The Antitrust Academy is an online platform hosting hundreds of videos comprising a complete course in antitrust law and economics. Teachers include Judge Douglas Ginsburg, Jon Klick, Joshua Wright and others. I am an advisor. A great resource whether you are learning this material for the first time or need to brush up on some legal or economic doctrines.
The post The Antitrust Academy appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
We use more than 900 million linked employer–employee records covering the entire formal workforce of Brazil to examine when cities provide upward mobility for the initially poor. We find that upward mobility for low-wage workers is strongest in workplaces that combine low-wage individuals with high-wage workers. This association is particularly pronounced in Brazil’s southern cities, where more complex industries include workers with a wider range of skills. The association is weaker in northern cities, where formal employment is dominated by the public sector.
Here is the paper by Radu Barza, Edward Glaeser, César A. Hidalgo, and Martina Viarengo. And here is a useful thread on the paper. This is one of the best and most important economics papers I have seen in the last few years.
The post Important results on economic mobility appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
That is the topic of my latest Free Press column. Excerpt:
The key is to create some basic safeguards, but without stifling broader AI progress. To do so, we must defy the conventional wisdom about public oversight and instead trust the AI labs to be their own primary regulators.
My version of the proposal starts with defining a private not-for-profit body for AI regulation. An ideal body would draw some features from FINRA (the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority): a consortium of financial firms that examines the trade practices of each and makes recommendations, helping the federal Securities and Exchange Commission with oversight and regulation. The AI version would include the major labs and would be authorized and overseen by Washington, perhaps through the now-fledgling Center for AI Standards and Innovation.
This body would periodically audit major AI companies and their models, judging their conduct and safety. In the short run at least, much of this would be focused on issues of cybersecurity, and whether the new models created more cyber risk than they help to solve. If a company passed the audit, it would be exempted from standard liability law, at least provided that it had shown basic, reasonable care, as opposed to extreme or deliberate negligence. That would free the AI labs from the fear that courts might derail their business by granting huge awards to plaintiffs for ill-defined harms that could not reasonably have been prevented. And it would give the labs a strong incentive to meet the safety standards of this body.
It is reasonable to wonder whether such a body, composed of industry players, would issue fair and equitable judgments of safety. Maybe not. Yet there are many upsides and no better alternative.
For one thing, each company knows that a dangerous model from another company could cause a harmful incident and damage the prospects for the entire industry. Consider the Three Mile Island meltdown in 1979, which contributed significantly to the mothballing of the entire U.S. nuclear industry. Few people can name the company (Metropolitan Edison) behind the malfunctioning plant; the reputational penalty attached to the industry as a whole.
Another incentive for safety is that the top companies do not want too much competition from lower-price, lower-quality upstarts. That too will induce those companies to support fairly tough standards, perhaps excessively tough in some cases. Still, we are choosing from imperfect alternatives. The concrete truth, whether we like it or not, is that there is far more expertise within the companies for judging AI safety than we can expect to find in the federal government anytime soon.
I am indebted to some ideas from Dean Ball, noting that his proposal is somewhat different. And here are some comments from Brendan McCord.
The post The least bad way to regulate AI? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
The fact that AI wrote 1M LOC and then refined it over the course of the next couple of months to produce a reliable piece of software that is currently running on millions of developer machines is absolutely mind blowing. And you can say, “well it’s not that impressive because they had an oracle to compare against, so it was simple to go from one language to another”, but I think that’s selling this entire thing short. If you can build a verification system and give proper direction, AI can produce a highly complex, highly sophisticated piece of software and it can continue to refine it until it just works.
— Paul Dix, The end of programming
Tags: coding-agents, ai-assisted-programming, generative-ai, bun, ai, llms
Over the past five years, Alex Colville has become one of the most influential figures in the longevity and aging fields.
There’s a decent chance you have not heard of him, which is a bit by design. Unlike many longevity gurus, Colville does not seek much attention and, for the most part, operates in the background where he’s been doling out many millions of dollars in investments. Today, Colville runs age1, a venture capital firm that has backed the likes of Loyal, Science, Conception and a bunch of other companies listed as “Stealth” on its web site.
Colville is the guy I call to reality check whatever is being hyped up in Longevity Land. He studies the actual science. He reaches sober conclusions. He’s honest about where the technology is today and what might show promise in the future.
In this episode, we get into Colville’s takes on GLP-1s, partial cell reprogramming, China’s biotech rise, the odd animals teaching us the most about longevity and, well, the prospects of living forever. We also get into Colville’s life and unusual rise as the longevity kingmaker, and, of course, we discuss keeping a human head alive without a body because what choice did we have.
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Did we go to Texas, find a telescope ranch and then obtain an entire nebula in Brex’s honor? Oh yes, we did.
We run on Brex and so should you. Learn more about Brex right here.
Timestamps (they link out to YouTube)
0:00 Intro
2:41 Meet the Switzerland of Aging
8:01 Why Did Aging Become the Enemy?
10:28 What Can an Axolotl Teach Us?
26:23 What Works in Worms, but Not Yet in Humans?
30:16 The Longevity Expert Who Takes Nothing
34:37 Are GLP-1s Already Anti-Aging Drugs?
44:14 Can We Make Old Cells Young Again?
58:48 What Do Hibernating Squirrels Know?
1:05:02 When Does Medicine Become an Upgrade?
1:09:57 Has CRISPR Lived Up to the Hype?
1:12:43 What Are Altos and Calico Really Doing?
1:20:24 The Breakthrough That Could Change Everything
1:25:14 Will China Win the Biology Race?
1:28:24 Why a Virtual Cell Is Not a Cell
1:30:28 A Head in a Waymo?
In August 2026, back-to-back winter storms left parts of the Atacama Desert in northern Chile covered in a rare blanket of snow. The typically arid region has seen snowfall before, notably in 2025 and before that in 2011. But one of the 2026 events was unusually widespread, stretching from the Andes to near the Pacific coast.
The OLI (Operational Land Imager) on the NASA-USGS Landsat 8 and Landsat 9 satellites captured these images (above) on August 6 and August 14, before and after a period of severe weather, respectively. They show a detailed view of the Chajnantor plateau within the Altiplano-Puna volcanic complex, home to the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA)—one of the planet’s most powerful radio telescopes. As snow and high winds set in, ALMA suspended operations, moving its antennas into a protective survival mode.
Another storm in the second half of the month blanketed an even wider area with fresh snowfall. This image, captured by the MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) on NASA’s Terra satellite on August 19, shows snow extending westward from the Andes, across the desert’s hyper-arid core, and close to the Pacific coast south of the Chilean port city of Antofagasta. This coastal area is home to several other major astronomical observatories, some of which also suspended operations during the event.
Most of the region’s winter precipitation comes from cutoff lows—low-pressure systems that become cut off from the jet stream and can occasionally reach northern Chile. That’s what happened in 2025, said René Garreaud, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Chile. The late-August 2026 storm also came from a cutoff low, but this one spun off from an unusually large trough—an elongated area of relatively low atmospheric pressure—that spanned an enormous stretch of the hemisphere, from the tip of South America up into the subtropics.
The atmospheric disruption, combined with ample coastal moisture, produced precipitation that spanned an unusually wide swath of the region—offshore, along the coast, across the core of the Atacama, and over the Andes. Totals reached a magnitude “rarely seen in the otherwise extremely arid region,” Garreaud said.
In some areas it fell as rain, not snow. Taltal, for instance, on Chile’s northern coast, accumulated nearly 40 millimeters (1.6 inches) of rain in three days—about 10 times its annual mean, Garreaud said. “We see these kinds of events only a few times, if any, per decade.”
The abundant precipitation spurred destructive mudflows and flash flooding in parts of northern Chile. The National Disaster Prevention and Response Service (SENAPRED) reported thousands were affected and hundreds of homes had major damage.
Garreaud noted that the strengthening El Niño is the backdrop for the anomalously wet winter in north-central Chile. In addition to the August storms, a major event in July brought significant impacts to the country’s Norte Chico region. During El Niño, the subtropical Pacific high—which normally keeps the region dry—weakens, while a blocking high tends to form in the South Pacific near the tip of the continent. Together, these shifts push the Southern Hemisphere storm track equatorward.
NASA Earth Observatory images by Lauren Dauphin, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey and MODIS data from NASA EOSDIS LANCE and GIBS/Worldview. Story by Kathryn Hansen.
Stay up-to-date with the latest content from NASA as we explore the universe and discover more about our home planet.
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The post Rare, Widespread Snow in the Atacama Desert appeared first on NASA Science.
I still remember the first time I set foot on Market Street. I was a freshman in college, and big cities were still a very new thing to me. It felt like I was swimming through an ocean of foot traffic; the towering shops and hotels seemed like they were built by giants.
That Market Street is gone now. In its place is a giant empty field of asphalt in the center of San Francisco — a desolate gray waste baking in the sun, empty except for the occasional bus and a tiny smattering of bicycles.
On either side of this yawning wasteland are giant sidewalks with only a few pedestrians, boarded-up stores, and the occasional small, sad retail chain. At midday on a Monday, what was once the bustling commercial heart of San Francisco feels abandoned.
What happened? In fact, Market Street was destroyed by several things:
The city’s decision to close the street to cars (but not buses), enacted in 2019
The crime wave of the early 2020s
The pandemic, and the shift to remote work
The second and third of these, together, are known as the “Doom Loop”. It’s been talked about a lot, so let’s just cover it briefly.
The pandemic, and the economic and social changes it brought, came out of the blue. But San Francisco was particularly vulnerable to the shock. As in many American cities, 20th century urban planning and zoning rules concentrated office buildings in the downtown area and put housing farther out. This meant that once people stopped going downtown for work, the neighborhood was just a lot more empty, because almost no one lives there. This is in contrast to big cities in Europe and Asia, where downtown neighborhoods are typically mixed-use. (SF also had a stronger shift to remote work, because of the heavy presence of the tech industry.)
The crime wave was another shock. Although SF escaped the destructive rioting that hit other West Coast cities like Seattle, Portland, and Los Angeles in 2020, it had plenty of looting in downtown areas — especially around Union Square and the San Francisco Centre mall on Market Street. Even after the pandemic ended, San Francisco suffered especially hard from the statewide wave of “smash-and-grab” store thefts. It got so bad that American Eagle actually sued the San Francisco Centre for being negligent toward crime, reporting over 100 serious incidents of violence and harassment in its downtown store.
Crime and emptiness fed on each other. Less foot traffic meant fewer “eyes on the street” to discourage property crime. Property crime and reduced foot traffic forced stores to close. Fewer stores meant less foot traffic, and so on. The collapse of downtown culminated in January 2026 with the closure of the San Francisco Centre, the iconic mall that had formed the commercial heart of Market Street, but which had been gutted by the Doom Loop. It now stands as a looming, empty, boarded-up structure dominating the area around the Powell Street train station:
The intersection of Powell Street and Market Street, once bustling and alive with tourists, shoppers, and street vendors, is now virtually empty, except for a forlorn line of people waiting to get on the iconic streetcar:
But recent years have seen the first glints of recovery from the Doom Loop. For one thing, crime has begun to fall. 2025 alone saw a 27% decrease in property crime, including a 29% decrease in burglaries, a 22% decrease in larceny (including retail theft), and a 24% decrease in robbery. 2026 has seen further drops. The reasons for this are interesting, but I’ll go into them another time. Suffice it to say that this has made downtown SF feel much safer and more orderly. The stereotype of SF as being overrun by drug addicts and dangerous vagrants still holds true of a few areas of the city, but from Powell Street to the bay, the city no longer feels like a post-apocalyptic movie.
Meanwhile, the business district is showing a few sluggish signs of life. The AI boom is causing a (modest) rebound in the demand for office space. Some office buildings are being converted to housing, raising hopes that SF’s downtown can finally become a mixed-use neighborhood. A concerted effort to revive Union Square after the devastation of 2020 is beginning to bear fruit. And both companies and the SF city government are mandating return-to-office policies.
And yet Market Street remains a dead zone. Weekday foot traffic is still down by half compared to 2019:
The wounds inflicted by the Doom Loop will take lots more time and effort to heal. Retail businesses have to be encouraged to open. Defunct buildings have to be torn down and rebuilt. Crime has to be reduced even further, and so on. This will all take years.
But there’s one other factor contributing to the death of San Francisco’s most important street, and it began before the pandemic: The ban on cars.
In recent years, a number of cities around the world have experimented with car-free zones and traffic reduction policies in their downtown areas. The most famous of these is Paris, with its Limited Traffic Zone, its expansion of pedestrian malls, and its road closures during Sundays and holidays. Shortly before the pandemic, San Francisco decided to enact a plan its leaders thought was in the same spirit: closing downtown Market Street to all car traffic:
But although Market Street was closed to cars, it wasn’t closed to buses, delivery trucks, and licensed taxis. This was in keeping with the general “transit good, cars bad” thinking of modern progressive urbanism. But a bus will kill a pedestrian just as easily as a car will, which is why Market Street remains empty of pedestrian traffic. This mathematically guaranteed that Market Street would become a more empty place: Cars were subtracted, but pedestrians weren’t added.
The direct cost of this policy is pretty obvious. When people can’t park in a parking garage on Market, and when Uber and Lyft can’t pick people up and drop people off on the street, it makes businesses on the street less attractive to visit. Sure, people could bike or take the train, but not everyone wants to do that; instead, they’ll just go to restaurants or stores in other areas. In addition, restaurants on Market Street now can’t deliver food, cutting them off from an important source of revenue. That probably helps explain why Market has suffered more from the Doom Loop than other areas.
But what did SF gain by deleting cars from Market Street and adding nothing at all in their place? Cars create a little bit of pollution (though modern cars are very clean), so that was removed. Pedestrians who run off the sidewalk and into the street are somewhat less in danger of being killed (though still in danger). These are meager benefits indeed.
What about bike traffic? Presumably, reduced danger of being hit by a car would allow more cyclists to ride down Market Street. But in fact, bike traffic on the street is considerably lower than it was pre-pandemic:
A lot of that is the Doom Loop — there are simply fewer stores for cyclists to visit on Market Street, so there’s less reason for them to go there. But much of downtown hasn’t collapsed the way Market Street has, and presumably cyclists could use the street as a way to get to places like the Embarcadero, Chinatown, etc. They’re not doing it. Cyclists are a relatively rare sight on Market these days.
One reason might be that although the city planned to make the car-free stretch of Market more bike-friendly, it never really followed up on those plans. So it’s still pretty dangerous to ride a bike or scooter down the street — you can get caught in the train tracks, and you can get hit by a bus or truck.
In fact, this sloppy implementation is a general pattern with the Market Street closure. Josh Koehn had a great article in 2023 about how the plan degenerated from its initial form:
A $600 million capital project called Better Market Street promised to create a futuristic boulevard that would safely buffer bicycles and scooters on elevated sidewalk lanes, separating the little wheels from rapid bus lines, vintage streetcars and pedestrians…The new vision for Market Street, advocates said, would create a safer, more vibrant multimodal avenue…More than a decade of planning went into alterations of Market Street…
But funds for anything beyond modest improvements along a three-block stretch of Market Street between Fifth and Eighth streets…have evaporated…The cost of Better Market Street, which soared above a billion dollars before being reined in to a still-staggering $604 million, is almost double the amount spent on the tormented Van Ness Avenue redesign…
City officials enraged safe streets advocates when they announced in late 2020 that the elevated bike lanes on sidewalks would be scrapped.
SF’s lack of state capacity had a lot to do with this; constant cost overruns inevitably require ambitious projects to be scaled back. The pandemic also obviously got in the way. But part of what killed the vision for Market Street is simply that the vision itself was never very good.
If you look at Paris, it’s immediately clear how that city’s car-limitation measures were designed to create spaces for pedestrians. In certain areas like the banks of the Seine, Paris didn’t just ban cars; it also banned buses and trucks, so that people could walk safely. Paris also reserved much larger areas for pedestrians on certain days.
But Market Street has no more pedestrian areas than it did in 2019. You can still only walk on the sidewalk. If the entire street were reserved for foot traffic during certain times — like SF does with Valencia Street, for example — then these periodic temporary pedestrianizations could become an event that regularly draws lots of people to the area. This could include farmers’ markets, street concerts, and other fun events. Those would give people a reason to walk around Market Street even before new businesses opened.
Alternatively, if SF permanently closed off some portion of the street to buses and trucks, that stretch of road could become a pedestrian public square, similar to the center of Times Square:
Instead of thinking about how to create spaces that people would actually want to walk around in, the SF government — and the many activist groups and nonprofits that influence its policy — appear to have adhered to the simple rule of “bikes and buses good, cars bad”.
This is a way of thinking centered around modes of transit rather than public space. It implicitly conceives of areas like Market Street as thoroughfares to take people from one place to another, rather than as actual destinations. Market Street’s car closure is all about forcing people to go down Market Street in a different way, rather than about encouraging people to go to Market Street.
There’s something inescapably and depressingly suburban about this way of thinking. In the suburbs, life is lived point-to-point — you go from house to strip-mall to restaurant to office without thinking much about the places you traverse in between. In a suburb, the mode of transportation — how you get from Point A to Point B — is the important question.
Americans are a suburban people; even many of our urban areas look like suburbs in other countries. So perhaps it’s inevitable that the urbanists who closed Market Street off to car traffic would think entirely about modes of transportation and ignore the vibrant city center whose destruction they exacerbated. Instead of Jane Jacobs, they ended up just being the Robert Moses of buses.
Again, careful attention to car limitations in cities like Paris, where people are used to occupying urban places instead of simply whizzing through them, would have proven enlightening. Paris’s Limited Traffic Zone doesn’t ban cars in downtown areas; it merely bans cars from transiting through those areas. People who stay within the area can still drive. The point is to make downtown spaces into places people occupy rather than places people simply go through. What San Francisco did to Market Street was, in many ways, the exact opposite.
In lieu of turning Market Street into a pedestrian paradise, SF’s best move is probably just to allow private cars again. It’s not the optimal way to create more foot traffic to nourish retail businesses, but it’s the quickest and easiest. In fact, Mayor Daniel Lurie has made moves in this direction, allowing certain Uber, Lyft, and Waymo cars to operate on the street. But they might as well simply go all the way. Best to simply bury the era when Market Street was a large empty scar commemorating the decline of San Francisco; if San Francisco can’t be Paris, at least it can return to what it used to be.
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Note: After I recorded this it was reported that Trump officials are threatening to demolish the Kennedy Center if it can’t be renovated to Trump’s taste (and presumably with his name added). Matches my argument exactly.
Der Untergang naht.
Pardon my German pronunciation. I’m going to take a break today from wonky economic analysis and talk about, well, Donald Trump, but in a slightly different way from what I think most people are saying. Not positive, obviously.
Just before recording this, I saw that Trump wants to rename Lake Ontario Lake America. Which is silly, would be funny, except that this guy is the President of the United States. And it’s really kind of troublesome that someone in that position is that out of it, that petty, disconnected from reality.
And look, it’s not news to anybody that Trump is ego-driven, disconnected from reality, and at the same time, somehow commands a level of deference and obedience from the entire machinery of the federal government that no president has ever had before. So this is really quite serious.
What I don’t think people are fully aware of is just how bad it can get, given that Trump is so obviously dissociating, decompensating, that he’s not all there.
Obviously, he was already a very problematic personality, which was doing a great deal of damage to the United States. I don’t think even now people fully appreciate the amount of damage that has been done. Even before the Iran War, Trump’s provocations, insults, his trade wars, really destroyed the world’s trust in America.
America became a country that could not be trusted to honor agreements. It was a country that constantly tried to bully other countries. Our word was worth nothing. Our sanity was not to be taken for granted. And then, of course, along comes Iran, where in addition to showing that we’re not to be trusted, that we’re not going to be relied upon., we also showed that we were far weaker than people imagined.
If there’s one thing people thought it was, well, America has a powerful military. It turns out, well, not as powerful and not nearly as competent as people thought. How much of that is the result of Trump and Hegseth degrading it and how much of it was there to begin with is an interesting question. But anyway, at this point, we are not loved, we are not respected, and we aren’t even feared.
And we’re not getting that back. Even if Trump is succeeded by someone decent —God help us if he isn’t— but even if we have a more or less rational, well-intentioned government that follows, the world now knows that we are capable of putting someone like Trump in a position of unprecedented, almost absolute power and that it can happen again.
And the world also knows that we’re just not as fearsome as we seem to be. That we can be defied much more successfully even by smallish countries than anyone really imagined.
And we’re not getting that back. I anxiously wait for the days when we’re no longer a Trump-ruled country, but this is my country, and what will be left of us, what will be left of our role in the world, even once he’s gone?
Okay, the title I gave, the way that I opened this talk was Der Untergang, which is the German title of the movie Downfall, about the last days of Adolf Hitler. I hope that nobody is going to complain about my using the German, right? We’re long past the point where it’s considered unthinkable and incredibly rude to make Nazi parallels. There’s a lot of people in this administration or close to this administration who are effectively Nazis, in some cases explicitly Nazis. America is not yet Germany under Hitler. But the reason we don’t have a functioning Gestapo in this country is not for lack of desire to have one. It’s because these people, at least so far, don’t have the juice. So all of the stuff, all of the parallels seem appropriate.
And the parallels are there. I mean, the parallels are there even in seemingly small things. Hitler was obsessed with building a gigantic gaudy ballroom. So there’s just a lot of parallels in there.
Now the main message of the movie Der Untergang is that it’s about Hitler in his final days who knew that he was losing. He knew that defeat was looming. He knew that his power was collapsing. And his reaction was, among other things, to take it out on his own country.
Hitler never accepted that he had failed Germany. He felt that Germany had failed him. And so he had a plan, often called the Nero Decree, which was to destroy as much as possible of Germany’s infrastructure. Supposedly to deny it to the victorious allies, but in large part to punish Germany.
Well, Trump knows. He may deny it, he may have his moments when he actually believes that the polls are all fake and all of that, but in many ways he is behaving like somebody who knows that his days of supreme power are about to end. He, of course, is not going to accept that it’s his fault. It’s the fault, obviously, of the Democrats, who are all communists. It’s the fault of the Republicans, who didn’t live up to his leadership. The fault of everybody but him.
What does he do in the position of losing? Probably not committing suicide in the Fuhrerbunker, but still in the position of losing all of his power. Well, what you do in that position, if you are somebody like Trump, who is an empty vessel: there’s nothing in there, the only pleasure he appears to take in life comes from dominating other people.
Well, one thing you do is you try to stick your name everywhere, or leave your imprint everywhere. So Trump, according to reporting by Swan and Haberman, spends most of his time thinking about his construction projects and trying to leave his mark on everything in Washington.
What I don’t think we’re fully appreciating even about those projects is that there isn’t a whole lot of actual construction. There’s a lot of starting of stuff, but so far it’s been mostly destruction, mostly tearing stuff down. We don’t have a triumphal arch, but we have a hole where the ballroom is supposed to be. We have just a lot of damage having been done to our nation’s capital and to the iconic structures that were supposed to define, symbolize who we are as a country. The scale of the destruction is really quite amazing.
So I’m not going to try fancy video editing here. I’m just going to show you a picture of what the environs of the White House look like right now. There you go. That bare area is the South Lawn, ripped up because of Trump’s cage match. You can see in the corner there the hole in the ground, which is where the east wing of the White House used to be. Basically, Trump has left, so far, wreckage in his wake.
Even the things which have not involved tearing stuff down, the gilding of statues, the horrific redecoration of the White House, is surpassingly ugly. That’s partly because Trump has terrible taste, but it’s also, I think, a clear sign of aggression. He’s saying, oh yeah, you’re going to give me a 33% approval rating? Well, I’m going to make the nation’s capital as ugly as I can in this little time as I possibly can.
Now, this is all superficial. This is stuff that can and will be repaired. It’ll cost a lot of money, but OK. So we’ll rebuild the White House. We’ll reseed the South Lawn. We’ll strip the gilding off the statues. We’ll make the White House a dignified place again.
But how much more will be coming? When we talk about Hitler’s last days, as I said, one of his last attempted acts was what’s called the Nero Decree, which was an attempt to destroy as much of Germany’s infrastructure as possible, supposedly to deny it to the victorious allies. But clearly, and even there’s some evidence that he actually he clearly thought this as a way of punishing the German people for failing him.
Now, historiography is a little more complicated than that, as it usually is, but that’s clearly the gist of it. That Hitler’s final acts were to basically try to bring everyone else down with him.
Do you really want to say that that’s not what’s going to happen with Trump? Assuming that he loses much, if not all, of his power to shape events this November, and of course we’re all worried about how he may try to disrupt or overturn the election, but assuming he doesn’t manage to do that, he will find himself much diminished. How much damage will he do basically taking revenge on America?
Because always you want to bear in mind that Trump hates America. He hates the values on which America was built. He hates democracy. He hates rule of law. He hates all of the things that are what we’re supposed to be about as a nation.
But increasingly it looks as if he just plain hates this country because it doesn’t love him. How much damage will he do? How much damage can he do? I don’t want to make a specific prediction, but I’m worried.
And don’t say that he won’t do that or he can’t do that. Those have been famous last words again and again over the past decade. So this is going to be even worse, even uglier, I think than most people imagine.
Have a great rest of your day.
It's pretty big: 125B tokens, but only 6B active which means it gets a significant performance boost.
I've been trying it out on a DGX Spark using these Unsloth quantized models. I'm still exploring the model - so far I've tried the 72.5GB UD-IQ1_S one (producing these pelicans) and the 78.9GB UD-Q2_K_XL (producing these).
My favorite so far was this xhigh reasoning effort one from UD-Q2_K_XL:
Via Hacker News
Tags: ai, generative-ai, llms, qwen, pelican-riding-a-bicycle, ai-in-china, nvidia-spark
The New York Times has a long article (alt link) on surveillance systems aimed at babies. They are increasingly using AI.
Nanit and its rivals want to own 24/7 health tracking for the sub-four-foot set. And their already astonishing levels of baby data collection are just the beginning. Nanit recently raised $50 million from investors to expand its use of A.I. and use its camera to track speech and language development, motor skills and more, while extending its presence in children’s bedrooms into early adolescence.
Up, and after doing something in order to the putting of my house in order now the joynery is done, I went by water to White Hall, where the Court full of waggons and horses, the King and Court going this day out towards the Bath, and I to St. James’s, where I spent an hour or more talking of many things to my great content with Mr. Coventry in his chamber, he being ready to set forth too with the Duke to-day, and so left him, and I meeting Mr. Gauden, with him to our offices and in Sir W. Pen’s chamber did discourse by a meeting on purpose with Mr. Waith about the victualling business and came to some issue in it.
So home to dinner, and Mr. Moore came and dined with me, and after dinner I paid him some money which evened all reckonings between him and me to this day, and for my Lord also I paid him some money, so that now my Lord owes me, for which I have his bond, just 700l..
After long discourse with him of the fitness of his giving me a receipt for this money, which I for my security think necessary and he otherwise do not think so, at last, after being a little angry, and I resolving not to let go my money without it, he did give me one.
Thence I took him, and he and I took a pleasant walk to Deptford and back again, I doing much business there. He went home and I home also, indoors to supper, being very glad to see my house begin to look like itself again, hoping after this is over not to be in any dirt a great while again, but it is very handsome, and will be more when the floors come to be of one colour.
So weary to bed.
Pleased this day to see Captain Hickes come to me with a list of all the officers of Deptford Yard, wherein he, being a high old Cavalier, do give me an account of every one of them to their reproach in all respects, and discovers many of their knaverys; and tells me, and so I thank God I hear every where, that my name is up for a good husband for the King, and a good man, for which I bless God; and that he did this by particular direction of Mr. Coventry.
Links for you. Science:
Staggering 90% of biomedical papers now show signs of AI help. The figure, which is much higher than previous estimates of Large Language Model use, is for papers published in December and archived in PubMed
The Case Against Splitting Up the MMR Vaccine
Outputs of generative diffusion models are often unattributable
What really happened on Easter Island? For decades, an influential theory blamed the Rapanui for their own downfall—a story made famous by Jared Diamond’s book Collapse. New evidence tells a different tale
Emergence Biases in Molecular Evolution
‘They Want Us All To Leave’: Interior Reassigns Dozens of Senior Staff
“I’m Not Talking About 2020. I’m Talking About 2026.”
Other:
Eyeing the midterm elections, D.C. is taking the fight for statehood to the states
Dolly Parton, Public Health Hero, Dies at 80
The Man Behind the Anti-Flock Darth Vader Mask Wants to Know: ‘When Will This End?’
Canada’s Resistance Benefits the US. Trump is our oppressor; those who fight him help us.
No matter what, we have to tear down Trump’s corrupt ballroom (Damnatio memoriae must be an essential part of detrumpification)
Calif. colleges bought everyone ChatGPT. No one knows what to do with it.
Trump Officials Propose Sale of ‘Woke’ Painting by Kehinde Wiley. The State Department recently removed the painting of Dominicans from a U.S. embassy, noting it was by the artist who made Barack Obama’s presidential portrait.
Trump’s Obsession With Dominance Has Made Him a Huge Loser
Police departments weren’t looking for officers abusing Flock. We did it for them.
Oyez, Oyez and Ahoy! Paddlers Protest John Roberts’ Private Island
Trump Administration Has a Different Way to Drain Harvard Funding
So the most powerful person in the world is insane. Now what?
We Asked the Women of the SEC About “Shrekking”
Main Character Syndrome
KING CARNEY ACTIVATES KONG MODE WITH ZERO FUCKS
Two weeks. No power. Gary, Indiana, failed Black citizens. Like many others, Indiana has entered the data center race and is particularly attractive due to the availability of cheap land. NIPSCO, a monopoly utility that serves Gary, is leading the effort.
What’s more punk than … a sewing machine?
Trump takeover has been a financial disaster for the Kennedy Center
Raze Application Filed For Howard’s Wonder Plaza, Clearing Path For New Fusion Building
Losing the Iran War: The Economic Front
Anacostia River water quality improves, but it’s still not safe for swimming
First deaths from measles in Pennsylvania in 35 years
The AI Hater’s Manifesto
Trump administration says it might demolish the Kennedy Center if court blocks renovations
Kennedy Center finances deteriorated sharply after Trump name change
It Should Be Harder to Apply for a Job. No, Really. Thanks to a dwindling supply of open roles, “one-click” applications, and the rise of artificial intelligence, it’s easier than ever to apply for a job. We’re all paying the price.
How Trump’s Crazed Fury at Canada Is Already Backfiring Badly for Him
Farmers Struggle to Get Basic Services From Depleted Agriculture Dept. After the departure of thousands of federal workers, rural communities report problems obtaining loans, grants, technical assistance and support for infrastructure and other services.
Trump’s border wall construction threatens rock art as old as the pyramids: ‘The ancestors are still here’
DHS acknowledges the noncitizen numbers it touted on voter rolls were inflated
As part of its nuclear fusion processes, the Sun produces a particularly interesting isotope of helium, known as helium-3. Some of this helium-3 escapes the Sun's gravitational pull as part of the solar wind, a stream of charged particles that emanates out across the Solar System.
Over billions of years, this wind has bombarded every body in the vicinity of the Sun, including Earth's Moon. Lacking a magnetic field or atmosphere, the Moon's surface has no barrier to prevent the constant flow of this wind.
This means that helium-3 has been striking the lunar soil, or regolith, for a long time. These helium ions penetrate only a little way into the individual grains of this soil, but periodically meteorites have struck the lunar surface to churn the soil, mixing some of this helium-3 a little below the surface.
Chance Miller:
Not to be overshadowed by the new Mac mini and Mac Studio, Apple today has also released an updated version of its Polishing Cloth. In an age of everything getting more expensive, the new Polishing Cloth is cheaper than before at $9 (down from $19). [...]
Apple released the Polishing Cloth in October 2021 and sold out almost instantly. While it has become a meme, it is genuinely a good polishing cloth for your Apple gear.
Moore’s Law comes for everything eventually.
Zac Hall, 9to5Mac:
Apple has officially announced its next product event, where it will unveil the iPhone 18 Pro lineup and its first foldable iPhone. The event will take place on September 9 at 10 am, PT. The tagline reads “Surprise and shine,” and the invitation features a glowing Apple logo with a sun shining through.
Apple generally prefers Tuesdays, but on years when Labor Day falls in the second week of September, they move it to Wednesday.
XCancel:
On Monday 24th August at 8PM EST, we received at letter from X Corp. asking to cease and desist the service XCancel.
The service XCancel is stopped until further notice.
We are seeking legal advice and won’t share more details for now.
Thank you for the trust you have put in these two years of XCancel.
I didn’t want to jinx them, but this obvious threat hanging over their head was the main reason I never linked only to XCancel rather than directly to tweets on x.com. This sucks not just because some people don’t want to visit x.com, but because XCancel was a faster-loading website with no bullshit.
Bill Friskics-Warren for The New York Times:
Her death was announced in a video posted on social media by her nephew Bryan Seaver. No cause was provided. Concerns about Ms. Parton’s health were raised last year as she postponed and later canceled a Las Vegas residency, and intensified to the point that she took to social media in October to announce, “I ain’t dead yet.”This May, she said that she had responded well to treatment after her immune and digestive systems had, as she put it, “got all out of whack” in recent years.
From her hardscrabble beginnings to glittering stardom, Ms. Parton’s life was the stuff of make-believe. With her voluptuous figure, sparkly stage costumes and blond bouffant wigs, she was likened by the writer Chet Flippo to the Big Rock Candy Mountain, the Depression-era symbol of abundance. Her songs spoke to millions, confronting privation and loss even as they radiated possibility and hope.
She was, quintessentially, a uniter of people. In 2019, The New York Times ran a story with the headline “Is There Anything We Can All Agree On? Yes: Dolly Parton.”
Dolly Parton did all the good she could, for all the people she could, for as long as ever she could.
From her legendary songwriting to the Imagination Library — which sent 1 million books a month to children across the country — she was the best of America.
Dolly, we’ll miss your great heart.
Parton accomplished so many great things, but man, the Imagination Library is just hard to believe. They’ve distributed over 330 million books to children — and counting. In lieu of flowers or anything else, her family is requesting that any money you might want to contribute to show your appreciation be donated to the library. Count me in.
As a general matter, people who write about or strategize about politics greatly overestimate our collective ability to shape how an election will play out, the extent to which clever ideas can pivot the course of an election in any new direction. We’re more small sailboats on a big ocean than some kind of latter-day Neptune actually changing the waves or the wind. But, all that said, Trump may have handed a unique card for Democrats to play against Republican candidates, especially those bordering Canada, which include key states like Michigan, Alaska, and Maine, as well as states with strong trade dependencies like Iowa and Ohio. This part requires little explanation. Heading into an ugly midterm cycle with one damaging and needless war underway, it boggles the mind that he thinks it’s a good idea to start a trade war with America’s second-largest trading partner. Trade wars raise prices; and the cost of living is the largest single issue in the election.
But there’s an additional dimension to the politics.
One of the Trump opposition’s consistent challenges through both his presidential terms has been making the case that Trump’s selfishness, corruption, incompetence and malevolence affects voters’ individual lives. One blindspot for the opposition during Trump’s first term, at least through February 2020, was that for many people, as crazy and terrible as Trump acted, if you just went about your life and didn’t pay attention to the news, none of it really mattered. Trump inherited a strong economy and then juiced it with free spending and tax cuts. Many people could just ignore it and go about their business. And of course that’s what a big cross-section of the population is always doing, especially those loosely committed voters who are most up for grabs in any election.
The dynamics are different here. Not unlike the case with the Iran War, most people not only oppose this trade war, they’re baffled by it — like why is this even happening? It’s all Trump’s erratic impulsive and grandiosity and aggression bundled together. And unlike the Reflecting Pool or the ballroom or corrupt prosecutions of people you may not know, this is actually going to affect you, and not in a good way. Trump’s pathetic threat to rename Lake Ontario as Lake America plays nicely into this. It drives home that this isn’t some arcane trade dispute that maybe you don’t understand. It’s clearly another of his ego-trip, dick-swinging gyres, only this time really clearly at your expense.
A lot of Canadians think we, as Americans, have turned against them or are attacking them. And they are totally justified in assuming that and being super angry about it since our country could stop this at any moment. And we’re not. But Trump has actually had pretty little success convincing Americans that Canada is some aggressive power harming or taking advantage of America.
As you can see in this poll, Trump has had a fair amount of success changing Republicans’ views of Canada. But even among self-identified Republicans, most of whom are off-limits even in a wave election, a fairly big majority still has a favorable opinion of Canada. Unsurprisingly, Democrats’ views are unchanged and couldn’t be much higher. Independents’ views are still upwards of North Korea levels of support. But even that 80% number is a little deceptive. Substantial slices of “independent voters” are actually firmly aligned with one party or another. In voting terms, they’re Republicans or Democrats. They are independents as a matter of political identity rather than voting behavior. Put this all together and what it amounts to is that outside consistent Republican voters, nobody buys any of this.
The political line of attack is pretty clear. Unlike so many other examples of chaotic and degenerate bullshit or egregious damage that shows up over time in indirect ways, this one is crystal clear: it’s all on Trump and something almost everyone feels in the here and now. You’re already struggling to make ends meet. Trump doesn’t care and isn’t doing anything about it. And all Trump will do is go create more chaos, do some stupid thing no one was asking for for his own kicks, making your situation worse.
As I said at the top, most voters will come to these conclusions on their own. And an incumbent party usually takes the hit for whatever goes wrong, whoever’s fault it was. But it’s important for the opposition party to help it along. And more specifically, Democrats need to frame these attacks not just around Trump but around Republican candidates who need to answer for it and for him since they support him 100% on anything and everything.
When some stars or legends die, they spur outpourings and commemorations that appear to transcend the mere mechanics and scaffolding of their fame. Dolly Parton was clearly one of those stars. For many reasons, with her this isn’t surprising. It was predictable and for very good and understandable reasons. But it still hits a certain way when you watch it unfold. It’s certainly not her greatest or hundredth greatest accolade. But I saw someone point out that in the hours after her death she was lauded on the social media feeds of the Democratic Socialists of America and Donald Trump’s — an emblem of her ability to transcend some of the most acidic divides in contemporary American society.
Music has always played a central role in my life. And I have an uncannily strong aural memory, despite having until quite recently virtually no technical knowledge about music theory at all — which tones are associated with which alphabet letters, chord progressions, etc. What I’ve studied pretty closely through my life is popular music history. And if you study the history of the production, composition and performance of music starting around the beginning of the 20th century, you know that one of the biggest throughlines separating the happy stories from the sad and tragic ones is rights and royalties and songwriting credits. Which will bring us back to Parton in a moment.
I’m always amazed at just how much money rights and royalties throw off over time. You can be a huge, huge pop star and if you don’t write the songs, you can end up with little or nothing a few years after the peak of your stardom. But writing the song is just the start of it. There’s a complex bundle of rights and powers associated with a composition. First there’s the moral right involved, the ability to say, ‘I wrote this song and you didn’t.’ Then there’s control over who gets to do what with the song. Then there are money streams which are traditionally and typically divided 50/50 into songwriting royalties and publishing royalties. Again, if you write songs and you hold onto most or all of these rights and, critically, if you write songs other people want to sing or record, it’s hard to overstate just how much money this can bring in over time. This is why Bob Dylan, within just a few years of his fame, was already a millionaire a few times over (a much bigger deal in the mid-’60s than now). So many other acts were covering his songs.
Parton, early in her career but really throughout, often indulged or leaned into the caricature of herself as a loud-looking, big-boobed, hillbilly girl. But she was a shrewd self-advocate and businesswoman from the very start. In 1966, at the age of 20, she set up her own music publishing company, something highly unusual for a country artist at the time, especially a female one. She didn’t have full ownership of the music publishing company at the start, though she gathered the remainder back over the next few years. That decision set the stage for roughly doubling the income she drew from her own songbook by holding both the 50% that went to the songwriter (Dolly Parton) and the 50% that went to music publisher (Dolly Parton).
Parton guarded those royalties consistently and aggressively. In one oft-told story, Elvis Presley, during his mid-’70s comeback, wanted to record “I Will Always Love You,” what turned out to be one of Parton’s signature songs and a #1 country hit for her in 1974. That was a big deal for Parton, still relatively early in her career. But at the last minute — apparently literally the night before the studio session — Presley’s notorious manager, Colonel Tom Parker, called Parton with a catch. It was their standard practice, according to Parker, that when Elvis recorded a song he got half the publishing rights. Not just half those rights and revenues on his recording, but half the publishing rights to the song itself in perpetuity. An anguished Parton refused, and that was the end of it. When Whitney Houston had a global mega-hit with the song in 1992 (many people, especially outside the U.S., have no idea it’s even Parton’s song), she had a massive windfall because of this close management of that bundle of rights. Published reports put her royalties on that recording, just during the ’90s, at over $10 million. That would be over $20 million today.
One of the consistent themes of all the obituaries and remembrances of Parton we’re reading today isn’t just her multifaceted talent but her bounteous and fairly low-profile philanthropy over many decades. This meticulous and far-sighted management of her songbook, which runs into thousands of songs, was the cornerstone of the fortune that made it possible.
Wikipedia:
The purpose of a system is what it does (POSIWID) is a heuristic in systems thinking coined by the British management consultant Stafford Beer, who stated that there is “no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do”. It is used in systems theory, and is generally invoked to counter the notion that the purpose of a system can or should be read from the intentions of those who design, operate, or promote it. When a system’s side effects or unintended consequences reveal that its behaviour is poorly understood, then the POSIWID perspective can balance political understandings of system behaviour with a more straightforwardly descriptive view.
I don’t recall seeing POSIWID before, but I love the concept. A friend sent this to me, with the quip that I forgot to include a link to it in my “What Is the Point of the DMA?” piece this week. Indeed, it encapsulates my arguments about the DMA specifically and the European Commission generally. The purpose the DMA is what it does, not what you imagine it is intended to do.
In the same vein, I have been thinking too about the famous anecdote reported by Adam Lashinsky for Fortune back in 2011:
Steve Jobs doesn’t tolerate duds. Shortly after the launch event, he summoned the MobileMe team, gathering them in the Town Hall auditorium in Building 4 of Apple’s campus, the venue the company uses for intimate product unveilings for journalists. According to a participant in the meeting, Jobs walked in, clad in his trademark black mock turtleneck and blue jeans, clasped his hands together, and asked a simple question:
“Can anyone tell me what MobileMe is supposed to do?” Having received a satisfactory answer, he continued, “So why the fuck doesn’t it do that?”
You can argue all you want that the DMA is intended to give developers and users choice and freedom. My retort is “So why the fuck doesn’t it do that?” The DMA is what it does — and it isn’t that.
(Also, if you follow the link quoted above to Stafford Beer’s Wikipedia entry — man, put a hat on that guy and damned if he doesn’t look like Jim Dalrymple. It would be even more uncanny if his name had been Stafford Heineken.)
Using Danish registry data, we study how managers’ gender attitudes shape gender inequality in the workplace by exploiting the birth of a daughter – as opposed to a son – as a plausibly exogenous shock to male managers’ gender attitudes. Comparing within-firm changes in women’s labor outcomes depending on the gender of the manager’s newborn child, we find that women’s relative earnings and employment increase by 4.4% and 2.9% respectively following the birth of the manager’s first daughter. These effects are driven by an increase in managers’ propensity to substitute male hires with female hires that have comparable education, hours worked, and earnings. Consistent with this substitution channel, we do not detect any significant effect on firm performance. Because these effects emerge rapidly and persist over time, we can rule out the need for prolonged exposure to gender issues or for personal incentives tied to improving conditions for their own daughters as prerequisites for managers to promote gender equality within their firms.
That is by Maddalena Ronchi and Nina Smith, forthcoming in Review of Economic Studies.
The post Daddy’s Girl appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
1. At least one in four NFL players, and possibly much higher, ends up with brain disease (NYT). As I read the results, probably most of them do.
2. On the LLM flooding of governmental services.
3. Joe Walker podcast with Andrew Charlton on the future of AI in Australia.
4. The bread culture that is the German regulatory state.
5. Data on the placement of economics PhDs.
6. The Nvidia thing is now under dispute. And here is a defense of the original.
The post Wednesday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Trump started the morning on social media saying: “The United States is giving serious consideration to changing the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America in that we don’t expect to [be] doing much business with Ontario any longer.” On X, the account of the Republicans pushed the idea of renaming the lake.
In contrast to MAGA’s performative nonsense, Canadian officials announced today that on September 8 they will begin to impose tariffs of up to 50% on about 700 products worth about $20 billion in retaliation for Trump’s tariffs on Canada. Those products include U.S. steel, aluminum, chain saws, appliances, processed cheese, and clams. Paul Vieira of the Wall Street Journal noted that the tariffs appear targeted toward plants in Republican-held congressional districts.
Canada will also invest about 7.5 billion in Canadian dollars ($5.4 billion U.S.) in Canadian firms and workers hit by the trade war.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s threat of yesterday that the U.S. intends to strangle Iran’s economy isn’t faring much better than Trump’s attempt to rename Lake Ontario.
As economist Paul Krugman pointed out in his newsletter today, China can supply much of what Iran needs and has incentive to do so as Trump’s “self-inflicted quagmire in Iran” saps U.S. strength and respect. Krugman warned that Bessent’s threat “reeks of desperation,” a scent China would surely smell.
Krugman concluded with a prediction: “I can safely predict that the Chinese will make sure that the Iranian regime survives, and that they will thoroughly enjoy watching Trump slowly twist in the wind over the Strait of Hormuz.”
Indeed, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lin Jian today rejected the administration’s call for isolating Iran economically. “Cooperation between China and Iran has always been conducted within the framework of international law and should not be interfered with or disrupted,” Lin said. “China has already stated many times that it firmly opposes illegal unilateral sanctions.… China will take all necessary measures to firmly safeguard its own rights and interests.”
As Krugman pointed out, the Iran war has forced the U.S. to abandon many of its Middle East bases—that’s why the USS Lincoln couldn’t be resupplied—and it has little prospect of reclaiming them now that Iran has been emboldened to attack the troops there. MS NOW national security analyst Barry R. McCaffrey, a retired Army general, posted Saturday: “In my judgement, the US Armed Forces have probably permanently lost access to 15 Persian Gulf bases. Iran now poised to control access [to] the Gulf States. US will have to negotiate new access in western Saudi Arabia, Israel, southern Europe.”
On Sunday, in The Atlantic, Robert Kagan noted that the Iran war has reconfigured the Middle East. For years, Iran was on the ropes, with the U.S. dominating the region alongside countries aligned with the U.S., including Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. Now Iran has withstood six months of attacks from the U.S. and Israel. Its survival has reconfigured the power structure of the region, with Iran emerging as the area’s dominant power as it has demonstrated its ability to damage the oil and gas infrastructure of its neighbors.
It is plain, Kagan wrote, that “Washington fears escalation more than Iran does,” limiting what the U.S. can do as Iran not only exercises the right to collect tolls on vessels transiting the Strait of Hormuz but also decides who can use the strait. That control, Kagan notes, gives Iran “leverage every day, over dozens of countries.” It can “reward friends, punish enemies, extract revenue, force the loosening of sanctions, and make governments think twice before opposing Iranian policies…without firing a shot.”
The policy of Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to bring a “warrior” ethos to the Pentagon by putting it “on offense, not just on defense” using “maximum lethality, not tepid legality,” and having “violent effect, not politically correct,” has given the U.S. a tremendous loss in Iran.
And a report today from Megan Rose and Hannah Allam of ProPublica suggests that officers in U.S. Central Command recognized the dangers of Hegseth’s approach to warfare. Rose and Allam report that when Hegseth polled top commanders about cutting the Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response program instituted after civilian casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan hardened opposition to the U.S., they universally objected.
Current and former defense officials told the journalists that Hegseth apparently thought senior officers would agree with him that focusing on civilian security was “woke” and would hamper “maximum lethality.” Instead, they uniformly disagreed, warning that scaling back the effort to protect civilians would “result in decreased efficiency of U.S. lethal operations due to an increased risk of target misidentification and reduced battlespace awareness.” Hegseth gutted the program anyway, and U.S. strikes have killed hundreds of civilians. Now it appears the administration is considering rebuilding the program.
Social media this morning picked up that a U.S. Air Force transport aircraft that had taken off from Joint Base Andrews near Washington, D.C., landed in Moscow. Later reports said the U.S. official traveling to Moscow was the director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), John Ratcliffe. There’s been lots of speculation about the purpose of his trip to Moscow, but so far it’s all guesses.
Journalist Greg Sargent notes that Trump’s trade war with Canada will hit the Midwest right before the midterms. Josh Turek, the Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate from Iowa and a leading voice for a new prairie populism that works for farmers, told Sargent, “It’s a really dangerous time to be a farmer in the Midwest.” “You talk to farmers, and they’ll tell you it’s one gut punch after another,” Turek said. Iowans tell him they feel betrayed.
Michigan’s Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate, Abdul El-Sayed, said that “Trump is escalating a trade war with Canada for his own vanity” and that his Republican opponent, former representative Mike Rogers, is a “rubber stamp” for Trump’s plans.
Maine, too, will be hit by the trade war with Canada. Yesterday, Vice President J.D. Vance was in Maine campaigning for Senator Susan Collins, but while he praised her, she did not show up for the rally. Vance made it a point to call Collins “independent,” a descriptor that many former MAGA candidates in Maine are using in this election cycle.
Collin’s Democratic opponent, Troy Jackson, was a logger on the Canada border before pursuing a career in politics, giving him an authentic voice as he explains the cost of a fight with Canada for Mainers.
NBC News national political reporter Sahil Kapur noted today that Ralph Alvarado, who is running for the U.S. House from Kentucky’s sixth District, which Trump won in 2024 by 15 points, has scrubbed his website of references to Trump and has changed his slogan from “America First Fighter” to “Independent Leadership.”
Still, Trump appears to think his power is unchallenged and, in the midst of the fires all around him, continues to be focused on his renovations to Washington, D.C. A report today from Jonathan Edwards in the Washington Post showed that ticket sales and fundraising for the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts plummeted after Trump’s name was added to it, even though the board insisted his takeover was a financial rescue.
Today Trump’s lawyers suggested that the administration might have to demolish the Kennedy Center if the courts don’t allow the board to renovate it over the next two years and add Trump’s name to the facade. After the renovations, it would read: “The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts Restored and Renovated by President Donald J. Trump.”
As Gary Grumbach and Dareh Gregorian of NBC News reported, Justice Department attorney Brantley T. Mayers wrote: “Without those efforts, the Center will deteriorate further into an unsafe, decrepit structure that will be required to be taken down, with a determination to follow on what to build on the site, such as a large outdoor amphitheater overlooking the Potomac River that has been proposed, by some, for many years.”
Trump’s threat to destroy the Kennedy Center unless he gets to do what he wants to it seems to be a metaphor for the United States: “Nice country you got there. It would be a shame if something happened to it.”
—
Notes:
https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/25/business/canada-us-tariffs-american-consumers
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/2026/08/iran-middle-east-power/688374/
https://newrepublic.com/article/214669/trump-canada-trade-war-backfiring
https://www.ms.now/news/vance-susan-collins-trump-maine-senate
Trump’s Truth:
X:
Republicans/status/2092241418609713392
mccaffreyr3/status/2091313067200266407
sahilkapur/status/2092281557213925691
Bluesky:
SpaceX made Florida's Space Coast home to the world's busiest spaceport for a decade, but that will change this year. The company is significantly cutting the number of launches from Florida until Starship arrives, a senior SpaceX official confirmed Tuesday.
The Falcon 9 rocket has been SpaceX's workhorse, routinely launching batches of satellites for the company's Starlink network, primarily from launch pads at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. There were 165 Falcon 9 launches last year—about three flights per week—and about 75 percent of them carried Starlink satellites.
This year is different. SpaceX has launched more missions from its West Coast launch pad at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California since January, and this trend will amplify for the rest of the year.
SALT LAKE CITY – Aug. 25, 2026 – Tendeg has released NewTEN, a two-axis steerable reflector antenna that expands communications performance and pointing access for small spacecraft. Unveiled Monday, Aug. […]
The post Tendeg Launches NewTEN Steerable Compact Antenna at SmallSat appeared first on SpaceNews.
In this episode, SpaceNews Mike Gruss interviews Kevin Lausten, CEO of Morpheus Space, at the 2026 Small Satellite Conference in Salt Lake City, Utah. They discuss why propulsion is critical […]
The post Propulsion is having a moment appeared first on SpaceNews.
Space Angel has welcomed its selection by the Western Australian Government as the recipient of the $1.75 million Spaceport Establishment Support Grant, announced by Science and Innovation Minister Stephen Dawson. […]
The post Space Angel secures $1.75m WA Government backing to advance Western Australian spaceport plans appeared first on SpaceNews.
The US discussion over datacenters is depressing. Datacenters do not use a lot of water, they produce very useful outputs, they are not a blight on the landscape. All of this is obvious. But I don’t want to restate the obvious. What bothers me most about the discussion is that people seem to think this is or should be a collective decision. No.
We have a simple set of rules that everyone must follow. You buy land from someone willing to sell it. You contract for electricity. You hire workers who want the job. Your obligations to your local neighbors come from the same laws that govern everyone else. We do not ask what the land, electricity and labor is for. If you follow the rules, that is nobody’s business.
This is the distinction North, Wallis and Weingast make in Violence and Social Orders (paper here) between limited access orders or the natural state and open-access orders. For most of recorded history large-scale economic activity depended on access to political power. In the natural state, “people outside the coalition have only limited access to organizations, privileges, and valuable resources and activities.” The dominant coalition controlled entry into valuable activities and created rents by granting privileges.
An open access order works through general criteria. Organizational formation is “open to everyone who meets a set of minimal and impersonal criteria.” In economic life, the transition entails “the ability to create economic organizations at will, open entry and competition in many markets.”
The key word is impersonal. The same conditions apply regardless of who wants to build or whether public officials admire the proposed use. The state is not necessarily laissez-faire but its role ends once you have complied with the impersonal rules.
Now look at how a data center actually gets built. Rezoning, special use permits, comprehensive plan amendments, a negotiated “community benefits agreement” of school donations, fiber, soccer fields, and payments in lieu of taxes, public comment and then more public comment. These are not general rules. They are terms of admission negotiated with whoever holds the veto. Calling them community benefits doesn’t change the structure. Access to economic activity has become something that must be bargained for, argued for in the collective sphere, and paid for–with success determined by rents and political access. The natural state returns.
(The subsidies, by the way. are the same error wearing the other hat. A sales tax exemption written for datacenters and a county moratorium aimed at datacenters both replace a general rule with a judgment about whether this industry deserves to exist. An open access order offers neither special favors nor special burdens. It offers a rule.)
Opponents often complain that communities deserve more of a say. No, they do not. You did not vote on the bakery and the baker did not vote on you. That is the deal.
Datacenters happen to be where this is most visible today. Their size and novelty make them easy targets for vilification and rent extraction. But the big issue is not datacenters. It is whether building depends on following impersonal rules or on securing permission case by case from those who control access. The natural state was the human default for ten thousand years. The open access order that displaced it is the foundation of our prosperity and our political strength, and it is younger and more fragile than we like to think.
The post Data Centers and the Open Access Order appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Interview Marc Kley
1. Professor Ockenfels, your work focuses on the design of markets and incentives. How can founders leverage your scientific insights when developing their business models?
Every business model is, to some extent, an exercise in incentive and market design, whether founders are aware of it or not. Whoever builds a platform, a pricing scheme or an app decides who can trade with whom, what information they see, and what incentives they face. Market design research offers three lessons for founders. First, details matter: seemingly minor rules can make or break a market. I have seen many systems fail because of seemingly innocuous design mistakes. Second, behavior matters: people reciprocate, care about fairness, are loss averse, and are quickly overwhelmed by complexity. Third, testing matters: experiments are the wind tunnel of market design and the gold standard for finding out what works and what does not.
...
4. In your opinion, which major societal challenge could be solved more effectively if we designed markets, platforms, and incentives more intelligently?
Almost any. Take climate change. It is often framed as a moral problem, but at its core it is a cooperation problem: everyone benefits if emissions fall, yet each country, company and individual prefers others to bear the cost. A uniform carbon price would steer billions of everyday decisions toward climate protection without micromanaging any of them. Not less importantly, our research shows that carbon pricing facilitates international negotiations built on reciprocity, which can stabilize cooperation where unilateral pledges fail. A similar logic creates value elsewhere: kidney exchange programs save lives, well-designed electricity markets keep the energy transition affordable, and clever matching systems allocate school places more fairly. Wherever incentives are misaligned, better economic design can unlock large social value
Across the social sciences, many studies use cross-sectional designs that reveal associations but are generally unable to support direct causal claims, yet authors of such articles may make or imply causal claims anyway. Here, to examine the prevalence of such ‘overreaching’ causal language, we analysed 194,631 cross-sectional articles using large language models. Over the period 1980–2024, an average of 46% of articles contained causal language in their titles or abstracts, where the annual rate has risen almost threefold since 2000 from 20% to 60%. To examine the effects of such language, we conducted a human-subjects experiment (N = 1, 105), finding that readers frequently indicate abstracts with this phrasing provide causal evidence but that methodological labels (β = −0.4, 95% confidence interval −0.56 to −0.19) and associational wording (β = −0.3, 95% confidence interval −0.43 to −0.07) reduce this tendency. Experiments with five LLMs revealed that model summaries of these articles (N = 100 each) can amplify causal overstatement, removing hedges and introducing causal claims where articles used strictly associational phrasing; however, prompting caution diminishes this pattern.
That is from a recent paper by Calvin Isch, Timothy Dörr, Neil Fasching, Grace Jennings & Duncan J. Watts. Note that Isch is on the job market this year, working with Tetlock and Watts.
The post Overreaching causal language in the social sciences appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
I'm currently working on migrating my open source projects from GitHub to a self-hosted Forgejo instance. As part of this effort I often end up looking through the Forgejo source code to figure out if there are hidden ways to configure certain things to my liking when I can't do it on the administration UI. I thought I'd start putting my discoveries in writing here, in case they can help others. So here goes the first one.
One of the aspects of the migration that is tricky is how to transition issues and pull requests. What makes the most sense to me is to only use Forgejo to track issues and pull requests going forward, leaving all the issues and pull requests created up to the migration point on GitHub. Of course whether this is a good or bad idea is debatable, but considering all the options I have decided that this is the solution that is going to inflict the least pain on me.
The one problem with this approach is that I would end up having duplicate issue numbers, because Forgejo would start creating issues and pull requests all the way back from #1, and all those low numbers have been used on the GitHub side. So I wanted to hack my Forgejo instance so that issues start from, say, 10000. That way when anyone references an issue by its number I would know that numbers below 10000 are on GitHub and only those above are on my own instance.
Jethro Elsden, London area, to study the regulatory structure of the UK using AI.
Paula Benedetti, Buenos Aires, marine biology work in Brazil.
Nyida Gyal, 17, northern Virginia, AI and data.
Gabe Sekeres, Cornell, what if an economist just lets AI run?,
Ollie Payne, NYC, Future Aesthetics Foundation.
Jacob Watson-Howland, London, podcast on science and progress.
Cameron Monroe, UC Santa Cruz, archaeology in Ghana.
Björn O. Öste, archaeology and Peru.
Oliver Pryce, Cambridge, mathematics, AI and a unified representation of geometry and physics.
Demetre Tsiklauri, Tblisi, 16, general career support, building a student network in Georgia.
Shannon Wong, Paris/Antarctica, general career support.
Lydia Farnham, London, matching donors and projects.
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EVE Online: The Move to Python 3 Begins!
EVE Online has been one of the most interesting case studies in Python at scale for over twenty years now.They've been running on Stackless Python since their launch in 2003, and their last major upgrade was 16 years ago, to Stackless Python 2.7 in 2010.
Their upgrade to Python 3 will start using the futurize script against 2.4 million lines of code, followed by careful manual review of the ~20,000 places where Python 2 and 3 behavior differ - for example 1 / 2 is 0 in Python 2 but is 0.5 in Python 3.
There's nothing in this announcement about how they plan to replace Stackless, but at their conference last year they presented Scheduling in Carbon: Leaving Stackless Python Behind describing how they replaced Stackless in the Carbon engine for their more recent game EVE Frontier, using their (now open source) carbonengine/scheduler library.
Via Lobster.rs
Tags: eve-online, migrations, python, python3, stackless
It won’t look like this
So here, according to Trump and his officials, is the state of the war with Iran: Iran has been totally defeated and is desperate for a deal — indeed, Trump has announced that a deal is imminent on at least six distinct occasions. Also, because there is no deal, and Iran is intransigent, Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, is preparing what he calls an “economic D-Day,” economic sanctions that will bring the Iranian regime to its knees — a tricky proposition since, according to those same officials, Iran is already on its knees. But whatever.
What you need to know is that this economic campaign will fail as thoroughly as the military campaign.
The U.S. plan, or maybe just a concept of a plan, appears to be “Blockade me? No, blockade you!”
On one side, the U.S. is trying to restore the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz despite Iranian threats. At least some tankers are running the strait “dark,” with their transponders off. Private insurers won’t cover the risks of these runs, so the U.S. government is providing insurance instead. And U.S. military forces are providing some protection against Iranian drones and missiles.
This part of the plan is, dare I say it, not entirely stupid. Clearly at least some oil is making it out. The Trump administration says 8 million barrels a day, which would be a significant amount if true. Unfortunately, that figure is coming from Trump officials, who have zero credibility, so it’s anyone’s guess how big the number really is.
More important, however, is the fact that even a successful re-opening of the Strait of Hormuz matters a lot less now than it would have a few months ago. There are two main reasons ending Iran’s blockade of the Strait, even if possible, will be ineffective.
First is the sheer scale of the U.S. military failure in the Persian Gulf. Not only did U.S. attacks on Iran fail to overthrow the regime, Iranian attacks have forced the U.S. to abandon many of its bases in the region. The loss of these bases, combined with the depletion of U.S. stocks of interceptors and other munitions, means that America is effectively unable to defend its Gulf allies.
So what will happen if Iran feels that its blockade of Hormuz isn’t doing enough damage? It can and will escalate to attacks on oil facilities all around the region. And there’s very little America could do to stop it.
Second, energy prices to final users have become increasingly disconnected from the price of crude oil. Remember, people don’t burn crude, they burn gasoline and diesel. And the prices of these refined products are up much more than crude prices. The chart below shows the price of Brent crude along with the wholesale price of diesel fuel and a weighted average of the wholesale prices of diesel and gasoline:
The huge premium in the prices of refined products over the price of crude — the “crack spread” — is a result of a global shortage of refining capacity (partly caused by Ukrainian attacks on Russian refineries.) So even if Bessent can get more oil flowing through Hormuz and drive down crude prices, the economic pain that Americans are suffering at the gas pump will remain high.
What about Bessent’s threat to isolate Iran economically, cutting off both its exports and imports? There’s a one-word rejoinder: China. As I wrote a few weeks ago, China has been the winner from Trump’s war.
Now it’s true that the U.S. Navy can and has mostly blocked Iranian oil exports, although maintaining this blockade is harder than it may seem. After all, we know that the Navy is under severe strain, literally having trouble keeping sailors fed and the plumbing on their ships working. These difficulties, in turn, stem largely from the loss of U.S. bases, especially the base in Bahrain. Still, this means that Iran is losing its main source of export revenue. In 2025, that revenue amounted to about $45 billion.
That is a lot of money from Iran’s point of view — around 7 percent of the country’s 2025 GDP. It is, however, only about 0.2 percent of China’s GDP.
Why is China relevant? Well, because the Chinese are obviously enjoying great geopolitical benefits from Trump’s self-inflicted quagmire in Iran. And it would cost them very little, from their point of view, to keep us stuck in the quagmire by supplying the Iranian regime with enough money to finance purchases of essential imports.
Can’t the U.S. blockade Iranian imports too? No. Lucian Truscott has a very good article explaining how fundamentally impossible it would be for the US to close the many, many routes through which goods can get into Iran.
In his remarks yesterday, Bessent made grandiose claims to the effect that we can isolate Iran by imposing sanctions on countries and companies that deal with the Iranian regime. But the Trump administration has already imposed tariffs and other sanctions on so many countries, for so many alleged purposes, and backtracked so many times, that its credibility is exhausted. Moreover, Iran can get much of what it needs from China. So do you really believe that a weakened U.S. can coerce China into helping it defeat Iran? And against China’s own strategic interests? If you believe that I have a few 30-year bonds to sell you.
Yes, the United States still has the capability to impose substantial economic hardship on Iran. But it’s just another Trump fantasy to believe that he can intimidate a regime that has already survived decapitation of most of its leadership, enduredmonths of intense bombing, and that has successfully retaliated against U.S. allies in the Gulf.
While Scott Bessent is a contemptible sycophant, he isn’t stupid. He surely knows that this pathetic attempt to pressure Iran will not only not work but also reeks of desperation. And the erstwhile bond trader in him will know what happens when those who really have the goods – China, in this case – smell the scent of desperation. I can safely predict that the Chinese will make sure that the Iranian regime survives, and that they will thoroughly enjoy watching Trump slowly twist in the wind over the Strait of Hormuz.
NONMUSICAL CODA
What a real D-Day looked like
With their charming waddles, heat-conserving huddles, and tuxedo-like plumage, emperor penguins are among the world’s most recognizable animals. Recent satellite surveys estimate that hundreds of thousands of the flightless birds live in 66 colonies spread around Antarctica’s inaccessible, frozen coastlines. But those numbers could fall in the coming decades because emperor penguins rely on landfast (or fast) ice—a type of sea ice attached to the shoreline—to breed, raise chicks, and molt.
While Antarctic sea ice remained relatively stable between the late 1970s and 2015, it has been declining since 2016, and climate projections suggest that trend will continue. How landfast ice is faring remains poorly understood and is an active area of study. However, one study suggests that it has declined in West Antarctica and the Weddell Sea in recent decades even as it has trended upward in the Bellingshausen Sea and East Antarctica.
Meanwhile, some models project that emperor penguins could disappear by 2100 due to their habitats becoming inhospitable. The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service listed emperor penguins as threatened in 2022, and the International Union for Conservation of Nature classified them as endangered in 2026.
After Antarctic sea ice cover hit a record low in 2022, British Antarctic Survey researchers reported “catastrophic” breeding failures among Bellingshausen Sea colonies. However, new research, based on decades of observations from NASA-USGS Landsat satellites, offers some hope, underscoring that many colonies have persisted for decades and that emperor penguins may be more flexible about where they breed than previously thought.
Except for a few well-studied colonies, scientists have known little about how long many emperor penguin colonies have existed, how their populations have changed, or how they have responded to past disruptions in landfast sea ice.
“There’s little baseline information for what’s ‘normal’ for most of these colonies,” said Michelle LaRue, a wildlife ecologist at the University of Canterbury. That’s made projecting future population levels a challenge.
Two new studies published in 2026 used decades of Landsat observations to start filling gaps in understanding. Landsat cannot resolve individual penguins, but researchers identify colonies from the guano stains that accumulate where thousands of birds congregate on the ice.
Using this technique, researchers at the University of Freiburg found that 18 colonies predate their initial identification by an average of 17 years. Because Landsat has imaged Antarctica continuously since the early 1980s, it provides one of the few systematic long-term records of remote penguin colonies.
Among the oldest colonies studied was the roughly 6,000-bird Smyley Island colony in the Bellingshausen Sea, which dates to at least 1989, two decades earlier than previously known. Other colonies that predated their earliest known presence by 20 or more years included those at Barrier Bay, Brownson, Luitpold Coast, Ragnhild, Smith, and Verdi Inlet.
Scientists have watched the Smyley Island colony closely in recent years because it is among the colonies that may have suffered a total breeding failure in 2022. Satellite images captured that year show the colony splitting up, with some penguins moving onto a large iceberg grounded near the coast.
Despite persistently low sea-ice conditions since then, the colony has continued to appear in satellite imagery, generally establishing itself near icebergs along the edge of the ice shelf. The image above on the right shows the colony in December 2025, the most recent month Landsat has observed the colony.
“We’re seeing a degree of resilience in the Smyley Island colony,” LaRue said. “They seem to be doing okay now, and we will continue to monitor them to learn more about their behaviors.” The colony’s persistence underscores that one bad breeding year—even a total failure—doesn’t mean the end of a colony. Blizzards and predators can lead to bad years with very low chick survival rates as well, she added. “It’s when we start to see frequent breeding failures year after year that the birds won’t be able to keep up, and it starts to be a problem for a colony.”
A second study, led by Grant Macdonald, a remote sensing scientist at Durham University, found further evidence of behavioral flexibility. Macdonald and colleagues analyzed nearly 40 years of observations from Landsat, the ASTER (Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer) on NASA’s Terra satellite, and other sources for three colonies disrupted by iceberg calving or early sea ice breakup. They found that penguins of the Mertz and SANAE colonies responded by temporarily shifting to nearby icebergs, embayments, or ice shelves before returning to their former breeding sites.
Landsat first imaged the SANAE colony in 1984 on fast ice in a sheltered bay in the Queen Maud Land region in East Antarctica. After a major calving event in 2011 exposed the fast ice to more punishing winds, the colony relocated to rift ice in an embayment 11 kilometers (7 miles) to the south. The move proved temporary. Part of the group moved to another nearby site, and part of it returned to the original breeding location in 2016.
Yet in the 2016–2017 breeding season, the returnees did something unexpected. Despite the presence of stable fast ice, they trekked onto the ice shelf and huddled and bred there. In the Landsat image above, a winding guano-stained trail traces the penguins’ route onto the ice shelf. By 2022, after roughly a decade of wandering and splitting between sites, the entire colony had returned to its original breeding ground on the fast ice, where it has bred each year since.
At the third colony the researchers studied, the Astrid colony on the Vigridisen Ice Shelf, the birds kept returning to their original breeding location even after a major calving event in 2006. That’s likely because some fast ice remained and nearby icebergs provided some shelter. The guano stains indicate that the colony did, however, sometimes spend time on a nearby ice shelf toward the end of the breeding season both before and after the calving event.
Indeed, moving and sometimes breeding on alternative surfaces such as ice shelves, icebergs, or rift ice may be “more common and feasible than previously thought,” Macdonald said, perhaps because some sites offer better shelter from wind. This willingness to move may represent a “useful adaptation” as ocean temperatures warm and sea ice declines, he added, though he cautioned that behavioral flexibility alone won’t necessarily offset the long-term effects of continued sea-ice loss.
“We have so much more to learn about emperor penguins,” added LaRue. “These colonies are so remote and difficult to access that satellites—especially government satellites with easily accessible data—are going to be absolutely invaluable to understanding what the future will bring for them.”
NASA Earth Observatory images by Michala Garrison, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Photo by Michael Van Woert (NOAA NESDIS, ORA). Story by Adam Voiland.
Stay up-to-date with the latest content from NASA as we explore the universe and discover more about our home planet.
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Scientists relied on satellite data to understand how the Antarctic glacier lost so much ice so rapidly.
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The post A Changing World for Emperor Penguins appeared first on NASA Science.
Context: Placemark is a tool that lets you view, create, and edit geospatial (map) data. I ran it as a company for a while and open sourced it when I shut down that company.
Yesterday Placemark got a pretty big PR from Birk Skyum, replacing its dependency on Mapbox GL JS with MapLibre, along with some other improvements. Birk is one of the cofounders of MapLibre[1] and a generally prolific open-source contributor.
It's merged and live, and you can see it in action at placemark.io. This meant swapping out both the Mapbox frontend code as well as switching to a different tile service - we're now using OpenFreeMap for tiles, OpenMapTiles-based styles, openrouteservice for the routing drawing mode, and MapTiler for the satellite layer. Forks of Placemark no longer require a Mapbox API token to work, but they do require a MapTiler token to support Satellite tiles, and an openrouteservice token to do route-drawing.
The big upside here is that this makes Placemark cleanly open source: all of its dependencies have proper open source licenses like MIT, ISC, Apache-2.0, BSD-3-Clause, or similar[2]. Mapbox GL's license is not open source and requires the developer to have a Mapbox account and follow their Terms of Service. So: you can now fork Placemark and build cleanly-licensed open source applications on its codebase. I recommend it!
You'll notice some visual changes: MapTiler's satellite sources and processing are different than Mapbox's, and the OpenFreeMap styles are a bit different. I hope that it's not a disruptive change for anyone relying on the tool.
Along with this, Birk removed the deck.gl dependency that had been bothering me for a few years, and swapped out the routing functionality for a more permissive provider. It was a really great contribution, and resolved an issue more than two years old. Great stuff, and much appreciated!
Notes on the Mapbox / Maplibre history, for clarity. ↩︎
Here's the full license list from pnpm license list. ↩︎
The post Dolly Parton, RIP appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Up very early and removed the things out of my chamber into the dining room, it being to be new floored this day. So the workmen being come and falling to work there, I to the office, and thence down to Lymehouse to Phin. Pett’s about masts, and so back to the office, where we sat; and being rose, and Mr. Coventry being gone, taking his leave, for that he is to go to the Bath with the Duke to-morrow, I to the ’Change and there spoke with several persons, and lastly with Sir W. Warren, and with him to a Coffee House, and there sat two hours talking of office business and Mr. Wood’s knavery, which I verily believe, and lastly he tells me that he hears that Captain Cocke is like to become a principal officer, either a Controller or a Surveyor, at which I am not sorry so either of the other may be gone, and I think it probable enough that it may be so.
So home at 2 o’clock, and there I found Ashwell gone, and her wages come to 50s., and my wife, by a mistake from me, did give her 20s. more; but I am glad that she is gone and the charge saved.
After dinner among my joyners, and with them till dark night, and this night they made an end of all; and so having paid them 40s. for their six days’ work, I am glad they have ended and are gone, for I am weary and my wife too of this dirt.
My wife growing peevish at night, being weary, and I a little vexed to see that she do not retain things in her memory that belong to the house as she ought and I myself do, I went out in a little seeming discontent to the office, and after being there a while, home to supper and to bed.
To-morrow they say the King and the Duke set out for the Bath.
This noon going to the Exchange, I met a fine fellow with trumpets before him in Leadenhall-street, and upon enquiry I find that he is the clerk of the City Market; and three or four men carried each of them an arrow of a pound weight in their hands. It seems this Lord Mayor begins again an old custome, that upon the three first days of Bartholomew Fayre, the first, there is a match of wrestling, which was done, and the Lord Mayor there and Aldermen in Moorefields yesterday: to-day, shooting: and to-morrow, hunting. And this officer of course is to perform this ceremony of riding through the city, I think to proclaim or challenge any to shoot. It seems that the people of the fayre cry out upon it as a great hindrance to them.
Andy Ellis has a roundup of the security vendors at Black Hat this year.
Key Takeaways: We have entered into an AI world. While nearly half of booths didn’t directly mention AI or agents in their taglines, the effects of AI are everywhere. Multiple spaces (Identity, SaaS, AppSec, Data) have almost every vendor leading with AI; existing unsolved problem areas just got worse.
At the same time, there’s a clear trichotomy in the market: tools that tell you how bad things are; tools that stop adversaries, and tools that prevent problems from occurring. While you’d suspect that the tools that fix things would dominate, the tools that merely tell you how bad things are seem to be frustratingly plentiful.
Update Aug. 26, 6:15 a.m. EDT (1015 UTC): SpaceX landed its first stage booster.
SpaceX launched its latest Starlink mission from Vandenberg Space Force Base in the predawn hours of Wednesday morning.
The Starlink 15-22 mission will add another 27 broadband internet satellites to the company’s low Earth orbit megaconstellation. SpaceX has flown more than 2,000 of its Starlink satellites to orbit so far this year.
Liftoff from Space Launch Complex 4 East happened at 2:35 a.m. PDT (5:35 a.m. EDT / 0935 UTC). The rocket flew on a south-easterly trajectory upon leaving the pad.
SpaceX launched the Starlink 15-22 mission using the Falcon 9 first stage booster with the tail number B1082. This was its 24th flight after previously flying the NROL-145, USSF-62, and OneWeb Launch 20 missions as well as 20 batches of Starlink satellites.
Nearly 8.5 minutes after liftoff, B1082 landed on the droneship, Of Course I Still Love You, positioned in the Pacific Ocean. This was the 221st landing on this vessel and the 655th Falcon booster landing to date.
The launch came a day after SpaceX launched the Starlink 10-49 mission from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. Following that flight, SpaceX Vice President of Launch Kiko Dontchev said that it was the last planned Starlink launch on a Falcon 9 rocket from Florida as they begin to pivot to Starship orbital launches.
“Super proud of this incredible team. You’ve made Falcon 9 the most reliable launch vehicle in history. You also helped build the largest low-Earth orbit satellite constellation providing connectivity to millions around the world, and you’ve set the foundation for what’s next,” Dontchev wrote on social media.
“In the last seven years, Falcon has flown ~260 Starlink missions from the Cape… can’t wait until we launch that and many more with Starship!”
This morning’s @SpaceX mission from pad 40 was the last planned Falcon 9 Starlink launch from Florida (and it launched on the fleet leading booster!!), marking the end of an era for these launches on the East Coast. From here on, Starlink missions out of Florida will fly on… pic.twitter.com/VG9rTdLg0G
— Kiko Dontchev (@TurkeyBeaver) August 25, 2026
Links for you. Science:
Scientists find evidence for two origins of life on Earth. Life may share one ancient genetic code, but new evidence suggests free-living cells emerged independently twice. (paper here)
Bigger, Hotter Fires Are Slowly Erasing America’s Great Forests
HHS document offers new clues to Kennedy’s vaccine plans
She grew up unvaccinated. Now she’s a leading voice for science — and empathy
We killed off California’s grizzly bears over a century ago. Can we resurrect them?
How much of a cancer drug is too much? Patients, researchers challenge FDA-approved dosages.
BGSU research finds toxins from algal blooms present in air samples
Other:
‘It embarrasses me to be involved’: Inside the National Guard D.C. deployment
We Need To Hear From Jeffries. He needs to be drawing redlines, not signaling compromise. Did he get snookered, or does he really intend to work cooperatively with thieves?
The Quest for the Holy Grail of Downtown Recovery
He Picked a Fight With Black America. I’m Here to Finish It.
Why does the New York Times keep calling the left ‘divisive’?
‘People are p***** off’: Black voters are turning out after Supreme Court guts Voting Rights Act
You’re Not Censored, But Get Off My Stage. It’s not deplatforming when security won’t let me rap with Kendrick.
Never Apologize For Being a Class Traitor
What actually happened to faculty hiring under DEI? (“During the pandemic, faculty hiring dropped dramatically but DEI policies kept minority hiring flat/slightly elevated — leading to ~1 additional faculty hired per institution per year relative to the counterfactual.”)
Hey, So Why The Hell Is Hakeem Jeffries Meeting With Prince Jared Of Trump?
Born on technology’s third base
Dan Osborn staffers infiltrated rival political party, tried to dissolve it
What Democrats can learn from Mitch McConnell
Are the polls overestimating Democrats again?
The friction-free design principles at the heart of Japan’s busiest cities
USS Lincoln sailor heartbroken after Trump’s ICE goons arrest his dad
Trump’s Third-Worldism
Trump-Aligned America First Policy Institute Backing Ex-NBA Player Tossed from WNBA Game
49ers Owner Jed York Red-Faced After Arrest In Ohio
Secret White House bunker undercuts Trump’s ballroom lawsuit, ex-officials say
The Density Divide and the Southernification of Rural America
Narrative Vehicles: The law enforcement bullets that killed Renee Good, Kohen Wiley, and John Albers entered from the side. Why did the official accounts say the cars were driving straight at officers?
US territories hit out at Trump plan to explore deep sea mining in the Pacific
Does Your Cat’s Butthole Touch Everything It Sits On? One Middle-Schooler Devised an Experiment to Find Out
Trump Seethes at Natalie Harp Mess as Leaks Grow Damning
How Canada can help Americans and defeat America
I usually don’t care about job approval polling, but this is just funny (boldface mine):
Amid President Donald Trump’s record-low approval ratings nationally, a new YouGov/Economist projection shows the president’s net job approval is negative in all but three states.
According to The Economist and YouGov, more people disapprove than approve of Trump’s job performance in 47 out of 50 states and in the District of Columbia. The three states where the majority of respondents still approve of the president are Wyoming (+14), Idaho (+9), and West Virginia (+6).
All three went for Trump in the 2016, 2020, and 2024 presidential elections.
The lowest net job approval rating for Trump was in D.C. (-83).
It’s worth noting this is a projection, but no one should be surprised with Trump at -83 in D.C. (lmfao). No idea how this translates into votes, of course, but this can’t be good for Republicans; hopefully, it will be bad enough. What should really worry Republicans are projections like -28 in South Carolina.
The more people see of Trump, the more they dislike him. Maybe not everything is Glonzo…
Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry said Tuesday that SpaceX will commit $100 billion to develop Starship factories and launch pads in the state's coastal areas. In doing so, the company seeks to replicate the Starbase facility it has built over the last decade in southern Texas on a larger scale.
The announcement capped months of speculation about SpaceX's interest in a sprawling parcel of land along the Gulf coast of Louisiana, which offers room to build multiple launch towers and offers access to the methane propellant that fuels the Starship rocket.
Gwynne Shotwell, the president and chief operating officer of SpaceX, said the "Starbase Louisiana" facility would become a self-sustaining spaceport with propellant production, power generation, deep-water shipping capabilities, vehicle processing facilities, and an airport on site.
1. How to run a start-up with AI agents and zero employees (video talk).
2. Elon of the bird world (Times of London).
3. Swiss judge using AI to help set sentences (in German). And in French.
4. Arguably EA philanthropists should obsess over fertility decline at least as much as X risk.
5. Much of Nvidia’s contribution has been missing from U.S. gdp figures.
6. One set of worries about Treasuries, possibly exaggerated. And Druckenmiller on the bond market (WSJ).
The post Tuesday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Back in the medieval era, there were 141 official holidays every year, according to scholar Pierre Émile Levasseur. That’s almost 40% of the year devoted to leisure. Even the French can’t match that.
And if you dig deeper into the past, lifestyles were even more festive. According to anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, prehistoric hunting-gathering tribes only worked around 15-20 hours per week.
This hardly changed until the Industrial Revolution.
As a specialist in the social history of music, I’ve tried to figure out what people did with all their free time. This is perhaps the most important question in the history of music and entertainment, but rarely gets asked. For the most part, the everyday music of earlier societies has disappeared without a trace.
But if you dig deeply into old source documents, you can start to put together the pieces. And—as I show in my book Music: A Subversive History—the everyday music of medieval life was often outrageous.
The partying got out of control, even during religious celebrations. I’ve tracked down numerous church documents from the Middle Ages that mention music—and the clergy complain bitterly about dirty songs and lewd dancing.
The authorities kept trying to stop it, but never really succeeded. Dirty dancing has always been with us, and always will. Today it’s Madonna, but back then it happened on the Feast of the Madonna.
For most of the last two thousand years, party songs were censored—so almost none of them have survived. But I can make one claim with absolute assurance: While our ancestors were enjoying these feast days, they didn’t make money for huge corporations.
Life is different now. People use up their leisure time scrolling through web ‘content’ saturated with advertisements—teens especially, who devote 4-5 hours per day on these platforms. Or they binge on Netflix. Or pay to play video games.
Most of the world’s free time has now been monetized by tech companies. In fact, the monetization of leisure time is how Silicon Valley execs make their billions. Our fun is their gravy train.
As recently as a hundred years ago, leisure time existed in a media-free zone. Nobody expected you to make money for wealthy elites on your day off.
I sometimes talked with my father about this. He was old enough to remember a world before mass media. Not only did he experience life before television, but he actually pre-dated the mass adoption of radio—which didn’t show up in most American homes until the mid-1920s.
He was almost ten years old before a radio arrived in his home.
I asked him what his family did in the evenings without TV or radio or an Internet connection. Can you guess what he said?
He told me that people would talk to their friends and neighbors. Many would go outside and sit on the porch in the evening so they could participate in the give-and-take of the larger community.
Can you imagine that—going outdoors and talking to your neighbors? Tell that to your kids. They won’t believe you.
My father told me that people in the neighborhood who were good storytellers and conversationalists were always in demand. They had the gift of gab, and were welcome in every home. It was like Substack, but in the flesh—and no subscription fee.
I was reminded of this years later, when I learned about anthropologist Andrea Migliano’s survey of 300 members of a hunter-gatherer tribe in the Philippines. She asked each respondent to pick five people they would want as companions if they were setting up a new community.
She expected that whey would choose the best hunters. Or maybe the strongest or the best at building. Or perhaps the best healer or the smartest leader.
Instead they preferred the best storytellers.
You probably would too, if you were cut off from mass media.
Of course, my father did other things as a youngster—especially play baseball. He had dreams of doing it professionally, but he unfortunately went to a high school packed with future major leaguers. (He said that the two students who beat him out in tryouts for catcher on the school team—Mickey Owen and Roy Partee—both ended up in the major leagues.)
“I couldn’t believe I was no better than third string,” he told me. “I thought I was a pretty good ball player. But it made sense when I saw those two other boys go pro.”
He also loved live music and dancing. He won trophies for his dance skills—which his Sicilian immigrant mother (who never learned to speak English) threw out with the trash. She was embarrassed that her son spent so much time dancing to jazz bands.
My father didn’t have much money—he was a teenager during the Great Depression. But you could have a good time in Los Angeles back then without cash. He could go to the beach, or take a walk with friends, or play ball on an empty field, or deal cards, or listen to neighbors who made music.
That was all free.
Most of your leisure time was spent joyfully, without monetization by huge corporations. There was a strict division between work and play—and only your work time was expected to generate corporate income.
Most of this world had disappeared before I was born. But I still got a taste of non-monetized leisure as a child. I competed in sports, went for walks and outings, and spent a lot of time playing chess and making music.
I also read a lot of books, most of them borrowed from the library. That was totally free, too—unlike Netflix or HBO today. And when I purchased a book, I often went to a used book store on Hawthorne Boulevard where secondhand paperbacks cost around 25 or 30 cents each.
The owner often tried to tempt me to spend more. He said he would sell me one hundred paperbacks for just ten dollars. He made that offer repeatedly. But I never had ten dollars, so he was wasting his breath.
There were so many pastimes that were free, or almost free. I played ping pong against my father (he was wickedly good), and worked jigsaw puzzles with my mother. I challenged both of them in pinochle. We played a lot of board games—including Scrabble, Risk, Clue, Monopoly, Stratego, and (if we were especially ambitious) Diplomacy.
My schoolmates and my brother’s friends often joined in, and cross-generational games and competitions were a regular occurrence. We did this more for the banter and sociability, and didn’t worry much about who won or lost.
We also told a lot of jokes—and jokes were much, much longer back then. (In a real oral culture, a joke that just lasts a few seconds is practically worthless—the exact opposite of today’s dopamine jolt comedy.) And we knew all sorts of puzzles, and guessing games, and stunts—and were always trying to learn more.
I failed at juggling, but got very good at doing card ticks. Almost every one of my buddies had some special skill of this sort, requiring coordination, practice, and a willingness to perform.
I want to emphasize that every one of the activities mentioned above was social and communal. It brought you closer together with family, friends, and neighbors.
Corporations didn’t make much money off all this. Sure, somebody had to buy a deck of playing cards, or some chess pieces, and the other required paraphernalia. But you could get years of enjoyment from tiny expenditures.
There were no monthly subscription fees for our ping pong table. There were no in-app purchases on the Scrabble board. The piano in our home, inherited from my uncle, didn’t need upgrades and a credit card number on file.
And some games were absolutely free—word games such as “20 Questions” or pantomime games like “Charades.” We all knew dozens of ways of entertainment that didn’t cost a penny.
Ah, the whole texture and ambiance of the world was different before leisure got monetized.
I’m not arguing for a nostalgic return to the past. Just stop making us work for the man during all our spare time. If we could open up our leisure to more non-corporatized activity, even for just a few hours per week, it would be healing.
Some people tell me that there is no conclusive proof that this shift in our leisure time is bad for people. They want more evidence.
I must say that this response leaves me dumbfounded. It feels like they are shilling for the man.
I’ll ask you straight up—which is healthier for youngsters: (1) My dad’s leisure time spent in baseball, dancing, friendships, storytelling, and other social interactions; or (2) non-stop scroll-and-swipe?
If you need more information to answer that question, you probably shouldn’t be a parent.
This is not a philosophical debate, and it certainly has nothing to do with nostalgia. Even just from a physical fitness point of view, the choice is clear. And don’t even get me started on mental health issues.
How many advertisements do we consume in this mind-numbing way? Marketeer Ron Marshall decided to count the number of ad exposures he had in a single day—and he got to 487 even before he finished his breakfast.
I’m not sure anybody has made a totally accurate measure of our daily monetization. But there has to be as much ad garbage in our heads right now as microplastics in our body.
It’s not unreasonable to put some limits on how corporations maximize income from captive users by monetizing their leisure hours. And, sure, I understand that billionaires are gonna billion. But don’t insult my intelligence by pretending that their manipulation of vulnerable youngsters is socially beneficial.
Their schemes go unchecked and, as a result, the culture is polluted. Even worse, the mindspace of the users of that culture is polluted as well. A society that doesn’t protect youngsters from this is destroying its future.
Most people have already figured this out. Only the policymakers—influenced by tech lobbyist cash—pretend not to notice.
But this elephant in the room will soon be impossible to ignore. We are only beginning to grasp the social cost of intensely monetized leisure—but already the price is far too high.
In the future, I plan to write more about leisure. I especially want to focus on its origins in ritual, festivities, sociability, and relaxation. In Western culture, the Day of Rest was actually sanctified—and the people who tried to monetize it were thrown out of the temple.
That might still be a sound policy today.
“You have to dominate,” President Trump told governors on a conference call. “If you don’t dominate, you’re wasting your time. They’re going to run over you. You’re going to look like a bunch of jerks.” It was June 1, 2020, when protests erupted across the country after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Trump explained his belief that the protests had to be put down with a maximum degree of violence so everyone would know who was in charge and the troublemakers would learn their place. “The word is dominated,” he reiterated. “If you don’t dominate your city and your state, they’re going to walk away with you.”
This is one of the central pillars of Trump’s worldview: Every interaction, whether between individuals or nations, is a contest of strength with a winner and a loser. Yet ironically, his stubborn pursuit of dominance blinds him to everything about economics, politics, international relations, and human nature that might actually enable him to succeed.
In other words, Trump’s obsession with dominance is what is now making him such a loser.
This is how he believes conflict, or really any relationship, works: There is a stronger party and a weaker party; the stronger party shows they’re stronger by threatening or hurting the weaker party; and the weaker party capitulates.
When it doesn’t actually work that way — because people, systems, and nations are more complicated than that — he’s at a loss. The only thing he can think of is to do the same thing, only harder. That’s what we’re seeing with Canada and Iran.
Trump has now initiated a new trade war with Canada, for no reason that anyone can discern. This has been happening off and on since he took office in 2025, when he apparently decided that since Canada is a loyal friend and partner to the United States, and Americans think warmly of their Canadian neighbors, it was important to do everything in his power to destroy the two nations’ mutually beneficial relationship. And the particular way he did so could not have been more perfectly calibrated to produce maximum resistance from Canada.
Because Trump is caught in his we’re-strong-you’re-weak paradigm, it wasn’t enough to impose a bunch of new tariffs on Canadian goods; he had to do it while saying again and again that Canada should become the “51st state” and repeatedly portraying it as a vassal of America. There is literally nothing he could have said that would be more insulting to Canadian identity, and inevitably produce exactly the reaction we’ve seen. Precisely because they live in the shadow of the global hegemon and share so much language and culture with America, Canadians are fiercely protective of their sovereignty and distinctiveness.
When Trump talked about Canada that way, the political fallout was predictable: The Conservative Party, which had been moving toward a kind of Canadian Trumpism, plunged in popularity, and the Liberals won an election that just a few months before they seemed doomed to lose badly.
But that was only the beginning. While the country faces plenty of challenges that have nothing to do with the U.S., Mark Carney’s tenure as prime minister is being defined by his willingness to stand up to Trump. When Trump makes a new attack on Canada — either rhetorically or in trade policy — Carney must meet it with a response that demonstrates the country’s strength and resilience. That’s what he’s been doing, and that’s why he remains popular.
In the current round of trade talks, Trump’s representatives made demands that struck directly at Canadian sovereignty. As the New York Times reported, “The United States wanted Canada to apply U.S. tariffs to other countries, particularly when it came to steel, now and in the future: If the United States changed policy and place higher tariffs on certain goods from a third country, Canada would need to do the same, even if it already had a trade agreement in place, a Canadian official said.” In other words, Canada would be essentially barred from making its own trade agreements in its own interests, and would have to simply do whatever the U.S. told it to.
Trump believes that as onerous as those terms might be, Canada will have no choice but to accept them. After all, we’re bigger than they are, and our economy is many times the size of theirs; if the “dollar for dollar” retaliatory tariffs Carney is promising come to pass, surely the U.S. will be better able to absorb the pain than Canada.
But here’s what Trump misses: Absorbing the pain isn’t just about percent of GDP; it’s also about psychology and identity. Carney even told his constituents what Trump never would: that “some of these measures will raise costs and reduce choice for Canadians,” but it’s necessary because they must stand up for themselves. One poll showed three-quarters of Canadians supporting the Carney government’s decision to walk away from the negotiations.
I’m sure Trump just doesn’t get that. We’re strong and they’re weak, why aren’t they giving in? Here’s a useful explanation from Stephen Marche:
While the prime minister’s approach is certainly new, it emerges from deep reservoirs of the Canadian spirit. For nearly a decade, I was a columnist at Esquire magazine. During that time, one of the greatest discrepancies I noticed between Canadians and Americans — and Canadian and American men in particular — was in their basic idea of what earned respect. For Americans, the capacity to project power, the ability to make things happen and to win are the primary virtues. For Canadians, the defining virtue is toughness, the capacity to endure.
Canadians will endure some economic pain, because to not do so would be an affront to their identity. Meanwhile, Trump will force Americans to endure economic pain, and for what? What reward will any of us here in the United States gain from this deranged trade war? Nothing.
Faced with that resistance, Trump is so flummoxed that this is the best he can come up with in response:
That is absolute loser stuff, the bleating of someone who wants everyone to think he’s strong but has had his weakness revealed.
The Iran war played out the way it has for the same reason: Trump assumed that because America has the world’s biggest military, he could pound Iran for a while, then its leaders would come on their knees before him and submit to all his demands. In fact, he keeps saying that’s exactly what’s happening, even though it plainly isn’t. “They are begging to make a deal. Not me. They’re begging to make it,” he said. “The reason they want to make a deal is they have been just beat to shit.” That was in March, five months ago, and since then he has said the same thing again and again (“They want to make a deal so badly”).
But they clearly aren’t begging to make a deal — at least not the kind of deal Trump demands, in which they give up everything and we give up nothing. Just as for Canadians the trade conflict is about sovereignty, for the Iranian regime the war is about survival. The regime is willing to tolerate an almost unlimited amount of suffering on the part of the Iranian people, as long as it does not threaten their hold on power. That willingness, added to the realization of just how potent control of the Strait of Hormuz can be, has left the regime feeling that they are the stronger ones.
So now, having drastically depleted our reserves of munitions and all but run out of targets in Iran to blow up, Trump announced “the MOST CRUSHING ECONOMIC OPERATION EVER TAKEN AGAINST ANY COUNTRY!” Is that going to lead the Iranian government to finally surrender, or will it retaliate in ways that will hurt the United States and the world economy? Everyone except the president knows the answer.
Where has this quest for dominance gotten Trump and his party? The Iran war is a disaster, pushing gas prices higher and Trump’s approval lower. The trade war on Canada will likely hurt Republicans in the midterm elections, especially in the Midwest. America’s military and economic primacy in the world now look shakier than they have in decades.
And the man whose entire life has been an endless, desperate quest not to be seen as a loser? He has never looked weaker.
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Apple Newsroom:
Apple today debuted M6 in the new Mac mini and M5 Ultra in the new Mac Studio, providing an extraordinary leap in performance and AI capabilities. M6, Apple’s first state-of-the-art 2-nanometer chip, advances every compute block, delivering gains across every dimension of performance. The chip features a larger 12-core CPU complex with the world’s fastest CPU core, a larger 12-core GPU with Neural Accelerators, a Dual 16-core Neural Engine, and up to 170GB/s of unified memory bandwidth. M5 Ultra, the ultimate powerhouse for pro and AI workloads, uses next-generation UltraFusion technology to form a quad-die architecture for the first time in an M-series system on a chip (SoC). The chip includes an up-to-36-core CPU and up-to-80-core GPU with a massive 1.2TB/s of unified memory bandwidth, 50 percent more than M3 Ultra.
The new Mac Mini (M6 and M5 Pro) and Mac Studio (M5 Max and M5 Ultra) are available for preorder today, but none of them ship until September 22.
All are slated to ship with MacOS 27 Golden Gate. On a background briefing for these new desktops yesterday, I asked if that implied that MacOS 27 would be released to the public on or before September 22, and the folks from Apple just sort of smiled and said they had no comment on anything other than the new hardware.
Finalist 4 is the biggest update yet to the paper-inspired day planner for iPhone, iPad, Mac, and now Apple Watch. The headline is Notes, in the app or as a folder of Markdown files that round-trips with Obsidian. Tasks in those files land on the right day, next to your reminders and events, even inside the macOS menu bar app.
The rebuilt Timeline lets you pencil tasks into your day, and Apple Pencil gets special powers to sketch the plan in seconds.
There’s tons more, brewed over four months with 1,000 beta testers. Try it free on the App Store.
I made a mistake in my table earlier today regarding the base price of the M5 Max Mac Studio, but my mistake was because of a rather sneaky design in Apple’s purchasing flow. Apple’s web interface looks like this:
Both of the available M5 Max SoCs have 18-core CPUs, but the entry model (that starts at $2,500) has a 32-core GPU, and the upgraded chip has a 40-core GPU. That upgrade is labeled “+ $300”, which makes it look as though the starting price for the 18/40-core model is $2,800. That’s the price I put in the original version of my chart.
But if you select that option, you’ll notice that the actual starting price jumps from $2,500 to $3,100 — a $600 difference, not $300. The reason is that the $2500 18/32-core version only comes with one option for RAM: 32 GB. The 18/40-core chip has three tiers for RAM: 48, 64, and 128 GB. So when you switch from the 18/32-core chip to the 18/40-core chip, you don’t just get 8 extra GPU cores (which Apple is saying costs $300), but the base RAM jumps from 32 to 48 GB, and that costs you an additional $300.
Apple does show a blue notification stripe when you change chips here, which states “Based on your new selection, other parts of your configuration have been updated. Please review the changes.” But because the RAM options are mutually exclusive between the two M5 Max variants, it’s easy to make the mistake I did, and think the base price for the 18/40-core M5 Max Studio is $2,500 + $300 = $2,800, when in fact it’s $2,500 + $300 + $300 = $3,100.
I regret the error, and we all regret how expensive all of this has gotten.
If you already read my “What Is the Point of the DMA?” piece yesterday, this morning I added a lengthy footnote regarding the DMA’s predecessor, the GDPR. Click through to read the entire note, but here’s the kicker:
The GDPR went into effect 10 years ago. By their inaction, they obviously think it’s working just fine. I think they look at the situation and realize, with satisfaction, that every time any website presents a cookie-permission dickover, that dickover effectively has a “Brought to you by the European Commission” badge on it. They were here, they did something, and everyone around the world sees the fruits of the GDPR cookie regulations every time they open their web browser. Job well done.
Apple today announced an all new lineup of Mac Mini (M6 and M5 Pro) and Mac Studio (M5 Max and M5 Ultra) desktops. The Apple Newsroom announcements for Mac Mini and Mac Studio only note base model prices. Here’s my attempt to put all of the RAM/SSD configurations into condensed tables, so you can see which storage and memory options are available for each chip, and how much they cost.
Market Design
12-core CPU, 12-core GPU: $900
RAM:
16 GB $0
24 GB $200
32 GB $400
SSD:
256 GB $0
512 GB $200
1 TB $500
2 TB $1000
15-core CPU, 16-core GPU: $1,700
18-core CPU, 20-core GPU: $1,900
RAM:
24 GB $0
48 GB $600
64 GB $1000
SSD:
512 GB $0
1 TB $300
2 TB $800
4 TB $1800
8 TB $3800
18-core CPU, 32-core GPU: $2,500
RAM:
36 GB $0
18-core CPU, 40-core GPU: $3,100
RAM:
48 GB $0
64 GB $400
128 GB $2000
SSD:
512 GB $0
1 TB $300
2 TB $800
4 TB $1800
8 TB $3800
30-core CPU, 64-core GPU: $5,500
36-core CPU, 80-core GPU: $6,800
RAM:
96 GB $0
256 GB $4000
512 GB “Coming late October”
SSD:
1 TB $0
2 TB $500
4 TB $1500
8 TB $3500
16 TB $7500
Ethernet: Across all Mac Mini models, upgrading from 2.5 gigabit to 10 gigabit is $100. On Mac Studio, 10 gigabit is standard on all models.
If you configure an M6 Mac Mini with 2 TB of storage, the SSD upgrade ($1,000) costs more than the entire base model computer ($900). So too with the 4 TB SSD upgrade for the M5 Pro Mini ($1,800 upgrade for a $1,700 computer).
Both Mac Mini and Mac Studio are available in a wide array of cool color choices, including silver.
It kind of stinks that there are no RAM options for the M5 Ultra Studio between the 96 GB base and the $4,000 256 GB upgrade. There “should be” a 128 GB tier, but if you squint you can see why they did it this way.
The best currently-available-to-order Mac Studio (36/80 cores, 256 GB RAM, 16 TB SSD) costs $18,300. But if you’re OK with the base 30/64-core chip and just 8 TB storage, you can cut the price to a smooth $13,000.
“Coming late October” = “Bend over”.
“Dear Tyler,
I enjoyed reading your notes on visiting Anthropic to advise on Claude’s constitution. Framing AI governance around the common law, case law (“Talmud”), and independent adjudication is a much more adaptive approach than relying on a static, top-down text.
That said, moving from a fixed text to a case-law system introduces its own set of structural risks. If Anthropic adopts this direction, a few institutional design hazards seem worth anticipating:
The common-law analogy is compelling, but the real test is whether the institutional machinery can handle the sheer velocity and scale of software.”
That is from Scott Jenkins.
The post AI and constitutions (from my email) appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
The post Galaxy Gallery: Galactic Gems Glisten in New Gallery From NASA’s Chandra appeared first on NASA Science.
With New Horizons now 63 AU out, it’s time to ponder that record hibernation period that the spacecraft just went through. Over 10 months long, this one had the same goal as previous such periods, to hold down operating costs but also give a break to onboard instrumentation in hopes of augmenting mission lifetime. As a kid, I often thought how cool it would be to be involved with a distant spacecraft. For some reason I always visualized this as being here on Earth while working with a craft beyond the Solar System. So maybe I was dreaming more of being a flight controller than an astronaut.
I hadn’t realized until reading Alan Stern’s recent update that while hibernation means there are no commands and responses going back and forth, the craft does continue active data gathering from its Solar Wind at Pluto (SWAP) plasma detector and the Pluto Energetic Particle Spectrometer Science Investigation (PEPSSI) instrument. The Student Dust Counter is also in operation. Since awaking early in the summer, New Horizons has been delivering data from these instruments back to Earth.
I see that future flybys of Kuiper belt objects (KBOs) are still a distinct possibility, assuming that one can be found within range of the vehicle. And yes, the Vera Rubin Observatory is already in use in the search for such objects, with planning extended to requests for time on the Roman Space Telescope, now scheduled for launch within days. Writing about New Horizons always comes with a tinge of melancholy as I contemplate the fact that no successor is ready, but it’s a relief to see how active this tough little craft continues to be. There are good successor concepts out there, but none are currently funded.
Meanwhile, we have the interesting news about possible liquid flows on Pluto’s surface, revealed by New Horizons images of Sputnik Planitia, the nitrogen glacier whose northern regions reveal convection cells separated by features that suggest liquid nitrogen has flowed there in the past. The new work out of Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) and published in the Planetary Science Journal, suggests that this process continues, doubtless through liquid nitrogen upwelling from beneath the glacier.
SwRI’s Kelsi Singer, one of the study’s co-authors, comments:
“The surface of Sputnik Planitia is quite young, probably less than one million years based on modeling of the surface overturn, and thus these features that we are looking at must have formed since then. Pluto has many unique terrains seen nowhere else in the solar system, and this area of Sputnik Planitia is one of them. Its surface provides a different set of conditions compared to what we are used to on Earth, and exploring that allows us to better understand how materials behave in environments that are difficult to produce on Earth.”
Image: Pluto’s northern Sputnik Planitia glacier (in the western or left side of Pluto’s bright heart) is shown here in a color mosaic made from NASA’s New Horizons imagery. The direction of north is shown on the image. The image is ~ 700 x 350 kilometers across. The red box has been added to show most of the region containing dark features attributed to the wetting of the glacier by liquid nitrogen sourced from a “basal melting” process beneath the glacier. NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/SwRI.
These findings are based on studies of a glacial surface far from Earth and involve liquid nitrogen rather than water, but it’s interesting that the paper reports that the surface patterns on this region of Sputnik Planitia have darkened in ways that are similar to Earth glaciers that have undergone their own wetting by subsurface liquid. The team worked with images from the Landsat 9 satellite that included the Greenland ice sheet. Computer models of glacial melting led by Orkan Umurhan (SETI Institute) reveal a transport mechanism to the surface and indicate an icy flow that can persist on the surface for short periods, which would account for the dark features.
And there is another Earth analogue that perhaps comes into play. From the paper:
We have posited that the striking, dark, irregular linear and diffuse features prevalent at the northern margin of SP are manifestations of the upwelling of liquids or liquid slurries from beneath the SP ice sheet. We have further posited that these liquids were created as a basal melt at depth below the glacier, and we have quantitatively shown the plausibility that such a mechanism can then advect through conduits to the surface of SP where it will horizontally spread out, leaving a darkened surface akin to that observed in northern SP. The buoyant ascent of liquid nitrogen through the denser N2 ice is akin to terrestrial volcanism where less dense basaltic melt rises through cold continental crust.
Does this process occur on other dwarf planets in the Kuiper Belt? We won’t know that until we have mapping missions to objects like Eris. The paper also mentions the obvious candidate at Neptune, the large moon Triton, as a possible example of such processes factoring into the geysers Voyager 2 observed during its flyby. For that matter, it’s fascinating to consider that despite the success of New Horizons at Pluto/Charon, over half the planet (I know I’ll get emails about calling it that) remains unmapped at high resolution because of the geometry of the encounter. So for the time being, we don’t even know whether apparent flows like that at Sputnik Planitia occur elsewhere.
The SETI Institute’s Umurhan points out that the physics of solid nitrogen materials under stress and strain are not well understood, and have to this point “never been studied in real detail in the laboratory.” We need, in other words, to go out there and look, and New Horizons has just reminded us why.
The paper is Stern et al., “Evidence for Possible N2 Basal Flow beneath Pluto’s Northern Sputnik Planitia,” Planetary Science Journal Vol. 7, No. 7 (31 July 2026), 185 (full text).
On Friday night, Prime Minister Mark Carney instructed Canadian negotiators to walk away from talks with officials from the Trump administration over new tariffs of 50% Trump had imposed on $28 billion of Canadian products. Carney explained in a statement that “last-minute changes in the U.S. proposed terms were unfair, uneconomic, and called into question the reliability of any deal.”
He has a point. From July 1, 2020, until Trump’s second term, the U.S., Canada, and Mexico traded under the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement (USMCA). Negotiated under the first Trump administration, USMCA replaced the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and was similar to it, creating one of the world’s largest free trade zones.
The trade zone reinforced the close alliance between Canada and the U.S., enabling people in both countries to enjoy the longest demilitarized border in the world stretching more than 5,000 miles (more than 8,000 kilometers) across the entire North American continent. Canada and the U.S. have shared military and defense capabilities, with the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) operating since 1957 to detect aircraft or missiles, especially those coming over the North Pole, that could prove a threat to the United States (NORAD’s Santa Tracker originally was a way to make Americans aware of what NORAD did).
But as soon as he won reelection in 2024, Trump began to emphasize that he intended to use “economic force,” specifically tariffs, to pressure Canada into joining the U.S. as its 51st state. He began to exercise that threat the day he took office for the second time, saying he would put 25% tariffs on Canada. This violation of his own trade agreement reflected the administration’s abandonment of the principles of free trade and defensive alliances put in place after World War II, replacing that system with one favored by autocrats like Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, in which strong countries imposed spheres of influence in their regions of the world.
Since then, Trump has sought to use the extraordinary economic power of the United States to force Canada and other countries into subordinate relationships. The recent threat against Canada came after Trump’s previous tariffs either were struck down or expired. On July 20, Trump said he would use Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930, more commonly known as the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, to impose a 50% tariff on certain Canadian products. No president had ever before invoked Section 338, which allows a president to impose tariffs when a country discriminates against U.S. products relative to its comparative treatment of other countries’ goods.
On Sunday, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said Carney would have to back down because tariffs will be “devastating for his country.” Also on Sunday, the Wall Street Journal editorial board noted that Trump “has contrived an array of pretexts—from fentanyl trafficking to trade deficits—to bludgeon Canada with tariffs.” And the editorial board, known for its right-wing slant, called Trump’s tariff war on Canada “the dumbest trade war in history” and said it “makes no economic or political sense.”
Canada is the second largest trading partner of the U.S., and the editors noted that Trump’s “latest round of border taxes will hit an array of consumer goods, construction materials and manufacturing components,” driving prices still higher at a time when consumers are already squeezed.
Trump’s new attack on Canada might not make economic or political sense for the U.S., but it seems to make sense for a decaying president.
Trump is flailing in Iran, and so—as national security scholar Tom Nichols pointed out in The Atlantic after Trump nonsensically attacked South Korea, another longstanding and loyal ally—he is looking to reassert his dominance. Trump doesn’t dare to cross the leaders who actually threaten the U.S., those like Putin, China’s Xi Jinping, and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. Instead, Nichols writes, he is trying to make himself feel better by “kicking America’s allies, the nations he can punish without fear that they will kick him back.”
“At a better moment in American history, an enraged Congress would step in and demand answers about such dangerous idiocy,” Nichols wrote. “They would rush to the White House, talk to the press, hold hearings, and in general act like responsible stewards of American power.” But Republicans in charge of Congress appear to be unwilling to cross Trump. Our allies, though, Nichols notes, “have power and agency of their own, and even now are likely planning for a world in which the Americans are no longer men and women of principle who stand by their word and by their friends.”
That moment appears to have arrived.
In Davos, Switzerland, in January 2026, Carney warned the World Economic Forum that the world is “in the midst of a rupture.” He warned that the post–World War II rules-based international order is no longer automatically a route to prosperity and security as the world’s most powerful nations are using the economic integration that system championed as a way to coerce other countries.
He urged “middle countries” to create “coalitions for different issues based on common values and interests” as an alternative to a “world of fortresses” made up of major powers with spheres of influence.
On Friday night, after recalling Canada’s negotiators, Carney released a statement saying: “We have recognised from the beginning that America has changed, and that we will not return to our old relationship. Our government understood, before many, that America is altering all its trade relationships. Putting tariffs on its closest allies and charging for access to its vast market.”
Although negotiators had tried to work with the U.S., he wrote, Canada’s core economic strategy has been on building Canada’s economy and diversifying economic partnerships. He noted that Canada is creating jobs at four times the rate of the United States. “Canada has what the world wants,” he wrote, “And we will not allow any nation to determine our future.”
In an address to Canadians on Saturday, Carney said: “Last spring, I warned that America is trying to break us so that they can own us. And I promised: ‘That will never, ever happen.’ We are keeping that promise.” “Canada is becoming stronger and less dependent on America. We are already giving ourselves more than they can take away. And we are just getting started.”
Carney said Canada will retaliate against the U.S. tariffs, dollar for dollar, beginning on September 8.
This morning, Trump exploded on social media, claiming that “Canada has been ripping off the United States of America for years” and warning that “Canada will be treated like a State no longer!” He said that on “January First, 2027,” he would place tariffs of 50% on “all Cars, Trucks, both large and small, Automotive Parts, and Steel.” Canadians “feel entitled,” he wrote, “and yet, WE DON’T NEED CANADA, THEY NEED US!” Ontario Premier Doug Ford, who used to be a Trump fan, told reporters today “I have a lot of real estate on my ass, so [Trump] has a lot of room to kiss my ass.”
Today Carney told reporters that Canada will soon “begin intense discussions with the European Union, the world’s second-largest economy, to build a much stronger and deeper economic and security partnership. Now,” he said, “we can build such unparalleled access because we’re trusted, because we’re reliable, and because we have what the world wants.”
On Friday The Economist reviewed polling by YouGov showing that Trump has a positive job approval rating in only three states: West Virginia, Idaho, and Wyoming.
There seems little reason to think those numbers are going to turn around. On Friday, Trump announced he would try to lower beef prices by suspending tariffs on imports of up to 300,000 metric tons of imported ground beef that he said would be sold “at 25 percent below current prices.”
Cattle ranchers and farmers, who have in the past strongly supported Trump, cried foul, saying the imports would drive down prices while making it impossible to distinguish between U.S. and foreign meat just after nearly 30,000 pounds of Argentine beef were recalled after missing a required inspection in the U.S.
Trump has refused to identify from which country or countries he plans to get the ground beef, a reluctance dovetailing unfortunately with a report from Dave Philipps with visuals by Erin Schaff in the New York Times on August 20 that the Bureau of Land Management under Trump has been selling wild horses for slaughter as meat for as little as $25 a head. Wild horses are legally protected from hunting or capture, but the administration appears to be selling them to middlemen who resell them into the food pipeline unquestioned.
In a sign of just how untrustworthy many Americans now consider Trump, anti-Trump social media users were quick to put the two stories together.
Georgi Kantchev, Rebecca Feng, and Summer Said of the Wall Street Journal today also cast doubt on the administration’s claims that large volumes of oil are moving through the Strait of Hormuz. “The trackers whose job it is to count the world’s oil shipments see much less,” they write.
On Sunday, Noah Robertson and Dan Diamond of the Washington Post reported that Trump’s insistence that he needs his new ballroom for security is bunk: the White House already has a secure, hardened facility that can withstand a nuclear blast and house dozens of people for weeks. It was built secretly during the Obama administration.
Meanwhile, the angry opposition to the Trump administration and the wealthy tech bros it serves is taking shape with popular fury over the data centers. These facilities house computers, servers, and data storage infrastructure and have existed for a long time, but to support the extraordinary demands of artificial intelligence they have grown exponentially lately. Tech giants have built huge facilities that are noisy, pollute, and require huge amounts of energy and water.
Technology advocates have pushed their agenda by claiming they will dramatically expand the economy, and the Trump administration has backed their ambitions. Trump even brought billionaire Elon Musk into the administration after he poured almost $200 million into getting Trump elected.
But opposition to the data centers is bipartisan and growing as they appear to symbolize the takeover of our system by a few wealthy men like Musk. Molly Hennessey-Fiske of the Washington Post reported today that in Texas, some Republicans are mobilizing to prevent Republican Greg Abbott from winning a fourth term as governor because of his support for data centers.
Over the weekend, the growing fury over Trump and his administration led to an uproar over a report in the New York Times by Maggie Haberman and Annie Karni about a meeting in the past weeks between House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. The journalists said the meeting was about “potential areas of common ground,” a vague description that led a clearly nervous House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) to warn Kushner: “You better not bet against the House Republicans.”
But even the idea that Jeffries was talking to Kushner was enough to infuriate opponents of the administration, a fact that seems likely to have been behind the leak of the meeting in the first place. For his part, Haberman and Karni note, Jeffries has emphasized that he wants “to get rid of toxic Trump cabinet secretaries,” including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth,” but it’s clear that demands for even more widespread accountability are growing.
In addition to posting a number of references to the first plane landing “at the newly named President Donald J. Trump International Airport,” claims that the “Radical Left Democrats are going CRAZY with Fake Polls,” and two photos of himself with Kim Jong Un, Trump posted today that “IRAN IS COMPLETELY COLLAPSING!!!”
And yet Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent today announced “Operation Economic Outcast,” an initiative to demand other world leaders join with the U.S. in strangling Iran’s economy. Bessent says Trump is contacting other leaders, but, as Riley Beggin, David J. Lynch, and Aoife Walsh of the Washington Post note, would neither say who they were nor specify the deadline.
“The United States expects action,” Bessent told reporters. “We do not have infinite patience here.”
—
Notes:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/22/world/canada/carney-trump-canada-tariffs.html
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/08/trump-iran-korea/688306/
https://thehill.com/business/6045845-duffy-predicts-carney-trade-negotiations/
https://globalnews.ca/news/11620877/carney-davos-wef-speech-transcript/
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/22/world/canada/carney-trump-canada-tariffs.html
https://globaltradealert.org/blog/s338-the-return-of-the-authority
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/the-dumbest-trade-war-revisited-57c9fe81
https://www.economist.com/interactive/trump-approval-tracker
https://www.thecentersquare.com/national/article_1ecdc151-fa37-4963-b376-32ac76376702.html
https://rollcall.com/2026/08/21/trump-creates-beef-with-ranchers-over-new-import-plan/
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/20/us/trump-wild-horses-legal-loophole-slaughter.html
https://www.forbes.com/sites/technology/article/what-is-a-data-center/
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/23/us/politics/jeffries-kushner-private-meeting.html
https://www.newsweek.com/mike-johnson-jared-kushner-hedges-bets-jeffries-meeting-12357577
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/08/24/data-centers-oh-s-t-moment-01046465
Trumpstruth:
Bluesky:
moneypowerpolitics.bsky.social/post/3mttkfz6tek2p
piperformissouri.bsky.social/post/3mtnaisjlcc2o
mrsbettybowers.bsky.social/post/3mtrovwzuu22l
In Britain, the House of Lords was traditionally dominated by hereditary peers–a right bequeathed by the monarch, sometimes in ancient times, to sit in the House of Lords that was transmitted generationally. That system has been withering away for decades, however, and was finally ended this year by the 2026 Hereditary Peers Act. So how should members of the House of Lords be chosen?
One idea which comes to mind quickly is selection by merit. Perhaps the House of Lords should be filled with Nobel Prize winners, wise professors, former politicians, distinguished public servants and so forth. All very well and good but the nub here is that these people have to be chosen by someone, and whoever controls the selection process inevitably influences the kind of people selected. That makes an appointed chamber less independent of, and potentially more similar to, ordinary politics, even with lifetime appointments. Moreover, what is their interest? Madison argued that for a good system “the interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place.” A politicized selection of representatives, even meritorious representatives with lifetime appointments, may not differ enough from ordinary elected politicians to make much difference.
In 10% Less Democracy, my colleague Garett Jones, suggests that bondholders have a formal role in government. So let us consider, a House of Lords based on bond holdings. The advantage of this system is that bond holders are self-selected and their interests are in long-term stability–exactly what we want in a check on the popular house.
Votes in the House of Lords could be allocated proportionally to holdings; thus in practice we would get institutional representatives most notably including pension funds. If you want stability and growth, giving pension funds a bit more sway in national politics does not seem like a terrible idea. Bondholders would, for example, likely be more concerned with long-run financial stability, for example than current politicians seem to be. Should foreign holders of bonds be given a vote? Why not? Perhaps this would improve the prospects for peace. Although the popular house will always have the final say.
If anything, bondholders might prove too fiscally conservative as they are concerned primarily with default risk. The traditional House of Lords based on hereditary peers really amounted to a House of Lords based on landed property which isn’t a bad proxy for long-term stability and growth. After all, land owners do tend to do well when the country does well and you can’t take your land to another country. The ancient system had its wisdom; but landholding is not perfectly aligned with national prosperity. The House of Lords defended tariffs on imported foods (the corn laws) to promote land rents at the expense of food prices for everyone else. For similar reasons, we might, therefore, want to leaven the House of Lords with some equity, say ownership of Trills–the Robert Shiller idea for shares backed by real GDP. We would thus have a popular house and a corporate house divided into equity and bonds, all well aligned.
The post Towards a New House of Lords appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
We provide the first direct estimates of the effects of minimum wages on low-wage workers in families at different points of the distribution of income-to-needs, using data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation, which oversamples low-income families. We find adverse – rather than beneficial – effects of minimum wages on the employment, hours, and earnings of initially-employed low-wage workers in poor and low-income families. Although we do not find a gradient indicating more adverse effects on the poorest low-wage workers, the adverse effects for poor and low-income low-wage workers help explain why minimum wages do not reduce poverty.
That is from a recent paper by David Neumark and Emma Wohl.
The post Do Minimum Wages Help Workers in Poor and Low-Income Families? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
The FT has the story:
"Legal marijuana imports have increased sixfold since 2024, according to data from the Federal Health Institute. That year, the leftwing government led by then-chancellor Olaf Scholz passed laws allowing adults to possess and privately cultivate cannabis, while also expanding legal sales to users with a prescription.
...
"Despite the partial legalisation, more than half of weed consumers do not rely on medical prescriptions to get the drug.
“Social supply”, meaning purchasing cannabis through social contacts, makes up 35.2 per cent of the market, even as selling the plant without a medical prescription remains illegal. The next biggest source, at 21 per cent, is for consumers to grow their own, according to a study conducted in the second half of 2025.
In 1914 Yitzhak Ben-Zvi and David Ben-Gurion, the president and prime minister of Israel after 1948 respectively, were in the Ottoman capital studying law at Istanbul University. They had studied Ottoman Turkish and embarked on their legal studies in the hope of one day serving in the Assembly of Deputies as elected representatives from Jerusalem. With war on the horizon, they made their way back to Palestine, where they volunteered for military service in the Ottoman army. They also proposed the formation of a Jewish legion to fight under the Ottoman banner, but their intiative fell on deaf ears…We have no way of knowing how things might have turned out had Ben-Zvi and Ben-Gurion been allowed to suit up in Ottoman uniform…
Moshe Sharett, another future prime minister of Israel and said to have been fluent in both Arabic and Turkish, served in the Ottoman army during the Balkan Wars and all through the First World War, even beyond the announcement of the Balfour Declaration and the British occupation of Jerusalem in December 1917.
That is all from the quite good The War That Made the Middle East: World War I and the End of the Ottoman Empire, by Mustafa Aksakal.
The post That was then, this is now appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
With one glance at a particular 12-mile stretch of Lake Huron’s shoreline, it’s clear there’s a pattern. Small islands outlined by tan beaches and bright, shallow water align in a remarkably parallel orientation. The claw-mark-like appearance of this Great Lakes locale is evident in this image, acquired with the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on the NASA-USGS Landsat 9 satellite in July 2026.
The Les Cheneaux Islands are a group of 36 islands near the shore of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, about 20 miles (32 kilometers) northeast of the Straits of Mackinac. The archipelago contains coastal marshes, rock and sand beaches, peat bogs, and forests full of pine and cedar. Parts of several islands are set aside as nature preserves, including a substantial portion of Marquette Island, which is only accessible by boat or over ice. The islands are interspersed with sheltered waters that inspired their name; the French “Les Cheneaux” roughly translates to “the channels.”
The Les Cheneaux Islands, like many landforms in the Great Lakes region, look the way they do because of glaciers that carved the landscape during the Wisconsin Ice Age before retreating around 10,000 years ago. Their elongated shapes indicate many of them are drumlins: mounds of glacial debris that run parallel to the direction of the ice’s movement.
The glacial topography has helped give rise to a distinct local maritime culture. In contrast with the Great Lakes’ vast open expanses, the waters around the Les Cheneaux Islands are relatively protected from the infamous storms that can otherwise roil the upper Midwest lakes. This creates opportunities for paddling, as well as fishing in quiet alcoves for species such as smallmouth bass, northern pike, yellow perch, and lake trout. The town of Cedarville boasts an annual antique wooden boat show, a boat-building school, and museums highlighting how people, from the area’s earliest inhabitants to today’s residents, have used the islands and waterways.
On land, the much older geology of the area is revealed in a couple of brightly colored quarries. The bedrock here is dolomite, a modified form of limestone. It was deposited in the Silurian period more than 400 million years ago in a shallow, tropical sea before the movement of tectonic plates brought it up north. Michigan is home to several large dolomite and limestone mines, and Port Dolomite, east of Cedarville, ships millions of tons of the material every year.
NASA Earth Observatory image by Lauren Dauphin, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Story by Lindsey Doermann.
Stay up-to-date with the latest content from NASA as we explore the universe and discover more about our home planet.
Beaver Island is one in a string of verdant and scenic jewels in a northern Lake Michigan archipelago.
The expansive mudflats, sandy beaches, and mangrove forests of the Bijagós archipelago support an array of migratory shorebirds and large…
The hills and basins of Seattle, Washington, have been sculpted by glaciers and modified by humans.
The post Michigan’s Les Cheneaux Islands appeared first on NASA Science.
Apple Developer News:
Starting later this year, new Sign in with Apple addresses, previously issued on
privaterelay.appleid.com, will be issued onprivate.icloud.com. Existing addresses onprivaterelay.appleid.comwill continue to work and forward mail to users without interruption.After further consideration and reviewing community feedback, iCloud+ Hide My Email addresses will remain on
icloud.com.
Back in June, Apple announced plans to merge both systems onto the new private.icloud.com domain. The objection to this plan was rather obvious: it’s fine for Sign In With Apple to use an easily distinguishable domain name, because the only sites that see such email addresses are those that support Sign In With Apple (SIWA). The problem with moving Hide My Email (HME) addresses to a distinguishable domain name is that we often want to use such hidden email addresses on sites that would prefer to block those addresses and try to force us to use our “real” addresses. A little birdie suggested to me after I wrote about it in June that there were strong objections to the merger internally all along, from the HME side. Seems like those objections have won out.
