This hand-painted stop motion animation recalls the textures of a family home demolished to make way for a widened road
- by Aeon Video
Is mathematical beauty real? Or is it just a subjective, human ‘wow’ that is becoming redundant in an AI age?
- by Rita Ahmadi
Given the rapid pace of advancement of AI, how should academic journals adapt to these changes? One issue might be an excess of submissions, but what other questions should be considered here? Which reforms should be made?
Your thoughts would be most welcome.
The post Academic journals and AI bleg appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
A new view on the heart of our Milky Way is presented in today's Picture of the Week. This stunning snapshot, taken with ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), reveals the stars and gas surrounding an invisible giant — a supermassive black hole, located some 27 000 light-years away. This is a hugely dynamic environment, with stars and gas clouds hurtling by the black hole at dramatic speeds.
A team of astronomers at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany has detected a new gas cloud, named G2t, orbiting the supermassive black hole. Two gas clouds, G1 and G2, were already known, but their nature and origin were still being debated. In particular, it was unclear whether these clouds were hiding a star inside or consisted purely of gas. However, the discovery of a third gas cloud now helps answer these questions.
The observations were done with the Enhanced Resolution Imager and Spectrograph (ERIS), an instrument on ESO’s VLT that can not only take images like the one in this Picture of the Week, but also spectra. Thanks to this, astronomers were able to measure the 3D orbits of the clouds around the black hole. The clouds move within a very small region at the centre of this wide-field image. It was revealed that G1, G2 and G2t are actually on almost identical orbits, only rotated a bit with respect to each other. This rules out the possibility that each cloud hides a star in their core, as the odds of different stars having almost identical orbits are slim. The similarity of the orbits suggests that the three clouds probably share the same origin, most likely IRS16SW, a pair of massive stars expelling an enormous amount of gas. As IRS16SW moves around the black hole, each cloud of gas is ejected in a slightly different orbit, explaining the small differences in the trajectories of the ‘G-triplet’.
This discovery shows that, despite decades of monitoring our Milky Way centre, new unanswered curiosities still arise. But what could be more exciting than mysteries waiting to be solved?
Just inland from the Pacific coast of El Salvador, the striking blue waters of Lake Coatepeque fill part of a caldera of the same name. An astronaut aboard the International Space Station took this photo of the lake and surrounding terrain on February 10, 2026, as the station passed over Central America.
The caldera formed during a series of explosive eruptions between 72,000 and 51,000 years ago. After the caldera’s formation, additional eruptions produced several lava domes along its western side, including one that became Isla del Cerro (Isla Teopán). According to the Smithsonian Institution’s Global Volcanism Program, there have been no reported eruptions from the caldera during the Holocene (the past 11,700 years).
Today, homes, restaurants, boathouses, and other structures line the lakeshore. This human footprint extends westward toward the caldera’s steep rim, which abuts the eastern flank of Santa Ana—El Salvador’s tallest volcano. Unlike Coatepeque, Santa Ana remains active, with small to moderate explosive eruptions recorded since the 16th century. Its most recent severe eruption occurred in 2005.
Although the lake appears its usual blue in this photo, it can occasionally take on a strikingly different hue. At times, the water temporarily shifts to bright turquoise, prompting questions about its cause. In 2024, scientists reported that while pigments from microalgae and cyanobacteria can affect the lake’s color, the turquoise episodes are likely the result of natural mineralization.
The broader landscape around the lake and Santa Ana Volcano is a mosaic of urban areas, agricultural fields, and even more volcanic terrain. The city of Santa Ana lies about 15 kilometers (9 miles) to the north, while San Salvador, also nestled amid volcanoes, lies 40 kilometers (25 miles) to the east. The volcanic landscape stretches more than 1,000 kilometers (600 miles) along Central America’s Pacific coast, from Guatemala to Panama, composing the Central American Volcanic Arc.
Astronaut photograph ISS074-E-312810 was acquired on February 10, 2026, with a Nikon Z9 digital camera using a focal length of 400 millimeters. It was provided by the ISS Crew Earth Observations Facility and the Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit at NASA Johnson Space Center. The images were taken by a member of the Expedition 74 crew. The images have been cropped and enhanced to improve contrast, and lens artifacts have been removed. The International Space Station Program supports the laboratory as part of the ISS National Lab to help astronauts take pictures of Earth that will be of the greatest value to scientists and the public, and to make those images freely available on the Internet. Additional images taken by astronauts and cosmonauts can be viewed at the NASA/JSC Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth. Story by Kathryn Hansen.
Stay up-to-date with the latest content from NASA as we explore the universe and discover more about our home planet.
The glow of city lights, the aurora, and a rising Moon illuminate the night along the northwest coast of North…
The Large Magellanic Cloud—one of our closest neighboring galaxies—is a hotbed of star formation that is visible to both astronauts…
Rounding out a remarkable year, the outback lake displayed distinct green and reddish water in its two main bays.
The post Lake Coatepeque appeared first on NASA Science.
Frank McLynn, Villa and Zapata: A History of the Mexican Revolution. The best book on its topic, and one of the best books on Mexican history flat out. Everything is explained with remarkable clarity. By the way, the central government never really has controlled the entire country, or not for very long anyway.
Sean Mathews, The New Byzantines: The Rise of Greece and Return of the Near East. Anexcellent and original book, somewhere between a history and travel book. Views Greece as part of “the Middle East.” I found every page interesting.
Robert Polito, After the Flood: Inside Bob Dylan’s Memory Palace. An informationally dense, rambling, and frequently insightful and obsessive book about the “late” career period of Bob Dylan. When does his “late” period start? 1990 perhaps? I remember thinking in 1990 that we were well into Dylan’s late career phase. But that was thirty-six years ago!
Muriel Spark, The Driver’s Seat. If you like her at all, you will be entranced by this one. With a radical ending, as you might expect.
Richard Holmes, The Boundless Deep: Young Tennyson, Science, and the Crisis in Belief. A fun new book on Tennyson’s relations with the science of his time, and how he drifted away from religious belief.
Partha Dasgupta, On Natural Capital: The Value of the World Around Us, is a popular summary of some of his thinking on valuing the environment and natural resources.
Davd Epstein, Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better. A good popular look at what the subtitle promises.
José Donoso, The Boom in Spanish American Literature: A Personal History is a good lshort overview, noting that Donoso’s own The Obscene Bird of Night is one of the great underrated works of 20th century literature.
The post What I’ve been reading appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
In October 1973, on Yom Kippur — the Day of Atonement — Syria and Egypt launched a surprise attack on Israel. After desperate fighting, the Israelis gained the upper hand, thanks in part to a huge airlift of weapons from the United States.
The Arab world erupted in rage, and oil producers temporarily embargoed exports to the U.S. and other nations that had supported Israel. The result was the first of a series of oil crises that wreaked global economic havoc.
And here we are, almost 53 years later, with a war in the Middle East causing a major disruption of world oil supplies. We don’t know yet how bad this will get. As I write this, analysts are divided. Basically, oil experts’ hair is on fire — the Strait of Hormuz is closed! — while macroeconomists are relatively calm, arguing that we’re not as vulnerable to an oil shock as we were two generations ago.
One thing is clear: It’s important to understand the risks and learn what lessons we can from the past. So today’s primer will be devoted to oil crises, past and possibly future.
Not to be coy about it: The disruption of world oil supplies caused by the war in Iran looks extremely serious. Indeed, if the Strait of Hormuz remains closed for an extended period, this will be a worse disruption than either the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War or the aftermath of the 1979 Iranian revolution. Hence the alarm of oil experts.
However, the U.S. economy and other major economies have changed greatly since the 1970s. They have become much less dependent on oil, and they are probably much less prone to experiencing inflationary spirals in the aftermath of an oil price shock. Hence the relatively relaxed attitude of macroeconomists.
Beyond the paywall I will address the following:
1. The history of oil crises, from the Yom Kippur War to Operation Epic Fury
2. Why oil shocks did so much economic damage in the 1970s
3. How the economics of oil have changed since 1973
4. Scenarios for the economic impact of the Iran War
What I had not realized is that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people.
— Joseph Weizenbaum, creator of ELIZA, in 1976 (via)
Tags: ai-ethics, ai, computer-history, internet-archive
In discussions of modern wars Americans obsess about “exit strategies”. How do you avoid getting “bogged down”. How do you know when the mission is finished? How do you avoid “mission creep”? These are very much Great Power questions. They’re all questions you ask about what are fundamentally wars of choice. They’re framed as questions of duration and sustainability, questions a Great Power asks when there are likely multiple draws on blood or treasure in various parts of the world, fears of over-extension and over-commitment. Other countries don’t have the luxury of these kinds of questions; it’s built into the Great Power equation. Ukraine has no “exit strategy”. They’re being invaded. They’re fighting to control their own territory and sovereignty. In a way, at least if you place yourself in the world of Greater Russian nationalism where Vladimir Putin and his entourage live, Russia doesn’t have one either. They’re trying to reclaim “their” territory or something between a national and imperial possession. They’ll fight until they get it.
But talk of “exit strategies” is really a way of asking what the goals are that led you to start a war in the first place. If the goal of your military action is clear, your exit strategies should be straightforward. Indeed, you shouldn’t need a ‘strategy’ at all. When your goals or met you’re done and you leave. Or at least you stop using military force. If you know what your goal is you fight until you’ve a) achieved your goal or b) realized through battlefield reverses that your goal is unattainable. If your goal is unclear all the inherent forward momentum of superior military force drives you forward.
There are few modern wars where the US has launched an all out war, which this certainly is, with so little clarity about what it is we are even trying to accomplish. The Iraq War of 2003 is certainly a pretty good example of that. But what we were trying to achieve in Iraq was pretty clear: we wanted to topple the government of Saddam Hussein and replace it with another one. When the moment of invasion came in March 2003 really no one had any question that this was the only outcome the United States would accept. Just why that was so important was much, much fuzzier and what kind of government we’d put in its place even more so. But the immediate goal of the war was clear: there was no way the US would allow Saddam Hussein to remain in power.
How about here? We’re demanding now “unconditional surrender”. That appears to be our current war aim. But we’ve also said it’s eliminating Iran’s nuclear program, degrading its missile armory, creating an opening for a domestic opposition to take power, reacting to an imminent threat. Most notably, the US doesn’t appear to be deploying the kind of force that has much chance of achieving this goal.
A friend of mine commented last night on just how little visibility we seem to have into any part of the war zone – just how little we’re seeing from inside Iran or also, in terms of missile hits, inside Israel. The private sector sources of satellite information have announced a 96 hour hold on imagery of damage to US bases in the region. (If that’s a demand from the US government, it’s an understandable one. But it leaves the public even less visibility.) President Trump has made a series of increasingly totalizing demands which now appear to amount to unconditional surrender by the current government and an agreement to allow President Trump to choose the future leader of Iran. (Notably, this approach to Trump’s electoral prerogative seems to assume a permanent leader, not someone elected by a future democratic government. Obvious, but worth saying out loud and tells you a lot.) If our aim is really unconditional surrender and Iran becoming a US vassal state it sounds like any exit could be very far off.
And why is defining war aims so difficult? We’re not the first power to have difficulty with this. But it’s a product of the vastly superior military power the US has enjoyed for going on forty years – figure 1989-90 as the turning point. (Note to get your bearings, that that is approaching as long a period of time as the Cold War itself.) And before that the US was one of two Great Powers, certainly with that kind of military heft within its own sphere. When you have that kind of totally disproportionate military power you don’t think as clearly about the specific goals you’re trying to achieve. There’s plenty more military power where that came from so you can improvise. There’s not a huge amount of need, at the level of civilian decision-makers, to finely calibrate and align costs and goals. The resort to military force becomes more a consequence of frustration, national or presidential frustration, when some unacceptable behavior is defined, recognized and then not easily resolved. Like many physically strong people, if they can’t easily get what they want by asking they resort to force.
That’s been a problem for the US for a long time. It’s wildly more so when US power is so tightly chained to the will and impulses of a single person. Trump started this war as part of his international acting out he’s been at for the last few months, a way of compensating for reverses at home. If we look at his statements and US actions leading up to the beginning of the war, the impulse or the goal seems simply to have be in charge, for Iran to do what Trump says. He’s even stated explicitly that this should be going how it did in Venezuela, where the next in command steps forward and agrees to an indefinite period of vassalhood under not so much the US but Donald Trump himself. What remains of the Iranian state leadership does not seem interested in that. But the desire to be in charge is more a characterological impulse than any kind of military goal. Indeed, it leaves the initiative all in the hands of the adversary. Only the other side can tell you when you’ve gotten what you want. The US keeps fighting until Iran agrees Trump is in charge or the government falls and is replaced by someone who will say that. That’s not only a hard challenge. It’s also a classic example of goals military planners don’t like. You want something clear that you can achieve at your own initiative, without someone else having to agree to anything: blow up the base, occupy the country, cut off exports. These are concrete things a superior military force can achieve through its own actions. This war is probably just about Donald Trump being in charge. That’s not a clear or definable goal. It leaves the initiative in the hands of whoever currently controls the Iran state and military. It’s a recipe for unclarity.
DCReport Readers, I want to strongly encourage you to look at the front page of The New York Times for Sunday, March 8, 2026. There are six stories, any one of which I would have been proud to author, and all of which upend any claim that The Times is no longer worth your time.
The great Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Charlie Savage leads the page with a news analysis headlined “Trump Tramples a Line, Worn Faint, on War. He describes how, since the Cold War began, the Constitutional principle that only Congress can declare war has been progressively eroded.
As commander-in-chief, the President only has inherent authority to defend against a current or imminent attack. Trump’s war on Iran finishes wiping out that bedrock Constitutional standard, while the leadership on Capitol Hill, where Republicans control both chambers, does nothing.
Immediately below that piece, but still above the fold, is a Kenneth P. Vogel piece headlined “Pardon Industry Offers the Rich A Path to Trump.”
Vogel, a dogged investigative reporter, devotes an entire inside page to showing how Donald Trump is selling clemency and pardons to the rich. If that sounds like an impeachable offense, it is. Among those pardoned are some of the world’s biggest cocaine traffickers, child sexual abusers, and white-collar criminals who will now get to keep their ill-gotten billions with no restitution to their victims.
This was an exceptionally difficult story to ferret out because public records are scant, and conspirators in these pardons-and-clemency-for-sale schemes aren’t eager to implicate themselves or Trump.
It’s also criminal in my view, as someone who both knows Trump and has taught law for the last 17 years, although I’m not a lawyer.
Taking money to let people out of prison or wipe their slates clean, even when it’s done through intermediaries or ancillary characters, is a crime, not an “official act.” That distinction matters because of a cockamamie 2023 Supreme Court decision that former presidents may not be prosecuted for any “official act” performed while in office.
Issuing clemency and pardons is an official act. Taking money isn’t, even if the money goes to confederates.
Also above the fold: “Colleges Respond to Upswing in Disability Diagnoses,” in which reporters Mark Arsenault and Steven Rich dive into the reasons for the last decade’s 50% jump in the number of students receiving special treatment for diagnosed disabilities. They found that some of these reflect refined techniques to identify disabilities and related physical and intellectual limitations. However, some of it reflects students gaming the system for a range of accommodations, such as extra time to complete quizzes, midterms, and finals.
Right at the fold, a four-column headline suggests a threatening scenario: “Torrent of Money Transforms A Slice of Wyoming” This story documents America’s billionaire boom and how wealth is increasingly concentrated at the very top, a story I started making a kitchen-table topic in 1995 when I became a reporter for The Times, and I continued to pursue it for the next 13 years.
Back then, a small army of critics blamed me for, in their view, abusing income statistics to fabricate an issue. Those critics were never able to point to any conceptual or factual error, but that didn’t stop their attacks until the Obama era, when widening income inequality became so obvious that denial no longer resonated with anyone except cranks and the willfully blind.
Times reporters Katie Benner, Steven Rich, Mike Baker, and John Branch did a fabulous job of updating the economic data to show that the top 1 in 1,000 families is experiencing skyrocketing wealth, while the bottom half of Americans have merely doubled their minuscule wealth in the last 35 years.
The sixth story is about retirees who chose to stay in Gotham rather than go to Florida. As Kiplinger’s, the personal finance magazine, pointed out years ago, if you have your housing costs solved (own, rent-controlled, or rent-stabilized), then the big city is one of the cheapest and most culturally enriching places in America for those with a modest income. No surprise, but a sound reminder.
It’s easy to fault The New York Times. Indeed, few people are more critical of the paper than those who work in its newsrooms.
That’s because newsrooms operate on principles different from any other commercial enterprise. There’s an old journalistic saying that “a healthy newsroom is a newsroom with lots of bitching” about what is and is not in the daily report, as the mix of news stories is known among reporters and editors.
Newspapers make mistakes just like every other institution. But they are virtually unique in owning up to those mistakes and ensuring the public is aware of them.
There’s another old saying in newsrooms: “Doctors bury their mistakes, lawyers see theirs off to jail, only reporters sign theirs on the front page for everyone to read.”
I once spent money on researchers to find out who originated that phrase. The oldest verifiable use was under my byline. But I did not originate it. If you know who did, please write to us via the DCReport Tipline.
Few institutions in America have the resources, the talent, and the institutional imperatives to stand fast against Trump. For a long time, The Washington Post stood for our Constitution and the liberties of the people. But then its billionaire owner, Jeff Bezos, decided his fortune mattered more than America’s future as a democracy of free peoples.
Now and then, Rupert Murdoch’s The Wall Street Journal breaks a big story that infuriates Trump. But Donald can rely on the WSJ opinion pages to, for the most part, give cover for his anti-democratic moves. The American edition of The Guardian, a British newspaper, is solid, as are many independent news websites.
If you want to live free. If you want your progeny and the progeny of others to enjoy our liberties, then one key thing you can do is start every morning by reading The New York Times.
That doesn’t mean you should concur with or believe everything you read. Read the first rough draft of history with a grain of salt, as I do. Recognize that some reporters are great and many are merely good, and that, overall, the news is a highly accurate recounting of the official version of events and the official criticisms of those events.
Or be cynical. Close your eyes. Donald Trump will exploit your ignorance, but he’ll never thank you.
“FREEDOM OF THE PRESS IS NOT JUST IMPORTANT TO DEMOCRACY, IT IS DEMOCRACY.” – Walter Cronkite. CLICK HERE to donate in support of our free and independent voice.
The post Trump and The New York Times appeared first on DCReport.org.
(Lord’s day). Being sent to by Sir J. Minnes to know whether I would go with him to White Hall to-day, I rose but could not get ready before he was gone, but however I walked thither and heard Dr. King, Bishop of Chichester, make a good and eloquent sermon upon these words, “They that sow in tears, shall reap in joy.”
Thence (the chappell in Lent being hung with black, and no anthem sung after sermon, as at other times), to my Lord Sandwich at Sir W. Wheeler’s. I found him out of order, thinking himself to be in a fit of an ague, but in the afternoon he was very cheery. I dined with Sir William, where a good but short dinner, not better than one of mine commonly of a Sunday.
After dinner up to my Lord, there being Mr. Rumball. My Lord, among other discourse, did tell us of his great difficultys passed in the business of the Sound, and of his receiving letters from the King there, but his sending them by Whetstone was a great folly; and the story how my Lord being at dinner with Sydney, one of his fellow plenipotentiarys and his mortal enemy, did see Whetstone, and put off his hat three times to him, but the fellow would not be known, which my Lord imputed to his coxcombly humour (of which he was full), and bid Sydney take notice of him too, when at the very time he had letters in his pocket from the King, as it proved afterwards. And Sydney afterwards did find it out at Copenhagen, the Dutch Commissioners telling him how my Lord Sandwich had hired one of their ships to carry back Whetstone to Lubeck, he being come from Flanders from the King. But I cannot but remember my Lord’s aequanimity in all these affairs with admiration.
Thence walked home, in my way meeting Mr. Moore, with whom I took a turn or two in the street among the drapers in Paul’s Churchyard, talking of business, and so home to bed.
At 8:50 yesterday morning, President Donald J. Trump posted on social media: “There will be no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER! After that, and the selection of a GREAT & ACCEPTABLE Leader(s), we, and many of our wonderful and very brave allies and partners, will work tirelessly to bring Iran back from the brink of destruction, making it economically bigger, better, and stronger than ever before. IRAN WILL HAVE A GREAT FUTURE. ‘MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN (MIGA!).’ Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP”
As Alex Leary and Vera Bergengruen of the Wall Street Journal observed, the demand for unconditional surrender was quite a shift from Trump’s original promise to the people of Iran that the future is “yours to take,” or even his early claim that he was hoping to knock out Iran’s nuclear facilities. Trump’s shift highlighted that there appears to have been very little planning for what would happen after U.S. and Israeli bombs began to rain on Iran.
Leary and Bergengruen noted that Trump was bouncing ideas for the next stage of the assault off journalists even as ships stopped passing through the Strait of Hormuz, American citizens were stranded in the Middle East, the war spread to countries throughout the region, and U.S. military personnel died.
When reporters asked about what Trump meant by unconditional surrender, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt seemed to say that unconditional surrender meant whatever Trump decides it does whenever he decides what the goals of Operation Epic Fury are. She said: “What the president means is that when he as commander in chief of the U.S. armed forces determines that Iran no longer poses a threat to the United States of America and the goals of Operation Epic Fury has [sic] been fully realized, then Iran will essentially be in a place of unconditional surrender whether they say it themselves or not.”
Like other administration figures, Leavitt suggested that the violence itself was the point, saying: “Frankly, they don’t have a lot of people to say that for them because the United States and the state of Israel have completely wiped out more than fifty leaders of the former terrorist regime including the supreme leader himself.”
President of Iran Masoud Pezeshkian said Iran’s enemies “must take their dream of the Iranian people’s unconditional surrender to their graves,” but he did apologize to neighboring countries for the strikes against U.S. military bases in their lands. He said Iran would suspend those strikes unless those states themselves launched attacks on Iran.
At 6:11 this morning, Trump posted on social media: “Iran, which is being beat to Hell, has apologized and surrendered to its Middle East neighbors, and promised that it will not shoot at them anymore. This promise was only made because of the relentless U.S. and Israeli attack. They were looking to take over and rule the Middle East. It is the first time that Iran has ever lost, in thousands of years, to surrounding Middle Eastern Countries. They have said, ‘Thank you President Trump.’ I have said, ‘You’re welcome!’ Iran is no longer the ‘Bully of the Middle East,’ they are, instead, ‘THE LOSER OF THE MIDDLE EAST,’ and will be for many decades until they surrender or, more likely, completely collapse! Today Iran will be hit very hard! Under serious consideration for complete destruction and certain death, because of Iran’s bad behavior, are areas and groups of people that were not considered for targeting up until this moment in time. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP”
Zach Everson of Public Citizen recalled a quotation from William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, summing up Adolf Hitler’s view: “We must always demand so much that we can never be satisfied.”
Today, on Air Force One, when asked “what unconditional surrender looks like to you,” Trump answered: “Where they cry uncle or when they can’t fight any longer and there’s nobody around to cry uncle. That could happen too…. If they surrender or if there is nobody around to surrender but they’re rendered useless in terms of military.”
On Thursday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth warned representatives from sixteen Latin American and Caribbean countries that if they don’t adopt more aggressive strategies against drug cartels, the Trump administration will do it for them. Hegseth urged the countries to remain “Christian nations, under God, proud of our shared heritage with strong borders,” and not be led astray by “radical narco-communism, anarcho-tyranny…and uncontrolled mass migration.”
Tiago Rogero of The Guardian reported that Latin American countries resisted the framing of Hegseth’s speech. The title of his article used the word “dismay.”
In Miami today, Trump and his advisors convened a “Shield of the Americas” summit with twelve of Latin America’s Trump-aligned leaders. At the meeting, Trump called for an “anti-cartel coalition” that would use military might to crush drug cartels. Former homeland security secretary Kristi Noem told the group: “Now that America is secure, and our borders are secure, we want to focus on our neighbors and help our neighbors with their borders and the challenges they have.”
Trump suggested that Cuba was next on his list of countries to topple. “We’re looking forward to the great change that will soon be coming to Cuba,” Trump said. “They have no money, they have no oil, they have a bad philosophy and bad regime.” “Cuba is in its last moments of life as it was, but it will have a great new life,” he said.
In Need to Know, David Rothkopf today called out the madness of the fact world trade and global security is being shattered by a single man. “Not since Adolf Hitler blew his brains out in a bunker beneath the garden of the German Reich Chancellery on April 30, 1945, have the lives of so many people around the world been so buffeted by the psychosis of a single man.”
Why has Trump launched a war against Iran on a whim, attacked other countries, and upended world trade, Rothkopf asked. “Because he’s insane. Because he’s venal. Because he’s a malignant narcissist. Because he’s a sociopath. Because he has a fragile ego. Because those around him exacerbate and play to those traits to advance their own interests. Because CEOs and investors do likewise to fill their coffers. Because to some people, whether he is insane or malevolent or repugnant or not matters less than whether his actions will feather their nests, increase their power.
“Because they, the billionaires…play their games and the consequences for the little people down below, the consequences for us, hardly matter a whit.”
On Thursday, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) called attention to another factor in play. In a speech to the Senate, Whitehouse noted that throughout his second term, Trump has advanced policies that help Russia, pausing weapons shipments to Ukraine, easing sanctions on Russia, and pushing a peace deal favorable to Russia. Last summer, he welcomed Putin to American soil, and administration officials have parroted Russian propaganda. Russian state media gloated when Trump “installed Russia apologist Tulsi Gabbard as his director of national intelligence,” and Attorney General Pam Bondi upon taking office stopped the anti-kleptocracy work that had targeted Russian oligarchs.
Trump’s new national security policy threw traditional U.S. allies overboard and favored policies that Russian government officials praised as “largely consistent” with their own.
“If Trump were purposefully doing Russia’s bidding,” Whitehouse said, “it is hard to see what he would be doing differently. The United States is the most powerful nation in the world. Russia is a weak, corrupt regime. My old friend Senator John McCain used to say that Russia is a gas station, run by gangsters, with an army. It doesn’t make sense that the President of the United States, who insists—insists—on being dominant in essentially every relationship, is so submissive to one person and that one person is Russia’s dictator, Vladimir Putin.”
Whitehouse suggested that the answer “could…have something to do with Trump’s close friendship with the deceased pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.” He noted that the Epstein files, riddled as they are with references to Trump, are also riddled with references to Russian girls and women, Russian operatives, and Russian president Vladimir Putin.
Whitehouse spoke about how many of Epstein’s victims believed he was recording them, and how there were hidden cameras installed throughout his homes. He quoted Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre, who wrote: “He explicitly talked about using me and what I’d been forced to do with certain men as a form of blackmail, so these men would owe him favors.”
Whitehouse suggested the possibility that Epstein might have been working with Russian operatives, but emphasized that we don’t know. “Epstein was an inveterate liar and a criminal who often sought to exaggerate his power and influence, and the Epstein files need to be viewed through that lens,” he said. “What we do know is that a significant number of powerful men—our current President, some of his cabinet secretaries, tech billionaires like Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and others—were very mixed up with Epstein at different times. And Epstein seems to have been very mixed up with Russia.”
“We also know that there is a cover-up afoot at the Department of Justice,” he continued, where officials are “trying to shield Trump from something in the Epstein files.”
“One of the great forces that Washington runs on is normalcy bias,” he said, but he suggested looking past that bias to note that “we have links with Russia, girls from Russia, money from Russia, people from Russia, deals and transactions with Russia, contacts with people with Russian intelligence, news reports exploring contacts with Russia, and an official investigation from the government of Poland into an Epstein-Russia connection.”
Yesterday Noah Robertson, Ellen Nakashima, and Warren P. Strobel of the Washington Post reported that Russia is providing Iran with the information it needs to attack U.S. forces in the Middle East, including aircraft and ships.
During a roundtable on college sports, Peter Doocy of the Fox News Channel asked Trump about that report, saying: “It sounds like the Russians are helping Iran target and attack Americans now.” Trump responded: “I have a lot of respect for you. You’ve always been very nice to me. What a stupid question that is to be asking at this time. We’re talking about something else.”
—
Notes:
https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/trump-is-rewriting-the-iran-endgame-in-real-time-98f8531f
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/07/trump-shield-of-americas-summit
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/05/hegseth-latin-america-drug-cartels
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2026/03/06/russia-iran-intelligence-us-targets/
YouTube:
Bluesky:
zacheverson.com/post/3mghqh4cc4c2l
2026/03/06/trump-iran-oil-surrender.html
thetnholler.bsky.social/post/3mgj3lywzvc2h
atrupar.com/post/3mgfx6ep5ic2f
Last week, Apple released a parade of hardware announcements, and the one that captured the most attention across the industry was the $600 ($500 if you’re in education!) MacBook Neo, the brightly-colored low-end laptop that they launched to great fanfare. The conventional wisdom is that this product opens up Apple to the low end of the laptop market for the first time, radically changing the dynamics of the entire market, and throwing down the gauntlet to the garbage Windows laptop market, as well as challenging a huge swath of Chromebooks which tend to dominate in the education market. This is incorrect.
Apple has, in fact, sold a MacBook Air with an M1 chip at Walmart for years, which it has intermittently discounted to $499 at key times like Black Friday and Cyber Monday. The single-core performance of that laptop (meaning, how it works for most normal tasks that people do, like browsing the web or writing email or watching YouTube videos), is very nearly equivalent to the newly-released MacBook Neo.
But. A laptop with an old design, using a chip that has an old number (the M1 chip came out six years ago!), sold exclusively through a mass-market retailer that is perceived as anything but premium, presents an enormous brand challenge for Apple. It is, to put it simply, embarrassing. Apple can have low-end products in its range. They invest lots of effort in that segment of their product line, as the new iPhone 17e shows, making a new basic entrant to their most recent series of phones. But Apple can’t have old, basic-looking products that people aren’tt even able to buy at an Apple Store.
And that’s what Neo solves. It’s a smart reframing of a product that is nearly the same offering as the old M1 Air: the Neo and that old M1 machine both have 13” screens, both weigh just under 3 pounds, both have 8GB of RAM, both start at 256GB of storage, both have about 16 hours of battery life, are both about 8”x12”, both have 2 USB ports and a headphone jack, and both of course cost almost exactly the same. They did add a new yellow (citrus!) color for the Neo, though.
What was more striking to me was Apple’s introductory video, which clearly seems aimed at people who are new to Apple computers, or maybe people who are new to laptop computers entirely. They’re imagining a user base who’s only ever had their smartphones and are buying computers for the first time — which might describe a lot of students. There’s no discussion here of the chamfers of the aluminum, or the pipelines in the GPU cores, and there’s barely even the slightest mention of AI; instead, they describe the basics of what the laptop includes, and even go out of their way to explain how it interoperates with an iPhone.
There’s also a very clear attempt to distinguish Neo’s branding from the rest of Apple’s design language. The type for the “MacBook Neo” name in the launch video, and the “Hello, Neo” text on the product homepage are a rounded typeface that’s so new that it’s not actually even an actual font that Apple’s using; they’ve rendered it as an image instead of a variation of their usual “San Francisco” font that Apple uses for everything else in their standard marketing materials. The throwback to 2000s-era design (terminal green, the word “Neo” — are we entering the Matrix?) couldn’t be more different from the “it looks expensive” vibes of something like the Apple Watch Hermès branding.
In all, it’s pretty impressive to see Apple use its marketing strengths to take a product that is remarkably similar to something that they’ve had for sale for years at the largest retailer in the world, and position it as a brand-new, category-defining new entry into a space. To me, the biggest thing this shows is the blind spot that traditional tech trade press has to the actual buying patterns and lived experience of normal people who shop at Walmart all the time; it would be pretty hard to see Neo as particularly novel if you had walked by a Walmart tech section any time in the last three years.
At a time when Apple has lost whatever moral compass it had, even though its machines still say “privacy is a human right” when you turn them on, we still want to see positive signs from the company. And a good one is that Apple is engaging with the reality that the current moment calls for products that are far more affordable. It is a good thing indeed when affordable products are presented as being desirable, when most of the product’s enclosure is made of recycled material, and when the lifespan of a product can be expected to be significantly longer than most in its category, instead of simply being treated as disposable. All it took was removing the stigma over the existing affordable laptop that Apple’s been selling for years.
Links for you. Science:
Experts warn NIH director now leading CDC will push ‘RFK Jr’s agenda’
N.I.H. Director Will Temporarily Run C.D.C. in Leadership Shake-Up
Revitalizing actinobacteria research: an urgent response to the antimicrobial resistance crisis
The 80% power lie
National Institutes of Health faces leadership vacuum as director positions sit open
This Is What Destroying the Vaccine Market Looks Like. A shocking move by RFK Jr.’s team has the industry spooked—for good reason.
Other:
Donald Trump, Jeffrey Epstein, And The Construction Of Political Crisis
Don’t Be Fooled By the Corrupt Court’s Tariff Decision
Get Ready for Zombie Tariffs. Even after losing at the Supreme Court, Trump has plenty of ways to reconstruct his trade regime.
Pastor Linked to Erika Kirk Faces Child Trafficking Charges as Online Speculation Spreads
Kansas pass anti-trans ‘bathroom bounty’ law despite governor’s veto (very weird original headline, demonstrating a lack of basic political knowledge)
MAHA Moms Turn Against Trump: ‘Women Feel Like They Were Lied To’
DOJ Deleted Record Revealing That Maxwell Holds Potential Blackmail Over Trump
The break is over. Companies are jacking up prices again.
Kansas Mayor Who Voted for Trump as Noncitizen Faces Felony Charges (he’s Republican, obviously…)
Indian Skier Starts, Finishes Race
Florida pickleball brawl involving up to 20 people results in paddles to the face and felony charges
He made a fake ICE deportation tip line. Then a kindergarten teacher called.
How Legal Immigration Became a Deportation Trap
Maryland bans partnerships with ICE, citing ‘unaccountable agents’
Epstein was invited to gatherings with a dozen members of Congress years after his initial arrest, documents reveal
I Guess We’re Still Doing This
Jesse Watters says billionaires should “make the homeless people in skid row fight like gladiators”
‘Hello Girls!’: Epstein Donated to Harvard Student Group for Years After Sex Conviction
Security And Confidentiality
Staff at Dilley raiding cells to confiscate kids’ letters and drawings detailing conditions inside. The raids allegedly began in response to a recent ProPublica article featuring letters and drawings from children inside the San Antonio-area immigrant detention site.
US plans online portal to bypass content bans in Europe and elsewhere
ICE moves out to the suburbs. The less densely populated areas outside the Twin Cities make it harder for protesters and observers to organize.
Epstein Used Botstein’s Prestige and Connections to Recruit and Support One of His Victims, a Violinist from Europe
Turns Out There Was Voter Fraud in Georgia—by Elon Musk
The billionaires’ eugenics project: how Epstein infiltrated Harvard, muzzled the humanities and preached master-race science
Nevada Brothel Workers Are Unionizing to Protect Their Digital Rights
US judge throws out immigration board’s ruling endorsing Trump mass detention policy
Wow, Elon Musk sure does like White people
Look how much Canadians hate the United States now
Bizarre new RFK Jr video features shirtless secretary climbing into tub in jeans
Simon Willison:
There are a lot of open questions about this, both ethically and legally. These appear to be coming to a head in the venerable chardet Python library.
chardetwas created by Mark Pilgrim back in 2006 and released under the LGPL. Mark retired from public internet life in 2011 andchardet’s maintenance was taken over by others, most notably Dan Blanchard who has been responsible for every release since 1.1 in July 2012.Two days ago Dan released chardet 7.0.0 with the following note in the release notes:
Ground-up, MIT-licensed rewrite of chardet. Same package name, same public API — drop-in replacement for chardet 5.x/6.x. Just way faster and more accurate!
Yesterday Mark Pilgrim opened #327: No right to relicense this project.
A fascinating dispute, and the first public post from Pilgrim that I’ve seen in quite a while.
The post Jazz Samba appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
The state of my tasks list in Things remains non-optimal but has not yet descended into a swamp of forever tasks. Still recoverable.
Although I didn’t have many symptoms remaining from last weekend’s cold, I still felt unusually tired, so I skipped exercise until the end of the week. That was pretty nice, I must admit, gaining at least an hour or two a day (including driving time to the gym) for important faffing.
Had a filling this week, the first for years, which was fine, aside from the pain of the injection and the numbness for most of 24 hours. Now I’m just worried it’s going to break or fall out, which I haven’t been about the others for however long I’ve had them.
§ This week I’ve been listening a lot to Lucrecia Dalt’s 2024 album A Danger to Ourselves:
Some good sounds.
§ One day this week I wrote a script for getting all the listed buildings in a specified area of England and outputting that as an HTML table. I feel pretty rusty at writing code and I’m not sure if it’s because of this that it took me quite a while to work out how to access the API for getting that list.
[Several boring paragraphs detailing how I stumbled my way to figuring out the URL and parameters for the API deleted.]
It’s very nice that this is all “open data” but if you can’t provide some simple instructions for accessing and querying it then I’d argue it’s only “open” in one sense. I have no idea how anyone would find that – never mind figure out what any of it meant – without, as I did, stumbling around many pages, examining the network requests in my browser’s web developer console, trial and error, and gag asking ChatGPT.
If it’s open, write documentation.
§ I updated the guidelines for posting comments on The Diary of Samuel Pepys this week, for the first time in years (decades?), to say that using AI is not permitted. There is no surer sign of a man (and it usually is) who has nothing worth saying than them posting a comment that starts “I asked ChatGPT…” It’s barely happened on that site yet, but best to pre-empt such things.
§ I quickly finished reading Blue Ruin by Hari Kunzru this week (here’s a decent review) which I enjoyed. Although it’s set during COVID this is mostly just a reason for the characters to be stuck in one place with little outside contact. I enjoyed all the backstory about the characters as art students, then entering the art world, and their struggles with all that entails.
§ We finished season four of Industry this week which was good fun. Some dramas are a bit spoiled when certain events or dialogue seems unbelievable. But almost everything about Industry is unbelievable, all too over-the-top and simplified, that you can just accept this world and enjoy the drama and characters.
§ That’s all. Have a good week.
A whirlwind of a week in Donald Trump’s world has swirled expectations in global relationships, in economics, in politics and in any sense of personal security. Every conversation now is filled with public dread over uncertainty and private desire to shut the noise.
Apart from watching a war develop seemingly uncontrollably, we’re seeing prices rise yet more, jobs and immigrants disappearing before us, health care and social services being declared optional at best, and Americans fleeing late from the Middle East.
We are getting a constant barrage of messaging that if we complain, we’re being told we are unpatriotic, even if those messages change by the day or hour. As an example, Trump’s call for “unconditional surrender” by Iran faded after a day to “when Iran can fight no longer,” just as quickly as “war” was being described as a “limited combat opportunity.”
Iran’s president said Iran would halt unprovoked attacks on neighbors except Israel, only to have reports in the hours that followed of more Iranian missiles landing.
At his recent State of the Union, Trump demanded that people stand if they agree that “The first duty of the American government is to protect American citizens, not illegal aliens.” It prompted Republican legislators to rise while Democrats, who see that statement riddled with illegal tactics and randomly unwarranted deportations remaining seated and expressionless.
Even in the moment, it smacked of political grandstanding for partisan gain. But a week or more later, it feels an empty gimmick worth re-applying.
In the name of “protecting American citizens,” Trump has launched a preemptive strike against Iran, acting apart from all allies but Israel, and leaving many believing that Trump remains under the sway of Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu towards an expensive, open-ended conflict towards ends that even the administration has trouble encapsulating.
When War/Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth says the military objectives are clear, he’s probably right. The U.S. and Israeli military commands have long-established lists of specific targets to wipe out nuclear and missile capacity, weapons manufacture, Islamic Revolutionary Guard command and control and the like. More than a week after the launch of daily sorties against hundreds of targets a day – and on the brink of committing some “limited” ground forces — the ultimate political, economic, security goals remain uncharted, and unaddressed.
All week, there was continuing talk of one Trump move trying to distract from the previous one, whether the war was a “wag the dog” move about slumping polls and election setbacks, the ever-present Epstein mess or immigration roundups seen as gone out of control. It feels as if there always is something from which we need distraction.
In this single week, the Congress has sought, and failed, to pass resolutions to assert its Constitutional right to declare war amid arguments from Republicans who avoid the use of the word “war” to elude the requirement. By the day, Iran shows no sign of concession and is bombing – and drawing response from Israel and a growing number of Gulf nations – in ever-widening circles to make this conflict much wider.
Rather than American dominance, what we are witnessing is a flailing America working out of sync with allies to demand obedience from a world that is growing increasingly uneasy with the U.S. and its promises, and with Trump’s government. Using brute force is usually not the best way to win hearts and minds, whether in Iran or in the many historical cases that have proceeded it.
None of this has to do with the “rightness” of acting against Iran’s bad behavior over five decades, but everything to do with the ham-handedness and egocentricity with which Trump seems to have blown a unique chance to build and lead a coalition of nations towards a common goal.
As a result, even within a first week of war by whatever name, we are already seeing ill economic effects building, further undercutting the Trump arguments that he is presiding over an American “golden age.” The week was concluding with unexpected downturns in job numbers, oil and energy prices rocketing around the world as shipping through the Gulf is halted, and even questions about available weaponry for a sustained conflict.
It was a week that opened the U.S. election season, amid solid gains and enthusiasm for Trump opponents even in deep-red Texas, scandals that further threaten the thin Republican Congressional majorities, and the firing of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem over her botched public relations handling of a $220 million ad campaign at a time when Homeland Security is threatened by possible Iranian cells.
Court rulings continue to declare Trump policies illegal over tariffs and the proposed prosecution of political foes, while federal agencies are focusing on control over what comedians can say on television and what merit badges earned by Scouts may violate Trump’s sense of horror at diversity and inclusion concerns.
Trump and Hegseth were taking heat for dismissive comments about the first troop deaths as something to expect, and saying Americans should expect there will be more to come. Those fleeing the Middle East only after the start of these preemptive strikes are hearing from the White House that they should have known the area was dangerous from its previous travel warnings.
Trump and Hegseth insist that U.S. weapons supplies are ample enough for multiple global military deployments but had defense contractors meet in the White House to agree to speed production of replacement missiles, drones and explosives.
Trump is making a point of greeting the coffins of six U.S. soldiers killed, but has dismissed casualties as something that happens in war.
Together, it makes one question whether Trump is rising this week to say that his primary mission is to “protect American citizens.”
He’s not protecting against increasing prices or war-fueled inflation. He is not protecting against a diminishing respect abroad from international institutions and our expected allies. He is not protecting in any systematic manner against the sexual abuse exposed by the Epstein Files, and there are serious questions about whether his anti-drug campaign is effective by any practical measure.
He is protecting Americans against his “feelings based on fact” belief, as the White House tells it, that Iran wants to reconstitute its nuclear weapons development and continue to harass Israel and the Gulf with missiles. But we have yet to see that there was anything “imminent” about those plans. The Omani go-between official who was shuttling between Iranian and U.S. negotiators said Iran was ready to accept most terms that Trump had wanted about nukes, but that other missiles were not discussed.
On the other hand, we have seen much reporting this week saying that the Israelis wanted to strike Iran while it was down after the previous U.S.-Israeli bombing run on nuclear labs and setbacks for Hezbollah and Hamas, Iranian proxies. The “imminent” danger seemed concern for U.S. personnel in the region being endangered by expected Iranian response to an Israeli strike.
Now that the political season is open, we can expect to see Republican ads about who was standing and who was not at the State of the Union, as if that showed who is loyal to Trump and who is “crazy,” in Trump’s label.
Trump now argues that Democrats back both unending illegal immigration and a nuclear-armed Iran.
Who is “protected” in all this. It feels as if it is Team Trump that is protected, not Americans, citizen or not.
Just who is crazy here? If backing the Constitution for its process guarantees for individual rights for citizens and migrants alike and a belief that we ought to know what the goal is before sending thousands of U.S. airmen, sailors and troops at Iran, count me as one of the loons.
This week was not about disagreement. It was about trying to stuff “crazy” into political packaging.
“FREEDOM OF THE PRESS IS NOT JUST IMPORTANT TO DEMOCRACY, IT IS DEMOCRACY.” – Walter Cronkite. CLICK HERE to donate in support of our free and independent voice.
The post Trump’s War Week Raises Questions About Who Is Really Being “Protected” appeared first on DCReport.org.
2. Adam Smith against hegemony.
3. US median income vs. Europe.
4. The academic papers is a dead format these days (read the whole chain).
5. The wisdom of Daniel Gross.
6. The political economy of California initiatives.
The post Sunday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
German launch startup Rocket Factory Augsburg (RFA) says it is planning its first launch for this summer after delivering two of its stages to the launch site.
The post RFA plans first launch this summer appeared first on SpaceNews.
The Chronicle of Higher Ed has the story:
The Drop in International Students Last Year Was Worse Than We Thought By Karin Fischer
In 2024, the entire neuronal diagram of the fruit-fly brain–some 140,000 neurons and 50 million connections–was mapped. Later research showed that the map could be used to predict behavior. Now, Eon Systems a firm with some of the scientists involved in the fruit-fly research and with the goal of uploading a human brain has announced that they uploaded the fruit fly brain to a digital environment.
The digital fly appears to behave in the digital environment in reasonably fly like ways–this is not a simulation, the fly’s “sensors” are being activated by the digital environment and the neurons are responding. Some more details here.
N.b. this work is not yet published.
Addendum 1: Of course Robin Hanson is an advisor to Eon Systems.
Addendum 2: In other news, human brain cells on a chip learned to play Doom. No word on whether they were conscious or not.
The post A Fly Has Been Uploaded appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber.
Thanks to California’s Prop 13, which limits annual property tax increases to 2% over the most recent sales prices, a very large (and increasing) fraction of homes in California are transferred through inheritance. “About 18% of all property transfers in the state last year, representing nearly 60,000 homes, were made through inheritance, according to a recent analysis by real-estate data firm Cotality. That share is a record for California in data going back to 1995, up from 12% in 2019. It is also roughly double the national share of 8.8% last year.” [WSJ]
Claims about the rising cost of housing’s impact on US fertility. Based on a (data-derived) economic model, so take with a grain of salt. “I vary housing costs directly within the model, finding that rising costs since 1990 are responsible for 11% fewer children, 51% of the total fertility rate decline between the 2000s and 2010s, and 7 percentage points fewer young families in the 2010s.” [X]
Los Angeles makes it easier to convert offices into apartment buildings. This is a perennially popular idea for increasing the supply of housing that is often hard to make work in practice (since these sorts of conversions are typically very expensive), but good to make it easier to do. [LA Times]
An interesting look at the largest homebuilders in the US, and the Japanese corporations that are acquiring them. I wonder if we’re finally starting to see the sorts of concentration in US homebuilding that we see in other industries. [Resiclub]
ONX Homes is a Florida-based prefab homebuilding company started by ex-Katerra folks, and using a Katerra-esque business model, that I’ve written about previously. There’s reports that things aren’t going well in their Austin division, and that a development they’re working on has been abandoned. [X]
Since historically it’s been prohibitively expensive to store electricity, the grid needs to balance electricity supply and demand moment to moment, bringing power sources online as demand rises and bringing them offline if it falls. If there’s a mismatch — such as if, say, dozens of data centers which collectively draw several thousand megawatts of power simultaneously disconnect because of grid disturbances — that can cause damage to the grid if its not carefully managed. “Early last year, a cluster of data centers in Virginia suddenly dropped off the power grid, threatening the stability of the already vulnerable system. The roughly 40 data centers, which had been using enough electricity to supply more than one million homes, simultaneously switched to backup power sources in February 2025, when a high-voltage power line malfunctioned. The sudden plunge in electricity demand forced the grid operator to take quick action to avoid potentially serious damage.” Grid operators have been able to handle these occurrences so far, but they’re apparently worried what might happen in the future if even larger disconnects occur. [WSJ]
China plans to invest $574 billion in upgrading its power grid over the next five years. [Reuters]
The Washington Post has an article on what might be an increasing willingness to embrace solar PV in the Trump administration. “A growing number of prominent Trump allies — including former House speaker Newt Gingrich, veteran strategist Kellyanne Conway and GOP pollster Tony Fabrizio — are promoting solar as electricity demand surges and energy affordability climbs the list of voter concerns.” [Washington Post]
Solar PV manufacturers are increasingly diversifying their businesses. [Bloomberg]
Cool graphic showing where solar panel efficiency records (the fraction of sunlight a panel can convert into usable electricity) have been set over time. It used to be the US developing increasingly efficient solar panels. Now those records are being set in China. [VoxDev]
The Department of Energy released the new nuclear safety rules that it had reportedly been updating. Apparently 750 pages, 2/3rds of the previous rules(!) have been cut, including what seems like references to ALARA (requirements that radiation exposure be “As Low As Reasonably Achievable.”) [NPR]
There are three basic facts you need to know about the U.S. macroeconomy right now:
The economy overall (growth, employment, inflation) is doing pretty well.
Productivity growth is unusually high.
Job growth is terrible.
Let’s start with some numbers. Late 2025 is the latest number we have for GDP growth, but it looks pretty solid — around 2.5%, about where it was in the late 2010s.
And most people still have jobs. Prime-age employment rates — my favorite single indicator of the labor market — are still really high. Higher than any time in the 2010s, actually:
If you look at unemployment, you can see a slowly rising trend since mid-2023, even if you restrict it to the prime age group. But this is entirely due to more people saying that they’re looking for work — prime-age labor force participation has been steadily rising. So that’s not very scary either. It’s just more of the people without jobs saying that they’re looking for work, instead of just sitting around.
Meanwhile, inflation is still in the 2.5% range — a little higher than we would like, but not particularly fast.
So in terms of the headline numbers, everything is kind of just bumping along. From a bird’s-eye view, this economy looks pretty normal and healthy. Under normal circumstances, I’d be inclined to not even write a post about the macroeconomy this month.
But underneath the surface, two interesting things are happening. The first is that productivity growth has accelerated; the second is that job growth has stalled out. On its face, this sort of pattern might suggest that AI is finally starting to take Americans’ jobs — and lots of people are suggesting this conclusion. But when we look closely at the numbers, the story becomes more complicated.
The first is that productivity growth has accelerated. Output per hour — also called “labor productivity”, which is sort of a quick, rough-and-ready measure of productivity — is growing significantly faster than it was in the late 2010s. It’s been at around 2.5-3% since late 2023, compared to more like 1-2% during Trump’s first term:
In fact, productivity is well above where economists thought it would be six years ago:
That’s a major acceleration. 2.8% labor productivity growth is about equal to the best decades we’ve seen since World War 2. If that rate is sustained for a decade, or accelerates further, it’ll be pretty historic.
What’s driving the productivity boom? It’s tempting to conclude that AI is making white-collar workers more productive, but Ernie Tedeschi points out that the biggest swing has been in manufacturing productivity. For a long time, manufacturing productivity was basically flatlining in America; now it’s suddenly growing again.
Tedeschi argues that this is also probably AI-driven, but it’s not about people using ChatGPT and Claude Code at work — it’s about the fact that a ton of data centers are being built, and data centers are very valuable:
If you look at data centers’ contribution to growth itself, it looks pretty small, but this masks the value of the computers contained within the data centers. Together, the creation of data centers and computing equipment have been contributing about as much to GDP growth as they were during the dot-com boom:
A second thing that’s happening is that American capital is being utilized more intensively — machines are being run for more hours of the day, buildings are keeping the lights on longer, and so on. The San Francisco Fed makes monthly estimates of Total Factor Productivity growth — productivity growth once you take the amount of labor and capital into account — and they find that it’s been pretty fast since late 2023. But once you take utilization rates into account, it looks like there was a moderate burst of TFP growth in 2023-4 that faded in 2025:
This is also consistent with the story that the data center boom, not an AI use boom, is driving fast productivity growth in America.
The Army is launching a new Warrant Officer Retention Bonus Auction. This initiative introduces a market‑based approach to retaining senior technical talent while ensuring responsible stewardship of taxpayer dollars. The program represents a shift from traditional, fixed‑rate bonuses to a more flexible, market-driven system.
The structure is designed to make the best strategy straightforward—bid your true value. Eligible warrant officers will submit a confidential bid indicating the minimum monthly bonus they would be satisfied receiving in exchange for a six‑year Active‑Duty Service Obligation. Overbidding increases the risk of missing out on a bonus, while underbidding could result in commitment to a lower rate. Army leadership believes the system rewards transparency and encourages officers to carefully consider the compensation that would make them comfortable with continued service.
“The goal is simple. Reward as many qualified Warrant Officers as possible with the most competitive bonus the budget allows,” said Lt. Col. Tim Justicz, an Army economist who helped design the program.
Once bids are submitted, the Army will determine a single market‑clearing bonus rate that retains the maximum number of qualified warrant officers within the available budget. Every warrant officer whose bid falls at or below that rate will receive the same bonus amount. This means that warrant officers who bid lower than the final rate will still receive the higher, market‑determined bonus.
Here is more, via Charles Klingman.
The post A market-based officer retention system? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Fron anonymous:
I personally think social media is pretty bad for people (kids and adults). I got off Facebook around 2009. I never got on Twitter. I had Instagram for a while but only followed my wife to see her posts of our family. This worked great until Instagram started feeding me content beyond the people I was following (really just my wife), so I quit using it. The only social media I currently use is Substack (not sure if that counts?). But the same dynamic may be playing out there as well (the algorithm feeding me stuff I don’t want, and me getting locked into wasting time doom scrolling).
HOWEVER, I completely agree with your point about parents. Our 14-year-old son has an iPhone, but we have locked it down pretty tight. It took some work on our part, to be honest. And we have to be pretty vigilant about enforcing the no-phone-in-your-room rule (which is a source of conflict sometimes). Our son has no social media accounts. He can text and he has access to a few messaging apps that they use at his school. Beyond that, we’ve basically shut down his ability to access the internet on the phone. His Chromebook works perfectly well for any legitimate internet needs.
In principle, any parent can do what we’ve done. So why don’t they? Why are they begging the government to do something they could just do themselves, albeit with a little work? Well, I’ve been struck by how badly many parents desperately need their children’s approval. They find themselves incapable of disappointing or upsetting their children on even the smallest of things. They know they should tell their kids not to use TikTok (or whatever), but they don’t want to make their kids mad. That’s why they want someone else to do it for them.
I don’t get it. Perhaps I’m overly cranky, but I honestly don’t mind it if (when) my kids get mad when I do something I believe is in their best interest. I simply don’t believe my children’s emotional reaction is a very good guide to parenting. Because they’re children. And they don’t know very much. And they especially don’t know what they don’t know and that’s why I’m here. If I won’t tell my kids no when they need to hear it but don’t want to hear it, then what good am I? My wife feels the same way. But we see lots of families that clearly feel differently.
Okay rant over.
See also Arnold Kling on related ideas.
The post On social media and parents (from my email) appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Some people can credibly demand unconditional surrender. Some can’t.
Between events and family matters, I couldn’t get it together to do an interview this week. Primer on energy crises coming tomorrow.
Also, I’ll be in conversation with Lina Khan 6:30 PM Monday:
I will have gotten a haircut by then. Register for live or online attendance here.
Now OpenAI have launched their comparable offer: six months of ChatGPT Pro (same $200/month price as Claude Max) with Codex and "conditional access to Codex Security" for core maintainers.
Unlike Anthropic they don't hint at the exact metrics they care about, but the application form does ask for "information such as GitHub stars, monthly downloads, or why the project is important to the ecosystem."
Via @openaidevs
Tags: open-source, ai, openai, generative-ai, llms, codex-cli
We live in a time when those who rule over us mix malevolence and absurdity. We have an example of this in this Politico article. White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles is telling advisors to “bring ideas to the Oval Office to lower gasoline prices in the wake of the U.S. attack on Iran.” One of the oil executive sources for this story says the White House is “looking under every rock for ideas on improving energy prices, especially gasoline prices.” Trump’s Energy and Interior Secretaries are “are getting screamed at to find some good news” on bringing down oil and gas prices.
No one looks great when they’re in the midst of a chaotic situation. But I don’t think it’s a stretch at this point to think that Trump himself and certainly the people focused on the midterms didn’t connect the dots about the near certainty that starting a regime change war would lead to at least some significant upward pressure on gas prices.
Up betimes, and to the office, where some of us sat all the morning. At noon Sir W. Pen began to talk with me like a counterfeit rogue very kindly about his house and getting bills signed for all our works, but he is a cheating fellow, and so I let him talk and answered nothing. So we parted.
I to dinner, and there met The. Turner, who is come on foot in a frolique to beg me to get a place at sea for John, their man, which is a rogue; but, however, it may be, the sea may do him good in reclaiming him, and therefore I will see what I can do. She dined with me; and after dinner I took coach, and carried her home; in our way, in Cheapside, lighting and giving her a dozen pair of white gloves as my Valentine. Thence to my Lord Sandwich, who is gone to Sir W. Wheeler’s for his more quiet being, where he slept well last night, and I took him very merry, playing at cards, and much company with him. So I left him, and Creed and I to Westminster Hall, and there walked a good while. He told me how for some words of my Lady Gerard’s1 against my Lady Castlemaine to the Queen, the King did the other day affront her in going out to dance with her at a ball, when she desired it as the ladies do, and is since forbid attending the Queen by the King; which is much talked of, my Lord her husband being a great favourite.
Thence by water home and to my office, wrote by the post and so home to bed.
Footnotes
Links for you. Science:
Mobile genetic elements drive a fusion-deletion life cycle that shapes plasmid evolution and antimicrobial resistance
Scientist Jack Horner linked to Jeffrey Epstein in newly released DOJ files
FDA reverses course, agrees to review Moderna’s flu vaccine
NanoHIVSeq: A Long-Read Bioinformatics Pipeline for High-Throughput Processing of HIV Env Sequences
How Microbes Got Their Crawl. In the oceans and on land, scientists are discovering rare, transitional organisms that bridge the gap between Earth’s simplest cells and today’s complex ones.
FDA reverses course, will review Moderna’s mRNA flu vaccine
Other:
DOGE Bro’s Grant Review Process Was Literally Just Asking ChatGPT ‘Is This DEI?’ (not even smart enough to do the dirty work themselves)
Wilson Building Bulletin: To fight (Congress) or not to fight, that is the question (wimping out when faced with Republican lawbreaking: it’s not just for national professional Democrats anymore!)
10 Thoughts On “AI,” February 2026 Edition
Leaked Email Suggests Ring Plans to Expand ‘Search Party’ Surveillance Beyond Dogs
With state backing, Augusta County says no to ICE facility
“The most powerful crime syndicate in history”
Strategic Bombing and the Pop History Problem: Reviewing Malcom Gladwell’s “The Bomber Mafia”
Ohio GOP mayor accused of sniffing underage relative’s underwear (his last name is Dingus–we need new scriptwriters)
AI bots may lead to the end of the internet as we know it
Republicans keep pretending Trump can bail them out in November
Popularism!
After leaving WHO, Trump officials propose more expensive replacement to duplicate it
Ah, Well, Nevertheless
Offshore wind triumphs over Trump in court, but future projects face delays
GGWash endorses Janeese Lewis George for mayor of the District of Columbia
After the massive sewage spill into the Potomac, a shitload of questions remain
Moonlighting: D.C. Rental Housing Administrator Solicits Landlord Clients For His Side Gig. Terrance Laney was put on leave after City Paper asked about the potential conflict of interest in his dual roles.
Goldman Lawyer, Epstein Conferred on Secret Service Prostitution Scandal. In a series of 2014 emails, the wealthy financier gave advice to the former White House counsel as the Colombian incident blew up.
Labor Secretary’s Husband Barred From the Department After Sexual Assault Reports
Inflation Is Down, But Americans Still Feel an Affordability Squeeze
After Censoring CBS, Trump Will Go For CNN
‘No expense has been spared’: Inside a luxury jet DHS wants to buy for deportations
Yeah, US Olympians are woke. Deal with it. Sports have always been political — it’s just a question of who’s speaking out.
You may soon need a passport to vote. Trump is making it harder to get one.
For LGBTQ Winter Olympians, visibility matters just as much as medals
Tabletop industry veteran Ryan Dancey loses Alderac COO job after saying AI can generate game ideas as good as some of his company’s designs
Under Mamdani, City to Probe Businesses Where Most Workers Take Zero Sick Days. Employers will be subject to an investigation by the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection if more than half their employees took zero paid time off in a given year.
Republican congressman’s anti-Muslim remark prompts calls for his resignation
We’re pediatricians. We see how ICE is harming children.
Crypto super PAC wades into Illinois House primaries
Vernor Vinge’s sci-fi novel Rainbows End (2006) is so prescient about AI training data.
His short Fast Times at Fairmont High (2002) is set in the same universe, and was written in that era where we felt like we had line of sight to pervasive augmented reality and also 3D printers. I read it at the time and it’s a low-stakes high school drama (about augmented reality and 3D printers), but from today’s perspective it is more like a utopia (of a certain kind) – democratised tools of production, reality as consensus hallucinations, super empowered kids.
The spine of Rainbows End is something called the “Librareome Project.”
Ok SPOILERS – right? So stop here if you’re planning to read the book (which would you).
The Librareome Project, you find out about a third of the way through, is a giant digitisation project of the world’s knowledge, and they plan to scan the world’s libraries to do it.
"But didn’t Google already do that?"
Yes but this is more total; like the Human Genome Project the whole is more than the sum of its parts:
It’s not just the digitization. It goes beyond Google and company. Huertas intends to combine all classical knowledge into a single, object-situational database with a transparent fee structure.
(Oh yeah, micropayments, there’s a whole model here.)
We’re not told what an object-situational database is. But this singular thing makes possible correlations that will reveal new knowledge:
Who really ended the Intifada? Who is behind the London art forgeries? Where was the oil money really going in the latter part of the last century? Some answers will only interest obscure historical societies. But some will mean big bucks. And Huertas will have exclusive rights to this oracle for six months.
I mean, this is so Large Language Model. 2006!!
An oracle!
This promise is why the universities are allowing their libraries to be scanned.
Uh, “scanned.”
The books are shredded. Fed into the wood chipper and blasted into a tunnel and photographed at high resolution:
The pictures coming from the camera tunnel are analyzed and reformatted. It’s a simple matter of software to reorient the images, match the tear marks and reconstruct the original texts in proper order. In fact–besides the mechanical simplicity of it all–that’s the reason for the apparent violence. The tear marks come close to being unique. Really, it’s not a new thing. Shotgun reconstructions are classic in genomics.
"The shredded fragments of books and magazines flew down the tunnel like leaves in tornado, twisting and tumbling." – the image has stuck with me since I read it.
Anyway.
The libraries are being fed into the maw of the machines.
And it turns out that Chinese Informagical, which "has dibs on the British Museum and the British Library," was going faster than Huertas so they don’t have their monopoly.
And the Chinese have nondestructive digitisation techniques, so none of it was necessary.
Well.
Court filings reveal how AI companies raced to obtain more books to feed chatbots, including by buying, scanning and disposing of millions of titles (Washington Post, paywall-busting link).
I’m not trying to make a point here like “AI is bad” (you know me well enough and I’m pleased that my own book lives in the weights of the god machine) but one story reminds me of the other, and there is a violence intrinsic to creation, in this case the creation of new knowledge, slamming together words in the particle collider of linear algebra, something is lost but new exotic shimmering sparks appear - grab them! - and I guess what I mean is let’s recognise the violence and be worthy of it: if we’re going to do this then let’s at least reach for oracles.
Auto-detected kinda similar posts:
The Reverend Jesse Jackson died on February 17, 2026, at age 84. Tying together the past and the future, this weekend’s annual commemorative crossing of the Edmund Pettus Bridge will honor his legacy.
The past that his legacy will honor is rooted in March 7, 1965, when marchers set out across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, headed for the state capital at Montgomery.
The trigger for their march was the shooting death of an unarmed 26-year-old, Jimmy Lee Jackson, but their journey had begun a full three years before, in 1963, when Black organizers in the Dallas County Voters League launched a drive to get Black voters in Selma registered. They had chosen Selma because while there were more Black people than white people among the 29,500 people who lived in Selma, the city’s voting rolls were 99% white.
In 1964, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, but the measure did not adequately address the problem of voter suppression. In Selma a judge had stopped protests over voter registration by issuing an injunction prohibiting public gatherings of more than two people.
To call attention to the crisis in her city, Amelia Boynton, a member of the Dallas County Voters League acting with a group of local activists, traveled to Birmingham to invite the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. to the city. King had become a household name after delivering his “I Have a Dream” speech at the 1963 March on Washington, and his presence would bring national attention to Selma’s struggle.
King and other prominent members of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) arrived in January to push the voter registration drive. For seven weeks, Black residents tried to register to vote. County Sheriff James Clark arrested almost 2,000 of them on a variety of charges, including contempt of court and parading without a permit. A federal court ordered Clark not to interfere with orderly registration, so he forced Black applicants to stand in line for hours before taking a “literacy” test. Not a single person passed.
Then on February 18, white police officers, including local police, sheriff’s deputies, and Alabama state troopers, beat and shot an unarmed 26-year-old, Jimmie Lee Jackson, who was marching for voting rights at a demonstration in his hometown of Marion, Alabama, about 25 miles northwest of Selma. Jackson had run into a restaurant for shelter along with his mother when the police started rioting, but they chased him and shot him in the restaurant’s kitchen.
Jackson died eight days later, on February 26.
The leaders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Selma decided to defuse the community’s anger by planning a long march—54 miles—from Selma to the state capitol to draw attention to the murder and voter suppression.
On March 7, 1965, the marchers set out. As they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, named for a Confederate brigadier general, Grand Dragon of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan, and U.S. senator who stood against Black rights, state troopers and other law enforcement officers met the unarmed marchers with billy clubs, bullwhips, and tear gas. They fractured future U.S. representative John Lewis’s skull and beat Amelia Boynton unconscious. A newspaper photograph of the 54-year-old Boynton, seemingly dead in the arms of another marcher, illustrated the depravity of those determined to stop Black voting.
Images of “Bloody Sunday” on the national news mesmerized the nation, and supporters began to converge on Selma. King, who had been in Atlanta when the marchers first set off, returned to the fray and asked faith leaders to join him.
A young seminary student from Chicago named Jesse Jackson organized a group of students to answer King’s call. Born in South Carolina in 1941, Jackson was president of his high school class and at Greensboro’s North Carolina A&T College became active in the civil rights movement. After graduating from college in 1964, Jackson began his studies at Chicago Theological Seminary.
The marchers set out again on March 9. Once again, the troopers and police met them at the end of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, but this time, King led the people in prayer and then took them back to Selma. That night, a white mob beat to death a Unitarian Universalist minister, James Reeb, who had come from Massachusetts to join the marchers.
On March 15, President Lyndon B. Johnson addressed a nationally televised joint session of Congress to ask for the passage of a national voting rights act. “Their cause must be our cause too,” he said. “[A]ll of us…must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.” Two days later, he submitted to Congress proposed voting rights legislation.
The marchers remained determined to complete their trip to Montgomery, but Alabama’s governor, George Wallace, refused to protect them. So President Johnson stepped in. When the marchers set off for a third time on March 21, they had the protection of 1,900 members of the nationalized Alabama National Guard, FBI agents, and federal marshals. Covering about ten miles a day, they camped in the yards of well-wishers, their ranks growing as they walked. When they arrived at the Alabama State Capitol on March 25, they numbered about 25,000 people.
On the steps of the capitol, speaking under a Confederate flag, Dr. King said: “The end we seek is a society at peace with itself, a society that can live with its conscience. And that will be a day not of the white man, not of the black man. That will be the day of man as man.”
That night, Viola Liuzzo, a 39-year-old mother of five who had arrived from Michigan to help after Bloody Sunday, was murdered by four Ku Klux Klan members who tailed her as she ferried demonstrators out of the city.
On August 6, Dr. King and Mrs. Boynton were guests of honor as President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Recalling “the outrage of Selma,” Johnson said: “This right to vote is the basic right without which all others are meaningless. It gives people, people as individuals, control over their own destinies.”
But many of the marchers recognized that civil rights needed economic justice. Before he left Selma to go back to Chicago, Jesse Jackson asked Ralph Abernathy, a pastor and civil rights activist who was King’s closest friend and advisor, for a job with SCLC to prepare to spread the civil rights movement from the South into northern cities. King hired Jackson to lead Chicago’s Operation Breadbasket, a campaign that created economic opportunities in Black communities by boycotting businesses that would not hire Black employees. In 1967, Jackson became the national director of Operation Breadbasket.
After clashes with Abernathy, who took over SCLC after King’s assassination, in 1971 Jackson launched his own organization for economic empowerment: Operation PUSH (People United to Save Humanity). In 1984, Jackson left the organization to run for president. In a speech at the 1984 Democratic National Convention, after Republican president Ronald Reagan had turned the country sharply away from the liberal programs of the past thirty years, Jackson reminded Americans: “Our flag is red, white, and blue, but our nation is a rainbow—red, yellow, brown, black, and white—and we’re all precious in God’s sight.”
“America is not like a blanket—one piece of unbroken cloth, the same color, the same texture, the same size,” he said. “America is more like a quilt: many patches, many pieces, many colors, many sizes, all woven and held together by a common thread. The white, the Hispanic, the black, the Arab, the Jew, the woman, the Native American, the small farmer, the businessperson, the environmentalist, the peace activist, the young, the old, the lesbian, the gay, and the disabled make up the American quilt…. [W]e have experienced pain but progress, as we ended American apartheid laws. We got public accommodations. We secured voting rights. We obtained open housing, as young people got the right to vote.” But he noted the losses, too, including “Martin…and Viola.” Jackson pulled together a “Rainbow Coalition” to build a base of those hurt by the new direction of the country. In 1996, his organizations merged.
Jackson’s funeral services today in Chicago were packed with mourners, including former presidents Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden. Obama recalled how Jackson paved the way for people like him by promising everyone “that they mattered, that their voices and their votes counted. He invited them to believe. He invited us to believe in our own power to change America for the better.”
Obama continued: “He was talking about everyone who was left out, everyone who was forgotten, everyone who was unseen, everyone who was unheard. And in that sense, he was expressing the very essence of what our democracy should be, the ideals at the very heart of the American experiment, the belief that regardless of what we look like or how we worship, regardless of where our ancestors come from or how much money we got, we’re all part of the American family. We’re all endowed with the same inalienable rights to life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We’re all obligated to answer the call and step forward and take responsibility for making wrongs right and for caring for our neighbors, and bringing the reality of America a step closer to its glorious ideals.”
“We are living in a time when it can be hard to hope,” Obama said. “Each day we wake up to some new assault on our democratic institutions, another setback to the idea of the rule of law, an offense to common decency. Every day you wake up to things you just didn’t think were possible. Each day, we’re told by those in high office to fear each other and to turn on each other, and that some Americans count more than others, and that some don’t even count at all. Everywhere we see greed and bigotry being celebrated and bullying and mockery masquerading as strength, we see science and expertise denigrated while ignorance and dishonesty and cruelty and corruption are reaping untold rewards. Every single day we see that, and it’s hard to hope in those moments. So it may be tempting to get discouraged, to give into cynicism. It may be tempting for some to compromise with power, and grab what you can, or even for good people to maybe just put your head down and wait for the storm to pass.”
But, Obama said, Jackson’s life “inspires us to take a harder path. His voice calls on each of us to be heralds of change, to be messengers of hope…. Wherever we have a chance to make an impact, whether it’s in our school or our workplaces or our neighborhoods or our cities, not for fame, not for glory, or because success is guaranteed, but because it gives our life purpose, because it aligns with what our faith tells us God demands, and because if we don’t step up, no one else will.”
—
Notes:
https://www2.census.gov/prod2/decennial/documents/37721510v1p2.pdf
https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/selma-montgomery-march
https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/jackson-jesse-louis
https://mississippi-www.brtsite.com/newsdetail/851041
https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/abernathy-ralph-david
https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/operation-breadbasket
https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/barack-obama-jesse-jackson-memorial-speech-full-transcript/
Here's a recent paper showing that work from home (WFH) increases fertility, expecially if both couples work from home. The proposed mechanism is that WFH offers increased flexiblilty for child care...
Work from Home and Fertility by Cevat Giray Aksoy, Jose Maria Barrero, Nicholas Bloom, Katelyn Cranney, Steven J. Davis, Mathias Dolls, and Pablo Zarate, January 29, 2026
Abstract: We investigate how fertility relates to work from home (WFH) in the post-pandemic era, drawing on original data from our Global Survey of Working Arrangements and U.S. Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes. Realized fertility from 2023 to early 2025 and future planned fertility are higher among adults who WFH at least one day a week and, for couples, higher yet when both partners do so. Estimated lifetime fertility is greater by 0.32 children per woman when both partners WFH one or more days per week as compared to the case where neither does. The implications for national fertility rates differ across countries due mainly to large differences in WFH rates. In a complementary analysis using other U.S. data, one-year fertility rates in the 2023-2025 period rise with WFH opportunities in one’s own occupation and, for couples, in the partner’s occupation.
"Flexibility in when, where, and how to work – or the absence of such flexibility – is a potentially important factor in fertility decisions (Goldin, 2014, 2021). Jobs that allow work from home (WFH) typically offer more flexibility in these respects, making it easier for parents to combine child rearing with employment, and perhaps raising fertility. In this light, we investigate how realized and planned fertility relate to the WFH status of individuals and couples."
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The FT has this on that:
Could working from home solve the global fertility crisis?
New research shows allowing more flexibility to fit jobs around family could enable people to have more children by Ashley Armstrong
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One can imagine that having both members of a couple work from home might raise fertility even more directly than through the prospect of increased flexibility for child care. In that respect, WFH reminds me of Philip Larkin’s 1974 poem Annus Mirabilis:
1. Baby names banned in Mexico?
2. Blind hearing tests for audiophiles.
3. AI models and the Coase conjecture.
4. Stopping unwanted audio recordings.
5. Swedish shootings continue to plummet.
6. The dangers of diplomatic parties in Iran.
The post Saturday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
In our textbook, Modern Principles, Tyler and I write:
Imagine how difficult it would be to get a date if every date required marriage? In the same way, it’s more difficult to find a job when every job requires a long-term commitment from the employer.
In two new excellent pieces, Brian Albrecht and Pieter Garicano extend this partial equilibrium aphorism with some general equilibrium reasoning. Here’s Albrecht:
[I]magine there is a surge for Siemens products. Do you hire a ton of workers to fill that demand? No, you’re worried about having to fire them in the future but being stuck until they retire.
But it’s even worse than that…..[suppose Siemens does want to hire] where is Siemens getting those workers from?…Not only is it a problem for Siemens that they won’t be able to fire people down the road, the fact that BMW doesn’t fire anyone means you can’t hire people.
Garicano has an excellent piece, Why Europe doesn’t have a Tesla, with lots of detail on European labor law:
Under the [German] Protection Against Dismissal Act, the Kündigungsschutzgesetz, redundancies over ten employees must pass a social selection test (Sozialauswahl). Employers cannot choose who leaves: they must rank employees by age, years of service, family maintenance obligations, and degree of disability, and then prioritize dismissing those with the weakest social claim to the job. If someone is dismissed for operational reasons but the company posts a similar job elsewhere, the dismissal is usually invalid.
Disabled employees can be dismissed only with the approval of the Integration Office (Integrationsamt), a public body. The office will weigh the employer’s reasons, whether they have taken sufficient steps to integrate the employee, and whether they could be redeployed elsewhere in the organization. Workers who also become caregivers cannot be dismissed at all for up to two full years after they tell their bosses they fulfill that role.
As a company becomes larger and tries to let more workers go at once these difficulties increase. In many European countries, companies with more than a certain number of workers – 50 in the Netherlands, 5 in Germany – are obliged to create a works council, which represents employees and, in some countries, must give its approval to decisions the employer wants to make regarding its employees, including layoffs or pay rises or cuts.
…Companies that are allowed to fire someone and can afford to pay the severance costs have to wait and pay additional fees. Collective dismissal procedures in Germany start after 30 departures within a month; once triggered they require further negotiations with the works council, a waiting period, and the creation of a ‘social plan’ with more compensation for departing workers. When Opel shut down its Bochum factory in Germany, it reached a deal with the works council to spend €552 million on severance for the 3,300 affected employees. This included individual payments of up to €250,000 and a €60 million plan to help workers find new jobs.
Now what is the effect of regulations like this? Well obviously the partial equilibrium effect is to reduce hiring but in addition Garicano notes that it changes what sorts of firms are created in the first place. If you are worried about being burdened by expensive dismissal procedures, build a regulated utility with captive government contracts, not a radical startup with a high probability of failure.
Rather than reduce hiring in response to more expensive firing, companies in Europe have shifted activity away from areas where layoffs are likely. European workers are for sure, solid work only. This works well in periods of little innovation, or when innovation is gradual. The continent, however, is poorly equipped for moments of great experimentation.
…Europe’s companies have immense, specialized knowledge [due to retained workforces, AT]. The problems happen when radical innovation is needed, as in the shift from gasoline to electric vehicles. The great makers of electric cars have either been new entrants, like Tesla and BYD, or old ones who have had their insides stripped, like MG.
..If Europe wants a Tesla, or whatever the Tesla of the next decade will turn out to be, it will need a new approach to hiring and firing.
The post The Hidden Cost of Hard-to-Fire Labor Laws: Why European Firms Don’t Take Risks appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Program will test large segmented optical system for future surveillance satellites
The post Air Force lab awards BlackSky contract worth up to $99 million for large optical satellite payload appeared first on SpaceNews.
NASA has selected the Centaur upper stage currently used on United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan rocket for future flights of the Space Launch System.
The post NASA selects Centaur for new SLS upper stage appeared first on SpaceNews.
The Vietnam draft conscripted hundreds of thousands of young Americans into an integrated military. I combine near-random draft lottery variation with administrative voter data to study the long-run racial integration effects of coerced national service. Black and Native American veterans became more likely to marry white spouses, identify as Republicans, and live in more-integrated neighborhoods. Improved economic standing may partly mediate these effects. Effects are larger for Southerners and are precisely null for white veterans. Coerced military service generates substantial but asymmetric cross-racial political convergence and racial integration: Vietnam-era service caused about 20 percent of affected cohorts’ interracial marriages.
That is from a recent NBER working paper by Zachary Bleemer.
The post The Vietnam War and racial integration appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Take some policy, action, or person whom you regard as morally questionable and indeed is morally questionable. That same policy, action, or person does some bad things, bad in conquentialist terms I now mean. Practically bad, utilitarian bad.
The odds are that you overrate the badness of those consequences by some considerable degree.
Even very smart people do this. Sometimes they do it more, because they can come up with more elaborate arguments for why the bad consequences are completely disastrous.
They might overrate the badness of those consequences by as much as 5x or 10x (gdp is a huge mound of stuff!).
So if you want to have better opinions, look for the cases where you do this and stop doing it.
Easy-peasy!
And good luck with that.
The post A simple way to improve your thought and conclusions appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
In his 1961 novel The Winter of Our Discontent, John Steinbeck wrote of loss, "It's so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone."
The death of NASA's Exploration Upper Stage today represents the inverse of that sentiment. The world of spaceflight is so much brighter now that its light has gone out.
The rocket's death came via a seemingly pedestrian notice posted on a government procurement website: "NASA/MSFC intends to issue a sole source contract to acquire next-generation upper stages for use in Space Launch System (SLS) Artemis IV and Artemis V from United Launch Alliance (ULA)."
It is common for people in elite circles to engage in magical thinking disconnected from reality.
For example, it is common for people engaged in policy debates to claim that we can get returns in the stock market that are totally unconnected to the rate of growth in the economy or to current levels of the price-to-earnings ratio.
We can’t.
That leads ostensibly serious people to project that we can get stock returns of 10 percent a year indefinitely, even when the price-to-earnings ratio is already near 40 to 1. (Before the 1929 and 1987 stock market crashes, the ratio was around 20 to 1, or about half the wildly inflated p-e ratio today.
It was also the standard wisdom that we could reduce tariff barriers to manufactured goods without any substantial negative impact on employment and wages. Even when the data clearly showed that a soaring trade deficit was costing millions of manufacturing jobs, most of the people who dominate policy debates denied reality.
The first decade of this Century was pretty awful for manufacturing workers. In December of 1999, we had 17.3 million manufacturing jobs. By December 2009, this fell to 11.5 million, a loss of 5.8 million jobs, or one-third of all the manufacturing jobs that had existed at the start of the decade. That looks like a pretty big deal.
In this vein, it is a widespread view among policy types that we can’t get innovation without patent monopolies.
This should strike the reality-based community as pretty whacked out.
After all, patent monopolies are only one way to provide incentives for innovation. So why in the world would any serious person think it’s the only way? After all, it’s undisputed that people will work for money.
Patent monopolies are especially problematic in the case of prescription drugs.
Drugs are almost invariably cheap to manufacture and distribute. Most drugs would sell for just five or ten dollars per prescription in a free market, but because we give a drug company a patent monopoly, a drug can cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars.
As everyone who has taken any economics knows, these patent-protected prices are an invitation for corruption.
When a company can sell a drug for $500 that costs $5 to manufacture and distribute, they have an enormous incentive to lie about its safety and effectiveness to get as many people as possible to buy it.
We saw this corruption most dramatically with the opioid crisis, where the manufacturers of the new generation of opioids misrepresented their addictiveness to have them prescribed as widely as possible. (This scandal is the motivating story in the CBS drama Matlock starring Kathy Bates.)
Opioids are an extreme case, but the problem of misrepresented research is widely recognized. Medical journals have to contend with ghost-authored articles, while medical associations have to worry that drug companies are paying conference speakers.
We could largely eliminate corruption by simply paying upfront for the research and then selling new drugs in a free market without expensive patent monopolies or related protections.
This is where Representative Rashida Tlaib’s Medicine for the People’s Act comes in. Her idea is to create a new division of the National Institutes of Health, the National Institute for Biomedical Research and Development.
This institute would be charged with developing drugs in important areas. It would be responsible for everything from basic research to developing an actual drug, running clinical trials, and eventually shepherding successful drugs through the FDA approval process. At that point, since it has all the rights to the new drug, the institute could allow the drug to be sold at a low free-market price.
In addition to the advantages of cheap drugs and reduced incentives for corruption, advanced funding of research should also enable greater transparency and faster sharing of research results. (No law requires drug companies to disclose results of testing on the many failed drugs.)
With patent monopoly financing, however, drug companies have an incentive to squirrel away their findings until they can secure them with a patent. By contrast, the institute’s interest would be in promoting good healthcare.
The bill would not prohibit drug companies from developing drugs on their own. And they could pitch ideas for funding to the proposed institute.
To that end, it would want to publicize any notable finding as quickly as possible.
Obviously, Representative Tlaib’s bill will not become law. Republicans control both houses of Congress and are not likely to give it a warm reception. Even if the Democrats controlled Congress, it’s unclear whether Tlaib’s bill would have much better prospects.
But Tlaib’s bill can be a jumping-off point for robust, serious debate about the best way to finance the development of new drugs. It is absurd that an archaic system like patent financing continues, unquestioned, in the 21st Century.
We can do much better with an alternative system like the one outlined in Tlaib’s bill.
We need—at the very least—to discuss better and cheaper ways to develop new and better drugs.
This opinion column, in slightly different form, was originally published on March 6, 2026, by the Center for Economic and Political Research. Photo is from their article and supplied by them.
“FREEDOM OF THE PRESS IS NOT JUST IMPORTANT TO DEMOCRACY, IT IS DEMOCRACY.” – Walter Cronkite. CLICK HERE to donate in support of our free and independent voice.
The post Drugs Would Be Cheap but for Patents That Make Them Expensive appeared first on DCReport.org.
NASA officially selected United Launch Alliance’s Centaur 5 as the upper stage for its Space Launch System rocket starting with the Artemis 4 mission, scheduled to launch no earlier than early 2028.
The Centaur 5 was developed as the upper stage of ULA’s Vulcan rocket. The launch vehicle flew four times since its debut in January 2024 and the upper stage performed well across all flights.
The news, disclosed in contract documents published on Friday, comes one week after NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman announced that the agency would move towards a “standardization of the [Space Launch System rocket] fleet to… a near-Block 1 configuration.”
“The idea is we want to reduce complexity to the greatest extent possible,” Isaacman said during a briefing at the Kennedy Space Center on Feb. 27. “We want to accelerate manufacturing, pull in the hardware, and increase launch rate, which obviously has a direct safety consideration to it as well.”
Originally, NASA planned to launch the first three missions for the Artemis program using ULA’s Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage (ICPS), a modified version of its Delta 4 Cryogenic Second Stage, and then transition to the Exploration Upper Stage (EUS), built by Boeing, beginning with the Artemis 4 mission.
NASA, under Isaacman’s leadership, decided to move away from those plans due to cost and schedule overruns.
Long before this decision, Tory Bruno, ULA’s President and CEO at the time, was asked during a reporter roundtable in December 2024 about how the company would handle a theoretical change in the architecture for the SLS rocket. The question came up a month after President Donald Trump was elected to a second term, which sparked discussions of whether or not the SLS plans at the time might change.
“The Exploration Upper Stage is a very, very large upper stage. It’s much larger than the Interim Cryogenic Upper Stage that we’re providing now. It’s larger than a Centaur 5,” Bruno said. “If the government wants to change something in the architecture of SLS, they would tell us and we would tell them what we could do.”
That ‘what if?’ scenario is now reality.
In its procurement statement, NASA said its intention is to issue a sole source contract to ULA, meaning it’s the only upper stage being considered for this new iteration of the SLS rocket. An eight-page supporting document from NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) in Huntsville, Alabama, was published to document the reasoning for its decision.
Among the stated reasons are the decades-long heritage of the RL10 engine, which has matured over time; the ability of the Centaur 5 to use the interfaces available on the Mobile Launcher 1 (ML1) along with the propulsion commodities of liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen; and the experience of ULA’s teams working with NASA’s Exploration Ground Systems (EGS) at the Kennedy Space Center and elsewhere in the country.
They also noted that with the Centaur 3 upper stage achieving certification to launch humans as part of the Commercial Crew Program, there are a lot of common features with the Centaur 5.
“This approach leverages current support infrastructure and will use, with relatively minor modifications, an existing ULA upper stage,” NASA said. “All other alternative solutions fail to meet the performance requirements, would require significant modifications to hardware that is still under-development, or would require the development of new hardware that does not currently exist.”
NASA also said a time constraint to this decision caused them to select ULA as its sole choice.
“The NASA Kennedy Space Center (KSC) need date for processing is projected to be nine months prior to a launch,” NASA said. “Award to another source would cause unacceptable delays to current launch schedules.
“These delays would derive from the procurement process, on/off ramping of new contractor personnel, the potential need for reworked activities, as well as efforts necessary to satisfy SLS technical and programmatic drivers.”
The other upper stage that may have been in contention was from Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket. Besides not having the previously stated advantages from NASA’s perspective, the agency also expressed concerns with the modifications needed to adopt Glenn Stage 2 for the ML1.
“Using the NGUS would require significant modifications to both the stage and the EGS infrastructure. For example, using NGUS would require relocating the Mobile Launcher Crew Access Arm and modification to the upper stage umbilical retraction mechanism,” NASA said.
“The stage could be shortened to meet VAB height constraints but would require full scale development and testing to qualify the stage for the shorter configuration. Full scale testing/requalification would result in unacceptable schedule impacts and additional cost risk to the SLS Program.”
Another GS2 ready to fly. We completed a 15-second hotfire with serial number 4 today. Incredible work by our New Glenn team ramping GS2 production. pic.twitter.com/Ltjq3psFwK
— Dave Limp (@davill) December 12, 2025
The original plan to use an EUS-enabled rocket would’ve enabled what NASA called “more ambitious missions” to the Moon, given that it would allow for the delivery of up to 11 metric tons more mass to the lunar surface under the Block 1B configuration as compared to the ICPS-powered Block 1 rocket.
However, a 2024 report from NASA’s Office of Inspector General found that, despite the SLS Block 1B being in development since 2014 and moving the first flight from Artemis 3 to Artemis 4, it continued to be behind schedule due in part to what the OIG called “quality control issues” at the Michoud Assembly Facility (MAF) in Louisiana.
“We project SLS Block 1B costs will reach approximately $5.7 billion before the system is scheduled to launch in 2028,” the report stated. “This is $700 million more than NASA’s 2023 Agency Baseline Commitment, which established a cost and schedule baseline at nearly $5 billion.
“EUS development accounts for more than half of this cost, which we estimate will increase from an initial cost of $962 million in 2017 to nearly $2.8 billion through 2028.”
The mid-2024 report also noted that at the time, delivery of the EUS to NASA was “delayed from February 2021 to April 2027.” That put the Artemis 4 flight, then projected for September 2028, to become further delayed.
Back in late September 2025, Spaceflight Now spoke with Sharon Cobb, the Associate Program manager for SLS at Boeing, about the Artemis 2 mission as well as the progress on the EUS.
“We’ve been working very diligently on Exploration Upper Stage. I was just at MAF last week and was able to see the liquid oxygen tank has been welded and tested,” Cobb said. “We’ve also got barrels in work there that are about to be welded for the flight unit. The LOX tank is a structural test article. So, we’re making really good progress on developing that Exploration Upper Stage.
Like with the core stage that launched the Artemis 1 mission, the plan was to perform what’s called a ‘green run’ with the EUS at NASA’s Stennis Space Center in Mississippi. That would include a full fueling of the upper stage and a full duration static fire test of the four RL10 engines as well.
Presumably, with this new direction for the SLS rocket, that will no longer take place, though NASA hasn’t specifically commented on what will happen with the EUS hardware currently in flow.
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Centered on maximum eclipse,
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