The second launch of New Glenn will aim for Mars

Blue Origin is making steady progress toward the second launch of its New Glenn rocket, which could occur sometime this fall.

The company already ignited the second stage of this rocket, in a pre-launch test, in April. And two sources say the first stage for this launch is in the final stages of preparation at the company's facilities in Cape Canaveral, Florida.

Publicly, the company has said this second launch will take place no earlier than August 15. This is now off the table. One source told Ars that a mid- to late-September launch date was "realistic," but another person said late October or November was more likely.

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Are these trees growing on Mars? Are these trees growing on Mars?


Austin Vernon on taxes on solar (from my email)

I think your question about new taxes on solar and wind is an interesting one, and increasing taxation has been an ongoing process for years.

Some of these tax increases are normal, like ending property tax exemptions. These taxes don’t impact project economics too severely, and the breaks create a lot of ill will at the local level.

Solar has seen constant tax increases and quotas on imported panels. Uncompetitive domestic producers, other competing energy sources, anti-trade folks, and China hawks all favor these taxes. The important metric is that buying panels in the US is 2x-3x more expensive per watt than in the rest of the world.

Solar panel factories are easy to build, and technology changes quickly. There is a Dutch boy and the dam effect. We constantly have to add new tariffs on different countries and new technologies (although foreign production from US-owned companies has generally been exempt). These tariffs have to get stiffer to maintain the balance.

A recent change was that the IRA finally led everyone to start building factories in the US. An absolute avalanche of panel factories is/was on the way with less activity for cells, wafers, and polysilicon. These factories might be viable without subsidies considering US panel prices. Most of the interest groups listed don’t appreciate this outcome, especially because many are Chinese-owned factories. Foreign Entity of Concern content and ownership penalties are the obvious solution as the next hole to put a finger in because many subcomponents would still be imported and the general kludge laws like that add.

The solar installation lobby has been satisfied with tax credits that counteract some of the high panel costs. These rules tend to discourage new technology in the fine print and skew incentives. Simpler, denser solar farm designs make sense once panels are cheap. There is no reason to make the switch if panels are expensive and the tax credit is based on the total install cost. Roughly 90% of US utility-scale installations have trackers that add cost but increase per panel output. In China, there are almost no trackers. There are also some nasty effects in the residential business that encourage complex financial products over streamlining construction and permitting.

It is an interesting crossroads where the tax credits are gone, and there is now a reason to have a more direct confrontation on panel cost. The battery industry is in the early stages of a similar conflict, but it seems like they might retain the deal with the devil and keep tax credits for now.

The post Austin Vernon on taxes on solar (from my email) appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

      

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Freddie Mac House Price Index Declined in May; Up 2.2% Year-over-year

Today, in the Calculated Risk Real Estate Newsletter: Freddie Mac House Price Index Declined in May; Up 2.2% Year-over-year

A brief excerpt:
Freddie Mac reported that its “National” Home Price Index (FMHPI) decreased -0.23% month-over-month (MoM) on a seasonally adjusted (SA) basis in May. On a year-over-year (YoY) basis, the National FMHPI was up 2.2% in May, down from up 2.6% YoY in April. The YoY increase peaked at 19.0% in July 2021, and for this cycle, bottomed at up 0.9% YoY in April 2023. ...

Freddie HPI CBSAAs of May, 31 states and D.C. were below their previous peaks, Seasonally Adjusted. The largest seasonally adjusted declines from the recent peaks are in D.C. (-4.7), Colorado (-3.1%), Idaho (-3.0%), Texas (-2.7%), and Florida (-2.2%).

For cities (Core-based Statistical Areas, CBSA), 257 of the 384 CBSAs are below their previous peaks.

Here are the 30 cities with the largest declines from the peak, seasonally adjusted. Austin continues to be the worst performing city. However, 4 of the 6 cities with the largest price declines are in Florida. Cities in Florida (10) and Texas (7) dominate this list.
There is much more in the article!

The Biggest Climate Problem You Aren't Thinking About

The Cross Section is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

The following is an interview with journalist Michael Grunwald about his new book, We Are Eating the Earth: The Race to Fix Our Food System and Save Our Climate. You can listen to the audio right here, or get it wherever you get your podcasts — just search for The Cross Section and subscribe. A transcript is also below.

TRANSCRIPT:

Paul Waldman: When you think about the sources of climate change, you probably think about power plants burning coal and natural gas, or cars and trucks with internal combustion engines spewing greenhouse gases out of their tailpipes. What you probably think less about is the production of the food we all eat. Well, my guest today is Michael Grunwald, a journalist who spent years writing about politics for the Washington Post and Politico and other publications, and then a few years ago, he began to focus his reporting on climate change. His new book, which is going to be released in a few days (available for pre-order now) is We Are Eating the Earth: The Race to Fix Our Food System and Save Our Climate. Mike, thank you so much for joining me.

Michael Grunwald: It's great to be with you, Paul.

Paul Waldman: So one of the themes of the book is that land is not free. Can you explain why that is such an important idea to understand how climate is affected by the need to feed all eight billion humans?

Michael Grunwald: It is true, land has a cost. Right now, two of every five acres on the planet are either cropped or grazed. That's what I mean when I say we are eating the earth. It all used to be natural, and now it's agricultural. And that's really the transformation of the planet. All that natural land used to store a lot of carbon. It also used to absorb some of the carbon that we pump into the atmosphere with our fossil fuels.

And when we clear it, we lose their carbon and we also lose their ability to absorb more carbon in the future. I say that trying to decarbonize the planet while you're continuing to vaporize trees, it's like trying to clean your house while you're smashing your vacuum cleaner to bits in the living room. That's really what this is about. And ultimately, the way we've analyzed our emissions, our climate problems – and this started with biofuels. My main character was just a wetlands lawyer who thought corn ethanol seemed like a dumb idea because he didn't like corn. But he realized that the various sort of analyses, they call them life-cycle analyses that show whether this stuff makes any sense for the climate, were ignoring land. They were treating land as if it were free.

They were ignoring this idea that if you use land to grow fuel, you can no longer use it to grow food. It has an opportunity cost. And of course, probably what's going to happen is that somewhere else you're going to grow more food and it's not going to be in a parking lot. It's going to be in a forest or a wetland. And really it was this kind of eye-opening notion that, gosh, for biofuels we're completely ignoring land. And it turns out that biofuels are eating about one Texas worth of the earth, but agriculture is eating 75 Texases worth of the earth. And we've had really a similar blind spot when it comes to considering what that means for the planet and particularly the climate.

Paul Waldman: And at least agriculture gets you something you want, which is food. The biofuels question was something that I found kind of eye-opening. I had always just figured, well, it doesn't seem like it gets you very much. There really is no real environmental benefit to biofuels like ethanol. Presidential candidates go to Iowa every four years and talk about how great ethanol is. But what I didn't realize until reading your book is that it's actually terrible for the environment. It's not just that it doesn't get you very much. It's actually bad.

Michael Grunwald: Yeah, it's really bad. And now, course, since electric cars are sort of threatening the ethanol program, right? Because really all of our ethanol programs that all of the candidates agri-pander about in Iowa are just about increasing the price of corn and other grains, which is of course great for the corn farmers and bad for those of us who eat or use fuel.

“All of our ethanol programs that all of the candidates agri-pander about in Iowa are just about increasing the price of corn and other grains, which is of course great for the corn farmers and bad for those of us who eat or use fuel.”

But now with electric vehicles, they're really worried that there's going to be no demand for that, so they're trying to put grain into our planes. And in fact, in the Big Beautiful Bill, which as you know takes about a trillion dollars in cuts to various clean energy subsidies that are actually clean, but there's 50 billion dollars in new money for “sustainable aviation fuels.” And along with that, they've put in some language that prohibits the people analyzing the climate impact of these biofuels from looking at land use. So again, it's sort of like corn and soy wasn't penciling out, so they're essentially telling the government to put down their pencils.

Paul Waldman: Now, one of the things you talk a lot about in the book is beef. The problem seems to be that people really love beef. And maybe you could explain why it is so problematic from a climate standpoint compared to other kinds of food.

Michael Grunwald: It’s true. People say that the meat is a problem and it is; we eat 350 million tons of meat every year. And I'm not going to pretend that chicken and pork are not worse than beans and lentils. If you can go vegan, that is the best diet for the climate. But it turns out that beef is like 10 times worse than chicken or pork. So if you just cut out beef and lamb like I have, you're basically just as good as a vegetarian because vegetarians tend to eat more and tend to eat more dairy. And really, cows, cattle are the baddies. I'm sure people have heard about how they burp and fart a lot of methane. They also poop and that creates all kinds of problems. But the real problem is how much land they use.

In the United States, we use half of our agricultural land to produce beef that provides about 3% of our calories. Cattle are just incredibly inefficient converters of their feed into our food, which is why grass-fed beef is even worse than feedlot finished beef, because they're a little bit more efficient. Beef really are a problem. Cows are the problem. At least dairy, they're providing food several times a day. But of course, beef cattle only provide food once. If you care about the climate and the planet, there are a million things you can do to try to reduce your impact, but the number one easiest and best is to eat less beef.

Paul Waldman: That brings up another question. When you say the words industrial agriculture or factory farming, most people, even people who eat meat, have negative associations with that. But when it comes to the climate effects of food production, the story is somewhat more complicated. And that gentle family farm may actually be worse for the climate than the factory farm despite all the other things that the factory farm might bring with it that are problematic. But can you explain a little bit what it is about industrial agriculture that actually in some ways is better than the kind of small family farms of the past when it comes specifically to climate change?

Michael Grunwald: No, that's right. And I get why people hate industrial agriculture because it treats animals badly, treats people badly. Most of the people running it, their politics suck, and they're lobbying against environmental regulation and climate action. They use too many antibiotics, which is a public health crisis of its own. And yeah, these factory farms are sort of unpleasant. They dump a lot of poop into the rivers. They do lots of things that people don't like.

That said, they produce a lot of food. This is what factories do. They manufacture cheap commodities in big numbers and the world is going to need 50% more food in the next 25 years. We’re going to have to make more food than we've made in the last 10,000 years. And it's going to have to do that with less land. And that is something that industrial agriculture does pretty well. It's not the only way to have high yields, but high yields are really important.

We need to make more food per acre so that we can use fewer acres to make food. Michael Pollan, who writes beautifully, has created for a lot of us this idea that there's kind of good farming, natural farming, kinder and gentler farming that's more diverse, fewer chemicals, not these horrible industrial chemical-soaked monocultures that people don't like. But the fact is that the real environmental damage that's done by agriculture is that transformation of nature into farms.

“Michael Pollan, who writes beautifully, has created for a lot of us this idea that there's kind of good farming, natural farming, kinder and gentler farming that's more diverse, fewer chemicals, not these horrible industrial chemical-soaked monocultures that people don't like. But the fact is that the real environmental damage that's done by agriculture is that transformation of nature into farms.”

Even the nice Michael Pollan bucolic farms, that's when you lose all the biodiversity. That's where you lose all the carbon. And there is an additional cost to intensifying those little farms. It's not so great for the microbiome to be bombing it with chemicals and have only corn and soy. But the fact is, the real damage was when you lose the nature in the first place and industrial agriculture or certainly high yield agriculture can help us use, lose less land.

The Green Revolution tripled our yields since the 1960s. So that this amount of food would take three times more land if we hadn't had this Green Revolution with chemicals and GMO seeds and large-scale irrigation and factory farms and all kinds of things that people don't like.

Paul Waldman: And so are there ways out there to, looking into the future as more and more people around the world, their incomes go up, which means they want to eat more meat, among other things, are there ways to increase those yields that maybe that don't come with a lot of those negative externalities?

Michael Grunwald: Yeah, and this is part of what I talk about in the book is this idea that maybe we can have a greener green revolution. The 20th century was a lot about chemistry. And so you have these fertilizers that are literally manufactured from natural gas. And they're the reason that we have these algal blooms in the Great Lakes and that we have a dead zone the size of Connecticut in the Gulf of Mexico. If I'm still allowed to call it that. I'm sure I am on your pod.

But the fact is that these fertilizers help stuff grow and pesticides are really good at killing pests. So I think in the future, and I write about dozens of potential solutions in my book, but a lot of them have to do with using biology instead of chemistry. I write about a company like Pivot Bio, which is backed by Bill Gates, and they make this kind of alternative fertilizer where they gene edit microbes to essentially grab nitrogen out of the air and feed it to crops instead of pouring chemicals on it. And that's very exciting. It's on 5 million acres in the United States and it's replacing about a fifth of the fertilizer. And that's just great. I write about a bio pesticide where they're actually using the mRNA technology behind the COVID vaccines to literally constipate potato beetles to death.

And in a way it's sort of like, it's like sending Jason Bourne into just take out the bad guys instead of just like a nuclear bomb that takes out everybody and all the good bugs as well as the bad bugs. So I think there's a lot of exciting technologies. Scientists at the University of Illinois are literally trying to reinvent photosynthesis, which has done a pretty good job supporting life on earth for a few billion years, but turns out to have some real inefficiencies. And they're using artificial intelligence and modern gene editing and big data to try to figure out where the inefficiencies are and edit them out. And they think they can increase crop yields 50% over the next two or three decades. So there's a lot of exciting things happening.

You even mentioned with beef, where I went down to Brazil and I saw these ranches where they were, in some ways, modern industrial ranches where they had the massive tractors and feed lots and they fertilized their pastures in ways that Michael Pollan would hate. But then they also use some of these kinder and gentler regenerative practices that Michael Pollan pushes. Cover crops, and no-till farming, and they integrate, they let the cows eat the cover crops and then they have these mob-grazing approaches to the cows and basically all kinds of things that are sort of not doing it because they read Michael Pollan, just doing it because kick-ass yields are good for farmers and it turns out good for the planet. So I do think there's a lot of hope out there, but I also point out that none of these solutions are very far along and they are going to require some government support.

Paul Waldman: Well, speaking of things that are not very far along, let's talk about fake meat. We've had these kind of up and down hype cycles for a lot of these things, whether it's Impossible Burgers, various kinds of cultivated meat, which is actual meat that is grown in a lab or in something that looks like a lab. But as of yet, none of them have panned out the way people have hoped. Can you talk a bit about why that has happened? What is the cycle that these new products go through when they get all this money from venture capitalists, and then, I feel like in reading your book, the number 98 % kept coming up, that their stock prices went down by 98% happened to one company after another.

Michael Grunwald: Yeah, these are hard times. A lot of these investors are really, really hating life. It's funny, I actually started my reporting this book for this book at the Good Food Institute conference in 2019. They're kind of like the trade group for fake meat of all sorts. And at the time, this was a couple of months after Beyond Meat went public, and at the time, Beyond was worth about a third as much as Tyson Foods.

And the mood at this conference was just like the exuberance was off the charts. People were having serious conversations about whether it would take one decade or two to completely eliminate the meat industry. My joke was that I thought I was going to accidentally raise a series A round in the drinks line. Look, at the time it was like, hey, meat is kind of inefficient, right? Cows have hooves, cows have tails, they poop, they burp, they do all kinds of breathing and have reproductive systems that don't produce meat. Why don't we just replace that, right? Instead of putting 25 calories into a cow, 25 calories of plants into a cow to make one calorie of meat. Why don't we just make it out of plants, sort of recreate that architecture?

The idea was, these aren't going to be the same old hockey puck veggie burgers. And they were better than that. And there was a lot of excitement about that. But they weren't better than meat. Like, meat's really awesome. A lot of my friends told me like, especially since I'm still eating chicken and pork, you're quitting beef, in a month, you won't even miss it. I miss it. You know, when I when I went to Brazil and visited those visited those cattle ranches, I fell off the wagon. I had a bunch of really awesome local steaks. And so I get it.

I went back to GFI, the Good Food Institute conference in 2023, towards the end of my reporting. And there it was all doom and gloom. And it was like, we're screwed, we're never going to make it. This was all a bad idea. What were we thinking? And I again thought that was excessive, right? I mean, it's, like, yeah, you came out with these products. They were not as cheap and not as good as meat. So it did not do very well in the marketplace. But to me, the answer is like just like with Tesla, electric cars, you got to make them better. Now, electric vehicles and solar and wind, they had a lot of government support that helped them get better. And you're starting to see a little bit of that, obviously not in the U.S. right now under Trump, but around the world you're starting to see some government support for alternative proteins, but it's very early.

Cultivated meat has had $3 billion in investment in its entire history, and we put in $250 billion into solar in a quarter. So, I haven't given up on it. And again, this stuff is really important, because it's 90% less land and 95% fewer emissions. So if you're looking for ways to get us to eat less beef, the vegan approach of like “meat is murder, you suck, stop doing that” hasn't really worked so well. Maybe this can.

“Cultivated meat has had $3 billion in investment in its entire history, and we put in $250 billion into solar in a quarter. So, I haven't given up on it. And again, this stuff is really important, because it's 90% less land and 95% fewer emissions. So if you're looking for ways to get us to eat less beef, the vegan approach of like “meat is murder, you suck, stop doing that” hasn't really worked so well. Maybe this can.”

Paul Waldman: I do wonder if that history and the way it is politicized is an impediment not just to the fake meats that are made from plant matter, but even to the cultivated meat, which is meat. You live in Florida. Your governor, Ron DeSantis, I think it was maybe last year, signed a bill outlawing the sale of cultivated meat in Florida, which was not for sale anywhere in Florida, or I don't even know if it's for sale anywhere. It has these small startups that have produced, you know, one hamburger or one piece of salmon or whatever. And there really is no logical reason why Ron DeSantis should be out there saying, we are never going to give up our beef and, you know, be forced – I think he even said in that press conference something about how we're not going to let the global elite force us to eat bugs, as though that was something that anyone is actually trying to make them do. But it just slots well into that kind of culture war that politicians like him love to wage. And I wonder if you think that's going to be an impediment forever for cultivated meat or if that might fade away, if it actually becomes reasonably priced and you can actually get a real steak or a real hamburger that just happens to have been grown in a vat.

Michael Grunwald: You raise exactly the right question, and I am definitely worried about this. You don't want these things to be “Biden burgers,” just like you didn't want electric vehicles to be Obama mobiles. Ideally, what was it Michael Jordan said? That Republicans buy shoes too. And you want them to buy meat substitutes. That said, as electric vehicles got better and cheaper, they got more popular. And certainly solar is seen as, that's the ultimate “woke” energy. And they're actually trying to ban it on farmland in a lot of rural counties. But the market has really spoken on solar, and the politics can end up delaying the transition, but it's just so efficient and has gotten so cheap that in most of the world, if you're building a new power plant, it's probably a wind or solar plant. And so the hope is that over time, cultivated meat and plant-based meat will get so good and so cheap that it will become this kind of overwhelmingly compelling product that will overcome some of these, “Oh, it's ultra processed garbage, it's a woke burger.” But I'm not going to pretend it's not a challenge. On the list of challenges that these things have, that's a real one.

“The hope is that over time, cultivated meat and plant-based meat will get so good and so cheap that it will become this kind of overwhelmingly compelling product that will overcome some of these, “Oh, it's ultra processed garbage, it's a woke burger.” But I'm not going to pretend it's not a challenge.”

Paul Waldman: Well, let me ask you, you have probably tried more different kinds of substitute, fake and cultivated meats than almost anyone. Which ones did you find the most tasty?

Michael Grunwald: Well, I will say that a lot of the cultivated meat, you can't tell the difference. That is really extraordinary. And it's not that extraordinary, right? Cause it tastes like chicken because it's chicken. It's made from actual chicken cells. And particularly the ones I've had like at Upside Foods, I’ve had chicken that was a hundred percent chicken. I think the stuff you're going to start seeing in the marketplace, it's going to be blended with plant-based material.

But that was better than chicken because it was made from not these kind of industrial chickens that are bred for fast growth and, all kinds of nastiness, but from the original heritage chickens that certainly taste chicken-ier. So that was incredible. I've had cultivated sushi from Wildtype and lox that was made from salmon cells and that was delicious.

Mission Barns should be on the market very soon. They do a little bit of cultivated fat, pork fat, and they blend it into plant-based meatballs. And I've had their salami as well, which it's really good. And even with the small percentages, partly because fat is such an overwhelming part of the taste of a lot of meat, it turns out. So one thing I've noticed with cultivated meat is that it does sort of send that meat message to my brain, I call it like kind of two million years of evolution saying hi.

On the plant-based side and the mycelium, the kind of fungus-based side, there it's more kind of like they're trying to copy meat. And on things like chicken nuggets, they're just as good. There's no longer any reason to have a chicken-based chicken nugget. I mean, who even knows what's in those things. They're mostly just a vehicle for sauce anyway. But the more complicated you get, I've tried a couple of plant-based and fungi-based steaks and they were just not there yet. I've heard talk that there are a couple of companies that are making a lot of progress there, but again, meat is a really good product. We've been eating it for a very long time. Most people don't care about the climate, so it's going to be very difficult to sort of put together a value proposition where people are like, “Hey, I want this stuff instead of the delicious cheap stuff I've been eating for so long.”

Paul Waldman: Well, let's turn to politics. So the Biden administration put a lot of its climate effort in the legislation that it passed – the Inflation Reduction Act, the infrastructure bill – into agriculture. And this was, I think, in part an effort to show red America that they were interested in their welfare too. That's where a lot of their other climate efforts went. The vast majority of spending on things like subsidies for green industries went into Republican areas. But that was true of agriculture too. And I wonder as that stuff has developed (and obviously now a lot of it is being repealed by the Trump administration and Republicans, we can talk about that in a second), but what was your assessment of that package of policies as it related to agriculture and what the Biden administration was trying to do?

Michael Grunwald: Well, they definitely had a theory of the case. And you sort of alluded to it. They put like 20 billion dollars into what they called climate smart agriculture. And so, again, the theory was it's going to be all carrots, no sticks, that there's no point in trying to tell these guys in rural America, you have to do this, that they're skeptical of climate stuff anyway. They're just going to rebel and they have too much political power. You've got to give them an incentive. You basically got to say, here's some money, try to do some good stuff with it. And the idea was that these kind of Republican farmers wearing the John Deere hats are going to be like, “Hey, this actually works. It's pretty good.” And sort of embrace it.

There were real debates inside the White House. One of Biden's aides was really pushing for, you want to work on nitrous oxide, you want to work on methane, because these are basically like trying to incentivize them to use less fertilizer, try to incentivize them to manage their manure better, things that we actually know how to do a little bit and are not that complicated and could actually really move the needle quickly. But the administration, [Secretary of Agriculture] Tom Vilsack and some of his aides were really in love with this idea of carbon farming, this idea that you could get these guys to do these regenerative practices that you might've seen in movies like Kiss the Ground or Common Ground. And the idea is that essentially by kinder and gentler farming, you're going to take some of that carbon that our fossil fuels have pumped into the sky and kind of magically move it underground to our soils.

The science on it really sucks. But the compromise was, okay, we're going to go ahead and do it, we're going to throw billions of dollars at it, but we're also going to put some money into measuring it. So we'll at least see if it works. And that actually was a reasonable compromise. But of course, as you say, the experiments are going to be a waste of time because they didn't get far enough to really see if they work. There was some money for, I write about, there's a methane reducing project on rice fields. That's been a massive success. Instant reductions in emissions. And I feel like if they had done more of that, where they could have shown some results? And that project, now they're selling their emissions reductions in the carbon markets, they’re going to be able to continue to do it and expand their program without government subsidies. That's how it's supposed to work. That's how the Obama stimulus really did with clean energy, while this was really kind of trying to make “fetch” happen with this carbon farming stuff, and so far it has not happened.

Paul Waldman: And the all carrot, no stick approach, that seems to be a general conclusion of the entire environmental movement across all issues. We're not going to do carbon taxes. Let's just make this nice and easy for people. They get so spooked by the idea that they're asking people to make any kind of sacrifice that they figured that if we can just throw a bunch of carrots in front of people, then maybe we can get to the same kinds of climate goals that we were trying to with those other means.

Michael Grunwald: And it's not a crazy idea, particularly with the power of the agriculture industry, which is throughout my book. I tell stories about the kind of absurd amount of power they have and the ridiculous length that members of Congress will go to pander to them. That said, from a democratic perspective, there's really bipartisan support for a lot of these biofuels, for farm subsidies and for every kind of farm subsidy, for crop insurance and loan deficiency payments and conservation payments that are often just to like help farmers build fences and put lids on their manure, lagoons and all kinds of things that we wouldn't really think is like major environmental investments.

Around the world there are six hundred billion dollars worth of agricultural subsidies every year, and why should the United States be any different? But from a Republican perspective, it's terrible, it's certainly not conservative. And it's, in my opinion, terrible public policy. But at least Republicans are getting votes out of it. They're dominating even more and more in rural America. Well, Democrats seem to be happy to throw just as much, in some cases, even more money at these farmers. And they're getting nothing for it.

I always like to point out that when you look at the Farm Bureau, their manifesto about what we stand for, the number one thing they stand for is that marriage is between a man and a woman. And so it has nothing to do with farming, but they know who their people are. And to me, that just is a suggestion that this idea that throwing more money at them is going to somehow be good politics, I've been very skeptical of that.

I always like to point out that when you look at the Farm Bureau, their manifesto about what we stand for, the number one thing they stand for is that marriage is between a man and a woman. And so it has nothing to do with farming, but they know who their people are. And to me, that just is a suggestion that this idea that throwing more money at them is going to somehow be good politics, I've been very skeptical of that.

I'm not sure I have a better idea, other than don't do that. I'm not sure how to bring rural America on board with the Democratic Party, somebody smarter than me is going to have to figure that out. But certainly, we all know what the definition of insanity is and Democrats seem pretty committed to doing the same thing over and over and getting nothing for it.

Paul Waldman: That's a whole topic that I've written lots about that we could go on about.

Michael Grunwald: I've heard, should we discuss white rural rage?

Paul Waldman: Well, it is now out in paperback. Briefly, my position has been that the problem Democrats have is that they haven't been willing to really attack Republicans. And even though there is consensus on things like farm subsidies, you see now how many different ways the Trump administration is harming people in rural America who were some of Trump's most devoted supporters. And it's happening in a lot of different ways. Things like cutting Medicaid, which is a dire threat to rural hospitals. About 200 rural hospitals have either closed completely or dramatically reduced their services in the last 20 years or so. And when you go to rural communities, the two biggest employers are always the closest hospital and the local school district. And so people depend on them, not just for healthcare, but for jobs.

That's just one example. There are all kinds of different ways that that rural America is being harmed. Lots of programs that are being cut. Rural development programs and things like that. The problem Democrats have is that when they come back into those rural areas, which a lot of which in a lot of cases they have abandoned, which left it so that Republicans didn't have to do anything to win elections, they do so in a very apologetic way. And the recommendation that they always get from rural liberals is, you have to show up, and you have to be respectful and show people that you understand where they're coming from. And that is maybe necessary, but not sufficient.

And what they haven't done is really waged any kind of full-on attack on the ways that the Republicans who were elected in those areas from every office, president down to dog catcher, have failed those people. And so I think Democrats have to talk more about that and they have to be more frank, and to say, you have been sold a bill of goods. The people that you’ve been electing have betrayed you. And if you are not going to vote for Democrats, at the very least, you ought to get yourself some better Republicans.

Michael Grunwald: I think that's right. I’m coming at this more from a farm policy perspective, but it's not like the money that they're showering on these really rich, big farmers is really doing much for rural communities. It does something. I come back to this a lot, there used to be this kind of this sort of grand bargain: Urban people can have their food stamps and rural people will get their farm subsidies and everybody will go along with it. But since Republicans are now backing off the food stamp deal, you'd think that now more than ever, this is a time for Democrats to at the very least say, hey, if we're going keep throwing all this money at you, we've got to at least have some responsibility here. There has to be a grand bargain. We'll even help you make more food.

Trump is running around cutting agricultural research when we should be going in the opposite direction. But the fact is, we want you to make a lot of food, but you've got to do it with less of a mess. And that's really what has to happen with agriculture around the world. And it's going to be hard. But I do give the example of Denmark –which, I know, I know, it’s Denmark – but they just passed a massive agricultural reform, partly because their climate policy has been so aggressive in other areas that their energy sector is pretty clean. And now their agriculture sector is an outlier. But instead of doing what the enviro wanted, which was to kind of shut down the Danish dairy and pork industries, which are really efficient and just would have essentially outsourced their emissions abroad, there's going to be a lot of investment in helping them get even more efficient, but also cleaner with all kinds of new technologies.

At the same time, there's going to be a tax on agricultural emissions. There's going to be a national effort to promote sort of plant forward eating. And they're going try to rewild like a million acres of farmland, turn it back to nature. That would be hard in the United States, like a tax on emissions. I talked to one guy, a pollster who said that taxes on meat are the least popular policy he had ever polled. He said it was like veterans benefits for ISIS.

So these things are hard. If it were easy, somebody would have done it long ago. And these are really pressing problems, not just for foofy climate people, but for people who care about feeding the world, for hungry people and for people who just care about the Amazon. It would be nice to have the lungs of the earth and we’re cutting it down really fast. We're losing a soccer field worth of tropical forest every six seconds. I know that's not going to be the number one priority in American politics, but probably ought to be a priority.

Paul Waldman: Well is a great place to end. Mike, thank you so much for joining me. Again, the name of the book is We Are Eating the Earth, the Race to Fix Our Food System and Save Our Climate. Michael Grunwald, thank you so much.

Michael Grunwald: Thanks for all your good work, Paul.

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Tip: Use keyword-only arguments in Python dataclasses

Tip: Use keyword-only arguments in Python dataclasses

Useful tip from Christian Hammond: if you create a Python dataclass using @dataclass(kw_only=True) its constructor will require keyword arguments, making it easier to add additional properties in the future, including in subclasses, without risking breaking existing code.

Via @chipx86.bsky.social

Tags: python

How to Fix Your Context

How to Fix Your Context

Drew Breunig has been publishing some very detailed notes on context engineering recently. In How Long Contexts Fail he described four common patterns for context rot, which he summarizes like so:

  • Context Poisoning: When a hallucination or other error makes it into the context, where it is repeatedly referenced.
  • Context Distraction: When a context grows so long that the model over-focuses on the context, neglecting what it learned during training.
  • Context Confusion: When superfluous information in the context is used by the model to generate a low-quality response.
  • Context Clash: When you accrue new information and tools in your context that conflicts with other information in the prompt.

In this follow-up he introduces neat ideas (and more new terminology) for addressing those problems.

Tool Loadout describes selecting a subset of tools to enable for a prompt, based on research that shows anything beyond 20 can confuse some models.

Context Quarantine is "the act of isolating contexts in their own dedicated threads" - I've called rhis sub-agents in the past, it's the pattern used by Claude Code and explored in depth in Anthropic's multi-agent research paper.

Context Pruning is "removing irrelevant or otherwise unneeded information from the context", and Context Summarization is the act of boiling down an accrued context into a condensed summary. These techniques become particularly important as conversations get longer and run closer to the model's token limits.

Context Offloading is "the act of storing information outside the LLM’s context". I've seen several systems implement their own "memory" tool for saving and then revisiting notes as they work, but an even more interesting example recently is how various coding agents create and update plan.md files as they work through larger problems.

Drew's conclusion:

The key insight across all the above tactics is that context is not free. Every token in the context influences the model’s behavior, for better or worse. The massive context windows of modern LLMs are a powerful capability, but they’re not an excuse to be sloppy with information management.

Tags: ai, prompt-engineering, generative-ai, llms, drew-breunig, llm-tool-use, ai-agents

We’re All Rats Now

Zohran Mamdani’s upset victory in New York’s Democratic primary has created panic in MAGAland. Stephen Miller, the architect of Donald Trump’s deportation policies, waxed apocalyptic:

Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, declared that New York is about to turn into “Caracas on the Hudson.”

And Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama basically declared New York’s voters subhuman, saying:

These inner-city rats, they live off the federal government. And that’s one reason we’re $37 trillion in debt. And it’s time we find these rats and we send them back home, that are living off the American taxpayers that are working very hard every week to pay taxes.

These reactions are vile, and they’re also dishonest. Whatever these men may claim, it’s all about bigotry.

Miller isn’t concerned about the state of New York “society.” What bothers him is the idea of nonwhite people having political power.

Bessent isn’t really deeply worried about Zamdani’s economic ideas. But he feels free, maybe even obliged, to slander a foreign-born Muslim with language he would never use about a white Christian politician, even if that politician were (like some of his colleagues in the Trump administration) a total crackpot.

And while Tuberville stands out even within his caucus as an ignorant fool, his willingness to use dehumanizing language about millions of people shows that raw racism is rapidly becoming mainstream in American politics.

Remember, during the campaign both Trump and JD Vance amplified the slanders about Haitians eating pets.

And now that they’re in office, you can see the resurgence of raw racism all across Trump administration policies, large and small. You can see it, for example, in the cuts at the National Institutes of Health, which are so tilted against racial minorities that a federal judge — one appointed by Ronald Reagan! — declared

I’ve never seen a record where racial discrimination was so palpable. I’ve sat on this bench now for 40 years. I’ve never seen government racial discrimination like this.

You can see it in the renaming of military bases after Confederate generals — that is, traitors who fought for slavery.

You can even see it in a change in the military’s shaving policy that is clearly custom-designed to drive Black men — who account for around a quarter of the Army’s new recruits — out of the service.

So racism and bigotry are back, big time. Who’s safe? Nobody.

Are you a legal immigrant? Well, the Supreme Court just allowed Trump to summarily strip half a million U.S. residents of that status, and only a fool would imagine that this is the end of the story. Anyway, when masked men who claim to be ICE agents but refuse to show identification are grabbing people off the streets because they think those people look illegal, does legal status even matter? Does it even matter if you’re a U.S. citizen?

And the One Big Beautiful Bill Act is set to massively increase ICE’s funding — basically setting up a huge national secret police force.

Now, maybe you imagine that you yourself won’t suffer from this new reign of bigotry and imagine that everyone you care about is similarly safe. But if that’s what you think, you’re likely to face a rude awakening.

I personally don’t have any illusions of safety. Yes, I’m a native-born white citizen. But my wife and her family are Black, and some of my friends and relatives are foreign-born U.S. citizens.

Furthermore, I’m Jewish, and anyone who knows their history realizes that whenever right-wing bigotry is on the ascendant, we’re always next in line. Are there really people out there naïve enough to believe MAGA’s claims to be against antisemitism, who can’t see the transparent cynicism and dishonesty?

The fact is that the Trump administration already contains a number of figures with strong ties to antisemitic extremists. The Great Replacement Theory, which has de facto become part of MAGA’s ideology, doesn’t just say that there’s a conspiracy to replace whites with people of color; it says that it’s a Jewish conspiracy.

So I’m definitely scared of what the many antisemites inside or with close ties to the Trump administration may eventually do. And no, I’m not frightened at all by the prospect that New York may soon have a somewhat leftist Muslim mayor.

Anyway, my personal fears are beside the point. Everyone who cares about keeping America America needs to take a stand against the resurgence of bigotry. Because the truth is that we’re all rats now.

MUSICAL CODA

llvm: InstCombine: improve optimizations for ceiling division with no overflow - a PR by Alex Gaynor and Claude Code

llvm: InstCombine: improve optimizations for ceiling division with no overflow - a PR by Alex Gaynor and Claude Code

Alex Gaynor maintains rust-asn1, and recently spotted a missing LLVM compiler optimization while hacking on it, with the assistance of Claude (Alex works for Anthropic).

He describes how he confirmed that optimization in So you want to serialize some DER?, taking advantage of a tool called Alive2 to automatically verify that the potential optimization resulted in the same behavior.

Alex filed a bug, and then...

Obviously the next move is to see if I can send a PR to LLVM, but it’s been years since I was doing compiler development or was familiar with the LLVM internals and I wasn’t really prepared to invest the time and energy necessary to get back up to speed. But as a friend pointed out… what about Claude?

At this point my instinct was, "Claude is great, but I'm not sure if I'll be able to effectively code review any changes it proposes, and I'm not going to be the asshole who submits an untested and unreviewed PR that wastes a bunch of maintainer time". But excitement got the better of me, and I asked claude-code to see if it could implement the necessary optimization, based on nothing more than the test cases.

Alex reviewed the resulting code very carefully to ensure he wasn't wasting anyone's time, then submitted the PR and had Claude Code help implement the various changes requested by the reviewers. The optimization landed two weeks ago.

Alex's conclusion (emphasis mine):

I am incredibly leery about over-generalizing how to understand the capacity of the models, but at a minimum it seems safe to conclude that sometimes you should just let the model have a shot at a problem and you may be surprised -- particularly when the problem has very clear success criteria. This only works if you have the capacity to review what it produces, of course. [...]

This echoes Ethan Mollick's advice to "always invite AI to the table". For programming tasks the "very clear success criteria" is extremely important, as it helps fit the tools-in-a-loop pattern implemented by coding agents such as Claude Code.

LLVM have a policy on AI-assisted contributions which is compatible with Alex's work here:

[...] the LLVM policy is that contributors are permitted to use artificial intelligence tools to produce contributions, provided that they have the right to license that code under the project license. Contributions found to violate this policy will be removed just like any other offending contribution.

While the LLVM project has a liberal policy on AI tool use, contributors are considered responsible for their contributions. We encourage contributors to review all generated code before sending it for review to verify its correctness and to understand it so that they can answer questions during code review.

Back in April Ben Evans put out a call for concrete evidence that LLM tools were being used to solve non-trivial problems in mature open source projects:

I keep hearing #AI boosters / talking heads claiming that #LLMs have transformed software development [...] Share some AI-derived pull requests that deal with non-obvious corner cases or non-trivial bugs from mature #opensource projects.

I think this LLVM optimization definitely counts!

(I also like how this story supports the idea that AI tools amplify existing human expertise rather than replacing it. Alex had previous experience with LLVM, albeit rusty, and could lean on that knowledge to help direct and evaluate Claude's work.)

Tags: alex-gaynor, compilers, llvm, open-source, ai-assisted-programming, anthropic, claude, coding-agents, claude-code

Agentic Coding: The Future of Software Development with Agents

Agentic Coding: The Future of Software Development with Agents

Armin Ronacher delivers a 37 minute YouTube talk describing his adventures so far with Claude Code and agentic coding methods.

A friend called Claude Code catnip for programmers and it really feels like this. I haven't felt so energized and confused and just so willing to try so many new things... it is really incredibly addicting.

I picked up a bunch of useful tips from this video:

  • Armin runs Claude Code with the --dangerously-skip-permissions option, and says this unlocks a huge amount of productivity. I haven't been brave enough to do this yet but I'm going to start using that option while running in a Docker container to ensure nothing too bad can happen.
  • When your agentic coding tool can run commands in a terminal you can mostly avoid MCP - instead of adding a new MCP tool, write a script or add a Makefile command and tell the agent to use that instead. The only MCP Armin uses is the Playwright one.
  • Combined logs are a really good idea: have everything log to the same place and give the agent an easy tool to read the most recent N log lines.
  • While running Claude Code, use Gemini CLI to run sub-agents, to perform additional tasks without using up Claude Code's own context
  • Designing additional tools that provide very clear errors, so the agents can recover when something goes wrong.
  • Thanks to Playwright, Armin has Claude Code perform all sorts of automated operations via a signed in browser instance as well. "Claude can debug your CI... it can sign into a browser, click around, debug..." - he also has it use the gh GitHub CLI tool to interact with things like GitHub Actions workflows.

"Tip 1: Unified Logging" at top, followed by title "Forward Everything Into One Log File" and bullet points: "Combine console.log + server logs + everything else", "patch console.log in the browser -> forward to server via API call", "All output streams flow to a single, tailable log file", "Give it a way to log out SQL too!", "Provide a make tail-logs command for easy access". Bottom shows example: "# Example" and "make tail-logs  # Shows last 50 lines, follows new output".

Tags: armin-ronacher, ai, generative-ai, llms, ai-assisted-programming, anthropic, claude, ai-agents, model-context-protocol, claude-code

Space Force eyes maneuverable satellites and cloud-based control software to outpace threats in orbit

“Maneuver is pretty critical to warfighting,” said Kelly Hammett, director of the Space Rapid Capabilities Office

The post Space Force eyes maneuverable satellites and cloud-based control software to outpace threats in orbit appeared first on SpaceNews.

Chinese spacecraft begin rendezvous and proximity operations in geostationary orbit

Shijian-21 lifting off atop a Long March 3B on Oct. 24, 2021. The Shijian-21 spacecraft later successfully docked with a defunct Chinese satellite to alter its orbit.

China’s Shijian-21 and Shijian-25 are conducting proximity operations for a second time high above the Earth as a precursor to an expected on-orbit refueling test.

The post Chinese spacecraft begin rendezvous and proximity operations in geostationary orbit appeared first on SpaceNews.

Space is hard. There is no excuse for pretending it’s easy.

Starship ship

The headlines in the space industry over the past month have delivered a sobering reminder: space is not forgiving, and certainly not friendly to overpromising entrepreneurs. From iSpace’s second failed […]

The post Space is hard. There is no excuse for pretending it’s easy. appeared first on SpaceNews.

Moog Completes Major Building Expansion to Enhance Space Actuation and Avionics Manufacturing Capabilities

Moog logo

Moog hardware enables weekly space launches for commercial and government customers

The post Moog Completes Major Building Expansion to Enhance Space Actuation and Avionics Manufacturing Capabilities appeared first on SpaceNews.

Monday assorted links

1. Ferris Bueller’s vest sells for 279k.

2. “The strength of Earth’s magnetic field seems to rise and fall in line with the abundance of oxygen in the planet’s atmosphere, a study of geological records spanning the past half a billion years has found.

3. Fully synthetic, successful AI cultural product.

4. The cost of being cancelled.

5. Studying the emotional content of paintings over time.

6. Why European defense spending hikes might not work (NYT).

The post Monday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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FHFA’s National Mortgage Database: Outstanding Mortgage Rates, LTV and Credit Scores

Today, in the Calculated Risk Real Estate Newsletter: FHFA’s National Mortgage Database: Outstanding Mortgage Rates, LTV and Credit Scores

A brief excerpt:
Here are some graphs on outstanding mortgages by interest rate, the average mortgage interest rate, borrowers’ credit scores and current loan-to-value (LTV) from the FHFA’s National Mortgage Database through Q1 2025 (released last Friday).
...
FHFA Percent Mortgage Rate First LienThis shows the surge in the percent of loans under 3% starting in early 2020 as mortgage rates declined sharply during the pandemic.

Note that a fairly large percentage of mortgage loans were under 4% prior to the pandemic!

The percent of outstanding loans under 4% peaked in Q1 2022 at 65.1% (now at 53.4%), and the percent under 5% peaked at 85.6% (now at 71.3%). These low existing mortgage rates made it difficult for homeowners to sell their homes and buy a new home since their monthly payments would increase sharply.

This was a key reason existing home inventory levels were so low. However, time is eroding this lock-in effect.
There is much more in the article.

It's raining stars. It's raining stars.


Housing June 30th Weekly Update: Inventory up 0.3% Week-over-week, Up 28.7% Year-over-year

Altos reports that active single-family inventory was up 0.3% week-over-week.

Inventory is now up 33.1% from the seasonal bottom in January and is increasing.   Usually, inventory is up about 20% from the seasonal low by this week in the year.   So, 2025 is seeing a larger than normal pickup in inventory.

The first graph shows the seasonal pattern for active single-family inventory since 2015.

Altos Year-over-year Home InventoryClick on graph for larger image.

The red line is for 2025.  The black line is for 2019.  

Inventory was up 28.7% compared to the same week in 2024 (last week it was up 30.7%), and down 14.1% compared to the same week in 2019 (last week it was down 13.2%). 

This is the highest level since November 2019.

For 2019, this was the week inventory peaked for the year (then moved sideways for several months), so any further increase this year will close to gap to 2019.  It now appears inventory will be close to 2019 levels towards the end of 2025.

Altos Home InventoryThis second inventory graph is courtesy of Altos Research.

As of June 27th, inventory was at 831 thousand (7-day average), compared to 829 thousand the prior week. 

Mike Simonsen discusses this data regularly on Youtube

How Cybersecurity Fears Affect Confidence in Voting Systems

American democracy runs on trust, and that trust is cracking.

Nearly half of Americans, both Democrats and Republicans, question whether elections are conducted fairly. Some voters accept election results only when their side wins. The problem isn’t just political polarization—it’s a creeping erosion of trust in the machinery of democracy itself.

Commentators blame ideological tribalism, misinformation campaigns and partisan echo chambers for this crisis of trust. But these explanations miss a critical piece of the puzzle: a growing unease with the digital infrastructure that now underpins nearly every aspect of how Americans vote.

The digital transformation of American elections has been swift and sweeping. Just two decades ago, most people voted using mechanical levers or punch cards. Today, over 95% of ballots are counted electronically. Digital systems have replaced poll books, taken over voter identity verification processes and are integrated into registration, counting, auditing and voting systems.

This technological leap has made voting more accessible and efficient, and sometimes more secure. But these new systems are also more complex. And that complexity plays into the hands of those looking to undermine democracy.

In recent years, authoritarian regimes have refined a chillingly effective strategy to chip away at Americans’ faith in democracy by relentlessly sowing doubt about the tools U.S. states use to conduct elections. It’s a sustained campaign to fracture civic faith and make Americans believe that democracy is rigged, especially when their side loses.

This is not cyberwar in the traditional sense. There’s no evidence that anyone has managed to break into voting machines and alter votes. But cyberattacks on election systems don’t need to succeed to have an effect. Even a single failed intrusion, magnified by sensational headlines and political echo chambers, is enough to shake public trust. By feeding into existing anxiety about the complexity and opacity of digital systems, adversaries create fertile ground for disinformation and conspiracy theories.

Testing cyber fears

To test this dynamic, we launched a study to uncover precisely how cyberattacks corroded trust in the vote during the 2024 U.S. presidential race. We surveyed more than 3,000 voters before and after election day, testing them using a series of fictional but highly realistic breaking news reports depicting cyberattacks against critical infrastructure. We randomly assigned participants to watch different types of news reports: some depicting cyberattacks on election systems, others on unrelated infrastructure such as the power grid, and a third, neutral control group.

The results, which are under peer review, were both striking and sobering. Mere exposure to reports of cyberattacks undermined trust in the electoral process—regardless of partisanship. Voters who supported the losing candidate experienced the greatest drop in trust, with two-thirds of Democratic voters showing heightened skepticism toward the election results.

But winners too showed diminished confidence. Even though most Republican voters, buoyed by their victory, accepted the overall security of the election, the majority of those who viewed news reports about cyberattacks remained suspicious.

The attacks didn’t even have to be related to the election. Even cyberattacks against critical infrastructure such as utilities had spillover effects. Voters seemed to extrapolate: “If the power grid can be hacked, why should I believe that voting machines are secure?”

Strikingly, voters who used digital machines to cast their ballots were the most rattled. For this group of people, belief in the accuracy of the vote count fell by nearly twice as much as that of voters who cast their ballots by mail and who didn’t use any technology. Their firsthand experience with the sorts of systems being portrayed as vulnerable personalized the threat.

It’s not hard to see why. When you’ve just used a touchscreen to vote, and then you see a news report about a digital system being breached, the leap in logic isn’t far.

Our data suggests that in a digital society, perceptions of trust—and distrust—are fluid, contagious and easily activated. The cyber domain isn’t just about networks and code. It’s also about emotions: fear, vulnerability and uncertainty.

Firewall of trust

Does this mean we should scrap electronic voting machines? Not necessarily.

Every election system, digital or analog, has flaws. And in many respects, today’s high-tech systems have solved the problems of the past with voter-verifiable paper ballots. Modern voting machines reduce human error, increase accessibility and speed up the vote count. No one misses the hanging chads of 2000.

But technology, no matter how advanced, cannot instill legitimacy on its own. It must be paired with something harder to code: public trust. In an environment where foreign adversaries amplify every flaw, cyberattacks can trigger spirals of suspicion. It is no longer enough for elections to be secure – voters must also perceive them to be secure.

That’s why public education surrounding elections is now as vital to election security as firewalls and encrypted networks. It’s vital that voters understand how elections are run, how they’re protected and how failures are caught and corrected. Election officials, civil society groups and researchers can teach how audits work, host open-source verification demonstrations and ensure that high-tech electoral processes are comprehensible to voters.

We believe this is an essential investment in democratic resilience. But it needs to be proactive, not reactive. By the time the doubt takes hold, it’s already too late.

Just as crucially, we are convinced that it’s time to rethink the very nature of cyber threats. People often imagine them in military terms. But that framework misses the true power of these threats. The danger of cyberattacks is not only that they can destroy infrastructure or steal classified secrets, but that they chip away at societal cohesion, sow anxiety and fray citizens’ confidence in democratic institutions. These attacks erode the very idea of truth itself by making people doubt that anything can be trusted.

If trust is the target, then we believe that elected officials should start to treat trust as a national asset: something to be built, renewed and defended. Because in the end, elections aren’t just about votes being counted—they’re about people believing that those votes count.

And in that belief lies the true firewall of democracy.

This essay was written with Ryan Shandler and Anthony J. DeMattee, and originally appeared in The Conversation.

Dog walking (and driving with dogs) in Iran

As we wait to see if the Israel-Iran cease fire will hold, we can hope that the new normal will become better than the old normal, in both Israel and Iran, in so many ways.

 Here's some  not-so-urgent Middle East news from the NYT (just before the latest outbreak of hostilities) that gave some idea of what was on the minds of authorities in Iran when relative peace prevailed.

‘Dog Walking Is a Clear Crime’: Iran’s Latest Morality Push
The government regards pet dogs as a sign of Western cultural influence. They are also considered impure, in Islam. Now there is a crackdown.
  By Amelia Nierenberg and Leily Nikounazar  June 9, 2025

"When Iran banned dog walking in 2019, few dog owners were all that worried about the order. But after years of lax enforcement, officials in recent days have pledged to crack down, according to the state news media.

Prosecutors in at least 20 cities cited public health risks and threats to public safety in announcing the heightened enforcement of the bans, which include both dog walking and driving with dogs.

Dog walking is a clear crime,” Mohammad Hossein Doroudi, the prosecutor in Mashhad, told reporters on Monday as he announced that city’s plan,  according to IRNA, a state-owned news outlet. "

Dehumidifier

It's important for devices to have internet connectivity so the manufacturer can patch remote exploits.

The cosmic distance ladder with Terence Tao: part two

Illustration of two turquoise beams pointing from the Milky Way galaxy toward another galaxy on a black background.

An engrossing look at how knowledge has grown alongside our technologies, and how we might unlock the puzzles of the Universe

- by Aeon Video

Watch at Aeon

Walk in these

Photo of ornate 18th-century women’s shoes with floral embroidery and green trim on a neutral background.

Shoes are deeply personal, literally moulded to our lives. But they create our social lives as much as express them

- by Matthew McCormack

Read at Aeon

Big News: Tillis Retiring

Classic Trump-era chain of events. North Carolina Sen. Tom Tillis said he’d vote against the “Big Beautiful Bill.” Trump announced he’d choose one of the Tillis’ primary opponents to support. Only hours later, Tillis announced he’s retiring. This is pretty big news for the midterms. Tillis retiring almost certainly makes a North Carolina Senate pick up more likely for Democrats, especially if former governor Roy Cooper runs, which now seems increasingly likely though still not certain.

To be clear, Dems’ chances of taking control of the Senate are still very challenging, even assuming a very good political environment. Basically, they have to pick up Maine and North Carolina — both doable but by no means gimmes. Then they need to find two more pick ups. And for those you need to starting looking in states like Iowa and Texas and Florida. So it’s a pretty big challenge, to put it mildly. That said, I think the political class is generally underestimating Republican electoral vulnerability. A lot can happen in a wave election. But the challenges for the Senate are no joke.

Some European countries have mastered a happiness trick?

Using Eurobarometer data for 21 Western European countries since 1973 we show the U-shape in life satisfaction by age, present for so long, has now vanished. In 13 northern European countries – Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey and the UK – the U-shape has been replaced by life satisfaction rising in age. We confirm these findings with evidence from the European Social Surveys, the Global Flourishing Survey and Global Minds. Evidence of change in the U-shape is mixed for Austria and France. In six southern European countries – Cyprus, Greece, Italy, Malta, Spain and Portugal – the U-shape was replaced by life satisfaction declining in age. In these southern European countries, life satisfaction of the young has been rising since around 2015. A contributory factor is the rapid decline in youth unemployment from its 2015 peak.

Here is the full NBER paper by David G. Blanchflower and Alex Bryson.

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Take a closer look, something’s missing...

Imagine a telescope... are you thinking of one? What are the parts you think are vital? For an optical telescope (ones that watch the skies in the visible spectrum of light) there is one thing they can’t go without... a mirror. 

In this Picture of the Week, we’re taking a peek behind the scenes at the Unit Telescope 2, a part of the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Paranal, Chile. It’s looking a bit empty behind the yellow barricades, as its main 8 m mirror has been removed for recoating. The mirror is covered with a thin layer of highly reflective aluminium that needs to be reapplied every 18 months to ensure the telescope captures as much light as possible. With this key piece missing, the telescope didn't do any observing for a few days — but don’t worry, the mirror is already back with a fresh, dust free surface.  

While it’s gone though, we get a chance to see the true enormity of the telescopes internal structure. If you look closely, you can see a whole cherry-picker (with a worker inside it) easily fit within the space where the mirror used to be.

The world’s most expensive toll?

A bridge connects Copenhagen and Malmo, and now the price is higher:

…the basic price for a one-way car journey across the bridge has been jacked up to 510 Danish kroner, or £58. For the largest vans, it is the equivalent of £218.

Research by Sydsvenskan, a regional newspaper in southern Sweden, suggests this is by far the most expensive bridge toll on the planet, costing about twice as much as its nearest rivals in Japan and Canada…

Despite the vehicle toll, the total number of people crossing the Oresund by car, train or ferry hit a record 38 million last year, equivalent to about 105,000 trips a day. A one-way railway journey between central Copenhagen and Malmo typically costs only £13.

Here is the full story from The Times.  I find this intrinsically interesting, but I also would like to make a simple point.   If you are assessing the optimal toll here, claims that “the higher toll limited congestion,” or “the higher toll diminished the number of car trips” are not dispositive.  They are relevant information, but one also has to measure whether gains from trade across the two polities went down as well.  Otherwise, you do not have much of a conclusion.

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Big, beautiful budgets: not just an American problem

Across the rich world, governments are splashing the cash. What could go wrong?

Sunday 29 June 1662

(Lord’s day). Up by four o’clock, and to the settling of my own accounts, and I do find upon my monthly ballance, which I have undertaken to keep from month to month, that I am worth 650l., the greatest sum that ever I was yet master of. I pray God give me a thankfull, spirit, and care to improve and encrease it.

To church with my wife, who this day put on her green petticoat of flowred satin, with fine white and gimp lace of her own putting on, which is very pretty. Home with Sir W. Pen to dinner by appointment, and to church again in the afternoon, and then home, Mr. Shepley coming to me about my Lord’s accounts, and in the evening parted, and we to supper again to Sir W. Pen. Whatever the matter is, he do much fawn upon me, and I perceive would not fall out with me, and his daughter mighty officious to my wife, but I shall never be deceived again by him, but do hate him and his traitorous tricks with all my heart. It was an invitation in order to his taking leave of us to-day, he being to go for Ireland in a few days.

So home and prayers, and to bed.

Read the annotations

Sunday Night Futures

Weekend:
Schedule for Week of June 29, 2025

Monday:
• At 9:45 AM ET, Chicago Purchasing Managers Index for June.

• At 10:30 AM, Dallas Fed Survey of Manufacturing Activity for June.

From CNBC: Pre-Market Data and Bloomberg futures S&P 500 are up 17 and DOW futures are up 212 (fair value).

Oil prices were down over the last week with WTI futures at $65.52 per barrel and Brent at $67.77 per barrel. A year ago, WTI was at $83, and Brent was at $82 - so WTI oil prices are down about 21% year-over-year.

Here is a graph from Gasbuddy.com for nationwide gasoline prices. Nationally prices are at $3.17 per gallon. A year ago, prices were at $3.49 per gallon, so gasoline prices are down $0.32 year-over-year.

Links 6/29/25

Links for you. Science:

Study finds removing school mask mandates contributed to 22,000 U.S. COVID deaths in a year
A minimum data standard for wildlife disease research and surveillance
Bill Cassidy: A Profile in Cowardice. The Louisiana Republican knew better than to vote for public health enemy RFK Jr. He did it anyway.
It turns out weather on other planets is a lot like on Earth
50 years after ‘Jaws,’ sharks are in trouble
Universe’s mysteries may never be solved because of Trump’s Nasa cuts, experts say

Other:

America slides into totalitarianism — and it won’t be easy to reverse: “Authoritarianism” is so 2018 — Donald Trump and his minions want to conquer all of civil society
The top five problems with Bowser’s RFK deal (solutions included)
Come One, Come All!
Facing a decision on Iran, Trump is as befuddled as ever
L.A. Dodgers, facing fan pressure, pledge $1M after immigration raids
When Hegemons Backslide
Social Security stops reporting call wait times and other metrics
‘An Existential Threat’: Food Banks Brace for Fallout From Trump Cuts
Bosses want you to know AI is coming for your job
The Trump admin cut a life-saving LGBTQ resource just when we need it most
Government drops cases against ‘predatory’ financial firms
Bad Arguments Against Free Buses
How Talking Heads stumbled their way to success
Welcome, Antifascists!
A Tribute to Bourbon Street
The People Search Sites in the Suspected Minnesota Killer’s Notebook Are a Failure of Congress
Taking Your Meaning
I Tried Pre-Ordering the Trump Phone. The Page Failed and It Charged My Credit Card the Wrong Amount
The Prince of War: Everything Erik Prince touches turns to shit
The Real Reason Bob Iger Declared War on A.I.
Protecting Congress Starts With Police Reform
Enchanted America
House Bill Would Lay Waste to Congress’s Watchdogs and Information Experts
Masked men in U.S. Border Patrol vests take Santa Ana father after repeatedly hitting him
Incompetent Old Guard
MAGA backers like Trump’s ‘Big beautiful Bill’—until they learn of health consequences
Crews unearth relics of enslaved children’s lives at site of 1760s school
Emmanuel Irono Was Barred from D.C. Contracts, Now He’s Trying to Build a Restaurant Empire
D.C.’s TOPA Tall Tale: Investors Aren’t Fleeing D.C. Because of the Tenants Rights Law (Despite What You Heard)

The parental dead end of consent morality

Consent morality is the idea that there are no higher values or virtues than allowing consenting adults to do whatever they please. As long as they're not hurting anyone, it's all good, and whoever might have a problem with that is by definition a bigot. 

This was the overriding morality I picked up as a child of the 90s. From TV, movies, music, and popular culture. Fly your freak! Whatever feels right is right! It doesn't seem like much has changed since then.

What a moral dead end.

I first heard the term consent morality as part of Louise Perry's critique of the sexual revolution. That in the context of hook-up culture, situationships, and falling birthrates, we have to wrestle with the fact that the sexual revolution — and it's insistence that, say, a sky-high body count mustn't be taboo — has led society to screwy dating market in the internet age that few people are actually happy with.

But the application of consent morality that I actually find even more troubling is towards parenthood. As is widely acknowledged now, we're in a bit of a birthrate crisis all over the world. And I think consent morality can help explain part of it.

I was reminded of this when I posted a cute video of a young girl so over-the-moon excited for her dad getting off work to argue that you'd be crazy to trade that for some nebulous concept of "personal freedom". Predictably, consent morality immediately appeared in the comments: Some people just don't want children and that's TOTALLY OKAY and you're actually bad for suggesting they should!

No. It's the role of a well-functioning culture to guide people towards The Good Life. Not force, but guide. Nobody wants to be convinced by the morality police at the pointy end of a bayonet, but giving up on the whole idea of objective higher values and virtues is a nihilistic and cowardly alternative.

Humans are deeply mimetic creatures. It's imperative that we celebrate what's good, true, and beautiful, such that these ideals become collective markers for morality. Such that they guide behavior.

I don't think we've done a good job at doing that with parenthood in the last thirty-plus years. In fact, I'd argue we've done just about everything to undermine the cultural appeal of the simple yet divine satisfaction of child rearing (and by extension maligned the square family unit with mom, dad, and a few kids).

Partly out of a coordinated campaign against the family unit as some sort of trad (possibly fascist!) identity marker in a long-waged culture war, but perhaps just as much out of the banal denigration of how boring and limiting it must be to carry such simple burdens as being a father or a mother in modern society.

It's no wonder that if you incessantly focus on how expensive it is, how little sleep you get, how terrifying the responsibility is, and how much stress is involved with parenthood that it doesn't seem all that appealing!

This is where Jordan Peterson does his best work. In advocating for the deeper meaning of embracing burden and responsibility. In diagnosing that much of our modern malaise does not come from carrying too much, but from carrying too little. That a myopic focus on personal freedom — the nights out, the "me time", the money saved — is a spiritual mirage: You think you want the paradise of nothing ever being asked of you, but it turns out to be the hell of nobody ever needing you.

Whatever the cause, I think part of the cure is for our culture to reembrace the virtue and the value of parenthood without reservation. To stop centering the margins and their pathologies. To start centering the overwhelming middle where most people make for good parents, and will come to see that role as the most meaningful part they've played in their time on this planet.

But this requires giving up on consent morality as the only way to find our path to The Good Life. It involves taking a moral stance that some ways of living are better than other ways of living for the broad many. That parenthood is good, that we need more children both for the literal survival of civilization, but also for the collective motivation to guard against the bad, the false, and the ugly.

There's more to life than what you feel like doing in the moment. The worst thing in the world is not to have others ask more of you. Giving up on the total freedom of the unmoored life is a small price to pay for finding the deeper meaning in a tethered relationship with continuing a bloodline that's been drawn for hundreds of thousands of years before it came to you.

You're never going to be "ready" before you take the leap. If you keep waiting, you'll wait until the window has closed, and all you see is regret. Summon a bit of bravery, don't overthink it, and do your part for the future of the world. It's 2.1 or bust, baby!

Would you rather have cheap energy, or stupid culture wars?

Photo by Digitmed via Wikimedia Commons

There are many things to despise about Trump’s deeply unpopular budget bill, known as the One Big Beautiful Bill, or BBB. It would expand the national debt to dangerous levels with irresponsible and unnecessary tax cuts. It would shift the distribution of income upward. But perhaps the most ridiculous, pointless, and downright insane feature of the BBB is its attack on American energy supply.

Previous versions of the BBB eliminated government subsidies for solar and wind energy. The new version now being debated in the Senate would actually add a tax on solar and wind energy. Politico reports:

Senate Republicans stepped up their attacks on U.S. solar and wind energy projects by quietly adding a provision to their megabill that would penalize future developments with a new tax…The new excise tax is another blow to the fastest-growing sources of power production in the United States, and would be a massive setback to the wind and solar energy industries since it would apply even to projects not receiving any [tax] credits…

Analysts at the Rhodium Group said in an email the new tax would push up the costs of wind and solar projects by 10 to 20 percent — on top of the cost increases from losing the credits…

The provision as written appears to add an additional tax for any wind and solar project placed into service after 2027…if a certain percentage of the value of the project’s components are sourced from prohibited foreign entities, like China. It would apply to all projects that began construction after June 16 of this year.

The language would require wind and solar projects, even those not receiving credits, to navigate complex and potentially unworkable requirements that prohibit sourcing from foreign entities of concern — a move designed to promote domestic production and crack down on Chinese materials.

In keeping with GOP support for the fossil fuel industry, the updated bill creates a new production tax credit for metallurgical coal, which is used in steelmaking.

Jesse Jenkins, a widely respected energy modeler and Princeton engineering prof, has estimated how much this GOP bill would raise taxes on solar energy, and it’s a lot:

Later in his thread, he explains how he arrived at these estimates.

But it gets worse! As Jenkins notes, the bill would also tax nuclear and geothermal energy and battery storage, and subsidize the coal industry:

The new draft of the 'One Big Beautiful Bill'…now contains FOUR tax increases on wind & solar projects — and two facing nuclear, geothermal, and batteries.

  1. It ends tax cuts for wind & solar projects…

  2. It kills accelerated depreciation available to wind & solar investments since 1986…

  3. ⁠It imposes a new tax on wind & solar projects…

  4. Raises taxes on US wind manufacturers…

The bill ALSO raises taxes on batteries, geothermal and nuclear projects that can't meet significant, burdensome requirements to prove not a drop of Chinese content as well. And they all lose accelerated depreciation too it seems…

The kicker: the bill raises taxes on the electricity technologies of the future while ALSO creating a new subsidy for coal used for steel making, coal that we…export to China so they can dump cheap dirty steel on the global market! THAT is the GOP's plan for energy dominance??…

And of course, it does that while murdering 100s of US manufacturing projects set to employ 100s of thousands of Americans in good paying jobs building the energy technologies of the future.

Michael Thomas of Clearview Energy, a company that tracks energy-related data, estimates that this bill will lead to the cancellation of more than 500 GW of planned energy supply in the U.S.:

That would have represented more than a 42% increase in U.S. electricity production, and it would have gone to power homes, factories, offices, data centers, and more. Now, under Trump’s budget, that will all be gone. Thomas estimates that this will lead to substantial increases in electricity bills for Americans:

CNN has an interactive tool that allows Americans to see how much their energy bills could go up if Trump’s BBB passes, according to estimates from the think tank Energy Innovation. They write:

Red states including Oklahoma, South Carolina and Texas could see up to 18% higher energy costs by 2035 if Trump’s bill passes, compared with a scenario where the bill didn’t pass…Annual household energy costs could rise $845 per year in Oklahoma by 2035, and $777 per year in Texas. That’s because these states would be set to deploy a massive amount of wind and solar if Biden-era energy tax credits were left in place. If that goes away, states will have to lean on natural gas to generate power.

Trump’s bill wouldn’t just make energy more expensive; it would make it less reliable too. In Texas, adding solar and batteries to the grid has allowed it to avoid blackouts. This is from the New York Times last year:

During the scorching summer of 2023, the Texas energy grid wobbled as surging demand for electricity threatened to exceed supply. Several times, officials called on residents to conserve energy to avoid a grid failure.

This year it turned out much better — thanks in large part to more renewable energy.

The electrical grid in Texas has breezed through a summer in which, despite milder temperatures, the state again reached record levels of energy demand. It did so largely thanks to the substantial expansion of new solar farms.

And the grid held strong even during the critical early evening hours — when the sun goes down and the nighttime winds have yet to pick up — with the help of an even newer source of energy in Texas and around the country: batteries.

The federal government expects the amount of battery storage capacity across the country, almost nonexistent five years ago, to nearly double by the end of the year. Texas, which has already surpassed California in the amount of power coming from large-scale solar farms, was expected to gain on its West Coast rival in battery storage as well.

Here are some quotes from the CEO of ERCOT, Texas’ grid operator, which explain why adding solar and batteries makes electricity more reliable:

A little over 9,000 megawatts of new energy coming online, new supply. The bulk of that is in the solar and energy storage categories…Those are extremely helpful during the summer seasons…The peak in the summer of course is in the afternoon at the peak heat when air conditioning load is at its highest. Solar energy is very well suited to help support that. Energy storage resource is very well positioned to help during the evening ramps…We are seeing as a result of this that the peak risk hour which is generally around 9 PM in the summer evenings, that the risk of emergency events during that hour is shrinking, dropping from over 10% a year ago to under 1% this year, again because of the… new resources.

And of course nuclear and geothermal, which Trump also wants to raise taxes on, are among the most stable energy sources that exist.

It’s also notable how many GOP districts and red states would be hurt by this disastrous policy. Although I don’t believe the purpose of industrial policy should be to create jobs, it’s undeniable that the boom in solar, wind, and batteries has generated a ton of economic activity in Republican-leaning areas.

Why would Trump and the GOP Congress want to raise energy prices for Americans, make electricity less reliable, and destroy their own voters’ jobs? One possibility is that the GOP is captured by fossil fuel interests, which could explain why the BBB goes after nuclear and geothermal as well as renewables. Although I think this is probably true of some representatives and senators, I don’t think Trump himself is captured by Big Fossil Fuels — especially because he was perfectly willing to hurt those industries with his tariffs.

I find two additional reasons to be especially compelling:

  1. Trump and his people are deeply ignorant and misinformed about how energy works, and

  2. Trump and his people see attacks on solar, batteries, and other non-fossil-fuel energy technologies as part of a culture war against progressive culture, which often overrides economic concerns.

Trump’s budget bill claims a national security justification for its taxes on solar, batteries, nuclear and geothermal — it frames the taxes as being about blocking imports from China. But in his public communications, Trump’s Energy Secretary Chris Wright makes it clear that the real goal is to attack new energy technologies themselves:

How much would you pay for an Uber if you didn’t know when it would pick you up or where it was going to drop you off? Probably not much…Yet this is the same effect that variable generation sources like wind and solar have on our power grids…You never know if these energy sources will actually be able to produce electricity when you need it — because you don’t know if the sun will be shining or the wind blowing…Even so, the federal government has subsidized these sources for decades, resulting in higher electricity prices and a less stable grid.

President Donald Trump knows what to do: Eliminate green tax credits from the Democrats’ so-called Inflation Reduction Act, including those for wind and solar power…As secretary of energy — and someone who’s devoted his life to advancing energy innovation to better human lives — I, too, know how these Green New Deal subsidies are fleecing Americans…Wind and solar subsidies have been particularly wasteful and counterproductive…

Climate change activists are predictably up in arms over efforts to end the subsidies…

If sources are truly economically viable, let’s allow them to stand on their own, and stop forcing Americans to pick up the tab if they’re not. [emphasis mine]

Wright’s statements — which we should assume speak for the Trump administration and the BBB’s supporters in general — make three things clear.

First, Trump and GOP leaders deeply and honestly believe that non-fossil-fuel energy sources are unreliable. This is because they’re grossly misinformed. They have not examined the data from Texas’ positive experience with solar and batteries. They do not understand how much batteries have come down in cost, and how much cheaper they could get. They do not understand the basic fact that batteries can also be charged by natural gas plants, meaning that batteries make the grid more reliable no matter how the power is being produced.

This is partly because the Trump administration, and the GOP leadership, are trapped in an information bubble in which they only hear from people who bash solar and batteries. Consider this tidbit from a recent NYT article:

Alex Epstein, an author and founder of a think tank that argues fossil fuels are crucial for human prosperity, is one of the most influential figures calling for the permanent elimination of all clean-energy subsidies by 2028…He has described wind and solar subsidies as “immensely harmful” to the nation’s power grid and “a cancer we have to get rid of.”…In a recent interview on Mr. Epstein’s podcast, Representative Chip Roy, Republican of Texas, said wind and solar jobs made the United States “weaker” and likened subsidies that create such employment to the drug trade. Mr. Epstein agreed, calling them “fentanyl jobs.”

These are the kinds of people that Trump is listening to. They are not serious, respected, or honest energy modelers like Jesse Jenkins. They are polemicists who have a fixed belief that solar and batteries are bad, and they have never updated this belief in light of the incredible cost declines for those technologies.

Second, it’s clear that Trump and the GOP leadership think the main purpose of solar and batteries is to reduce carbon emissions to fight climate change. Their statements about these technologies constantly reference “climate”. The notion that solar and batteries actually make energy cheaper for Americans, with or without climate change, has not entered the collective Republican consciousness yet.

And finally, it’s clear that Trump and the GOP leadership see their attacks on American energy supply as part of a culture war rather than purely economic policy. This is apparent from Wright’s gleeful mention of how angry “climate change activists” will be at Trump’s bill. It’s also obvious from the words like “cancer” and “fentanyl” that opponents of solar and batteries use to describe those technologies. And from the disingenuousness of Wright’s argument — he says solar and batteries should “stand on their own”, while trying to levy heavy taxes on them — we should conclude that there are deeper motivations at work than pure dollars and cents.

Basically, most of the GOP decided long ago that solar and batteries were some hippy-dippy bullshit that lefty activists were trying to force on America in order to bring down capitalism. And they have simply not reconsidered, looked at new evidence, or updated their belief in decades, even as advances in solar and battery technology have utterly changed the game. They are confident that attacking solar and batteries won’t hurt the U.S. economy, and so will give them an easy, safe way to own the libs.

One Republican who clearly does understand both the power and the importance of solar and batteries is Elon Musk, who has been tweeting relentlessly against Trump’s bill, and who makes many good points about the importance of new energy technologies. For example:

And also:

Musk knows that if AI data centers can’t get batteries, they can’t operate cheaply in the U.S. And if data centers leave the U.S., China will have a much easier time winning the AI race.

But Trump and his people are not listening to Musk. They are not listening to anyone, except to ignorant fawning toadies who flatter their existing beliefs and insult their enemies for them. Their fingers are stuck firmly in their ears, so they won’t hear the sounds of catastrophe as they kick over the physical foundations of American prosperity.

This was also the pattern we saw with tariffs, an act of national self-sabotage Trump only paused when the bond market threatened to demolish the entire U.S. economy before Trump’s term was up. This time, bond markets are unlikely to intervene, since the threat comes from a stolen future rather than a disrupted present.

The American people, for the most part, get the general gist of Trump’s ideology-driven approach to economic policy, and they’re not happy about it. Poll after poll shows that even many Republicans despise the One Big Beautiful Bill. This is from NBC a few days ago:

Nonpartisan polls released this month show that voters have a negative perception of the bill…A Fox News poll found that 38% of registered voters support the “One Big Beautiful Bill” based on what they know about it, while 59% oppose it.

The survey found that the legislation is unpopular across demographic, age and income groups. It is opposed 22%-73% by independents, and 43%-53% among white men without a college degree, the heart of Trump’s base.

A Quinnipiac University poll found that 27% of registered voters support the bill, while 53% oppose it. Another 20% had no opinion. Among independents, 20% said they support it and 57% said they oppose it.

A KFF poll found that 35% of adults have a favorable view when asked about the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” while 64% have an unfavorable view. Just 27% of independents said they hold a favorable view of it.

A survey from Pew Research Center found that 29% of adults favor the bill, while 49% oppose it. (Another 21% said they weren’t sure.) Asked what impact it would have on the country, 54% said “a mostly negative effect,” 30% said “a mostly positive effect” and 12% said “not much of an effect.

A poll by The Washington Post and Ipsos found that 23% of adults support “the budget bill changing tax, spending and Medicaid policies,” while 42% oppose it. Another 34% had no opinion.

The bill’s self-defeating policies are probably only a small part of this, especially since the Senate version of the bill — which actively taxes new energy technologies instead of just removing subsidies — hadn’t even been released when these polls were taken. Debt increases, Medicaid cuts, and tax cuts for the rich are driving these negative polls. But if and when Americans realize that the GOP is also trying to make their energy bills go up in order to fight a stupid outdated culture war, I expect them to sour on the bill even further.

But I’m not sure how much that will matter. Trump and the GOP leadership have shown that appeasing public opinion is very low on their list of priorities.

This is a recipe for national failure. Countries that turn their back on the march of technology — whose leaders insist on ignoring extant reality in favor of internecine status battles and feuds — have historically declined, while countries that embrace technological progress and bow to physical realities have dominated. Right now, the country that is embracing progress and bowing to physical realities in the energy space is China, not America.


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Inequality, Part V: Predatory Financialization

My favorite line from the 1987 movie Wall Street comes when Gordon Gekko ridicules the Charlie Sheen character for his limited ambitions:

I'm not talking about some $400,000-a-year working Wall Street stiff, flying first class, and being comfortable.

Adjusted for inflation, 400K in 1987 would be around $1.1 million now.

What the line tells us that even in 1987, fairly early in the great post-1980 surge in inequality, many people in finance — working Wall Street stiffs — were already being paid very large sums, and a few people were acquiring extraordinary fortunes.

Last week I noted that the very biggest fortunes in America are now primarily based on technology quasi-monopolies. But go down the Forbes 400 list a bit and you see a number of plutocrats who made tens of billions in finance, especially hedge funds. These include people like Stephen Schwarzman, who compared efforts to close a Wall Street-friendly tax loophole to Hitler’s invasion of Poland, and Ken Griffin, a Republican megadonor.

The fact is that financialization of the U.S. economy has been a major driver of rising inequality. What do I mean by financialization? Actually I mean two different but related things. One aspect is the extraordinary rise in the share of the U.S. economy devoted to financial activities as opposed to production of goods and services. A second is the pervasive way in which financiers and financial institutions like hedge funds and private equity have changed how even nonfinancial business operates. These changes have almost always increased inequality.

Beyond the paywall I will discuss the following:

1. The growth of the financial sector and what explains it

2. How growth in finance directly increases income and wealth inequality

3. How the increased role of Wall Street has changed the way the rest of the economy operates

Read more

Sunday assorted links

1. What is so special about Uruguay?

2. Luis Garicano on why economic growth will not go crazy with AI.  These arguments remain unanswered.

3. Ten ways to rebuild Britain.

4. How should London tax mega marshmallows?

5. Dead lawmakers have not stopped posting.

6. Progress with biological computers? (FT)

7. JSTOR now has an AI-powered reading assistant.

8. New paper on stablecoin devaluation risk.

9. Are we actually going to add a new tax on solar and wind production?

The post Sunday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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Blue Origin launches third New Shepard mission within three months

NS-33 landing

Blue Origin launched its third crewed suborbital flight in under three months June 29, flying a group that included a married couple and a lawyer in legal trouble.

The post Blue Origin launches third New Shepard mission within three months appeared first on SpaceNews.

Tidally locked in Tidally locked in


w/e 2025-06-29

At the start of the week – which seems a long time ago – I was still in Essex and took the opportunity of being only an expensive commuter train journey away from London to pop in for lunch with T and D at a nice place by the canal in Haggerston. Lovely. Once upon a time, “Lovely” as a reaction to “by the canal in Haggerston” might have been meant sarcastically, but these days it’s pleasant and cool, and I had a nice walk up along Bishopsgate and Kingsland Road, and back down through Hoxton and Shoreditch.

I must have seen every possible size, shape, length and style of trouser during those few hours. Except maybe bell bottoms and pedal pushers, although neither would have been out of place. Anything goes these days, everything’s fashionable, everyone looks just fine, well done.

Then back into Essex and in the evening a drink with my oldest friend D outside a pub in a village by the most picturesque river. Good times.

Then the next day British Gas came to service Mum’s boiler and discovered that the guy who installed it last year hadn’t done it correctly, so now I need to get him to rectify it in a house on the other side of the country from me. I’m being very restrained in my language here, fwiw.

Back to Herefordshire straight after that.


§ I enjoy Derek Guy on Bluesky, have read his blog for longer, and may even have come across him on the menswear forums way back when. So I didn’t expect the first thing I’d buy on his recommendation would be a cat grooming comb thing. Pippa appears to love it and it’s amazing how much fur we’ve removed from her. She probably appreciates it more than a chambray shirt or a relaxed Italian jacket.


§ I haven’t watched much of Glastonbury yet but am looking forward to catching up on a lot of it. I did see Self Esteem’s set though and that was great. I liked it more as it went on, really uplifting.


§ A couple of weeks back I ordered a TRMNL e-ink screen which then spent a long time sitting somewhere in Indianapolis before arriving here this week. I definitely don’t need an e-ink screen but I could see it might be useful, I haven’t had any new computing technology to tinker with for a long time, and it isn’t that expensive.

In general, the whole system is very nicely done. It’s more than just “an e-ink screen”: there’s a web-based system for choosing plug-ins, setting up schedules of what to display when, and for creating your own plug-ins. In this way it reminds me a lot of BERG’s Little Printer which was also a device relying on a friendly infrastructure for set-up and tinkering (and for which I made some apps and wrote some documentation).

Of course, I can’t think of much to do with it. I get very, very few notifications on my phone, so there’s nothing that I could make “quieter” by somehow moving to an e-ink display. And a screen displaying any information only adds to mental noise, no matter how unobtrusive it is.

For now I’ve cobbled together a plug-in that displays the latest image from the King of the Hill Screens Bluesky account. I don’t need to see it, but when I glance at it in passing, and see a new picture from a nice show, it’s… nice? fun? not a bad thing? I’m not sure that’s justification enough but it’s early days.

A photo of a small rectangular screen with a white plastic border and TMRNL embossed at the bottom. On the screen is a black-and-white dithered image from King of the Hill, depicting Bobby and Boomhauer in a car and Hank leaning down to the window, speaking.

It’s a shame the built-in image dithering isn’t Atkinson. I can’t quite face doing it myself in PHP (and thus having to save the image) or in JavaScript.

Setting it up and writing a plug-in was more complicated than I expected although that might be me not reading the documentation properly, the usual struggles with getting anything working on the web, and my own apparently dwindling ability to think and code clearly. Still, a nice distraction to fiddle with for a bit.


§ This week I finished reading Introducing Camus by David Zane Mairowitz and Alain Korkos (also published as Camus for Beginners). It’s the first book I’ve taken from Dad’s shelves and it’s probably the only one he owned containing comic book illustrations. I’m not sure they help tbh. I expect some/most are based on photos and I’d have preferred to see the original images for those, which would have made the biography more immediate and real. But the text was good, clear, simple and short, so I now know more about Camus than I did a couple of weeks ago. Job done.


§ Apparently Spring has expired and I’ve barely even thought about the tasks I allocated myself for that season. Yet another plan that I bang on about and that comes to nothing. Good work.

One day life will seem simpler again, and my brain won’t be constantly churning over one thing at the expense of everything else, and I’ll get back to stuff. I imagine.


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Supreme Disappointment As Decision Imperils Birthright Citizenship

Trashing the Written Constitution in the Name of More Deportations

The six-member conservative majority handed down a decision that sidesteps the main issue in the Trump administration’s campaign to rewrite the birthright citizenship clause of the Constitution — that it is in black and white in the founding document. Trump did so by executive order, not a law.

Instead, the 6-3 decision focused narrowly on whether a district court judge considering a challenge to Donald Trump’s actions can set a national injunction to halt action while the full case proceeds. Ironically, this decision does the opposite, lifting the injunction after the next 30 days, to allow deportations to proceed — until the full case is heard, likely in the fall.

While the court’s decision still allows individual, regional or national injunctions for “class-action” cases, which are not defined, it opens the door to other Trump executive orders that may pay little attention to legal constraints by saying district court judges in one part of the country cannot halt them everywhere.

In practical terms regarding birthright, actions to ignore whether a migrant was born in the United States can now be ignored — temporarily at least — in 28 states where there was no challenge, for example.

Naturally, Trump himself called an immediate press conference, flanked by Attorney General Pam Bondi and her deputy, Todd Blanche, to heap praise on the court majority, Justice Amy Coney Barrett for writing the decision, and himself for thinking it a wonderful idea to trash the written Constitution in the name of more deportations.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor called the decision a “travesty for the rule of law.” In a separate dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was even harsher.

But what the decision did not do was to say the Constitutional right to citizenship upon birth in this country is wrong or magically no longer applicable. Challenges to the birthright citizenship executive order are in appeals courts, headed for the Supreme Court should Trump lose. There is no pending case on the merits of the birthright citizenship executive order at the Supreme Court.

As it stands, the decision is an incredible disappointment for ducking the central question, now seemingly a pattern for this court to find ways to uphold Trump’s broad challenges to institutions, laws and protocols. It is a continuing disappointment that this court does not appear to consider the practical consequences of its decisions.

Practical Impacts

In the meantime, of course, the issue will return to those same lower courts, where details like who determines citizenship in the hospital birthing suite must be worked out.

It is a remarkable set of reasoning for the conservative justices who have relied so much on history and written legal language now to simply ignore what is written in favor of discussing court remedies once a challenge appears.

And, of course, this will not be limited to the birthright question. Trump has issued hundreds of executive orders about immigration, energy, education, health, business and trade, and on silly stuff like the use of plastic straws.

It could lead to a chaotic breakdown of civil rights generally and feed a growing outrage over what is perceived as a slide from democracy into authoritarian rule by a single, unchecked leader.

When a group or a state attorney general or even a coalition of interests feels harmed by an administrative action, it can file suit the local federal district court. It is almost standard for the plaintiffs to ask that the practice creating the perceived harm be ordered to stop immediately while the case proceeds. Judges weigh the extent of claimed harm and issue such injunctions, even if temporary. The actions in the birthright case and in many others arising from executive orders is that the harm is not limited to one person or one neighborhood or one state. The policy is nationwide, and so are the injunction orders.

That is the tool under pressure in this decision. It still allows for a class of employees or doctors or, presumably organized migrants, to seek injunctive remedy as a group. The chances of that happening, are far slimmer than outraged partisans seeking the action through more friendly attorneys general. The chance that every migrant individually affected could effectively challenge the order is zero.

End of Season

This is end-of-season for the Supreme Court: In other released rulings, the court upheld the constitutionality of a task force that recommends which preventative care services health insurers must cover, rejected a challenge to a Texas law that seeks to limit minors’ access to online pornography, and ordered public schools in Maryland to allow parents with religious objections to withdraw children from classes in which storybooks with L.G.B.T.Q. themes are discussed.

The court itself has had a rocky year, with a series of embarrassing disclosures about Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito receiving payments from partisan interests, about the rising ideological dissention within the court, and about the increasing reliance on “shadow docket” decisions for which no explanation or reasoning is offered.

Overall, the conservative bent of the court majority has resulted in expanded powers for the presidency and the loss of independence for federal agencies, and the now written assumption of protected innocence for most official acts undertaken by a president.

Prospects are good that Trump will have one or two more chances over the next three and a half year to bolster that conservative majority with new appointees, whom he promises will be yet more politically loyal to whatever policies Trump supports.

That, too, is a supreme disappointment.


CLICK HER TO PROTECT FREEDOM OF THE PRESS AND TO ALLOW US TO CONTINUE TO INFORM ON BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP

The post Supreme Disappointment As Decision Imperils Birthright Citizenship appeared first on DCReport.org.

Links 6/28/25

Links for you. Science:

X and Y gene dosage effects are primary contributors to human sexual dimorphism: The case of height
Six former CDC vaccine advisory committee chairs warn: U.S. risks losing access to life-saving immunizations
CDC Staffing Upheaval Disrupts HIV Projects and Wastes Money, Researchers Say
What to know about stinging Asian needle ants detected in 20 states (more information here)
Still Not Feeling the Same After COVID-19? You’re Not Alone
Administration to phase out NIH support of HIV clinical guidelines

Other:

ICE agents scatter as SD Bishop Pham, other clergy visit immigration court
‘A good day’: Detained U.S. citizen said agents bragged after arresting dozens at Home Depot
Trump Wants to Be a Strongman, but He’s Actually a Weak Man
The secret police descending on Small Town, U.S.A.
There Is a Fatal Flaw in the Republican Megabill That Could Stop Its Worst Provisions from Ever Taking Effect
Abandoned by Trump, a farmer and a migrant search for a better future
Proud Boys Say Trump Will Lose Their Support If He Goes To War With Iran (Night of the Long Sporks to follow?)
Marcia Resnick, photographer of punk’s heyday, dies at 74
No More Rose Garden and Other Travesties
Trump is in danger of repeating Bush’s Middle East mistakes
The Latino police chief championing inclusion in Massachusetts
Update: The Washington Post Is Still Dying
The US was once a major supplier of rare earths. This Woburn startup aims to revive domestic production.
Donors (I think it has to do with the Congressional Retirement Plan)
So What Is It Gonna Take?
Trump attacks Watergate laws in massive shift of ethics system
If Trump Could Make John Wayne the Head of Homeland Security, He Would
Dread in the Water
Appeals court blocks Louisiana law requiring Ten Commandments in classrooms
The Dodgers Can’t Sit This Moment Out
No Kings: Los Angeles
Against The Day
A Swingin’ Surprise or Two
Weenie Centrist Legislator Faceplants Hard At Weekend Protest Event
Why the LA Dodgers Stood Up to ICE
Trump’s tariffs are running up against the limits of nature
Forget the Two-state Solution. This Israeli-Palestinian Organization Offers Another Path to Peace
After 35 years as a Post journalist, I’ve decided it’s time for a change

Final H-2A launches Earth science satellite

H-2A final launch

An H-2A rocket successfully launched an Earth science satellite June 28 on the final flight of a vehicle that had long been the workhorse for Japanese space access.

The post Final H-2A launches Earth science satellite appeared first on SpaceNews.

Sign of the Times

Observed at the corner of 17th and P Streets NW, Dupont Circle, D.C.:

Deport

Hotels: Occupancy Rate Increased 1.3% Year-over-year

From STR: U.S. hotel results for week ending 21 June
The U.S. hotel industry reported positive year-over-year comparisons, according to CoStar’s latest data through 21 June. ...

15-21 June 2025 (percentage change from comparable week in 2024):

Occupancy: 70.5% (+1.3%)
• Average daily rate (ADR): US$163.77 (+2.0%)
• Revenue per available room (RevPAR): US$115.39 (+3.3%)
emphasis added
The following graph shows the seasonal pattern for the hotel occupancy rate using the four-week average.

Hotel Occupancy RateClick on graph for larger image.

The red line is for 2025, blue is the median, and dashed light blue is for 2024.  Dashed purple is for 2018, the record year for hotel occupancy. 

The 4-week average of the occupancy rate is tracking behind both last year and the median rate for the period 2000 through 2024 (Blue).

Note: Y-axis doesn't start at zero to better show the seasonal change.

The 4-week average will increase during the summer travel season; however, we will likely see a hit to occupancy during the summer months due to less international tourism.

Privatize Federal Land!

I’ve long advocated selling off some federal land—an idea that reliably causes mass fainting spells among the enlightened. How could we possibly part with our national patrimony, our land, our sacred wilderness? Calm down. Most of this “public land” is never used by the public. Selling some of it would actually make it more accessible and useful to real people.

Moreover, most of you wailing about selling some Federal land are probably very happy we sold the “public” airwaves for your private cell phone use. Privatizing the airwaves made them much more useful to the public. (Thank you Reed!).

AEI has an excellent map of the lands that could be sold and developed in the Mike Lee bill. Here’s their conclusion:

The data show a significant opportunity. Our analysis finds that developing just 135-180 square miles of the most suitable BLM land, a minuscule fraction of the total, could yield approximately 1 million new homes over ten years. This would substantially address the West’s housing shortage while generating an estimated $15 billion for the U.S. Treasury from land sales.

Here’s an example of the some of the land potentially developable around Las Vegas.

Here’s a Google satellite image of the bit around Mountain’s Edge. Enjoy your fishing on these public lands!

And here’s a very crude but useful scatter plot showing the correlation between median home prices in a state and Federal land ownership. Should home prices in Utah (63.1% Federally owned) really be 71% higher than in Texas (1.8% Federally owned)? Of course, Texas is famously an urban hellscape with no parks, no open space, and nowhere to hunt or fish.

The post Privatize Federal Land! appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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Harvard's finances (Endowment, expenses, revenue by school)

 Harvard Magazine has a collection of stories related to Harvard's ongoing battle with the Trump administration:  Harvard in the Crosshairs

Here's the introduction to the collection:

The Standoff: Harvard’s Future in the Balance
Introducing a guide to the issues, players, and stakes.  

 Here's a look at Harvard's finances:

Harvard’s Standoff: The Financial Stakes. Putting Harvard’s $53 billion endowment into perspective
by Jonathan Shaw

 "Harvard’s $53.2-billion endowment might sound limitless, but not when compared to the University’s annual expenses: $6.5 billion. If Harvard relied entirely on the endowment to fund its operations (ignoring investment returns), the total would be depleted in a little more than eight years. Nor does the endowment seem large when considering that it is not a single pot of money but 14,600 separate funds. Eighty percent of those funds are restricted to specific uses defined by the original donor. And most belong not to the Harvard president, but to the individual schools, which maintain separate budgets under a principle known as “every tub on its own bottom.”

Harvard, if taxed on endowment investment gains at the 21.4 percent rate discussed in Congress in May, would pay about $850 million annually on an average investment gain of 7.5 percent. That sum is greater than Harvard’s total federal support for research in fiscal year 2024 ($686 million, now frozen) and larger than the last fiscal year’s $525 million in annual gifts for current use. But even philanthropic sources of income would likely diminish if the tax treatment of donations were to change. And while the loss of federal grants and contracts would cost the University about $2.2 billion over the next five years (the typical length of a federal grant), taxing the endowment would result in lost income of more than $4.25 billion by the end of that period—combined blows from which the country’s premier academic research institution might not recover, scientists say."

 

Endowment (2024)

Colorful pie chart showing a $53,235M total market value, with Harvard Management Company holding the largest share.


Operating expenses (2024)

Pie chart of Harvard’s operating expenses showing 52% for people, 17% for campus, and smaller slices for other costs.



Revenue by school (2024)

Stacked bar chart showing Harvard schools' operating revenue sources, with largest shares in student income and endowment.



C’mon British people, you can do better than this…

I’ve seen estimates that thirty people a day are arreested in the UK for things they say on social media.  Other anecdotes of varying kinds continue to pile up:

Describing a middle-aged white woman as a “Karen” is borderline unlawful, a judge has said amid a bitter row at a mental health charity.

The slang term, used increasingly since the pandemic, refers to middle-aged white women who angrily rebuke those they view as socially inferior. Sitting in an employment tribunal, a judge has now said that the term is pejorative because it implies the woman is excessively and unreasonably demanding.

The woman who used the term nonetheless was acquitted, though barely.  Here is the article from Times of London.  And this:

The government’s new Islamophobia definition could stop experts warning about Islamist influence in Britain, a former anti-extremism tsar has warned.

Lord Walney said that a review being carried out by Angela Rayner’s department should drop the term Islamophobia, or risk “protecting a religion from criticism” rather than protecting individuals.

Ministers launched a “working group” in February aimed at forming an official definition of what is meant by Islamophobia or anti-Muslim hatred within six months.

Here is The Times link.  British people, it is not just J.D. Vance who is upset.  You are embarrassing yourselves with all this!  Please stop.  Even enemies of free speech think you are going about this in a pretty stupid way.

The post C’mon British people, you can do better than this… appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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Apple’s Full List of Differences between ‘Tier 1’ and ‘Tier 2’ in the EU App Store

Apple Developer:

By default, apps on the App Store are provided Store Services Tier 2, the complete suite of all capabilities designed to maximize visibility, engagement, growth, and operational efficiency. Developers with apps on the App Store in the EU that communicate and promote offers for digital goods and services can choose to move their apps to only use Store Services Tier 1 and pay a reduced store services fee.

What follows is a long chart, making clear which features are excluded from Tier 1.

Like I wrote in my larger piece on Apple’s new DMA compliance plans, I don’t think Tier 1 is intended to be a feasible choice for any mainstream apps or games. The whole thing is just a way to assert that 8 percent of the commission developers pay is justified by various features of the App Store itself.

 ★ 

★ Apple Announces Sweeping but Complicated Policy Changes for Apps in the EU, Attempting to Comply With the Latest Dictums Regarding the DMA

Let’s start with Apple’s own announcement at Apple Developer News:

The European Commission has required Apple to make a series of additional changes under the Digital Markets Act:

Communication and Promotion of Offers

  • Today, we’re introducing updated terms that let developers with apps in the European Union storefronts of the App Store communicate and promote offers for purchase of digital goods or services available at a destination of their choice. The destination can be a website, alternative app marketplace, or another app, and can be accessed outside the app or within the app via a web view or native experience.
  • App Store apps that communicate and promote offers for digital goods or services will be subject to new business terms for those transactions — an initial acquisition fee, store services fee, and for apps on the StoreKit External Purchase Link Entitlement (EU) Addendum, the Core Technology Commission (CTC). The CTC reflects value Apple provides developers through ongoing investments in the tools, technologies, and services that enable them to build and share innovative apps with users. [...]

Update to Business Terms for Apps in the European Union

  • By January 1, 2026, Apple plans to move to a single business model in the EU for all developers. Under this single business model, Apple will transition from the Core Technology Fee (CTF) to the CTC on digital goods or services. The CTC will apply to digital goods or services sold by apps distributed from the App Store, Web Distribution, and/or alternative marketplaces.
  • Apps currently under the Alternative Terms Addendum for Apps in the EU continue to be subject only to the CTF until the transition to the CTC is fully implemented next year. At that time, qualifying transactions will be subject to the CTC, and the CTF will no longer apply. Additional details regarding this transition will be provided at a later date.

Amongst other policy and API changes, Apple also announced a new, seemingly simplified, experience on iOS/iPadOS for installing apps and alternative app marketplaces in the EU.

As for the other policy changes, here’s Jason Snell’s summary, which I think captures the gist as well as possible:

Tiered App Store fees. For today’s full-service App Store, developers will now pay 13% on sales, reduced to 10% for Small Business Program members. Or developers can opt into “Tier One”, which comes with a 5% fee but does not support a raft of App Store features we’ve come to expect, like automatic app updates, App Store promotions, placement in search suggestions, ratings and reviews on product listings (!), and more.

Core Technology Commission. Apple is going to move all developers over to a new tax called the Core Technology Commission, in which developers who opt to sell apps outside the App Store will pay 5% of sales made through in-app promotions. The €0.50-per-install Core Technology Fee will be dropped as of January 1.

Free linking. Developers can promote offers broadly, are no longer limited to a single static URL without tracking parameters, and can freely design the interfaces for those links and promotions.

New business terms. Developers have to pay a 2% fee for digital goods and services purchased by new users for the first six months after a user first downloads an app; members of the Small Business Program don’t have to pay this fee.

And here’s Chance Miller’s summary at 9to5Mac, which includes the following statement from Apple (which statement was provided to me, as well):

“The European Commission is requiring Apple to make a series of additional changes to the App Store. We disagree with this outcome and plan to appeal.”

The new fee structure is undeniably convoluted, and I think downright confusing. Seemingly no one can figure out exactly what commissions apps that use alternative payments or distribution are going to pay. It’s a natural consequence that an overly complicated law (the DMA) has resulted in an ever-more-complicated set of guidelines and policies (from Apple). It’s all downright byzantine.

That seems largely by design on Apple’s part: byzantine compliance with a byzantine law. Because it’s so complicated and hard to understand, it’s difficult even to summarize with a headline describing what’s new. Even if you understand it enough to just want to express anger at Apple for spiteful compliance and greed, it’s hard to sum up why you’re angry in a succinct headline or tweet.


The bottom line, as I understand it, is the following (but I could be wrong about some of this1 — if I am, let me know, and I’ll try to correct it):

  • Developers who just do the simplest thing possible — distribute through the App Store and process all payments using Apple’s IAP — will continue to pay the same commissions, 30% by default, or 15% for Small Business Program developers and recurring subscriptions after the first year. Of course this is what Apple would prefer developers do.

  • Big developers, distributing through the App Store but processing their own payments, will still owe Apple a commission of around 20% on non-IAP purchases: 13% for “store services”, 5% for the new Core Technology Commission (replacing the €0.50 per-download Core Technology Fee), and 2% for “initial acquisition”. Small Developer Program members and recurring subscriptions after the first year pay 15% — no “initial acquisition fee” and a reduced “store services” fee of 10%. But everyone’s on the hook for the 5% CTC.

  • Apps distributed through the App Store can pay a reduced rate of 5% for “store services” (down from 13%) by opting into a reduced “Tier 1”. Rather than this “Tier 1” being an appealing choice for any developers, I think the point of it is for Apple to assert that those App Store features justify 8 percent of Apple’s commission on purchases: automatic software updates, reviews and ratings, surfacing through search for anything other than an exact name match, and a whole lot more.

  • One consequence of the €0.50 per-download Core Technology Fee (CTF) being replaced by a 5% Core Technology Commission (CTC) is that there will no longer be a penalty for small developers who have a free-to-download app that hits over one million EU downloads. That was a legitimate problem with the CTF — an app with 5 million EU downloads would owe Apple €2 million for the CTF, but might be generating far less than that (or even nothing at all) in revenue. But another consequence of switching to the CTC from the CTF is that super-popular apps from super-big companies that don’t sell digital goods from their apps will continue to pay nothing at all. E.g. unless Meta starts selling digital goods from within their apps, they’ll continue to pay nothing at all to Apple for zillion-download apps like Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp. That was a shortcoming with the App Store’s model that the CTF was designed to correct.

  • All of this additional complication is, I believe, just for apps distributed through the App Store. Feel free to blame Apple as much as you want for spiteful compliance (especially when it comes to payments made on the web, from links in apps), but part of this is on the European Commission for demanding not only that Apple allow apps to be distributed outside the App Store (which is somewhat reasonable), but also for requiring Apple to allow outside payments for apps distributed through the App Store. Apps and games distributed through alternative EU app marketplaces or web downloads are only on the hook for the 5% CTC (by the end of the year, when it replaces the CTF). But there is no free lunch — iOS apps and games distributed outside the App Store that require a purchase, or offer digital content for sale, must pay the 5% CTC.

There are a lot of people who think what Apple is “supposed” to do is collect no commission or fees at all on anything other than IAP from apps and games that are distributed through the App Store. That Apple should collect no commission or fees from apps distributed outside the App Store, nor any commission or fees from apps in the App Store that offer their own payment processing — and, thus, that Apple should set their own IAP commission accordingly, as something akin to Stripe or PayPal, in the single-digit percentage range. That’s obviously not in Apple’s interest. But it’s also not what the European Commission has suggested the DMA demands.


  1. One thing I might be wrong about is that these new terms could be read to suggest that developers who stick with the App Store and Apple’s IAP now pay just 20 percent commission under the new EU terms. That’d be really weird, insofar as it would mean that developers in the EU get an 80/20 split for App Store distribution + IAP, but apps everywhere else in the world still get 70/30 for the same thing. That doesn’t make sense unless there’s another shoe to drop, and Apple is going to reduce IAP to 80/20 worldwide soon. (Which would be a great move on Apple’s part — something that would actually earn them back some developer goodwill.) ↩︎

Another Perspective on NYC Politics, Zionism, Jews and Everything Else

I’m sharing a post a friend of mine, Victoria Cook, wrote on Facebook about the New York City mayor’s election and Jews and Israel. That whole thing. It’s not a TPM Reader email but I’m posting it in the same vein. This is her piece, not mine. So, in the nature of things, I wouldn’t write everything in the same way or agree with every individual point. But, for me. she wrote with great subtlety about how some Jews experience this bundle of issues. She also captured something that is quite salient to me, which is that this conversation often gets clogged up on the very binary question of whether some thing or some person is antisemitic. Obviously, some people really want it to land there or insist that it not land there for their own reasons. But on these issues, for me and I guess for Victoria too, that’s often kind of beside the point.

In any case, some of this is very internal to the Jewish experience and a specific variant of Jewish experience. And TPM isn’t a site about Judaism. So if you’ve already heard enough on this topic, I get it. But, as always, I share what is interesting to me in the hope and expectation some readers may find it interesting as well. For me this helped illuminate some of my own thoughts and feelings about this that I hadn’t been able to tease apart on my own.

WARNING, this is a very long post. If you are going to react by responding with anti-Arab or anti-Islam comments I beg you to scroll on by, you are not welcome here.

I think the issue of whether Zohran Mamdani is antisemtic and carries personal animus towards Jews is a distraction (although, footnote, I’m not sure why this particular view of anti-a certain group has to be intentional when we accept when a society is built in an “ism” — and after millennia of supercessionist world imperial religions and their respective influenced cultures from holy books to classic literature to current popular music certainly created a society in which the “Jew” is the most evil character but somehow that is not seen as being in the water we swim and the air that we breathe so I’ll stick with “intentional Jew hater”.) I do not think he is an intentional Jew hater. He clearly has Jewish friends, grew up with many Jewish people, and I believe him when he says he cares about antisemitism which I also believe he can recognize in many although not all of its forms and that he does not wish ill on Jews and genuinely wants to create a more inclusive and diverse thriving NYC.

I want to emphasize that I am not scared of Zohran as a person, I probably would really like him if I met him, in a million ways he seems like an older version of my son’s awesome smart and funny precocious friends from Bronx Science, I agree with most of his agenda, I voted for Brad Lander, but would love a younger vibrant brilliant communicator version who himself is an immigrant to lead this city of immigrants, especially now, but I am indeed scared of the ideology of some of his activism.

The issue of concern for me and I think for many Jews is that the worldview of his activist community — which worldview he shares at least in part as is clear from his own longtime and current political activism in these communities as well as some of his own rhetoric and certainly that of the organizations whose support he centers as endorsements and a core part of his coalition in his movement politics — is engaged in an agenda of not only dismantling Zionist Israel but it also operates sometimes knowingly and sometimes unwittingly to simultaneously be creating a category of “good Jews” and bad Jews (i.e., Jews like me), and my fear is that this worldview is being rewarded and normalized by the electorate. Moreover, by having the mayor of the city with the most amount of Jews in the world, a city where our mayors become global stars, be himself a proponent of that even unintentionally is troubling.

When it comes to the question of what he could do on the ground in NYC as he’s only a mayor, I am concerned about his stated commitment to Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) as a form of political resistance. This worldview does not support coexistence measures because that is “normalization”but instead supports cultural boycotts. This could mean that based on the BDS principles (which are also expressly shared by DSA) we could have a city policy of not welcoming Israeli academics to City colleges, canceling semester abroad programs at City colleges, not allowing city museums to sponsor exhibits with Israeli artists, not permit city sponsored international dance events to include Batsheva, not allow the Mayor’s Office for Film & Television to cooperate with an Israeli film that wants to shoot NYC scenes locally, etc. Even if the mayor does not have the full authority to do these things, City Council will be informed by his agenda and I don’t want the vibrant cultural and academic life of NYC to be caught up in Mamdani’s commitment to BDS. If he were to publicly expressly say he will bifurcate his personal commitment to BDS from that of the City then I would be less concerned but I expect that a not insignificant part of his constituency will pressure him to bring it with him to Gracie Mansion and it will be an ongoing issue in the public discourse.

But much more scarily to me is that this worldview connects the litany of not only global but local city ills to the Jewish State, like police abuse in NYC is because of Israel (the “Deadly Exchange”), the water crisis in Ferguson was because of Israel (“From Ferguson to Palestine”), the fires in LA were because of Israel (climate change because of the war, war spending meant no money for LA fire department, take your pick), NYC libraries are underfunded because of funding for Israel (cities have no impact on funding any part of the Israeli military) — these are not just random signs at marches, they are part of scholarly journals and part of the talking points of the leaders of the movement(s) which then end up as Instagram infographics — and to Within Our Lifetime, even cancer hospitals should be targeted by marches accusing them of collaborating with genocide because of a donor also giving money to Israel. In this way of looking at the world’s ills, since everything is ultimately interconnected, the message is often expressly but most of the time implied, that if we could only get rid of this one thing — Zionism and the Zionist state (not the fantasy Israel he is ok with existing, the one with all of its issues like all nation states that currently actually in the real world exists where half of the remnant of world Jewry live most as refugees from the Judenrein world) then we could not only free, free Palestine but we could free the whole entire world from all its evils. I hear the message of this logic loud and clear. Maybe to others they can’t hear it because they agree with it, or it sounds like a mere whisper but to me it is quite literally shouting in my ear that the “Jewish Problem” still exists and eradication is the only solution.

Not only does it echo with every ancient antisemitic trope and conspiracy theory since time and immemorial, that type of rhetoric and the politics behind it are expressly used to demonize “Zionism” and its proponents (🙋🏻‍♀️) (although their definition has very little to do with mine) here in NYC making them unwelcome in polite society, although in this modern day version, it’s righteous society, the good people society. And mainstream Jews with their petty worries about their own survival after millennia of near constant attempted destruction should just get over it and sit down and stop centering themselves and anyway we’ve given you an opportunity to enter our embrace, just reject that place and those people and unlearn your “lifetime of indoctrination”, and how you see your religion and ethnic identity, and accept not only another narrative as essentially important and open your eyes to often ugly truths that must be reckoned with and work together to create a better future out of shared trauma, but instead accept as the only truth the opposite one, replace your myth with our myth, and work to dismantle everything you think is important about you to you, make your religion universalist, and that place where your family lives, where your religious texts and language started, where your religious calendar and holidays are based, that you know is a complicated beautiful diverse place, it is really a white supremacist caricature, it is the root of all evil and you have just a made up colonial connection to it. Just say those words and you can come sit at our table and you can even practice your religion just the version that ends every seder with “Next Year in Jerusalem” as only a metaphor. Echoes are loud sometimes.

All of this at the same time that the politics are — for good reason! I believe in much of the policy goals — anti bankers, developers, and “money interests” and once you add to that “Zionists” are working against the campaign and it all feels very, very familiar. Suffocatingly familiar.

And it is also a fact that this worldview’s rhetoric, including phrasing that Mamdani has defended and parsed despite his own usage on social media as far back as 2015, has been used in connection with actual violence against Jews including murder only last month so there is that kind of fear in the background too while important thought leaders like M. Gessen try to convince us that is not antisemitic violence so again stop centering yourselves Jews! It’s not antisemitism! It’s just anti-Israel! Tell that to the elderly couple who were firebombed for trying to remind the world about the hostages.

But then, of course, like clockwork, the anti Arab and anti Muslim racists and bigots come out in force from within our community and we have an embarrassment of plenty of those, and the right wing uses their fake concern for us while they also freely use the most intense antisemitic rhetoric like Tucker Carlson & Candace Owen becoming besties and Steve Bannon now calling a Fox News broadcaster “Tel Aviv Mark” so we are just fucked from all sides and an important conversation about electorate concerns is now drown out by all the stupid haters and instigators and influencers who are a toxic cancer in my community.

So that’s my fear. I am also fearful of the current discourse. I pray that Mamdani stays safe in this time of political and racist violence and the voices that are adding heat to this fear shut the f*&k up. I also have hope. My hope is that Mamdani engages with the mainstream Zionist community on these issues from his own highly critical anti-Israel perspective, I am not asking him to change his politics and I would welcome such a moment with open arms since it is not erasure but dialogue. And despite my fears, I am very glad we are as a city finally talking about housing, income inequality and especially immigrants rights as we are sinking further and further into autocracy as a country. That part of his platform should be celebrated and amplified.

I’m not even sure why I’m posting this other than to try to help people understand what at least some of the Jews are worried about and for the discourse to calm the fuck down. I do not want the Trump and MAGA people to further divide us but I desperately want people to hear this concern and not to dismiss it as merely part of that right wing agenda and I simultaneously desperately want to try to at least in my small corner of the internet disrupt the scary reductive racist binary conversation.

$40 Million

A TPM Reader pointed out to me that the “Big Beautiful Bill” budgets fully $40 million dollars through what’s left of the National Endowment for the Humanities to the President “for the procurement of statues” for the President’s “Garden of Heroes.”

Upcoming Sponsorship Openings at Daring Fireball

Weekly sponsorships have been the top source of revenue for Daring Fireball ever since I started selling them back in 2007. They’ve succeeded, I think, because they make everyone happy. They generate good money. There’s only one sponsor per week and the sponsors are always relevant to at least some sizable portion of the DF audience, so you, the reader, are never annoyed and hopefully often intrigued by them. And, from the sponsors’ perspective, they work. My favorite thing about them is how many sponsors return for subsequent weeks after seeing the results.

At the moment, I’ve only got four openings left through the end of September:

  • June 30–July 6 (next week)
  • August 18–24
  • August 25–31
  • September 1–7

I don’t know why next week remains unsold, but that’s just how it works out sometimes. If you’ve got a product or service (or, perhaps, a just-opened blockbuster car-racing movie) you think would be of interest to DF’s audience of people obsessed with high quality and good design, get in touch.

 ★ 

Balaji on AI

A few miscellaneous thoughts.

(1) First, the new bottleneck on AI is prompting and verifying. Since AI does tasks middle-to-middle, not end-to-end. So business spend migrates towards the edges of prompting and verifying, even as AI speeds up the middle.

(2) Second, AI really means amplified intelligence, not agentic intelligence. The smarter you are, the smarter the AI is. Better writers are better prompters.

(3) Third, AI doesn’t really take your job, it allows you to do any job. Because it allows you to be a passable UX designer, a decent SFX animator, and so on. But it doesn’t necessarily mean you can do that job *well*, as a specialist is often needed for polish.

(4) Fourth, AI doesn’t take your job, it takes the job of the previous AI. For example: Midjourney took Stable Diffusion’s job. GPT-4 took GPT-3’s job. Once you have a slot in your workflow for AI image gen, AI code gen, or the like, you just allocate that spend to the latest model.

(5) Fifth, killer AI is already here — and it’s called drones. And every country is pursuing it. So it’s not the image generators and chatbots one needs to worry about.

(6) Sixth, decentralized AI is already here and it’s essentially polytheistic AI (many strong models) rather than monotheistic AI (a single all-powerful model). That means balance of power between human/AI fusions rather than a single dominant AI that will turn us all into paperclips/pillars of salt.

(7) Seventh, AI is probabilistic while crypto is deterministic. So crypto can constrain AI. For example, AI can break captchas, but it can’t fake onchain balances. And it can solve some equations, but not cryptographic equations. Thus, crypto is roughly what AI can’t do.

(8) Eighth, I think AI on the whole right now is having a decentralizing effect, because there is so much more a small team can do with the right tooling, and because so many high quality open source models are coming.

All this could change if self-prompting, self-verifying, and self-replicating AI in the physical world really gets going. But there are open research questions between here and there.

Here is the link to the tweet.

The post Balaji on AI appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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How Lalo Schifrin Composed the Mission Impossible Theme Song

I want to celebrate the artistry of pianist and composer Lalo Schifrin, who died on Thursday at age 93. So I’m sharing this updated article from the archives on how he composed his iconic theme song to Mission Impossible.

Schifrin did so many other remarkable things in his long career. I first knew about him as a jazz musician who collaborated with Dizzy Gillespie. But Schifrin gained far more fame in Hollywood—where he got nominated for six Academy Awards and four Emmy Awards.

When I published a list of my 100 favorite film scores, I included Schifrin’s soundtrack to Bullitt. But I could have just as easily showcased several others—for example his Oscar-nominated work on Cool Hand Luke or The Amityville Horror, or his contributions to the Dirty Harry films.

But none of these will ever match the popularity of his Mission Impossible theme. It has thrilled audiences for almost sixty years—drawing them to cinemas even as I write these words.

I expect it will continue to do for many years to come.


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I love this music—I enjoy all those action theme songs, but this is one of my absolute favorites. It’s right up there with Hawaii Five-0 and Secret Agent Man. I’ll buy a ticket to the movie just to hear the song. And while other fans dig the action scenes and car chases because of the excitement, I eagerly await those same moments because that’s when the theme song kicks in.

They don’t waste this adrenaline-pumping music on the boring scenes. As soon as you hear that 5/4 groove start up, you know cars will crash and bombs will burst. Whatever happens over the next couple minutes took at least $10 million to film and a week to clean up. The song is your signal to stay in your seat—forget about popcorn or a trip to the loo—and enjoy the fireworks.

But even if I love the song, I didn’t cut composer Lalo Schifrin much slack—at least not initially. I always assumed he was just imitating Dave Brubeck and (composer) Paul Desmond’s hit song “Take 5”—which had introduced 5/4 rhythms into popular music a few years before Schifrin wrote this theme for the Mission Impossible TV show (1966-1973).

In the aftermath, 5/4 rhythms started showing up in commercial songs. You heard it everywhere from Jethro Tull’s “Living in the Past” to Cream’s “White Room” (just the intro) to Nick Drake’s “River Man.” The theme from Mission Impossible was part of this Brubeck-inspired trend.

Argentine pianist and composer Schifrin was a jazz musician by background. So he clearly knew all about “Take Five.” Of course, back then everybody who owned a radio heard that song. Schifrin even uses the same subdivision of the bar into a lilting three beat phrase followed by heavy accents on beats 4 and 5.

The composer, however, had an air tight alibi.

He wasn’t imitating Brubeck—not at all. Instead he learned this rhythm from Morse Code.

Schifrin merely took the initials of the title—which for Mission Impossible were M and I. Then he converted them to Morse Code.

The Morse Code for M is two dashes (— —) and the Morse Code for I is two dots (· ·). This gave him:

Now all you need to do is assign a beat-and-a-half to a dash, and a single beat to a dot.

You add this up, and it creates a five-beat pattern of _ _ .. or ♩. ♩. ♩ ♩

Or to be more precise:

Voilà—we have a Mission Impossible vamp, and no Brubeck or Desmond required. But in one interview, Schifrin admitted to a possible linkage back to his Time Out predecessor. “I suppose the Dave Brubeck Quartet’s ‘Take Five’ was in my heart,” the composer told Marc Myers, “but the 5/4 tempo just came naturally. It’s forceful, and the listener never feels comfortable.”

Here’s what it looked like on TV back in the 1960s.

Schifrin didn’t have much to work from. He didn’t have any footage to watch or scripts to read. He was simply told that the credit sequence opened with the lighting of a bomb’s fuse, and that he should write “something exciting.”

If anybody knew the rules of exciting cinematic music it was Schifrin. He has contributed scores to some of the greatest action films in movie history.

Even so, his first attempt at a Mission Impossible theme, composed in march rhythm, got rejected. That was unexpected—usually whatever Lalo wants, Lalo gets. But not in this case.

Time was running out—the TV series needed a song, and fast. So Schifrin sat down at his desk (not a piano), and composed the now classic song—it took about 90 seconds.

The vamp is the hook. But Schifrin added some nice touches—for example the bongo beat played by Emil Richards, and the unexpected flute part (probably performed by Bud Shank).

Actor Martin Landau, who starred in the series as Rollin Hand—the forerunner of Cruise’s Ethan Hunt—showed up at the studio the day the music was recorded. “I was stunned,” he later recalled. “It was so perfect. I came out humming that tune.”

The song was released as a single, but never cracked the top 40—peaking at number 41. Yet it has enjoyed tremendous staying power over the years. The movie reboot of Mission Impossible would have been unthinkable without that theme song. It’s almost 60 years old, but still feels young and spry.

Not long ago I published a chapter here from my book Music to Raise the Dead. The chapter is called “Why Do Heroes Always Have Theme Songs?” And it’s true, they do. That was the rule in ancient times—the most famous lyric poet of the classical world, Pindar, specialized in songs for heroes—and it’s still true today. In fact, songs of heroes seem to outlast other kinds of music.

Just consider the defining literary works of antiquity—such as Gilgamesh, the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Aeneid, and other towering works of this sort. They, too, are very much songs of heroes, and have survived for thousands of years.

Hollywood can’t match that long lineage. But in its own way, the movie themes of heroes are surprisingly durable.

In my study of heroic theme songs, I explain:

Every screen hero has a theme song, and these possess remarkable staying power. The iconic theme composed for super-spy James Bond in his first film appearance in 1962 is still propelling the franchise forward more than sixty years later. The multibillion dollar Mission Impossible franchise absolutely requires the incantatory appearance of the familiar 5/4 theme song launched with the original TV show back in 1966, which hasn’t lost its mojo despite a half-century of changing musical trends and tastes. Indiana Jones and Harry Potter enjoy endless reboots in movies, games, and TV shows—but the audience would refuse to accept these brand extensions without these heroes’ special songs.

Strange as it may seem, the songs have actually proven more enduring than the actors, plots, directors, or settings in these films. This runs against everything we’re told about the music business, where an instrumental track from 1962 would have very little significance in any other sphere of pop culture. But when it comes to heroes, different rules apply. These larger-than-life figures need their special songs and—as in the traditional quest stories—the melodies that have proven their magic in the past are the most potent of all.

That’s why I expect the Mission Impossible theme song to stay around for many more decades. It has cross-generational appeal.

That’s already been demonstrated. Consider the premiere of the first Mission Impossible film in 1996. The studio invited theme composer Lalo Schifrin to the event, which took place a few days before his 64th birthday. Not many people recognized him at the premiere, especially among the younger Hollywood crowd.

But one person did.

“When Tom Cruise saw me, he hugged me twice,” Schifrin later recalled. “He said he grew up with the television series and the music was one of the biggest elements that convinced him to get involved in the movie project, not only as an actor but as the co-producer. So he made my day.”

Schifrin has now left us at age 93. He had an illustrious career outside of Hollywood, collaborating with everyone from Dizzy Gillespie to Astor Piazzolla. But this popular theme song, composed in a couple of minutes to meet a tight deadline, will be his most lasting mark on the culture. It will obviously survive him, but it will also outlive Tom Cruise and all the other current stars.

That’s because Hollywood stardom is fleeting, but heroes and their songs live forever.

Saturday 28 June 1662

Up to my Lord’s and my own accounts, and so to the office, where all the forenoon sitting, and at noon by appointment to the Mitre, where Mr. Shepley gave me and Mr. Creed, and I had my uncle Wight with us, a dish of fish. Thence to the office again, and there all the afternoon till night, and so home, and after talking with my wife to bed. This day a genteel woman came to me, claiming kindred of me, as she had once done before, and borrowed 10s. of me, promising to repay it at night, but I hear nothing of her. I shall trust her no more.

Great talk there is of a fear of a war with the Dutch; and we have order to pitch upon twenty ships to be forthwith set out; but I hope it is but a scarecrow to the world, to let them see that we can be ready for them; though, God knows! the King is not able to set out five ships at this present without great difficulty, we neither having money, credit, nor stores.

My mind is now in a wonderful condition of quiet and content, more than ever in all my life, since my minding the business of my office, which I have done most constantly; and I find it to be the very effect of my late oaths against wine and plays, which, if God please, I will keep constant in, for now my business is a delight to me, and brings me great credit, and my purse encreases too.

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Reading List 06/28/25

Ryugyong Hotel, North Korea, via @sci_fi_infra.

Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure and industrial technology. This week we look at Fannie and Freddie’s mortgage blacklist, the air traffic controller shortage, the largest landowners in the US, a blended wing airliner, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber.

My essay “Why Are Homes So Expensive In Western States” made use of the USDA’s Natural Amenities Scale. Because the original index used temperature data from 1941-1970, I recalculated it using more recent temperature data from 2010-2024. I’ve made the recalculated scale available on Github here for those who are interested.

Car carrier sinks in the Pacific

The Morning Midas, a car carrier transporting 3000 cars, sank off the coast of Alaska this week after it had been abandoned when a fire broke out. From CNN:

A cargo ship that had been delivering new vehicles to Mexico sank in the North Pacific Ocean, weeks after crew members abandoned ship when they couldn’t extinguish an onboard fire that left the carrier dead in the water.

The Morning Midas sank Monday in international waters off Alaska’s Aleutian Islands chain, the ship’s management company, London-based Zodiac Maritime, said in a statement…

Fire damage compounded by bad weather and water seepage caused the carrier to sink in waters about 16,404 feet (5,000 meters) deep and about 415 miles (770 kilometers) from land, the statement said.

The ship was loaded with about 3,000 new vehicles intended for a major Pacific port in Mexico.

Ships sinking is apparently a lot more common than I thought (though it’s a small fraction of the roughly 100,000 commercial oceangoing ships in operation). Every year a few dozen oceangoing ships are lost at sea. Most of them are smaller vessels, but some of them will be larger ships like the Morning Midas.

The rate seems roughly constant for the last 15 years, though thankfully the rate of crew losses seems to have dramatically decreased.

Mortgage blacklist

This week I learned about the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac “mortgage blacklist”, a list of condo developments that don’t meet Fannie and Freddie requirements, are ineligible to be guaranteed by them, and thus have extreme difficulty getting conventional mortgages. From Themortgagereports.com:

Fannie Mae, the government-sponsored enterprise that guarantees mortgages, maintains a list of condo and co-op projects that fail to meet its lending criteria. Properties on this list are ineligible for conventional loans backed by Fannie Mae, which significantly reduces financing options for buyers and owners looking to refinance.

Condo developments may be blacklisted for several reasons, including:

  • Structural or safety concerns that remain unaddressed

  • Insufficient reserves to cover maintenance and repairs

  • Pending litigation that could pose financial risks

  • High investor ownership, making the property less appealing to lenders

  • Insurance issues that fail to meet Fannie Mae’s requirements

Once a condo is on the list, obtaining financing through traditional lenders becomes extremely difficult, often forcing buyers into cash-only purchases or high-interest alternative loans.

Herold Law has some more information on the blacklist, particularly on the role of insurance. As insurance has gotten more expensive, it’s gotten harder for condo developments to meet Fannie and Freddie’s requirements:

Fannie Mae and its counterpart Freddie Mac do not issue loans but purchase roughly half of the nation’s home loans to package and resell to investors, guaranteeing payments. Loans meeting their underwriting criteria, known as conforming loans, can be less expensive and require lower down payments than bespoke mortgages. Properties that fail to qualify face a major disadvantage in the real estate market….

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac require a minimum level of insurance. The firms issued new guidelines last year that have prompted lenders to take a stricter line on insurance requirements, according to lenders, real estate agents, and insurers.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac require a specific level of insurance coverage for home loans they are willing to buy to ensure the debt can be repaid should the property be damaged or destroyed. However, rising claims from natural disasters have led insurers to raise premiums, limit coverage, and impose higher deductibles, often beyond what Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac permit. One particularly contentious issue is that many insurers now only cover the depreciated value of damaged roofs rather than full replacement costs, a practice neither Fannie Mae nor Freddie Mac accept.

As a result, many condominium associations are struggling to secure insurance policies that meet such strict standards. Some are opting for reduced coverage, even if it means their properties become ineligible for Fannie Mae-backed loans, which makes it difficult for homeowners to sell their units.

Air traffic controller shortage

The National Academies released a 286-page long report investigating the extents and causes of the shortage of air traffic controllers in the US. It found that 30% of facilities are understaffed by 10% or more, and that at many of the highest-traffic facilities staffing shortages exceed 15%.

Primarily as a result of hiring fewer controllers than those lost to attrition, 19 of the largest facilities have fallen 15% below their staffing targets as estimated with the traditional approach. These large, understaffed facilities serving the 30 largest airports account for about 6% of facilities, 27% of commercial operations, 40% of all delays, and 45% of other delays, which include those that are staffing-related. (See Chapters 2 and 8.)

Although FAA has been increasing hiring as directed by Congress in FY 2024, it can only hire as many new staff as it can train expeditiously due to constraints on training capacity at the FAA Academy and individual facilities. The principal constraint has been the shortage of former FAA controllers willing to serve as classroom trainers at the Academy and facilities. Through its National Training Initiative (NTI), FAA is working diligently to address this constraint. FAA is currently confident it has addressed this issue at the Academy. Attracting former controllers to serve as trainers at individual facilities is a long-standing problem in specific locations, typically those with high costs of living. Expanded and improved training is needed to rectify declining training success rates and increasing time required for new hires to fully certify at the largest facilities. Without further improvements in hiring and training, it would take an average of at least 4.8 years from tentative hire offers to reach CPC status in En Route Centers. For CPCs required at the largest Terminals, the bulk of which require transfers from a smaller facility, it would take an average of 5.5 years for new hires to reach CPC status. (See Chapter 6.)

Jones Act 2.0

The Jones Act is the widely detested law that requires cargo shipped between US ports to be carried on US-built ships. Because the US builds so few ships (and because the ones it does build are extremely expensive), the Jones Act has been blamed for driving up the costs and complexities every service that requires shipping between US ports (such as transporting goods to Hawaii, and installing offshore wind turbines).

Now a new, similar bill, requiring any cargo used for transportation projects to be carried on US-built ships, has passed the House. Via Judge Glock on Twitter:

96%(!) of the House voted in favor of the bill.

Policy-minded folks are often extremely critical of the Jones Act and advocate for it’s removal or reform, but with such enormous bipartisan support for similar laws its hard to imagine this being a tractable cause at the moment.

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The Modernity Machine II

We’re now 6 months into our book club. It’s easily the most fun I’m having this year. The 6 books we’ve read so far are:

  1. January: City of Fortune by Roger Crowley.

  2. February: Raiders, Rulers, and Traders: The Horse and the Rise of Empires by David Chaffetz.

  3. March: Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition by Frances A. Yates.

  4. April: Ibn Khaldun: An Intellectual Biography by Robert Irwin.

  5. May: The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe by Elizabeth S. Eisenstein.

  6. June: Monkey King: Journey to the West

You can find links to the books, chat threads, and a Google Form that earns you free subscription month credits for every month you read a book, on the book club page. I’m about to dole out the first tranche of the reward months.

July is a good month to jump in. It’s a side-quest month, where book clubbers can pick their own read within the theme, so you can choose your entry point. I have supplied a list of side quest suggestions (scroll to the bottom of the page), but you can find your own.

The picks for the rest of the year have already been posted. There’s a loose study focus theme to the book club. I outlined the initial version of the theme in The Modernity Machine (Jan 26), and this is an update to the thesis, 6 books in.

The theme is early pre-modernity. Looking for the emerging contours of what we now think of as modernity in books about, or from, roughly 1200 to 1600.

When we started out, I decided to use my curatorial BDFL privileges not just to make my picks, but also strongly urge a particular strongly colored reading perspective, based on a couple of ideas. I’m handing out free subscription months as a reward mainly to bribe people into adopting my perspective:

  1. World as machine: In keeping with theme of this newsletter, we’re adopting a mechanistic, engineering perspective. We’re trying to do our reading with an eye to reverse engineering how the world works (and how it came to work that way) in a machinic rather than humanist idiom. So we deliberately go looking for machine metaphors, decenterings of the human, centerings of non-human things, and so forth. For example, I picked the February read because it centers horses rather than humans in telling the story of steppe nomads.

  2. Horizontal history: History is generally told vertically in time, following course of streams of human identity — individuals, clans, tribes, dynasties, kingdoms, ethnicities, races. We’re deliberately trying to go horizontal instead, which is why we’re going geographically global but time-boxing our reading to a few centuries.

This has generally been a successful perspective, though not always easy to apply. The focal temporal band of 400 years was a little broader than I wanted, but it turns out that’s really about the shortest period within which a world machine can come into being and get turned on to power the planet. You really can’t make sense of important things that happened by around 1600 without going back at least to 1200.

Something similar is unfolding today. The modernity machine that was installed worldwide between 1200-1600 (the founding of various royal charter trading companies is a good bookend development) is reaching an End of Life state, and is about ready to be entirely decommissioned. The postmodernity machine that has been built over the last 400 years (1600-2000) is finally ready to be switched on.

The 1600 boundary ±50 years is when the completed modernity machine got powered on worldwide for the first time, and the postmodernity machine started to be envisioned and sketched out. In general, ~1600 feels like a good cutting point for a machinic and horizontal history perspective. A version 1.0 of the machine stabilizing, and a version 2.0 entering development.

Other perspectives will not lead to the same periodization cuts.

  • Fukuyama, focused on the evolution of political order from a philosophy-of-history lens, chose to make the cut in the 19th century (specifically, the Battle of Jena, ~1813).

  • If you’re focused on literal technology, the 1890s are perhaps the best cut point, since it separates the artisan era from the scaled-engineering and interchangeable-parts era.

  • If you’re focused on art and culture, the romanticism movement of the late 18th century is perhaps the right cut point.

Call it a technical conceit, but I think thinking in terms of world machines that combine the political, cultural, and technological within a single machinic paradigm, is in some ways the best perspective. It leads to the most elegant periodization of history. I’m trying to develop a systematic argument for the “succession of world machines” view of history based on information flow bottlenecks, intra-epoch vs. inter-epoch causal flows, and so on.

If you want to carve up historical reality at the joints, the points at which particular world machines get turned on properly for the first time, with all the key pieces in place, is a pretty good class of candidate points. The machines themselves take about 400 years to assemble for whatever phenomenological reasons, but they “turning on” seems to take no more than a generation. We just turned on the postmodernity machine in the last decade, even though it’s been under construction for 400 years.

The machine that got “turned on” around 1600-1630 (and is ready to be turned off now) had a lot of moving parts. The matured print revolution. The scientific sensibility. Legalistic (rather than vibe-based) religious pluralism. The final eclipse of the steppe nomad. The first full-ish mapping of the world, with all major sailing routes established. The Americas established as a space for modernity to work itself out. A pathway (a pretty dark one) for Africa to get integrated into the world machine properly for the first time.

Equally importantly, lots of old moving parts were set aside firmly, for good. A medieval machine, which had come together ~800-1200, got turned off and mothballed.

Pre-gunpowder military technologies. Scribal cultures. An Eastern Mediterranean focused myopic European mindset. Chronologically nonsensical senses of history. The gentle sidelining of mythology and literalist religion as a load-bearing component of the machine. The effective obsolescence of the Silk Road. The reduction of the chivalric cultural modes of the medieval machine to camp (Don Quixote, published in 1605, is a good marker for the demise of that mode not just in Europe, but in Asia too).

On that last front, the comparable military culture of the early Islamic centuries had given way to something like a professionalized military culture based on the twin pillars of slave soldiers/generals and artillery based warfare. Though the full shift from honor-based combat to what we now understand as total war would take another 2 centuries to complete, by 1605 the gears had already decisively shifted worldwide, and the elites had shifted to the new modes of governance and warfare. The Thirty Years War in Europe is a well-known marker of the shift in the West, but you find signs all over the world.

A particular favorite of mine is the Battle of Talikota in India in 1565. Unlike the Battle of Panipat 40 years earlier (1526), which had brought the Mughals into India, and popularized their artillery based warfare (artillery had been sporadically used in the subcontinent before, but the Mughals were the first to introduce warfare that was doctrinally artillery-based), this battle featured artillery tactics on both sides. There was a confused blend of medieval pitched battle modes and the positioning and maneuvering modes catalyzed by artillery.

The battle is often mythologized as a Hindu-Muslim battle (between the Hindu Vijaynagara empire and a coalition of the fragmented remnants of the Muslim Bahamani empire, known as the Deccan Sultanates), but it both was and wasn’t. The Vijaynagara army featured two Muslim generals, skilled in artillery tactics — but they defected halfway through. Like the Thirty Years War, the overstory was large-scale religious dynamics, with a sense of a hangover from Crusade-style narratives, but the understory was one of cosmopolitan mercenary politicking and pursuit of largely non-religious competitive agendas.

This, by the way, is what I mean by “horizontal history.”

We often treat the Crusades as a culturally distinct era of religiously justified warfare that was unique to the Europe-Islam interface, but the Islam-Asia interface featured roughly very rhyming dynamics, just with a different balance of power. The centuries of encounters between the early Muslim invaders and the Rajputs of the Northwest had many similarities with the Crusades.

Similarly, we treat the 30 years war as creating the modern religious landscape of the West, in the wake of the Reformation, but rhyming things happened in Asia as well. The Battle of Talikota happened after the effects of the Sufi, Bhakti, and Sikh reform movements had begun to spread through the societal fabric, and reformers from Sankara to Chaitanya had done their work. By 1556, the printing press had already arrived in India (in Goa, with the Portuguese), and printing in Indian languages had already begun wherever European Christianity found a foothold.

There were differences (most, I’m now convinced, due to the delayed arrival and diffusion of print), but these didn’t matter as much as you might think.

This “everything everywhere, all at once” character of the arrival of the modernity machine is often underestimated. Sure, full diffusion (the “scale out” of the machine via connecting the islands with trade, military, and knowledge links) took another couple of centuries, but it is easy to underestimate the impact of just the initial wave of diffusion, and increased cosmopolitan connectivity among the elites of the world. The essential 20% of the modernity machine, which delivered 80% of the disruption and re-building of the societal fabric, was installed relatively quickly.

Europe did diverge from the rest of the world after 1600, a story about the postmodernity machine rather than the modernity machine, but a persuasive case can be made that that is a distinct story with very different dynamics.

Anyhow, this is turning out to be a fascinating journey for a committed dozen or so of us in the book club, and I hope more of you will join in. You don’t have to scramble to catch up with the readings we’ve already finished. This is something of a random-access book club, so you can join in now, and dive into the finished readings at your own pace as, when, and if you like.

To sneak a peek ahead, you’ll see that where the earlier reads explored the structural contours of the machine, as well as the “making of the modern mind” aspect, the remaining reads delve into the (firmly decentered) human stories more, as well as the beginnings of the “scale-out” story.

I’ll do another thesis update in December, and at that point, I think we’ll be have a pretty good portrait of the modernity machine going.

Rocket Lab launches second Electron within 48 hours

Electron launch

A Rocket Lab Electron placed an undisclosed satellite into orbit June 28 on the company’s second launch within 48 hours and fourth this month.

The post Rocket Lab launches second Electron within 48 hours appeared first on SpaceNews.

SpaceX scores $81.6 million Space Force contract to launch weather satellite

Space Force awards third consecutive NSSL Phase 3 task order to SpaceX for 2027 launch

The post SpaceX scores $81.6 million Space Force contract to launch weather satellite appeared first on SpaceNews.

Detroit helicopter drop of cash

The money drop was apparently the last wish of the owner of a nearby car wash. Knife said the man recently died due to Alzheimer’s Disease and his funeral was Friday.

Despite the mad dash for free cash, the incident remained peaceful, if hectic, Knife said.

“There was no fighting, none of that,” she said. “It was really beautiful.”

…Witnesses said a helicopter hovering in the area of Gratiot Avenue and Conner Street dropped thousands of dollars in cash onto the pedestrians below, bringing a sudden and surreal burst of joy to a hot Friday afternoon in east Detroit.

Lisa Knife, an employee at the nearby Airport Express Lube & Service, 10490 Gratiot, estimated that thousands of dollars were tossed from the chopper.

Here is the full story, via Edward Craig.

The post Detroit helicopter drop of cash appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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Real Estate Newsletter Articles this Week: New Home Sales Decrease to 623,000 Annual Rate in May

At the Calculated Risk Real Estate Newsletter this week:

New Home SalesClick on graph for larger image.

New Home Sales Decrease to 623,000 Annual Rate in May

NAR: Existing-Home Sales Increased to 4.03 million SAAR in May; Down 0.7% YoY

Case-Shiller: National House Price Index Up 2.7% year-over-year in April

Inflation Adjusted House Prices 1.7% Below 2022 Peak

Final Look at Local Housing Markets in May and a Look Ahead to June Sales

This is usually published 4 to 6 times a week and provides more in-depth analysis of the housing market.

Notes towards Interesting Lates

 
 
 
 
 
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Continuous AI

Continuous AI

GitHub Next have coined the term "Continuous AI" to describe "all uses of automated AI to support software collaboration on any platform". It's intended as an echo of Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment:

We've chosen the term "Continuous AI” to align with the established concept of Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD). Just as CI/CD transformed software development by automating integration and deployment, Continuous AI covers the ways in which AI can be used to automate and enhance collaboration workflows.

“Continuous AI” is not a term GitHub owns, nor a technology GitHub builds: it's a term we use to focus our minds, and which we're introducing to the industry. This means Continuous AI is an open-ended set of activities, workloads, examples, recipes, technologies and capabilities; a category, rather than any single tool.

I was thrilled to bits to see LLM get a mention as a tool that can be used to implement some of these patterns inside of GitHub Actions:

You can also use the llm framework in combination with the llm-github-models extension to create LLM-powered GitHub Actions which use GitHub Models using Unix shell scripting.

The GitHub Next team have started maintaining an Awesome Continuous AI list with links to projects that fit under this new umbrella term.

I'm particularly interested in the idea of having CI jobs (I guess CAI jobs?) that check proposed changes to see if there's documentation that needs to be updated and that might have been missed - a much more powerful variant of my documentation unit tests pattern.

Tags: continuous-integration, github, ai, github-actions, generative-ai, llms, llm

Talking With Martin Wolf

It’s been a hell of a week for me, including two successive nights sleeping on airplanes. So there was no time for a regular, properly edited video interview.

However, I have a new YouTube channel, which I am gradually populating with videos, some already posted on Substack but some new. In particular, I have been doing a series of conversations with Martin Wolf for the FT. Here’s the first of them, about — surprise! — the uncertainty Donald Trump has been creating for the world economy:

Context engineering

The term context engineering has recently started to gain traction as a better alternative to prompt engineering. I like it. I think this one may have sticking power.

Here's an example tweet from Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke:

I really like the term “context engineering” over prompt engineering.

It describes the core skill better: the art of providing all the context for the task to be plausibly solvable by the LLM.

Recently amplified by Andrej Karpathy:

+1 for "context engineering" over "prompt engineering".

People associate prompts with short task descriptions you'd give an LLM in your day-to-day use. When in every industrial-strength LLM app, context engineering is the delicate art and science of filling the context window with just the right information for the next step. Science because doing this right involves task descriptions and explanations, few shot examples, RAG, related (possibly multimodal) data, tools, state and history, compacting [...] Doing this well is highly non-trivial. And art because of the guiding intuition around LLM psychology of people spirits. [...]

I've spoken favorably of prompt engineering in the past - I hoped that term could capture the inherent complexity of constructing reliable prompts. Unfortunately, most people's inferred definition is that it's a laughably pretentious term for typing things into a chatbot!

It turns out that inferred definitions are the ones that stick. I think the inferred definition of "context engineering" is likely to be much closer to the intended meaning.

Tags: andrej-karpathy, prompt-engineering, generative-ai, ai, llms

Saturday assorted links

1. Claude buying things.  And does Claude generate better research ideas? (Maybe!)

2. NYT 100 best movies of the century list.

3. Can a 78-year-old tech magnate conduct Mahler’s 2nd? (NYT)

4. How active is Child Protection Services? (link is now fixed)

5- Mamdani on Adam Smith.

6. Is morally universal language declining over time?

7. Denmark will give people IP in their own features, voices, and likenesses.

8. Lauren Groff on Mansfield Park (NYT).

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SpaceX completes 60th Starlink flight of 2025

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifts off from Space Launch Complex 4 East at Vandenberg Space Force Base on the Starlink 15-7 mission on June 28, 2025. Image: SpaceX

SpaceX completed its second of two planned Saturday Falcon 9 rocket launches with the second lifting off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.

It launched 26 more Starlink V2 Mini satellites into low Earth orbit, adding to a constellation nearly 8,000 strong. The Starlink 15-7 mission took off from Space Launch Complex 4 East at 10:13 a.m. PDT (1:13 p.m. EDT, 1713 UTC).

The Falcon 9 first stage booster used on this mission had the tail number B1088 and flew for an eighth time. It’s previous launches included NASA’s SPHEREx, two missions for the National Reconnaissance Office and the Transporter-12 ride share mission.

A little more than eight minutes after liftoff, B1088 landed on the droneship, ‘Of Course I Still Love You.’ This was the 139th touchdown on this vessel and the 470th booster landing to date.

In Case You Missed It…

…a week of Mad Biologist links:

A Programming Note Regarding the Iran Attack

Officer Friendly? Or a Kidnapper?

The Majority of Americans Want Due Process for Undocumented Immigrants

Trump Declares War on the Birds and the Bees

When Totalitarianism Comes to D.C.: The Renaming Edition

Mamdani Proposes a ‘PX for the People’ and the Washington Post Loses Its Shit

The military culture that is German

Pistorius must grapple with a procurement bureaucracy that once took seven years to select a new main assault rifle and more than a decade to procure a helmet for helicopter pilots. He will have to oversee an enormous ramp-up by an arms industry already struggling with capacity. And billions must go towards tasks such as upgrading barracks, some of which are in “disastrous” shape with crumbling plaster and mould, according to the armed forces watchdog.

Here is more from the FT.

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Schedule for Week of June 29, 2025

The key report scheduled for this week is the June employment report to be released on Thursday.

Other key reports include the June ISM Manufacturing survey, June Vehicle Sales and the Trade Deficit for May.

----- Monday, June 30th -----

9:45 AM: Chicago Purchasing Managers Index for June.

10:30 AM: Dallas Fed Survey of Manufacturing Activity for June.

----- Tuesday, July 1st -----

9:30 AM: Discussion, Fed Chair Jerome Powell, Policy Panel Discussion, At the European Central Bank Forum on Central Banking 2025, Sintra, Portugal

10:00 AM: ISM Manufacturing Index for June. The consensus is for the ISM to be at 48.8, up from 48.5 in May. 

10:00 AM: Construction Spending for May. The consensus is for a 0.1% decrease in construction spending.

Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey10:00 AM ET: Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey for May from the BLS.

This graph shows job openings (black line), hires (dark blue), Layoff, Discharges and other (red column), and Quits (light blue column) from the JOLTS.

Jobs openings increased in April to 7.39 million from 7.20 million in March.

The number of job openings were down 3% year-over-year and quits were down 6% year-over-year.

Vehicle SalesLate in the day: Light vehicle sales for June.

The consensus is for light vehicle sales to be 15.5 million SAAR in June, down from 15.6 million in May (Seasonally Adjusted Annual Rate).

This graph shows light vehicle sales since the BEA started keeping data in 1967. The dashed line is the sales rate for last month.

J.D. Power is forecasting sales of 15.0 million SAAR in June.

----- Wednesday, July 2nd -----

7:00 AM ET: The Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) will release the results for the mortgage purchase applications index.

8:15 AM: The ADP Employment Report for June. This report is for private payrolls only (no government). The consensus is for 110,000 payroll jobs added in June, up from 37,000 in May.

----- Thursday, July 3rd -----

Employment per month8:30 AM: Employment Report for June.   The consensus is for 129,000 jobs added, and for the unemployment rate to be unchanged at 4.2%.

There were 139,000 jobs added in May, and the unemployment rate was at 4.2%.

This graph shows the jobs added per month since January 2021.

8:30 AM: The initial weekly unemployment claims report will be released. The consensus is for initial claims to increase to 239 thousand from 236 thousand last week.

U.S. Trade Deficit8:30 AM: Trade Balance report for May from the Census Bureau.

This graph shows the U.S. trade deficit, with and without petroleum, through the most recent report. The blue line is the total deficit, and the black line is the petroleum deficit, and the red line is the trade deficit ex-petroleum products.

The consensus is the trade deficit to be $69.8 billion.  The U.S. trade deficit was at $61.6 billion the previous month.

10:00 AM: the ISM Services Index for June.   The consensus is for a reading of 50.8, up from 49.9.

All US markets will close early at 1:00 PM ET in observance of Independence Day

----- Friday, July 4th -----

All US markets will be closed in observance of Independence Day

Internet advertising: affiliate marketing scams, evolving

 Ben Edelman announces a return to his roots, detecting advertising fraud on the internet. (Remember when malware would flash unwanted pages on your browser?)

From his blog:

Advertising Fraud Detection at VPT Digital

Today I announced joining the security startup VPT Digital as Chief Scientist.  VPT operates in a space I feel I pioneered: Automated testing to find misconduct in affiliate marketing.  As early as summer 2004 (not a typo!), I was catching affiliates using adware to claim commission they hadn’t earned.  I later built automation to scale up my efforts.

Think affiliate fraud is no big deal?  I was proud to recover large amounts for my clients.  For one large client, I once proved that nine of its top ten biggest affiliates were breaking its rules – which might sound like a disaster, and in some sense it was, but ejecting the rule-breakers yielded ample funds to pay more to those who genuinely drove incremental value.  Affiliate marketing experts may also remember Shawn Hogan and Brian Dunning, who faced both criminal and civil litigation for affiliate fraud – allegations that the FBI said stemmed from reports from me.  Litigation reported that defendants collected more than $20 million in 18 months.  “No big deal,” indeed.

The web is a lot messier than when I started down this path, and tricksters use a remarkable range of methods.  Reviewing VPT’s automation, I’ve been suitably impressed.  They test a range of adware, but also cookie-stuffing, typosquatting, and more.  Of course they test Windows adware and browser plug-ins, but they and have Mac and mobile capabilities too.  They test from multiple geographies, at all times of day.  Their testing is fully automated, yielding spiffy reports in a modern dashboard – plus email alerts and API integration.  It’s all the features I used to dream of building, and then some.

I’ll be working with VPT part-time in the coming months and years to continue to hone their offerings, including making their reports even more accessible to those who don’t want to be experts at affiliate fraud.  I’ll also blog about highlights from their findings.

#########

Earlier:

Saturday, February 15, 2014 Ben Edelman, Internet Sheriff

and (still earlier), I may have helped secure that nickname in this post:

Friday, October 10, 2008 Online advertising--Ben Edelman

 
 

 

What should I ask Seamus Murphy?

Yes I will be doing a Conversation with him.  An associate of his emails me this excellent description of his work:

Spent over two decades photographing in Afghanistan (12 trips between 1994–2007). Has been back since the fall of the U.S. side.

  • Collaborated with P.J. Harvey on her album Let England Shake— they travelled together through Kosovo, Afghanistan, and the U.S. while she wrote songs and he filmed/photographed. This lead to P.J.’s album, and Seamus’s documentary ‘A Dog Called Money’
  • Made a film on recently deceased Irish poet Pat Ingoldsby. Pat was a well known Dublin character, a former TV presenter who sold his poetry on the streets of Dublin outside Trinity college for decades.
  • Published several books, including:
    • A Darkness Visible: Afghanistan
    • I Am the Beggar of the World (with Afghan women’s Landay poetry)
    • The Hollow of the Hand (with P.J. Harvey)
    • The Republic (on Ireland pre-2016 centenary)
  • Won 7 work press photo awards, and has photos held in the Getty Museum and Imperial War Museum
  • More recently Seamus has published Strange Love which is a photography book on visual parallels between the U.S. and Russia.
  • Seamus also semi lives in India now and has photo collections on modernising/not-modernising India (https://www.seamusmurphy.com/Epic-City/2)

TC again: So what should I ask him?

p.s. Here is Murphy’s home page.

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RFK Jr.’s CDC Panel Ditches Some Flu Shots Based on Anti-Vaccine Junk Data

Beth Mole, reporting for Ars Technica:

The vaccine panel hand-selected by health secretary and anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Thursday voted overwhelmingly to drop federal recommendations for seasonal flu shots that contain the ethyl-mercury containing preservative thimerosal. The panel did so after hearing a misleading and cherry-picked presentation from an anti-vaccine activist.

There is extensive data from the last quarter century proving that the antiseptic preservative is safe, with no harms identified beyond slight soreness at the injection site, but none of that data was presented during today’s meeting.

The significance of the vote is unclear for now. The vast majority of seasonal influenza vaccines currently used in the US — about 96 percent of flu shots in 2024–2025 — do not contain thimerosal. The preservative is only included in multi-dose vials of seasonal flu vaccines, where it prevents the growth of bacteria and fungi potentially introduced as doses are withdrawn.

However, thimerosal is more common elsewhere in the world for various multi-dose vaccine vials, which are cheaper than the single-dose vials more commonly used in the US. If other countries follow the US’s lead and abandon thimerosal, it could increase the cost of vaccines in other countries and, in turn, lead to fewer vaccinations.

Having an ignorant conspiracy nut lead the Department of Health and Human Services is angering and worrisome, to say the least. But it’s also incredibly frustrating, because Donald Trump himself isn’t an anti-vaxxer. In fact, one of the few great achievements of the first Trump Administration was Operation Warp Speed, a highly successful effort spearheaded by the US federal government to “facilitate and accelerate the development, manufacturing, and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines, therapeutics, and diagnostics.” Early in the pandemic experts were concerned it would take years before a Covid vaccine might be available. Instead, multiple effective vaccines were widely available — and administered free of charge — in the first half of 2021, only a year after the pandemic broke. It was a remarkable success and any other president who spearheaded Operation Warp Speed would have rightfully taken tremendous credit for it.

But instead, while plotting his return to office, Trump smelled opportunity with the anti-vax contingent of the out-and-proud Stupid-Americans, and now here we are, with a genuine know-nothing lunatic like RFK Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services. God help us if another pandemic hits in the next few years.

 ★ 

‘Stupid-Americans Are the New Irish-Americans, Trump Is Their JFK’

Banger of a post by “tarltontarlton” on Reddit:

That same process is happening now with stupid people. They’re transcending their individual limitations, finding each other and becoming out-and-proud Stupid-Americans. [...]

How individual stupid Americans are becoming the collective, self-aware group of Stupid-Americans is a great idea for a lot of very fancy journalism I’m sure. It’s probably got something to do with the internet, where stupid people can find and repeat stupid things to each other over and over and over again.

I believe it has a lot to do with the Internet, which has functioned as a terribly efficient sorting machine. It used to be that there were conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans. Both political parties were, effectively, shades of purple. Now we’ve sorted ourselves, and the result is the palpable increase in polarization. Low-IQ stupidity might still be spread across both sides of the political aisle, but willful ignorance — the dogmatic cultish belief that loudmouths’ opinions are on equal ground with facts and evidence presented by informed experts — is the entire basis of the MAGA movement. A regular stupid person might say, “Well, I don’t know anything about vaccines, so I better listen to my doctor, who is highly educated and well-informed on the subject.” An out-and-proud Stupid-American says “I don’t know anything about vaccines either, so I’m going to listen to a kook who admits that a worm ate part of his brain, because I can’t understand the science but I can understand conspiracy theories.”

If written language survives the next six weeks, we’ll be writing about Donald Trump for a thousand years. But whatever else there is to say, the most important thing about Donald Trump, the thing that is obvious from watching him speak for just 14 seconds, is that he is profoundly stupid. Whatever it is that he might be talking about or doing at any given moment, it’s clear that while he has a reptilian instinct for reading and stoking conflict, he has no real idea what’s going on and he doesn’t really care to. Stupid is what he is and where he comes from. It is his mind and his soul. Catholic was what JFK was. Gay was what Harvey Milk was. Stupid is who Donald Trump is.

And that’s what they love most, the Stupid-American voters.

Remember that sentence you heard at the beginning of all this in 2016? “He’s just saying what everybody is thinking.”

But see, not everybody was thinking that Hillary Clinton was an alien, that global warming was a Chinese hoax and that what America needed most of all was a plywood wall stretching from Texas to California. Only the stupid people were. And suddenly, in an instant, the most powerful man on earth was thinking just like them. With his clueless smirk and unstoppable rise, he turned people whose stupidity made them feel like nobody into people who felt like everybody.

That’s why he’ll never lose them. Because it was never about what he did or didn’t do. All that stuff is very confusing and the Stupid-American community isn’t interested in the details. They love him for who he is, which is one of them, and because he shows them every day that Stupid-Americans can reach the social mountaintop.

(Via Kottke.)

 ★ 

Apple’s Other ‘F1 The Movie’ In-App Promotions

Joe Rossignol:

The company has promoted its Brad Pitt racing film with advertisements across at least six iPhone apps leading up to today’s wide release, including the App Store, Apple Wallet, Apple Sports, Apple Podcasts, iTunes Store, and of course the Apple TV app.

Most of those apps have ads in them all the time. It’s certainly fine for Apple to use those ad spots to promote their own movie. Even with Apple Sports, which most of the time has no ads at all, I think it’s fine for Apple to occasionally drop a promotion in there for something of their own. And F1 The Movie is a sports movie. The Apple Wallet push notification isn’t just a little different, it’s a lot different.

I will also note one other sort-of promotion. I play the mini crossword every morning in Apple News. Today’s 1-down clue was “F1 The Movie star Brad ____”. I think that’s a clever on-brand tie-in. Fun, not obnoxious. But with the smell of that Wallet push-notification fart still hanging in the air, not as much fun as it otherwise would have been.

 ★ 

What I’ve been reading

1. Alex Niven, The North Will Rise Again: In Search of the Future in Northern Heartlands.  If you can look past the usual ill-informed chatter about Maggie ruining northern England (the author needs to study growth models!), this is quite an interesting book.  I do not mind that it roams into the territory of popular music in what seems to be an arbitrary fashion.  Here is one bit: “I have written before about how a version of this cultural complex is one of the reasons why English identity — with its nostalgia for vague historical dreams and absurd lack of real constitutional structures in the present — is really a kind of vast melancholic illusion.  Northern English identity is a sort of killer variant of this more widespread national disease.”

2. Christopher Clarey, The Warrior: Rafael Nadal and His Kingdom of Clay.  An intelligent and very good book, covering one of the greatest eras (Federer-Nadal-Djokovic) that any sport ever has had.

3. Ned Palmer, A Cheesemonger’s Tour de France.  About half of this book is good and focused.  Think of it as one possible introduction to French regional history.  You can learn why Provence is so special for goat cheese, and why Dijon has kept so many original agricultural and cheese-making traditions.  Why cheese comes from Brittany only in recent times, and so on.

4. Rupert Gavin, Amorous or Loving?: The Highly Peculiar Tale of English and the English.  An excellent book that will make my best of the year list.  How did the English language come to be so diverse and also have so many words?  Along the way you get decent insights into economic history, the importance of London, and the Straussian readings of Macbeth.

5. Tim Bouverie, Allies at War: The Politics of Defeating Hitler.  A useful and detailed reminder that allies never really quite get along with each other.  You can never read too many books about World War II.

I am very sympathetic with Dean Spears and Michael Geruso, After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People.

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WorkOS

My thanks to WorkOS for once again sponsoring Daring Fireball. Modern authentication should be seamless and secure. WorkOS makes it easy to integrate features like MFA, SSO, and RBAC.

Whether you’re replacing passwords, stopping fraud, or adding enterprise auth, WorkOS can help you build frictionless auth that scales.

Future-proof your authentication stack with the identity layer trusted by OpenAI, Cursor, Perplexity, and Vercel. Upgrade your auth today.

 ★ 

Heat and Fire Weather Concerns in the West; Excessive Rainfall Possible in the South-Central U.S.

CPHC Central North Pacific Outlook


Central North Pacific 2-Day Graphical Outlook Image
Central North Pacific 7-Day Graphical Outlook Image


ZCZC HFOTWOCP ALL
TTAA00 PHFO DDHHMM

Tropical Weather Outlook
NWS Central Pacific Hurricane Center Honolulu HI
Issued by NWS National Hurricane Center Miami FL
800 AM HST Mon Jun 30 2025

For the central North Pacific...between 140W and 180W:

Active Systems:
The National Hurricane Center is issuing advisories on Tropical
Storm Flossie, located in the eastern Pacific basin a couple of
hundred miles offshore the coast of southwestern Mexico.

Tropical cyclone formation is not expected during the next 7 days.


Forecaster Kelly/Nepaul


NHC Atlantic Outlook


Atlantic 2-Day Graphical Outlook Image
Atlantic 7-Day Graphical Outlook Image


ZCZC MIATWOAT ALL
TTAA00 KNHC DDHHMM

Tropical Weather Outlook
NWS National Hurricane Center Miami FL
200 PM EDT Mon Jun 30 2025

For the North Atlantic...Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of America:

1. Near the Southeastern U.S.:
A frontal boundary is expected to stall and weaken off the southeast
U.S. coast late this week. An area of low pressure could develop
from the weakening front by the weekend off the southeast U.S., over
Florida, or over the eastern Gulf. Some gradual tropical or
subtropical development could occur thereafter as the low moves
little.
* Formation chance through 48 hours...low...near 0 percent.
* Formation chance through 7 days...low...20 percent.



Forecaster Blake


NHC Eastern North Pacific Outlook


Eastern North Pacific 2-Day Graphical Outlook Image
Eastern North Pacific 7-Day Graphical Outlook Image


ZCZC MIATWOEP ALL
TTAA00 KNHC DDHHMM

Tropical Weather Outlook
NWS National Hurricane Center Miami FL
1100 AM PDT Mon Jun 30 2025

For the eastern and central North Pacific east of 180 longitude:

Active Systems:
The National Hurricane Center is issuing advisories on Tropical
Storm Flossie, located in the eastern Pacific basin a couple of
hundred miles offshore the coast of southwestern Mexico.

1. South of Southwestern Mexico:
An area of low pressure could form several hundred miles offshore of
southwestern Mexico late this week. Some gradual development of this
system is possible thereafter while it moves generally
west-northwestward.
* Formation chance through 48 hours...low...near 0 percent.
* Formation chance through 7 days...low...30 percent.



Forecaster Kelly/Nepaul