Rocket Lab conducts a launch simulation of its Neutron rocket from Launch Complex 3 at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport within NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia on Oct. 3, 2025. Image: Rocket Lab
Rocket Lab announced the block sale of five Neutron rocket launches and three Electron rocket flights to a secret customer.
While the company didn’t disclose the value of the contract, it said it surpassed its previous record, which was a $190 million contract for 20 hypersonic, suborbital test flights of the Haste version of its Electron rocket for the Department of Defense.
During a first quarter 2026 earnings call on May 7, Adam Spice, Rocket Lab’s Chief Financial Officer, said they ended the quarter with about $2.2 billion in backlog, with launches accounting 41.5 percent of that.
“We are actively cultivating a strong pipeline that includes multi-launch agreements, large satellite platform contracts, and an increasingly diverse set of satellite component and subsystem merchant opportunities across government and commercial programs,”Spice said. “These larger, needle-moving opportunities can introduce lumpiness and backlog growth, but they are critical drivers of long-term value and scale for the business.”
Rocket Lab Founder and CEO Sir Peter Beck said that investors should watch for “placing of items on test stands” as the benchmark of progress towards the first Neutron launch during the fourth quarter of 2026. He said they are working on an “aggressive schedule” to get to the pad.
“The teams has made tremendous strides on the stage one tank design refinements and have improved both the tank strength margins and manufacturability and give us confidence in the structural performance,” Beck said, referring to an unintended rupture of a first stage tank during a test at Wallops Flight Facility earlier this year.
“We’ve cleared separation events at full flight loads on the second stage article and interstage development system, which is great news. We’re now testing the resilience of the off-nominal separation events,” Beck added. “So, if you see something broken on the test stand from here on, know that’s completely intentional.”
It’s all gas no breaks with Archimedes engine testing at @NASAStennis. Full duration burns with TVC motions across the full conical sweep, vacuum engine hot fires, and both Archimedes test cells in operation all day every day. Archimedes is coming pic.twitter.com/3giUBflyki
The rocket will be powered by nine, liquid methane-fueled Archimedes engines on the first stage, which are designed to provide nearly 1.5 million pounds of thrust at liftoff, similar to the 1.7 million pounds of thrust achievable on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.
Beck said that “extensive testing” of the engines is ongoing at their test stands at NASA’s Stennis Space Center in Mississippi.
“This is for both the stage one version of the engines and for the vacuum-optimized Archimedes that will power stage two,” Beck said. “It’s non-stop hot fires across both test stands as the team really stretches the performance of these engines while running them in the full range of gimbal angles for the thrust structure.
“Since completing qualification, the team has gotten stuck into fitting it out with all the flight set of avionics and fluid systems. That’s taking place at our Middle River facility before it’s sent out to Launch Complex 3 for integrated systems testing on the pad.”
Neutron features a unique payload fairing design, which Rocket Lab calls ‘Hungry Hippo.’ Those fairing halves remain attached to the first stage and open to release the second stage.
“Our qualified reusable fairing system has been covered in TPS or thermal protection system once arriving in Virginia,” Beck said. “Integration of the avionics and fluid systems on this part of the vehicle continues as well.”
Once Neutron makes its debut, Beck said they aim to replicate the Electron rollout by launching Neutron once during year one, three times during year two, and five times during year three. For comparison, Electron completed 2025 with 21 Electron rocket launches, after it debuted in May 2017.
It has not been a banner day for members of the Trump administration.
Evan Hill, Jarrett Ley, Alex Horton, Tara Copp, and Dan Lamothe of the Washington Post reported that Iranian strikes since February 28, when U.S. and Israeli air strikes began, have caused far more damage to U.S. military sites in the Middle East than Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and the U.S. government have admitted.
While the damage from the Iranian strikes, which have killed and wounded servicemembers, is itself important, so is the underlying story: the U.S. government is hiding the true cost of the war in Iran from the American people. The journalists note that it is “unusually difficult” to get satellite imagery from the Middle East right now because less than two weeks into the war, the U.S. government asked two of the largest commercial providers of satellite imagery, Vantor and Planet, “to limit, delay or indefinitely withhold the publication of imagery of the region while the war is ongoing.”
The companies complied, forcing the journalists to turn to high-resolution satellite imagery published by Iran’s state-affiliated media, cross-checking it with lower-resolution imagery from the satellite system the European Union uses.
Global affairs journalist David Rothkopf wrote today in The Daily Beast: “Not since Vietnam have we seen a more systematic effort by an administration to lie about the nature, costs, consequences, and results of a war than we have seen from the White House on Iran.”
Early this morning, Barak Ravid of Axios, who often reports information from White House insiders, wrote that the White House believed it was close to a memorandum of understanding with Iran that would end the war and lay the groundwork for future negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program, although there was plenty of hedging in the article.
Once again, there were fortuitously timed trades before the story broke. Adam Kobeissi’s Kobeissi Letter, which comments on global capital markets, noted that about 70 minutes before the Axios story, someone took about $920 million worth of crude oil shorts and bet the market would drop, meaning they promised to provide about 10,000 contracts for oil at the current price. Within two hours, oil prices had fallen more than 12%, making the entity a profit of about $125 million.
On social media, Trump’s account continued to whipsaw between pressing for an end to the war and threatening apocalyptic destruction if Iran doesn’t agree to U.S. demands. “Assuming Iran agrees to give what has been agreed to, which is, perhaps, a big assumption,” he wrote, “the already legendary Epic Fury will be at an end, and the highly effective Blockade will allow the Hormuz Strait to be OPEN TO ALL, including Iran. If they don’t agree, the bombing starts, and it will be, sadly, at a much higher level and intensity than it was before. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP”
The administration’s shifting justifications and claims about the Iran war are “dizzying,” Ben Finley, Matthew Lee, and Farnoush Amiri of the Associated Press wrote today. Yesterday, after calling the war “concluded,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth spent the day selling Trump’s Project Freedom to open the Strait of Hormuz, only to have Trump call Project Freedom off with a post on social media.
Mosheh Gains, Courtney Kube, Andrea Mitchell, Natasha Lebedeva and Daniel Arkin of NBC News reported tonight that Trump’s abrupt about-face came after Saudi Arabia told the U.S. it would not permit the U.S. military to use Saudi airspace for the operation.
This afternoon, the U.S. fired on an Iranian oil tanker as it tried to pass through the U.S. blockade, and Israel launched strikes on a suburb of Lebanon’s capital, Beirut. China’s foreign minister Wang Yi said today that China is “deeply distressed” by the conflict and called for a ceasefire. “We believe that a comprehensive ceasefire is urgently needed, that a resumption of hostilities is not acceptable,” he said. Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi was in China today, where he met with Wang. Trump is due to visit China on May 14. Trump wants a solution to the Iran War before that meeting, and the Iranians know it, giving them leverage over a deal.
This evening, the speaker of Iran’s parliament,* M.B. Ghalibaf, posted: “Operation Trust Me Bro failed. Now back to routine with Operation Fauxios.”
Hegseth is not the only member of the administration in trouble in the news today. After journalist Sarah Fitzpatrick wrote an April 17 story in The Atlantic detailing FBI director Kash Patel’s drinking and inability to perform his job, Patel sued both The Atlantic and Fitzpatrick for defamation, asking for $250 million in damages.
The Atlantic and Fitzpatrick stood by the story, which had two dozen sources. Fitzpatrick noted that after she published the piece, additional informants came forward to corroborate her findings.
Today, Ken Dilanian and Carol Leonnig of MS NOW reported that the FBI has launched a criminal leak investigation into who talked to Fitzpatrick. Sources told the reporters that such an investigation, called an “insider threat investigation,” usually involves government officials who may have given away state secrets or classified documents. Focusing on leaks to a reporter is “highly unusual,” they say. Although it remains unclear what steps the investigation has taken, Dilanian and Leonnig note that it could allow FBI agents to obtain Fitzpatrick’s phone records and examine her social media contacts.
One of the sources told the reporters that FBI agents feel ”deep concern” about the probe. “They know they are not supposed to do this,” one source told the reporters. “But if they don’t go forward, they could lose their jobs. You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t.”
FBI spokesperson Ben Williamson denied the story, telling Dilanian and Leonnig: “This is completely false. No such investigation like this exists and the reporter you mention is not being investigated at all. Every time there’s a publication of false claims by anonymous sources that gets called out, the media plays the victim via investigations that do not exist.”
Under Patel, the FBI has already investigated a New York Times reporter who wrote a story about an FBI security detail assigned to Patel’s girlfriend and searched the home of a Washington Post reporter.
Today the FBI raided the offices and business of Virginia state senator L. Louis Lucas, 82, a Black woman who led the movement to redraw Virginia’s districts after Republicans redrew districts in Republican-dominated states. The Fox News Channel was on the scene, suggesting it had been tipped off by the FBI.
Meanwhile, Fitzpatrick published a new story today in The Atlantic reporting that Patel travels with “a supply of personalized branded bourbon” with the label “KASH PATEL FBI DIRECTOR” and an FBI shield. She explains: “Surrounding the shield is a band of text featuring Patel’s director title and his favored spelling of his first name: KA$H. An eagle holds the shield in its talons, along with the number 9, presumably a reference to Patel’s place in the history of FBI directors. In some cases, the 750-milliliter bottles bear Patel’s signature, with ‘#9’ there as well.”
In what sure reads like a journalist burying a subject with evidence, Fitzpatrick lists the places and occasions on which Patel has given out bottles of the whiskey and explains that he has transported the whiskey on a Department of Justice plane including to the Olympics in Milan, Italy. When a bottle went missing during a “training seminar” with Ultimate Fighting Championship athletes in Quantico, Virginia, Patel was angry enough that he threatened to make his staff take polygraphs and face prosecution.
Fitzpatrick notes that “[s]everal current and former FBI employees, including multiple senior leaders, told me that the director regularly handing out his own personally branded bourbon, including to civilians outside the bureau, was unheard-of.” They explain: “The FBI has traditionally had a zero-tolerance approach to unauthorized use of alcohol on the job and for its misuse while off duty.”
“Handing out bottles of liquor at the premier law-enforcement agency—it makes me frightened for the country,” George Hill, a former FBI supervisory intelligence analyst, told Fitzpatrick.
Ron Filipkowski of MeidasNews noted: “The journalist who is being sued by Kash Patel and reportedly being investigated by the FBI is out with a new story. Is there a Pulitzer for being a fearless badass? If so, she should win it.”
Josh Wingrove of Bloomberg reported today that Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche will ask the Supreme Court to let the Department of Justice (DOJ) intervene in the case of columnist E. Jean Carroll, who won an $83.3 million jury verdict against Trump for defamation after he lied that he had not sexually assaulted her. Although the Department of Justice is supposed to represent the American people, Trump’s appointees are using the department as Trump’s personal law firm.
If the Supreme Court allows the DOJ to step in, swapping the U.S. government for Trump in the case, the case would have to be dismissed because plaintiffs can’t sue the federal government for defamation. Judges from the appeals court have already refused to permit such a swap, but Blanche is giving it another shot.
Finally, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick was in front of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee today for a closed-door interview about his relationship with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. He was not under oath for his testimony, a requirement Democrats want for those testifying before the committee and committee chair James Comer (R-KY) does not.
Lutnick had said he had cut all ties with Epstein in 2005, only to have information come out that, in fact, the two maintained contact until at least 2018, years after Epstein’s 2008 conviction for soliciting prostitution for a minor.
Asked why he had taken his wife and their four young children to Epstein’s private island in the Caribbean in 2012, Lutnick told the committee that he didn’t remember and that it was “inexplicable.”
Indeed.
—
*Edit at 12:00 on May 7: Last night I incorrectly identified M.B. Ghalibaf as Iran's foreign minister. He is the speaker of Iran's parliament. I apologize for the error.
If there is one weirdly satisfying lesson I’ve learned from the whole Truth OC experience, it’s this: Politicians are (with rare exception) egomaniacal douches.
And you may be thinking, “Bruh, how is that even slightly satisfying?”
The answer is simple. No matter how far apart left and right, MAGA and non-MAGA, east and west, north and south may seem, there are universal truths that bind us all. And one of the greatest truths is that, to seek higher office, one must have an Andre the Giant-sized ego. One must think he/she/they are The Answer. One must think nobody else can capably do the job. One must believe he/she/they is universally beloved and darn close to perfect. I’m telling you—this applies to Donald Trump, to Joe Biden, to George W. Bush, to Barack Obama, to Pete Wilson, to Gray Davis, to the majority of your local congressional members. Or, put different: I am a big Katie Porter fan. I want her to be the next governor. But what type of sane human does this?
Answer: An egomaniacal douche.
I digress.
As we speak, we are inching terrifyingly close to the June 2 gubernatorial primary, where the top two vote getters (party affiliation be damned) will advance to the general election. Last I checked, all of the polls read similarly to this …
Read it.
Read it again.
And again.
Antonio Villaraigosa is the former mayor of Los Angeles, as well as former speaker of the California State Assembly. He entered the race months ago, which was certainly his right, but it’s just never really happened for him. There has been no fire. No great moment. No rise in the polls. No, “You know who we need? Villaraigosa!!!!!”
Nope.
And I understand, to a certain degree. You’re 73. The spotlight shines on others. You’re bored. You love power. You love attention. You start thinking about one last ride in the sun. Hell, Jerry Brown had a comeback for the ages. So why not Villaraigosa? Why not Antonio? So you run your ass off. You shake hands, hold press conferences, have some shiny moments in the debates. You feel revived and refreshed and perfectly tailored for a Return of the Jedi-esque revival.
Only, eh, we’re less than a month out, and you have no shot. Even worse, there is a somewhat decent chance we wind up with two Republicans in the grand finale if Democratic voters split their votes among all the (cough) egomaniacal douches.
And you know this.
You’ve been told this. By friends. By advisors. By media members. “Antonio, you can’t win. It’s a statistical impossibility.”
But … no. You will not step aside. You will not urge your followers to back Xavier Becerra or Tom Steyer. You will not rise to the moment.
No software company in history has been worshipped quite like OpenAI. The fans are devoted, occasionally unhinged, and a non-trivial number of them appear to believe Sam Altman is something closer to a prophet than a tech executive. That energy was thick in the air on Tuesday night at the company’s exclusive GPT-5.5 launch party in San Francisco. (Yes, we have parties for AI models here - Ed.)
The company had its AI model choose the party’s date, time, and even its attendees. Out of more than 8,000 applicants only 200 were chosen to attend. The prompt told Codex to optimize for “people who make the Codex internet feel real” rather than the biggest AI social media stars. This resulted in a real mixed bag of patrons, which became a topic of conversation throughout the night.
After my purse and my person were poked and prodded at four separate security checkpoints, I made it to the event space. There was boba served upon entry, several bars featuring cocktails like Token Refresh (white rum and kiwi) and Multimodal Fizz (gin and passionfruit). Various tables had Goblin Mode and GPT 5.5 stickers strewn about. Two photo booths stood by the stage that created AI-generated pics for attendees as goblins, astronauts, pixel art race car drivers, and poorly drawn sketches.
As I maneuvered through the crowd, I noticed a familiar face standing alone. It was Altman’s husband Ollie, a warm-spirited and generally shy Australian who works in tech. I asked him if his husband was in attendance, and as if on cue, Altman came waltzing over with a big grin and a Token Refresh in hand.
There weren't a lot of big new announcements from Anthropic at yesterday's Code w/ Claude event, but the biggest by far was the deal they've struck with SpaceX/xAI to use "all of the capacity of their Colossus data center".
As I mentioned in my live blog of the keynote, that's the one with the particularly bad environmental record. The gas turbines installed to power the facility initially ran without Clean Air Act permits or pollution control devices, which they got away with by classifying them as "temporary". Credible reports link it to increases in hospital admissions relating to low air quality.
I would simply not run my computing out of this specific data center
I get that Anthropic are severely compute-constrained, but in a world where the very existence of "AI data centers" is a red-hot political issue (see recent news out of Utah for a fresh example), signing up with this particular data center is a really bad look.
There was a lot of initial chatter about how this meant xAI were clearly giving up on their own Grok models, since all of their capacity would be sold to Anthropic instead. That was a misconception - Anthropic are getting Colossus 1, but xAI are keeping their larger Colossus 2 data center for their own work.
As an interesting side note, the night before the Anthropic announcement, xAI sent out a deprecation notice for Grok 4.1 Fast and several other models providing just two weeks' notice before shutdown, reported here by @xlr8harder from SpeechMap:
This is terrible @xai. I just spent time and money to migrate to grok 4.1 fast, and you're disabling it with less than two weeks notice, after releasing it in November, with no migration path to a fast/cheap alternative.
I will never depend on one of your products again.
xAI owner Elon Musk (who previously delighted in calling Anthropic "Misanthropic") tweeted the following:
By way of background for those who care, I spent a lot of time last week with senior members of the Anthropic team to understand what they do to ensure Claude is good for humanity and was impressed. [...]
After that, I was ok leasing Colossus 1 to Anthropic, as SpaceXAI had already moved training to Colossus 2.
Just as SpaceX launches hundreds of satellites for competitors with fair terms and pricing, we will provide compute to AI companies that are taking the right steps to ensure it is good for humanity.
We reserve the right to reclaim the compute if their AI engages in actions that harm humanity.
Presumably the criteria for "harm humanity" are decided by Elon himself. Sounds like a new form of supply chain risk for Anthropic to me!
One of the things I always look for when evaluating a new GitHub repository is the number of commits it has... but that number isn't visible on GitHub's mobile site layout. I built this tool to fix that, using this prompt:
Given a GitHub repo URL or foo/bar repo ID show information about that repo absorbed via wither REST or graphql CORS fetch() including the number of commits in the repo and other useful stats
The super rich are different from you and me. They are pettier and more self-centered than most of us can easily imagine.
Hi, Paul Krugman here. This video is partly me trying to show that yes indeed I am on vacation, sort of, although on my laptop too much of the time.
But anyway, I’m at least working on the laptop sitting in cafes. But I also wanted to do a follow-up on a post earlier this week in which I talked about Jeff Bezos feeling now that he needs to sell his ostentatious, bad taste yacht because people are paying attention to the ostentatiousness and the bad taste — which is, kind of, what did he expect. But it is news that rich people are feeling some of the heat, that some of the backlash is starting to get to them.
Today I want to talk about a story that’s a couple of days old but is more along the same lines and has some other resonance I think is worth talking about.
So, Ken Griffin is a hedge fund billionaire. was a big Trump supporter, although not a reliable one, and he happens to be the owner of the most expensive apartment ever purchased in America, at least as far as we know, a $200-something million place on Central Park South.
Zoran Mandani, New York’s very interesting mayor, has called for a pied-à-terre tax, a tax on luxury residences exceeding $5 million that are owned by people who are not residents of New York, who are therefore not paying New York City income taxes. It’s a wealth tax, but a limited one. It would definitely raise some money, but of course has got people irked. And he put out a video which featured a shot of the building in which Ken Griffin has his apartment.
Griffin went wild. He said this is a personal attack on me, it’s putting me at risk. He even compared himself to Donald Trump facing assassination attempts and just in general went wild, as if this was the most evil horrible thing ever.
First of all the sheer again self-centeredness and pettiness is kind of amazing. Griffin has also threatened — I’ve actually written about him before when he made a big splash of moving his firm from Chicago to Miami and then fairly soon started renting a lot of space in Manhattan because it turned out that New York was a better place to do the hedge fund business. Now he’s saying he’s going to pull out of or threatening to pull out of New York because of this.
You know, Griffin has investors. They should care about him locating his operations where it makes sense as a business proposition, not about where he feels like pulling them out of personal spite. His feeling that Mamdani dissed him is not a reason to to move his business to a place where it can’t be done as well. so that’s kind of a bad thing in and of itself, but also again the self-centeredness is quite amazing.
But this apparently is what great wealth does to people. F. Scott Fitzgerald said that they’re careless people, but there’s more than. They’re people who put their minor discomforts on a level with matters of life and death for normal human beings.
Let me also say something that is not terribly rigorous but still substantive. I do not understand why someone with that much money would want to have a residence in Manhattan. Certainly why they would want to live in Manhattan, which Griffin sort of presumably does only part-time.
New York City is not at this point a city for the working class or or the middle class. It’s expensive. Things cost a lot. Real estate costs an awful lot. I saw a an article in a local West Side publication saying that the Upper West Side is a haven for independent minds. My immediate thought was, yeah, independent minds who can afford to pay $1,700 a square foot.
But it is a paradise basically for the 5%. The city has never been safer. It has never offered a greater diversity of cuisine, of culture. It’s a great place. Not quite the same as places with cafes where you can sit for hours and no one will bother you; they’re kind of scarce in New York. But anyway but it’s great for the affluent.
But if you’re super rich, if you spend your time being driven around in a car with tinted windows, if you don’t go anywhere without an entourage and probably at the upper limits of wealth with bodyguards, then you lose the whole the life of the streets.
New York is a place to to wander around. It’s a place to try out an ethnic restaurant that you haven’t been in before. (Everything in New York is an ethnic restaurant.) Basically, the random happenstances of life are a big part of what makes the city worth living in.
I knew somebody who had an upper floor apartment on Central Park South. It wasn’t his. He had a position at an institution where the apartment came with the job. And his family actually hated it despite the vast panoramic view of Central Park because there was no neighborhood. Many of the apartments were vacant most of the time because they were owned by oligarchs, princelings, and sheikhs. People didn’t support local stores, didn’t support any of the things that make urban life worth living.
So I’m not even sure what the point is if all you’re going to do is be chauffeured around, if you’re going to eat only at see-and-be-seen high-profile restaurants. I used to say you might as well be living in Dubai. Well, New York has the advantage of not being hit by cruise missiles currently. But still, what is the point?
But anyway, there it is.
And the extent to which America’s oligarchs put their personal foibles, their pettiness, their small senses of discomfort or lack thereof on a par with major issues is a huge source of evil right now. Elon Musk, who doesn’t feel that people give him enough credit, got to take his personal obsessions to the Trump administration and played them out in DOGE cuts. Among other things, the current estimate is that his destruction of USAID has killed 600,000 people, mostly children, so far. This is awesome.
I have to say, if displaying Ken Griffin’s apartment building helps win support for a progressive agenda, fine. Griffin and people like him should look at themselves in the mirror and ask, who are we? What are we doing with our lives?
At this point it’s almost routine: Almost every time Donald Trump makes a major announcement about the Iran War, that announcement is preceded — sometimes by only a few minutes — by huge and hugely profitable bets in the oil market.
The influential Kobeissi Letter documents the latest example:
BREAKING: According to our analysis, ~$920 million worth of crude oil shorts were taken 70 minutes before an Axios report claimed the US and Iran were near a “14-point” deal to end the war.
At 3:40 AM ET today, nearly 10,000 contracts worth of crude oil shorts were taken without any major news.
This is equivalent to ~$920 million in notional value, an unusually large trade for 3:40 AM ET.
At 4:50 AM ET, just 70 minutes later, Axios reported that the US is “close” to a “memorandum of understanding” to end the Iran War.
By 7:00 AM ET, oil prices had fallen over -12% with these crude oil shorts gaining approximately +$125 million.
Minutes later, Iran launched the “Persian Gulf Strait Authority” and oil prices surged +8%.
What just happened?
As the BBC among others has documented, this isn’t the first time, or the second time, that this has happened. Again and again, just before Trump makes announcements that raise hopes about the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, one or more “whales,” very large traders, sell large quantities of oil futures, almost instantly reaping big profits as prices fall.
What’s truly remarkable is that this keeps happening even though the pattern has become familiar. This tells us two things: The Trump administration is making no real effort to crack down on whoever is trading using inside information, and these inside traders are operating with a complete sense of impunity, assured that they can get away with it.
The stench of corruption is overwhelming. Yet aside from the raw corruption, these incidents also raise a larger question. The insiders ripped off the parties who sold futures to them at what turned out to be very unfavorable prices to the sellers. What broader damage does this kind of unchecked insider trading do?
There’s both a narrow and a broad answer.
The narrow answer involves economic efficiency. How is the functioning of the economy affected by the realization that somebody — it’s not hard to make guesses, but we don’t know for sure — is trading oil futures based on advance knowledge about what will soon appear on Truth Social or Fox News?
It took me a while to figure this out. But I think I have an answer.
First, ask yourself what purpose is served by the oil futures market. Unlike the prediction markets Polymarket and Kalshi, the oil futures market is not intended to be mainly a vehicle for gambling. Instead, it is a market that serves to reduce risk through hedging.
Here’s how it works. There are people and institutions, such as oil producers, who will need to sell oil at a future date. They want to lock in the price today on those future sales. There are also people and institutions, such as airlines, who have a future need for oil and would like to lock in the price today. Thus the futures market lets both sellers and buyers of oil eliminate a major source of risk – fluctuations in the price of oil. This reduces uncertainty in the economy as a whole.
But what if there are substantial players in the futures market with inside information? Then if you are, say, a corporation trying to lock in the price of oil you plan to buy next month, you may not be making a mutually beneficial deal with future sellers. You may, instead, be being played for a sucker — paying what in retrospect will have been an excessive price — by people who know what’s about to appear in the president’s social media feed.
The same could apply to sellers of oil futures, although the examples of insider trading we know about involved Trump insiders getting ahead of falling, not rising, prices.
Either way, the effect of traders’ suspicion that they may be losers in a rigged game will be to make them reluctant to play at all — reluctant either to buy or to sell oil futures. And this will mean losing the risk-reducing benefits of a properly functioning futures market.
Now, insider trading of oil futures probably isn’t big enough to do critical damage to those markets. But it does do damage, which hurts all of us, not just the buyers who got stuck with the immediate losses.
And beyond the narrow economic losses, insider trading on oil is part of the broader rise of what we can call the predation economy.
Under Trump II, corruption runs rampant. Success in business depends not on what you know but on who you know, and there are no rules beyond having — and, obviously, buying — the right connections.
This is bad for everyone who doesn’t have those connections. It’s bad for economic growth. And it undermines the moral basis of the economy and society as a whole. It’s the path of how a country slides into third-world status.
I’ll have much more to say about the predation economy in future posts.
I'm using my vibe coded macOS presentations tool to put together a talk, and I wanted to add a slide with some text on it. The tool only accepts URLs, so I put together a quick page that accepts query string arguments and turns them into a simple slide.
Fascinating, in-depth details on how Mozilla used their access to the Claude Mythos preview to locate and then fix hundreds of vulnerabilities in Firefox:
Suddenly, the bugs are very good
Just a few months ago, AI-generated security bug reports to open source projects were mostly known for being unwanted slop. Dealing with reports that look plausibly correct but are wrong imposes an asymmetric cost on project maintainers: it’s cheap and easy to prompt an LLM to find a “problem” in code, but slow and expensive to respond to it.
It is difficult to overstate how much this dynamic changed for us over a few short months. This was due to a combination of two main factors. First, the models got a lot more capable. Second, we dramatically improved our techniques for harnessing these models — steering them, scaling them, and stacking them to generate large amounts of signal and filter out the noise.
They include some detailed bug descriptions too, including a 20-year old XSLT bug and a 15-year-old bug in the <legend> element.
A lot of the attempts made by the harness were blocked by Firefox's existing defense-in-depth measures, which is reassuring.
Mozilla were fixing around 20-30 security bugs in Firefox per month through 2025. That jumped to 423 in April.
Prolost Watches is an iPhone app for managing your watch
collection. It’s part database, part journal; designed for the
detail-obsessed mind of the watch fanatic. As you log each day’s
choice of watch, insights are revealed. Wear logs trace a path on
the map. Events from the past are resurfaced at opportune times.
Finances mange themselves as you buy and sell. Your entire
collection lives in your pocket, and you get to enjoy all your
watches, even the ones you’re not wearing. [...]
Prolost Watches is a one-time purchase. There’s no subscription,
no ads, no account, and no server. Your data is secure and
private, and never leaves your device. Pre-order now for
US$14.99, with expected release on June 16 at US$19.99.
I’m friends with Stu, I have my own little obsessively curated watch collection, and, for some of my interests in life, I love keeping a log of activity. So I jumped at the chance to beta test Prolost Watches. And it turns out, my watches are not one of those things I want to track in a log or database. I just want to continue doing what I’ve been doing ever since I went from owning only one watch to two: I pick the one I’m in the mood for that morning and I wear it for the day.
I feel the same way about sleep tracking. I’m fortunate in that I sleep great every night. I’ve been sleeping better this past year than I have in my entire life. So while I have my Apple Watch(es) set to track my sleep overnight — because why not collect the data? — I don’t look at it or worry about it most days because all it tends to do is add a little stress to my mind over a something I ought not have even an iota of stress regarding. (I like wearing an Apple Watch while I sleep not for the sleep tracking but because it’s easy to read in the middle of the night in the dark.)
But, that’s me. I obsessively track other things that most of you would think are a bit nutty to track. You don’t get to pick your obsessions, but you know what they are. If you’ve got a few watches and you think you’d be interested in tracking how often you wear each one, you should already have to above link to Prolost Watches open in a tab.
Interesting too, is how Maschwitz made Prolost Watches:
Bitrig has changed a lot since I used the iPhone version to
create the ill-fated version of Drinking Buddy. It’s now
a native Mac app that allows prompt-base creation of native
SwiftUI apps for iPhone, as well as iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch. It
has a built-in simulator, and can preview your apps on your device
as well. If Lovable (which I used to create the shipping
version of Drinking Buddy) is at one end of the spectrum — easy
for anyone to use with little experience, and Claude Code
running in the terminal is at the other, Bitrig is in a sweet spot
right in the middle: a little nerdy, but with some well-considered
creature comforts that, in my case, made it mostly a delight to
craft and refine a complex app.
The iPhone version of Bitrig got swept up in Apple’s infuriating but unsurprising crackdown on iOS vibe-coding apps a few months ago. It’s still in the App Store, but hasn’t been updated in over five months. The Mac app is in active development. It’s kind of bananas that the iPhone is a nearly 20-year-old platform and you still can’t use an iPhone app to make iPhone apps. And when developers, like Bitrig, found ways to build atop LLM capabilities to make iPhone apps that can make iPhone apps, Apple put the kibosh on it.
I’m sure there’s a scene marker right at the cut, so that’s why an ad got inserted there. But, my god. Someone at Amazon should go to prison for this.
(I think it’s a total coincidence that the Febreze ad seems roughly color-matched to the sky. But scroll down in the Bluesky thread for some links to the absolute genius campaign from Cerveza Cristal beer, with spots specifically designed to integrate into Star Wars when it was broadcast on commercial TV in Chile. “Your father wanted you to have this when you were old enough” might be the funniest TV commercial ever made.)
Engineer Fernando Mier-Hicks inspects a test stand used to investigate the performance of next-generation Mars helicopter rotor blades at high speeds inside the 25-Foot Space Simulator at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California in November 2025. Data from the tests indicate that the rotors could surpass the sound barrier without breaking apart.
The test campaign was funded by the agency’s Mars Exploration Program in pursuit of maximizing the capability of future aircraft flying at the Red Planet. A division of Caltech in Pasadena, JPL manages the Mars Exploration Program for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington.
NASA’s Next-Gen Mars Helicopter Rotors Are Moving Fast
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NASA’s Next-Gen Mars Helicopter Rotors Are Moving Fast
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Engineer Jaakko Karras inspects a next-generation Mars helicopter rotor blade prior to supersonic speed testing in the 25-Foot Space Simulator at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California in November 2025. The three-bladed rotor hanging horizontally in the foreground is the next-gen rotor being tested. The vertically aligned two-bladed rotor provided a “headwind,” enabling the tips of the three-bladed rotor to go beyond Mach 1. Data from the tests indicate that the next-gen rotor could surpass the sound barrier without breaking apart.
The agency’s Mars Exploration Program funded the test campaign in pursuit of maximizing the capability of future aircraft flying at the Red Planet. A division of Caltech in Pasadena, JPL manages the Mars Exploration Program for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington.
I’ve been covering policy and social issues for 14 years. There’s a gap in our national conversation that honestly bothers me. We talk endlessly about healthcare reform, tax policy, military spending—all the usual stuff that dominates cable news. But something affects roughly 750,000 families every single year in America: divorce.
We barely mention it.
Not the celebrity tabloid version—the actual policy nightmare that hits regular people trying to navigate a system designed to drain their bank accounts.
The System Nobody Wants to Fix
Politicians avoid this topic entirely. There’s no good sound bite, no easy villain to point at during campaign season. But when I started digging into how our courts actually handle family separations, I found something disturbing. The average contested case costs between $15,000 and $30,000. That’s assuming things go smoothly, which they don’t 62% of the time.
When basic legal processes cost more than most people make in three months, people can’t access them.
I talked to a woman in Michigan who’d been trying to finalize her separation for 11 months. She wasn’t fighting over a mansion or business empire. They’d agreed on everything—custody, property division, all of it. But the paperwork required 47 different forms in her county, each needing specific language that changes based on whether you have kids, property, or debts.
She eventually paid $4,200 to an attorney just to fill out forms correctly.
What Courts Won’t Tell You
Courts have zero incentive to simplify this. Court clerks can’t give legal advice because of liability issues, so they hand you a stack of papers and say “good luck.” Attorneys benefit from complexity since billable hours increase when everything’s confusing. And lawmakers? They’re mostly attorneys themselves who came up through that same system.
So nothing changes.
But some things are changing. I’ve watched the rise of “legal tech” over the past six years. Companies automated the document prep part—you answer questions in plain English, software generates the right forms for your jurisdiction. Costs drop to $69 to $299 instead of thousands.
The Bigger Picture We’re Missing
This connects to everything we cover in mainstream political discourse. Economic mobility? Hard to climb out of poverty when you’re spending savings on legal paperwork. Access to justice? We’ve created a two-tier system where wealthy people get experienced lawyers and everyone else gets confused by incomprehensible forms.
Kids get caught in this bureaucratic mess. About 630,000 children are involved in these cases annually. When parents can’t afford to finalize things properly, custody arrangements stay informal and unstable. Support payments don’t get enforced.
I’m not saying we need some massive federal program with billions in new spending. But maybe we could start by asking why something affecting 2.4 million adults every year (plus their kids) gets less policy attention than farm subsidies or tax breaks for specific industries.
You won’t find this in party platforms during election season. Won’t see congressional hearings about it on C-SPAN. But the gap between what actually affects people’s daily lives and what we debate in public forums keeps growing wider.
We might be heading towards a populist backlash towards AI, but we’re not there yet. Outside the tech bubble, Americans really don’t care about AI yet.
AI is Americans’ 29th most important issue, according to the fantastic survey @davidshor ran that everyone is rightly looking at.
It’s not surprising that Americans will answer sentiment questions about AI negatively, as they’ve been negative towards tech for a while. But it’s a big leap from negative sentiment to meaningful political action.
Americans have been negative on social media for 10 years, and there has been no meaningful political action. And that’s despite all the other hallmarks of backlash people are saying about AI—violent extremists (people forget there was a shooting at YouTube HQ), protests, etc.
My prediction: we will get real populist backlash to AI when the unemployment moves by, say, 2 percentage points and people see it as caused by AI.
Assisted living has shifted significantly over the last twenty years. The old picture of clinical corridors and fixed meal schedules no longer matches what actually happens. Today’s residences feel far more like close-knit neighborhoods, where independence, comfort, and personalized support guide each part of the day. Families walking through these communities often leave struck by the warmth, the considered daily rhythms, and the real bonds between staff and residents.
Mornings Begin With Choice and Comfort
Each morning moves at the resident’s preferred speed. A few head outdoors for an early walk through the gardens, while others linger over coffee and a plated breakfast with neighbors in a dining room modeled after a casual restaurant. Care staff pass through without fanfare, offering assistance with grooming, medication cues, or a helping hand when balance becomes tricky.
Meal planning carries the same thoughtfulness. Kitchen teams prepare rotating selections that accommodate specific dietary needs, such as low-sodium entrees, diabetes-appropriate choices, and texture-adjusted servings. That attention matters considerably, and families exploring assisted living in Taylorsville often look closely at how communities personalize daily nutrition and care. According to the National Council on Aging, roughly 54% of older adults manage at least one chronic health condition, which puts proper nutrition at the center of daily wellness.
A Day Built Around Engagement
As breakfast winds down, the activity schedule steps in. Residences today view engagement as foundational to wellness rather than an optional add-on. Findings from the National Institute on Aging connect steady social contact with reduced rates of cognitive decline, depression, and heart-related illness.
Families researching assisted living in Taylorsville soon notice how current communities build enrichment directly into the day. Gentle yoga, art rooms, gardening groups, and memory-care sessions give residents something genuine to look forward to. Offerings flex around personal capabilities, so a neighbor easing back from surgery can take part alongside a resident celebrating her ninetieth birthday without feeling singled out.
Wellness Beyond Physical Care
Newer residences recognize that well-being stretches past physical health alone. Counselors, chaplains, and licensed therapists on staff handle emotional and spiritual needs through meditation gatherings, grief circles, and simple conversation groups scheduled across the week.
Movement programming fills in the rest of the picture. Therapy rooms, warm-water pools, and low-impact strength classes help seniors hold onto their mobility. Research in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society found that regular activity can reduce fall risk by up to 23%, which is why exercise options appear on almost every daily calendar.
Afternoons Filled With Purpose and Connection
The afternoon hours lean social. Residents make their way toward interest groups, learning classes, and scheduled excursions. Book discussions, bridge matches, and knitting circles produce the sort of everyday friendships that make a place feel lived-in. Visits between generations are another common sight, with nearby schools, scout troops, and volunteer groups showing up on a predictable basis.
Technology now has a steady role in these hours, too. Video-call setups keep residents in touch with grandchildren a few states away, while tablet-based puzzles and memory games sharpen focus. AARP research shows nearly 70% of adults over 65 currently use smartphones or tablets, a noticeable rise from a decade back. Staff cheerfully guide anyone still getting comfortable with the screens.
Personalized Care Woven Into Daily Life
Help remains nearby without feeling heavy-handed. Care teams follow individual service plans covering bathing, dressing, medication oversight, and mobility support. Digital health records keep nurses, physicians, pharmacists, and family members aligned in real time.
Those living with memory loss receive focused support within secure neighborhoods. These spaces rely on soft palettes, personal life-story displays, and dependable routines that reduce anxiety. Person-centered practices have steadily replaced the uniform approach that shaped senior care a generation ago.
Evenings Bring Relaxation and Togetherness
As the light softens, the dining service transitions into slower, quieter hours. Some residents settle in for movie nights, live performances, or cultural events; others prefer a corner of the library or a late visit from family finishing their workday.
Safety holds steady through the night. Overnight staff stay on shift, emergency call buttons sit within easy reach, and wellness rounds continue on schedule. Restful rooms feature blackout curtains, adjustable beds, and noise-reducing touches. Families settle in at home, knowing their loved ones are supported in a setting that still feels personal.
Conclusion
Daily life inside a modern assisted living community looks very different from the outdated stereotypes many people still carry. Residents keep their independence, form real friendships, and receive care that adjusts as needs change. Chef-prepared plates, wellness programs, and relaxed evening gatherings give shape and meaning to each day. For families considering senior care options, these residences strike a careful balance of autonomy, safety, and connection that supports aging with dignity.
Restaurants, caterers, and food service operations know that dairy inventory can be tricky to manage well. Cheese stands out as especially demanding because each variety has its own shelf life, temperature requirements, and turnover rate. Purchasing in bulk brings order to that chaos, cutting down on how often teams need to reorder while keeping costs and stock levels far more predictable. The result is less time spent chasing supplies and more energy directed at the food itself.
Why Frequent Small Orders Create Problems
Ordering cheese in small batches several times a week adds layers of work that most kitchens can do without. Every delivery triggers its own paperwork, scheduling, and inspection process. That pulls staff away from prep and service tasks where their time matters most. This is why it is crucial to work with a trustedwholesale cheese supplier. They take away the entire burden and chaos.
There is also a reliability issue. A kitchen that depends on twice-weekly mozzarella or cheddar shipments faces twice the exposure to courier delays or supplier hiccups. When a delivery falls through during a Friday dinner rush, the scramble for substitutes can throw off an entire menu.
How Buying in Volume Streamlines Supply Chains
Shifting to bulk orders collapses several small transactions into one larger, more manageable delivery cycle. The administrative load shrinks immediately: fewer invoices to process, fewer receiving windows to staff, and less back-and-forth with procurement contacts.
Working with a trusted wholesale supplier strengthens this approach even further. A consistent source delivers uniform quality across large shipments, which takes much of the uncertainty out of stock planning. Teams can set reliable reorder thresholds based on actual consumption data rather than guessing when they might run low.
Cost Advantages That Affect the Bottom Line
Suppliers almost always offer better per-unit pricing for larger commitments. Volume discounts, tiered pricing structures, and reduced freight charges are standard incentives for sizable orders. For any operation that treats cheese as a staple ingredient, those savings add up fast.
Think about it across a full quarter. A pizzeria moving through 200 kilograms of mozzarella each month might save 10 to 15 percent simply by consolidating weekly orders into a single monthly purchase. That recovered margin can fund equipment repairs, new menu testing, or additional training for kitchen staff.
Simplified Storage and Rotation Practices
Standardizing Refrigeration Protocols
Receiving larger quantities at once gives teams a reason to tighten their cold storage systems. With more product on hand, disciplined rotation is no longer optional. First-in, first-out practices become a daily habit, keeping spoilage rates low and freshness consistent across every plate.
Assigning dedicated refrigeration zones to different cheese types also speeds up kitchen flow. When cooks know exactly where to find aged Parmesan or fresh ricotta, prep time drops noticeably during peak hours.
Reducing Waste Through Better Planning
Businesses that buy in bulk tend to forecast more carefully. Knowing that a single shipment needs to last two or four weeks encourages us to pay closer attention to how much product we actually use. Many operations see measurable drops in waste after switching, largely because they start treating consumption data as a planning tool rather than an afterthought.
Strengthening Supplier Relationships
Placing consistent, high-volume orders builds the kind of trust that benefits both parties. Suppliers naturally prioritize accounts that bring steady revenue, and that often translates into tangible perks. Preferred buyers may get early access to seasonal varieties, more flexible payment arrangements, or priority fulfillment when supply runs tight across the market.
Strong partnerships also open up customization options. Buyers can request specific aging profiles, block dimensions, or packaging formats suited to their kitchen setup. Suppliers, in return, gain the demand visibility they need to plan production with greater confidence.
Tracking Inventory With Greater Accuracy
Fewer deliveries mean fewer data entry points, reducing the chances of record-keeping errors. Each bulk shipment generates a single clean entry that accounts for weeks of supply. Spotting consumption trends, flagging unusual spikes, and calibrating future orders all become simpler with tidier data.
Clean records also make financial forecasting more reliable. When purchasing patterns stay stable from month to month, finance teams can project dairy expenses with a level of precision that scattered weekly orders rarely allow.
Conclusion
Bulk cheese purchasing gives food service operations a clear, practical route to better inventory control. Consolidated orders, lower per-unit costs, deeper supplier partnerships, and more accurate tracking records all feed into smoother day-to-day workflows. For kitchens and catering teams willing to commit to a volume-based buying strategy, the payoff is less administrative burden, less product waste, and the kind of consistency that keeps customers coming back.
You poured an entire afternoon into cutting the perfect Reel and walked away with forty views, mostly from people who already have your phone number. Social media strategists are increasingly blunt about it: the old “post it and hope” routine doesn’t build an audience anymore. Publishing into the void is a bit like performing for an empty theater. Working with an organic follower-growth service is closer to handing a megaphone to someone standing in the middle of a busy plaza. The data backs this up: durable results now depend on staying squarely within Instagram’s rules so the followers you pick up are real and your account stays healthy. Stop burning weeknights on metrics that don’t move the needle. The three companies below have built systems designed to pull your profile out of the manual grind.
SocialWick
Hunting for people who genuinely connect with your content is brutal when broad hashtags are your only lever.SocialWick functions more like a dedicated specialist parked next to your account. Rather than blasting your posts at a giant, indifferent crowd, the platform leans on AI to home in on users who are already deep in your niche. What sets it apart from the wider pack of digital marketing tools is its “Lookalike” modeling, building a pool of prospects whose behavior closely tracks the followers you already love. The AI walks through a three-step routine to lock in your ideal viewer profile. Crucially, the password to your Instagram never changes hands, so nothing about your account is exposed to outside parties. AI-driven targeting is one strong path to growth; engagement-led strategies are another.
Famety
Curious how the rival café down the street suddenly added 500 followers? Famety is often the answer. The mechanic is simple human psychology: when a stranger likes your photo, you tend to tap their profile out of curiosity. Famety automates that nudge by sending likes to people who already follow your direct competitors.
This “competitor targeting” zeroes in on accounts whose audience overlaps with the one you want, producing organic-feeling interactions that actual humans respond to. Instead of suspicious overnight surges, the platform leans on “drip-feed engagement”, releasing those likes gradually across the day so the activity reads as a real person scrolling at normal speed. That measured pace is precisely how you lift a lagging engagement rate without flagging Instagram’s safety systems.
FameViso
Inflating your follower count is pointless if none of those new accounts ever react to anything you post. FameViso treats this as the core problem to solve, behaving more like a tight bouncer at the door of your profile and scaling your presence without leaning on fake numbers.
Rather than scooping up anyone with a pulse, the service deliberately seeks out real users with a demonstrated interest in your specific niche. The mechanism behind that precision is something the platform calls “Negative Filters”, essentially an automatic screen that weeds out bots, spam-heavy accounts, and dormant “ghost” profiles before they ever land in your follower list. Keeping that list clean means the people seeing your posts are actually around to like, comment, and share, which lifts engagement on its own.
How to Spot a Fake Growth Service
Handing your login over to a shady provider is the digital version of giving a stranger keys to your shop. The first marker of a safe Instagram growth provider is how they connect to your account, reputable teams use secure authorization protocols and never ask for your raw password, which is also how they stay aligned with Instagram’s rules. A second marker: real account managers behind the scenes, not blunt-force scripts that get profiles flagged within hours. Verify the social proof too, look for independent reviews on third-party sites instead of trusting whatever testimonials are bolted to the company’s homepage. Before you spend a dollar, put four questions to their support team:
Will you ever request my actual Instagram password?
Are the actions on my account performed by people or by bots?
What’s your policy if my account gets restricted?
Can you show trackable ROI tied to real followers?
Once you’ve vetted a partner properly, a structured plan on top of that foundation is what turns the spend into a real return.
In 2025, Space42’s systems helped save over 660 lives across 25 distress events, from earthquakes in Myanmar, Nepal, and Turkey to cyclones in Mozambique and floods in Nigeria. In each […]
The space sector is booming. But it is also running up against limits we are only beginning to acknowledge. Like many industries, it is expanding as if resources such as materials, energy and orbital capacity were eternally abundant, when in reality all three are becoming more constrained, more contested and more expensive. At the same […]
As direct-to-smartphone services blur the line between space and terrestrial connectivity, hybrid constellations are bringing communications and imagery closer together in orbit.
MILAN – French-led satellite operator Eutelsat and Indian maritime service provider Station Satcom have signed a multi-year agreement to expand Eutelsat-owned OneWeb LEO connectivity services across Station Satcom’s maritime fleet, the companies announced April 30. The agreement builds on a previous activation in 2025 covering hundreds of Station Satcom vessels and broadens the number of […]
Chinese commercial launch startup Nayuta Space has completed consecutive Pre-A financing rounds to support development of its unconventional Xuanniao-R rocket concept.
The orbital data center boom is promising opportunities well beyond the pioneers hoping to build colossal, AI-driven computing platforms in space. A mix of ventures developing novel space technologies are looking to ride a wave of investment and dealmaking in the early innings of this emerging market, even as SpaceX and others behind some of […]
Starfighters Space has hired two former Blue Origin New Glenn managers to help advance its air-launch system toward flight demonstrations and operational cadence.
A decade ago, the space technology company Stellar Exploration needed about three years to build, test and deliver a small satellite propulsion system. Today, the same system takes about a year. Increasingly, customers are requesting deliveries in half that time. “That’s not reasonable, but people have no hesitation asking,” said CEO Tomas Svitek. “In the […]
DENVER – In the last year, leaders from the Republic of the Marshall Islands, a 181-square kilometer landmass surrounded by two million square kilometers of water, wanted to reduce the time it takes to detect of vessels suspected of illegal fishing. During a 12-day campaign by the Marshall Islands Marine Resources Authority, satellite radar and […]
DENVER – The job of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s Rapid Capabilities Office (RCO) is to “deliver disruptive capabilities to our warfighters faster than emerging threats,” NGA Director Lt. Gen. Michele Bredenkamp said May 6 in 2026 GEOINT Symposium keynote. Achieving that goal will require the new office to “take a lot of risk in acquisition,” […]
DENVER – Odin Space, a British startup focused on mapping and analyzing sub-centimeter orbital debris, announced plans May 7 to establish its first U.S. office in Los Angeles. “We are expanding in the United States because that is where the demand has moved fastest, and where the strategic stakes of attribution are highest,” James New, […]
Launch is the foundation of the space industry, to the point that many conflate it with the space industry in entirety because it is literally the loudest, most spectacular element we see. But the quietly orbiting satellites overhead are what really drive the space economy. Even if launch capabilities drastically increase as SpaceX promises with […]
Quelle surprise! Earlier this year, anti-vaxxer and former* head of FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research Vinay Prasad rejected Moderna’s application for a mRNA-based flu vaccine because Prasad is a stupid, pig-headed man who is so enamored of his own brilliance he thinks he is smarter than thousands of biologists** he did not like the comparison vaccine used, even though the FDA had approved that decision. Fortunately, after much hue and cry, Prasad was overruled (probably due to pressure from the White House).
The results — which showed the mRNA shot performed about 27% better — could help bolster the vaccine’s chances of approval after the Food and Drug Administration rejected Moderna’s original submission earlier this year…
The trial, funded by Moderna, included more than 40,000 adults ages 50 and up who were randomly assigned to get the mRNA vaccine or one of four standard flu shots during the 2024–2025 flu season. With the exception of very young children, older adults are generally at greater risk of severe complications from the flu than younger groups. The trial involved 301 sites across 11 countries, including the U.S.
The results found that fewer people got sick in the mRNA flu vaccine group — about 2%, compared with 2.8% in the standard flu shot group.
Side effects such as fatigue, headache and arm pain were more common in the mRNA group, but were mild and short-lived. People often have similar reactions after getting a traditional flu shot.
An mRNA flu shot could make a huge difference in flu prevention. Because it takes months to make a traditional flu shot, global health officials pick the strains up to 12 months before peak flu season. That time lag may result in mismatched strains. For example, last summer a strain called H3N2 subclade K emerged, making changes on the surface protein of the virus, raising concerns about the effectiveness of the flu shot, which was targeted to H1N1 and H3N2 (flu type A) and a Victoria virus (flu type B).
Make no mistake about it, a 27 percent decrease in infection is significant, and would like prevent a lot of hospitalizations (and death). Since I do not have a great time when I get the COVID vaccine, I guess I will find out if that is mRNA-specific or COVID antigen-specific. Anyway, this is good news.
Neither Prasad nor Kennedy, who championed Prasad, should have ever been appointed to their positions. Impeach Kennedy, impeach him now.
*Prasad previously left, then returned, then left again. Hopefully, there will not be a third time for that asshole.
**It is amazing, in a 42 car pileup kind of way, how Prasad and a plucky few iconclasts genuinely believe that they have discovered some hidden flaw that the entire medical research community has ignored. They do this routinely.
Disputes about medical aid in dying are as contentious in Britain as in the US. Here's some discussion on VoxTalks Economics, in connection with my (imminently) forthcoming Moral Economics.*
"This week Tim Phillips talks to Al Roth of Stanford University about how economics can contribute to the debate on medical aid in dying (MAID). Roth, a Nobel Prize laureate, has written a new book that argues this, and similar debates, often miss the key insight: the binary choice of “allow” versus “ban” rarely reflects reality. For example, in the United States, he explains that physicians in jurisdictions where assisted dying is illegal are familiar with the practice of administering doses of drugs that will relieve pain, but also end life.
Roth's argument is not that assisted dying is always right. It is that a moral position that ignores the costs of a ban is not more ethical — it is less honest. Economists, he says, bring one specific thing to this debate: the insistence that trade-offs be made explicit. "
I’m hoping to bring you some news on the DOJ-in-Exile front in the not-too-distant-future. It was probably simply too early in the spring and summer of 2025. It’s not too early now. But the DOJ-in-Exile idea was and is part of a more general ambition and agenda — to create a baseline record, a predicate and an expectation of future accountability for the Trump administration’s criminal conduct. Some of that effort is a kind of opposition therapy, resisting the authoritarian aim of convincing the public that the law, the ecosystem of criminal accountability has disappeared. It heartens people. It provides a framework of expectation: the law hasn’t disappeared. We’re in an interregnum. It will return, as will accountability. The battle over expectations about the future is a central battle in any authoritarian takeover.
But it’s not solely a matter of heartening, strengthening the morale of the opposition. It is also very directly and literally laying the groundwork for criminal accountability for a renegade executive and all the corrupt actors and criminals who now populate the executive branch.
This morning we saw news that the head of the Virginia state senate, Louise Lucas, had her office raided after successfully leading the effort to redistrict the Virginia House map. It’s conceivable that there’s some legitimate criminal probe into Lucas’s conduct. But one of the key issues in recent public corruption cases and high-profile prosecutions brought by the Justice Department is that we should no longer have any expectation of good faith from the DOJ. In a case like Lucas’s we should assume that this is retribution until there is some strong evidence to the contrary. These prosecutions — in which former FBI director James Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James and others have been targeted — aren’t simply non-standard, retributive, controversial. They are definitional abuses of power which are themselves criminal in nature. It’s part of the game that we’re supposed to start seeing these as, if not normal, than just kind of what one has to expect or deal with under Trumpism. That’s wrong. This is criminal conduct which absolutely must be investigated with an eye to holding officials criminally accountable for their actions.
The same applies to the wild and increasingly open selling of pardons, apparent foreign and domestic bribery of federal officials (Jared Kusher, Steve Witkoff, et al.), all the ways the Trump family has monetized the presidency in the last 18 months. The manufactured presidential immunity doctrine is only as strong as the current corrupt Court majority. But even on its own terms it leaves plenty of room for clawing back the gains piled up by the Trump family’s criminal conduct.
This is the complement to killing the filibuster and reforming the Supreme Court. You can’t end this kind of corruption, confirm the illegitimacy of abuses of power at this scale without criminal accountability. Is it challenging? Is it hard? Of course. But there’s simply no other way forward.
And there you have it. As the White House licks its wounds after Virginia’s successful move to redistrict its House map and net Democrats as many as four new seats, the leader of that effort (and most high-profile advocate) has her office raided by the FBI in some hitherto unknown federal investigation. The fact that the Feds tipped Fox News to the raid on state Senate President Pro Tempore Louise Lucas’s office probably tells us all we need to know about this FBI action.
It’s been ten years since Mark Cooper-Jones and Jay Foreman teamed up to form Voltron launch an occasional and irregular series of videos about maps. They called themselves the Avengers Map Men, and in each… More
Standard models predict that expectations of artificial general intelligence (AGI) should elevate long-term interest rates. I show that this prediction need not hold. I develop a heterogeneous-agent asset pricing model in which AGI, or more broadly, transformative AI (TAI) capable of automating most human labor, can lower interest rates even as it dramatically accelerates growth. Under baseline calibrations, the risk-free rate falls to near zero despite growth rising from 2% to 11%, and the equity premium expands from 6% to over 20%. The effect on yields is negative and muted for all maturities, even under aggressive assumptions about the speed of AI adoption. These results advise caution when interpreting long-term bond yields as a signal of market expectations of transformative AI.
The astronauts flying aboard the Artemis II mission to the Moon last month took a lot of pictures, and a few dozen of the best ones were released during and shortly afterward the flight.
But it wasn't until last weekend that NASA released the whole trove of more than 12,000 images, dumping them onto the Gateway to Astronaut Photography. The astronauts used three different cameras on the mission: a Nikon D5, a Nikon Z9, and an iPhone 17s. There are some hits and misses in the archive, plus some new gems.
One of the early highlights during the mission was the "Hello, world" image captured by Artemis II Commander Reid Wiseman as the Orion spacecraft left Earth on its outbound journey toward the Moon.
In the 1860s Jevons built a Logical Abacus, sometimes called a logical piano, a kind of early computer that could perform (some kinds of) logical operations faster than humans could. It is held in the Museum of the History of Science at Oxford University, and you can think of its structure and operation as broadly akin to a player piano in music. It was limited in its powers, and geared mainly toward replicating Boolean logic, but extreme in its ultimate ambitions. Jevons understood the potential. In his written presentation of the project, Jevons cites the work of Charles Babbage, and noted that “material machinery is capable, in theory at least, of rivalling the labours of the most practiced mathematicians in all branches of their science. Mind thus seems able to impress some of its highest attributes upon matter, and to create its own rival in the wheels and levers of an insensible machine.” Jevons understood that science would be able to tackle some of the most difficult projects, and he wanted to be on as many of those frontiers as possible. He understood that his own work was a mere beginning, and he wanted to press forward as much as possible.25See Jevons (1870, the quotation from p.498), and also Maas (2005, chapter six). For a general background on Boolean logic, see Hailperin (1986).
Jevons also studied molecular motion in liquids and developed the concept of “pedesis,” a precursor of what we now call Brownian motion. That said, Jevons thought his pedesis was an electrical phenomenon related to osmosis, and so he turned out to be incorrect in his fundamental hypotheses. Nonetheless, this topic, like the others, showed he was an observant mind and obsessed with developing theories to explain anything and everything. He wasn’t just a pedant, rather he made real contribution to a number of scientific fields above and beyond economics.26On Jevons on pedesis and Brownian motion, see Brush (1968).
Jevons also was a “born collector” in the words of Keynes, and an extreme bibliomaniac. He accumulated thousands of books, and he lined the walls of his house and attic with them, and also stored them in piles in the attic, which became a problem for his wife upon his passing.
The above image is from a recent tweet by University of Pennsylvania economist Jesús Fernández-Villaverde (henceforth referred to as “JFV”), in which he criticizes the field of development economics for ignoring the big questions. He writes:
A fundamental lesson from my posts these last two weeks on modernization, industrial policy, and development is that development economics should be about understanding why South Korea got rich but Bolivia did not.
The current field has largely given up on that question. Sharply identified RCTs on small micro programs are a fine way to publish in the AER and get tenure at a fancy university, but a profession that knows everything about microfinance impact evaluations and almost nothing about industrialization has misallocated its own intellectual capital on a pretty heroic scale.
JFV’s critique of modern development econ isn’t new. Eminent economists have been complaining about randomized controlled trials for years. I wrote about this back in 2020:
In 2019, Lant Pritchett — then at Oxford — made an argument very similar to JFV’s when he criticized that year’s Nobel winners:
People keep saying that the recent Nobelists “studied global poverty.” This is exactly wrong. They made a commitment to [the RCT] method, not a subject, and their commitment to [that] method prevented them from studying global poverty…
[P]overty programs…account for less than 1 percent of total variation in poverty…[C]hanges in [actual] poverty…are overwhelming associated with growth in median income/consumption…[V]ariation in the size and efficacy of poverty programs had little or nothing to do with poverty reduction…So what the Nobelists really did was…using a particular method to study whatever could be studied with that method in poor countries (lots of which were “interventions” by NGOs at very small scale), knowing that this…severely limited their ability to study…global poverty.
In other words, what really beats poverty is economic growth, and you can’t do an RCT to study economic growth. This is basically a slightly broader version of what JFV says. JFV says that industrialization is the key, and industrialization is how almost every rich country got rich.
So basically, the idea here is that if you’re a development economist, and you’re not asking “How can countries industrialize?”, you’re being kind of useless.
The counterargument here — which I made in 2020 and which a number of economists made in response to JFV’s post — is that it’s better to study something knowable than to study something unknowable, even if the knowable things are less important.
For example, there are plenty of doctors working on finding slightly better treatments for acne. If we could solve the mystery of aging, and make it so that humans live healthy lives for 100 years, it would do a LOT more for human quality of life than treating acne would. But solving the mystery of aging is very hard, while finding slightly better acne treatments is very doable. So it doesn’t make a lot of sense to yell at doctors to all stop studying acne and only work on aging.
The field of economics doesn’t lack for big ideas about why countries go from poverty to riches. These include:
Institutions: The idea that property rights, legal frameworks, and other systems of human organization are long-lasting (“sticky”) and are crucial for development
Geography: The idea that countries’ natural endowments — navigable waterways, farmland, proximity to other regions, etc. — determine which place gets rich
Human capital: The idea that skills — reading, math, etc. — and population health determine national income
Industrialism: Various theories about how promotion of manufacturing, export-led growth, the “development state”, industrial policy, and so on are the key to rapid development
Culture: The idea that countries grow because of a culture of progress, innovation, and openness to technology
Coordination failure: The theory that countries naturally grow rich as long as they don’t have any significant roadblocks to growth, so that development happens when you remove all of the roadblocks at once
Flying geese theory: The idea that growth naturally happens in a sequential pattern as some countries luckily get rich first and then invest in poor countries until those countries catch up
Economic liberalism: The notion that all you really need to grow is free markets and openness to trade
State capacity: The theory that strong, efficient states are crucial for growth
National cohesion: The idea that a populace who see themselves as one unified people will support the public goods and other policies necessary for growth
That’s just a small sample of the huge diversity of big ideas out there. Each one of these ideas has received enormous attention and publicity, both inside of the economics profession and in the general public. You can read Why Nations Fail about institutions, Guns, Germs, and Steel about geography, How Asia Works on industrialism, A Culture of Growth on culture, and so on. There are plenty of high-profile academic papers laying out variants of each one of these theories, and plenty more that attempt to find evidence for or against them.
So why do all these theories still exist? And why do all of them still have prominent adherents and advocates, both in the economics profession and out in the world? Is it just because we haven’t allocated top talent to the job of generating and testing these theories? That seems unlikely — Daron Acemoglu worked on institutions, Joel Mokyr worked on culture, Arthur Lewis and Dani Rodrik worked on industrialism, Gary Becker and Robert Lucas both worked on human capital and growth, Paul Krugman worked on economic geography (which uses geography to generate “flying geese” effects), Alberto Alesina worked on national cohesion, Milton Friedman worked on economic liberalism, Chad Jones worked on coordination failures and so on.
Most of those researchers have Nobel prizes, and all of them are very highly respected in the field. Nor are they even close to being the only high-profile, respected economists who have worked on each of those ideas. There are probably a few of the theories — state capacity in particular, but also industrialism — that could use some more attention from top researchers, in part because they cut against the economic liberalism that dominated the culture of academic economics in the late 20th century. But overall, there are very few neglected big ideas on the list.
Perhaps the problem is that we have too few economists working on testing these theories? In general, every empirical economics program needs more than just a few big names — it needs a ton of lower-level researchers hunting down data, constructing good data sets, finding natural experiments, and so on. Each of the ten big ideas I listed above has a very active research program associated with it. Here are a few example papers from the last decade:
Institutions: “Institutions and economic development: new measurements and evidence”, by Acquah et al. (2023)
Geography: “The Global Distribution of Economic Activity: Nature, History, and the Role of Trade”, by Henderson et al. (2017)
Human capital: “Global universal basic skills: Current deficits and implications for world development”, by Gust et al. (2024)
Industrialism: “Manufacturing Revolutions: Industrial Policy and Industrialization in South Korea”, by Lane (2025) (Here are some more fun examples via Oliver Kim, just because I personally like industrialism)
Economic liberalism: “Does economic globalisation promote economic growth? A meta‐analysis”, by Heimberger (2022)
National cohesion: “National identity, public goods, and modern economic development”, by Skaperdas and Testa (2025)
There are many, many more examples in each of these categories (and for the other theories of development that I didn’t list). Many are by researchers at good schools, publishing in respected journals.
In other words, there is tons of research effort dedicated to generating and testing sweeping theories of economic development. I’m not sure what “field” JFV is referring to when he says “The current field has largely given up” on the question of comparative development. If he means the field of economics as a whole, he’s just obviously, utterly wrong.
If he means the field of development economics specifically, it’s more arguable — a lot of the examples I listed above come from economists who aren’t known specifically as “development” economists, and most of the papers aren’t in development-econ field journals. Perhaps JFV believes that if development economists weren’t so busy doing RCTs, they would be throwing their time, effort, and intellectual heft into the grand quest to determine which big theories of development are right.
Even there, however, he’s on shaky ground. Jessica Leight found in 2022 that only about 19% of development econ papers include RCTs. In 2015, David McKenzie found that for development field journals, the percentage was 13%, though it was 31% for development econ papers published in top 5 journals. These are not insignificant numbers, but they’re not huge either.1 If all of the economists doing RCTs were to switch to doing work on the Big Questions, the increase in effort on those questions would be pretty marginal.
So I’m not sure what JFV is talking about here. He’s an economist I like and respect, but his perception of the state of research on the big questions of development doesn’t seem very accurate.
Which brings us to the question: Why haven’t we been able to tell which of the Big Ideas are right and which are wrong? The obvious answer here is that it’s just very hard to prove or disprove any of these theories.
Why did South Korea grow so much more than Bolivia from the 1960s through the 2010s? The divergence is certainly startling:
But this is an event that only happened once. There were a lot of differences between South Korea and Bolivia during this time, and it’s hard to know which ones were decisive. South Korea was much more highly educated than Bolivia in the 60s, despite its poverty. While Bolivia focused on selling its natural resources for as high a price as possible, South Korea focused on exporting manufactured goods and climbing up the value chain. Korea had a special relationship with the U.S. that provided it with a large, friendly, reliable market for its manufactured products, as well as government procurement contracts, aid, and technological assistance. Korea is ethnically homogeneous and has many centuries of history as a country with its own language; Bolivia is an ethnically diverse post-colonial state. Korea had a strong, professionalized bureaucracy; Bolivia, not so much. Korea has plenty of sea access; Bolivia is landlocked. Korea got to take advantage of Japanese know-how when its companies paid retired Japanese engineers to come teach their own workers; Bolivia had no such advantage. South Korea had to develop in order to ward off the military threat from North Korea; Bolivia had no such pressing imperative.
And so on. Depending on which Big Theory you believe, you could attribute Korea’s relative success to any combination of these natural advantages and policy choices. You could also tell a composite story — for example, in my own assessment of Poland’s economic miracle, I attributed the country’s breakout success to a combination of geography (proximity to the EU), institutions (changes made in order to be admitted to the EU), industrialism (promotion of manufactured exports and FDI), and flying geese (investment from Germany). I could have also mentioned high human capital, ethnolinguistic homogeneity, and the military threat from Russia. This makes for a good story — and you can call Poland’s success a “model” and try to emulate as much of it as you can — but it’s not a scientific explanation.
So what if you get a bunch of development success stories like Korea, and a bunch of failures like Bolivia, and you try to systematically figure out the most important factors? This is the idea of a cross-country regression, and it’s a common tool that development economists use, but it’s fraught with issues.
There aren’t that many development success stories, and a lot of them look very different from each other — you can group Korea with Qatar as “rich countries”, but that grouping will obscure more than it reveals. There’s tons of endogeneity present — you might observe that countries with efficient bureaucracies tend to grow faster, but that doesn’t mean the former caused the latter, because both might be caused by differences in the education system. Different time periods might yield different lessons. You might leave out some really important variables entirely. A large country might not be comparable to a small country. And so on.
Basically, lots of development economists run cross-country regressions, and they always lead to vigorous arguments about what the regressions mean and whether the models were appropriate. If you want to read such an argument, a great example is Rodrik (2008), which uses a cross-country regression to claim that countries grow faster when they keep their currencies undervalued. Michael Woodford offers a lengthy commentary in which he raises doubts regarding Rodrik’s statistical choices and the interpretation of his results. You can choose to believe that Rodrik is right — and some people do! — but it requires tons of assumptions.
So what else can you do? Another tool that lots of development economists use is a structural model — basically, a development theory whose parameters you estimate from data. But this approach has even more problems. First of all, structural models are a bit like toothbrushes — everyone has one, but nobody wants to use anyone else’s. There are a vast number of structural models, and none of them ever get rejected because they don’t fit the data — economists just find the parameters that best fit the model and call it a day, without ever questioning whether the model is just wrong. But because there are so many models, they can’t all be right — in fact, only a few of them can. As a result, making a structural model almost never helps tell you what’s really going on in the world — it’s just a way of extrapolating the implications of your assumptions.
Another thing you can do is narrative history — basically, looking at a historical episode of development and recording all the interesting details, so that hopefully someone can figure out which of those details mattered. People responded to JFV’s tweet with a number of examples of this, such as Douglas Irwin’s 2021 paper about the South Korean economic miracle, and Piatkowski and Zhang’s 2022 paper about shock therapy in China. Books like How Asia Works, Asia’s Next Giant, MITI and the Japanese Miracle, and Governing the Market are classic examples of narrative history with regards to various East Asian success stories, and I think they’re all excellent.
This is useful work, and you can make a good argument that development economists should be doing a lot more of this. But on its own, recording the facts isn’t enough to tell you which facts mattered, or which will matter in other countries.
The final thing you can do is to use microeconomic empirical work to assess the effects of policies. A good example of this is Nathan Lane’s 2025 paper on South Korea’s Heavy and Chemical Industry Drive, which looks at how a famous Korean industrial policy affected specific industries. Another example is Barteska et al. (2025), which measures the impact of U.S. defense procurement on specific Korean companies. A third example is Kim and Wang (2025), which studies Taiwanese land reform.
This is very useful work, but it also has some obvious limitations. It only studies policy; it has little to say about the importance of natural advantages like geography or human capital. It’s also hard to translate from a policy’s effect on specific companies or industries to its effect on the economy as a whole.
So while there’s much useful development economics to be done, even the brightest minds in the field are playing with a set of inherently weak tools. History only happens once, so our ability to make a science out of one-time historical events like economic development is very limited.
That’s why I think scoffing at RCTs and urging development economists to tackle the Big Questions more often will have a negligible effect. There’s really not a lot more that can be done, in terms of generating Big Theories of Why Countries Get Rich, or in terms of testing those theories. Unless and until AI gets smart enough to study human society from a bird’s-eye view, I think we should be humble about how much we expect development economists to be able to contribute to developing countries’ growth policies in real time.
Humility, I think, should be the key word here. Development economists can do lots of useful things for policymakers — they can explain various theories, cite a bunch of details about successful countries like Poland and Korea, point out failures, and draw on various suggestive empirical results. But there is no science of development, and it’s not clear there ever will be. So we should be careful that exhortations for development economists to focus on the Big Questions don’t pressure them to pretend that they have the Big Answers.
Von Kármán vortex streets appear on the lee side of Peter I Island in this image acquired with the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 8 on February 11, 2026.
NASA Earth Observatory/Michala Garrison
Over the Southern Ocean surrounding Antarctica, winds can whip around the globe relatively unimpeded by land. Intrepid sailors termed these southern latitudes the Roaring Forties, Furious Fifties, and Screaming Sixties on account of the strong prevailing winds.
When those winds encounter a barrier like an island, the disruption in airflow can be beautiful. One impediment, shown here, is remote Peter I Island. This ice-cloaked volcano lies at 68.86 degrees south latitude in the Bellingshausen Sea, some 400 kilometers (250 miles) off the coast of West Antarctica and more than 1,800 kilometers (1,100 miles) from Cape Horn, Chile.
On an austral summer day in 2026, the Landsat 8 satellite captured this image of von Kármán vortex streets downwind of the island. These counterrotating spirals form as flowing air is deflected, slows, and spins into eddies. A stiff, but perhaps not quite “screaming,” wind was likely blowing that day. Wind speeds typically need to be 18 to 54 kilometers (11 to 34 miles) per hour for vortices to form. With stronger gales, the eddies cannot maintain their shape. The following day, vortex streets appeared within a complex array of cloud types near the island.
Where the clouds parted around the island, some of its icy edifice became visible to the satellite. A 100-meter-wide circular crater sits at its summit, 1,640 meters (5,380 feet) above sea level. The Smithsonian Institution’s Global Volcanism Program describes the island as a “shield-like volcano,” but there are no records of recent eruptions.
Peter I Island is nestled among sea ice and clouds in this photo, taken from NASA’s DC-8 airborne science laboratory during an Operation IceBridge flight on November 3, 2011.
Photo courtesy of Christopher Shuman, UMBC (retired)
Scientific research on Peter I Island has been limited due to its remote location and the challenging ice conditions surrounding it. The island was discovered in 1821 by the Russian explorer Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen and named for a tsar, but no one landed on it until 1929. The relatively few studies since have focused on geology, biodiversity, and the climate history recorded in its ice.
NASA surveyed the island during an Operation IceBridge campaign in 2011. This airborne science mission collected a suite of measurements over Earth’s polar ice in the period between the ICESat and ICESat-2 satellite missions to sustain the record of observations in these regions. While NASA’s DC-8 aircraft flew back to Chile from Antarctica, where teams spent the day measuring the Getz Ice Shelf and Thwaites Glacier from the air, the crew on board caught a rare glimpse (above) of the remote island.
NASA Earth Observatory image by Michala Garrison, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Photo courtesy of Christopher Shuman, UMBC (retired). Story by Lindsey Doermann.
On Thursday, two research teams, working independently of each other, demonstrated attacks against two cards from Nvidia’s Ampere generation that take GPU rowhammering into new—and potentially much more consequential—territory: GDDR bitflips that give adversaries full control of CPU memory, resulting in full system compromise of the host machine. For the attack to work, IOMMU memory management must be disabled, as is the default in BIOS settings.
“Our work shows that Rowhammer, which is well-studied on CPUs, is a serious threat on GPUs as well,” said Andrew Kwong, co-author of one of the papers. “GDDRHammer: Greatly Disturbing DRAM RowsCross-Component Rowhammer Attacks from Modern GPUs.” “With our work, we… show how an attacker can induce bit flips on the GPU to gain arbitrary read/write access to all of the CPU’s memory, resulting in complete compromise of the machine.”
Update Friday, April 3: On Friday, researchers unveiled a third Rowhammer attack that also demonstrates Rowhammer attacks on the RTX A6000 that achieves privilege escalation to a root shell. Unlike the previous two, the researchers said, it works even when IOMMU is enabled.
…does largely the same thing, except that instead of exploiting the last-level page table, as GDDRHammer does, it manipulates the last-level page directory. It was able to induce 1,171 bitflips against the RTX 3060 and 202 bitflips against the RTX 6000.
GeForge, too, uses novel hammering patterns and memory massaging to corrupt GPU page table mappings in GDDR6 memory to acquire read and write access to the GPU memory space. From there, it acquires the same privileges over host CPU memory. The GeForge proof-of-concept exploit against the RTX 3060 concludes by opening a root shell window that allows the attacker to issue commands that run unfettered privileges on the host machine. The researchers said that both GDDRHammer and GeForge could do the same thing against the RTC 6000.
This is the seventh chapter of my SQLAlchemy 2 in Practice book. If you'd like to support my work, I encourage you to buy this book, either directly from my store or on Amazon. Thank you!
Starting with release 1.4, SQLAlchemy includes support for asynchronous programming with the asyncio package, for both the Core and ORM modules. This is an exciting improvement that brings the power of SQLAlchemy to modern applications such as those written with the FastAPI web framework.
It is far too soon to mention retirement, but astute observers of the space industry have noticed SpaceX's workhorse Falcon 9 rocket is not launching as often as it used to.
The decline is modest so far, and it does not signal any problem at SpaceX or with the Falcon 9. Rather, it is a manifestation of SpaceX's eagerness to shift focus to the much larger Starship rocket, an enabler of what the company wants to do in space: missions to land on the Moon and Mars, orbital data centers, and next-gen Starlink.
Elon Musk's SpaceX conducted 165 launches with the Falcon 9 rocket (no Falcon Heavy missions) last year, up from 134 Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launches in 2024 and 96 Falcon flights in 2023. The company plans "maybe 140, 145-ish" Falcon launches in 2026, SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell told Time earlier this year. "This year we'll still launch a lot, but not as much," she said. "And then we'll tail off our launches as Starship is coming online."
NASA's goal of reaching the Moon's surface as many as 21 times over the next two and a half years will require an overhaul of the agency's approach to buying lunar landers and success in rectifying the myriad problems that have, so far, caused three of the last four US landing attempts to falter.
It will also require improved oversight of NASA's industrial base and better management of a supply chain that has often failed to deliver on time.
These landers are separate from NASA's Human Landing System program, which has contracts with SpaceX and Blue Origin to develop and deliver human-rated landers to ferry crews to and from the lunar surface for the agency's Artemis program. Alongside the crew landers, dozens of robotic and cargo landings will deliver payloads to scout for a future Moon base and demonstrate technologies for larger vehicles, mining and resource utilization, and sustained operations during the two-week-long lunar night.
Up betimes and to my office a good while at my new rulers, then to business, and towards noon to the Exchange with Creed, where we met with Sir J. Minnes coming in his coach from Westminster, who tells us, in great heat, that, by God, the Parliament will make mad work; that they will render all men incapable of any military or civil employment that have borne arms in the late troubles against the King, excepting some persons; which, if it be so, as I hope it is not, will give great cause of discontent, and I doubt will have but bad effects.
I left them at the Exchange and walked to Paul’s Churchyard to look upon a book or two, and so back, and thence to the Trinity House, and there dined, where, among other discourse worth hearing among the old seamen, they tell us that they have catched often in Greenland in fishing whales with the iron grapnells that had formerly been struck into their bodies covered over with fat; that they have had eleven hogsheads of oyle out of the tongue of a whale.
Thence after dinner home to my office, and there busy till the evening. Then home and to supper, and while at supper comes Mr. Pembleton, and after supper we up to our dancing room and there danced three or four country dances, and after that a practice of my coranto I began with him the other day, and I begin to think that I shall be able to do something at it in time. Late and merry at it, and so weary to bed.
Apple today announced that Chief Financial Officer Luca Maestri
will transition from his role on January 1, 2025. Maestri will
continue to lead the Corporate Services teams, including
information systems and technology, information security, and real
estate and development, reporting to Apple CEO Tim Cook. As part
of a planned succession, Kevan Parekh, Apple’s Vice President of
Financial Planning and Analysis, will become Chief Financial
Officer and join the executive team.
Luca Maestri is Apple’s vice president of Corporate Services,
reporting to CEO Tim Cook. In this role, he oversees a range of
functions, including information systems and technology,
information security, real estate and development, Caffè Macs,
and Claris.
I find the mention of Caffè Macs to be utterly charming. (And the mention of Claris to be at least a little interesting.)
Apple has removed more desktop Macs from its online store as the
global memory shortage continues. Mac mini models with 32GB and
64GB of RAM are no longer available for purchase, nor is the M3
Ultra Mac Studio with 256GB RAM.
The M3 Ultra Mac Studio is now available only in a 96GB RAM
configuration, with higher-tier options eliminated. Both M3 Mac
Studio and M4 Max Mac Studio models have delivery estimates of 9
to 10 weeks.
Last March, Apple was hit with a class action lawsuit
after delaying the launch of the “more personalized Siri”
that was first announced at WWDC 2024. Apple agreed to settle the
case in December, and the full settlement terms are now available.
Apple is set to pay $250 million to settle the lawsuit, equating
to an estimated $25 per device. That number could reach up to $95
per device, depending on how many users submit claims. [...]
As part of the settlement, Apple is not admitting any wrongdoing.
The company continues to assert that “it acted in good faith and
in a manner reasonably believed to be in accordance with all
applicable rules, regulations, and laws.” In a statement to
9to5Mac, an Apple spokesperson said:
Since the launch of Apple Intelligence, we have introduced dozens
of features across many languages that are integrated across
Apple’s platforms, relevant to what users do every day, and built
with privacy protections at every step. These include Visual
Intelligence, Live Translation, Writing Tools, Genmoji, Clean Up
and many more.
Apple has reached a settlement to resolve claims related to the
availability of two additional features. We resolved this matter
to stay focused on doing what we do best, delivering the most
innovative products and services to our users.
A $25/device settlement sounds about right. Apple ran ads showing features that still haven’t shipped. That they honestly intended to somehow ship those features, as promised, doesn’t mean the ads didn’t wind up being false.
Taegan Goddard, quoting the Financial Times last week:
The Pentagon said President Trump’s Iran war has cost the United
States at least $25 billion, driven primarily by the military’s
use of munitions, the Financial Times reports.
The cost to expand Obamacare subsidies for one year.
These are all comparisons to other aspects of the U.S. federal budget. It’s interesting also to use this in comparison with the current moment in tech:
Larry Ellison currently has a net worth of $220 billion. That’s just short of 9 Iran Wars. But since the start of the war on February 28, his net worth has grown $46 billion. That’s about 2 Iran Wars during the time of the actual Iran War thus far.
Back in 2009, Merlin Mann and I jointly gave a talk at SxSW titled “Obsession Times Voice”. Regarding how it turned out, I wrote:
My muse for the session was this quote from Walt Disney: “We
don’t make movies to make money; we make money to make more
movies.” To me, that’s it. That’s the thing.
Merlin and I were talking about independent writers and podcasters, because that’s what we were (and remain), but the concept applies just as perfectly to independent developers. This came to my mind after reading (and linking to) David Smith’s description of the new Pedometer++ today. Not just what it does, but why he spent six years making it. That’s the sort of productive obsession that fascinates me.
The wholething with MacOS 26 Tahoe is similar. To be clear, the UI crimes in Tahoe are deeply worrisome, but they are nowhere near as severe as those in Adobe’s Spectrum. But the problems with Tahoe are steps down the same fork in the road that Adobe took years ago. Spectrum is where Tahoe suggests that MacOS was headed under Alan Dye’s leadership: cross-platform sameness for the sake of sameness, with a complete disregard for longstanding platform nuances and idioms. In Spectrum’s case those platforms are MacOS and Windows and the web. In Tahoe’s case it’s MacOS and iOS.1
The other side of the software fork is not deserted. It’s just populated, more than ever, by the products of small independent developers who obsess, first and foremost, over quality and artistic vision. Remarkable new software gems exhibiting spectacular UI design appearall the time. They’re just not coming from the biggest companies, the ones whose apps, alas, dominate not just our desktops and pockets but our entire culture today.2
There’s always been software with poorly designed user interfaces. Much of it has been successful financially, sometimes spectacularly so. I’d argue, in all seriousness, that that’s the story of Microsoft in a nutshell. What’s new today is poorly designed software from developers from whom we expect better. In the old days there were people who would argue that prioritizing good user interface design was a waste of time — like spending hours decorating cupcakes destined for kindergarteners who are simply going to mash them into their mouths. (Again: cf. Microsoft’s undeniable market success.) What’s new today is people holding up objectively bad interaction design and proclaiming it to be good, and the product of teams that purportedly prioritize “design”, when it’s clear they have no idea what they’re talking about. It’s one thing to make something poorly designed and shrug on the grounds that it doesn’t matter. It’s another thing to make something poorly designed and hold it up as good design.
We are justified to expect nothing short of insane greatness from Apple, and solidly good design from Adobe. In principle, all software ought to have well-designed user interfaces. That’s never going to be the case. But software for designers — Adobe’s raison d’être — absolutely demands to be well-designed itself, like how a book on writing must itself be well-written.
Perhaps I was wrong, though, to describe Adobe’s new UI as inexplicable. It’s just indefensible. The explanation for so much software going so rotten from a UI-design perspective is, the more I think about it, related to Nilay Patel’s “Software Brain” theory, which I’ve commented on both directly and indirectly. Here’s Patel’s definition of “software brain”:
The simplest definition I’ve come up with is that it’s when you
see the whole world as a series of databases that can be
controlled with the structured language of software code. Like I
said, this is a powerful way of seeing things. So much of our
lives run through databases, and a bunch of important companies
have been built around maintaining those databases and providing
access to them.
Zillow is a database of houses. Uber is a database of cars and
riders. YouTube is a database of videos. The Verge’s website is a
database of stories. You can go on and on and on. Once you start
seeing the world as a bunch of databases, it’s a small jump to
feeling like you can control everything if you can just control
the data.
But that doesn’t always work.
You might think it counterintuitive that a movement obsessed with software would be spearheading a severe decline in the design quality of software, but in Patel’s definition, there’s no concept of software as art, as a practice, as a craft. Software brain is purely an obsession with software as a medium in and of itself. A means with no consideration for the end.
Framed in Walt Disney’s adage, software brain makes software only to make more money. The idea of making money in order to make more software — to afford the time and talent to craft it — does not compute. Framed in the metaphor that Steve Jobs used to close his introduction of the original iPad, and returned to again to close his final keynote at WWDC 2011, software brain is nowhere near the intersection of technology and the liberal arts. Software brain is so far down Technology Street that it’s no longer in the same zip code as Liberal Arts Avenue. Another way, perhaps, to define software brain is that it’s the utter rejection of Jobs’s maxim that “technology is not enough”. With software brain, technology is all there is.
I don’t want to belabor the similarities between Adobe’s Spectrum UI system and Apple’s Liquid Glass, because there are significant differences. Foremost, what’s wrong with Spectrum is wrong everywhere. Photoshop with Adobe’s new “modern” UI is, I suspect, just as bad a Windows app as it is a Mac app. Whereas the usability problems with Liquid Glass are lopsided platform-wise. It’s a litany of disasters on MacOS 26 Tahoe, but actually pretty good on Apple’s other version 26 OSes, especially iOS. There are aspects of Liquid Glass on iOS 26 that some people don’t like, but they’re literally skin-deep. Cosmetic details. Functionally, iOS 26 is pretty strong, and Apple made some very nice changes regarding the placement of things like search fields to improve consistency system-wide. I still have iOS 18 running on my year-old iPhone 16 Pro, and there are very few things I prefer in iOS 18 versus iOS 26. Whereas I’d be sick if I had to work in MacOS 26 Tahoe every day.
That’s my point here. iOS 26 doesn’t suffer in any way — not even one teensy little single way — from MacOS UI idioms being inappropriately applied to the iPhone. On the iPad, maybe there’s a little of that, like, say, the weird way iPadOS 26 uses Mac-style red / yellow / green window control buttons but makes them too small to use, so before you use them, you need a gesture to embiggen them temporarily first. But the implementation of “Liquid Glass” on MacOS Tahoe is just riddled with iOS-isms that aren’t appropriate on MacOS. So many decades-old Mac UI nuances and idioms were just ignored. They weren’t changed, they weren’t updated, they were just ignored. You either see that this is true or you don’t, and if you don’t see it, you shouldn’t be designing the Mac user interface. ↩︎︎
Consider the age of television. Television is the broadcast of motion pictures with sound. Cinema is an artform. But at the peak of television’s hegemony over western culture and mass media, the artistic quality of almost everything on TV was terrible. It was slop. It wallowed in its own sloppiness. This, despite the fact that cinematic artists had largely mastered the artform in the decades preceding TV. TV became popular in the 1950s and culturally dominant in the 1960s. But Citizen Kane came out in 1941. The network executives with “TV brain” in the second half of the 20th century didn’t even consider TV as a medium for art. They just cared that it was watched. It was judged only by ratings and ad revenue, not artistic merit. That’s what’s happening with software right now. But remember too, that as dreadful television programming rocketed to stratospheric popularity in the 1970s, that same decade saw a remarkable explosion in innovative filmmaking in movie theaters. Keep the faith. ↩︎︎
Those around the league quickly honored that legacy during Monday
night’s slate of games. Tributes rolled in from across the league,
with various play-by-play announcers deviating from their typical
routines to give a nod to Sterling’s distinct style.
It started with the Yankees and TV man Michael Kay, who called
Aaron Judge’s first-inning home run exactly as Sterling would
have: “It is high, it is far, it is gone!” Kay said, continuing:
“Aaron Judge, a Judgian blast! Here comes the Judge!”
The Yankees also tipped the cap to Sterling by playing a recording
of his iconic post-win call over the loudspeakers in Yankee
Stadium once New York wrapped up a 12-1 win over the Orioles — “Yankees win, theeee Yankees win!” — something Judge and
manager Aaron Boone each said they hoped could continue to be
done moving forward.
Sterling called 5,426 regular-season Yankees games and 225 postseason games. According to this tally, there are only three teams that have even played in at least 225 postseason games in franchise history. He called 5,060 consecutive games from September 1989 to July 2019 — a span that included every at-bat of Derek Jeter’s career and every inning of Mariano Rivera’s. He called five seasons for the Atlanta Braves before getting a real job.
John Sterling called nearly 3.0% of all games in MLB history — this includes all games, for all teams, even those prior to the
first ever radio broadcast of a ballgame on Aug. 5, 1921.
(Vin Scully, the best there ever was, called over 4 percent of all MLB games ever played.)
I listened to Sterling call a lot of games. He never once made it boring.
That previous item led me to look at Claris’s website for the first time in a while. And, lo, there’s a banner promoting a message from CEO Ryan McCann that was posted just yesterday, under the headline “How Claris Is Building for What’s Next”:
Every AI-generated application creates the same problems: Where
does it run, and how is it deployed, secured, and managed?
The app needs a database. It needs user authentication, role-based
permissions, and audit logging. It needs backup and recovery. It
needs to work on Mac, Windows, iPad, iPhone, and the web. It needs
to run on infrastructure your organization controls, whether that
is in the cloud or on your own hardware.
This is what FileMaker already is. One unified platform with data,
logic, interface, security, and cross-platform delivery, built
together from the start. We’ve been solving this problem at scale
for over 40 years.
“Mac, Windows, iPad, iPhone, and the web”, huh? Feels like there’s a somewhat popular platform missing from that list. Can’t quite put my finger on it. Oh yeah.
FileMaker 2026 is coming soon. This release focuses on resiliency,
productivity, and infrastructure, including native disaster
recovery and business continuity capabilities enabled by two new
features: FileMaker Server Remote Backup and Standby Server.
Additionally, it lays the groundwork for agentic development. We
will share specifics in the coming weeks.
Later this summer, following the release of FileMaker 2026, we
will deliver the first developer previews of our agentic coding
functionality.
I have to admit I very seldom hear about FileMaker, and I’ve never once heard of Ryan McCann before. But it must still be a significant business. Tim Cook certainly doesn’t seem like the sentimental type.
Andon Labs previously started an AI-run retail store in San Francisco. Now they're running a similar experiment in Stockholm, Sweden, only this time it's a cafe.
These experiments are interesting, and often throw out amusing anecdotes:
During the first week of inventory, Mona ordered 120 eggs even though the café has no stove. When the staff told her they couldn’t cook them, she suggested using the high-speed oven, until they pointed out the eggs would likely explode. She also tried to solve the problem of fresh tomatoes being spoiled too fast by ordering 22.5 kg of canned tomatoes for the fresh sandwiches. The baristas eventually started a “Hall of Shame”, a shelf visible to customers with all the weird things Mona ordered, including 6,000 napkins, 3,000 nitrile gloves, 9L coconut milk, and industrial-sized trash bags.
Where they lose their shine is when these AI managers start wasting the time of human beings who have not opted into the experiment:
She also successfully applied for an outdoor seating permit through the Police e-service, which didn’t require BankID. Her first submission included a sketch she had generated herself, despite having never seen the street outside the café. Unsurprisingly, the Police sent it back for revision. [...]
When she makes a mistake, she often sends multiple emails to suppliers with the subject “EMERGENCY” to cancel or change the order.
I don't think it's ethical to run experiments like this that affect real-world systems and steal time from people.
I'm reminded of the incident last year where the AI Village experiment infuriated Rob Pike by sending him unsolicited gratitude emails as an "act of kindness". That was just an unwanted email - asking suppliers to correct mistakes that were made without a human-in-the-loop or wasting police time with slop diagrams feels a whole lot worse to me.
I think experiments like this need to keep their own human operators in-the-loop for outbound actions that affect other people.
We’re in the midst of a new nuclear energy boom. Start-ups – both fusion and fission – abound, and the U.S. government has cleared the way to build again. Meanwhile, China is racing ahead with nuclear plans that dwarf those of the rest of the world combined.
As with any boom cycle, there is a lot of hype and a lot to understand if you want to get a handle on what’s real and what’s not. And so, we brought James Krellenstein onto the podcast. He’s the co-founder and CEO of Alva Energy and he’s sort of frightening in how much he knows about the nuclear industry. Like, really. You’ll see.
This episode runs long because we wanted to use it as a chance to go through the past few decades of history and really explain why the U.S. nuclear industry slowed and how the U.S. might fix the situation. We also wanted to explain how all these new technologies work and, of course, explore where China is heading.
Krellenstein is something of a contrarian and thinks many of the U.S. nuclear start-ups are misguided in their approach.
He’s also incredible to listen to. You will enjoy this one. I think it’s one of the best episodes we’ve ever done.
The Core Memory podcast is on all major platforms and on our YouTube channel over here. If you enjoy the show, please leave a review and tell your friends.
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Late yesterday, Republicans in the Senate released their funding request for the budget reconciliation bill. It includes $1 billion for White House security, including Trump’s proposed ballroom. President Donald J. Trump unexpectedly began the process of knocking down the East Wing of the White House on October 20, 2025, just two days after millions of Americans turned out for the October 18 No Kings rallies.
Days later, Trump told reporters that the cost of the ballroom he intended to build on the site would be paid “100 percent by me and some friends of mine.” At the time, he claimed the ballroom was necessary because presidents needed more space to host events. Since the incident at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, the White House has emphasized the need for the space for security reasons. In response, Republicans proposed a measure that appropriated $400 million to build a secure ballroom.
And now, Republicans are advancing a measure that will appropriate $1 billion in taxpayer money for Trump’s ballroom. They are doing so through budget reconciliation, which cannot be filibustered and so can pass the Senate with no Democratic votes.
The bait and switch of the ballroom plans seems to represent the bait and switch of the Republican ideology since the 1980s. When he ran for the presidency in 1980, Ronald Reagan promised voters that he would restore their freedom by cutting taxes and slashing regulations. With the resulting boom in the American economy, he argued, there would continue to be money for the social programs Americans liked. Americans could have tax cuts and social programs both.
In fact, Reagan’s tax cuts required deficit spending that tripled the national debt from $995 billion to $2.9 trillion—more federal debt than in the entire previous history of the country—prompting calls for cuts to social programs in order to address the ballooning debt. Rather than creating a rising tide that lifted all boats, as the saying went, the new system moved more than $50 trillion from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%.
And yet that theory still animates the Republican Party. Last July, with their budget reconciliation bill known as the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” Republicans extended the 2017 Trump tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee promised the measure would fuel an economic boom. “Renewing the Trump tax cuts will be a huge boost to America’s economy—leading to higher wages and more job creation,” they said.
Not a single Democrat voted for the measure. Among other things, Democrats noted, its failure to extend the premium tax credits that enabled individuals and families to buy healthcare insurance on the Affordable Care Act markets would mean Americans would lose health insurance, and the slashing of about $186 billion in federal spending, about 20% of it, from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program over 10 years would hurt Americans who live with food insecurity.
The numbers are starting to come in.
Last Friday, Reed Abelson and Margot Sanger-Katz of the New York Times reported the conclusion of insurers and analysts that at least 20% of those covered by the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, are dropping their coverage, with analysts expecting that number will continue to rise another 6%. Already at least 5 million of the 24 million people who were covered last year have dropped their coverage. In Georgia, enrollment has fallen by more than a third.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told the House Committee on Education and the Workforce last month that the drop in coverage has come from the administration’s crackdown on fraud.
As Melissa Goldin of the Associated Press reported yesterday, there is a similar story about SNAP recipients. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins recently told the Fox News Channel that “we now have moved 4.3 million Americans off of the food stamp program. A lot of that is fraud. A lot of it is people taking the program that shouldn’t have been. And a lot of it is just a better economy…. So people don’t need food stamps.”
In fact, as Goldin notes, experts say that fraud in SNAP is rare, with less than 1% of those who enroll disqualified from the program for fraud. People appear to have dropped off the SNAP rolls because the new rules in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act made it harder to enroll.
While Republicans don’t intend to fund healthcare or nutrition programs, the Senate’s proposed budget reconciliation bill appropriates $72 billion to fund Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection, the parent agency for Border Patrol, through 2029. Extending the funding until then means that Democrats will not be able to use funding as leverage to try to reform ICE and Border Patrol after their aggressive sweeps targeting immigrants led to dramatic abuses, including the shooting deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti.
In February, G. Elliott Morris of Strength In Numbers crunched the polls and found that reforms to ICE are extraordinarily popular. Ninety-two percent of Americans want ICE agents to wear body cameras, for example, and 80% wanted an independent investigation in the killings of Good and Pretti. Morris noted that between 60% and 90% of voters—a supermajority that includes Republicans and a majority of Independents—say they want “transparency, accountability, rules, and oversight” for federal agents.
Today, at the Border Security Expo in Phoenix, Arizona, Trump’s White House advisor on border security, Tom Homan, assured Republicans that mass deportation is coming and that the administration will flood immigration officers into jurisdictions that aren’t cooperative. Michael Williams of CNN reported that Homan told Republicans angry that the administration is not deporting enough people: “You ain’t seen sh*t yet. This year will be a good year. Mass deportations are coming.” He added: “You’re going to see more ICE agents [than] you ever seen before.”
The administration’s disregard for the will of the American people also shows in its approach to its war on Iran. Today, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters: “The operation is over. Epic Fury, as the president notified Congress, we’re done with that stage of it. We’re now on to this Project Freedom,” the attempt to open the Strait of Hormuz. The 1973 War Powers Act required the president either to get congressional approval for the war or to withdraw the troops within 60 days of notifying Congress of a military action. That deadline was May 1.
Now, according to Rubio, the war is now in a different phase: opening the Strait of Hormuz, which was open before Trump’s military adventure.
But Iranian officials have responded to Trump’s Project Freedom with military strikes against both the vessels attempting the transit and other Gulf countries. This afternoon, Trump backed down.
He posted on social media: “Based on the request of Pakistan and other Countries, the tremendous Military Success that we have had during the Campaign against the Country of Iran and, additionally, the fact that Great Progress has been made toward a Complete and Final Agreement with Representatives of Iran, we have mutually agreed that, while the Blockade will remain in full force and effect, Project Freedom (The Movement of Ships through the Strait of Hormuz) will be paused for a short period of time to see whether or not the Agreement can be finalized and signed.”
Yesterday the Food and Drug Administration broke with previous policy and approved the sale of blueberry and mango-flavored vapes, dismissing long-standing concerns that making sweet-flavored vapes available will lead to increased smoking, especially among young people. A White House spokesman claimed that this policy U-turn reflected “Gold Standard Science,” but the decision came after Donald Trump — who suddenly became pro-vaping in 2024 after meeting with a “leading vaping lobbyist” — personally put pressure on the FDA commissioner. Trump is reportedly hoping that support for vaping will win back support from young men.
In other news, the New York Times reports that the Trump FDA has been suppressing research that refutes disinformation from anti-vaccine activists:
Officials at the Food and Drug Administration have blocked publication of several studies supporting the safety of widely used vaccines against Covid-19 and shingles in recent months, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services confirmed.
The studies, which cost millions of dollars in public funds, were conducted by scientists at the agency, who worked with data firms to analyze millions of patient records. They found serious side effects to be very rare.
Does MAGA want to see thousands of Americans die prematurely from smoking and refusal to get vaccinated? Yes.
Let’s back up for a minute. Most Americans appear to be unaware of the fact that life expectancy in the United States is substantially lower than in other advanced countries; we’re on a par with poorer nations in Europe like Albania. Surely even fewer people know that this wasn’t always true. In the early 1980s Americans lived about as long as citizens of other rich nations. Now we die substantially earlier:
What changed in the 1980s? The obvious answer is politics: The election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 heralded a sharp U.S. turn to the right. And there is a strong correlation between right-wing politics and increased mortality — stronger than many of the statistical associations that guide public health policy.
You can see this correlation at the state level. Here’s life expectancy by state plotted against Trump’s share of the 2024 vote:
I’ve labeled the 10 most populous states. I’ve also labeled the outliers — red states with relatively high life expectancy, blue states with low life expectancy — to emphasize that these are small states. Taking population sizes into account, the trend line through the data points shows that there is there’s a strong, clear negative correlation between Trump-leaning orientation and low life expectancy at the state level. Deep red states like Alabama and West Virginia have life expectancy comparable to, say, Kazakhstan.
What drives this correlation? Part of the answer is that red states have weak social safety nets and are especially unwilling to provide healthcare to vulnerable populations. As I noted in my most recent primer, many red states refused to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, even though the federal government would have borne the bulk of the cost. Texas, which likes to boast about its economic success, leads the nation in the share of its children who lack health insurance.
Beyond this, right-wing politics in America often goes hand in hand with hostility to science in general and medical science in particular. The deadly linkage between reactionary politics and rejection of science was obvious during the Covid pandemic. The chart at the top of this post comes from the redoubtable Charles Gaba, who carefully tracked the association at the county level between political orientation and vaccination, and — because the vaccines worked when people were willing to get them — between politics and death rates. Deaths per capita in America’s reddest counties were almost three times as high as in our bluest counties. Also notice, in the chart comparing America with France, the big drop in US life expectancy during Covid, which had a lot to do with vaccine rejection.
Why is right-wing politics so deadly? Greed and willful ignorance.
The right’s opposition to providing healthcare obviously has a lot to do with greed, with wealthy donors unwilling to pay taxes to help others in need.
Greed is also an important factor in the attack on medical science. The best-known example of scientific disinformation promoted by corporate interests is the fossil-fuel-financed attack on climate science, but the template for this attack was the earlier campaign by the tobacco industry’s “merchants of doubt” to discredit evidence that smoking is harmful to your health. The straight line from this campaign to the relaxation of rules on flavored vapes is obvious.
The role of greed in the anti-vaccine movement may be less obvious, but the fact is that quack medicine is big business. Right-wing radio and social media have long relied on peddlers of snake oil for a large part of their revenue. So much of the attack on medical science can be seen as financially motivated.
Which is not to discount the role of willful ignorance driven by ideology. The modern U.S. right is, to a large extent, an alliance between oligarchs and white Christian nationalists — and the latter are deeply hostile to Enlightenment values, modern science very much included.
Now that this alliance is in power, we’re seeing the forces that keep U.S. life expectancy far below that in other rich countries, that cause Texans to die younger than residents of Massachusetts, go into overdrive at a national level.
The consequences will be grim.
We’re already seeing a resurgence of measles as a result of lower vaccination rates. Other infectious diseases will follow. And when — not if — we face another pandemic, there’s every reason to fear the worst.
Meanwhile, millions of Americans are set to lose health insurance this year, and millions more as drastic Medicaid cuts kick in. Reproducing a chart from my last primer:
America, then, is on track to experience a large rise in unnecessary deaths. But at least we’ll have mango-flavored vapes.
I recently talked with Joseph Ruscio about AI coding tools for Heavybit's High Leverage podcast: Ep. #9, The AI Coding Paradigm Shift with Simon Willison. Here are some of my highlights, including my disturbing realization that vibe coding and agentic engineering have started to converge in my own work.
One thing I really enjoy about podcasts is that they sometimes push me to think out loud in a way that exposes an idea I've not previously been able to put into words.
Vibe coding and agentic engineering are starting to overlap
When Joseph brought up the distinction between the two I had a sudden realization that they're not nearly as distinct for me as they used to be:
Weirdly though, those things have started to blur for me already, which is quite upsetting.
I thought we had a very clear delineation where vibe coding is the thing where you're not looking at the code at all. You might not even know how to program. You might be a non-programmer who asks for a thing, and gets a thing, and if the thing works, then great! And if it doesn't, you tell it that it doesn't work and cross your fingers.
But at no point are you really caring about the code quality or any of those additional constraints. And my take on vibe coding was that it's fantastic, provided you understand when it can be used and when it can't.
A personal tool for you, where if there's a bug it hurts only you, go ahead!
If you're building software for other people, vibe coding is grossly irresponsible because it's other people's information. Other people get hurt by your stupid bugs. You need to have a higher level than that.
This contrasts with agentic engineering where you are a professional software engineer. You understand security and maintainability and operations and performance and so forth. You're using these tools to the highest of your own ability. I'm finding the scope of challenges I can take on has gone up by a significant amount because I've got the support of these tools.
But I'm still leaning on my 25 years of experience as a software engineer.
The goal is to build high quality production systems: if you're building lower quality stuff faster, I think that's bad. I want to build higher quality stuff faster. I want everything I'm building to be better in every way than it was before.
The problem is that as the coding agents get more reliable, I'm not reviewing every line of code that they write anymore, even for my production level stuff.
I know full well that if you ask Claude Code to build a JSON API endpoint that runs a SQL query and outputs the results as JSON, it's just going to do it right. It's not going to mess that up. You have it add automated tests, you have it add documentation, you know it's going to be good.
But I'm not reviewing that code. And now I've got that feeling of guilt: if I haven't reviewed the code, is it really responsible for me to use this in production?
The thing that really helps me is thinking back to when I've worked at larger organizations where I've been an engineering manager. Other teams are building software that my team depends on.
If another team hands over something and says, "hey, this is the image resize service, here's how to use it to resize your images"... I'm not going to go and read every line of code that they wrote.
I'm going to look at their documentation and I'm going to use it to resize some images. And then I'm going to start shipping my own features. And if I start running into problems where the image resizer thing appears to have bugs or the performance isn't good, that's when I might dig into their Git repositories and see what's going on. But for the most part I treat that as a semi-black box that I don't look at until I need to.
I'm starting to treat the agents in the same way. And it still feels uncomfortable, because human beings are accountable for what they do. A team can build a reputation. I can say "I trust that team over there. They built good software in the past. They're not going to build something rubbish because that affects their professional reputations."
Claude Code does not have a professional reputation! It can't take accountability for what it's done. But it's been proving itself anyway - time and time again it's churning out straightforward things and doing them right in the style that I like.
There's an element of the normalization of deviance here - every time a model turns out to have written the right code without me monitoring it closely there's a risk that I'll trust it at the wrong moment in the future and get burned.
The new challenge of evaluating software
It used to be if you found a GitHub repository with a hundred commits and a good readme and automated tests and stuff, you could be pretty sure that the person writing that had put a lot of care and attention into that project.
And now I can knock out a git repository with a hundred commits and a beautiful readme and comprehensive tests of every line of code in half an hour! It looks identical to those projects that have had a great deal of care and attention. Maybe it is as good as them. I don't know. I can't tell from looking at it. Even for my own projects, I can't tell.
So I realized what I value more than the quality of the tests and documentation is that I want somebody to have used the thing. If you've got a vibe coded thing which you have used every day for the past two weeks, that's much more valuable to me than something that you've just spat out and hardly even exercised.
The bottlenecks have shifted
If you can go from producing 200 lines of code a day to 2,000 lines of code a day, what else breaks? The entire software development lifecycle was, it turns out, designed around the idea that it takes a day to produce a few hundred lines of code. And now it doesn't.
It's not just the downstream stuff, it's the upstream stuff as well. I saw a great talk by Jenny Wen, who's the design leader at Anthropic, where she said we have all of these design processes that are based around the idea that you need to get the design right - because if you hand it off to the engineers and they spend three months building the wrong thing, that's catastrophic.
There's this whole very extensive design process that you put in place because that design results in expensive work. But if it doesn't take three months to build, maybe the design process can be a whole lot riskier because cost, if you get something wrong, has been reduced so much.
Why I'm still not afraid for my career
When I look at my conversations with the agents, it's very clear to me that this is moon language for the vast majority of human beings.
There are a whole bunch of reasons I'm not scared that my career as a software engineer is over now that computers can write their own code, partly because these things are amplifiers of existing experience. If you know what you're doing, you can run so much faster with them. [...]
I'm constantly reminded as I work with these tools how hard the thing that we do is. Producing software is a ferociously difficult thing to do. And you could give me all of the AI tools in the world and what we're trying to achieve here is still really difficult. [...]
Matthew Yglesias, who's a political commentator, yesterday tweeted, "Five months in, I think I've decided that I don't want to vibecode — I want professionally managed software companies to use AI coding assistance to make more/better/cheaper software products that they sell to me for money." And that feels about right to me. I can plumb my house if I watch enough YouTube videos on plumbing. I would rather hire a plumber.
On the threat to SaaS providers of companies rolling their own solutions instead:
I just realized it's the thing I said earlier about how I only want to use your side project if you've used it for a few weeks. The enterprise version of that is I don't want a CRM unless at least two other giant enterprises have successfully used that CRM for six months. [...] You want solutions that are proven to work before you take a risk on them.
The OpenStreetMap tiles on the Datasette global-power-plants demo weren't displaying correctly. This turned out to be caused by two bugs.
The first is that the CAPTCHA I added to that site a few weeks ago was triggering for the .json fetch requests used by the map plugin, and since those weren't HTML the user was not being asked to solve them. Here's the fix.
The second was that OpenStreetMap quite reasonably block tile requests from sites that use a Referrer-Policy: no-referrer header.
Datasette does this by default, and I didn't want to change that default on people without warning - so I had Codex + GPT-5.5 build me a new plugin to help set that header to another value.
Tautologies have a bad reputation. They are often dismissed as mere definitions. People get scolded for trying to draw causal implications from tautologies. They are viewed as being simplistic.
It is true that tautologies are (implicit) definitions. It is true that they are simplistic. It is true that they have no direct causal implication. Nonetheless, tautologies are one of the most important parts of economics. They promote clear thinking and thus make it easier to see how the economy functions. They do not establish causal relationships, but they make it easier to see which causal relationships are plausible and which are not.
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Consider this rather banal tautology:
The number of shares of stock sold equals the number of shares of stock purchased.
I don’t know how many times I’ve heard the news media attribute a sharply decline in stock market indices to a “selling wave” hitting Wall Street: The Dow fell 800 points as investors sold 15.4 billion shares of stock. Yes, but investors also purchased 15.4 billion shares of stock. Two sides of the same coin:
At one time, the stock market was closed at night and yet market indices often changed dramatically, even without a single share being traded. A hundred years ago, the Dow might close one day at 243 and open the following morning at 227, reflecting bearish overnight news. In that case, it is fairly obvious that the market moves on new information, not trading activity. To the extent that trading activity has any impact on prices, it is due to what the trading reveals about information held by various participants in the market.
[Domestic] Saving - investment = Current account balance
Proponents of various policies often use tautologies as a sort of intuition pump—a way of making their model seem more plausible. I will show that the first (and most famous) tautology listed above is actually the least useful, whereas each of the other five offer valuable insights into macroeconomics
Part 1: Monetarism
Tautologies #1 and #2 show the relationship between the money supply and nominal GDP (P*Y). In a mathematical sense the two equations are exactly equivalent, as V = 1/k. But the Equation of Exchange (M*V=P*Y) is less useful than the Cambridge Equation (M=k*P*Y), as the latter has a common-sense explanation that is intuitively appealing, while the former does not.
The variable V in the Equation of Exchange is often described as “velocity”, the average number of times a unit of money is spent in a given year. But that is not actually what V represents, as money is frequently spent on goods that are not a part of NGDP, and some purchases of goods do not involve money.
The Cambridge equation says that if k is the share of gross income that people hold in the form of cash balances, then the level of nominal GDP is the ratio of the money supply to k. Unlike V, the variable k really does represent the variable described in the textbooks. The k ratio is a variable that you can visualize. You can imagine holding a larger or smaller share of your income in the form of cash balances. And you can also imagine the central bank directly changing the money supply through policies like open market operations.
The Cambridge equation tautology tells us that anything that changes NGDP does so by influencing one of two variables; either the stock of base money, or the share of gross income held in the form of base money. You can model NGDP by modeling each of those two variables.
I believe that M = k*P*Y is an especially illuminating tautology because most people have no idea that these two variables (the stock of base money and the share of income held as money) determine total national income. I doubt if one person in a hundred could explain this fact. And the reason is simple—most people don’t understand the distinction between nominal and real variables.
Think about the fact that for any economic variable X, it is true that:
X = k*P*Y, where k is defined as X/P*Y
Thus, X might be the total stock of gold, measured in dollars. Why is this not an interesting tautology?
If we were on the gold standard, then that sort of equation would be quite interesting. Suppose the public held a stock of gold equal to 3.5% of GDP. If the stock of gold rose by 20% due to a new discovery, and if the public’s demand for gold as a share of GDP were unchanged, then NGDP would rise by 20%. That’s an interesting fact to know, even if in the real world the public’s demand for gold as a share of GDP is not exactly constant.
But suppose that gold is not money. Now consider the same example, a 20% rise in the physical stock of gold due to a new discovery. If we are not on a gold standard, then, the nominal gold price of gold might change. If so, then even if the public continued to hold exactly 3.5% of gold as a share of GDP, the enlarged stock of physical gold need not have any impact on its value in monetary terms, and hence NGDP.
Thus, the Cambridge Equation is enlightening due to three critical assumptions:
Nominal GDP is priced in money terms.
The stock of base money is directly controlled by the central bank.
It seems plausible that the public’s demand for base money as a share of income is at least partly determined by factors that are independent of central bank policy, especially in the long run. After all, do you let Jay Powell determine the amount of base money that you hold as a share of your income?
Part 2: S = I and the Paradox of Thrift
The savings = investment relationship is often misunderstood. At an aggregate level, saving is defined as the funds used to finance investment—the construction of capital goods. Don’t try to construct counterexamples. If society decides to redefine a good formally viewed as investment as now being a consumer good (let’s say something like pickup trucks), then the funds used to pay for the good get redefined from saving to consumption. If I save money by lending it to a neighbor who blows it all in Vegas, then the neighbor’s actions are treated as negative saving, exactly offsetting my positive saving.
Don’t bother trying to find real world examples of where saving doesn’t equal investment; by definition they are equal. Saving is the portion of income used to finance investment. Period, end of story.
So, what are we to make of the often-stated fear that increased saving might cause a depression. In fact, no depression has ever been caused by increased saving. That’s because saving equals investment, and if saving increases then investment increases. By definition. And depressions generally feature declining investment, often sharply declining investment. So stop worrying about too much saving.
In The General Theory, Keynes worried about a slightly different problem. He worried about an increase in the propensity to save, i.e., the intention to save, which is a radically different concept from an increase in actual saving. Keynes worried that if people intended to save more money, it would lead to less nominal spending and a fall in national income. Keynes argued that because of the fall in aggregate income, the public would not actually save more. National income would adjust (downward), rather than S and I adjusting upward.
Unfortunately, many people misinterpreted Keynes’s “paradox of thrift” as a claim that more saving is bad for the economy. That’s not what Keynes said! Keynes argued that a decline in aggregate demand (basically nominal spending or NGDP) is bad for the economy, and that this sort of decline might be caused by an increase in the public’s desire to save. But Keynes never said that more saving is itself a bad thing, as he understood that in equilibrium there is an equality between saving and investment. And since Keynes was very much pro-investment, that means he was also very much pro-saving.
By combining the Cambridge Equation with the S = I identity, we can finally begin to understand Keynes’s paradox of thrift. In plain English, Keynes was saying that if the public tried to save a higher share of their income, it was likely to lead to an increase in the Cambridge k ratio. And the Cambridge Equation tells us that if the k ratio increases at a time when the money supply is constant, then NGDP must decline. That’s why Keynes worried about a higher propensity to save. But that fear has nothing to do with an actual increase in saving, which is generally associated with rising investment and a strong economy. What Keynes called the “paradox of thrift” should be called the problem of money hoarding.
When we combine the Cambridge Equation with the S = I identity we can also see why Keynes’s paradox of thrift fell out of style after the 1960s. When we moved to a fiat money regime, it became clear that the central bank could offset any decline in the k ratio by increasing the monetary base and thus prevent a fall in nominal GDP. Now there was no longer any reason to worry about the public becoming too thrifty. Saving is good, actually. Moving from a gold standard to a fiat money system removed the worry that saving was bad for the economy. (A point I should have made in my previous post, which critiqued the gold standard.)
Part 3: AS = AD and Say’s Law
Here’s AI Overview:
Say's Law, often summarized as "supply creates its own demand," posits that the production of goods generates the necessary income (wages, rent, profit) to purchase that total output. It implies that general overproduction or widespread "gluts" are impossible in a market economy, as total demand always equals total supply.
When defined this way, Say’s Law is true. The Great Depression was not caused by overproduction (as Franklin Roosevelt believed), rather it was a case of too little production. On the other hand, Say’s Law does not mean that we need not fear a situation where nominal spending is falling. Even if aggregate supply equals aggregate demand in a Depression, the equilibrium may occur at a undesirably low level of output and employment:
[Graph courtesy of ChatGPT]
Much of the confusion is due to the use of the term “aggregate demand”. I wish the model were called the nominal spending/real output model, not the AS/AD model. It has nothing to do with “demand” in the ordinary sense of the term as used in microeconomics.
Classical economists understood that if the government were to pass a law setting a very high minimum wage rate—say $40/hour, it would lead to less employment and output. Most economists would call this sort of policy an “adverse supply shock”.
Now consider a big drop in “aggregate demand” such as occurred during 1929-33, when NGDP fell by roughly 50%. Because nominal wages are sticky, this drop in nominal spending did not result in a 50% fall in wages and prices, leaving output unchanged. Instead, nominal wages were sticky and remained above equilibrium. Firms responded much as they would to a higher minimum wage rate, by reducing employment and output.
From the perspective of Say’s Law, these sticky wages create an aggregate supply problem, analogous to higher legal minimum wage rates. Thus, the fact that a fall in nominal spending in an economy featuring sticky wages leads to high unemployment in no way contradicts Say’s Law; indeed, it is a prediction of classical economics.
Keynes was wrong when he suggested that perfectly flexible wages would not solve the problem of falling nominal spending. But he won the intellectual battle anyway, as there is no way to make nominal wages perfectly flexible, so the sort of nominal spending shortfall that Keynes worried about really is a problem, a problem that must be addressed public policies that stabilize nominal spending.
I once wrote a paper entitled The Real Problem is Nominal, where the term “real” meant “actual”. Say’s Law teaches us that all economic problems are real, meaning supply side problems, even if the ultimate source of the problem is nominal wage rates that are too high relative to falling NGDP, triggered by a shortfall in “demand”.
Part 4: GDP = GDI (Gross output equals gross income)
The production/income identity is useful in a couple of different areas. First, it provides the intuition for one popular argument for NGDP targeting. In the previous section I alluded to the fact that a stable path of NGDP helps to stabilize the labor market. That’s because NGDP is the nominal revenue that firms have to pay nominal wages. The production/income equality suggests that stabilizing NGDP will also help to stabilize the financial system, as nominal income (NGDI) is the resource that individuals, firms and governments have available to pay nominal debts. Falling NGDI often leads to a financial crisis (as in 2008-09 and 1931-33.)
This identity is also useful when thinking about the impact of AI on the economy. Some fear that intelligent robots will eventually provide almost unlimited labor, leading to mass unemployment. But this hypothetical outcome would also imply almost unlimited output, meaning the economy would experience extremely high levels of gross income, despite near 100% unemployment rates. That’s not to deny the fact that AI might present important challenges for public policymakers, but it does suggest that policymakers would have an extremely powerful tool should they use to utilize it—the fiscal space to easily provide every single citizen a UBI equal to at least an upper middle-class lifestyle, if not higher.
When the public envisions mass unemployment, they also envision mass poverty. But that’s because technological progress over the past two centuries has not resulted in mass unemployment. Rather, occasional periods of high unemployment have been due to the interaction of falling NGDP and sticky wages, which really does impoverish a nation. In contrast, a mass unemployment produced by near limitless technological progress would enrich a nation. The GDP = GDI tautology helps us to understand that fact.
Part 5: Saving, investment and the current account balance
Do trade policies cause a change in the gap between saving and investment, or do policies that influence domestic saving and investment cause shifts in the trade balance? By itself, the S - I = CA balance tautology doesn’t prove anything about causation. But it is highly suggestive.
[Update: In the original post I should have indicated domestic saving minus domestic investment, as total saving equals total investment.]
Suppose you asked a protectionist to explain why they thought that trade barriers would improve the current account balance. How would they explain this outcome in terms of saving and investment?
There are only two ways that a country can increase its current account balance, either by reducing domestic investment or by increasing domestic saving. Protectionists would almost never point to lower domestic investment as the preferred explanation, for obvious reasons. Higher investment is almost universally viewed as a good thing, even among protectionists. The argument that protectionism will increase the trade balance almost always hinges on the question of whether it will increase domestic saving. And it might!
For instance, a tariff might increase government revenue, leading to higher government saving (or at least less dissaving) and this could increase the current account balance (i.e., reduce the deficit.) I’ve generally been skeptical about the impact of the Trump tariffs, but that’s not for purely theoretical reasons. Rather it is because Trump has aggressively cut taxes in other areas, thus the net effect of his fiscal policies has not been a boost in government saving. (BTW, quotas don’t even bring in government revenue, so they are especially unlikely to boost domestic saving.)
Of course, an extremely protectionist trade policy with prohibitive tariffs would almost certainly reduce America’s current account deficit by dramatically reducing both imports and exports. In that case, however, the most likely mechanism would be lower domestic investment, hardly the desired outcome.
Tautologies are some of my favorite economic tools. They force us to see connections that otherwise might be hidden from view. They allow us to see why certain causal relationships are likely to be true, or why they might be highly implausible. The Fisher Equation tautology (i = r + inflation) doesn’t prove anything about causality. But it points us in the right direction—it helps us to organize our thinking about the likely impact of inflation on interest rates. That’s because we know something about the world. Our views regarding the real interest rate are not a blank slate, just as our intuition about the public’s demand for cash balances as a share of income is not a blank slate.
Some tautologies are obvious in one sense, but not in another. The amount of money that people pay in interest is exactly equal to the amount of money that people receive in interest. The amount of money that people pay to buy homes, is exactly equal to the amount of money that people receive when they sell homes. Duh!! But keeping these truisms in mind helps to prevent the fallacy of reasoning from a price change.
And while it is true that tautologies, by themselves, do not prove any causal relationships to be true, isn’t that true of all social science models?
PS. To see some examples of tautologies being misused, check out my two posts on MMT (here and here.)
PPS. Slightly off topic, but I’d like to point readers to one of my favorite weekly summaries of the blogosphere, provided in David Levey’s substack.
The Pursuit of Happiness is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
GIMME SHELTER is a summing-it-up newsletter I do maybe three or four times a year (infrequent and sporadic). I send it out to via email to about 6,500 people and, also print it out here on my Substack. If you want to be on the list of recipients, send your email address to: lloyd@shelterpub.com. (It won’t be used for any other purposes.)
(In this case, it’s getting Substacked before we send out the full email.)
Going It Solo
I haven’t been single since I was 12 years old.
(When Gloria asked me to hold her hand as we walked back from the beach on the Russian River.)
Girlfriend after girlfriend, 3 of them serious, then 18 years the first marriage, almost 50 years the second.
As I’m shifting to being a soloista, I’ve at the same time — journalist at heart— been observing the process,
It’s way different, let me tell you.
I have a ton of solo friends, and they all seem to be doing fine. They’re not bitching about living alone — and they know stuff that I don’t.
Sure, I miss Lesley, but focusing on that gets me nowhere. And she appears unexpectedly now and then. One day I was walking along the brick path and came across a red flower, and got a jolt — there she was! Or a picture of her Shari handed me that I hadn’t seen before. She’s still here.
Plus:
The busy bee has no time for sorrow.
-William Blake
Weeping cherry tree (by pond) in full bloom
What’s different about the solo life?
Day-to-Day Busyness
• Doing all the shopping,cooking, dishes; washing and drying clothes (in the fresh air or by the fireplace); sweeping, composting, recyclable and non-recyclable garbage
• Getting firewood, kindling, splitting, stacking
• Gardening, which is huge around here. Tomatoes, cucumbers, KALE, chard, potatoes, zucchini (for first time ever, I kept ahead of the zucchini’s prolific production last season, picking a zuke every day or two — went on until December), hot peppers, artichokes, asparagus (20-year-old bed), strawberries raspberries, apples, plums, parsley, chives. Plus my friend/chef/neighbor Kate and I are planting a robust garden…
Old chicken coop, now storage, with living roof. When we cleared away weeds, here were succulents Lesley planted maybe 10 years ago
Adobe wall greenhouse planted with peas, beans, tomatoes, herbs, cucumbers Roof is double wall polycarbonate, a great greenhouse material.
Raised beds with various seedlings, hoop greenhouse with three hot pepper plants, asparagus, tomato. Seedlings are just starting in the raised beds.
Pump house, 15’ deep well provides garden water for most of year
• Ongoing homestead maintenance: pests like termites, ants, skunks; leaky valves; roof leaks (7 roofs); septic system maintenance, weeding, grass cutting, pruning (4 apple trees, 1 plum, raspberries, red currants), watering (most of the year from shallow (15’ deep well). Everywhere I walk on this 100x100’ piece of land, I see things to do, to maintain, to fix.
Pepé Le Pew, the homestead’s latest zorillo, handsome devil, nightly visitor enters property via quail opening I made in front gate
• No one to curb my enthusiasm
• More time for introspection
I feel like — at 4 years — I’m still testing, learning, groping, adapting, but things are finally starting to sail smoother on this ship of a homestead. It’s taking years to reconfigure the garden to something I can manage. I can’t picture what it would be like to live in a city apartment — life on a piece of land is so different.
Planetary impact: I’ve got rooftop solar panels, generating more electricity than I use. Most of my heating is from scrounged eucalyptus firewood. I dress in (sometimes 5) layers, merino wool, once in a while use a low-wattage electric heater. Dishwater gets dumped in the garden, virtually no grease goes into the septic tank. Every scrap of leftover food (banana skins, coffee grounds, chicken bones, spoiled food), has gone into the garden for over 50 years now. When I stay in a city, I have a hard time putting food in the garbage can.
Living a solo life makes me realize how efficient it is for two people to live together. Two people to pay the rent, two people to divide up the chores, two people to amuse each other.…
The nuclear family, subject to much disparagement since the ‘60s, is nevertheless an efficient setup, especially if you’re doing something like building a homestead.
Soaking up the soloism: around mid-March, I bottomed out with people. Day after day, lots of people to deal with. All good people, friends, interesting, fun — but I started craving alone-ness. The first night solo in a while, I cooked a wild duck, played Shorty’s Bunkhouse on our local (world-class) radio station KWMR, and danced around the room, using Indian clubs, dumbbells, and kettle bells to do various exercises to the beat. Fun!
That night, being alone was sweet.
I’m up and down. Lesley was very balanced (a Libra), but I swing from depression to ecstaticness. Just her calm presence would provide me a measure of balance, but now I’m on my innate solo roller coaster of emotional ups and downs. So be it.
Was the goin’ up worth the comin’ down?
-Kris Kistofferson
When I’m having an extraordinary day at the beach, or running on one of the beautiful Mt. Tam trails, driving home on Highway One with kick-ass music! — well, sure! Worth it.
But when I’m in the dregs of depression? Galumph! I’m having to learn toleration and patience — wait it out, not worsen things by bitching. Sloopy hangin’ on.
And furthermore, heh-heh, there’s this:
The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.
-William Blake
Aging
The Substack posts I do on aging are by far the most popular. Probably the boomers — closing in on their ‘70s, ‘80s — are curious about what’s coming.
This Gettin’ Old Sure Is Gettin’ Old
-Song by Mick Kolassa
I Lost a Day
The latest gorilla in my life of getting older:
The other day— Sunday, I thought — I went down to a barbecue at our boat club at noon. Funny, building crews were at work on a big downtown project, and there were plenty of parking spaces. Odd for a weekend.
Ulp! It was Monday, not Sunday. It gave me pause. Jesus! Like some sort of time machine, I’d lost a day! Discombobulating.
The Experiences in Getting Old Are New Experiences.
We’ve never been this old before, and the various decreasing abilities inherent with aging are happening for the first time.
• Forgetting names
• Malfunctioning of various physical parts
• Health issues
• Getting out of the car
• Losing strength, agility, flexibility
• Loss of manual dexterity, like buttoning shirts, threading needle
• Worsening depth perception
• Being out of touch with the stunningly fast-changing world
• Doing increasingly stupid stuff
What Did I Come In Here For?
It’s now happening a couple of times a day: I get into the house, cannot for the life of me think what I came in for, and walk back out to the studio, then remember and hurry back before I forget again.
Misplacing Phone and Car Keys
Happens all the time. Thank heavens for Apple’s “Find My.” Even so, sometimes it takes a lot of searching.
Missing calls, texts, DMs, WhatsApp’s
I can’t keep up with all the different forms of incoming messages. Often, I’ll recall a message, like someone asking for something and I check my texts or phone messages but can’t find it. So if I don’t respond, that’s what’s happening. The best way to contact me is by old fashioned email: lloyd@shelterpub.com.
Also, I don’t have my phone with me even half the time — hey, I’m 91 — I don’t have to be connected 7/24.
Forgetting Your Name
This happens daily. I remember faces but not names associated with those faces (or context of what this particular person does or how we met). When we meet, tell me your name.
Here are my previous Substack posts on aging:
A Night on the Beach
The other night I grabbed my backpack and headed for the beach. Normally I’ll walk about 2 miles to a somewhat distant long sandy beach but this time, the pack felt really heavy, so I set up my tent and built a fire closer by, where a creek flows into the ocean.
Been years since I’ve done this, so it was a bit awkward setting up, erecting (Nemo) tent, inflating (Nemo) (v. comfortable) air mattress. Cooked some venison on the coals plus potato and onion in foil. I’d left on an unseasonably warm afternoon, and didn’t take enough warm clothing or my warmer sleeping bag, so was pretty cold. But getting away from electricity and phone/computer/TV screens left me refreshed. This is what life used to be like!
Compulsion To Communicate
I’m a curious person, and I love telling people about extraordinary things I see going on in this world.
Lover of all things alive, wonderer at all he meets…
-Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803-1885
Now that I’ve sold my publishing company, my main forms of communication are Substack, which I love, and Instagram, which unfortunately Zuckerberg has kidnapped and downgraded in pursuit of profit.
I do about one post a week on Substack. Take a look (subscriptions are free):
(Plus the very occasional email such as this one.)
Artificial Intelligence
Perplexity AI has changed my life.
OK, OK, I’m aware of the present and scary future evils of artificial intelligence. I have a friend who won’t use it because of the enormous energy costs. AI can imitate voices and is already being used for scams. And who knows what will happen — in the creative arts — if AI gets beyond the present state of artistic slop?
BUT AI research – for me — is enormously useful.
Examples:
1. Recently I had written something about how my friend Paul Wingate learned how to be a carpenter, but couldn’t locate it. Perplexity pulled it right up:
“In his November 2025 article ‘Game Plan for Young Builders’ on lloydkahn.substack.com, Kahn describes how in the 1960s, his friend Paul Wingate wanted to become a carpenter.…”
2. I’ve done a ton of research on the harm that so-called “environmentalists” are doing to local economies: shutting down organic food production, eliminating blue-collar jobs and homes, and in the case of Bolinas, attempting to ban fishing along 8 miles of our coast. (See more on this below.)
3. What’s the best rootstock on which to graft apples?
4. It will give me one page, one paragraph or whatever length I designate summary of any book.
I always check out the referenced URLs.
It’s an extraordinary tool.
I loved Once Upon A Time in the West. This is what the West was really like, not the romanticized Hollywood versions. Look at the deck here.
My Next Book
It looks like I’ll be doing my first book in four years later this year, titled: Breaking Free in the ’60s: An Autobiography of Sorts. (Formerly titled Live From California.) It will be published by AdvetureKEEN
I grew up in San Francisco and went to high school in the Haight-Ashbury district and what I saw happen in the city in the ’60s differs from all the many books and articles and videos on the subject.
In writing it, I decided to outline my background: growing up in SFO, Lowell High School, Stanford, surfing in Santa Cruz before wetsuits, running a newspaper on an Air Force Base in Germany, building two houses in Big Sur, etc.
Me at age 24 with Peter, age 3 months while I was in the USAF in Germany in 1959, with my Rolleicord camera (it was the low-cost Rolleiflex).
It’s not really an autobiography, since it ends in 1973 (when we did the book Shelter) and also, I don’t feel comfortable getting deeply into my personal life, as most autobiographies do.
I’ll be serializing it for paid subscribers on my Substack platform, plus there will be a real hold-in-your-hands book for sale. Stay tuned.
Whatever you do today, do it with the confidence of a 4-year old in a Batman cape.
- Anon
Stewart Brand’s New Book
I hung out with Stewart a lot in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, working on the Whole Earth Catalogs and sharing excitement about countercultural changes; then in 1974 when we spent several weeks exploring (and pouring a house foundation) on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia.
Flash forward 24 years: at his 50th birthday party in San Francisco in 1998, he seated me next to R. Crumb at dinner (for which I will be eternally grateful).
This Guardian article was a couple of months ago, just discovered it now.
Regarding Stewart’s health:
“In terms of physical maintenance, Brand has always been a healthy, active, outdoorsy person – he was a keen sailor, he was hiking up mountains with rocks in his backpack in his ’60s, and he started going to CrossFit when he was 75 – ‘that built a pretty strong constitution.
“Now, though, he has a respiratory illness, he says, ‘…which is progressive, incurable and fatal’. He’s in a stable condition, and still exercises, but uses supplementary oxygen as well. ‘I’d be very surprised by making it into my ’90s,’ he says, seemingly without regret: ‘Imagine the luck, to get to be 87 – it’s just fantastic!’”
-Steve Rose, The Guardian, Feb 2, 2026
And more recently, this insightful and timely interview by Ezra Klein in the New York Times on April 26, 2026:
He was in good spirits at a small party in Sausalito last week, signing books and talking to maybe 50-60 people. He seems clear headed and in his skin.
In fact, (with profound help from his wife Ryan), he’s kickin’ ass!
His First Book in 15 Years
My big surprise here: it feels somehow like the early Whole Earth Catalogs.
He’s got these very cool publishers in SF, Stripe Press, who’ve created an author’s dream of PR and swag. There was a cool book-signing party at Fort Mason in San Francisco, at which Stewart said that back in the day, as a writer AND photographer, he wanted to tell stories graphically. Rang a bell with me.
Witty swag for Stewart’s book (this is a cloth patch about 3” high).
The book has a refreshing words-with-graphics look.
Kevin Kelly calls it “…an instant classic.”
Environmentalism Has Become A Business
A war of the elite on fishermen, farmers, homebuilders and the working class
At first this seemed like a local issue. But lo and behold, it’s going on nationally.
Locally
Our small seaside town, Bolinas, a fishing port (among other things) for over a century, is currently being threatened with a ruling that would ban all fishing along 8 miles of our coast. Not only fishing from shore, but yet another onerous restriction on our small local fishing fleet.
The plan is sponsored by the Environmental Action Committee of West Marin and is not based on any scientifically valid data and was put forward with scant local input and in an underhanded, sneaky way.
Nationally
With the environmentalism started by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962, then rising ecological awareness of the ‘60s counterculture, the Environmental Protection Agency was established in 1970. Environmentalism was real. The first Earth Day was in 1970 and it eventually became the world’s largest civic observance.
But as the years progressed, starting with the Reagan administration, businesses rebounded by creating groups calling themselves environmentalists, but actually using environmentalism as a tool to — among other things — further an elite approach to wilderness.
Groups like the Environmental Action Committee of West Marin are actually businesses. The EAC has a big budget ($800K donated in 2024), hires lawyers, has political connections, and has contributed to shutting down local food production in West Marin — oysters, dairy, beef — much of it organic — eliminating jobs and homes for 30 people at the Drake’s Bay Oyster farm and 90 tenants on the ranches on the Pt. Reyes Peninsula (mostly Latino).
We were blind-sided by their petition to the California Fish and Game Commission filed in 2023 to make our home beaches a Marine Reserve. We are fighting it (Save Duxbury Access) with a petition of our own.
I’ve gathered a tremendous amount of information on the “environmentalists” of today and am looking for an investigative reporter who’s interested in what I think is a big national story. I just don’t have the time to do it myself.
It’s way too big to cover here, but if you’re interested, I suggest doing some of your own research.
Especially if you contribute to the EAC or other “environmental” groups; are you aware of their anti-local, anti blue-collar, anti-country people actions? Do you want to be contributing to shutting down local food production and causing local people to lose jobs and homes?
And if you know of an investigative reporter who might be interested, let me know. I’ve done a ton of research, glad to pass it along.
BTW, The Nature Conservancy, the world’s biggest environmental organization, has $8 billion (!) in assets and pays its CEO $900 K annually. It’s been criticized for its corporate alliances and locally disruptive land decisions.
Hummingbird Week
Last week I discovered a baby Anna’s hummingbird on the ground. Located nest, put it back in (with a sibling), but mother never returned, so brought them into house and starting feeding them, keeping warm with light bulb.
Here they are in their nest. Note the camoflauge exterior.
One of them died, but this one had a fierce desire to survive. Fed it sugar water through eyedropper and added mashed-up aphids (Lillian’s idea) and flies for protein, but after 5 days, I was exhausted from feeding every hour, so took it to Wildcare in San Rafael, where they are way better equipped for bird survival — which I should have done in the first place.
It was a unique experience having a roommate for 5 days. Every time I’d walk into the room, its tiny heart was still beating and it would be bright-eyed and open its beak for food. I’d get up every few hours at night to feed the hungry critter. It was a real responsibility.
Update: Wildcare says it has survived and is perky. They have a lady who specializes in hummingbirds and is giving it proper food and heping it learn to fly.
Strangely, I got attached to this tiny (weighing 1/10 of an ounce when fully grown) being and am so glad it’s thriving. I wonder if Widcare will allow me to visit.
Closing with this song, recorded live in Tokyo in 1975. I know, I know, I’m prone to over-enthusiasm, but that said, I think this may be my favorite song of all time, not just for Ray’s heartbreaking voice, where he bends the notes, but trumpet player Johnny Coles’ solo, and the interplay of voice and brass.
Resist much, obey little.
-Walt Whitman
Thanks for reading Live From California with Lloyd Kahn! This post is public so feel free to share it.
Wolfers’s moment of clarity ultimately sent him down a road less traveled by academic economists: creating his own media company.
On Wednesday, Wolfers, 53, announced that he had founded Platypus Economics, an independent media start-up that aims to reach a mainstream audience. The name is a nod to his Australian roots, cheekily referring to the odd-looking mammal native to his birthplace. He’s funding the business himself, using the income from his textbook sales.
…To get his content channels off the ground and build an audience, Wolfers is teaming up with Initial Digital, the digital media division of the Initial Group, an entertainment company that’s backed by the private equity firm TPG.
We provide the first causal, national empirical analysis of the labor market impacts of heightened immigration enforcement during the second Trump administration. Enforcement increased everywhere, but, we take advantage of the fact that the increases have been uneven across geographic areas to classify areas as treated or control and then implement an event study and difference-in-differences design. Areas that experienced particularly large increases in the number of arrests also experienced a decrease in work among likely undocumented immigrants who remain in the U.S., compared to areas with smaller increases in arrests. We find no evidence of positive spillover effects to U.S.-born workers and U.S.-born workers who work in immigrant-heavy sectors are harmed.
If you’ve ever been offered “no interest” financing at checkout, whether for medical care, home improvement, or a retail purchase, then you’re not alone because it’s become a common occurrence. These offers are everywhere, and on the surface, they sound like a smart way to spread out payments without paying extra, so you might be tempted to go for it, but there’s a detail buried in the fine print that many consumers miss, which is deferred interest.
Deferred interest is one of the most misunderstood financing structures out there. And if you don’t fully understand how it works, it can end up costing you a lot more than you ever expected.
In this article, we’ll look at exactly what you’re getting into before you sign.
What Is Deferred Interest?
Deferred interest is a type of financing where interest is temporarily put on hold, usually only for a promotional period such as 6, 12, or 18 months.
During that time, you’re told you won’t pay interest. Basically, that’s true but only if you meet the terms. Interest is still being calculated in the background from day one. It’s just not added to your balance yet.
If you pay off the entire balance before the promotional period ends, you avoid paying that interest entirely. But if even a small portion of the balance remains, all the accumulated interest gets added back onto your account, but can cause you financial problems that you might not have counted on paying.
Why It’s Easy to Misunderstand
The phrase “no interest” creates a sense of safety that really doesn’t exist. It sounds similar to a traditional zero-percent APR credit card, but deferred interest is not the same thing.
With a true 0% APR offer, interest simply doesn’t exist during the promotional period. However, with deferred interest, it’s more like a ticking clock in the background because the interest remains.
Many consumers assume that making minimum payments is enough to stay on track. In reality, minimum payments are rarely structured to fully pay off the balance before the deadline, so you’ll be stuck with paying interest. That misunderstanding can lead to a surprise bill that’s much higher than you probably expected.
How the Costs Add Up
Let’s say you finance $3,000 with a 12-month deferred interest plan.
You make your monthly payments on time, but by the end of the promotional period, you still have $200 left to be paid even though you’ve made the payments.
Instead of just paying off the remaining balance, you now owe all the interest that has accumulated over the full 12 months, often at rates exceeding 20%. That could add hundreds of dollars to your total cost overnight.
When the interest takes effect retroactively, it doesn’t matter how close you were to paying it off. Missing the payoff by even a small amount will trigger the full interest charge to be launched.
Where Deferred Interest Is Often Used
Deferred interest financing shows up in a wide range of industries such as the following:
Healthcare and dental procedures
Cosmetic treatments
Furniture and appliance purchases
Electronics and retail stores
Home improvement projects
In many cases, it’s presented as a convenient solution to make large purchases more manageable.
And to be fair, it can be, but only if you fully understand the terms and plan your payments carefully to avoid the interest.
Why Companies Use Deferred Interest
From a business perspective, deferred interest is an effective way to increase conversions. Offering financing removes the immediate barrier of a large upfront cost. It allows customers to say “yes” to purchases they might otherwise delay or decline.
The structure of deferred interest means that lenders still have a strong chance of earning interest revenue, especially if consumers don’t pay off the balance in time.
It’s a model that benefits businesses, but it places the responsibility squarely on the consumer to manage the risk to the best of their ability.
Fine Print Matters
One of the biggest issues with deferred interest plans is how the terms are disclosed.
Important details, like when interest starts accruing, how it’s calculated, and what triggers it, are often buried in dense contract language that’s hard for a person to decipher.
Consumers may not realize:
Interest accrues from the purchase date and not after the promo period
Minimum payments don’t guarantee payoff in time
A single late payment can void promotional terms
The interest rate may be significantly higher than standard credit cards
These aren’t small details, but the difference between saving money and paying a premium.
How to Protect Yourself
Deferred interest isn’t inherently bad. It just requires a more strategic approach.
If you’re considering this type of financing, here are a few ways to protect yourself:
Know the Exact Payoff Date
Don’t estimate. Instead, get the exact date when the promotional period ends and work backward from there.
Calculate Your Monthly Payment
Divide the total balance by the number of months in the promo period. That’s your target payment, and not the minimum payment listed on your statement.
Set Up Automatic Payments
Missing a payment could cancel your promotional terms, so it’s imperative that you make your payments on time.
Pay It Off Early If Possible
The sooner you eliminate the balance, the less risk you carry.
Alternatives Worth Considering
Depending on your situation, there may be better financing options available.
Transparent payment plans with no retroactive charges
Some financing providers are also working to make terms clearer and more consumer-friendly, by focusing on simple interest rather than deferred interest rate structures.
Exploring these alternatives can help you avoid surprises and choose a plan that aligns effectively with your financial goals.
Why Transparency Matters
As more consumers become aware of how deferred interest works, there’s a distinct growing demand for clearer, more transparent financing options.
Regulators and consumer advocates have raised concerns about how these plans are marketed, especially when key terms aren’t clearly communicated so there are a lot of gray areas.
At the same time, financial literacy is improving because people are asking better questions and taking a closer look at the details before committing to the loan.
That shift is important. Because when consumers understand the rules, they’re in a much stronger position to make informed decisions and avoid interest.
Final Thoughts
Deferred interest financing can be a useful tool, but only if you go into it with a clear understanding of how it works.The biggest mistake isn’t using it, but it’s assuming it’s something it’s not.
Before you agree to any financing plan, take a few extra minutes to review the terms, calculate your payments, and consider your options. That small amount of effort can save you a significant amount of money. Because in the end, the goal isn’t just to make a purchase more affordable today, but to ensure it stays affordable in the future.
E-commerce and package networks scale volume while managing the same friction points every day: demand volatility, tight delivery windows, multi-carrier handoffs, WISMO spikes and cost leakage. This is exactly where last mile technology creates measurable control, because it turns delivery into a managed system, not a series of manual interventions.
As AI and automation mature, teams stop treating routing, dispatch, tracking and proof as separate tools through last mile technology. They run one operating loop where capacity plans reflect real density, routes stay feasible under disruption and exceptions close through workflows with clear ownership.
The outcome is operational stability that holds during peaks, while performance improves through daily planned-versus-actual discipline and better signal quality across fleets and partners. Let’s learn how AI and automation are shaping the next wave of last mile technology and what capabilities to prioritize first.
Why AI and Automation Matter in the Last Mile
AI and automation are needed because last-mile operations run on variance, not averages. Traffic shifts, service time changes by stop type and access friction compounds near the end of the shift. Manual teams spend too much time reacting to late discovery, while costs rise through overtime, reattempts and exception handling.
Modern last mile technology reduces decision latency. It standardizes inputs, automates recovery actions and learns from execution patterns so tomorrow’s plan reflects what actually happened today.
8 Ways AI and Automation are Becoming Non-negotiable in Last Mile Technology
AI and automation are reshaping how delivery operations plan, execute and improve every day. The sections below break down the core capability areas that are becoming non-negotiable for scalable execution in last mile delivery operations.
Capacity Forecasting Moves From Planning to Competitive Advantage
The strongest last mile technology stacks start earlier than dispatch by forecasting capacity needs months ahead, then translating forecasts into territory and fleet decisions. Teams see planning effort drop and service outcomes improve when territory and capacity planning are automated.
Territory Planning That Adapts: Dynamic boundaries adjust as delivery patterns change, instead of staying locked to outdated maps.
Density Smoothing: Workloads balance across days and territories to stabilize utilization and reduce peak-day improvisation.
AI-powered Capacity Forecasting: Planning workflows predict resource needs and cost trade-offs with higher accuracy.
Slotting and Scheduling Operate as a Real-time Promise Engine
As customer windows narrow, last mile technology connects checkout promises to live capacity signals, not fixed cutoff rules. Delivery slots stay protected based on real feasibility, then shift through what-if simulations as demand changes.
Real-time Slot Availability: Scheduling reflects demand, fleet availability and territory load in near real time, reducing promise failures during peak conditions.
Priority Handling For Urgent Orders: AI-driven scheduling absorbs urgent orders without collapsing the plan, by reallocating capacity instead of forcing manual reshuffles.
Feasibility-first Slot Governance: Slot reliability is measured by comparing planned and actual variances, so teams tighten assumptions before scaling to more regions.
Routing Shifts From Distance Optimization to Constraint Execution
Modern last mile technology treats routing as continuous decision support, not a single nightly plan. Constraint modeling depth matters more than “shortest path” math for multi-stop operations with real-world variance.
AI-based Routing With Real Constraints: Multi-stop plans model time windows, capacity, service times, traffic signals and driver shifts to protect feasibility.
Service Time Learning: ML-driven service-time estimation aligns with productivity and compliance gains, such as higher stops per hour and lower route deviation.
Dynamic Re-planning Without Chaos: When late orders or exceptions hit, routing adjusts parts of a route without rebuilding the entire day, reducing mid-shift disruption.
Multi-carrier Orchestration Acts as a Cost Control Lever
Hybrid networks are the default, so last mile technology orchestrates owned fleets, partner fleets and gig capacity through one decision layer. Rate-based routing chooses when to outsource a stop based on real-time cost trade-offs, not static rules.
Rate-based Routing: Systems compare internal fleet time cost versus outsourced stop cost to reduce total route spend.
Performance-aware Allocation: Carrier selection factors lead time, package rules and performance outcomes to reduce mis-packs and surcharges.
Contract and Billing Governance: Audit and reconciliation workflows reduce leakage and improve invoice accuracy.
Control Towers Function as AI-guided Execution Layers
Visibility alone does not protect SLAs. Modern last mile technology uses control towers that convert signals into actions, so teams intervene before commitments break. This includes proactive monitoring, exception collaboration and planned versus actual governance that runs daily.
Proactive Risk Detection: AI flags detours, long halts and delay risk so dispatch reassigns work early.
Automated Dispatch and Load Integrity: Pre-sorting and pre-loading by SLA, vehicle type and zone reduces load-out time and errors.
Operational Metrics That Drive Decisions: OTIF and cost per delivery tie to daily exception drivers and recovery actions.
Proof and Audit Operate as Automated Financial Controls
As volume scales, proof quality becomes a financial control, not a customer service detail. Last mile technology strengthens proof through automation that validates authenticity and flags anomalies, supported by audit logic and structured debriefing.
Policy-driven Proof Requirements: Proof types vary by shipment risk and location risk, so high-value drops follow a stronger verification discipline.
Automated Proof Audits: Screening of PoD and signatures reduces disputes and chargebacks.
Faster Claim Resolution: Proof and events live together, so teams resolve escalations without chasing screenshots or fragmented logs.
Architecture Prioritizes Scale, Security, and Workflow Agility
The next wave of last mile technology is defined by systems that scale fast, integrate cleanly and adapt workflows without long development cycles. Buyers evaluate operational agility as much as feature breadth because rollout speed and stability matter.
Workflow Management as a First-class Layer: Low-code process management supports faster launches of service tiers and exception playbooks.
Scalability by Design: Microservices-based scaling handles peak loads while maintaining high availability.
Security and Access Controls: As more partners connect, security becomes a core requirement for operational continuity.
Self-learning Optimization: Algorithms learn recurring patterns and optimize route decisions over time, improving outcomes with less manual tuning.
End-to-End Suites Consolidate Around One Operating Loop
Rather than stitching tools together, last mile technology consolidates into suites that cover planning through analytics. Modules span capacity planning, multi-carrier management, order-to-door visibility, dynamic routing, driver enablement, customer experience, rate management, AI agents and analytics.
One System of Record: Execution events, proof and exception actions live in one place to reduce reconciliation friction.
AI Agents for Productivity: AI assists dispatch and control tower users to reduce manual triage work.
Analytics That Drive Continuous Improvement: Planned versus actual learning loops improve service time assumptions and territory rules.
Turn Daily Variance Into Reliable Outcomes With Smart Last Mile Technology
AI and automation create real value when they cut operational variance, strengthen execution control and help teams solve issues before they spread across the route. The real advantage is not better reporting alone. It is the ability to keep capacity predictable, routes feasible and exceptions contained within the shift.
That is how logistics teams protect OTIF, reduce WISMO and maintain healthier unit economics as delivery volume grows. With technology partners such as FarEye, enterprises can scale faster while standardizing workflows, events and audit discipline across fleets and partners.
The next move is clear: invest in systems that improve live execution, automate repeat decisions and turn real-time signals into faster action. Build for control, act earlier and make delivery reliability a repeatable operating strength.
Jamie Raskin Warns Repairing Democracy Will Take Years
Obviously breaking things is much easier than remaking them. Restoration to bring new life and trust to what has been broken can become very long, arduous and expensive.
Just ask anyone taking on an old house.
If we talk about restoring broken institutions and government, the issues are magnified by the loss of trust and a less-than-sure way to see what is supposed to emerge.
Examples abound, of course, as we are seeing play out in this now-stubborn war with Iran. Sending in the bombs and missiles, however skilled, pricey, even gutsy the move, has turned out to be the easy part.
Building, negotiating, achieving whatever was intended to emerge from the damage is much more difficult.
Rebuilding seemingly calls on wholly separate sets of skills and experience to deal with a foe that sees time and effect differently, to regather allies in communal effort, and to require a permanent police role for Iran’s nuclear aspirations.
Whatever else is said about where we find ourselves, all can agree that Donald Trump’s gut-driven, impatient, all-or-nothing approach to deals is far from the deliberate, delaying and deceitful approach favored by Iran, which too has refined its thinking over decades or more of experience.
Broken Institutions
The brokenness of the war matches a bleak domestic governmental landscape littered by these first 18 months of Trump 2.0.
Whether you are among the dwindling supporters who relish it or a critic who thinks the country is going to hell, all will acknowledge that the Trump bull has run amok amid fragile trust stores in justice, health, immigration, education and the economy. Indeed, the Steve Bannon followers say that was the whole point.
Even those in the administration turned against the ill-fated DOGE effort that deployed computer-savvy people with no government experience to shut down international aid agencies, slash public health and Social Security agencies and more, all seemingly without knowledge about what services were being eliminated or why.
With supportive, unquestioning majorities in the House and Senate, a right-wing majority on the Supreme Court, and almost unrestrained powers to evade U.S. and international law and democratic precedents, Trump’s break-it-all philosophy is going unchallenged but for political talk and increasingly bad political polls.
Those polls almost uniformly project the Trump majorities are facing rejection in the fall elections — spawning new, unending would-be schemes by the Trump forces to disrupt voting, redistricting, vote-counting challenges and more to break elections too.
The only valid principle seems to be Winning.
But if the elections properly reflect a national mood that has turned against Trump’s insistence on breaking everything in sight, what happens then?
A Generation of Restoration
Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., was asked about Democratic priorities should his party prevail in November’s elections. Would the focus be on constant investigations of Trump administration misdeeds and oversteps, even on yet another futile impeachment effort against Trump himself, or on a broader agenda towards Democratic-supported improvements?
It’s a critical question even before November. Public anger has welled over broken promises about high prices, about excesses in the ICE deportation campaign, over cuts to health care, abuses in the justice system to go after political enemies, and, always, about the Epstein Files hypocrisies.
At the White House, The Washington Post reports, sources say the White House Counsel’s Office is already preparing officials for expected, aggressive congressional oversight to come from an electoral swing in Congress.
Raskin, a constitutional expert, was focused on what he called the need for a “sweeping de-Trumpification of the Department of Justice,” in particular, not only for accountability for abuses, but to re-create whole areas that have been abandoned to pursue immigration and political cases.
Justice has said it will no longer enforce the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and has stopped monitoring foreign subversion of American elections. The underpinnings of the pardon process have been thrown out to have the president just pick political friends, Raskin said. The FBI and Justice have eliminated counterintelligence units, even while we are at war in Iran.
Any “repair” is not a quick fix of replacing a name or two at the top of the department or the label of the political party.
Though Raskin, like other Democratic leaders, sees “almost daily impeachable offenses” are occurring, Democrats cannot waste political capital on impeachment.
Rather, he said, restoration work is “the work of a generation. That’s not going to happen in three months or six months when we get the House, the Senate and the White House back.”
Expand that thinking to changes in health cuts, the repair of international relations, food and humanitarian aid, education and environment. The obvious conclusion is that simply electing a different party majority in November may provide substantial political opposition to the Trump break-it agenda, but it will not guarantee that what has been broken will be fixable anytime soon or easily.
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It’s hard to think of a time when a president and a party worked as hard as Donald Trump and Republicans are now to lose an election. “That’s because they’re idiots,” you might say, and for many of them that’s true. But even stupid politicians have an instinct for self-preservation, one that is being violated every day as they seem to look for new ways to alienate the voters.
Here’s what the political landscape looks like six months before the midterms. The administration is waging the most unpopular war in history, with barely a whiff of dissent from Republicans. That war has, predictably, produced skyrocketing gas prices, perhaps the most sure-fire way to incur the wrath of the voters. Republicans have passed just one significant piece of legislation since Trump became president again, a tax cut for the wealthy that ballooned the cost of health coverage for tens of millions and caused millions to lose their coverage altogether. Trump’s economic policies, which Republicans continue to defend, have pushed his approval ratings on the cost of living down into the 20s.
Meanwhile, he’s beefing with the Pope, promoting hugely unpopular data centers, and at a moment when the affordability of everyday life is an urgent concern, dismissing that as stupid and short-sighted while obsessing endlessly over his gold-gilded ballroom.
Privately, Republicans are not happy about the fact that Trump seems determined to make them lose their seats in November. But what are they doing publicly? They just released a reconciliation bill to fund ICE that amounts to a slush fund for that disgraced agency of thugs, and includes a billion dollars for, you guessed it, Trump’s ballroom.
It’s not that they don’t go out every day and try to make a case for why everything they’re doing is worthwhile. But they know it’s not working. Persuasion is no longer the goal, which is part of why they’re so eager to reshape the electoral system so they don’t have to persuade anyone.
At first, the cult seems like a great idea
How did a party that has been pretty smart about politics get to this state of debasement? The answer may lie in the dynamics of the personality cult, which is absolutely what today’s Republican Party has become.
When Barack Obama was president, Republicans accused Democrats of constructing a cult of personality around him, despite the fact that Democrats weren’t building statues of him, renaming airports in his honor, or trying to divert taxpayer funds to his pet projects (let alone his own pockets). Republicans’ evidence for their charge consisted almost entirely of this: Obama is very charismatic and Democrats like him a lot, and we hate that. But since every accusation is a confession when it comes to the right these days, they were just waiting for the right leader around whom they could build their own cult of personality, and in 2016 they got him.
In retrospect, we often focus on the cult’s dramatic fall, the moment when the adherents destroy themselves, sometimes literally, at the behest of a cult leader who has obviously lost his mind. But it’s worth remembering that however they end up, cults that achieve any kind of success do so because the cult leader has genuine talents and offers adherents something compelling. That’s true of cult leaders like Jim Jones, and it’s true of political cults like the one around Mao or the one around Trump.
Trumpism may have required moral compromise from the beginning, but for Republicans who cared about power as well as political and policy success, joining up turned out to be a great deal. For many it led to temporary success and a place in congressional majorities, while for some it vaulted them to heights they could never have achieved under another president. If a saner Republican were president right now, Pete Hegseth would still be a weekend Fox & Friends cohost and Kash Patel would have a podcast with 200 subscribers; instead they’re two of the most powerful people in America.
But the fall we’re seeing now was exactly what many Republicans warned about in early 2016:
That seemed like the shrewd political assessment at the time, which is why the rush to Trump’s side happened in waves. The first wave was the chaos agents like Steve Bannon, along with the collection of bigots, misogynists, and all-around assholes for whom Trump was everything they’d ever been hoping for. Every douchebag, sleazebag, scumbag, and dirtbag looked at him and said, “Yeah, that’s my guy.”
But as the months went on, more sensible Republicans decided that they too had no choice but to get on board, and eventually they even concluded that Trump’s deranged personality and relentless self-promotion had met its historical moment; in other words, that becoming part of the cult was not something they had been forced into against their will, but the smart political move. And today, almost every Republican, whether they joined up the day after he declared his candidacy or the day before the election, is in the same boat.
When the cult goes bad
In cults like Jonestown, the leader’s own descent into madness pulls everyone down with him, and that’s pretty much what’s happening now. There may not be any way to avert a midterm blowout, but a different president would at least be promoting policies that weren’t so directly and dramatically damaging to his party’s political fortunes. He wouldn’t be knocking down buildings and talking constantly about his ballroom, and he wouldn’t have started a war like the one we’re in and telling people that they just have to suck it up and tolerate $5 a gallon gas because things will magically get better.
But now you have two factors that together are dooming the party. First, Trump is basically decompensating; whatever ability he once had to attract and persuade people has withered away, and all that’s left are the most unappealing parts of his personality. He is gaining no new adherents; instead, he’s losing support among the electorate every day.
Second, he built the current incarnation of the GOP around absolute loyalty to him, enforced through the kind of petty revenge he’s still trying to carry out. With just a couple of exceptions (e.g. Rep. Thomas Massie, whom Trump is trying very hard to defeat), Republicans all decided that they would not only support him unequivocally but engage in regular rituals of public fealty, the result of which is that their own identities were subsumed and voters who are mad at Trump can reasonably take out that anger at anyone with an R after their name.
Put it together, and every Republican on the ballot is little more than an appendage of a mad king who grows more unstable by the day. When he was relatively popular (or at least seemed like a good vehicle for voters’ grievances) it worked out well for them, but now that he’s unpopular, they’re screwed. And every day from now until November, he’ll probably get worse — more insane rants, more foolish policy decisions, more petty squabbles, more reasons for voters to decide that they should use their ballots to say “We’ve had enough of this.”
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My post yesterday was about the experiment about social media and the job market for economists. I only noticed later that the PNAS also posted a comment on our article, by Professor Peter Rousseau, the secretary of the American Economic Association, who has a long and intimate familiarity with that job market, which the AEA has played a giant role in organizing.
Here is the part of his comment directly connected to our paper:
" the authors make a welcome and useful contribution to the market design literature with a fascinating experiment designed to substitute for and even improve upon the informal information channels lost to the economics job market in the new postpandemic normal. Given that some job candidates are less active self-promoters than others and that, conversely, excessive self-promotion can in some cases be viewed as a negative by prospective recruiters, the authors’ proposed mechanism offers serious promise for leveling the playing field, even if just modestly, for economics job candidates in terms of their visibilities, and perhaps even for expanding the number of jobs actually filled over the course of a recruiting season.
"In the experiment, an AI-based algorithm, supplemented with some human checking and reassignments, matched selected economists on social media (i.e., the “influencers”) with willing job candidates based on the closeness of their research. About 43 percent of willing candidates were selected for this treatment. The key to the experiment lies in the matches themselves, which were assigned in a manner that did not take the relative prominence or institutional ranking of an influencer directly into account. All candidate participants were invited to post a tweet about their job market papers on a social media site created for this purpose, and the influencers were asked to post neutral quote-tweets about the members of the treatment group to which they had been assigned. If executed according to design, recruiters viewing the quote-tweets receive information about the closeness of a given candidate’s research interests to those of the influencer. This may function as a partial substitute for the painstaking process of deducing such information across the hundreds of application packets that recruiters receive with only a brief period for making initial decisions. Knowing that a candidate’s research is close to that of Professor “X” is a tangible signal that could make that candidate more likely to be interviewed or receive a campus flyout or job offer from an institution seeking an entry-level economist like Professor X. The experiment indicates that individuals in the treatment group did indeed receive more campus visits and job offers than candidates assigned to the control group, and that the effect on job offers was especially strong for women. It also finds, however, that these effects were more pronounced for candidates matched to influencers with relatively higher citation counts than for those matched to influencers with relatively more followers, as these two measures of prominence in the profession are not that highly correlated.
" The question of scalability then becomes paramount. Considering the experiment’s positive findings, it is natural to assume that, if universally available, all job candidates would choose to participate and receive the treatment. The process would otherwise go on as stated with perhaps additional influencers being selected by the organizers to serve the larger pool of candidates. Two observations seem reasonable at this point: first, in such a setup, better information about matches could lead to more open positions being filled, which would be a better aggregate outcome; and second, the treatment might in practice benefit candidates from outside the very top departments the most. This is because candidates from the highest ranked departments, who are often perceived by recruiters as having a higher probability of eventually becoming a star, will typically receive more interviews, campus visits, and offers, but in the end can still only accept one offer. With an enlarged set of viable matches, this means that some candidates who may have been otherwise overlooked will find jobs. Of course, the job market may take longer to clear under this mechanism as candidates will have more options to consider before departments go to second or third rounds of offers.
"Casual observations of the job market among economics departments and their chairs do suggest that a number of recruiters are unable to fill positions they have posted. The AEA does not currently collect information on just how many, but the very existence of the “AEA Job Market Scramble,” where recruiters and unmatched candidates can post their availabilities on an online message board each March, is indicative of the challenge (3). The design of a job signaling mechanism by the AEA and its implementation in December of each year (4), where job candidates can list two departments to which they would like to express interest in an interview, is another such intervention aimed at easing the congestion. Another interesting result is that women appear to benefit most from the treatment, while this benefit does not extend to members of other groups traditionally underrepresented in economics. The authors point to existing evidence indicating that women on average tend to be less active promoters of their own research on social media than others and suggest that the additional visibility provided by the quote-tweets could be leading to more job offers. This potential channel, of course, could also be viable for any candidate with a tendency to self-promote less. To explain a special advantage for women, one could note the possibility of forces in the 2022–2023 job market where departments seeking to improve the gender balances of their faculties became aware of candidates through the mechanism who they may have otherwise overlooked. If this is the case, the next question to ask is why does the effect not carry over for members of other underrepresented groups? The answer, though no doubt a speculative one, may lie in the preexistence of other mechanisms and informal channels for promoting such candidates, rendering the marginal effects of the authors’ particular intervention not statistically significant. Finally, while having the potential to increase the number of matches and raise their average quality, the effects of the authors’ intervention will be subject to some randomness based on the assignment of a given candidate’s influencer. For example, when any influencer posts a quote-tweet about a candidate who has been independently and objectively determined to have close research interests, that candidate’s post tends to receive more views and likes on X than those in the control group, and the extent of this visibility correlates with the size of the influencer’s following. Yet these effects do not seem to transfer downstream to job outcomes, where candidates receiving quote-tweets from highly cited influencers are the ones tending to see more offers. In a real sense, the adage “all publicity is good publicity,” often applied to economics research, may not be always true. The assignment of influencers to candidates, even if randomized, will matter for individual outcomes even though the aggregate effects of the intervention are positive. Given the potential individual benefits compared to nontreatment, however, job candidates would likely embrace the residual uncertainty and participate in the mechanism.
"The intervention designed by Qiu et al. may hold even greater promise outside of the economics discipline. In the natural sciences, for example, recruiting for scarce academic postdoctoral positions among new PhDs at a similar career stage, which are markets typically saturated with candidates, often moves directly to a very limited allocation of campus visits based in no small part on letters and other communications from mentors, some of whom could be less than ideally matched with their students or less well known than would-be assigned influencers. These cases are ones in which an enhanced visibility of candidates, when coupled with independent information about the closeness of their work to what senior researchers and their groups might be seeking, could lead to the greater advancement of science more generally. : "Competing interests P.L.R. has served since 2012 as Secretary-Treasurer of the American Economic Association, a 501(c)(3) non-profit deeply committed to improving the job market for new Ph.D. economists, and for which one of the companion article’s co-authors (A. E. Roth) served as President in 2017.
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Peter's comment and our paper appeared online, but won't appear in print until next week in the May 12, 2026 | vol. 123 | no. 19 issue of PNAS.
Carl Riccadonna lead Oregon’s Office of Economic Analysis, charged with forecasting the state economy and preparing state revenue forecasts. He summarized the condition and outlook for the Oregon economy in a recent media interview. Here are the key points he made:
Recent Growth Rebound: Despite lagging behind the national economy post-pandemic and struggling through a “lousy” first half of 2025 due to trade and tariff challenges, Oregon rebounded in Q3 and Q4, growing faster than the national trend.
Economic Diversification: Oregon’s shift from legacy industries (timber, agriculture) into semiconductors and service industries has stabilized the economy, linking its success more closely to national performance.
Recession Sentiment vs. Reality: While many Oregonians feel like the state is in a recession due to slowing growth and sputtering job markets, the state does not currently meet the technical criteria for one.
Income and Inflation: Although gasoline prices have caused a recent inflation spike, personal income growth in Oregon has generally outpaced inflation during the post-pandemic period.
Revenue Resilience: State revenue streams—including personal and corporate income taxes, estate taxes, and lottery revenue—remain strong and do not reflect recessionary patterns.
On April 26, 2026, KOIN TV’s Eye on Northwest Politics featured an interview with state economist Carl Riccadonna. Here are some selected points that Riccadonna made in this interview. The italicized quotations are taken from a transcript of the interview. Key points are bolded for emphasis and clarity.
Oregon’s economy outperformed the nation in the second half of 2025.
There’s some encouraging news in the back half of last year, where Oregon seemed to be bouncing back. So we had a lousy first half of 2025 as trade dependent states pretty universally experienced, given the tariff narrative and all of the things we saw on that front, we came back punching in q3 and q4 of last year, Oregon actually grew faster than the national economic trend. So this is an important economic development which we’re paying close attention to. We’ll see if it holds up in 2026 but at least it was a green shoot narrative to focus on as we ended 2025.
We’ve had some stumbles due to downturns at large employers.
Now, we’ve had some unique stumbles or micro economic challenges here in the state, having to do with a lot of the large employers in the state.
Oregon is more diversified today, and more closely linked to the national economy. If the US grows, so will Oregon.
Well, Oregon is a much more diversified economy than five or 50 years ago. and so, of course, the legacy industries like agriculture, timber and whatnot, are very important. But as the economy has diversified and we’ve expanded into semiconductors and service industries and whatnot, this has not only stabilize the economy to get out of those cycles of lower prices or agriculture prices, which drove economic conditions historically. Now it’s much more diversified. It’s much more linked more tightly with national economic performance. So if the national economy is improving, then most likely it’s going to drag Oregon along with it. And in fact, that is our view for 2026
Well, historically, Oregon doesn’t go into a recession. If the national economy is not a recession, and the national economy has been growing, so I could understand how Oregonians will have that feeling. Certainly there’s a lot of inflation pressure, particularly at the moment, given what’s happening with oil and gasoline prices.
Inflation is top of mind, but in the aggregate income is still outpacing inflation, leading to real income gains
That, being said, personal income growth in the state has outpaced inflation, so we’ve seen real gains in personal income through that post pandemic period. Now we have an inflation spike at the moment, given the gasoline story, so we’ll see if that holds up. We don’t have the data in hand just yet.
Perceptions are dominated by a slowing rate of growth
Also, we’ve had a slowing economy post pandemic, so each year has pretty much been slower than the year before it you mentioned that 4% growth, a big part of that is the inflation story. So if we, if we pull that apart, we have pretty much 3% inflation and about 1% economic growth in the state last year.
While we are slowing, we’re not headed into a recession
So you have a slower economy, high inflation and a job market which has really been sputtering for several quarters now, and so I can understand how that would feel like a recessionary narrative for Oregonians, but the reality is, we are not ticking the boxes for a recession nationally, and I don’t think we’re ticking the boxes here in the state as well.
Oregon’s key income growth indicators “do not look recessionary.” There is a narrative of resilience.
A good cross check for economic conditions is the revenue we see coming into the state, personal income taxes, corporate income taxes, estate taxes, lottery revenue, all of these things in my office, and we are seeing the type of income performance in all of those categories that does not look recessionary. And so there is a narrative of resilience.
Living as we must, in history, it is always important to distinguish between the mostly contingent events of the moment and the deeper trends that will affect the future. Call it, perhaps, the difference between the libretto and the score. I was thinking about this while I was trying to make sense of the latest jousting over the Strait of Hormuz. Trump remains in the same space, having gotten himself into the crisis with no plan for how to get out of it. He’s now making limited efforts to contest control of the Strait. Iran says it remains completely in control of it. But, in a way, that’s a trap for Trump, because if passage through the Strait requires using military force, it’s precisely the use of military force, the danger and uncertainty it creates, which makes it impossible to use the Strait as a secure and safe means of transit. Force may be the medium-term answer to Trump’s problem. But in the short term it makes things worse. And Trump’s not a delaying-gratification, thinking-long-term kind of guy.
But the deeper impact of this crisis, one entirely of Trump’s own making, has been to convince many countries, especially but not only in East Asia, that oil and gas are too vulnerable to price shocks and supply instability. Meanwhile, renewables like solar and wind have now crossed the threshold where they are not only simply cheaper than fossils fuels but, as a tech product, will continue to get cheaper over time. Wind and solar energy can be produced entirely within your sovereign borders. So the Strait crisis is looking like it may be a turning point in the climate/renewables energy transition.
As is often the case with such transitions, the building blocks are already in place. The economics of renewables are already unstoppable just on a cost basis. They’re cheaper. You also have a superpower, China, heavily, heavily invested in electro-power and eager, both for economic and geopolitical reasons, to export the technology around the world. So the building blocks are there. But a crisis can force everyone to consider the matter afresh, with the new facts of the Strait crisis, coming just a few years after the start of the Ukraine war, to spur different energy strategies for cost and supply stability into the future.
The key dimension to all of this is that none of this debate or conversation outside the United States, so far as I can tell, is driven by climate. It’s there in the background of course. But Egypt isn’t on a crash course to shift from 10% to 45% of its electricity from renewables in two years because it’s concerned about the future of the planet. It’s government is focused on reliability and cost. Beyond what I’m gently calling climate concerns, none of this global conversation is embedded in what in the U.S. we might call “woke” politics, either for or against. That’s all a U.S. thing. Or, the U.S. is the only place where culture war politics trump the nuts and bolts of which source of energy is cheaper and more reliable.
U.S. culture war and climate politics are the kind of thing that can exist in a country that has a lot of wealth and a lot of access to energy. It gives you the luxury of being unserious, of playing games. It’s a macro version of why Ukraine became a world leader in offensive and defensive military drone technology despite having a limited tech sector and defense sector and endemic corruption. They did it because they had to. Meanwhile, the U.S., where a lot of this technology originated and has vast wealth and military procurement apparatus, is playing catch up. Why? Because we didn’t have to. Necessity makes new things possible.
The simple fact is that China has bet big on renewables and battery technology, the bases of a post-fossil fuel energy economy. And that bet is paying off big time. Trump’s antic and erratic behavior got us into the Iran War and the Strait of Hormuz crisis. Meanwhile, the authoritianism-billionaire nexus, increasingly heavily backed by the oligarchs of Silicon Valley, is allied with the fossil fuel industry. They’re not only limiting national investment in the energy transition. Through Trump they’re busily working to tear up or shutter investments already made or wind and solar projects that are already underway. Energy politics is increasingly fused with the future of civic democracy in the U.S. and around the world. It’s all of a piece.
This is just a short follow-up on the topic of administration vs. ownership, which I discussed yesterday. There’s a huge amount of ground to cover in just how much Donald Trump has willfully and illegally destroyed in his second term, acts which go to the heart of the idea that the president, elected merely for a four year term, owns not only the government but in a sense the country itself. I discussed this with regards to USAID, the Department of Education and so forth. But nowhere is it more clear or is the damage more permanent than in biomedical research and the sciences. There the administration, wholly illegally, has blasted through institutions and processes and national assets that took decades and generations to build. These are latticeworks of expertise, money, experience and connections between the government and the nation’s research universities. They have not only created huge advances in hard sciences and cures. They’ve been been a generator of national power and economic might. A president hired for a four-year term had no legal right to destroy these things the American people had created.
Trump’s ballroom is getting a huge chunk of money in Senate Republicans’ new reconciliation bill, released late last night. That’s the headline today on many pieces about the legislation.
And it is important: the White House insisted that private donors, not taxpayers, would foot the bill for the ballroom. Now, through a vote where — due to Senate rules — Republicans do not need Democratic support, senators will in fact direct $1 billion of taxpayer funding to security features for the project, which, at times, seems to be all Trump truly cares about.
We, however, have been emphasizing another point about this legislation: it lasts for three years. That means if Democrats retake the House or Senate or both later this year, they’ll be deprived, via this reconciliation bill, of a key mechanism for reining in ICE and CBP: funding. The Constitution equipped Congress to check the executive branch via its power of the purse. This reconciliation bill is just the latest example of Republicans doing all they can to shrug off that responsibility.
1. David Narrett, The Cherokees in War & at Peace 1670-1840. An excellent book, one of the two best books on a single Native American tribe I have read. The book actually aims at explaining the Cherokees and enlightening the reader – how rare. In 1700, there were no more than 20,000 Cherokees, mostly in the southeast, so it is amazing what the author was able to come up with. Will make the year’s best of non-fiction list.
2. Boyd van Dijk, Preparing for War: The Making of the Geneva Conventions. A very good look at the negotiations behind the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and just how driven by national self-interest they were, including colonial motives from the major colonial powers, who wished to retain stronger rights to put down uprisings. The Soviets wanted strong protections against torture (!), as they thought this might limit the power of the United States to bomb their population into submission. Yet nuclear war ended up being permitted, largely at the insistence of the U.S. And so on. The colonial subjects of course had not much say in any of this.
3. Jim Windolf, Where the Music Had To Go: How Bob Dylan and the Beatles Changed Each Other — and the World. An excellent and engaging book, which even serious fans can learn from. The first time Paul McCartney heard the music of Bob Dylan he called it “folk crap,” to his brother Mike. Dylan and McCartney grew closest in 1971, when Paul was making the Ram album in NYC. Music from Big Pink is one of Paul’s favorite albums of all time. Thingumybob, first composed by Paul in 1968, later received accretions from Harrison and Dylan and became an odd three-party composition, albeit never released on a recording. And here is Paul’s account of bumping into Dylan at the airport.
Snow has melted from warm volcanic deposits of ash and rock on the flanks of Shivelyuch on April 23, 2026, in this image captured by the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 9.
NASA Earth Observatory / Lauren Dauphin
Shivelyuch (also called Shiveluch), the most northerly active volcano on the Kamchatka Peninsula, is one of the most active volcanoes in the world. On a near-daily basis, satellites detect new signs of activity within its horseshoe-shaped caldera, including thermal anomalies, hot avalanches and debris flows, and ash deposits that darken the surrounding landscape.
The Landsat 9 satellite captured this image of the towering volcano—one of the largest and tallest on the peninsula—on April 23, 2026, a day when fresh activity left its mark on the snowy, late-spring landscape. A multi-lobedplug of viscous lava called a lava dome—appearing as a dark patch in the caldera—has been actively growing in recent months, according to reports from the Kamchatka Volcanic Eruption Response Team (KVERT). Dome-building lava is typically extruded slowly and piles up into lobed, sloped, or spine-like shapes akin to those that form when toothpaste is squeezed from a tube.
The caldera contains a growing lava dome and signs of block-and-ash flows in channels radiating outward in this detailed image, acquired April 23, 2026, by the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 9.
NASA Earth Observatory / Lauren Dauphin
On Shivelyuch, lava domes cycle through periods of growth and collapse, frequently launching avalanches of hot ash and rock called pyroclastic flows when they collapse. Debris slides through structures that Alina Shevchenko, a volcanologist with the GFZ Helmholtz Centre for Geosciences, called “avalanche chutes” and “lahar channels” radiating outward from the caldera. Collapses can trigger events geologists call “block-and-ash flows,” which typically contain coarse, blocky chunks of cooled volcanic rock along with powdery volcanic ash.
Such flows often produce thick, insulating deposits that retain heat for long periods, sometimes even months or years, melting snow in the winter months. As seen in the Landsat images above, this activity leaves dark channels and exposed patches that contrast with the surrounding snow cover.
Satellites have regularly detected thermal anomalies within the caldera and near the growing lava dome in recent months, as well as warm land surface temperatures along the network of channels. On the day the image was acquired, KVERT reported that the “explosive-extrusive eruption” of the volcano continued, accompanied by “powerful gas-steam activity.”
An unusually large eruption and dome collapse in April 2023 sent massive pyroclastic flows barreling tens of kilometers down the mountain, destroying forest and leaving large deposits and flow channels near the foot of the mountain that are still visible today. “It’s quite possible that those deposits still retain some heat from that event,” said Janine Krippner, a volcanologist based in New Zealand. Krippner noted that when she did field research on Shivelyuch block-and-ash flows in 2015, she could still feel the heat within deposits that were five years old.
“Shivelyuch is an incredible volcano that has collapsed over and over again, on several scales, ranging from enormous flank collapses to more modest dome-collapse events,” Krippner said. “It goes through cycles of collapse but then builds itself up again and again through constant volcanic activity,” she added. “It should really be on a motivational poster.”
NASA Earth Observatory image by Lauren Dauphin, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Story by Adam Voiland.
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April 23, 2026
JPEG (7.84 MB)
References & Resources
Global Volcanism Program (2026) Sheveluch. Accessed May 5, 2026.
Something big happened in the world of AI the other day: Sam Altman, founder and CEO of OpenAI, and probably the person who’s most commonly regarded as the face of the industry, declared that the purpose of AI is not to take people’s jobs:
And he recently called AI CEOs “tone-deaf” for declaring that AI is going to take people’s jobs:
In fact, this shift represents more evolution than revolution. Years ago, Altman did seem to generally agree with the folk consensus that AI’s purpose is to make most or all humans obsolete; in 2014 he warned that we could be faced with “a new idle class”, and explored the idea of Universal Basic Income as a remedy. In 2021 he wrote that “The price of many kinds of labor…will fall toward zero.”
But in recent years, Altman has consistently stated that although AI will destroy many occupations, it will create new tasks for humans to do. In 2024 he wrote that “I have no fear that we’ll run out of things to do (even if they don’t look like “real jobs” to us today)”, and in 2025 he declared that “We will find new things to do, new ways to be useful to each other, and new ways to compete, but they may not look very much like the jobs of today.” He has reiterated that prediction in interviews.
OpenAI’s mission statement, meanwhile, continues to define the company’s goal as the creation of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), which it defines as “highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work”. That “most” does leave some wiggle room. But perhaps more importantly, the company is talking about AGI less and less — its 2026 statement of principles mentions the term only twice, as compared with 12 times in the 2018 version. OpenAI also removed a clause about AGI in its agreement with Microsoft, meaning that the term no longer defines its contractual business obligations.
So although Altman has never been quite as doomer-ish as some of his colleagues when it comes to AI and jobs, you can definitely feel the winds shifting. In fact, there has always been a contingent of tech leaders who have been broadly optimistic about AI and jobs, and who are now speaking up more vociferously. Nvidia’s Jensen Huang has consistently predicted that AI will create more jobs than it destroys, but recently he has harshly criticized AI CEOs who go around saying that their technology is a job-killer:
Venture capital titan Marc Andreessen, meanwhile, has come out swinging against the AI job loss narrative:
Cynical observers will see this all as just a messaging pivot, in response to the AI industry’s deteriorating popularity. Back in March I wrote about how the AI industry’s sales pitch was basically “Our product’s purpose is to put you and your descendants on welfare forever, and it may also wipe out your whole species”:
That was a bad sales pitch, to put it mildly, and it’s not surprising that voters have reacted negatively to this message. Basically every recent poll shows the American public turning very strongly against AI. Here’s a representative example from Pew:
This raises the possibility that AI will become the focus of populist rage, and that politicians from both parties will compete to win swing voters over by promising to take action against the industry.
This may already be happening. Bernie Sanders has moved past traditional progressive concerns about data center water use and copyright infringement, and has instead been warning about catastrophic AI risk:
Meanwhile, Donald Trump is reportedly considering a policy of having the White House vet AI models before they’re released, due to concerns about new models’ cyber capabilities:
President Trump, who promoted a hands-off approach to artificial intelligence and gave Silicon Valley free rein to roll out the technology, is considering the introduction of government oversight over new A.I. models, according to U.S. officials and people briefed on the deliberations…The administration is discussing an executive order to create an A.I. working group that would bring together tech executives and government officials to examine potential oversight procedures…Among the potential plans is a formal government review process for new A.I. models…The discussions signal a stark reversal in the Trump administration’s approach to A.I…[Trump’s] noninterventionist policy began changing last month after the start-up Anthropic announced a new A.I. model called Mythos. Mythos is so powerful at identifying security vulnerabilities in software that it could lead to a cybersecurity “reckoning,” said Anthropic[.] [emphasis mine]
Neither Bernie’s concern nor Trump’s is explicitly about protecting jobs; both are about the risk of misuse. But it’s hard not to see the generally souring mood on AI, especially among Independents, as an invitation to populists like Trump and Bernie to make political hay by reining in the industry.
Meanwhile, some politicians and industry figures are starting to talk openly about the possibility of nationalizing the big AI labs. Matteo Wong and Lila Shroff report:
Washington is getting antsy about the power imbalance [between AI companies and the government]. Over the past year, multiple senators have proposed legislation that would order federal agencies to explore “potential nationalization” of AI…In recent weeks, Elon Musk, OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman, and Palantir’s CEO Alex Karp have publicly spoken about the possibility of nationalization…
The government could regulate AI companies like it does utilities…[S]hould AI models displace large swaths of the labor market, such that a handful of companies run most of the economy, “then some kind of nationalization becomes potentially imperative,” Samuel Hammond [of FAI] told us—to distribute wealth and simply ensure the proper functioning of society. Both Anthropic and OpenAI have already suggested possible versions of such redistributive measures…
Perhaps the most likely fate for American AI companies is a future of soft nationalization—a world in which the government doesn’t fully control AI labs and their models, but instead enacts an escalating series of policies and establishe[s] close partnerships with private companies to shape the technology.
Different figures in the industry want quasi-nationalization to different degrees. Jensen Huang, who has fought hard against export controls, is probably more anti-nationalization, as is Marc Andreessen, who makes his living from funding startups (and would thus probably not like to see government ties entrench the market position of incumbent players). But even folks like Altman and Amodei who might be inclined to accept quasi-nationalization would certainly like to negotiate favorable terms for that partnership. To that end, it helps to have the government not view your industry as a dangerous job-killer.
So basically, it makes sense for leading figures in the industry to alter the basic sales pitch and reassure anxious humans that they’ll still have jobs.
In Altman’s case, there also might be some element of competitive positioning here. The loudest voice predicting human obsolescence has certainly been Anthropic founder and CEO Dario Amodei, who has been shouting from the rooftops about a coming job-pocalypse:
To a seasoned observer, Anthropic’s perspective here is pretty clear. They basically think AI progress is inevitable, and that AGI is eventually going to put most human beings on the welfare rolls. Thus, they see themselves as sounding the alarm — warning society to beef up its welfare state and its redistributionary mechanisms before the inevitable coming of job-annihilating AGI.
If you accept that AI progress is as inevitable as the tides, then this is an eminently reasonable position. But most people probably do not accept this. They probably see AI progress as something that we — human society — choose to do or not to do. And so to them, Dario isn’t sounding a warning — he’s making a threat.1 The average person probably hears Dario as saying something along the lines of “Hi, my colleagues and I are working very hard to make sure you are never gainfully employed again.” And that probably makes them feel fairly negatively toward Anthropic.
It’s possible that Altman and OpenAI see an opening here. Anthropic has recently overtaken OpenAI in revenue and market valuation.2 If OpenAI presents themselves to the nation as the guys who are trying to create AI that augments your job, then maybe they can sell themselves as the human-friendly alternative to those scurrilous folks over at Anthropic who just want to replace you. This is one theory I’ve seen thrown around, in any case:
But OK, saying “AI will increase the value of human labor” is one thing; providing a compelling explanation for this assertion is another. The notion that AI is fundamentally a human-remover is deeply ingrained into our national discourse — we’ve heard it so many times that it’s become not just the conventional wisdom, but an article of faith for many. It’ll be an uphill battle for pro-AI voices to dislodge and replace that notion.
So what arguments are they using?
One is the idea of task creation. So far, most technologies throughout history have created new kinds of work for humans to do. Some AI proponents assert that AI will be the same.
A second is the idea of induced demand, either from income effects (AI makes us richer so we buy more stuff) or from complementarities. This often goes by the name of Jevons’ Paradox.
Here’s Aaron Levie, CEO of Box, employing both ideas:
There are far more categories where AI agents making things more efficient will induce demand for that skill than spaces where agents eliminate the work. This is why the AI jobs predictions will not play out as advertised.
AI making it easy to produce more code will mean we start to apply code to far more parts of our businesses. We will build automation and software for things that wouldn’t have made sense before. Marketing automation, client onboarding, modernizing old systems, doing far more research on existing data, and more…Far more software will mean vastly more security risks. This will mean far more people thinking through system security, compliance, and governance…AI will make it so more companies care about this (and maybe can do something about it), causing more security roles…Companies will now be doing 10X more with video and graphics, and will need people to manage that work. More media. We’re going to have a near unlimited set of legal challenges in a world of AI as AI helps write even more bespoke and complicated legal docs. More lawyers.
This is probably correct — at least for now. Technologies have always destroyed some occupations, but they’ve usually created more demand for human labor than they replaced. At least for a while, it seems clear that AI will behave similarly.
But a lot of people have the intuitive sense that this solution works until it doesn’t. If AI becomes better than humans at all tasks, then humans’ only remaining value would come from comparative advantage — and as data centers proliferate and compete with humans for land and food and energy, the economic value of comparative advantage goes down and down.
So the pro-AI people naturally need to give the public some reassurance that even after the coming of AGI, humans will still be valued. The answer that more people are converging on is that humans will still pay for the human touch. Alex Imas has a good post about this:
If the model is right, the durable jobs of the future won’t be about monitoring AI systems or prompt engineering. Those are transitional roles in the automated sector. The durable jobs will be in the relational sector, where the human element is the product itself.
Some already exist and are growing: nurses, therapists, teachers, boutique fitness instructors, personal chefs, bespoke tailors, craft brewers, live performers, spiritual guides, childcare workers, and many varieties of hospitality and care work. Others are emerging: experience designers, human-AI collaboration artists, provenance certifiers, community curators. Many haven’t been invented yet, just as six out of ten jobs people hold today didn’t exist in 1940.
So this is shaping up to be the new AI sales pitch. In the short term, AI will give people more work to do, and in the long term we’ll still get paid just to be human to each other. And our real wages will go up and up, because of the abundance AI creates.
From a public relations perspective, this pitch is WORLDS better than the previous one. Shouting about replacing humanity might play well with corporate customers and investors salivating over the dream of eliminating labor costs, but eventually you get the rakes and pitchforks, followed by some form of nationalization. Describing AI as a normal technology — a successor to the steam engine and the automobile and the computer — is much smarter politics.
The question is: Is it just politics and PR? Certainly there are plenty of AI researchers and entrepreneurs who will keep quietly believing that AGI is going to make humans obsolete; they’ve heard (and repeated) this line for too many years to suddenly believe something else overnight.
But as they continue to repeat the line that “AI will augment humans” for the sake of their industry’s public image, I think there’s a chance that they’ll start to believe it — or at least to think about how they might be able to make it true.
Daron Acemoglu has written that society should try to steer AI development toward technologies that complement humans rather than replacing them. I just don’t think that’s feasible — society simply can’t mandate the economic value of a technology before it exists.
But I do think it might be possible for AI researchers to concentrate their efforts on AI applications that give humans superpowers, rather than on trying to copy what humans already do. Once they stop thinking “This technology is a replacement for the human species”, and start thinking “This technology is a tool for humans to use”, the direction of their research programs might subtly evolve in a more labor-augmenting direction.
So yes, I’m happy with the new AI sales pitch, even if some of the people saying it don’t necessarily believe it yet.
Actually, there is some uncertainty about this, given that both of these are hard to compare for closely held companies. But the trend line here is certainly clear. Anthropic is winning.
Personally, I’m a bit skeptical — I’ve already seen people pay Waymo a premium to avoid having to interact with a human Uber driver, and I suspect that future generations who grow up with AI tutors and chatbot companions will have less intrinsic desire for the human touch. I guess we’ll see.
If you’ve ever been offered “no interest” financing at checkout, whether for medical care, home improvement, or a retail purchase, then you’re not alone because it’s become a common occurrence. These offers are everywhere, and on the surface, they sound like a smart way to spread out payments without paying extra, so you might be tempted to go for it, but there’s a detail buried in the fine print that many consumers miss, which is deferred interest.
Deferred interest is one of the most misunderstood financing structures out there. And if you don’t fully understand how it works, it can end up costing you a lot more than you ever expected.
In this article, we’ll look at exactly what you’re getting into before you sign.
What Is Deferred Interest?
Deferred interest is a type of financing where interest is temporarily put on hold, usually only for a promotional period such as 6, 12, or 18 months.
During that time, you’re told you won’t pay interest. Basically, that’s true but only if you meet the terms. Interest is still being calculated in the background from day one. It’s just not added to your balance yet.
If you pay off the entire balance before the promotional period ends, you avoid paying that interest entirely. But if even a small portion of the balance remains, all the accumulated interest gets added back onto your account, but can cause you financial problems that you might not have counted on paying.
Why It’s Easy to Misunderstand
The phrase “no interest” creates a sense of safety that really doesn’t exist. It sounds similar to a traditional zero-percent APR credit card, but deferred interest is not the same thing.
With a true 0% APR offer, interest simply doesn’t exist during the promotional period. However, with deferred interest, it’s more like a ticking clock in the background because the interest remains.
Many consumers assume that making minimum payments is enough to stay on track. In reality, minimum payments are rarely structured to fully pay off the balance before the deadline, so you’ll be stuck with paying interest. That misunderstanding can lead to a surprise bill that’s much higher than you probably expected.
How the Costs Add Up
Let’s say you finance $3,000 with a 12-month deferred interest plan.
You make your monthly payments on time, but by the end of the promotional period, you still have $200 left to be paid even though you’ve made the payments.
Instead of just paying off the remaining balance, you now owe all the interest that has accumulated over the full 12 months, often at rates exceeding 20%. That could add hundreds of dollars to your total cost overnight.
When the interest takes effect retroactively, it doesn’t matter how close you were to paying it off. Missing the payoff by even a small amount will trigger the full interest charge to be launched.
Where Deferred Interest Is Often Used
Deferred interest financing shows up in a wide range of industries such as the following:
Healthcare and dental procedures
Cosmetic treatments
Furniture and appliance purchases
Electronics and retail stores
Home improvement projects
In many cases, it’s presented as a convenient solution to make large purchases more manageable.
And to be fair, it can be, but only if you fully understand the terms and plan your payments carefully to avoid the interest.
Why Companies Use Deferred Interest
From a business perspective, deferred interest is an effective way to increase conversions. Offering financing removes the immediate barrier of a large upfront cost. It allows customers to say “yes” to purchases they might otherwise delay or decline.
The structure of deferred interest means that lenders still have a strong chance of earning interest revenue, especially if consumers don’t pay off the balance in time.
It’s a model that benefits businesses, but it places the responsibility squarely on the consumer to manage the risk to the best of their ability.
Fine Print Matters
One of the biggest issues with deferred interest plans is how the terms are disclosed.
Important details, like when interest starts accruing, how it’s calculated, and what triggers it, are often buried in dense contract language that’s hard for a person to decipher.
Consumers may not realize:
Interest accrues from the purchase date and not after the promo period
Minimum payments don’t guarantee payoff in time
A single late payment can void promotional terms
The interest rate may be significantly higher than standard credit cards
These aren’t small details, but the difference between saving money and paying a premium.
How to Protect Yourself
Deferred interest isn’t inherently bad. It just requires a more strategic approach.
If you’re considering this type of financing, here are a few ways to protect yourself:
Know the Exact Payoff Date
Don’t estimate. Instead, get the exact date when the promotional period ends and work backward from there.
Calculate Your Monthly Payment
Divide the total balance by the number of months in the promo period. That’s your target payment, and not the minimum payment listed on your statement.
Set Up Automatic Payments
Missing a payment could cancel your promotional terms, so it’s imperative that you make your payments on time.
Pay It Off Early If Possible
The sooner you eliminate the balance, the less risk you carry.
Alternatives Worth Considering
Depending on your situation, there may be better financing options available.
Transparent payment plans with no retroactive charges
Some financing providers are also working to make terms clearer and more consumer-friendly, by focusing on simple interest rather than deferred interest rate structures.
Exploring these alternatives can help you avoid surprises and choose a plan that aligns effectively with your financial goals.
Why Transparency Matters
As more consumers become aware of how deferred interest works, there’s a distinct growing demand for clearer, more transparent financing options.
Regulators and consumer advocates have raised concerns about how these plans are marketed, especially when key terms aren’t clearly communicated so there are a lot of gray areas.
At the same time, financial literacy is improving because people are asking better questions and taking a closer look at the details before committing to the loan.
That shift is important. Because when consumers understand the rules, they’re in a much stronger position to make informed decisions and avoid interest.
Final Thoughts
Deferred interest financing can be a useful tool, but only if you go into it with a clear understanding of how it works.The biggest mistake isn’t using it, but it’s assuming it’s something it’s not.
Before you agree to any financing plan, take a few extra minutes to review the terms, calculate your payments, and consider your options. That small amount of effort can save you a significant amount of money. Because in the end, the goal isn’t just to make a purchase more affordable today, but to ensure it stays affordable in the future.
DarkSword is a sophisticated piece of malware—probably government designed—that targets iOS.
Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) has identified a new iOS full-chain exploit that leveraged multiple zero-day vulnerabilities to fully compromise devices. Based on toolmarks in recovered payloads, we believe the exploit chain to be called DarkSword. Since at least November 2025, GTIG has observed multiple commercial surveillance vendors and suspected state-sponsored actors utilizing DarkSword in distinct campaigns. These threat actors have deployed the exploit chain against targets in Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Malaysia, and Ukraine.
DarkSword supports iOS versions 18.4 through 18.7 and utilizes six different vulnerabilities to deploy final-stage payloads. GTIG has identified three distinct malware families deployed following a successful DarkSword compromise: GHOSTBLADE, GHOSTKNIFE, and GHOSTSABER. The proliferation of this single exploit chain across disparate threat actors mirrors the previously discovered Coruna iOS exploit kit. Notably, UNC6353, a suspected Russian espionage group previously observed using Coruna, has recently incorporated DarkSword into their watering hole campaigns.
A week after it was identified, a version of it leaked onto the internet, where it is being used more broadly.
This news is a month old. Your devices are safe, assuming you patch regularly.
Like the foresail of some great sailing vessel; the unmistakable tail of a 747. A Lufthansa -400, in this case, at Boston-Logan the other evening.
I’m not much for that new Lufthansa livery, but it’s nice to see the 747 still hanging in there. Lufthansa is the only major carrier still flying passengers in the -400 version (and has flown 747s continuously since 1970).
The airline is also the only (and likely the final) regular 747 operator at Logan, using the jet seasonally to Frankfurt. Not all that long ago you could see six or seven 747s wingtip-to-wingtip at terminal E: British Airways, Virgin, Swissair, Northwest, Alitalia, Olympic, and so on. Now it’s just the Germans.
With scattered exceptions, airports don’t have a whole lot going for them. They’re noisy, dirty, poorly laid out, and just generally hostile to passengers. As my regular readers are well aware, I’ve made this point in numerous prior posts — perhaps too many times.
Now, so that I’m not always harping on the negative, here’s something different. “Hidden Airport” is a semi-regular feature highlighting little-known spots of unexpected pleasantness.
ALL PHOTOS BY THE AUTHOR
— De Gaulle Green
Is there a name for these things? Green wall? Living wall? Whatever they’re called, the S4 satellite concourse (part of terminal 2) at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris has several of them, looming over the gates like verdant billboards. A little nature and greenery where you least expect it, imparting a calming and tranquil vibe.
The same concourse offers this terrace garden, down past gate M48.
— SCHIPHOL UNDERGROUND
In the central departure hall in Amsterdam, there’s a cutaway in the floor laid over with glass. About fifteen feet long, it’s sort of like the sections of sidewalk you’ll find in certain cities, beneath which pedestrians can look down at ancient ruins. In this case, you’re looking down into a section of the airport’s luggage transfer system.
As you walk along, you can see suitcases shuttling forth on the conveyors below. It’s nothing elaborate, and the no-slip stickers blot out too much of the view. But it’s the sort of quirky, flyer-friendly gesture Schiphol Airport is famous for, and it helps give the terminal some charm.
— RETRO BOS
I don’t know if this is permanent or not, but in baggage claim at Boston’s terminal A they’ve set up this vintage arcade with 1980s-era video games. Gen-Xers can relive their younger days with some Pac-Man and Donkey Kong.
— Vonnegut at KIND
I wrote about the KIND Gallery in Indianapolis once before (scroll down). It’s time for a revisit, now that they’ve got an installation honoring the city’s favorite literary son, Kurt Vonnegut.
It’s funny how this happened: I was walking along the concourse towards my gate, and I said to myself: They should have something about Vonnegut here at the airport. Twenty seconds later I saw the KIND Gallery and its new exhibit.
There are books, of course, a typewriter (the significance of which is unclear), photos, and some of the author’s sketches.
This is a big one for me. I had long-time infatuation with Vonnegut’s work, beginning in my teens and running into my early 20s. I think I’ve read everything he published. Just a few months ago I re-read “Jailbird,” my favorite of his novels.
— FROM IDLEWILD TO JFK
No sooner did I write about the 100th anniversary presentation at Boston-Logan (see below), when I came across a similar setup at JFK. “From Idlewild to JFK” is a collage of photos following the history of the airport we all love to hate.
Kennedy is a dysfunctional mess half the time, and most of its architectural highlights have been demolished, but it’s nonetheless the most historically significant airport in the nation, if not the world, and this exhibit hits the bullet points: Saarinen’s TWA’s terminal, the Worldport, Pan Am 707s, the Concorde.
The whole thing is a bit half-assed, frankly. The airport deserves more than just a temporary gateside exhibit with a wall’s worth of black-and-white photos, and much is ignored (how is there no mention of I.M Pei’s famous “Sundrome” terminal?).
But it’s better than nothing, and a welcome distraction in the otherwise boring terminal 4. It’s over near the A gates. Have a seat in one of the economy class chairs and relax for a few.
The runway graphics on the floor are cute, I guess. Except there’s no runway 23 at JFK.
— GREEN BAY GAME
I discovered this foosball setup near gate B2 at the pleasant little airport in Green Bay, Wisconsin.
I suppose it could get a little rowdy, but on the morning I was there a couple of kids were quietly knocking the ball back and forth.
Foosball is table soccer, which seems anathema in NFL-obsessed Green Bay (I was taking the Packers to Denver on a charter flight), but what the heck. It’s a welcoming, low-tech, old-school sort of distraction you don’t find much at airports anymore.
— HISTORICAL LOGAN
In terminal E at Boston’s Logan International, near the new security checkpoint, is an exhibit called “Logan 100,” commemorating the airport’s centennial. It’s a collaboration between Massport and the Boston Globe.
We Bostonians take a unusual civic pride in our little airport. More than a mere gateway, Logan is a part of the city. It’s a vibe you can feel as the seven LCD screens sequence through a century’s worth of archival photos, showcasing the people, planes, and events that helped shape Boston over the last century: VIP arrivals (The Beatles, Muhammad Ali), airlines that have come and gone (Northeast, Air New England), and the unforgettable headlines (the Blizzard of ’78, the arrival of Pope John Paul II in 1979).
What’s not here are Logan’s more infamous moments. The Delta and Eastern crashes, for example, or the World Airways incident in 1982. But that’s to be expected, I guess.
If you’re flying out, take a few minutes to stop by. You don’t need to be an airline nerd to appreciate the pictures.
Congrats to Massport and the Globe for having the good sense to come up with this. Now, if you’d please turn off those unbearable promotional PAs that blare in the connector walkway between A and E.
— BANGKOK GREEN
The new concourse at Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi Airport has opened. A short train ride connects it to the main terminal. The gates are designated with “S,” for satellite.
In one of the more peculiar flourishes I’ve seen at an airport, several of the gateside waiting areas include a wide section laid with artificial grass. I’m not entirely sure what the intent is, but I like it.
Do with it what you will: sprawl out and relax; let your bratty kids run around. If you’ve got your clubs, maybe practice your swing. I laid down for a few minutes and stretched.
You don’t see a lot of green in airports, and the effect is strangely pleasant and refreshing — even if it’s fake. I think they should go one better and install some plants or small trees along the perimeter.
— MSPee BREAK
Yes, it’s a mosaic in the vestibule of an airport men’s room. Minneapolis-St. Paul, concourse F. The artist is Josie Lewis, who presumably is this person. (She may or may not have a similar installation in the nearby women’s bathroom. For obvious reasons I didn’t check. Maybe a reader can report back.)
It feels wasted, maybe, to have such a pretty work of art in such an easy-to-miss space, where the only people who see it are rushing to take a whiz. On the other hand, aesthetic non-sequitirs like this can be charming, popping up where you least expect them. It’s aviation-themed, too, if that’s not too much of a stretch.
— NORFOLK SPECIAL
This one isn’t so hidden. Indeed it’s the entire main terminal of the airport in Norfolk, Virginia.
I’ve always been fond of ORF, and was happy to find myself there on a layover recently, for the first time in at least a dozen years. We love the clean, almost Scandinavian-style architecture, the unencumbered spaciousness, the skylights. I was able to get two great photos; one evening and one daytime, from more or less the same vantage point.
U.S. airports can be dreadful. Sometimes it’s the smaller ones that set themselves apart. Norfolk is a great example.
— CHAIRLESS IN BOSTON
This one is an almost. It’s a squander.
Where we are is Boston, at the south end of the pedestrian bridge connecting terminals A, E, and the central garage, just at the top of the escalator. This tucked-away alcove, right at the end, is a sunny, quiet spot out of range of the loudspeakers, with great views of the tarmac and the skyline beyond. It’s a perfect little spot. Except, there’s nowhere to sit. A hideaway like this needs to be savored. We dig the bottlcap sculpture, don’t get me wrong, but why are there no chairs?
The pedestrian bridge, in place for about twenty years now, was a welcome addition to Logan and architecturally handsome, the floor inlaid fetchingly with sea life mosaics created by Somerville artist Jane Goldman. But if you’re making the walk, the experience is ruined by a constant bombardment of public address announcements. What could be a relaxing six-minute stroll is spoiled by a tape-loop of needless “Welcome to Boston” promotions and parking instructions. This alcove offers a relaxing escape, but without a place to sit it’s easily overlooked.
Note to Massport: Chairs. Get some chairs. And turn off the bloody PAs while you’re at it.
— CINCINNATI READING ROOM
Cincinnati International (CVG) isn’t as as bustling as it once was, with Delta drawing down service after its merger with Northwest. But it’s a fairly busy airport and a pleasant one at that. And over on concourse B you’ll find this little library of sorts.
It’s more of a book swap than a proper library; you’re free to abscond with the title of your choice, or exchange your half-read copy of “Our Country Friends” for something better. Or drop into that funky chair and peruse a few chapters of some shitty crime thriller.
I have to say, the pickings were pretty dismal on the day I dropped by. And it feels a little ad-hoc: we wonder if this isn’t just a place-holder standing in for some unrented retail space, soon to be yet another overlit shop selling magazines and phone chargers. Possibly, but we like the idea, and for the time being it’s a peaceful nook to steal away in.
— BAHAMA CHILL
Nassau’s Lynden Pindling International Airport, in the Bahamas, doesn’t give you much to write home about. It’s an unpleasant complex of noisy kids, dirty fast food joints and hour-long security lines. But just outside, in a space between the domestic and international departure halls, you’ll find this sunny oasis of greenery and water.
We had three hours between flights, and this was the perfect spot to wait things out. No children, no crowds, no racket save for the sound of birds (which, I discovered, is piped in through a speaker). There are shady spots with benches, and the free airport wifi signal is strong enough to stream on.
You can sit inside at a greasy table at KFC, or you can sit here.
— BLEACHER FEATURE
A vast, overcrowded echo chamber of concrete, Mexico City’s terminal two is one of the least enjoyable airport buildings around. Downstairs in the arrivals lobby, however, set back against the rear wall, is one of the most creative and idiosyncratic features I know of: a set of bleachers, seven benches tall and about fifty feet wide, where family and friends can wait for passengers to emerge from the customs hall.
Arrivals lobbies are often a chaotic scrum of jockeying and shoving, people calling out names and craning their necks. From the bleachers, you have a clear view across the crowd, and can easily pick out your mom, your son, or your mistress without having to wade into the mob.
Here’s a low-tech idea that saves space, is eminently helpful, and costs almost nothing. Why have I not seen this anywhere else in the world?
— GATESIDE GRAFFITI
Terminal Four at Kennedy Airport isn’t the most passenger-friendly building, but it has its spots, including the famous Calder mobile dangling from the departure hall ceiling (see below). Now, in the B concourse close to gate 25, you can enjoy this interactive wall mural. It was put in place last summer, presumably as a sort of post-pandemic morale booster for travelers.
It looks like most people just scribble their autograph, but some leave the names of whatever far-flung destinations they’re headed to — or wish they were headed to. You might get your clothes dirty, but grab a giant pencil and jump in there. Give us a “Bayonne, New Jersey,” or a “Smolensk.”
— INDY KIND
Indianapolis International is the rare gem among U.S. airports. It’s spacious, clean, and splashed with natural light. Best of all, and unlike almost every other airport in the country, it’s remarkably quiet. According to Airports Council International, IND is the Best Airport in North America, and the readers of Conde Nast Traveler have dittoed that sentiment multiple times.
Tucked into the A concourse, between gates 14 and 16, is the KIND Gallery. Created in partnership with the city’s Arts Council, it showcases the works of Hoosier artists. The gallery is neither large nor — depending on your tastes in art — particularly breathtaking. But it’s exactly what it should be: an engaging and relaxing little sneak-away spot. My favorite of the current installation is “Cloud Study 1-4,” a four-frame series of cloudscapes by an artist named Kipp Normand.
What do we do at airports? We kill time. And here’s a way to do it that’s a little more fulfilling than staring at your phone or browsing the magazine kiosk.
And about that name, “KIND.” Chances are you’re familiar with the three-letter identifiers for airports, Indy’s being IND. What you probably didn’t know, however, is that airports also have four-letter identifiers. These are assigned by ICAO and used for navigation and other technical purposes. Airports in the United States simply add the letter “K” to the existing three-letter code. KLAX, for example. Or KBOS or KSFO or KMCO. Or, in this case, KIND.
— KENNEDY CALDER
The next time you’re on the check-in level of terminal 4 at Kennedy Airport, look up. Suspended from the ceiling near the western end of the building is a sculpture constructed of balanced aluminum arms and trapezoidal panels. This is “.125,” the famous mobile made by Alexander Calder in 1957, back when JFK was still known as Idlewild Airport.
At 45 feet long, it’s supposedly the fourth-largest mobile in the world. For years it hung in the arrivals hall of the old Terminal 4, better known as the IAB (International Arrivals Building). Later it was moved to the departure level when the terminal was rebuilt. “People think monuments should come out of the ground, never out of the ceiling,” said Calder. “But mobiles can be monumental too.” The name “.125” comes from the gauge of its aluminum elements. What it evokes is, I suppose, in the eye of the beholder. One can detect a certain flight motif, though to me it looks more like a fish.
This wasn’t Calder’s only aviation-related project. In the 1970s he hand-painted two airplanes for Braniff Airways, including a Boeing 727 for the Bicentennial.
— UNDERGROUND ATLANTA
The Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport has its negatives, to be sure. The low ceilings, beeping electric carts and endless public address announcements make the place noisy and claustrophobic. Many of the windows are inexplicably covered over, and the airport’s skinny escalators were apparently designed before the invention of luggage. On the other hand, ATL’s simple layout — essentially six rectangular concourses sequenced one after the other — makes for fast and easy connections. It’s one of the most efficient places anywhere to change planes.
The neatest thing about it, though, is the underground connector tunnel. This is where you go to catch the inter-terminal train, but the better choice is to walk it. (If, like me, you purchased a Garmin Vivofit and have become obsessed with step-counting, note that it takes sixteen minutes and 1800 steps to cover the tunnel’s full walkable length.)
Along the way you’ll pass a series of art and photography installations. Between concourses B and C, is an excellent, museum-quality multimedia exhibit on the history Georgia’s capital. You could easily spend a half-hour here. My favorite section, though, is the forest canopy ceiling in the tunnel between concourses A and B. This installation, made of multicolor, laser-cut aluminum panels is the work of artist Steve Waldeck. Described as a “450-foot multisensory walk through a simulated Georgia forest,” it features an audio backdrop of dozens of native birds and insects.
What a welcome change it is, listening to the calls of sandhill cranes and blue herons instead of some idiotic TSA directive. It takes only two or three minutes to pass beneath the length of it, but these are about the most relaxing (if a bit psychedelic) two or three minutes to be found at an airport.
— The 9/11 MEMORIAL AT BOSTON-LOGAN
The idea of building a memorial to the 2001 terror attacks, at the very airport from which two of the four hijacked planes departed from, ran a fine line between commemorative and tasteless. It needed to be done just right. What they came up with is superb, and ought to serve as a model for such memorials everywhere.
Reached along an ascending pathway that twists upward amidst grass and trees, the main structure is a sort of open-topped glass chapel, inside of which are two vertical slabs, one for each of the two aircraft that struck the World Trade Center — and mimicking the shapes, one can’t help noticing, of the twin towers themselves — engraved with the names of the passengers and crew. There’s one for American’s flight 11, the Boeing 767 that struck the north tower, and the other for United 175, which hit the south tower a few minutes later. The glass and steelwork allow the entire space to be flooded with silvery light, creating an atmosphere that’s quiet and contemplative without feeling maudlin or sentimentalized.
There are no flags or any of the crudely “patriotic” touches one might expect (and dread). It’s everything it should be: beautifully constructed, understated, and respectful.
Officially it’s called the “Place of Remembrance,” and it was built by the Boston-based firm of Moskow Linn Architects, as part of a public competition. The final design was chosen by airline workers, airport representatives, and family members of the victims. The engraved names are separated into columns of crew and passengers, and the names of off-duty United employees on the flight 175 plate include a small “tulip” logo of United Airlines. This might seem a strange touch, but this memorial was built primarily for the community of people who work at Logan Airport. Among the passengers and crew killed on the two jets were more than a dozen Logan-based employees.
But anyone is welcome, of course, and I only wish the memorial were more easily accessible. If you’re at BOS and have some time, it’s worth seeking out. It sits on a knoll just to the southern side of the central parking garage, at the foot of the walkway tunnel that connects the garage with terminal A. Find the tunnel and follow the signs.
— SFO DRAGONFLIES
Airport art installations of one form or another are awfully trendy these days. Paintings, sculptures and mobiles are popping up all over the place. And good for that. Among the best is artist Joyce Hsu’s “Namoo House” sculpture at San Francisco International.
It’s a huge, wall-mounted display of aluminum and stainless steel insects that, in the artist’s words, suggests the way the airport “fuses science, nature, and imagination, to become the transit home for all passengers” — whatever that might mean.
To me, the metalwork moths and six-foot dragonflies represent both natural and human-made flying machines. And they remind me of the erector-set toys that I played with as a kid. Go to gate A3 in SFO’s international terminal, near the Emirates and JetBlue gates.
— RALEIGH-DURHAM’S TERMINAL 2
“Ah for the days when aviation was a gentleman’s pursuit, back before every Joe Sweatsock could wedge himself behind a lunch tray and jet off to Raleigh-Durham.” That’s from Sideshow Bob, in an old episode of the Simpsons(back when that show was still watchable), and we love the way he gives the words “Raleigh-Durham” an extra nudge of derision.
I guess Bob hasn’t seen RDU’s Terminal 2. Home to Delta, American, jetBlue and United, this is possibly the most attractive airport building in America. Opened in 2008, it was the first major terminal with a wood truss skeleton. The design earned architect Curtis Fentress, whose firm also designed Denver International and Korea’s impeccable Incheon Airport, the American Institute of Architects’ Thomas Jefferson Award. “A blend of the region’s economy, heritage and landscape,” is how Fentress describes it. “Terminal 2’s rolling roofline reflects the Piedmont Hills, while the daylit interior provides the latest in common-use technology. Long-span wood trusses create column-free spaces that offer efficiency and flexibility, from ticketing to security.”
All true. And unlike most airport facilities in this country, it’s quiet. Boarding calls and other public address announcements are kept to a minimum. This, together with the building’s architectural style and flair, almost makes you think you’re in Europe.
— THE QUIET AREA AT MINNEAPOLIS-ST. PAUL
On the whole, the Minneapolis airport is about as architecturally unexciting as a parking garage. It’s an older complex with low ceilings and endless corridors that reminds me of the ’60s-era grammar school that I once attended. And like most American airports, it has a noise pollution problem. But unlike most American airports, it has a place to escape the racket: an upper-level “quiet area” overlooking the central atrium of the Lindbergh (Delta Air Lines) Terminal. It’s difficult to find, but worth the effort if you’ve got a lengthy layover and need a place to relax. Look for the signs close to where F concourse meets the central lobby.
The long, rectangular veranda has pairs of vinyl chairs set around tables. There are power outlets at each table and visitors can log in to MSP’s complimentary Wi-Fi. Delta provides pillows and blankets so that stranded passengers can nap. It’s a bland space without much ambiance, lacking the funky chairs, sofas, and other quirky accoutrements that you might find in Europe or Asia (Incheon Airport’s quiet zones are the coolest anywhere). But it does what it’s supposed to do. It’s comfortable, detached and peaceful. It’s a shame that more airports don’t set aside spots like this.
— THE La GUARDIA GARDEN
I’ve written at length about the Marine Air Terminal at La Guardia Airport in New York City. This historic art-deco building, in the far southwest corner of LGA, is one of the most special places in all of commercial aviation — the launching point for the Pan Am flying boats that made the first-ever transatlantic and round-the-world flights. Inside the cathedral-like rotunda is the 240-foot “Flight” mural by James Brooks. What few people know about, however, is the cozy garden just outside. Facing the building, it’s to the right of the old Art Deco doorway, set back from the street.
It’s a quiet, tree-shaded hideaway amidst, grass, flowers and shrubs. Grab a sandwich from the Yankee Clipper and enjoy it on one of the wooden benches. To get there, take the A Loop inter-terminal bus to the Marine Air Terminal. The spot is best appreciated in the warmer months, of course. Like the Marine Air rotunda it is outside of the TSA checkpoint, so you’ll need to re-clear security if you’re catching a flight.
Up betimes and to my office, and there busy all the morning, among other things walked a good while up and down with Sir J. Minnes, he telling many old stories of the Navy, and of the state of the Navy at the beginning of the late troubles, and I am troubled at my heart to think, and shall hereafter cease to wonder, at the bad success of the King’s cause, when such a knave as he (if it be true what he says) had the whole management of the fleet, and the design of putting out of my Lord Warwick, and carrying the fleet to the King, wherein he failed most fatally to the King’s ruin.
Dined at home, and after dinner up to try my dance, and so to the office again, where we sat all the afternoon. In the evening Deane of Woolwich went home with me and showed me the use of a little sliding ruler, less than that I bought the other day, which is the same with that, but more portable; however I did not seem to understand or even to have seen anything of it before, but I find him an ingenious fellow, and a good servant in his place to the King.
Thence to my office busy writing letters, and then came Sir W. Warren, staying for a letter in his business by the post, and while that was writing he and I talked about merchandise, trade, and getting of money. I made it my business to enquire what way there is for a man bred like me to come to understand anything of trade. He did most discretely answer me in all things, shewing me the danger for me to meddle either in ships or merchandise of any sort or common stocks, but what I have to keep at interest, which is a good, quiett, and easy profit, and once in a little while something offers that with ready money you may make use of money to good profit. Wherein I concur much with him, and parted late with great pleasure and content in his discourse, and so home to supper and to bed. It has been this afternoon very hot and this evening also, and about 11 at night going to bed it fell a-thundering and lightening, the greatest flashes enlightening the whole body of the yard, that ever I saw in my life.
NASA’s Perseverance Mars Rover Surveys ‘Crocodile Bridge’
PIA26699
Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS
Description
NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover used its Mastcam-Z camera system to capture this 360-degree panorama of a region nicknamed “Crocodile Bridge” on Jezero Crater’s rim. The panorama is made up of 980 images, 971 of which were taken on Dec. 18, 2025, the 1,717th Martian day, or sol, of the mission. An additional nine were taken on Jan. 25, 2026, Sol 1,754. This natural-color view has been processed to show the landscape as the human eye would see it.
Jezero Crater’s rim and the regions around it hold some of the oldest rocks anywhere in the solar system; they serve as time capsules of the Red Planet’s early history, when its crust and atmosphere were still forming. No terrain this ancient exists on Earth, where tectonic plates constantly recycle the surface. (Mars lacks tectonic plates, allowing some of this very old material to be preserved.)
“Crocodile Bridge” represents a transition into an area nicknamed “Lac de Charmes,” which Perseverance will explore for several months later this year.
[Full-resolution image versions of figures A through E can be downloaded at the bottom of this page.]
Figure A (low resolution)
Figure A is the natural-color view panorama.
Figure B (low resolution)
Figure B is the same panorama in an enhanced-color view, which brings out subtle details.
Figure C (low resolution)
Figure C is an anaglyph (3D) version of the natural-color view of the panorama.
Figure D (low resolution)
Figure D is an anaglyph red-color view of the enhanced version of the panorama.
Figure E (low resolution)
Figure E is an anaglyph blue-color view of the enhanced version of the panorama.
Managed for NASA by Caltech, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California built and manages operations of the Perseverance rover on behalf of the agency’s Science Mission Directorate as part of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program portfolio.
Arizona State University leads the operations of the Mastcam-Z instrument, working in collaboration with Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego, on the design, fabrication, testing, and operation of the cameras, and in collaboration with the Niels Bohr Institute of the University of Copenhagen on the design, fabrication, and testing of the calibration targets.
David Smith, “Six Years Perfecting Maps on watchOS”:
I love going on wilderness adventures. I am rarely happier than
when I am far off into the mountains without a soul in sight. As a
result, I have spent a lot of time learning how to safely explore
and navigate when I’m away from civilization. The most important
habit I’ve found for not getting lost is to be very regular in
checking your location as you go, and the best way I’ve found to
do that is to have a map on my wrist.
For more than six years I’ve been working towards creating the
best possible mapping experience on the Apple Watch. With
yesterday’s launch of Pedometer++ 8, I feel like this
design journey has reached a meaningful destination. I would
contend that Pedometer++’s watchOS mapping support is the absolute
best available on the App Store.
So I wanted to walk through the journey it took to get here.
“I love going on wilderness adventures” is how you start a post about an app update. Or at least my type of update to my type of app. I don’t have any desire for maps on my watch, but reading this makes me want it anyway. Enthusiasm is contagious. (See also: the Pedometer++ blog, and Stephen Hackett at 512 Pixels.)
Chess Peace — a new iOS game by Sam Shepherd — is my kind of logic puzzle. Each puzzle is a board with a few unplaced chess pieces. To solve you need to place all the pieces so that none of them attack each other. There’s a timer if you care, but I don’t. (And you can hide the clock.) Clever name too: the pieces need to be ... at peace with each other. You can download Chess Peace and try it out free of charge, and it’s just a one-time payment of $7 to unlock everything. Great simple premise, really well implemented.
If you do a little poking around in Adobe’s application bundles, a
key reason for the jankiness of these user interfaces becomes
apparent: it is because they are little webpages. These dialog
boxes are HTML files that reference a chunky CSS file and oodles
of JavaScript, and appear to be built with React. [...]
I was going to write about how this stuff should have been tried
with people who actually use Adobe’s apps in a high-pressure
environment, but I am sure it was and, also, it does not matter.
Wichary has it right. These are fundamental principles of user
interface design that Adobe is ignoring because its internal
tooling has taken precedence.
I will quibble only with this line from Heer’s post:
Also, Adobe’s interface has always been unique and not quite at
home on either MacOS or Windows.
You have to go back to the 1990s and classic Mac OS, but Adobe’s best apps used to have exemplary native UIs. Apps like Photoshop helped push the state of the art in Mac UI forward. Tabbed palettes were a revelation. Fire up, say, Photoshop 3.0 on MacOS 7.6 and see what I mean.
Also worth noting is how much this new “modern” UI isn’t just subjectively ugly, it’s objectively breaking the habits and expectations of users with literally decades of experience with Photoshop — users who, like me, remember when Adobe’s UI wasn’t just merely tolerable but actually good. It’s insane when you think about it.
How did Adobe lose that good sense of yore? Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.
According to a new Washington Post–ABC News–Ipsos poll, fifty-nine percent of Americans believe President Donald J. Trump does not have the mental sharpness necessary to lead the country. Fifty-five percent think he does not have the physical health to serve as president. Fifty-four percent say they don’t think Trump is a strong leader. Sixty-seven percent think Trump doesn’t carefully consider important decisions.
Today, Susannah George and Tara Copp of the Washington Post reported that as the U.S. ramps up its attempts to open the Strait of Hormuz, Iran is responding with military attacks. This morning, Iran fired drones and missiles at two U.S. destroyers and two merchant vessels moving through the strait. According to Admiral Brad Cooper, the head of U.S. Central Command, none of the ships were hit.
But Iran also launched six fast boats at the commercial ships. Cooper said the U.S. destroyed those vessels.
Ahmad Vahidi, the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, posted on social media: “The Strait of Hormuz will not be opened by the tweet of the President of the United States; the management and control of this waterway is in the hands of Iran. Nothing will have the right to enter without permission, and in the event of a violation of this matter, it will be considered a legitimate target.”
Iran also hit the United Arab Emirates today with fifteen missiles and four drones. One of the armaments started a fire in the oil hub of Fujairah.
Trump told Trey Yingst of the Fox News Channel today that his military blockade of Iranian ports is the “greatest military maneuver in history.” He also said that if the Iranians target U.S. ships, they will be “blown off the face of the earth.” And yet, as Iran demonstrated by hitting the United Arab Emirates today, resuming the war could devastate the Middle East, plunging the globe into even more economic chaos. So, for now, Trump appears to be hanging onto the ceasefire.
Alexander Ward of the Wall Street Journal noted that today, at the White House, Trump told a group of small-business owners that he “call[s] it a mini war.”
Senator Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) called out the fact that the Trump administration argued on Friday that it did not have to get congressional approval for the war on Iran at the 60-day mark required by the 1973 War Powers Resolution because, it said, the war had “terminated” on April 7. It made the claim despite the fact that a blockade is an act of war and the U.S. continues to blockade Iranian ports. Asked on Saturday how he could say the war had terminated when the U.S. military was enforcing the blockade, Trump told reporters: “Well, it’s a very friendly blockade. Nobody’s even challenging it.”
Duckworth, who lost both legs when serving as a U.S. Army helicopter pilot in the Iraq War, posted: “U.S. and Iranian ships are exchanging missile fire today in the Strait of Hormuz. Trump’s claims that hostilities have ceased were bullsh*t. He is lying to the American people and prolonging his disastrous war of choice—And he’s doing it illegally.”
This afternoon, Trump posted an AI image of President Joe Biden on one knee with the caption: COWARDS KNEEL,” an AI image of President Barack Obama with the caption “TRAITORS BOW,” and an AI image of himself with his fist raised and the caption “LEADERS LEAD.”
Journalist Aaron Rupar noted: “Trump is crazyposting at 3pm.”
In the spring of 1998, while working as a baseball writer for Sports Illustrated, I headed over to Chain of Lakes Park in Winter Haven, Fla. to interview Dwight Gooden, one of my boyhood heroes.
Back in the day, when I was a wee lad in New York, Gooden was an iconic Big Apple baseball figure, with a Rookie of the Year trophy and a Cy Young Award trophy and a shiny World Series championship ring. He boasted a high leg kick and a blistering fastball and a curveball that shattered the equilibrium of opposing batters.
But now, in ‘98, Gooden was a shell. He’d battled substance abuse problems, lost velocity, lost confidence. He’d bounced from the Mets to the Yankees to (ugh) the Indians, and at 33-years old looked beaten and battered and lost.
I, however, wanted to believe.
I shook Gooden’s hand and asked, “Do you still feel like you have the old Doc Gooden in you? Can you be that guy again? Can you!?”
He nodded, whispered, “Of course”—then left to jog toward the field. But, deep down, we both knew the truth. As badly as I wanted the hands of time to rewind a decade, it wasn’t realistic. The Dwight Gooden of my youth was long gone. He was just an aging Major League has-been.
Reality (almost) always wins.
•••
I bring this up because, last night, I drove to Santa Ana to attend a CA-40 candidate forum at the Church of the Foothills. I was anxious to see the three leading Democrats—Esther Kim Varet, Joe Kerr and Lisa Ramirez—engage for perhaps the final time before the June 2 primary (from which the top two overall finishers of all entrants advance to the November general election).
When I pulled into the lot and parked, this was the site that greeted me …
Then, a few minutes later, this was the site that greeted me …
That’s Kerr on the far left, Ramirez next to him, (inexplicable) independent Nina Linh next to her and … um … eh … ah …
Francis Xavier Hoffman on the far right.
If you’re wondering, “Wait. Who the fuck is Francis Xavier Hoffman?”—I, too, was wondering, “Wait. Who the fuck is Francis Xavier Hoffman?” The man has never before attended a CA-40 debate. He has neither candidate profile nor website. He wore a suit and a tie and had color to his skin, thereby eliminating the possibility that, like this Francis Xavier Hoffman, he’s been dead for 84 years.
I am guessing the not-deceased Francis Xavier Hoffman either: A. Lied and said, “I’m with the band.” B. Slipped the bouncer $20. C. Exclaimed, “Hey, I’m Esther Kim Varet!” and walked on through.
Whatever the case, while Francis Xavier Hoffman sat at the long table on the stage, Esther (unlike her van) was MIA (we were told there was a family issue).
Bummer.
The 1 1/2 hour forum was … eh, OK. Not amazing. Not terrible. Just, OK.
The turnout was depressingly small …
… and the questions—most of which were submitted by attendees—felt flat and regurgitated, like four-day old chicken breast. There were the typical inquiries about Trump, about government overreach, about gas prices. Hoffman did his best Admiral Stockdale; Linh stumbled over the basics (For the life of me, I have never understood why she’s doing this), Kerr was (as always) solid, steady, confident, well-spoken.
And then there was Lisa Ramirez.
Who.
Was.
Friggin’.
Awesome.
A veteran immigration attorney and first-time office seeker, Ramirez knows how to pump up a room (even a 70-percent empty one). Her answers were crisp, sharp, to the point. She speaks with a refreshing level of candor, admits when she’s unsure, doesn’t interrupt her opponents. She’s quick with facts, with data, with information. Seriously, since starting The Truth OC 1 1/2 years ago, I’ve attended far too many of these events. And I thought, last night, Lisa Ramirez was as good as it gets. When the affair ended, I asked a bunch of people (none of whom I knew) who they thought won the show—and every single one named Lisa.
She was that fantastic.
•••
If the preceding few paragraphs make me sound happy, well, you’ve misread. I’m actually not happy about CA-40. To be honest, I’m gutted.
I’ve been following this race dating back to the ol’ Perry Meade-Paula Swift days, and I believe Lisa Ramirez is—in an isolation chamber where only decency, experience and grit matter—the best candidate. She’s the most likable candidate. She’s the most refreshing candidate. Her career and Latina heritage make her an intriguing pick for these ICE-bombarded times in a 23-percent Latino district. She can speak to the issues we face with moral clarity.
Seriously, she’s The Package. I truly believe that.
But …
She has very little money.
Like, v-e-r-y little.
And … fuck. Fuckity fuck. Driving home from the event last night, I reached out to two people I know and trust who have deep political ties and vast understandings of local races. I asked them to paint me a picture of how Lisa Ramirez, a tremendous candidate with but $324,014 in her campaign, can somehow pull an in-a-month upset and wind up in the Top 2 of a plus-nine Republican district that was rejiggered after Prop 50.
The replies were grim. In short, she would need a political miracle. It would take, in some manner, the Republicans Young Kim and Ken Calvert narrowing themselves down to one and (simultaneously) Esther Kim Varet either last-minute relocating to Guam or holding a press conference to announce she enjoys murdering small cats and feeding them to the Marilyn Monroe corpse she stole from the Westwood Village Memorial Park & Mortuary.
Put simply (and glumly), the v-a-s-t majority of voters will learn of the candidacies of Young Kim, Ken Calvert, Esther Kim Varet, Joe Kerr and Lisa Ramirez via (those profoundly) annoying mailers and (those equally annoying) lawn signs. And while Lisa has very much upped her social media game, well … eh … money (and money alone) buys the most name recognition and exposure. It just does, in ways self-generated Tweets and TikToks cannot. Which, obviously, sucks.
It really sucks.
•••
This leads to a fascinating question: What to do?
I will inevitably receive another 17 nasty e-mails or texts for this, but Esther Kim Varet’s campaign is a tsunami of slop. It’s … it’s—I don’t even know precisely how to describe it, but it sorta reminds me of the time, as a college freshman, I drank a ton of grape MD 20/20, ran to the toilet, vomited everywhere and had the dirty toilet water splash back onto my face. It’s disorganized, chaotic, weird, cruel. There’s a lot of shit talk, a ton of staff upheaval, an inability to learn from mistakes and a (perplexing) need to remind voters of wealth and status. It’s felt more like an effort to purchase love than a desire to inspire hope. Something has been missing from Day One. A humanity. A humility. And before anyone from the campaign jumps all over me (yet again), just know that, oh, multiple times per week, someone new DMs me via Instagram to complain about a latest offense. I am not making this shit up.
That being said …
Esther Kim Varet has money. She doesn’t have Young Kim or Ken Calvert money, but she has enough to at least put up a fight and get her name out there over the next month. And … honestly, I don’t even know what to think/feel. With a little bit more self-reflection, and a willingness to not fire back at every Instagram critic with three followers and a profile picture of a puppy, Esther could theoretically/possibly/maybe possess a puncher’s chance. I mean, people are uniquely angry right now. And the efforts of Calvert and Kim to go as MAGA as possible might prove costly in a general against a Democrat. And Harley Rouda did shock Dana Rohrabacher. And Katie Porter did shock Mimi Walters. And … and … and …
I don’t know.
On the one hand, I think back to the words of Andy Van Slyke, Pittsburgh Pirates outfielder, after Barry Bonds left the team to sign with San Francisco. “You know,” Van Slyke said to a reporter, “I’d rather lose without Barry than win with him.” Sometimes, I feel that way about Esther Kim Varet. Maybe I’d rather lose without her than win with her. Maybe another two years of Young Kim wouldn’t be so awful, if it means ignoring a toxic Democratic candidate. Maybe we go with a Ramirez or Kerr, acknowledge the likely loss but feel principled in the decision.
Or …
Maybe desperate times call for desperate action. Maybe we suck it up, hold our nose, vote for Esther Kim Varet and hope for the best. Maybe, even if it feels unsightly, it’s a decision of necessity; of ridding the political world of another Donald Trump stooge. Maybe Esther Kim Varet isn’t the ideal choice, but the most logical one in an illogical moment in America.
•••
If you’ve read this far, seeking a definitive answer, bad news. I don’t have one.
I think Lisa Ramirez is the best candidate we have.
I think Lisa Ramirez lacks the finances to win.
I think Esther Kim Varet is the worst candidate we have.
I think Esther Kim Varet has the finances to put up a fight.
Unsloth released the unsloth/granite-4.1-3b-GGUF collection of GGUF encoded quantized variants of the 3B model - 21 different model files ranging in size from 1.2GB to 6.34GB.
All 21 of those Unsloth files add up to 51.3GB, which inspired me to finally try an experiment I've been wanting to run for ages: prompting "Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle" against different sized quantized variants of the same model to see what the results would look like.
Honestly, the results are less interesting than I expected. There's no distinguishable pattern relating quality to size - they're all pretty terrible!
I'll likely try this again in the future with a model that's better at drawing pelicans.
A few months ago, I saw someone posting a certain kind of erotica on X. They were images of hundreds upon hundreds of telescopes spread across what appeared to be ranch land. The telescopes were arra…
According to press reports, Jeff Bezos is planning to sell his 417-foot yacht, the one with a carved figurehead of Lauren Sanchez, his second wife, at the front. According to these reports, he’s unhappy at the attention that the yacht is getting. Funny how that works.
Hi, Paul Krugman with a bit of an experiment.
I am recording this in a cafe, a cafe that is not in New York, as you could probably guess. Let’s see how the noise level works with the headphones.
OK obviously playing the world’s tiniest violin . We’re not going to weep for Jeff Bezos’s discomfort and yes there’s a certain amount of just plain satisfaction at seeing him taken down a peg.
But I think there’s a little bit more to it. This is not just invidious comparison and hostility towards people who have acquired great wealth, although there’s nothing wrong with that. This is about the role of moods, vibes, and the motivations of the malefactors of great wealth that play such a large role in the US political system now.
As everybody should know, we have seen an extraordinary concentration of wealth at the top, probably bigger than the concentration that took place in the Gilded Age. And it’s gone along with something which is, I think, different from what we had in the late 19th century. In the late 19th century there were certain proprieties that people of great wealth felt that they had to observe. They had to maintain a certain pretense. The Victorian virtues were honored at least on the face of it.
Extremely wealthy men had conventional marriages. Presumably very many of them had mistresses as well; the strictures of conventional morality were not actually obeyed nearly as much as people wanted you to think — but they wanted you to think. They wanted to pretend to be good family men, all of that. A kind of hypocrisy was part of the package, and hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue.
Now we have a very permissive culture, which is not on the whole a bad thing. There’s a lot of openness, there’s a lot of misery that is avoided by not having to maintain the pretense that all marriages are happy, that people don’t have whatever motivations they have in reality. But one of the things that’s happened is that we have now a plutocracy, a concentration of incredible wealth and power at the top, without even the hypocrisy of morality, the hypocrisy of pretending to be virtuous.
Now there was, politically, some back pressure against that until Trump was elected the second time. And I think we have to bear in mind, we have to take seriously the idea that an important reason that we are in the state we’re in, an important reason that we have a would-be fascist regime in power — I don’t think they’re quite managing to pull it off, but they definitely would if they could — is that a handful of incredibly wealthy men wanted all restraints off.
They wanted to be able to live the privilege of their great wealth. They wanted to be able to just flaunt their wealth, performatively display their dominance, not have to worry about people chiding them for being politically incorrect just because they were abusive towards other people because of their gender or their whatever, their race, anything.
There was a Financial Times article just after the 2024 election with Wall Street people celebrating the fact that they were now free to say pussy and retard again. This is a pretty big deal. And I think if you look at the first year or so of the second Trump administration, the people at the top, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, they all were acting as if OK, no need to apologize, no need to pretend to be good.
By the way, charitable giving has dropped way off. The super wealthy are just not doing the kind of reputation enhancing philanthropic giving that their predecessors in the Gilded Age engaged in. So this is a completely amoral elite, I got it, you don’t, I’m in power, I’m friends with the people who hold ultimate power, I don’t have to worry, I don’t care what you think.
But it’s not lasting. It turns out, and this is why I think this is somewhat important, it turns out that the backlash is powerful enough, scary enough at least to worry them.
I don’t think that people like Bezos are actually scared that the torches and pitchforks are coming for them, but they are starting to realize that maybe they haven’t purchased themselves total immunity the way they thought they had. And this is, I think, a good sign. We need more hypocritical billionaires.
OK, we need fewer billionaires and we need to work on that. But in the meantime having them feel at least somewhat disciplined by the public opprobrium that outrageous behavior brings is a good thing. More ostracism, more boycotts, sneering at and yelling at giant yachts and people who own them is a good thing.
Now, of course, Jeff Bezos choosing to spend his infinite billions on something other than a yacht, doesn’t actually free that wealth up, although maybe even maybe he might be persuaded to spend a little bit on good causes.
But in any case I think there’s something culturally going on. I think we are seeing a turn and we’re seeing that the collapse of all standards in favor of the belief that wealth is the only thing that matters is not complete and may even be reversible.
So, this is a silly story but I think not an entirely trivial one.
Anyway, let’s find out if this recording is actually audible given the cafe noises behind me.
Last month, out of more than 11,000 new passenger vehicles registered in Norway, only around 150 had internal consumption engines. The rest were fully electric. In mainland Europe as a whole, EV sales are up 51 percent from a year ago.
The global energy transition — the shift from fossil fuels to electrotech, which uses solar, wind and batteries to power an electrified economy — is accelerating. It’s now clear that the closure of the Strait of Hormuz marks an inflection point: the global green energy curve, which was already on a rapidly rising trajectory, has suddenly become even steeper. “Investors,” reports the Financial Times, “are piling into clean energy funds.”
This acceleration isn’t just a consequence of soaring fossil fuel prices. It is also the result of the worldwide realization that, with the end of Pax Americana, depending on imported hydrocarbons is a risk not worth taking. The United States cannot be relied on to keep sea lanes open when cheap drones can take out an oil tanker or a major pipeline. Even relying on oil and gas from America itself is dangerous, since one never knows when an erratic U.S. government – now under the control of a twice-elected malignant narcissist — will try to use energy as a tool of coercion.
Despite the perversity of its causes, the current acceleration of electrotech is overwhelmingly positive for the world as a whole. It will slow climate change and reduce pollution. It will diminish the power of anti-democratic petrostates and limit the vulnerability of the world economy to disruptions at choke points like Hormuz. It will democratize access to cheap energy sources in places like Africa.
There is another positive consequence of the clean energy boom: the diminishment of the carbon coalition — the interest groups and ideologues who hate renewable energy and want the world to keep burning fossil fuels. That coalition currently controls the Trump administration’s energy policy. But this is only the latest stage in the corruption of U.S. politics by fossil fuel interests. When we decry the Supreme Court’s destruction of the Voting Rights Act, we should always remember that the Koch brothers and other fossil fuel oligarchs essentially created the Roberts court.
And now we have petrostate oligarchs making naked corruption great again by lining the pockets of the Trump family.
Trump’s own views about energy are defined by petulance and delusions. Wind power kills birds and drives whales crazy! China — which last year added three times as much wind capacity as the rest of the world combined — doesn’t actually use the turbines it has installed! (It does.)
But Trump’s energy officials are barely less delusional than their boss. Last month Chris Wright, Trump’s energy secretary, dismissed the rise of renewable energy as a failed project:
The result has been 10 or 20 years of just massive investment in energy that wasn’t helpful in better energizing the world. Wasn’t helpful in lifting people out of poverty. Wasn’t helpful in expanding access to energy. In fact, I believe it’ll go down as the greatest malinvestment in history.
Meanwhile, last year solar and wind power accounted for 99 percent of the growth in world electricity supply, while generation using fossil fuels declined:
Let’s not pretend that hostility to the energy transition has anything to do with faith in free markets or the desire to keep energy cheap. Trump and his minions are actively trying to stop the expansion of green energy even when it’s profitable. In the latest development, the administration is using bogus national security concerns to block the development of wind power:
Now the administration has held up a large number of onshore wind projects under development on private land, citing national security concerns. These wind farms typically have to undergo a review by the Pentagon before being built to ensure that their turbines won’t interfere with military radar or flight paths. In the past, those reviews have been fairly straightforward, but they have ground to a halt in recent weeks, and the Pentagon has canceled some meetings with developers.
Fortunately, America is not the world. We account for less than 20 percent of world electricity generation. So Trump’s policies can’t stop the global energy transition. Indeed, as a result of the Iran debacle, Trump’s presidency has been a net positive for the global green energy revolution.
Trump and the fossil-fuel cabal may be able to extract a few billion dollars in profits by keeping America stuck in a dirty-energy past. But in so doing they will also ensure that the United States is left behind, and that the future belongs to China.
Part of Datasette's evolving support mechanism for plugins that use LLMs. It's now possible to configure a model with default options, e.g. to say all enrichment operations should use a specific model with temperature set to 0.5.
New -o thinking 1 option to help test against LLM 0.32a0 and higher.
This plugin provides a fake model called "echo" for LLM which doesn't run an LLM at all - it's useful for writing automated tests. You can now do this:
So it’s well known that Y Combinator owns some stake in OpenAI. But how big is that stake? This seems like devilishly difficult information to obtain. I asked around and a little birdie who knows several OpenAI investors came back with an answer: Y Combinator owns about 0.6 percent of OpenAI. At OpenAI’s current $852 billion valuation, that’s worth over $5 billion.
When President Trump signed his marijuana executive order on Dec. 18, 2025, the rollout was unmistakable. The president held up the signed document for the cameras and told reporters he had “people begging for me to do this,” singling out veterans with service injuries and older Americans with chronic pain. Four months later, on April 23, 2026, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche delivered the next chapter: a Justice Department final order that immediately moved certain categories of marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III of the Controlled Substances Act.
The headlines that followed were sweeping. “Marijuana reclassified.” “Federal cannabis reform.” “End of an era.” Read carefully, the order is much narrower than the framing suggests, and it leaves most of the structural problems facing cannabis policy untouched.
Here is what actually changed, what did not change, and what patients can practically expect.
What the Order Actually Did
Acting AG Blanche’s April 23 order rescheduled exactly two categories of marijuana to Schedule III:
First, FDA-approved drug products that contain marijuana. There are very few of these. Epidiolex, the only widely prescribed FDA-approved cannabis-derived medicine, was removed from the Controlled Substances Act entirely in 2020, before this rescheduling.
Second, marijuana that is subject to a “qualifying state-issued license” for medical use. This is the part that drew most of the attention. State medical marijuana programs operating in 40 states are now, on paper, federally rescheduled.
The mechanism Blanche used is worth noting. Rather than completing the full administrative rulemaking process for broad rescheduling, the Justice Department invoked authority under the United Nations Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs to act on the medical category immediately. The broader rescheduling that would cover all marijuana, including recreational state programs, will go through a separate DEA administrative hearing scheduled to begin June 29, 2026, and conclude no later than July 15.
What the Order Did Not Do
The list of things that did not change is longer than the list of things that did.
Recreational state marijuana programs in 24 states and the District of Columbia remain in Schedule I at the federal level. An adult buying legal cannabis at a Colorado dispensary today is still purchasing a federally controlled Schedule I substance, the same legal status as heroin.
Bulk marijuana, marijuana extracts, and naturally derived delta-9 THC remain in Schedule I unless they are incorporated into an FDA-approved product or covered by a qualifying state medical license. Synthetic THC is also still Schedule I.
Interstate commerce in marijuana remains a federal crime. A medical cardholder in Pennsylvania cannot legally transport her medication across the state line into West Virginia, even if both states had identical medical programs.
Banking access did not change. Most federally regulated banks still refuse to provide accounts, payment processing, or lending to plant-touching cannabis businesses, citing federal money-laundering exposure. The industry continues to operate primarily in cash, with all of the security and compliance costs that come with that.
Criminal records were not addressed. Americans with prior marijuana convictions on their records have the same records they had before the order. There is no automatic expungement provision, and there is no presidential pardon attached to the rescheduling order.
Veterans Affairs doctors still cannot recommend or prescribe cannabis. VA physicians are federal employees, and federal prescribing rules for Schedule III drugs require FDA approval and DEA-registered prescribers. State medical marijuana programs do not satisfy those requirements.
Health insurance coverage did not change. No private insurer or public program covers state-legal medical marijuana, because the products are not FDA-approved prescription drugs. Patients continue to pay out of pocket.
The 280E Question
The single most consequential change, and the one driving most of the cannabis industry’s enthusiasm, involves Internal Revenue Code Section 280E. That provision prohibits businesses trafficking in Schedule I or Schedule II controlled substances from deducting ordinary business expenses on their federal tax returns. Effective tax rates for state-licensed cannabis retailers have routinely exceeded 70 percent, and tax practitioners have documented cases reaching 80 percent or higher. Cultivators and vertically integrated operators have somewhat lower effective rates, because production costs can be captured as cost of goods sold.
Schedule III is not on the 280E list. State-licensed medical marijuana operators should now, in principle, be able to deduct their ordinary business expenses going forward. The IRS has not yet issued transitional guidance, and how 280E will apply to dispensaries that sell both medical and recreational cannabis remains unsettled. For the medical-only operators rescheduled by the April order, the tax change is real and significant.
The question it raises is who benefits most. The largest beneficiaries of 280E relief are the multi-state operators with the highest revenue and the most sophisticated tax planning. Smaller operators, especially the social-equity licensees that several states have prioritized, get less of a benefit because their margins are thinner to begin with. The order does nothing to redistribute the licenses already concentrated in fewer hands.
What Patients Should Actually Expect
For the roughly 6 million Americans registered as medical marijuana patients across 40 states and the District of Columbia, the practical landscape today looks much like it did before the order.
Patients still need a state-issued medical marijuana card to legally purchase from a state-licensed dispensary. The federal rescheduling does not create a new federal pathway for patient access. State qualifying conditions, state physician certification rules, state possession limits, and state purchase limits all remain in force.
The certification process itself has continued to shift toward telemedicine in most states, which has expanded access for patients in rural areas and for those with mobility limitations. Most states now permit recertification visits by video, and some allow initial certifications by telehealth as well. Networks that focus on cannabis certifications, including telehealth medical cannabis evaluations for patients in dozens of states, have absorbed much of the certification volume that used to require in-person visits.
What has not improved is the cost picture. Patients still pay for the physician visit and for the state ID fee, and they still pay full retail at the dispensary because no insurance covers the product.
What Comes Next
Three things are worth watching in the next several months.
The DEA hearing scheduled for June 29 will determine whether the broader rescheduling, covering all marijuana including recreational state programs, moves forward. Smart Approaches to Marijuana, the prohibitionist organization that retained former Attorney General Bill Barr as counsel, has signaled it will challenge the rule in court. A temporary restraining order or preliminary injunction is plausible.
Congress has failed for years to pass either federal banking reform for cannabis businesses (the SAFER Banking Act cleared the Senate Banking Committee in a bipartisan 14-9 vote in 2023 but has never received a Senate floor vote, and has not been reintroduced under the current Republican-controlled Congress) or legislation addressing the hemp-derived cannabinoid market that grew up under the 2018 Farm Bill. Trump’s December order asked Congress to act on hemp and CBD. Whether anything happens depends on whether Republican leadership in both chambers wants to spend political capital on it.
State programs themselves continue to evolve, and the states (not the federal government) remain where the actual access decisions are made. For most patients, the federal headlines matter less than what their state does with qualifying conditions, dispensary licensing, and telehealth rules.
The president signed an order. Acting AG Blanche issued another. The medical marijuana program a patient in Pennsylvania, Arkansas or Illinois actually uses today is the same program they used last week.
NASA’s Curiosity Rover Frees Its Drill From a Rock
PIA26723
Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Downloads
NASA’s Curiosity Rover Frees Its Drill From a Rock
GIF (50.56 MB)
PIA26723 Figure A
GIF (48.45 MB)
PIA26723 Figure B
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Description
This series of images shows NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover as it got a rock stuck to the drill on the end of its robotic arm and, after waving the arm and running the drill a few times, finally detached the rock. The imagery showing the entire process was captured by the black-and-white hazard cameras on the front of Curiosity’s chassis and by navigation cameras on its mast, or head.
On April 25, 2026, Curiosity drilled a sample from a rock nicknamed “Atacama,” which is an estimated 1.5 feet in diameter at its base, 6 inches thick and weighs roughly 28.6 pounds (13 kilograms). When the rover retracted its arm, the entire rock lifted out of the ground, suspended by the fixed sleeve that surrounds the rotating drill bit. Drilling has fractured or separated the upper layers of rocks in the past, but a rock has never remained attached to the drill sleeve. The team initially tried vibrating the drill to shake off the rock, but saw no change.
Then, on April 29, they tried reorienting Curiosity’s robotic arm and vibrating the drill again. Imagery in the GIF shows sand falling from Atacama, but the rock stayed attached to the rover.
Finally, on May 1, Curiosity’s team tried again, tilting the drill more, rotating and vibrating the drill, and spinning the drill bit. The team planned to perform these actions multiple times but the rock came off on the first round, fracturing as it hit the ground.
Figure A
Figure A is the same GIF with yellow time stamps added in the upper left corner.
Figure B
Figure B is an alternate view of the same activities from the navigation cameras on Curiosity’s mast, or head.
Curiosity was built by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is managed by Caltech in Pasadena, California. JPL leads the mission on behalf of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington as part of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program portfolio.
NASA’s Juno spacecraft captured this view of Thebe, the second largest of Jupiter’s inner moons, during a close pass on May 1, 2026. The spacecraft’s Stellar Reference Unit (SRU) captured this image from a distance of approximately 3,100 miles (5,000 kilometers) at a resolution of about 1.9 miles (3 kilometers) per pixel.
Thebe resides at the outer edge of Jupiter’s faint ring system and is believed to play a role in the formation of the planet’s “gossamer” ring through the shedding of dust.
While the SRU’s primary function is to image star fields for navigation, its high sensitivity in low-light conditions makes it a powerful secondary science instrument. The SRU has previously been used to discover “shallow lightning” in Jupiter’s atmosphere and to image the planet’s ring system.
A division of Caltech in Pasadena, California, JPL manages the Juno mission for the principal investigator, Scott J. Bolton, of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. Juno is part of NASA’s New Frontiers Program, which is managed at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, for the agency’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington.
Schlossberg is clearly a guy who did not do the reading.
For reasons that have mostly to do with random internet virality and not keen insight, a couple of Bluesky posts I made about D.C. statehood blew up over the weekend (you can find the full length version in this post). This led to me learning that Democratic congressional candidate and RFK Jr. cousin posted the following about D.C. statehood:
This statement by Schlossberg shows he is too lazy to do the homework: in the D.C. statehood legislation passed by the House of Representatives of these United States in 2021, H.R. 51, there is still a federal district, it is just smaller (it is essentially census tract 98, minus Hains Point):
D.C. would become a state, the Douglass Commonwealth (named after Frederick Douglass), and the new, smaller federal district would be the constitutionally-mandated federal territory.
I want to make something clear: what I have described is not a white paper, a blog post, or a newspaper column. It was actual legislation that dealt with all of the issues people typically raise*. That said, Schlossberg is being exceptionally stupid, as the basic idea–some of what is currently D.C. would be reserved as a federal district–was widely reported in 2021.
I do not understand why Schlossberg feels the need to oppose D.C. statehood–I can only conclude he is as dumb and impulsive as his cousin RFK Jr. That he feels the need to opine this foolishly about D.C. statehood suggests he would likely do so for other issues that might affect the voters of his district. I have no idea what the hell NYC Democrats are doing, but there must be someone better than this lazy and incurious jackass Jack Schlossberg.
*There are a considerable number of D.C. statehood defenders online who have not done the homework either. The issues that these defenders claim can be solved easily have actually been solved.
A streak shot of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Space Launch Complex 4 East at Vandenberg Space Force Base during the Starlink 17-29 mission on May 5, 2026. Image: SpaceX
Update May 6, 8:09 a.m. EDT (1209 UTC): SpaceX deployed all 24 Starlink satellites.
SpaceX launched its second Starlink mission in the month of May, this time from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California aboard a Falcon 9 rocket.
The Starlink 17-29 mission sent another 24 broadband internet satellites into low Earth orbit, adding to a constellation of more than 10,000 spacecraft. SpaceX’s first Starlink launch of the month was from Cape Canaveral on May 1.
Liftoff from Space Launch Complex 4 East happened at 8:59:19 p.m. PDT (11:59:19 p.m. EDT / 0359:19 UTC). The Falcon 9 rocket flew on a south-southwesterly trajectory upon leaving the pad.
SpaceX launched the mission using the Falcon 9 first stage booster B1081, making its 24th flight. Previous launches by this booster included the NASA Crew-7, PACE, and CRS-29 missions.
A little more than eight minutes after liftoff, B1081 landed on the drone ship, ‘Of Course I Still Love You.’ This was the 195th landing on this vessel and the 609 booster landing for SpaceX to date.
I've been reading the new Sally Rooney novel, Intermezzo. It's really beautiful. The perfect kind of novel to read slowly. She manages to write prose that's engaging at the micro and macro levels - beautiful sentences, as well as lovely long narrative arcs. I've been trying to read the dialog with an Irish accent in my head.
It's a good book for reading in a park, and in Brooklyn we have a lot of nice little neighborhood parks. There's one right next to my apartment, public albeit under a confusing non-city ownership. Getting back from a long day of working on the internet, I want to throw that book in a bag and spend some time reading. But my bags are all the wrong size, too small or so large that the book lays horizontally at the bottom, which annoys me.
Following along with CW&T's newsletter, Kevin Lynagh, Casey Neistat, and others, I've gained an appreciation of people who create their own tools in real life, not just on the computer.
A sewing machine has unlocked a new domain of life where I feel free to do that. It's both supposedly practical and a crucial emotional-life crutch to be able to make something tangible as a respite from the virtual.
So I made a bag just for this one book. The Intermezzo bag. The dimensions are just based on fitting this one item, a book that I'll finish in a 120 pages anyway, and then it'll be more of a toss-up which books it will fit.
I did a minimum of planning for this project: the book, plus some tolerance, plus some reference points for details. The idea was to make the bag flat, unlike other things I've made, in the musette genre of bag shapes.
I had some accessory rope that I wanted to use to make a sort of sacoche which I hadn't gotten to yet, and some D-rings from previous projects. The main material is the same from the porteur bag 2 and original frame bag: ECOPAK 200D from Rockywoods. Unbelievably overkill for this project, but I like it and the way it holds shape.
The internet is so good for learning knots, I used animated knots.com for these. The important one is the adjustable grip hitch, which makes the strap adjustable. Works super well, and it's nice to have one less piece of 'hardware' and instead just rely on the physics and friction of knots.
The quiet drama was whether it would actually fit the book, which is not an easy thing to guarantee because flexible fabric and uncertain seam tolerances add up in a fuzzy way during a project like this.
One of the fun things about our paper published in today's PNAS is that, as a working paper, it prompted a vigorous discussion of the ethics of doing field experiments in economics. We discuss this more fully in the published version, below:
Abstract: Social media has transformed how academics disseminate research, but its effect on academic job outcomes remains unclear. Previous research has shown correlations between social media exposure and metrics like citation counts, but these relationships may be confounded by unobserved factors such as researcher quality or access to professional networks. We examine whether social media promotion causally affects job market outcomes in economics through a field experiment on Twitter (now X). We first collect tweets about job market papers from 519 candidates and post them from a dedicated account. We then randomize half of the posts to be quote-tweeted by established economists in the candidates’ fields, and measure the effects on both online visibility and hiring outcomes. We find that posts in the treatment group receive 441% more views and 303% more likes than those in the control group. Candidates whose posts were assigned to be quote-tweeted receive one additional flyout invitation compared to the control group average of 5.4 flyouts. Furthermore, women in the treatment group receive 0.9 more job offers than women in the control group, who receive 3 offers on average. Exploring mechanisms, we find that academic reputation drives these results, with stronger effects for quote-tweets from highly cited scholars and for candidates from top institutions. Our findings suggest social media promotion causally increases research visibility and improves academic job market outcomes.
...
"Ethical considerations. "After the release of our working paper on the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) on May 20, 2024, a vigorous discussion arose on both social and mainstream media, particularly on Twitter, about the ethics of our experiment and of field experiments more generally (e.g., ref. 30). The main concern suggested that job markets are essentially constant sum, so that randomly promoting some candidates through having their JMPs quote-tweeted by influencers would necessarily (and unethically) disadvantage both those who were in the control condition of the experiment and those who did not participate in the experiment.
"We understand the importance of considering the ethical implications of any experiment and that ethicality is connected to the underlying economics of the job market. In this latter respect, given the information friction and congestion in the interview process, job markets are unlikely to be constant sum. Aside from the possibility of welfare gains from improved match quality, we note that, typically in matching markets, many employers fail to fill all their positions while at the same time qualified candidates fail to find one, so that welfare can also be improved by filling more positions. [In the 2022–2023 job market, the total number of jobs listed on JOE was 3,608, including 933 (1,083) full-time academic jobs in (outside) the United States and 718 full-time nonacademic jobs (any location). On the supply side, 1,386 Ph.D. students and postdocs applied to at least one job through JOE from August to December 2022 (31).] In economics, the job market often has unfilled positions by the end of February, leading to a scramble round each year starting in March. Similarly, the annual National Resident Matching Program (NRMP) for new physicians in the United States also leads to some positions being unfilled, despite having far more applicants than available positions. [For example, in 2024, 38,494 positions were offered to 44,853 active applicants and 2,510 positions were unfilled (6.5%), at the end of both the main match (a deferred acceptance algorithm, see ref. 32) and a centralized postmatch scramble called the Supplemental Offer and Acceptance Program (33).]
"The phenomenon of unfilled positions in a thick labor market may reflect congestion in the interview process. In such a market, since many positions receive more applications than the number of candidates who can feasibly be interviewed, the matching of interviews to jobs may be imperfect in the sense that an employer can find that none of the people interviewed can be successfully hired, but could have filled the position if more appropriate interviewees had been chosen. To mitigate this issue, signaling mechanisms have been introduced in both the economics and medical markets to facilitate a better matching of interviewees and employers (29, 34). In our context, the quote-tweeting of JMPs may similarly serve to help employers find better matches with their selection of interviewees who can be hired.
"We also propose that highlighting suitable candidates from underrepresented groups for a position could potentially expand the overall number of job openings. A notable example is the President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program, implemented across multiple institutions including the University of Michigan and the University of California system. This program seeks to recruit future faculty members “with the potential to bring to their research and undergraduate teaching the critical perspective that comes from their nontraditional educational background or understanding of the experiences of groups historically underrepresented in higher education.” (See, e.g., https://presidentspostdoc.umich.edu/, retrieved on August 29, 2025.)
"Finally, we consider trends in the broader context of job search in evaluating the ethical considerations related to our study. Social media has become a common channel for academics to advertise the JMPs of their students. Thus, we are not introducing a new channel for candidate promotion, nor are we excluding others outside of our experiment from availing themselves of this channel. Our goal is to understand the extent to which this channel may create visibility or improve outcomes for job candidates, especially since not all candidates may have equal access. Our paper belongs to the class of natural field experiment (35), a class that has seen a growing number of studies in which field experiments are used to assess the effects of market interventions. [A natural field experiment is one “where the subjects do not know that they are in an experiment” (35). In our context, participants were told only that we would arrange for their JMPs to be tweeted, but not that there would be a quote-tweet treatment.] One of the main benefits of conducting a natural field experiment is that it minimizes possible Hawthorne effects (36). These studies are widely accepted and even recognized, with the 2019 Nobel Prize for experiments in development economics. If it is ethical for economists to use experiments to evaluate interventions in other markets, it should also be ethical for economists to study the market for economists. And if it is ethical to promote students who are on the job market, then it should be ethical to study the effects of such promotion.
"In sum, from a normative perspective (should scholars promote candidates?), we argue that such promotion can reduce information friction and job market congestion, potentially leading to more efficient matching. From a positive perspective (does promotion matter?), we demonstrate in Results that it increases candidate visibility and improves job market outcomes, especially for women who are traditionally underrepresented in economics."
In Modern Principles, Tyler and I show the invisible hand by telling the story of how the increase in oil prices in the 1970s encouraged millions of adjustments in how goods were produced and allocated, everything from an increased use of brick for driveways to a movement of the flower market from the US, which relied on heating greenhouses, to warmer climes like Columbia and Kenya. See the I, Rose video!
“When my sheep break wind, it smells of roses,” he said, recounting one of the more bizarre and far-flung consequences of the decision by US President Donald Trump and Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to bomb Iran in February.
Since Tehran hit back by firing drones and missiles at US allies in the Gulf — grounding cargo flights and closing off the Strait of Hormuz through which booming east African trade with the region used to flow — Mahihu has been forced to jettison millions of rose stems.
Schools across the U.S. have sharply restricted student use of phones during the school day. We evaluate one type of restriction—lockable phone pouches—using nationwide data combining large-scale surveys, GPS pings, standardized test scores, and school administrative records, along with sales records from the largest pouch provider. Using a staggered difference-in-differences design, we find that pouch adoption substantially reduces phone use as measured by GPS pings and teacher reports. In the first year after adoption, disciplinary incidents increase and student subjective well-being falls, consistent with short-term disruption. However, effects on well-being become positive in later years and disciplinary effects fade. For academic achievement, average effects on test scores are consistently close to zero. High schools see modest positive effects, particularly in math, while middle schools see small negative effects. We find little evidence of effects on school attendance, self-reported classroom attention, or perceived online bullying.
In sum, it is fine to want to run a school that way, but do not expect huge educational gains, if any. The evidence on this is accumulating, but many seem unable to accept the results. In any case it is not worthy of a major moral crusade.
I listened to your recent conversation with Arthur C. Brooks and found myself struggling with his core premise. His framing of happiness seems to reduce it to something like a biological or behavioural optimisation problem, which feels quite far from how psychotherapy traditionally and historically understands it.
I tried to find where he engages with psychotherapy as a discipline. The only reference I could locate was a passing mention of mindfulness-based CBT in a Free Press piece. But approaches like MCBT, while valuable, sit within a narrower, symptom-focused, behavioural tradition. They are not really representative of the broader psychotherapeutic field, which is less about “happiness” and more about understanding conflict, ambivalence, and the structure of the self.
That omission seems important. Sigmund Freud’s answer to the “happiness problem” is almost a rugpull: human beings are fundamentally conflicted, and any attempt to engineer sustained happiness runs up against unconscious forces, compromise formations, and the reality principle. Indeed, the goal of therapy to Freud, is to turn misery into “ordinary unhappiness”.
Later clinicians have developed this further. Jonathan Shedler, for example, has written compellingly about how psychodynamic therapy aims not at happiness per se, but at increasing the capacity to feel a full range of emotions without defensive distortion. I’m sure you’ve come across him – he’s absolutely brilliant.
It made me wonder whether there’s something slightly neurotic, even Bryan Johnson-esque, in trying to treat happiness as if it were a macronutrient to be optimised. That framing risks flattening the very thing it’s trying to measure.
PS. I liked that you asked him about the price of his book – and I respected his response too!
The geologically active area around Ahuachapán, El Salvador, includes an arced line of volcanoes, visible in this image acquired on November 25, 2024, by the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 8.
NASA Earth Observatory/Michala Garrison
Volcanic activity takes on many forms in western El Salvador. The land near the city of Ahuachapán is pockmarked with craters and covered with recent lava flows. Meanwhile, a geothermal field feeds geysers, heats mineral pools, and powers a long-operating energy plant. The area is part of a volcanic landscape that stretches more than 1,000 kilometers (600 miles) along the Pacific coast from Guatemala to Panama, composing the Central American Volcanic Arc.
On the right side of the image, Santa Ana stands at 2,381 meters (7,812 feet) above sea level as the country’s tallest volcano. Its summit features several crescent-shaped ridges surrounding a hot, acidic crater lake. The volcano remains active, with small to moderate explosive eruptions recorded since the 16th century. Its most recent significant eruption, in 2005, launched a dense gas and ash column high in the air and sent lahars down its slopes.
In 1770, another volcano began forming on Santa Ana’s southern flank. Izalco grew into a steep-sided stratovolcano through frequent eruptions over the next two centuries. Its regular activity—including Strombolian eruptions and lava fountains—earned it the nickname “Lighthouse of the Pacific,” as people at sea were reported to witness its glowing emanations. The “lighthouse” has since powered down, with Izalco’s most recent activity occurring in 1966.
A line of forested, dimpled stratovolcano peaks arcing across the scene forms the Apaneca Range. There are no recorded eruptions of these volcanoes in the Holocene (the past 11,700 years), but persistent geothermal activity along the range manifests in the form of fumaroles, hot springs, and steam vents. Sudden and deadly steam explosions occasionally occur in the area, including a blast in October 1990 near the range’s Laguna Verde volcano. More recently, a 2025 steam eruption near a popular hot springs facility spurred evacuations and damaged infrastructure.
Though sometimes hazardous, the region’s heat source has also been tapped for geothermal power. The Ahuachapán Geothermal Power Plant has operated since 1975, leveraging groundwater naturally heated to around 250 degrees Celsius (480 degrees Fahrenheit) and local fault systems. By the early 1980s, the plant was producing 40 percent of El Salvador’s electricity. Some scholars note that this high level of production coincided with a period of civil unrest and population growth in the region.
NASA Earth Observatory image by Michala Garrison, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Story by Lindsey Doermann.
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Market Design
