings or third-party damage.”

The company went on to describe the importance of performing deorbit burns on its upper stages when possible. Across 2024 and 2025 it said 16 upper stages were left passivated in space and six have since reentered into the atmosphere.

“The remaining 10 second stages on-orbit had no deorbit planned per the approved mission profiles and are continuously tracked, allowing satellites with maneuvering capabilities to adjust accordingly,” SpaceX wrote. “This deorbit reduction effort requires novel methods in order to perform deorbit burns on missions that would not otherwise have the performance to, such as missions to Geostationary Transfer Orbit.

“These tests provide critical data and insights, continuously improving the reliability of Falcon and protecting public safety across all missions.”

Marginal Revolution

FT podcast with Soumaya Keynes

Tyler Cowen
Updated

Mostly about the economics of food, this is from their episode summary:

If you want to understand food – and eat better – economics is a good place to start. How do immigration patterns shape a country’s cuisine? How do labour laws make our working lunches worse? And why do strip malls serve such good grub?

About 33 minutes, here are the links:

Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/what-an-economist-eats-for-lunch-in-2026-with-tyler-cowen/id1746352576?i=1000748476307

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/30oLOLQZvGmvxJzA31X3qK

Transcript: What an economist eats for lunch (in 2026), with Tyler Cowen—FT

via FT’s The Economics Show with Soumaya Keynes episode page Rules for dining from the world’s foremost foodie economist.

The post FT podcast with Soumaya Keynes appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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Eric Berger - Ars Technica

To reuse or not reuse—the eternal debate of New Glenn's second stage reignites

Eric Berger
Updated

Engineers at Blue Origin have been grappling with a seemingly eternal debate that involves the New Glenn rocket and the economics of flying it.

The debate goes back at least 15 years, to the early discussions around the design of the heavy lift rocket. The first stage, of course, would be fully reusable. But what about the upper stage of New Glenn, powered by two large BE-3U engines?

Around the same time, in the early 2010s, SpaceX was also trading the economics of reusing the second stage of its Falcon 9 rocket. Eventually SpaceX founder Elon Musk abandoned his goal of a fully reusable Falcon 9, choosing instead to recover payload fairings and push down manufacturing costs of the upper stage as much as possible. This strategy worked, as SpaceX has lowered its internal launch costs of a Falcon 9, even with a new second stage, to about $15 million. The company is now focused on making the larger Starship rocket fully reusable.

Read full article

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Centauri Dreams — Imagining and Planning Interstellar Exploration

A New Tool for Exoplanet Detection and Characterization

A New Tool for Exoplanet Detection and Characterization

It’s been apparent for a long time that far more astronomical data exist than anyone has had time to examine thoroughly. That’s a reassuring thought, given the uses to which we can put these resources. Ponder such programs as Digital Access to a Sky Century at Harvard (DASCH), which draws on a trove of over half a million glass photographic plates dating back to 1885. The First and Second Palomar Sky Surveys (POSS-1 and POSS-2) go back to 1949 and are now part of the Digitized Sky Survey, which has digitized the original photographic plates. The Zwicky Transient Facility, incidentally, uses the same 48-inch Samuel Oschin Schmidt Telescope at Palomar that produced the original DSS data.

There is, in short, plenty of archival material to work with for whatever purposes astronomers want to pursue. You may remember our lengthy discussion of the unusual star KIC 8462852 (Boyajian’s Star), in which data from DASCH were used to explore the dimming of the star over time, the source of considerable controversy (see, for example, Bradley Schaefer: Further Thoughts on the Dimming of KIC 8462852 and the numerous posts surrounding the KIC 8462852 phenomenon in these pages). Archival data give us a window by which we can explore a celestial observation through time, or even look for evidence of technosignatures close to home (see ‘Lurker’ Probes & Disappearing Stars).

But now we have an entirely new class of archival data to mine and apply to the study of exoplanets. A just published paper discusses how previously undetectable data about stars and exoplanets can be found within the archives of radio astronomy surveys. The analysis method has the name Multiplexed Interferometric Radio Spectroscopy (RIMS), and it’s intriguing to learn that it may be able to detect an exoplanet’s interactions with its star, and even to run its analyses on large numbers of stars within the radio telescope’s field of view.

We are in the early stages of this work, with the first detections now needing to be further analyzed and subsequent observations made to confirm the method, so I don’t want to minimize the need for continuing study. But if things pan out, we may have added a new method to our toolkit for exoplanet detection.

The signature finding here is that the huge volumes of data accumulated by radio telescopes worldwide, so vital in the study of cosmology through the analysis of galaxies and black holes, can also track variable activity of numerous stars that are within the field of view of each of these observations. What the authors are unveiling here is the ability to perform a simultaneous survey across hundreds or potentially thousands of stars. Cyril Tasse, lead author of the paper in Nature Astronomy, is an astronomer at the Paris Observatory. Tasse explains the range that RIMS can deploy:

“RIMS exploits every second of observation, in hundreds of directions across the sky. What we used to do source by source, we can now do simultaneously. Without this method, it would have taken nearly 180 years of targeted observations to reach the same detection level.”

The researchers have examined 1.4 years of data collected at the European LOFAR (Low Frequency Array) radio telescope at 150 MHz. Here low frequency wavelengths from 10 to 240 MHz are probed by a huge array of small, fixed antennas, with locations spread across Europe, their data digitized and combined using a supercomputer at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. Out of this data windfall the RIMS team has been able to generate some 200,000 spectra from stars, some of them hosting exoplanets. While a stellar explanation is possible for star-planet interactions, this form of analysis, say the authors, “demonstrate[s] the potential of the method for studying stellar and star–planet interactions with the Square Kilometre Array.” LOFAR can be considered a precursor to the low-frequency component of the SKA.

Here we drill down to the planetary system level, for among the violent stellar events that RIMS can track (think coronal mass ejections, for example), the researchers have traced signals that produce what we would expect to find with magnetic interactions between planet and star. Closer to home, we’ve investigated the auroral activity on Jupiter, but now we may be tracing similar phenomena on planets we have yet to detect through any other means.

Image: Artistic illustration of the magnetic interaction between a red dwarf star such as GJ 687, and its exoplanet. Credit: Danielle Futselaar/Artsource.nl.

Let’s focus for a moment on the importance of magnetic fields when it comes to making sense of stellar systems other than our own. The interior composition of planets – their internal dynamo – can be explored with a proper understanding of their magnetosphere, which also unlocks information about the parent star. That sounds highly theoretical, but on the practical plane it points toward a signal we want to acquire from an exoplanetary system in order to understand the environments present on orbiting worlds. And don’t forget how critical a magnetic field is in terms of habitability, for fragile atmospheres must be shielded from stellar winds so as to be preserved.

At the core of the new detection method is cyclotron maser instability(CMI), which is the basic process that produces the intense radio emissions we see from planets like Jupiter. CMI is an instability in a plasma, where electrons moving in a magnetic field produce coherent electromagnetic radiation. Here is a link to Juno observations of these phenomena around Jupiter.

Detecting such emissions, RIMS can point to the presence of a planet in a stellar system. Working with radio observations, we can move beyond modeling to sample actual field strengths, which is why radio emissions (not SETI!) from exoplanets have been sought for decades now. Finding a way to produce interferometric data sufficient to paint a star-planet signature is thus a priority.

Exoplanetary aurorae would indicate the existence of magnetospheres, and that’s no small result. And we may be making such a detection around a star some 14.8 light years away, says co-author Jake Turner (Cornell University):

“Our results indicate that some of the radio bursts, most notably from the exoplanetary system GJ 687, are consistent with a close-in planet disturbing the stellar magnetic field and driving intense radio emission. Specifically, our modeling shows that these radio bursts allow us to place limits on the magnetic field of the Neptune-sized planet GJ 687 b, offering a rare indirect way to study magnetic fields on worlds beyond our Solar System.”

There are also implications for the search for life elsewhere in the cosmos. Turner adds:

“Exoplanets with and without a magnetic field form, behave and evolve very differently. Therefore, there is great need to understand whether planets possess such fields. Most importantly, magnetic fields may also be important for sustaining the habitability of exoplanets, such as is the case for Earth,”

Using low-frequency radio astronomy, then, we turn a telescope array into a magnetosphere detector. Researchers have also applied the MIMS technique to the French low frequency array NenuFAR, located at the Nançay Radio Observatory south of Paris, detecting a burst from the exoplanetary system HD 189733 that was described recently in Astronomy & Astrophysics. As with another possible burst from Tau Boötes, the team is in the midst of making follow-up observations to confirm that both signals came from a star-planet interaction. If the method is proven successful, such interactions point to a new astronomical tool.

The paper is Tasse et al., “The detection of circularly polarized radio bursts from stellar and exoplanetary systems,” Nature Astronomy 27 January 2026 (abstract). The earlier paper is Zhang et al., “A circularly polarized low-frequency radio burst from the exoplanetary system HD 189733,” Astronomy & Astrophysics Vol. 700, A140 (August 2025). Full text.

Marginal Revolution

Can government coerce women into having more babies?

Tyler Cowen
Updated

To illustrate this challenge of measurement and inference, Figure 7 presents Romanian birth rates before, during, and after the imposition of an infamously coercive policy aimed at raising births. In 1966, a dictatorial government imposed Decree 770, which banned abortion and made modern contraception effectively inaccessible. The figure extends an idea from Sobotka, Matysiak, and Brzozowska (2019), which compares cohort and period fertility rates in Romania over a similar evaluation window. We add data from Bulgaria, Romania’s neighbor that was also communist during the time of the policy and that might plausibly serve as a control, shedding light on what course Romanian fertility might have followed after 1967 if not for the policy. Panel A plots period birth rates in the two countries and shows that Romania and Bulgaria had substantially similar trends and levels in period total fertility rates before and after the Romanian policy window. Focusing on panel A of Figure 7, it is clear that birth rates in Romania changed dramatically following the start of the policy, as families were taken by surprise. TFR nearly doubled in the year that followed. The sharp timing of this apparent impact following the policy change, together with the availability of data from neighboring Bulgaria to serve as a control, suggests the possibility of a difference-in-differences analysis comparing birth rates pre– and post–Decree 770 in Romania and Bulgaria.

But while such an analysis could answer the narrow question of the causal effect of Decree 770 on the total fertility rate in 1967, it may nonetheless reveal little in terms of the impact of the policy on the number of children Romanian women had over their lifetimes. After the initial rise in TFR, birth rates soon began falling quickly in Romania, as behavior adapted to the new policy regime. If, for example, an unexpected pregnancy results in a birth at a young age in 1968, a woman may choose and succeed at reducing the probability of a pregnancy in subsequent years, and still achieve the same lifetime count of children.
For a discussion of the theoretically ambiguous impact of abortion restrictions on birth rates, see Lawson and Spears (2025). Of course, the extent of persistence from period fertility to completed fertility depends on the details: A shock that encourages earlier-than-desired births, as Romania’s might have, allows for adjustment later in life. But it may be harder, later in life, to adjust for a policy or event shock that leads to fewer births early in life.

Panel B of Figure 7 plots completed cohort fertility. As in earlier figures, cohorts are plotted along the horizontal axis according to the year in which they turned 30. Although Romanian completed cohort fertility began at a higher level than in Bulgaria over the available data series, completed cohort fertility in Romania did not maintain a sizable upward trend relative Bulgaria during the period that Decree 770 was in force.

That is from the recent Geruso and Spears JEP survey piece on whether we can expect fertility rates to rebound in the future.  By the way, after Hungary’s subsidy-driven baby boom, the country is now having a baby bust, it is possible that similar mechanisms are operating.

The post Can government coerce women into having more babies? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry

Fireside Friday, February 6, 2026 (On Ancient Migrations)

Bret Devereaux
Updated

Hey folks, Fireside this week! I have ended up a bit behind in my work and as always it is the blog that much suffer first. In this case, we have in two weeks twice managed to have snow which only increased my workload (it didn’t cancel any of my classes, but did require me to offer a bunch of makeup quizzes and complicate daycare solutions). So we’re doing a fireside – next week we’ll be looking at a primer of the strategies of the weakest groups to take on the state: protest, terrorism and insurgency.

On the upside, we did manage to give our fireplace a proper workout.

For this week’s musing I want to circle back to a topic that was part of our primer on the Late Bronze Age Collapse and that is population movement, migration, mergers and replacement. One of the elements of the public’s imagination of the past that is the most stubborn is the tendency to assume incorrectly that migration always means population replacement. In fact, the question is a lot more complex than that. Fortunately we’ve developed quite a few historical tools to try to tell what kind of population change is happening in any given moment of mass migration. Unfortunately, a lot of folks continue to hold doggedly to the notion that population migration always means extermination and replacement, some because they refuse to accept that anything they learned in their high school textbook in the 1960s might have been wrong (a perennial problem doing public education – the ‘history shouldn’t change’ crowd) and others because their ideology (usually some form of ‘scientific’ racism, thinly veiled) demands it.

You will tend to find this view – that population migration always means replacement – very often in older (19th century) scholarship, for a few reasons. One of those reasons is, and you’ll have to pardon me, simply the racist mindset: 19th century racists tended to view ethnic groups as fully self-contained population units, with genetic and cultural identities being nearly perfectly co-extensive, which pushed each other around rather than ‘fuzzing’ into each other on the edges. It is not hard to see, on the one hand, why scholars from societies that were at once engaged in nationalistic projects predicated on the idea that the genetic nation, cultural nation and nation-state are and ought to be co-extensive (e.g. the idea that all cultural Germans are also genetically related and that as a result they ought to be contained in a single German state) and operating racially exclusive imperial regimes overseas might be wedded to this vision. Indeed, their racially exclusive imperial regimes almost require such an (inaccurate) vision of humanity, so as to justify why ‘the French’ could act as a single, coherent body to rule over ‘the natives’ in a system that admits no edge-cases.1

Given that mindset – the assumption that ‘superior races’ must dominate, conquer and either enslave or replace ‘inferior races’ – it is not shocking that these scholars tended to assume, any time they could detect a hint of population movement, that what was happening was extermination and replacement.

That said over time we’ve developed better historical tools to allow us to question those assumptions. For the earliest 19th century scholars, all they had were the raw textual evidence. And that’s tricky because ancient writers routinely describe places and peoples as being utterly, completely and entirely destroyed – verdicts carelessly accepted by readers both 19th century and contemporary – when the actual destruction was very clearly less total. Students of Roman history will have in their heads, for instance, that in 146 BC Carthage and Corinth were utterly, completely and entirely destroyed and that Numantia was similarly annihilated in 133.

Except they weren’t. Corinth is, after all, still around for St. Paul to write letters to the Corinthians in the first century AD and it is still a distinctively Greek settlement, not some Roman colony. Carthage is recolonized by the Romans in 44 BC, but the people from Carthage continue to represent themselves as Phoenician or Levantine, suggesting quite a lot of the population remained Punic. Most notable here, of course, is the emperor Septimius Severus, who was from that reestablished Carthage, who is represented in our sources (and seemingly represented himself) as of mixed Italian-Punic heritage, with branches of his family living in Syria as locals. Evidently the Carthaginians weren’t all destroyed after all.

As for Numantia, Numantia was the most important town of the Arevaci (a Celtiberian people) when it was supposedly annihilated. Except Strabo, writing in the early first century AD notes the presence of the Arevaci civitas (that is, their legally recognized local self-governing unit) and lists Numantia as one of their chief towns (Strabo 3.4.13). Pliny the Elder (HN 3.3.18-19) writing in the mid-first century AD likewise notes Numantia as a major town of the Arevaci civitas, as does Ptolemy (the geographer) writing c. 150 (2.5). Numantia remains a continously inhabited site well into the late Roman period!

In short, many students and scholars are swift to accept declarations by our sources that a given people was ‘wiped out’ or annihilated or replaced when it is clear that what we are reading is intense hyperbole meant to stress that these people were badly brutalized (but not wiped out).

Alas, the first real tool we got to assess population movement reinforced rather than discouraged the 19th century ‘all replacement, all the time’ view: linguistics. After all, if your sources say there was a population migration and the local language changes, well chances are you really do have a lot of people moving. But assuming replacement here is extremely tricky because the thing about languages is that people learn them. One need only briefly look at a list of languages under threat today to see how people will migrate towards more useful or popular languages – abandoning local ones – even in the absence of official repression and indeed sometimes in the presence of active state efforts to sustain local languages. But it was easy for a lot of older scholars who already had a migration-and-replacement mental model to point, as we began to puzzle out the relations between languages, to languages moving and expanding and assume that the reason one language replaced another in a region is that the former language’s speakers moved in, killed everyone else and set up shop. The fact that locally dominant languages tended to become universal over a few generations could be taken as (false) confirmation of a replacement narrative.

What begins to lead scholars to question many (though not all!) of these ‘replacements’ was not ‘wokeness’ but rather archaeology, which offered a way of tracking the presence of cultural signifiers other than language. One example of this, noted by Simon James in The Atlantic Celts (1999) is population movement into Britain during the Iron Age. Older scholars, noting that Britain was full of Celtic-Language speakers (even more so before the Anglo-Saxons showed up, of course), had imagined (in addition to Bronze Age or very early Iron Age migrations) an effective invasion of the isles by continental Celtic-Language speakers (read: Gauls with La Tène material culture). But the archaeology revealed that burial customs do not shift to resemble continental burial customs – had there been a great wave of invaders, they would have brought their distinctive elite warrior burials and grave goods with them and they didn’t. Instead, the evidence we have is for significant human mobility and trade over the channel between two culturally similar yet distinct groups which remain distinct through the mid-to-late Iron Age (and beyond).

Archaeological data thus lets us see cultural continuity and regional distinctiveness even in cases where people are adopting new languages. It also lets us see more clearly people below the level of the ruling class (who tend to write all of our sources and mostly write about themselves). That in many cases lets us see situations where we know there has been an invasion or mass migration, even potentially involving sources attesting leadership changes or shifting languages, but where material culture shows no major discontinuity, suggesting that what has happened is a relatively thin layering of a new elite overtop of a society that demographically has not changed much among the peasantry (the Norman conquest of England is a decent example of this, as is the Macedonian conquest of the Persian Empire). Sometimes the common-folk material culture will then drift more slowly but steadily towards the material culture of the new elite, sometimes such a slow-and-steady drift (often involving the new elite drifting as well!) suggests broad population continuity, adapting to new fashions.

Of course the newest and latest tool now available are genetic studies. This is an extremely powerful tool which can in some cases remove (or add) key question-marks in our understanding. Genetic evidence has, for instance, offered some significant insight into the arrival of western Steppe and Caucasus peoples – the Indo-European Language speakers – into Europe. Notably, a significant amount of Early European Farmer (that is, pre-Indo-European-speaker migration peoples) DNA remains in modern European populations. Unsurprisingly, it is strongest in places like Italy and Iberia (where we have pre-Indo-European languages that survived), but it is a significant layer over most of Europe, telling us quite clearly that the pre-existing population was not entirely wiped out by the arrival of the speakers of a new language family (although the incoming ancestry groups to come to predominate, suggesting some degree of replacement).

Likewise a recent study of roughly 200 remains at sites generally identified as Phoenician surprisingly identified a remarkable array of different potential origins, with individuals from Sicily and the Aegean as well as North Africa and surprisingly few individuals apparently from the Levant, suggesting that quite a lot of the population involved in Phoenician colonization was drawn from a relatively wide range of places in the Mediterranean.

That said, I think it is also necessary to handle this sort of genetic evidence with care. There is, I think, an unfortunate knee-jerk tendency particularly among the interested public to treat genetic studies as ultimately dispositive, in no small part because people operate from the same flawed assumption as those old 19th century racists, that genetic communities of ancestry and cultural communities are and must be co-extensive, when often are not. But the Phoenician example above points to the problems there: whatever the original source of the genetic material among the Carthaginians, we know quite clearly from archaeology, literary sources, inscriptions and linguistic evidence that the Carthaginians regarded themselves as culturally linked to the Levant (not the Aegean) with close ties to the ‘mother city’ of Tyre. They adopted and maintained a distinctively Phoenician material culture identity even in the distant Western Mediterranean, gave their children distinctively Punic names, and so on.

All of that serves as a reminder that – again, contrary to what the racial essentialists (sadly resurgent in online spaces) would suppose – that genetic identity was hardly the only category that mattered to people in the past. Indeed, in a very real sense, genetic identity in the way we are testing it didn’t matter to those people at all. Given the genetic mix we see, there almost certainly were a meaningful number of people in pre-Roman Etruria who, by whatever quirk of luck had few or even none of the genetic markers we use to identify Early European Farmer ancestry – there’s plenty enough blending in ancient Italian populations for it. Yet those would have spoken Etruscan, followed Etruscan customs, held citizenship in an Etruscan polity, they would have been Etruscan in every way they knew that mattered to them. That their genetically significant ancestors were all actually descendants of early Indo-European speakers is something they would not know.

Genetic evidence thus comes with a risk of over-reading a simple answer to the complex question of people in the past who often had complex, layered identities, which they expressed in any number of ways.

Now I should note here at the end that I have pushed here against the assumption that migrations and movements always meant extermination and replacement. Indeed, it is far more often that we see – often quite violently, to be clear (but not always so) – populations blend to a substantial degree. At the same time obviously sometimes peoples really did push or wipe out pre-existing populations. The aforementioned Early European Farmers – the first wave of farming peoples entering Europe, coming from Anatolia, do seem to have largely displaced almost all of the pre-existing European hunter-gatherer population. Of course living in the United States, the arrival of European settlers resulted in a catastrophic decline of the Native American population, primarily from disease and also from warfare and displacement.

The point here is not a pollyannish assertion that historical population contacts were always peaceful (or the equally silly proposition that they were always peaceful except for European imperialism). The point is instead that these contacts were complex: incoming migrations did not always or even usually mass-replace existing populations. They very frequently blended, sometimes relatively more peacefully, sometimes very violently. Meanwhile there was also a lot of human mobility that didn’t involve mass migration or warfare at all, resulting in the nice neat ethnic lines imagined by earlier scholars rapidly turning into a blur with strongly blended edges all around.

Of course in many cases, the folks who remain intensely wedded to a pure extermination-and-replacement model of population interaction remain so wedded not because that model is true or comports to the evidence (of which they generally have little knowledge), but because it is ideologically necessary: they’re bigots who want to engage in ethnic cleansing (or want to ward off the idea their own ancestors might have been guilty of it) and so want to assert that population interactions must always be so, because if it is always so, if there is no other way, then they can no longer be blamed for their fantasies.

But it was not always so. History is complex and defined by human choices. Better things were possible and better things are now possible. Sometimes we even chose those better things.

Of course I couldn’t leave you entirely without a cat picture.

On to Recommendations:

I’ve run across quite a few neat videos and podcasts over the past week. Over on ToldInStone’s podcast channel, he interviewed Roel Konijnendijk on Alexander the Great in a wonderfully informative discussion. I particularly like Konijnendijk’s stress on just how relatively limited the sources are here and how much we have to rely on conjecture to understand the process by which the Macedonian army emerged, how Alexander won his victories and how the Achaemenid army worked. These are informed conjectures, we do have evidence, but as always with ancient history, the evidence has frustrating gaps and limitations that need to be acknowledged.

Another great podcast that was recommended to me is Build Like a Roman, consisting of short episodes (around 20 minutes) talking the materials and methods by which the Romans built their famous structures. The podcast, by Darren McLean is just getting started laying out the different materials – concrete, lime, tuff, travertine, etc. – that were used in construction and is well worth a listen if you are interested in Roman building.

Meanwhile in naval history on Drachinifel’s channel, he has a long video (well, long by normal standards, regular length by Drach standards) on the start of Britain’s anti-slavery campaign at sea, led by the Royal Navy’s West Africa Squadron, which had the responsibility of enforcing Britain’s efforts to block the slave trade. The British ban on slave trading, passed in 1807, did not self-enforce, after all: British slavers arranged to fly false flags or get false papers from other countries in order to continue the trade illegally and of course the ships of other powers continued the trade. Drach takes this effort to 1820 and I hope he continues the series since the West Africa Squadron remained active into the 1860s.

Finally over on his History Does You substack, the admirably named Secretary of Defense Rock penned an interesting essay, “There is No Such Thing as Grand Strategy” which I think is worth reading. The title is in some sense misleading: sodrock immediately concedes that, by its narrow definition states do actually do grand strategy – that is, correlating economic, demographic, military and diplomatic policy to clear ends. What he disputes is the notion of some airy realm of pure strategy, where all of the messiness of politics falls away and states think purely in these terms. And that point is, I think, valuable. One of the challenges I’ve had in making my own arguments about Roman strategy is dealing with colleagues whose vision of strategy is so informed by the non-existent idea of this ‘higher plane’ of strategic thinking that they cannot recognize real strategy making – messy, ad hoc, temporary and complicated – when they see it.

Finally, on to this week’s Book Review. This week, I want to recommend Lucian Staiano-Daniels’ The War People: A Social History of Common Soldiers during the Era of the Thirty Years War (2024). Two quick caveats: first, I was given a copy of the book by the author (but I do not recommend every book I am given by an author and folks who send me books know that) and second, this is a volume that is a bit more pricey than what I normally recommend and I was going to hold off recommending it on that basis (the book is good, obviously) except that it has a much more reasonably priced Kindle version. I do generally try to avoid recommending academic books no one can afford, so the more affordable E-book is welcome.

The War People fits into a larger genre we call ‘micro-history:’ rather than grand narrative of a whole war or reign or country, it is a focused history of a relatively small group of people, with the aim of illuminating what it was like to live a certain kind of life in a certain place at a certain time. In this case, the focus of the book is on the Mansfield Regiment, raised by Wolfgang von Mansfield, a Saxon noble, in Saxony in 1625 to fight in Northern Italy on behalf of Spain as part of the Valtellina War, a side theater of the larger Thirty Years War (and the Eighty Years War) fought over a key component of the Spanish Road which connected Habsburg logistics from Spain to the Spanish Netherlands overland. Doubtless that sentence made your head spin a little but for the reader as much as for the soldiers raised the actual politics of all of this is secondary (as Staiano-Daniels notes, when their war ends in victory, the regiment doesn’t even record this in their records): this book isn’t about the Valtellina War, it is about what it was like to serve in a regiment in Europe during this period.

In order to do that Staiano-Daniels uses the records and letters of this one regiment to dig into what life and military culture were like. How, for instance, the soldiery had their own sense of honor and appropriate action, which differed quite a lot from the civilians around them (one soldier writes, “to make it in this thing, you’ve really got to be young, and you’ve got to look at others with your fists” which is just remarkably on the nose), how they got into trouble, how they were (sometimes not) paid, what their diverse origins were, how they displayed their status (with colorful outfits made of cloth that they bought, traded and sometimes stole) and most of all the social values of this society. The result is a window into another cultural world, at once familiar and alien. Eventually, for lack of pay, the regiment effectively collapses – the perennial problem that states in this period had the resources and administration to raise large armies, but not to sustain them – with some portion of the regiment bleeding away and the rest pulled into a new regiment under the command of Alwig von Sulz.

The War People is well- and clearly-written, though I should be clear that it is written in a clear and effective but relatively dry academic style. The background politics and strategic considerations which motivated the raising of the Mansfield Regiment may confuse a reader, but they are also in a way fundamentally unimportant to the purpose of the book – what mattered was there there were many such regiments engaged in many such wars and this is how they (or some of them) lived. And that part of the narrative, with Staiano-Daniels presents as a mix of vignettes (like the theft and distribution of quite a bit of cloth, for instance) and careful analysis (like the study of how and how much soldiers were paid) very clearly and effectively. The micro-history focus is particularly valuable here: it is one thing to read in larger scale histories of warfare in Europe in this period, for instance, that states often struggled to pay their armies, but it is informative in a different way to read through the process by which the Mansfield regiment steadily withered away (pillaging not a few locals in the process) as its officers struggled to maintain it or manage its transition to a new formation without proper pay. That is the great virtue of this approach: it takes a general feature and then reveals how that feature manifested ‘on the ground’ as it were.

Consequently, I can imagine this book as remarkably valuable in the hands of at least three kinds of readers. For the scholar of the period, it is an effective, often penetrating work of social and military history, of course. But equally for the enthusiast or reenactor, it gives a real sense of what daily life was like in these regiments, including some very intense ugliness (there’s quite a lot of violence in this book, recorded through legal proceedings and such), but also the soldier’s own sense of who they were, what their values were and what sort of person could be upright in their company. Finally, for the world-builders out there who want to tell stories about early professional armies, the book provides an opportunity to ground those stories in the real experiences of soldiers in such a regiment and the many, many other people (women attached to the men of the regiment, civilians unfortunate enough to be near it) it impacted. Here the ‘on the ground’ focus of the book is going to be particularly useful in translating general ideas into a specific sense of how those ideas might translate to actual practice .

Stephen Clark - Ars Technica

Lawmakers ask what it would take to "store" the International Space Station

Stephen Clark
Updated

Members of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee voted to approve a NASA authorization bill this week, advancing legislation chock full of policy guidelines meant to give lawmakers a voice in the space agency's strategic direction.

The committee met to "mark up" the NASA Reauthorization Act of 2026, adding more than 40 amendments to the bill before a unanimous vote to refer the legislation to the full House of Representatives. Wednesday's committee vote was just one of several steps needed for the bill to become law. It must pass a vote on the House floor, win approval from the Senate, and then go to the White House for President Donald Trump's signature.

Ars has reported on one of the amendments, which would authorize NASA to take steps toward a "commercial" deep space program using privately owned rockets and spacecraft rather than vehicles owned by the government.

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Stephen Clark - Ars Technica

Rocket Report: SpaceX probes upper stage malfunction; Starship testing resumes

Stephen Clark
Updated

Welcome to Edition 8.28 of the Rocket Report! The big news in rocketry this week was that NASA still hasn't solved the problem with hydrogen leaks on the Space Launch System. The problem caused months of delays before the first SLS launch in 2022, and the fuel leaks cropped up again Monday during a fueling test on NASA's second SLS rocket. It is a continuing problem, and NASA's sparse SLS launch rate makes every countdown an experiment, as my colleague Eric Berger wrote this week. NASA will conduct another fueling test in the coming weeks after troubleshooting the rocket's leaky fueling line, but the launch of the Artemis II mission is off until March.

As always, we welcome reader submissions. If you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets, as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Blue Origin "pauses" New Shepard flights. Blue Origin has "paused" its New Shepard program for the next two years, a move that likely signals a permanent end to the suborbital space tourism initiative, Ars reports. The small rocket and capsule have been flying since April 2015 and have combined to make 38 launches, all but one of which were successful, and 36 landings. In its existence, the New Shepard program flew 98 people to space, however briefly, and launched more than 200 scientific and research payloads into the microgravity environment.

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NASA Science

A Grand, Snow-Rimmed Canyon

Lauren Dauphin
Updated
 
A portion of the Grand Canyon, photographed from above, forms a U shape. The plateau on both sides of the canyon is partially covered in a layer of white snow.
January 26, 2026

A sunny day in early 2026 revealed the remnants of a winter storm on Arizona’s high desert—and produced a striking, if somewhat puzzling, display of light and shadow in the Grand Canyon. An astronaut aboard the International Space Station captured these photographs of the distinct topography on January 26, 2026.

Snow flurries were flying in the area the previous two days, as they were across much of the central and eastern U.S. Hazardous conditions within Grand Canyon National Park prompted officials to close Desert View Drive, which runs along a portion of the South Rim shown in the photo above, and to issue warnings about icy trails. (The North Rim is closed to traffic in winter and early spring.) When the road reopened around the time of these photos, a layer of white remained on both the South Rim, at an elevation of around 7,000 feet (2,100 meters), and the North Rim, at about 8,000 feet (2,400 meters).

A portion of the Grand Canyon, with the curving Colorado River at its bottom, runs across the width of this downward-looking photo. Snow covers some of the plateau on both sides of the canyon, with more appearing on the North Rim.
January 26, 2026

Snow is typical at these high elevations in winter. The South Rim and North Rim see average season totals of 58 inches and 142 inches, respectively. At lower, warmer elevations, precipitation tends to fall as rain. On January 24, for example, snow fell on the plateau, while a weather station at Phantom Ranch on the canyon floor recorded 0.06 inches of rain.

If these photos make the iconic feature of the American West look more like a mountain range than a vast chasm, the effect is likely due to a visual illusion called relief inversion. Many people have an unconscious expectation that a light source should come from the top of an image. In these images, however, the Sun is shining from the south, or the bottom of the photos. Though the shadows on the canyon walls may be visually deceiving, the presence of snow helps to signal that the flat areas sit at higher elevations.

Astronaut photographs ISS074-E-208838 and ISS074-E-208848 were acquired on January 26, 2026, with a Nikon Z9 digital camera using a focal length of 400 millimeters. They are provided by the ISS Crew Earth Observations Facility and the Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit at NASA Johnson Space Center. The images were taken by a member of the Expedition 74 crew. The images have 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 Lindsey Doermann.

Downloads

A portion of the Grand Canyon, photographed from above, forms a U shape. The plateau on both sides of the canyon is partially covered in a layer of white snow.

January 26, 2026

JPEG (9.88 MB)

A portion of the Grand Canyon, with the curving Colorado River at its bottom, runs across the width of this downward-looking photo. Snow covers some of the plateau on both sides of the canyon, with more appearing on the North Rim.

January 26, 2026

JPEG (10.45 MB)

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Simon Willison's Weblog

Quoting Tom Dale

I don't know why this week became the tipping point, but nearly every software engineer I've talked to is experiencing some degree of mental health crisis.

[...] Many people assuming I meant job loss anxiety but that's just one presentation. I'm seeing near-manic episodes triggered by watching software shift from scarce to abundant. Compulsive behaviors around agent usage. Dissociative awe at the temporal compression of change. It's not fear necessarily just the cognitive overload from living in an inflection point.

— Tom Dale

Tags: ai-ethics, careers, coding-agents, generative-ai, ai, llms

Simon Willison's Weblog

Running Pydantic's Monty Rust sandboxed Python subset in WebAssembly

There's a jargon-filled headline for you! Everyone's building sandboxes for running untrusted code right now, and Pydantic's latest attempt, Monty, provides a custom Python-like language (a subset of Python) in Rust and makes it available as both a Rust library and a Python package. I got it working in WebAssembly, providing a sandbox-in-a-sandbox.

Here's how they describe Monty:

Monty avoids the cost, latency, complexity and general faff of using full container based sandbox for running LLM generated code.

Instead, it let's you safely run Python code written by an LLM embedded in your agent, with startup times measured in single digit microseconds not hundreds of milliseconds.

What Monty can do:

  • Run a reasonable subset of Python code - enough for your agent to express what it wants to do
  • Completely block access to the host environment: filesystem, env variables and network access are all implemented via external function calls the developer can control
  • Call functions on the host - only functions you give it access to [...]

A quick way to try it out is via uv:

uv run --with pydantic-monty python -m asyncio

Then paste this into the Python interactive prompt - the -m asyncio enables top-level await:

import pydantic_monty
code = pydantic_monty.Monty('print("hello " + str(4 * 5))')
await pydantic_monty.run_monty_async(code)

Monty supports a very small subset of Python - it doesn't even support class declarations yet!

But, given its target use-case, that's not actually a problem.

The neat thing about providing tools like this for LLMs is that they're really good at iterating against error messages. A coding agent can run some Python code, get an error message telling it that classes aren't supported and then try again with a different approach.

I wanted to try this in a browser, so I fired up a code research task in Claude Code for web and kicked it off with the following:

Clone https://github.com/pydantic/monty to /tmp and figure out how to compile it into a python WebAssembly wheel that can then be loaded in Pyodide. The wheel file itself should be checked into the repo along with build scripts and passing pytest playwright test scripts that load Pyodide from a CDN and the wheel from a “python -m http.server” localhost and demonstrate it working

Then a little later:

I want an additional WASM file that works independently of Pyodide, which is also usable in a web browser - build that too along with playwright tests that show it working. Also build two HTML files - one called demo.html and one called pyodide-demo.html - these should work similar to https://tools.simonwillison.net/micropython (download that code with curl to inspect it) - one should load the WASM build, the other should load Pyodide and have it use the WASM wheel. These will be served by GitHub Pages so they can load the WASM and wheel from a relative path since the .html files will be served from the same folder as the wheel and WASM file

Here's the transcript, and the final research report it produced.

I now have the Monty Rust code compiled to WebAssembly in two different shapes - as a .wasm bundle you can load and call from JavaScript, and as a monty-wasm-pyodide/pydantic_monty-0.0.3-cp313-cp313-emscripten_4_0_9_wasm32.whl wheel file which can be loaded into Pyodide and then called from Python in Pyodide in WebAssembly in a browser.

Here are those two demos, hosted on GitHub Pages:

Screenshot of a web app titled "Monty via Pyodide" with description "Run Monty (a sandboxed Python interpreter by Pydantic) inside Pyodide (CPython compiled to WebAssembly). This loads the pydantic-monty wheel and uses its full Python API. Code is saved in the URL for sharing." A green banner reads "Code executed successfully!" Below are example buttons labeled "Basic", "Inputs", "Reuse", "Error Handling", "Fibonacci", and "Classes". A code editor labeled "Python Code (runs inside Monty sandbox via Pyodide):" contains: "import pydantic_monty\n\n# Create interpreter with input variables\nm = pydantic_monty.Monty('x + y', inputs=['x', 'y'])\n\n# Run with different inputs\nresult1 = m.run(inputs={"x": 10, "y": 20})\nprint(f"10 + 20 = {result1}")\n\nresult2 = m.run(inputs={"x": 100, "y": 200})" with "Run Code" and "Clear" buttons. The Output section shows "10 + 20 = 30" and "100 + 200 = 300" with a "Copy" button. Footer reads "Executed in 4.0ms".

As a connoisseur of sandboxes - the more options the better! - this new entry from Pydantic ticks a lot of my boxes. It's small, fast, widely available (thanks to Rust and WebAssembly) and provides strict limits on memory usage, CPU time and access to disk and network.

It was also a great excuse to spin up another demo showing how easy it is these days to turn compiled code like C or Rust into WebAssembly that runs in both a browser and a Pyodide environment.

Tags: javascript, python, sandboxing, ai, rust, webassembly, pyodide, generative-ai, llms, ai-assisted-programming, pydantic, coding-agents, claude-code

Simon Willison's Weblog

An Update on Heroku

An Update on Heroku

An ominous headline to see on the official Heroku blog and yes, it's bad news.

Today, Heroku is transitioning to a sustaining engineering model focused on stability, security, reliability, and support. Heroku remains an actively supported, production-ready platform, with an emphasis on maintaining quality and operational excellence rather than introducing new features. We know changes like this can raise questions, and we want to be clear about what this means for customers.

Based on context I'm guessing a "sustaining engineering model" (this definitely isn't a widely used industry term) means that they'll keep the lights on and that's it.

This is a very frustrating piece of corporate communication. "We want to be clear about what this means for customers" - then proceeds to not be clear about what this means for customers.

Why are they doing this? Here's their explanation:

We’re focusing our product and engineering investments on areas where we can deliver the greatest long-term customer value, including helping organizations build and deploy enterprise-grade AI in a secure and trusted way.

My blog is the only project I have left running on Heroku. I guess I'd better migrate it away (probably to Fly) before Salesforce lose interest completely.

Tags: salesforce, heroku, fly

Core Memory

This Is: How To Build A Humanoid

Ashlee Vance
Updated

The second installment of our This Is series arrives with a look at how Foundation builds a humanoid robot from scratch.

Subscribe now

Based in San Francisco, Foundation has a humanoid called Phantom. We spent a day with its engineers and founder and CEO Sankaet Pathak to learn about everything that goes into making the bot and then filmed the process in glorious detail.

If you missed the first This Is on how Neuralink builds a brain, it’s over here on the YouTube channel.

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Paul Krugman

American Decency Still Lives

Paul Krugman
Updated

If you want to accomplish anything in politics, you have to have realistic expectations about voters. Ordinary people aren’t deeply informed about policy or politics. They have jobs to do, children to raise, lives to live. A large proportion of voters don’t have strong ideological preferences — not because they’re “moderates,” but because they don’t think ideologically at all. Instead, they think pragmatically – they think about things like the price of eggs and the cost of health insurance. And because the average voter isn’t a policy or data wonk, they are often misled – for example, by claims that crime is rising even when it’s actually falling.

Granted, some voting behavior is motivated by ugly biases. Racism and sexism, homophobia and transphobia, are still important factors in politics. But there’s a difference between political realism and nihilistic cynicism.

Many of my readers are probably aware of the famous confessional by the German pastor Martin Niemöller:

First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me

I don’t know if Stephen Miller has ever seen these words. But if he has, he has taken them not as a warning but as operating instructions. MAGA’s ethnic cleansing plans — because that’s what they are — were clearly based on the cynical assumption that native-born white Americans wouldn’t rise to the defense of civil liberties and rule of law if state violence was directed at people who don’t look like them.

And for much of Trump’s first year in office many Democrats were reluctant to challenge his immigration policies, because their defeat in 2024 was widely seen as in part a response to surging immigration during the Biden years. Until recently, Democrats tried to keep the national conversation focused on affordability and Trump’s obvious failure to deliver on his promises to bring grocery prices way down.

While the Democratic strategy was an understandable response to a shattering electoral defeat, it rested on a cynical and nihilistic view of American voters: that they couldn’t be trusted to vote against a party that reveled in inflicting cruelty and injustice as long as the price of gasoline fell.

But recent events refute this nihilistic cynicism. Yes, Americans still name the economy as the most important political issue. But moral outrage over the Trump administration’s brutality (and its corruption, but that’s a subject for another post) has exploded as a political force over the past two months.

There was substantial resistance to ICE’s attempts to intimidate Los Angeles and Chicago. But the response since the invasion of Minneapolis (and now all of Minnesota) began in December has been on another level, a mass nonviolent uprising reminiscent of the civil rights movement in the 1960s and the color revolutions in the former Soviet empire.

MPR News reports that nearly 30,000 Minnesotans have been trained as constitutional observers, with another 6,000 volunteers registered to deliver food, give at-risk families rides, and so on. This is time-consuming, exhausting, dangerousactivism. Yet ordinary Americans in large numbers are willing to do it.

Cell phone cameras and whistles can’t completely stop ICE’s brutality and lawlessness. For some reason I’m especially troubled by tales of the many cars found abandoned in the middle of the street, their windows smashed and their occupants obviously abducted. But the resistance is throwing sand in the gears and producing acute frustration among the masked thugs, who have repeatedly been filmed drawing guns on citizens doing nothing but observing them.

And the public is not on the side of the thugs.

Many commentators have, correctly, drawn parallels between current events and the way violence against protestors led to growing support for the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. But that was a gradual process. Only a third of Americans approved of Martin Luther King in 1966, the last available polling before he was assassinated.

By contrast, the Trump/Miller assault on Minnesota has produced a huge, rapid backlash. Here, for example, is the latest Marist Poll:

A screenshot of a graph AI-generated content may be incorrect.

No doubt Trump would claim that the polls are fake. But harsh criticism of ICE and its actions is cropping up in many usually nonpolitical spaces, from hobbyist forums to, yes, professional wrestling matches.

Most Americans are decent people. They intensely dislike seeing brutal repression in their communities, even if most of the targets of this brutality have brown skins.

And Democrats should, even as a matter of cynical politics — although I hope it’s more than that — honor this decency by standing against the Trump administration’s brutal lawlessness. Of course they should continue to talk about the economy. But Trump’s immigration policies should no longer be viewed as a distraction from kitchen table issues. They have themselves become a major driver of opposition to his regime.

Many pundits have made this point — G. Elliott Morris and Greg Sargent have been especially clear about it. I would add an additional reason Democrats should go all out in opposing Trump’s deportation policies: They are an issue that won’t go away, while some of the economic issues might.

Here’s what I mean: Trump is not a consistent economic ideologue. He may instinctively side with oligarchs against workers, but he’s sometimes willing to coopt progressive ideas — as he did in calling for a cap on credit card interest rates. I don’t think he can turn around negative perceptions of the economy, but he will surely try.

But hatred of and brutality toward people of color are fundamental to Trump’s identity. He and his minions have responded to revulsion against their ethnic cleansing efforts by denying the reality of that revulsion, claiming that all the protesters and resisters are paid activists, and by doubling down on the brutality. I don’t think MAGA will change course; I don’t think it can change course.

So Trump’s war on immigrants is turning into a war against the decency of the American people. And it would be stupid as well as immoral to refuse to choose sides.

MUSICAL CODA

The Diary of Samuel Pepys

Friday 6 February 1662/63

Samuel Pepys
Updated

Up and to my office about business, examining people what they could swear against Field, and the whole is, that he has called us cheating rogues and cheating knaves, for which we hope to be even with him.

Thence to Lincoln’s Inn Fields; and it being too soon to go to dinner, I walked up and down, and looked upon the outside of the new theatre, now a-building in Covent Garden, which will be very fine. And so to a bookseller’s in the Strand, and there bought Hudibras again, it being certainly some ill humour to be so against that which all the world cries up to be the example of wit; for which I am resolved once again to read him, and see whether I can find it or no. So to Mr. Povy’s, and there found them at dinner, and dined there, there being, among others, Mr. Williamson, Latin Secretary, who, I perceive, is a pretty knowing man and a scholler, but, it may be, thinks himself to be too much so. Thence, after dinner, to the Temple, to my cozen Roger Pepys, where met us my uncle Thomas and his son; and, after many high demands, we at last came to a kind of agreement upon very hard terms, which are to be prepared in writing against Tuesday next. But by the way promising them to pay my cozen Mary’s legacys at the time of her marriage, they afterwards told me that she was already married, and married very well, so that I must be forced to pay it in some time.

My cozen Roger was so sensible of our coming to agreement that he could not forbear weeping, and, indeed, though it is very hard, yet I am glad to my heart that we are like to end our trouble. So we parted for to-night.

And I to my Lord Sandwich and there staid, there being a Committee to sit upon the contract for the Mole, which I dare say none of us that were there understood, but yet they agreed of things as Mr. Cholmely and Sir J. Lawson demanded, who are the undertakers, and so I left them to go on to agree, for I understood it not.

So home, and being called by a coachman who had a fare in him, he carried me beyond the Old Exchange, and there set down his fare, who would not pay him what was his due, because he carried a stranger with him, and so after wrangling he was fain to be content with 6d., and being vexed the coachman would not carry me home a great while, but set me down there for the other 6d., but with fair words he was willing to it, and so I came home and to my office, setting business in order, and so to supper and to bed, my mind being in disorder as to the greatness of this day’s business that I have done, but yet glad that my trouble therein is like to be over.

Read the annotations

Marginal Revolution

The economics of the NBA trading deadline (from my email)

Tyler Cowen
Updated

From an anonymous correspondent:

Perhaps, as NBA fan, there’s a column to be written about the incentives that drove the NBA trade market: namely the all-out search to avoid/get out of the luxury tax and the looming “tank” battle among the 6 worst teams.  These are both direct results of the recent NBA collective bargaining agreement changes. Of course, as these attempts to regulate behavior go, the ‘benign’ intentions of the regulators are far different from the actions of the rational actors having to live within the system.

The funniest behavior-following-incentive example was orchestrated by the Minnesota Timberwolves.  In step-by-step:

–They traded Mike Conley Jr. + a 1st round pick to the Bulls for “cash”.

–Why would they do this? For two reasons: one above board, one below board.

–Above board: the trade freed up cap room to trade for another Bulls guard, in a separate trade (Ayo Dosunmo). They could not have done that trade, according to cap rules, with Conley on board.

Now the below board, cap and rule circumvention steps:

–The Bulls then re-traded Conley to the Hornets as a ‘throw-in’ portion of a larger trade.

–The Hornets then waived Conley

–Why these moves? Because now Minnesota can re-sign Conley after he was waived.  They would not have been allowed to re-sign him if the Bulls cut him.  (You can’t re-sign a player you traded…unless that player is re-traded).

There will, of course, be no evidence that Minnesota set this whole process up during the step 1 portion.  But, human intuition would say: of course this was all part of Minnesota’s original plan.

And then economically: I challenge any business, anywhere, to have executed a better cost-savings strategy than the Boston Celtics did this year.  They left last off-season with a looming $540mm salary + luxury tax bill for this 2025-26 season.  Through a series of trades, they have cut that down to $190mm – and have fully avoided the luxury tax. Most amazingly: they are a better team today than they were at end of last year. That is $350mm in savings in one year, with a quality improvement to boot! Unheard of efficiency.

Sadly: the worst part of the NBA overregulation world will now commence.  6-8 teams will spend the rest of the year trying to lose every game.  Losing profits in this world, through the ‘logic’ of the NBA draft lottery.

At any rate, a fun day for any NBA fan – but especially for the economically-minded. Incentives matter!

TC again: I would not have expected the major trade stories to involve the Washington Wizards…

The post The economics of the NBA trading deadline (from my email) appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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The Map Room

The Cold War Seen Through Polar Projections

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There's no such thing as "tech" (Ten years later)

Ten years ago I wrote that there is no “technology industry”. It’s more true than ever.

There is no “tech”. There’s no such thing as “a FAANG company”. There is almost nothing in common between the very largest tech companies and the next several hundred biggest companies that happen to create tech platforms. Whatever shorthand we use for the biggest tech companies, they almost never have much in common—whether it's how they make money, what products they make, how they make decisions, who leads them, or what drives their cultures.

It’s important to make these distinctions because the false categorization of wildly dissimilar organizations into one grouping leads to absurdly inappropriate decisions being made. Let’s look at some simple examples to understand why.

Take the once-ubiquitous shorthand of “FAANG” to describe big tech. (It stood, at one time, for Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google. Then Facebook became Meta and Google became Alphabet and Microsoft became upset about not being included, and people started trying to use other more unwieldy, less-popular sobriquets.) This abbreviation still persists because of the mindset it represents, and it is still useful in capturing a certain vision of how the industry functions. I often encounter early-career tech workers who describe their ambitions as “working at a FAANG company”.

But let’s look at what these different companies actually do. For all its complexity, Netflix is, at its heart, about streaming video to people. Meta runs a number of communications platforms and social networks. Apple sells hardware devices. They all have very large side businesses that do other things, but this is what these companies are at their core — and they’re wildly different businesses in their core essence!

If someone said, “I want to be an executive at Walmart, or maybe at A24,” you would think, “This person has no idea what the hell they want to be, or what they’re talking about.” If they were to say, “I want to work for nVidia, or maybe Deloitte," you would think, “This person is just confused, and that’s kind of sad.” But this is exactly equivalent to asserting “I want to work at a FAANG company” or “I want to work at a startup” or, worse, “I want to work in tech”.

So many have been caught off guard as tech has grabbed massive power over nearly every aspect of society—from individuals who can't figure out their career paths to policy makers who've been bamboozled by tech tycoons. It's no secret how it happened: everyone underestimated the impact because they judged tech by the same rules as other industries.

Everything and nothing

These distinctions matter even more because today, everything is tech. Or, if you prefer, nothing is technology. Instead, every area is suffused with tech — and every discipline needs people who are fluent in the concerns of technology, and familiar with the tradeoffs and risks and opportunities that come with the adoption of, and creation of, new technologies.

Now, of course, I know why it’s useful to have the shorthand of being able to say “the tech industry” when talking about a particular sector. But the sleight of hand that comes from being able to hide the enormous, outsized impact that this small number of companies has across a vast number of different sectors of society is possible, in part, because we treat them like they’re one narrow part of the business world. In many cases, an individual division of a giant tech company dwarfs the entirety of other industries. Apple’s AirPods business isn’t even one of the first products one would think of when listing their most important, most influential, or most profitable lines of business, and yet AirPods alone are bigger than the entire domestic radio advertising business in the United States. Google’s ad business alone is larger than the entire U.S. domestic airline industry combined. Things that are considered an “industry” in other categories are smaller than things that are considered a product in “tech”.

That sense of scale is important to keep in mind as we push for accountability and to understand how to plan for what’s ahead. Even building a path for one’s own career — whether that’s inside or outside of the companies we consider to be in the tech sector — requires having a proper perspective on the relative influence of these organizations, and also on the distorting effect it can have when we don’t look at them in their full complexity.

One example from a completely different realm that I find useful in contextualizing this challenge is from the world of retail: Ikea is one of the top 10 restaurants in the world. (By many reports, it’s the 6th largest chain of restaurants.) That is, of course, incidental to its role as a furniture retailer. But this is the nature of massive scale. The second-order impacts are still enough to have outsized effects in the larger world.

At a moment when we have seen that so many of the biggest tech companies are led by people who don’t know how to act responsibly with all of the power that they’ve been given, it’s important that we complicate our views of their companies, and consider that they are much more than just part of the “tech industry”. They are functioning as communications, media, finance, education, infrastructure, transportation, commerce, defense, policing, and government much of the time. And very often, they’re doing it without our awareness or consent.

So, when you hear conversations in society about tech companies, or tech execs, or tech platforms, make sure you push those who are involved in the dialogue to be specific about what they mean. You may find that they haven’t stopped to reflect on the fact that this simple label has long since stopped accurately describing the extraordinary amount of power and control that this handful of companies exert over our daily lives, and over society as a whole.

Mike the Mad Biologist

Links 2/2/26

mikethemadbiologist
Updated

Links for you. Science:

The School Engine Behind Flu and COVID — and Why Clean Air for Kids Is the Missing Public Health Tool
STEPS To It
How the frog meat trade helped spread a deadly fungus worldwide
Shingles vaccine may slow biological aging in older adults
What is the toxin in Nestlé’s recalled infant formula?
RFK Jr.’s Health Department Is Studying Health Effects of Cellphones. Government webpages saying cellphones aren’t dangerous are quietly removed (ugh)

Other:

The president of the United States is at war with his own country
Amid raids, vitriol and violence, the great replacement theory rears its head in Minneapolis. Antisemitic rhetoric has shown itself to be deeply intertwined with anti-immigrant actions
San Francisco to make childcare free for families earning up to $230,000
Freedum
The Real AI Talent War Is for Plumbers and Electricians
Sure Why Not
Google’s AI Insists That Next Year Is Not 2027
As insurance prices rise, families puzzle over options
Why Silicon Valley is really talking about fleeing California (it’s not the 5%)
Lawyers allege Dept. of Homeland Security is denying legal counsel to Minnesota detainees
Trump suffers major losses in his war on offshore wind
America’s Worst Newish Fake Democratic Think Tank
The French Father of Public Transport
D.H.S.’s Role Questioned as Immigration Officers Flood U.S. Cities
House Democrats ask Trump administration if any Jan. 6 rioters are now working for ICE
Maine pauses undercover license plate requests amid ICE concerns
We Have Organized, and More Must Do So
Big Business Should End Its Faustian Bargain With Trump
For Trump, Greenland is about legacy — and humiliation
Trump’s Letter to Norway Should Be the Last Straw
ICE’s Facial Recognition App Misidentified a Woman. Twice
Some Trump voters are sneaking away. They’ll never admit they’re wrong, but polling reveals quiet GOP regret
Pardoned Jan. 6 rioter Andrew Johnson to face criminal trial for child molestation
Hispanic voters sent Trump back to power. Now some are souring
NYC Is Testing Guaranteed Income for Homeless Youths. Here’s How It’s Going.
Abolish ICE
America Is Slow-Walking Into a Polymarket Disaster
Mommy He Shot Me Back
The Democrats of the Seven Kingdoms
This Is the End. Putinism abroad always morphs into Putinism at home. And we chose this path. Why? Because something-something the price of eggs.

Mike the Mad Biologist

Links 2/6/26

mikethemadbiologist
Updated

Links for you. Science:

Rejecting Decades of Science, Vaccine Panel Chair Says Polio and Other Shots Should Be Optional
Spotlight on the Shingles Vaccine—Again!
New CDC deputy Ralph Abraham downplays possible loss of US measles-free status
Genetic Data From Over 20,000 U.S. Children Misused for ‘Race Science’
Freeze of public health funds for states, then reversal, sows confusion
Let The Record Show That Ötzi Fucked

Other:

This Year’s First Big Stupid Idea: “Retrain ICE”
8 weeks under siege in Minnesota
Reviving The Specter Of Bond Vigilantes. The scare story is true this time. Democrats should use it to warn Americans—even to oust Trump—BEFORE he wrecks the country. But they’d have to stop being so scared.
The stunning art trove hidden in a D.C. building marked by Trump for disposal. Packed with frescoes, paintings and reliefs, the federal government’s Cohen Building has been called “the Sistine Chapel of the New Deal.” Advocates fear these works could be at risk.
How the Free World Can Fight Mad King Trump
Hundreds of clergy descend on Minneapolis and go on lookout for ICE
Trump is uniting autocracies under the banner of ‘peace’
Trump’s post-per-minute Truth Social spree at midnight hits on TikTok, political targets and Melania trailer
Slavery displays removed from Philadelphia historical site after Trump directive
Some criminals ICE takes credit for arresting were already in Minnesota prisons
The state attorneys general are as mad as you are. The Democratic state AGs think they’re the only officials standing up to Trump. They are probably right.
ICE investigates after Colorado group says agents left ‘death cards’ in arrested immigrants’ abandoned cars
Videos Showing Aggressive ICE Tactics in Minnesota Fuel a Backlash
I Was Legally Observing ICE Agents When They Turned Their Ire on Me
Army vet detained by ICE for 8 hours says he wasn’t allowed to call an attorney
ICE Agents Violently Arrest Black Corrections Officer
Kids, staff, parents detained: How federal activity in Minnesota is affecting schools and students
ICE left racist death cards to intimidate Latinos in Eagle County
The People of Minneapolis vs. Donald Trump and ICE
Jimmy Kimmel slams Trump admin for ‘sneaky little’ change that will ‘stifle’ show
Target of Viral Botched ICE Raid Was Already in Prison
Observing ICE agents is ‘a de-escalation tactic,’ sociologist says
Minnesota judges continue to reject arrest warrants in ICE protests
Inside the effort to shield Stars and Stripes from Pentagon control
The Supreme Court Shows It’s Willing to Thwart Trump—When Money Is on the Line
D.C. psychiatric hospital accused of compromising safety, security
Hundreds protest against ICE in Maine as fear grips immigrant communities: ‘It’s like a manufactured crisis’
Federal judge bars Virginia from keeping thousands of felons from voting
Trump’s ICE Operation In Minnesota Is Wreaking Havoc In Schools
Abdul El-Sayed Wants to “Throw Some Righteous Punches”

The Map Room

The Peoples of North America in 1776

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The Aviationist
Spaceflight Now

SpaceX shifts away from Dragon launches at pad 39A as Starship looms

Will Robinson-Smith
Updated
SpaceX works on the crew access arm at Launch Complex 39A on Wednesday, Feb. 4, 2026. Image: Adam Bernstein/Spaceflight Now

It’s the end of an era as SpaceX transitions all of its planned Dragon flights from Launch Complex 39A (LC-39A) at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center to Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.

During the predawn hours of Feb. 4, the company erected a Leibherr LR13000 crane beside the crew access tower at LC-39A. It then proceeded to secure a support structure around the crew access arm, either in preparation for removal or to support repair work.

In a statement to Spaceflight Now, a NASA spokesperson said that SpaceX let the agency know about work it planned to perform on the crew access arm, but deferred to SpaceX for details. We reached out to SpaceX for comment, but didn’t receive a response in time for publication.

During a Jan. 30 news conference at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, Lee Echerd, SpaceX’s senior mission manager for Human Spaceflight Mission Management, talked about the shift for the company. He explained why there’s been a lack of Falcon 9 launches from LC-39A since December.

“It’s great to have two launch pads off the Florida coast. For our manifest going forward, we’re planning to launch most of our Falcon 9 launches off of Space Launch Complex 40. That will include all Dragon missions going forward,” Echerd said. “That will allow our Cape team to focus at 39A on Falcon Heavy launches and hopefully our first Starship launches later this year.”

Kiko Dontchev, SpaceX’s vice president of Launch, made similar comments regarding upcoming changes to its pad at the Kennedy Space Center in a social media post in mid-December.

“Worth noting that [Starlink 6-99] was also our last single stick from 39A for some time as we put full focus on Falcon Heavy launches and ramping Starship from the Cape!” he wrote. 

A NASA spokesperson clarified in a statement on Thursday how this change factors into the agency’s ability to fly its astronauts to the space station.

“NASA’s Commercial Crew Program does not specify a specific launch pad for crew rotation missions and maintains a launch capability at Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida,” the spokesperson said. “If needed, SpaceX could still support NASA crewed launch operations from pad 39A in the future.”

SpaceX began the process of modifying SLC-40 to support crewed missions back in 2023 and it was completed in 2024. The first Dragon mission to launch from this site to the International Space Station was the CRS-30 cargo flight in March 2024.

The first humans to launch from here were NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos cosomonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov on the Crew-9 mission in September 2024. Four more crew members are on deck to fly from SLC-40 with the Crew-12 mission slated to launch no earlier than Feb. 11.

NASA officials previously said that having the additional launch capability for crewed missions in Florida was a big benefit, since it gave the agency options to work around busy launch manifests.

“You wouldn’t have guessed this ten years ago out here at KSC, but what’s become one of the biggest constraints to launching is pad availability because business is booming here at the Space Coast and at Kennedy with not just SpaceX, but all of the folks launching,” said Daniel Forrestel, Launch Integration Manager for NASA’s Commercial Crew Program back in February 2024. “Bringing 40 online just gives us more flexibility to continue our primary mission.”

Starship looming

About an hour before Echerd’s remarks during the Jan. 30 Crew-12 briefing, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) announced the publication of a pair of documents permitting SpaceX to move forward with up to 44 launches and 88 landings annually of its Starship-Super Heavy rocket as well as construction of infrastructure to support such operations, from an environmental standpoint.

The evaluation came about half a year after the FAA published a draft Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) in August 2025 and took in public comment as part of compliance with the National Environmental Policy Act.

“SpaceX’s activities would continue to fulfill the United States’ expectation that increased capabilities and reduced space transportation costs will enhance exploration (including within the Artemis and Human Landing System programs), support U.S. leadership in space, and make space access more affordable,” the FAA’s Record of Decision document stated.

“By providing a reusable launch vehicle with increased lift capability that returns to its launch site, the Proposed Action would reduce the cost of a launch and increase efficiency, delivering greater access to space and enabling cost-effective delivery of cargo and people to the moon and Mars.”

In order to execute the full realization of Starship at LC-39A, SpaceX proposed about 70,000 square meters (roughly 800,000 square feet) of infrastructure changes “to include launch and landing pads and towers, propellant generation, and stormwater/deluge ponds.”

In order to comply with existing environmental laws, the FAA stated that SpaceX needs to coordinate with the St. Johns River Water Management District and the Florida Department of Environmental Protection (FDEP) for its water use. SpaceX is estimated to use 297 million gallons (1.1 billion liters) of water annually.

“SpaceX would construct onsite bulk storage for water and commodities and would reuse or recycle as appropriate,” the FAA wrote. “Based on the analysis of potential effects […], the FAA does not anticipate significant effects to utilities and infrastructure distribution systems and service capacity.” 

The FAA said the Kennedy Space Center Fire Marshal and Safety Office will assess the construction of a liquified natural gas (LNG) facility. This will require additions, like “a flammable vapor gas dispersion zone [and] design sufficient to withstand wind forces without loss of structural or functional integrity.”

“Until the LNG facility is constructed, commodities such as liquid oxygen and liquid methane would be trucked in by contractors,” the FAA wrote.

When assessing public safety, the FAA noted that closures related to static fire tests, launches and reentries could account for nearly 10 percent of a calendar year. It estimates up to 396 hours for static fire tests and 462 hours for launches and reentries.

The timing of the first launch of Starship from Florida is still up in the air, but may come as soon as the second half of 2026. During an address at the 7th Space Coast Symposium and Expo in August 2025, Dontchev assured members community members that Starship would be a proven rocket before it starts launching from the Sunshine State.

“Never has there been a case where a rocket at this scale has been tested and flown as many times as it has will actually come to Florida for the first time. That’s never happened. It’s usually Florida is the test range,” Dontchev said. “The New Glenn, Artemis, all these rockets launch here for the first time, even Falcon. That’s not going to be the case with Starship.

“Starship, you’re going to get a vetted machine that shows up ready to party.”

The next test flight of Starship will be the debut of the third iteration of the vehicle, called Starship Version 3, which features, among other upgrades, new versions of the Raptor engines built by SpaceX. A launch date hasn’t been announced, but SpaceX founder Elon Musk said the test flight could take off from Starbase, Texas, as soon as early March.

Hacker News
Talking Points Memo - Editors Blog

Trump’s Big Loser Energy, and Other Tales From the Annals of Political Messaging

Josh Marshall
Updated

A few days ago Donald Trump said he’s deciding to “nationalize” American elections. He then made the comically insane claim that he won the fairly, though not totally, blue state of Minnesota three times. (Reality: 2016: -1, 2020: -7; 2024: -4). What precisely Trump means by this isn’t totally clear and in fact is totally not the point. It’s a bit like asking what the front man from a third-rate punk band means when he dives into a mosh pit for a crowd surfing adventure. It’s just not a linear thing. Not at all. To the extent we can connect it to anything, it is that same central thread as everything else beginning early last fall: Trump is getting less and less popular and, as he does, he is lashing out constantly, both from a desire to hold on to a dominant position in the attention economy and to exert some level of control over his adversaries’ fear. Both at home and abroad he is leaning into prerogative and other powers which are untrammeled as a kind of compensating salve for his loss of popularity and power.

I’ve seen a lot of people respond to this with a mix of fear, anger and most of all outrage. That is the wrong response. And by that I mean it’s the wrong public response. Obviously, you should respond on your own with whatever you actually feel. But the posture we assume and the words we use in the public square aren’t the same thing.

We live in a political era of highly kinetic public conversation with a moral economy in which humiliation and contempt play a very large part. This is very rooted in the Trump era. In a way it’s a world of jousting and bravado that Trump created. But it’s not only that. It is part of our politics that has existed for two or three decades and one in which Democrats had always seemed ill-equipped. Twenty-plus years ago I coined the term “bitch slap politics”, the way in which our national politics especially seldom turned on questions of policy or the topics they were notionally about. They were competitive performances of power, rhetorical performances of power which signaled — accurately or not — how a leader would operate in the actual management of power, providing safety or chaos for an electorate that seldom had the time or attention span to delve deeply into different policy proposals. Trump brought all of this to a totally new level. The performance was no longer implicit. It’s no accident that Trump existed on the margins of the world of pro wrestling before and during his turn to politics. Trump brought that world into the world of politics: the performative aggression, the over-the-top, half-comic style. That is one part the political sickness of our age. But the political lexicon is real. We cannot thrive in this political world without understanding how to operate in that emotive space, without understanding its idioms.

Let me say something about that.

Outrage is the wimpiest register we can use to communicate in contemporary politics. On its own it is purely reactive. It’s operating on your back foot. It’s like saying it hurts after you get punched. Of course it does. That’s not a response.

Trump doesn’t want to “nationalize” elections. Before the semi-walkback by Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, the closest he and his toadies came to explaining what he meant is that he wants Republicans to take over running elections in some 15 places where he constantly loses and where he is upset about losing. This is really the biggest loser energy imaginable. He lost and he’s so stung by it that next time he wants to brings his own refs. Again, that’s just the biggest loser energy imaginable. And what’s motivating all of this is that he’s getting less popular every damn day and it’s straight up killing him. He’s homing in on a massive ego injury in November and he’s lashing out right and left.

There are few things that the Constitution is more clear on than the fact that states administer our national elections. Congress has a significant but still limited ability to set uniform ground rules and standards for those elections. But states administer them. The federal government has only a very limited ability to get its hands into that process and it goes through the courts.

This is a textbook instance where the subordinate but separate sovereign authority of the states comes so powerfully into play. They are separate sovereignties, the states and the federal government. There just aren’t levers or tethers connecting them to each other in this sense. For all his vast powers, a president can never order a governor or mayor or, for that matter, a dog catcher to do anything. He can’t fire them. They are part of a separate sovereignty. And it’s driving Donald Trump completely up the wall.

Great! Let him suffer. Glory in it. And most of all lean into it.

Trump’s supporters are abandoning him. He’s getting less popular. He’s losing. So he wants his Republican friends to start counting the votes. So he can win and feel less sad.

Big loser energy! Thank you for your attention to this matter.

The Constitution is so clear on this point it’s unlikely even our thoroughly corrupted judiciary will go along with any of it. What feels like an outrage and is an outrage like so much else happening in our world today is just the wildest and rawest expression of Loser Energy imaginable. Not to lean into a swaggering contempt for that and the humiliation that Trump should feel (and — truth be told — does feel ) for his weakness and fear of defeat and constant demand for special rules and his own refs and all the rest is just a willful obliviousness and paradoxical arrogance about the language of politics today.

In a democratic republic (and really in all times and places), the slavish hunger to be in the thrall of a strongman or a king is the ultimate moral degeneracy. It is a perverse form of moral weakness. The mores of civic democracy are rooted in strength, and self-respect. One of the strangest aspects of contemporary politics is the way that what were once the emblems of weakness and humiliation became rebranded as a kind of power: grievance, special pleading, whining, the demand for protection from the sting of defeat. It’s extremely weird. Trump is, more than anything else, a loser. He fears defeat and he can’t take it and he’s making wild claims to try to wriggle out of accountability and the public rebuke that he experiences as a moral death. Contempt, scorn and, yes, laughter are the only proper responses to Trump’s claims and demands. They’re weakness rather than strength, and no one should be fooled into treating them any other way.

Los Angeles Angels – MLB Trade Rumors
Marginal Revolution

How much is childlessness the fertility problem?

Tyler Cowen
Updated

The average decline in fertility among these recent cohorts relative to the cohorts preceding them by 20 years was 0.25 births. Of this decline, 0.09 births, or 37 percent of the gap, is statistically accounted for by increased childlessness in the later cohort. The remaining 0.16 births, or 63 percent of the gap, is accounted for by declines in fertility among the parous.

A similar analysis can be used to decompose differences across districts in India, where the difference to be decomposed is across districts for women born in the same set of years, with two groups of districts defined by having the lowest and highest cohort fertility rates. Unsurprisingly, given panel B of Figure 5, almost all of this difference—94 percent—is accounted for by the difference in fertility among the parous. Differing patterns of childlessness account for only 6 percent of the gap between high-fertility and low-fertility districts.

That is from a new and useful JEP survey article by Michael Geruso and Dean Spears.  The main concern of the authors is whether we can ever expect a fertility rebound.

The post How much is childlessness the fertility problem? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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Letters from an American

February 5, 2026

Heather Cox Richardson
Updated

The past two days have seen a growing struggle between Democrats, who are demanding accountability from the Trump administration, and Republicans trying to hide what the administration is up to.

Last night, Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) published a letter he sent to Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) John Ratcliffe. Wyden is the longest-serving member of the Senate Intelligence Committee and is a careful, hardworking, and dogged member of Congress. When Wyden speaks, people listen. Ratcliffe was an attack dog for Trump during his first impeachment trial and had no experience with intelligence before Trump forced his nomination to become director of national intelligence through the Senate. Now he is Trump’s appointee to the directorship of the CIA.

Wyden’s letter to Ratcliffe said: “I write to alert you to a classified letter I sent you earlier today in which I express deep concerns about CIA activities. Thank you for your attention to this important matter.” When Wired senior reporter Dell Cameron, who covers different forms of surveillance, commented, “I don’t like this,” Wyden reposted the comment.

Wyden has a long history of alerting the public in whatever way he can when something bad is going on that he cannot reveal because of its classified nature. This letter appears to be a way to alert the public while also notifying Ratcliffe that the CIA director will not be able in the future to deny that he received Wyden’s letter.

Also last night, Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) sent Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SD) and House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) a letter outlining demands Democrats want incorporated into a measure that will appropriate more funds for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). DHS is the department that contains Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol. Democrats insisted on stripping DHS funding out of the bills to fund the government for 2026 after ICE and Border Patrol agents began to inflict terror on the country.

Those demands are pretty straightforward, but if written into law as required for the release of funds, they would change behavior. The Democrats want federal agents to enter private homes only with a judicial warrant (as was policy until the administration produced a secret memo saying that DHS officials themselves could sign off on raids). They want agents to stop wearing masks and to have their names, agencies, and unique ID numbers visible on their uniforms, as law enforcement officers do. They want an end to racial profiling—that is, agents detaining individuals on the basis of their skin color, place of employment, or language—and to raids of so-called sensitive sites: medical facilities, schools, childcare facilities, churches, polling places, and courts.

They want agents to be required to have a reasonable use of force policy and to be removed during an investigation if they violate it. They want federal agents to coordinate with local and state governments, and for those governments to have jurisdiction over federal agents who break the law. They want DHS detention facilities to have the same standards of any detention facility and for detainees to have access to their lawyers. They want states to be able to sue if those conditions are not met, and they want Congress members to have unscheduled access to the centers to oversee them.

They want body cameras to be used for accountability but prohibited for gathering and storing information about protesters. And they want federal agents to have standardized uniforms like those of regular law enforcement, not paramilitaries.

As Schumer and Jeffries wrote, these are commonsense measures that protect Americans’ constitutional rights and ensure responsible law enforcement, and should apply to all federal activity even without Democrats demanding them.

Thune has said the demands are “very unrealistic and unserious,” and Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming, the second-ranking Senate Republican, called them “radical and extreme” and a “far-left wish list.” But Representative Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA) agreed that agents “need body cameras. They need to remove masks. They need proper training. They need to be conducting operations that are consistent with their mission.”

Trump’s determination to prove that he actually won the 2020 election continues to drive the administration. This morning, in a rambling and often crazed speech at the National Prayer Breakfast, Trump told attendees: “They rigged the second election. I had to win it. I had to win it. I needed it for my own ego. I would’ve had a bad ego for the rest of my life. Now I really have a big ego, though. Beating these lunatics was incredible, right? What a great feeling, winning every swing state, winning the popular vote. The first time, you know, they said I didn’t win the popular vote. I did.”

The reality that former secretary of state Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in 2016 by about 2.9 million votes explains Trump’s lie that undocumented immigrants voted in the election.

Trump also offered yet another explanation for the presence of Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard at the FBI raid on a warehouse holding ballots and other election-related materials in Fulton County, Georgia, saying that Attorney General Pam Bondi wanted Gabbard there.

Phil Stewart, Erin Banco, and Jonathan Landay of Reuters reported yesterday that a team working for Gabbard seized voting machines and data in Puerto Rico in what sources told the Reuters reporters was an attempt to prove that Venezuela had hacked the voting machines there. The reporters say that Gabbard’s team was looking at whether the government of Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro hacked the election.

There is no evidence for this theory, but it has strong adherents among Trump’s followers. Legal and political analysts, including Asha Rangappa, Norm Ornstein, and Allison Gill, have noted that administration officials might force Maduro, who is currently in prison in the U.S. after a raid in which U.S. forces took him and his wife into custody, to “cooperate” on this lie. In The Breakdown, Gill notes that while Trump has no role in elections, the Supreme Court has said that he must be given deference in the conduct of foreign affairs. He has relied on that deference to justify tariffs, immigration sweeps, attacks on small boats, and so on. It is not a stretch to think he is now trying to interfere with the 2026 election by claiming elections are part of foreign affairs.

Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the top-ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, told the Reuters reporters: “What’s most alarming here is that Director Gabbard’s own team acknowledges there was no evidence of foreign interference, yet they seized voting machines and election data anyway. Absent a foreign nexus, intelligence agencies have absolutely no lawful role in domestic election administration. This is exactly the kind of overreach Congress wrote the law to prevent, and it raises profound questions about whether our intelligence tools are being abused.”

Tonight, Matt Berg of Crooked Media reported that the FBI has “summoned state election officials from across the country for an unusual briefing on ‘preparations’ for the midterms” on February 25. A top election official from one state told Berg that it’s the “strangest thing in the world.” The FBI official who sent the email, Kellie Hardiman, used the title “FBI Election Executive.” When Berg asked the FBI for an explanation, the spokesperson wrote: “Thank you for reaching out. The FBI has no comment.”

On Monday, Dustin Volz and C. Ryan Barber of the Wall Street Journal reported that Gabbard had bottled up a May 2025 whistleblower complaint without transmitting it to congressional intelligence committees as required by law. Congress members learned about the complaint in November, but the government maintained it was too highly classified to be shared. This was deliberate obfuscation: the Gang of Eight, which is made up of the leaders from both parties in the House and Senate, and the leaders of the intelligence committees from both parties, was set up precisely so that Congress could always be informed of classified information.

Today Gabbard handed over the complaint, after heavily redacting it under claims of executive privilege—which means the president is involved.

The administration’s determination to hide the actions of its own members while exposing opponents has shown dramatically in the redactions in the Epstein files that have been released to date. Officials neglected to redact identifying information about survivors and even sexually explicit photographs of them, while blacking out the names of apparent friends and co-conspirators of the sex offender.

Trump’s name appears throughout the files, and in an attempt to center former president Bill Clinton, rather than Trump, in public discussion of the Epstein files, House Oversight Committee chair James Comer (R-KY) has subpoenaed Clinton and former first lady and former secretary of state Hillary Clinton to testify under oath. He says he doesn’t have to do the same for Trump about his relationship with Epstein because Trump is answering questions for reporters.

Yesterday the Clintons agreed to testify. Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton posted on social media: “For six months, we engaged Republicans on the Oversight Committee in good faith. We told them what we know, under oath. They ignored all of it. They moved the goalposts and turned accountability into an exercise in distraction. So let’s stop the games. If you want this fight, [Representative Comer], let’s have it—in public. You love to talk about transparency. There’s nothing more transparent than a public hearing, cameras on. We will be there.”

Forcing a former president to testify under threat of contempt establishes the precedent that Congress can force past presidents and their spouses and families to testify under threat of criminal charges. Scott Wong, Melanie Zanona, Sahil Kapur, and Ryan Nobles of NBC News reported that Democrats are taking note. Representative Ted Lieu (D-CA) told them: “We are absolutely going to have Donald Trump testify under oath.” Maxwell Frost (D-FL), who sits on the Oversight Committee, said that forcing Clinton to testify does indeed set a precedent. “[A]nd we will follow it,” he said. “Donald Trump, all of his kids. Everybody.”

Representative Jared Moskowitz (D-FL)—who flusters Comer so badly Comer once cracked and told him he looked like a Smurf, a childish insult Moskowitz needled him over for months—said that after Democrats regain control of the House, Republicans will blame Comer for what comes next:

“The folks here are going to run with it everywhere. It will be crypto. It will be their business. It will be all the investments in the Middle East. It’ll be the Qatari plane…. It’s going to be the latest thing with the UAE. It’s going to be all of it…. They are giving a license to these new chairmen in January and that will be Comer’s legacy. So when [Don] Junior and Eric and their children…[are] all here, they can thank James Comer for that.”

It seems likely Trump has already figured out that forcing Clinton to testify opens up some avenues he would rather leave closed. When asked about the Clintons’ testimony at the end of the month, he answered: “I think it’s a shame, to be honest. I always liked him.” Hillary was “a very capable woman.” “I hate to see it in many ways.”

Another court case might tear away some of the administration’s obfuscation, as well. Zoe Tillman of Bloomberg reported today that U.S. District Judge Theodore Chuang of the District of Maryland has denied the government’s request to block depositions of Elon Musk and two other former officials from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in a lawsuit charging Musk with unlawfully dismantling the agency.

Because Musk and the other two “likely have personal, first-hand knowledge of the facts relevant and essential to the resolution of this case,” Chuang said the testimony could go forward. While courts have generally said that “high-ranking government officials may not be deposed or called to testify about their reasons for taking official actions absent ‘extraordinary circumstances,’” Chuang said it was not clear that Musk and the other two were, in fact, high-ranking government officials.

At the same time, the case appeared to meet the criteria for extraordinary circumstances. The government employees who brought the case argue that Musk personally dismantled USAID when he had no authority to do so. The judge noted that the government’s failure to produce documents that explained the decisions killing the agency, as required, suggested that the decisions had been made orally, so the testimony of Musk and the other two men is crucial to the case.

Finally, the last existing arms treaty between the U.S. and Russia expired today. The New START treaty of 2011 capped the number of nuclear warheads each country could maintain. Trump’s account on social media posted that instead of extending the terms of the existing treaty, “we should have our Nuclear Experts work on a new, improved, and modernized Treaty that can last long into the future.” Until that time, though, there is no longer a cap on nuclear weapons for the U.S. or Russia.

—

Notes:

https://www.kvue.com/article/syndication/associatedpress/a-homeland-security-shutdown-grows-more-likely-as-republicans-rebuff-democratic-demands-for-ice/616-d3d39a7d-45c2-4023-9d3e-0421d24936ce

https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/05/politics/fears-nuclear-arms-race-treaty-expires

https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/us-spy-chiefs-office-investigated-voting-machines-puerto-rico-2026-02-04/

https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/congress-receives-redacted-version-of-whistleblower-complaint-against-gabbard-35a767d8

https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/classified-whistleblower-complaint-about-tulsi-gabbard-stalls-within-her-agency-027f5331

The Breakdown
Trump’s Plan to Nationalize Elections Using Fabricated Claims of Foreign Interference
Back in 2020 after losing to Joe Biden, Donald Trump conspired with multiple individuals to overturn the results. There were multiple conspiracies that all failed, leading to his final act of desperation: sending a violent and angry mob to the Capitol to block the certification of the votes…
Read more
2 days ago · 399 likes · 38 comments · Allison Gill

https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/05/politics/justice-department-under-scrutiny-for-revealing-victim-info-and-concealing-possible-enablers-in-epstein-files

https://www.404media.co/the-doj-redacted-a-photo-of-the-mona-lisa-in-the-epstein-files/

https://thehill.com/homenews/house/4824337-james-comer-mocks-harris-probe/

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2023/11/14/you-look-like-a-smurf-comer-moskowitz/71584650007/

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/republicans-push-clintons-testify-epstein-democrats-warn-haul-trump-rcna257275

https://www.rawstory.com/ice-masks/

https://www.techdirt.com/2026/02/05/the-wyden-siren-senators-cryptic-cia-letter-follows-a-pattern-thats-never-been-wrong/

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-02-05/elon-musk-can-be-questioned-under-oath-in-doge-case-judge-rules

https://apnews.com/article/2c7a5afc13824161a25d8574e10ff4e7

https://www.thune.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/press-releases?ID=0540E92B-40E4-428A-81AB-F50BB3A1286F

https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69636722/200/j-doe-4-v-musk/

https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/politics/2026/02/05/election-gabbard-puerto-rico-voting-machine-investigation/88528041007/

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Letters from an American

Politics Chat, February 5, 2026

Heather Cox Richardson
Updated

Boston Red Sox – MLB Trade Rumors
Marginal Revolution

Friday assorted links

Tyler Cowen
Updated

1. A good tweet about art collections.

2. Banknote bouquets could land you in jail, Kenya’s central bank warns.

3. Cass Sunstein on the aesthetics of liberalism.  And Becca Rothfeld on similar issues.

4. How will low fertility rates affect economies?  One estimate given has U.S. per capita consumption falling by over eight percent, which I consider “large,” though it seems the author (David N. Weil) does not?

5. Survey on the economics of noncompete clauses.

6. Is Bluey the most conservative show on TV? (WSJ)

7. Someone likes the new Wuthering Heights movie.

8. Covid has now become what some people claimed it was all along.

The post Friday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

Comments

 
Phil Gyford’s writing

How I Scrobble

phil@gyford.com (Phil Gyford)
Updated

In this fast-moving time of novel technologies it’s important that we don’t allow traditional folk crafts to die out.

So here’s how I’m still scrobbling my music listening to Last.fm these days.

macOS

  • Music.app: To scrobble playing in this I use the lovely Sleeve app. It’s mainly a very configurable desktop “now playing” thingy with the added ability to scrobble playing in Music, Spotify and Doppler.
  • Spotify: I still scrobble from this by linking Spotify to Last.fm in my Spotify application settings page (read more). It has occasionally silently stopped working so maybe I should use Sleeve for this too.
  • Bandcamp.com: When listening to music on the Bandcamp website in Safari I use the Web Scrobbler browser extension (also available for Chrome, Firefox and Edge). It also works with 384 other sites, including YouTube, SoundCloud, radio stations, etc., and can scrobble to several alternatives to Last.fm. But I only need it for Bandcamp to Last.fm.

iOS and iPadOS

  • Music.app: To scrobble from this I use the official Last.fm app (on Apple App Store) which is clunky but works:
    • Every so often I have to open it and “Scan” for recently-played music and then submit the data to Last.fm.
    • Before connecting the device to my Mac in order to sync downloaded music (yes I still do this) I have to be sure to do that Scan + Submit immediately beforehand. And then after the Mac sync has finished, Scan again and Discard all the scrobbles, because it gets out of sync with tracks that were actually played on the Mac.
  • Spotify: Again, I have Spotify and Last.fm linked via Spotify settings.
  • Bandcamp.com: Web Scrobbler also works for listening via the Bandcamp website on my phone and iPad, which feels like magic, given how locked-down and separate data feels on there.

My recent very belated discovery of the brilliant Web Scrobbler has filled an annoying gap in my scrobbling. I wish the official Bandcamp apps could Scrobble, because without there’s no point me using them.

I’ve been scrobbling my music listening for nearly 21 years now: 254,537 scrobbles from 20,716 artists.

The first time I heard about all this was when having lunch with Tom Steinberg who’d just come across this “scrobbling” thing. But I thought it was a silly word so I didn’t look it up for a while.

Always pay attention to Toms.

My all-time Top Artists chart, since February 2005.
A chart showing 20 artists. The first ten are: The Mountain Goats (2143 scrobbles); Belle and Sebastian (1467), Martha (1339); Sylvan Esso (1257); and Brian Eno (1252); The Wedding Present (1148); Adult Mom (1127); Camera Obscura (1123); Art Brut (1045); and Emmy the Great (1036).

I do wonder what my all-time charts would look like if I’d been able to do this for my entire life. Which albums and artists would be at the top from the days when I’d play the same few tapes, LPs and CDs over and over?

Read comments or post one

kottke.org

Aaron Cohen
Updated
I’ve always said more popstars should duet with puppets, so Sabrina Carpenter and Kermit the Frog singing Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton’s ‘Island in a Stream’ as part of The Muppet Show’s latest special is perfect (to me).
SpaceNews

Pentagon casts Golden Dome as model for faster, risk-tolerant defense buying

Sandra Erwin
Updated

Golden Dome deputy program manager Marcia Holmes: ‘We are going to be easier to work with’

The post Pentagon casts Golden Dome as model for faster, risk-tolerant defense buying appeared first on SpaceNews.

SpaceNews

FAA approves Starship launches from LC-39A

Jeff Foust
Updated
Starship LC-39A

The Federal Aviation Administration has approved plans for Starship launches from Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 39A as SpaceX shifts Falcon 9 launches away from the historic pad.

The post FAA approves Starship launches from LC-39A appeared first on SpaceNews.

SpaceNews

NASA selects two Earth science missions for development

Jeff Foust
Updated
Earth Dynamics Geodetic Explorer

NASA has selected two Earth science missions for development, one focused on studying the atmosphere and the other on terrestrial ecosystems and ice.

The post NASA selects two Earth science missions for development appeared first on SpaceNews.

SpaceNews

Over the moon and under the radar

Jeff Foust
Updated
SLS/Orion 2026 Feb 2

Depending on when you read this, NASA will be weeks — perhaps days — from one of its biggest missions in years. On Jan. 17, NASA rolled out the Space Launch System rocket, with Orion spacecraft mounted on top, to the launch pad for the Artemis 2 mission. The launch will be the first time […]

The post Over the moon and under the radar appeared first on SpaceNews.

SpaceNews

China set for in-flight abort test of Mengzhou crew spacecraft

Andrew Jones
Updated
China’s Mengzhou crew spacecraft launches away from the pad during a successful pad abort test at Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center on June 17, 2025, with plumes of smoke and dust rising from the desert launch site.

China appears set for an in-flight abort test of its new-generation Mengzhou spacecraft next week in a key step for the country’s human spaceflight plans.

The post China set for in-flight abort test of Mengzhou crew spacecraft appeared first on SpaceNews.

SpaceNews

Tomorrow.io banks $175 million for DeepSky weather constellation

Debra Werner
Updated

SAN FRANCISCO – Tomorrow.io raised $175 million to fund DeepSky, a satellite constellation designed to gathering vast quantities of atmospheric data for artificial intelligence models. With the money provided by private equity investors Stonecourt Capital and HarbourVest Partners, Tomorrow.io plans to rapidly expand its “space infrastructure and intelligence platform, enabling unprecedented global atmospheric sensing and […]

The post Tomorrow.io banks $175 million for DeepSky weather constellation appeared first on SpaceNews.

Schneier on Security

iPhone Lockdown Mode Protects Washington Post Reporter

Bruce Schneier
Updated

404Media is reporting that the FBI could not access a reporter’s iPhone because it had Lockdown Mode enabled:

The court record shows what devices and data the FBI was able to ultimately access, and which devices it could not, after raiding the home of the reporter, Hannah Natanson, in January as part of an investigation into leaks of classified information. It also provides rare insight into the apparent effectiveness of Lockdown Mode, or at least how effective it might be before the FBI may try other techniques to access the device.

“Because the iPhone was in Lockdown mode, CART could not extract that device,” the court record reads, referring to the FBI’s Computer Analysis Response Team, a unit focused on performing forensic analyses of seized devices. The document is written by the government, and is opposing the return of Natanson’s devices.

The FBI raided Natanson’s home as part of its investigation into government contractor Aurelio Perez-Lugones, who is charged with, among other things, retention of national defense information. The government believes Perez-Lugones was a source of Natanson’s, and provided her with various pieces of classified information. While executing a search warrant for his mobile phone, investigators reviewed Signal messages between Pere-Lugones and the reporter, the Department of Justice previously said.

Market Design

Moral Economics: back-cover blurbs

Al Roth
Updated

 I now know what blurbs will likely be on the back cover of Moral Economics when it comes out in May. They are by Peter Singer, Abhijit Banerjee & Esther Duflo, Claudia Goldin, and Paul Milgrom & Bob Wilson, all people whose work I admire more than I can say.


    “Alvin Roth received the Nobel Prize for work in economics that has saved thousands of lives. In Moral Economics, Roth applies his open-minded, evidence-based thinking to controversial issues at the intersection of markets and morals, where his way of thinking could save even more lives.”
    Peter Singer, author of Ethics in the Real World


    “A surprising large part of economics is about things money can't buy, for many good and bad and complicated reasons. This wonderful book by the leading scholar in that area of economics is something else that just money could never buy. It's a labor of love, a testament from a lifetime of thought and research.”
    Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo, Nobel laureates and authors of Poor Economics


    “With clarity and compassion, Al Roth explores the transactions society cannot escape—surrogacy, the purchase of body parts, the sale of sex, and a host of ‘repugnant’ relationships. What should be regulated? What should be banned? What are the limits of using price in the marketplace? Be prepared to think in new ways and gain from the insights of a great market designer.”
    Claudia Goldin, Nobel laureate and author of Career and Family


    “From the right to sell a kidney to the cost of a surrogate birth, our sense of ‘right and wrong’ shapes the economy more than we realize. Nobel laureate Alvin Roth—the world's leading ‘philosopher-economist’—unpacks the hidden moral codes that govern our most intimate transactions. This is a clear-eyed guide to understanding where the market ends, where morality begins, and how we can design a world that honors both.”
    Paul Milgrom and Robert Wilson, Nobel laureates, Stanford University
 

Spaceflight Now

ULA offloads first Vulcan rocket at Vandenberg at it preps its next Cape launch

Will Robinson-Smith
Updated
A United Launch Alliance Vulcan booster is offloaded from the company’s R/S RocketShip barge at a dock at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. This will be the first Vulcan rocket to launch from the West Coast. Image: United Launch Alliance

United Launch Alliance is staging rockets at launch complexes on both the West Coast and the East Coast for the first time since November 2022.

On Tuesday, the company announced the arrival of its transport barge, called the R/S Rocket Ship, at a port at Vandenberg Space Force Base. There it offloaded the booster and upper stages for the first Vulcan rocket that will fly from California. 

After loading up with flight hardware from ULA’s rocket manufacturing plant in Decatur, Alabama, in December, the vessel made its way down to Port Canaveral in Florida. After that, it then set sail for California in early January.

In a statement to Spaceflight Now, the U.S. Space Force’s System Delta 80 (SYD 80) said the first planned Vulcan mission from Space Launch Complex 3 (SLC-3) is the Space Development Agency’s T1TR-B (Tranche 1 Tracking Layer B) mission. A spokesperson notes thought that “the manifest is continually evolving,” so that may change.

United Launch Alliance (ULA) hoists the USSF-87 mission payload atop the Vulcan rocket in the Government Vertical Integration Facility (VIF-G) adjacent to Space Launch Complex-41 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. This will be Vulcan’s second national security mission for the U.S. Space Force’s Space Systems Command (SSC). Image: United Launch Alliance

Meanwhile, on Wednesday at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, the company hoisted the payload for the USSF-87 mission onto a different Vulcan rocket inside its Vertical Integration Facility at Space Launch Complex 41 (SLC-41).

“Launching atop the rocket, as the forward spacecraft, is the Geosynchronous Space Situational Awareness Program (GSSAP) spacecraft built by Northrop Grumman, launching to GEO with an ascending node injection to improve our ability to rapidly detect, warn, characterize and attribute disturbances to space systems in the geosynchronous environment,” ULA wrote in a blog post on Wednesday.

“The Aft [space vehicle], provided by Northrop Grumman, is a propulsed ESPA (EELV Secondary Payload Adapter) flying multiple payloads launching into a direct inject GEO orbit.”

A SYD 80 spokesperson described the secondary payloads on the mission as “research, development, and training systems that USSF Guardians are using to refine tactics, techniques and procedures for precision on-orbit maneuvers.”

“They will also enhance and validate resiliency and protection in geosynchronous orbit,” a SYD 80 spokesperson said.

ULA is targeting a launch of the USSF-87 mission no earlier than Feb. 12. As is typical for a mission with payloads concerning national security, a launch time won’t be announced until closer to liftoff.

The company has been working towards reestablishing its West Coast launch capabilities since its final Atlas 5 rocket took off from SLC-3 on Nov. 10, 2022. It carried the Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS)-2 satellite for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) along with a technology demonstration for NASA and ULA called the Low-Earth Orbit Flight Test of an Inflatable Decelerator (LOFTID).

After that final flight, ULA began converting that pad from an Atlas 5 configuration to one dedicated to its Vulcan rocket. Former ULA President and CEO Tory Bruno previously said that work out west faced challenges due to supply chain constraints, but those were worked out over time.

Part of the work needed at Vandenberg was dredging the harbor to allow for the RocketShip barge to safely offload flight hardware. Also, unlike launches at SLC-41 in Florida where the rocket rolls out to the pad from the VIF, at SLC-3 ULA is using a Mobile Service Tower (MST) that will roll back away from the rocket ahead of flight.

United Launch Alliance (ULA) transport barge, the R/S RocketShip sails towards Vandenberg Space Force Base to deliver the booster and upper stage for the first Vulcan rocket to fly from California. Image: United Launch Alliance
Aeon | a world of ideas

How selfish are we?

Jonathan R Goodman
Updated

Photo of a truck on a narrow bridge with people balancing and pushing it under a clear sky.

An age-old debate about human nature is being energised with new findings on the tightrope of cooperation and competition

- by Jonathan R Goodman

Read on Aeon

Oklahoma Watch
Stories by Steve Yegge on Medium

The Anthropic Hive Mind

Steve Yegge
Updated

As you’ve probably noticed, something is happening over at Anthropic. They are a spaceship that is beginning to take off.

This whole post is just spidey-sense stuff. Don’t read too much into it. Just hunches. Vibes, really.

If you run some back-of-envelope math on how hard it is to get into Anthropic, as an industry professional, and compare it to your odds of making it as a HS or college player into the National Football League, you’ll find the odds are comparable. Everyone I’ve met from Anthropic is the best of the best of the best, to an even crazier degree than Google was at its peak. (Evidence: Google hired me. I was the scrapest of the byest.)

Everyone is gravitating there, and I’ve seen this movie before, a few times.

I’ve been privileged to have some long, relatively frank conversations with nearly 40 people at Anthropic in the past four months, from cofounders and execs, to whole teams, to individuals from departments across the company: AI research, Engineering, GTM, Sales, Editorial, Product and more. And I’ve also got a fair number of friends there, from past gigs together.

Anthropic is unusually impenetrable as a company. Employees there all know they just need to keep their mouths shut and heads down and they’ll be billionaires and beyond, so they have lots of incentive to do exactly that. It’s tricky to get them to open up, even when they do chat with you.

But I managed. People usually figure out I’m harmless within about 14 seconds of meeting me. I have developed, in my wizened old age, a curious ability to make people feel good, no matter who they are, with just a little conversation, making us both feel good in the process. (You probably have this ability too, and just don’t know how to use it yet.)

By talking to enough of them, and getting their perspectives in long conversations, I have begun to suspect that the future of software development is the Hive Mind.

Happy But Sad

To get a proper picture of Anthropic at this moment, you have to be Claude Monet, and paint it impressionistically, a big broad stroke at a time. Each section in this post is a stroke, and this one is all about the mood.

To me it seems that almost everyone there is vibrantly happy. It has the same crackle of electricity in the air that Amazon had back in 1998. But that was back in the days before Upton Sinclair and quote “HR”, so the crackle was mostly from faulty wiring in the bar on the first floor of the building.

But at both early Amazon and Anthropic, everyone knew something amazing was about to happen that would change society forever. (And also that whatever was coming would be extremely Aladeen for society.)

At Anthropic every single person and team I met, without exception, feels kind of sweetly but sadly transcendent. They have a distinct feel of a group of people who are tasked with shepherding something of civilization-level importance into existence, and while they’re excited, they all also have a solemn kind of elvish old-world-fading-away gravity. I can’t quite put my finger on it.

But I am starting to suspect they feel genuinely sorry for a lot of companies. Because we’re not taking this stuff seriously enough. 2026 is going to be a year that just about breaks a lot of companies, and many don’t see it coming. Anthropic is trying to warn everyone, and it’s like yelling about an offshore earthquake to villages that haven’t seen a tidal wave in a century.

The Vibe Mind

Everyone you talk to from Anthropic will eventually mention the chaos. It is not run like any other company of this size. Every other company quickly becomes “professional” and compartmentalized and accountable and grown-up and whatnot at their size. I don’t think Anthropic has bothered with any of that crap yet.

I mean sure, yes, for their production systems, they are of course very serious and appropriately frowny-faced and have lots of world-class SREs and scaling engineers. Buuuut, you know. The tail that wags their dog is Claude in its various incarnations, and that’s the Work Generator that keeps the hive buzzingly happily along.

So when I generalize and say Anthropic is completely run by vibes, I’m sure there are exceptions at the periphery, where it makes sense to have hardened interfaces with the rest of the world, whether it’s production, or GTM, or product marketing. And the company is probably a bit more “normal” at those edges.

But at the core, they are self-evidently in the middle (or maybe beginning) of a Golden Age, which I’ll talk about in the next section. And it’s very churny and frothy there.

The employees often describe it as a hive mind that is run entirely on vibes, so this isn’t me putting words in their mouths. They are observing it too. Organizations reflect their leaders, so it’s clearly being directed by leadership, and I’m sure it’s intentional. Not all the bees are the same size, and there are clearly some graph nodes spread through the hive mind that are keeping it stable.

But if you interfere with the hive mind operation, upsetting that balance, you’ll gently be pushed out to the edges, and maybe beyond. The centrifuge will spin you away to the periphery, carried by a wave of vibes.

It feels fragile, and it may have scaling ceilings we’re all unaware of. But they have kept it going so far, and I have some thoughts about how they’re managing it.

How To End a Golden Age

I’m going to share something with you here that’s orthogonal to the Hive Mind, but Anthropic is demonstrating this other property so clearly that we need a time-out to examine it together.

A Golden Age is a period of intense innovation, category creation, velocity, and productivity that lasts typically several years. Golden Ages at companies have the property of attracting all the greatest talent in the industry, very quickly. That’s happening at Anthropic right now.

I was at Amazon during their Golden Age, still going strong when I left in 2005. And I was at Google during their Golden Age, which lasted until April 2011. After that I watched Google ossify and become siloed and effectively incapable of cross-functional work, while Amazon continued to execute and innovate.

If you need a third Golden Age example, Microsoft had many of the greatest minds in the industry gathered together in the early 2000s, to figure out the future of software development on the CLR with C#/.NET, because they’d lost the Java lawsuit. It was the best thing that could have happened to them, and for a few years it was magical, and they produced stuff that shaped the entire industry. For a few years they were thought leaders. Many wound up fleeing to Google after it came crashing down.

I spent years wondering why and how it happened at Google. But I didn’t figure it out until I saw what is currently happening at Anthropic. That’s when it clicked.

Google had killed their innovation machine on the vine when they switched their focus to profits, which caused a shift in the ratio of work to people.

Google’s motto under their original CEO Eric Schmidt was, “Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom.” Schmidt’s explanation was that he was “generating luck” by encouraging innovation and taking a lot of bets, hoping some would pay off. It was something Google could afford to do, because they were rolling in money, in the new greenfield of the web.

When Larry Page took over as CEO in April 2011, his motto was: “More Wood Behind Fewer Arrows.” He felt–and rightly so–that the unfettered, unsupervised 20% work and Labs activity hadn’t produced any real hits. So Larry put big constraints on what work would get funded, and 20% work gradually died away. From that point on, the company turned “political,” lost most of their innovation engine, and the Golden Age was over.

Was it killing 20% work that caused the crash? Not directly. As a counterexample, Amazon never had 20% work. Their Golden Age of innovation and excitement lasted a pretty long time, much longer than after I left in 2005. So it wasn’t that. What did they have that Google didn’t?

One clue is something my colleague Jacob Gabrielson told me when he was a Principal Engineer at Amazon in maybe 2015-ish, when Google had become hardened like concrete. I told him that people often fought over projects at Google, and Jacob told me that it never happened at Amazon, because, as he put it, “Everyone here is always slightly oversubscribed.”

So now you see how the magic starts and ends. During Golden Ages, there is more work than people. And when they crash, it is because there are more people than work.

I realize I’m mixing units, but otherwise it gets grammatically awkward. You get the idea.

Larry Page told the company in April 2011, when he became CEO, “stop working on new stuff, we’re only going to do X, Y, and Z.” And they kept every single engineer, but cut the amount of work by a solid 50% or more. You could no longer work on any problem you wanted. And there wasn’t really enough to go around.

That was the beginning of the end. As soon as there wasn’t enough work, people began to fight over the work that was left. It kicked off a wave of empire building, territoriality, politicking, land grabs, and, as Lydia Ash taught me, Cookie Licking–a phrase folks at Microsoft had invented to accuse people of claiming work that they will never actually get around to doing.

That badness is normal operating behavior for a lot of companies out there today. One person described being at Microsoft as being a molecule in a metal, with your elbows tightly locked together with everyone else’s. Ironically, all the Microsoft cookies appear to be licked now.

At Anthropic, they are smack in the middle of a Golden Age, where there is far more available work than there are people to do it, on pretty much all fronts. It’s like they’re on the surface of an expanding sphere.

So despite the chaos, and the inevitable growing pains (not dissimilar to when I was at Amazon during their Get Big Fast phase just after their IPO), there is never a reason to fight over work. There is infinite work.

And so everyone gets many chances to put their ideas in the sun, and the Hive Mind judges their merit.

The Small Version

My strong suspicion is that Anthropic is operating the way all successful companies will soon operate within a few short years, despite it being so very different from how most operate today.

My suspicion arises from a second data point. Yes. I have diangulated on the answer from two data points. I bet you didn’t know you could do that. Well I did it. If my diangulation trick doesn’t convince you, fair enough. The Hive Mind may be an anomaly unique to Anthropic. I’m just trying to extrapolate from the data points we do have.

My friends Ajit Banerjee, Ryan Snodgrass, and Milkana Brace are a little 3-person startup called SageOx. They spend their time in a little apartment in Kirkland, about a mile from me, above a coffee shop bakery, alternating between coding and sleeping, for weeks on end. They don’t bother to put their shoes on when they walk down to get coffee.

They’re all level 7 to 8 on my Dev Evolution to AI chart. I got the sense this is also true for essentially all the engineers at Anthropic, and probably half their business people too.

SageOx are the ones that told me that an external fourth contributor overseas wasted a bunch of time acting on 2-hour-old information, because everything is moving so fast. They’re also the ones that told me you need full transparency at all times, at their speeds, or nobody will ever see what you are doing and you’ll fall irretrievably behind.

So they all turn their volume way up and announce everything they’re doing at all times. “I AM GOING DOWN TO GET A DONUT NOW,” they will say, and someone will yell from the nap couch, “GET ME A DONUT.” “I AM ALSO DELETING THE DATABASE.” “OK.”

A lot of engineers like to work in relative privacy, or even secrecy. They don’t want people to see all the false starts, struggles, etc. They just want people to see the finished product. It’s why we have git squash and send dignified PRs instead of streaming every compile error to our entire team.

But my SageOx friends Ajit and Ryan actually want the entire work stream to be public, because it’s incredibly valuable for forensics: figuring out exactly how and why a teammate, human or agent, got to a particular spot. It’s valuable because merging is a continuous activity and the forensics give the models the tools and context they need to merge intelligently.

So at SageOx they all see each other’s work all the time, and act on that info. It’s like the whole team is pair programming at once. They course-correct each other in real time.

They showed me a demo yesterday, very impressive actually, and we had a big debate over whether developers would be comfortable with their entire workstream made visible to the rest of the company. SageOx records even their own conversations at all times, and the transcripts are automatically uploaded and versioned, and they have the full work history of what every human and agent has done, forever. It’s fully transparent: a necessity for a hive mind.

The consensus was, most developers would be really uncomfortable with that.

Why? Because it’s the death of the ego. Everyone can see all your mistakes and wrong turns. Everyone can see exactly how fast you work. There is nothing you can hide, nothing to hide. You have to be a happy bee.

So I gave them some advice on making work hideable, because it’s gonna take some time for devs to adjust to working in fish bowls.

Anyway, seeing SageOx do this, operating a hive mind with three people, made me immediately think of Anthropic. SageOx are not focused on profits either; they’re focused on discovery. They are trying to find PMF by inventing it, since this is a new category. They are working together as a mini-hive mind, automating their own work in a tight self-reinforcing loop.

Building for yourself is the only way to give your product a nonzero chance of success in the new world. Build something just for yourself, and make sure you love it so much that you know it’s how other people should be working.

I see far too many AI-native startup founders today trying to guess what people might want, and building things that will never succeed. They build for enterprises, little agent workbenches that provide personas and helpers and RAG-like stuff, or they’ll build orchestrators for “normie developers” trying to make agents safe. And it’s all just… ugh. Wrong side of the Bitter Lesson.

They’re not building for themselves, so they can’t see it.

The Settlers of Catan inventor Teuber famously built new games for his own family to playtest for years, before they finally found the formula for Catan through many iterations. I like to think of them sitting around and testing out new variations of games as being very similar to how modern AI devs are building software.

The Campfire Model

Rather than a bunch of traditional departmental silos, Anthropic and SageOx both look to me like they are building together around a campfire, at least in contrast with how most people are currently thinking about agentic development.

I started seeing this analogy when we were discussing evolutionary design at the Thoughtworks unconference offsite in Deer Valley, Utah this weekend, which Martin Fowler was kind enough to invite me to. Absolutely lovely event, I got to meet so many brilliant people from around the world and the industry. It was a privilege to be there.

At one of the breakouts we were discussing Spec-Driven Development, which completely mystified me. I’d heard of it, but many people were using the term to describe a spectrum of different development practices, nearly all of which felt like waterfall to me at best, and Intentional Programming v2 at worst. Few of us found any SDD model very compelling when comparing them to our own personal development practices.

Instead, at our breakout session about SDD, we realized we mostly prefer what we were calling Exploratory Development or Evolutionary Development, where rather than making a big complex spec, everyone sits around a campfire together, and builds.

The center of the campfire is a living prototype. There is no waterfall. There is no spec. There is a prototype that simply evolves, via group sculpting, into the final product: something that finally feels right. You know it when you finally find it.

As evidence of this, Anthropic, from what I’m told, does not produce an operating plan ahead more than 90 days, and that is their outermost planning cycle. They are vibing, on the shortest cycles and fastest feedback loops imaginable for their size.

And the result, they tell me, is something like improv.

Improv at Scale

Anthropic’s Hive Mind is described by employees as “Yes, and…” style improvisational theater. Every idea is welcomed, examined, savored, and judged by the Hive Mind. It’s all based on vibes. There is no central decision-making authority. They are just trying everything, and when magic happens, they all just kind of realize it at once.

They’re making forward progress via mashups and exploration at the frontier of software development and knowledge work using AI. They’re finding their way like a floodfill search.

This reminds me of pure functional data structures, which are like append-only logs. Pure functional data structures are emerging not just at the organizational level in 2026, but also in DevOps. Ledgered, versioned, pure-functional databases like Datomic and Dolt are going to become increasingly valuable for mistake-prone agentic workflows. I’ll talk more about this in a future post.

With this accretive development model, it’s like Anthropic engineers are sculpting together with clay. It feels like there are a bunch of campfires at Anthropic, and they swarm around the fires (various in-flight products), changing their shapes as people try new variations and mashups.

Someone there told me that Claude Cowork was launched publicly 10 days after they first had the idea. When magic happens there, it happens very fast.

They are generating luck, exactly what Eric Schmidt had wanted. But they are doing it much, much faster than Googlers could, because they are all 10x to 100x as productive as engineers who are using Cursor and chat today, and roughly 1000x as productive as Googlers were back in 2005. (And in 2005 we were honestly pretty badass compared to programming back in 1986 when I started; it has been nice gradually turning into a wizard over the last 40 years.)

So to me, Anthropic feels like a quivering mass implementing Multi-Armed Bandit on ideas at a super high velocity. Everyone gets their chance, since you can implement anything and people will try it out.

But the hive mind will also eject anyone who’s not acting like a happy worker bee in the swarm. You need to contribute your ideas in the right ways. It’s the death of the ego. These were the exact words of someone who’s been there since the early days.

Sound familiar?

I think it really is kind of like improv. It’s a team sport. It doesn’t work to come in guns blazing, and make it about yourself.

So we’re seeing real power in the “Yes, and…” model.

And yet, most companies arrived at where they are by learning how to say No.

This is shaping up to be a problem.

More To Come

I have plenty more thoughts on the subject, but unfortunately precious little time or space. I have a huge blog-post backlog to get through, not to mention equally huge maintainer responsibilities now. There are literally whole companies using Gas Town, it’s pretty nuts.

If I’ve convinced enough people of the hive mind as an operating model, then maybe I can write more about how you might go about turning your existing company into one.

A little bird from… somewhere, in Sales, told me that all companies are asking variations of just the same two questions. They bluster and bluff and try to act informed, but they are all terrified. When you cluster their questions, they break down into, “Will everything be OK?” and “Will we be here in five years?”

The default answer, I’m afraid, is No. If you do nothing, you’re almost certainly going to get overrun. If you have an Atom Moat, then you stand a pretty good chance of weathering the storm, if you execute well. Just a chance, mind you: It’s a moat, not a force field. But atoms are a pretty good moat. If you make beer, or work with humans, or ship stuff, say, then you’ve got a bit more time to work with, maybe, to find your feet in the AI era.

If you have a strictly online or SaaS software presence, with no atoms in your product whatsoever, just electrons, then you are, candidly, pretty screwed if you don’t pivot. I don’t think there are any recipes for pivoting yet; this is all new, and it’s all happening very fast.

But there is a yellow brick road: spending tokens. This golden shimmering trail will lead your company gradually in the right direction. Your organization is going to have to learn a bunch of new lessons, as new bottlenecks emerge when coding is no longer the bottleneck. You need to start learning those bespoke organizational lessons early. The only way to know for sure that you’re learning those lessons is if people are out there trying and making mistakes. And you can tell how much practice they’re getting from their token spend.

I don’t work for anyone, I’m not associated with any company, and I’m not selling anything. I’m not even recommending any particular course of action, other than… learn AI. Now’s the time. Just start.

Start

You have a lot of work ahead of you. Build the campfire. Turn your product into a living prototype. Consider building some hives within your company, and giving them space to innovate.

And then pivot like hell to your new PMF, whatever that may be. Good luck. It’s gonna be a crazy year. May the best… whatever… win.

p.s. come join us at the Gas Town Discord, which you can find at gastownhall.ai — see you there!

Marginal Revolution

The polity that is Bolivia?

Tyler Cowen
Updated

Bolivia’s new president is planning major reforms to unleash a mining and oil exploration boom, burying nearly 20 years of socialism in the Andean nation with a new policy — “capitalism for all”.

Rodrigo Paz, a pragmatic centrist former senator, said his team was working on a package of laws to boost foreign investment in natural resources that would be presented to congress for approval “in the coming days or months”.

“We need a new oil and gas law,” Paz told the Financial Times in an interview while attending an economic forum in Panama.

“Bolivia should go for 50-50 [risk-sharing with foreign investors]. I give you the space. You come in with technology and investment . . . I think it’s the basis for business in future.”

Bolivia has a fifth of the world’s reserves of lithium, according to the US Geological Survey, but with its state-owned company YLB lacking technical expertise and investment, it has struggled for years to produce commercial quantities of the battery metal and exports are currently dominated by neighbouring Chile.

Bolivia also has big reserves of silver, tin and antimony. Paz said the Bolivian people, who have a history of protesting against mining, would support fresh investment if they were shown they would benefit financially. He compared his country to its neighbours: “Peru last year had mining revenues of around $50bn. Chile had revenues with state and private companies of $65bn. And we . . . had just $6bn,” he said.

Here is more from Michael Stott at the FT.  We will see, as they say.  I am cautiously hopeful.

The post The polity that is Bolivia? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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Marginal Revolution

Poverty and Dependency in the United States, 1939–2023

Tyler Cowen
Updated

We compare trends in absolute poverty before (1939–1963) and after (1963–2023) the War on Poverty was declared. Our primary methodological contribution is to create a post-tax post-transfer income measure using the 1940, 1950 and 1960 Decennial Censuses through imputations of taxes and transfers as well as certain forms of market income including perquisites (Collins and Wanamaker 2022), consistent with the full income measures developed by Burkhauser et al. (2024) for subsequent years. From 1939–1963, poverty fell by 29 percentage points, with even larger declines for Black people and all children. While absolute poverty continued to fall following the War on Poverty’s declaration, the pace was no faster, even when evaluating the trends relative to a consistent initial poverty rate. Furthermore, the pre-1964 decline in poverty among working age adults and children was achieved almost completely through increases in market income, during which time only 2–3 percent of working age adults were dependent on the government for at least half of their income, compared to dependency rates of 7–15 percent from 1972–2023. In contrast to progress on absolute poverty, reductions in relative poverty were more modest from 1939–1963 and even less so since then.

That is from a new NBER working paper by Richard K. Burkhauser and Kevin Corinth.

The post Poverty and Dependency in the United States, 1939–2023 appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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NASA Science

A Winter Blanket Covers North Carolina

Michala Garrison
Updated
 
A satellite image centered on North Carolina shows white snow covering most of the state, with additional snowy patches in neighboring states. Some forested and urban areas appear gray. To the right, a strip of barrier islands appears white against the green and blue Atlantic Ocean.
February 2, 2026

A potent winter storm in late January 2026 left much of North Carolina dealing with significant snow accumulations. Though the state is no stranger to snow, such widespread coverage is unusual.

This image, acquired on February 2 with the MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) on NASA’s Terra satellite, reveals a nearly continuous blanket of white stretching from mountain cities in the west to beachfront towns in the east. According to the North Carolina State Climate Office, measurable snow fell in all 100 counties for the first time in more than a decade.

Snowfall in North Carolina typically requires cold air funneled in from the north to combine with moisture supplied by a low-pressure system. During the January 31 weekend event, Arctic air from earlier in the week lingered across the state as a storm approached along a near-shore track, setting the stage for widespread snow.

Snow totals exceeded a foot in some of the state’s western, mountainous regions, following several years without significant snowfall events, though some locations such as Asheville saw smaller amounts. The storm even pushed south into Greenville, South Carolina, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, where the downtown area saw about 5 inches (13 centimeters) by the evening of January 31, according to the National Weather Service.

In the Piedmont region, the hilly central part of the state, Charlotte received nearly a foot of snow—the most since 2004—while Raleigh saw a lighter accumulation of 2.8 inches, according to the state climate center.

A detailed satellite image centered on eastern North Carolina shows white snow covering coastal areas along the blue-green Atlantic Ocean. Gray ice is visible on some rivers and lakes.
February 2, 2026

Even coastal parts of the state traded brown sandy beaches for a blanket of white, with more than a foot reported in parts of Carteret County. Beaufort, a mainland town in the southern Outer Banks area, experienced heavy blowing snow. Slightly inland, Greenville received 14 inches, an amount not seen since a large storm in March 1980.

Though appearing serene from space, the storm posed real hazards on the ground. Dangerous road conditions snarled traffic and caused collisions, according to local news reports, while coastal areas saw high winds and waves. Overwash on Highway 12 in the Outer Banks coated parts of the road in standing water and sand, while several homes along the shore of Hatteras Island collapsed into the sea.  

NASA Earth Observatory images by Michala Garrison, using MODIS data from NASA EOSDIS LANCE and GIBS/Worldview. Story by Kathryn Hansen.

Downloads

A satellite image centered on North Carolina shows white snow covering most of the state, with additional snowy patches in neighboring states. Some forested and urban areas appear gray. To the right, a strip of barrier islands appears white against the green and blue Atlantic Ocean.

February 2, 2026

JPEG (3.08 MB)

A detailed satellite image centered on eastern North Carolina shows white snow covering coastal areas along the blue-green Atlantic Ocean. Gray ice is visible on some rivers and lakes.

February 2, 2026

JPEG (3.08 MB)

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Simon Willison's Weblog

Mitchell Hashimoto: My AI Adoption Journey

Mitchell Hashimoto: My AI Adoption Journey

Some really good and unconventional tips in here for getting to a place with coding agents where they demonstrably improve your workflow and productivity. I particularly liked:

  • Reproduce your own work - when learning to use coding agents Mitchell went through a period of doing the work manually, then recreating the same solution using agents as an exercise:

    I literally did the work twice. I'd do the work manually, and then I'd fight an agent to produce identical results in terms of quality and function (without it being able to see my manual solution, of course).

  • End-of-day agents - letting agents step in when your energy runs out:

    To try to find some efficiency, I next started up a new pattern: block out the last 30 minutes of every day to kick off one or more agents. My hypothesis was that perhaps I could gain some efficiency if the agent can make some positive progress in the times I can't work anyways.

  • Outsource the Slam Dunks - once you know an agent can likely handle a task, have it do that task while you work on something more interesting yourself.

Via Hacker News

Tags: ai, generative-ai, llms, ai-assisted-programming, mitchell-hashimoto, coding-agents

Paul Krugman

Cryptocrash

Paul Krugman
Updated

A beginning is a delicate time. | monica byrne

I don’t normally post in the evening, but I thought I’d offer three quick notes on an … interesting day in the crypto market.

First, today’s price action shouldn’t change your view about Bitcoin’s usefulness or lack thereof. If, like me, you consider the whole thing a delusion — BTC isn’t a medium of exchange, nor is it a reliable store of value — then you already knew that and the fact that we seem to be having a Wile E. Coyote moment isn’t information about the fundamentals. (There are no fundamentals.) If you have some story about why this aging financial innovation is actually useful — do tell — you should HODL through the panic.

Incidentally, some readers insisted that HODL stands for “hold on for dear life.” No, it doesn’t. That’s a retcon intended to make it sound more respectable. The term comes from a post on a crypto message board from an investor so panicked that he misspelled HOLD. See link in this morning’s post.

And I did something similar in the title of this post as emailed out! Sigh.

Second, the fact that BTC is now lower than it was before the 2024 election is significant in two ways. It shows the limits of political favor — all the boasts about making American a crypto superpower, all the deregulatory talk and pardons for cryptocriminals, in the end couldn’t defy gravity.

But it also means that everyone who bought Bitcoin in the belief that Trump would make Bitcoin greater than ever has lost money, in many cases a lot of money. So this is another case of ETTD: everything Trump touches dies.

Finally, this crash may have political consequences. At least some young men supported Trump because they believed that he would enhance their crypto investments, and have remained favorable because he seemed to be delivering. I don’t know how many bitterly disillusioned bros there will be now, but there will be some.

And in general the whole “Say what you like about Trump, but markets are up” mindset must be under severe strain.

Are we having fun yet?

Simon Willison's Weblog

Quoting Karel D'Oosterlinck

When I want to quickly implement a one-off experiment in a part of the codebase I am unfamiliar with, I get codex to do extensive due diligence. Codex explores relevant slack channels, reads related discussions, fetches experimental branches from those discussions, and cherry picks useful changes for my experiment. All of this gets summarized in an extensive set of notes, with links back to where each piece of information was found. Using these notes, codex wires the experiment and makes a bunch of hyperparameter decisions I couldn’t possibly make without much more effort.

— Karel D'Oosterlinck, I spent $10,000 to automate my research at OpenAI with Codex

Tags: codex-cli, coding-agents, ai-assisted-programming, generative-ai, openai, ai, llms

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Crescent Enceladus

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