1. Sacralized digital authoritarianism.
2. Venezuela update.
3. The flawed paper behind the H-1B 100k fee.
4. Do we misuse our leisure time?
5. Hidden ties and stock returns.
6. Why are American trains so slow?
The post Sunday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
A day after NASA officials expressed optimism that they could be ready to launch the Artemis II mission around the Moon next month, the space agency's administrator announced Saturday that a new problem will require the removal of the rocket from its launch pad in Florida.
The latest issue appeared Friday evening, when data showed an interruption in helium flow into the upper stage of the Space Launch System rocket, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman wrote in a post on X. Isaacman posted a more thorough update Saturday, writing that engineers are still examining the potential cause of the problem, but any fixes must take place inside the Vehicle Assembly Building.
That means NASA and contractor ground teams will immediately begin preparing to roll the 322-foot-tall (98-meter) SLS rocket off of Launch Complex 39B and back to the VAB. The rocket and its mobile launch platform will ride NASA's crawler-transporter for the 4-mile journey.
Pastor Doug Wilson is a self-proclaimed Christian nationalist who advocates for a patriarchal society where sodomy is criminalized, women submit to their husbands and women lose the right to vote. He also preached at the Pentagon this week after being personally invited by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, a member of the pastor’s church network.
Wilson’s presence in the nation’s capital highlights how a fringe conservative evangelical Christian belief system has gained more traction in politics.
Three in 10 Americans qualify as Christian nationalism adherents or sympathizers, according to Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) survey data released this week. American women are just as likely as American men to hold Christian nationalist views.
Melissa Deckman, the chief executive of PRRI, said the percentage of Americans who adhere to Christian nationalist views has remained steady since PRRI started collecting this data in 2022 — but the movement’s influence has grown in politics and culture.
“I think we’re talking about Christian nationalism more and more in part because the MAGA movement has essentially taken over the leadership of the party,” Deckman said. “Even compared to Trump’s first term, you’re seeing a big difference in who Trump has brought with him back into office.”
The majority of Republicans — around 56 percent — qualify as Christian nationalism adherents or sympathizers, compared with 25 percent of Independents and 17 percent of Democrats, according to PRRI. Christian nationalist views are more prevalent in Southern and Midwestern states, where there is also a larger proportion of Republican elected officials in state legislatures.
The PRRI results were based on a survey and online interviews with more than 22,000 adults who were asked whether or not they agreed with five statements:
Based on their level of agreement, respondents were categorized as Christian nationalism adherents, sympathizers (groups PRRI identifies as Christian nationalists), skeptics or rejecters. The survey did not explicitly ask participants if they consider themselves to be Christian nationalists because many people don’t want to be conflated with the extremist stereotypes attached to the title.
In a 2025 CNN interview, Wilson said he embraced the term Christian nationalist, however, because he preferred it to the other names he was getting called. He added: “I’m not a White nationalist. I’m not a fascist. I’m not a racist.”
According to the survey data, Christian nationalists are more likely to believe the country should be more patriarchal, favor Trump, vote Republican, hold anti-immigrant views and believe true patriotism might require violence.
“If you think about Christian nationalism as a means to power, what has made Trump so popular with Christian nationalist leaders is that he’s been willing to enact policies that reflect their worldview,” Deckman said.
Trump has appointed conservative judges, including those who eventually overturned Roe v. Wade. He declared a war on gender ideology in a way that appeals to Christian nationalists; rolled back diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives; decried wokeness; and created a task force to eradicate anti-Christian bias in the country.
“I think many feminists find it surprising that this movement is often just as endorsed by women as men,” Deckman said. “There are lots of women for whom that worldview meshes with their own religious and cultural beliefs. It’s not a majority, but that’s a pretty consistent finding.”
CNN Chief Investigative Correspondent Pamela Brown, who has a documentary on Christian nationalism premiering Sunday, interviewed Wilson last year and later went to Texas to spend a weekend in a church connected to him.
“Doug Wilson is emblematic of the movement,” Brown said. “And as he told me, he’s been preaching the same things for decades and hasn’t changed his message, but he argues society is now moving toward him.”
Among those identified as Christian nationalist adherents, women tend to have differing views on gender than men, according to PRRI. For instance, 89 percent of men identified as Christian nationalist adherents think society is “too soft and feminine,” compared with just 61 percent of women. Christian nationalist women are also 21 points less likely than men to think that women’s gains have come at men’s expense. And women are nearly 30 points less likely to support policies that encourage Americans to have more children.
Brown talked to one woman in Texas who held a combat role in the Army and had plans to go to medical school before she gave all that up to get married, becoming a stay-at-home mom and a submissive wife. Another woman told Brown that her husband was the provider and decider and her role was to “glorify the home, make nice dishes and make a nice place for him to come to.”
“The women I interviewed there in Taylor said they’re flourishing, that they don’t feel oppressed, that this is what they believe the Bible tells them is how they should be in a marriage and that it’s the natural way a marriage should be,” Brown said.
But not everyone she spoke with was happy with the Christian community, Brown said. She also spoke to a group of women who had left their Christian nationalist communities due to emotional or physical abuse.
“These women had a different experience, and they did feel oppressed, like they didn’t have any agency,” Brown said. “A lot of them talked about developing health issues. And some even left with their husbands.”
Wilson told Brown that his church network saw membership skyrocket during the COVID-19 pandemic as many people found a sense of certainty and a black-and-white blueprint to live by in uncertain times.
But, experts say, it relies on a “modern day myth” that the United States was intended by the founders to be a Christian-only nation.
“If taken to its natural ends, Christian nationalism is antithetical to democracy,” Brown said.
This article was originally published by The 19th on February 20. Read original HERE.
“FREEDOM OF THE PRESS IS NOT JUST IMPORTANT TO DEMOCRACY, IT IS DEMOCRACY.” – Walter Cronkite. CLICK HERE to donate in support of our free and independent voice.
The post Women Are Just As Likely As Men to Hold Christian Nationalist Views appeared first on DCReport.org.
Management consulting seems like a natural use-case for large language models.
The Financial Times has the story:
Accenture combats AI refuseniks by linking promotions to log-ins
Consulting firms use ‘carrot and stick’ with some senior staff less willing to use technology than junior colleagues by Ellesheva Kissin and Elizabeth Bratton
"Accenture has begun monitoring staff use of its AI tools as part of how it decides top-level promotions, as consultancies push reluctant employees to adopt the technology.
The Dublin-headquartered firm told associate directors and senior managers that promotion to leadership positions would require “regular adoption” of AI, according to people familiar with the matter and an internal email seen by the FT.
This month Accenture started to collect data on individual weekly log-ins to its AI tools for some senior employees."
We just spent ten days filming in Los Angeles, and I have come back with thoughts. Mostly that the U.S. is totally fucked, but there are signs of life and hope.
People have been writing about rise of The Gundo for a while now. This refers to El Segundo, Calif. and the collection of twenty-somethings who have formed start-ups there. Many of these young companies center on hardware and on defense and on aerospace, and then there’s also nuclear reactor action, geoengineering, mining, additive manufacturing and other hard-tech things happening.
The Gundo has a vibe. It’s young, testosterone-rich, patriotic and somewhat Christian. Some of this feels like theater to me, and, frankly, The Gundo receives too much attention. It’s not really the thing.
The thing is Los Angeles and its mass of interconnected cities.
Twilight with Moon and Planets
Will Section 122 give Donald Trump enough time to invoke Sections 232 and 301? If not, is Section 338 really a possibility? Do you have any idea what I’m talking about? I hope not.
On Friday the Supreme Court delivered a body blow to Trump’s tariff policies, ruling that his promiscuous use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act — the acronym IEEPA sounds like a yelp of pain, which is appropriate — is illegal. In principle Trump could reclaim authority to do whatever he wants on international trade by getting Congress to pass enabling legislation, which is how the federal government normally works. But his tariff policy is wildly unpopular, the most unpopular ever, unpopular like nobody has ever seen before:
Members of Congress know this, and while Republicans will do almost anything for Trump, they won’t do that — that is, they wouldn’t have voted in the Trump tariffs as they were until Friday, and they won’t vote to restore them now. The Supreme Court struck down those tariffs because Trump tried to use IEEPA to impose tariffs without Congressional approval, and the Court said that was illegal.
But how was it ever possible to impose tariffs without a Congressional vote? Tariffs are taxes, and imposing taxes normally requires legislation. Why, then, has Trump been able to impose large tariffs without even consulting Congress? Why might he be able to keep tariffs high despite the Court’s ruling? And what’s with all the section numbers?
To understand what’s happening on tariffs, one needs to understand the history of U.S. international trade policy. And I do mean history: America has a system for tariff-setting whose roots go all the way back to the 1930s. That system was hammered together over decades by some very smart people who ingeniously harnessed self-interest in pursuit of their perception of the public good, cleverly created a synergy between domestic legislation and international diplomacy, and combined all of this with a keen sense of political realism. Unfortunately, that system was not designed to deal with a president like Trump.
Beyond the paywall I will address the following:
1. The long march to relatively free trade
2. The rules of the game, 1934-2025
3. Why presidents have so much discretion on tariffs
4. The Trump shock
So I recently received the following e-mail from Dori Campbell and the Creek OC Team. And instead of writing an article and mucking up the intent, I’ve decided to simply post the entirety of the message. Dori is clear, pointed and convincing. This is no small issue …
I am writing to ask if you would publicly share our correspondence with our county waterboard by imploring our local leadership to pressure the Orange County Flood Control District (OCFCD) and OCPW to immediately stop applying Herbicides in San Juan and Trabuco Creeks. These watersheds drain into our beaches and waterways such as Doheny and other local South OC surf spots. It will be a true hazard if any of this information and toxic waterway oversight affects our beachgoers and tourism dollars funded by larger organizations such as the IOC which will hold surf competitions in our area in 2028, not to mention the thousands of families and tourist dollars that flock to our shores every year.
Our ask of the county leadership is the following:
September 2025 initial meeting request
Review reports of the recent herbicide application in the channel this past July.
• Discuss the extent of the herbicide application.
• Look at creating a more deliberative process for controlling vegetation in the flood control channel.
• Discuss notifying the public in the future when herbicide application is going to occur.
At the core of our public request is a response to eradicate herbicides while maintaining the ecological health of the channel from this email October 2025:
“The current method of control in the channel is the denuding of the entire channel of any vegetation, native or exotic. All is killed annually with blanket herbicide application. In fact, according to the County’s own work order (see LO1 Work Order- July 2025), it takes over eight tons of herbicide to kill the channel. To put that in perspective, that is roughly five fire trucks worth of herbicide sprayed over a week’s time. The County also acknowledged that they do not let the local residents know about this practice, since the channel is considered their property.
The report is extensive— over 300 pages long— with data-based recommendations on how to protect life and property, stabilize the channel from further erosion, as well as improve the ecology of the channel. I spent the weekend reviewing this report. While this report is over 20 years old, I am unable to find a report from the Army Corps of Engineers that is more recent. Moreover, after reading this report, I doubt the recommendations would be any different today since the channel is essentially the same as it was then, particularly with the channel levees.
To summarize the report: The Army Corps of Engineers repeatedly and explicitly recommends against the exact actions that the County is taking in the San Juan Flood control channel. The massive application of herbicide in the channel to denude it of any foliage is explicitly ruled out as a viable strategy and does nothing to limit flood risk in the San Juan Capistrano and Dana Point areas.”
We have requested a meeting with the local OC Public Works (OCPW) authority since September of 2025, but we have not succeeded in creating a mutual compromise to the reduction of herbicide application. Our email correspondence files are enclosed for your further review.
We have written to county leaders with grave concerns regarding the inconsistency between the county’s current course of action and the actions recommended by the Army Corps of Engineers. Our statements (in an annotated version of the email) ask for the public to be aware of ecological safety and the health of our community, wildlife and waterways.
EMAIL to OCPW dated 10/17/25
“The channel is only at 60% capacity of what would be required in a 100 year storm event. This is based off of 2002 data, so current data will be different.
• The county asserts that herbicide application does not have any real impact on the ecology of the channel. Many birds rely on the denuded nature of the channel for habitat, and allowing vegetation to grow would be detrimental to these species, such as Plovers.
• Fish, such as the steelhead and cutthroats do not require vegetation for a proper ecosystem, therefore removing vegetation does not impact these species, whether they are migrating or living in the channel.
• The County stated that they are in compliance with all state and federal laws on herbicide application, particularly around notification of the public, schools within 400 meters, and adjacent neighborhoods.
• If endangered species moved into the channel and were discovered during an audit, this could significantly impact the brush clearance in the channel, so preventing establishment is another motive for brush removal.
• The county stated they would explore alternatives to killing all brush in the channel, and perhaps allow certain areas to have foliage. This would need to be approved by Engineering and the city of San Juan Capistrano”
Petition to save San Juan Creek
Thank you for your attention and support of our future waterway health for our local Orange County Communities.
On February 22, 1889, outgoing Democratic president Grover Cleveland signed an omnibus bill that divided the Territory of Dakota in half and enabled the people in the new Territories of North Dakota and South Dakota, as well as the older Territories of Montana and Washington, to write state constitutions and elect state governments. The four new states would be admitted to the Union in nine months.
Republicans and Democrats had fought for years over admitting new western states, with members of each party blocking the admission of states thought to favor the other. Republicans counted on Dakota and Washington Territories, while the Democrats felt pretty confident about Montana and New Mexico Territories.
In early 1888, Congress had considered a compromise by which all four states would come into the Union together. But in the 1888 election, voters had put the Republicans in charge of both chambers of Congress, and while the popular vote had gone to Cleveland, the Electoral College had put Republican Benjamin Harrison into the White House.
Democrats had to cut a deal quickly or the Republicans would simply admit their own states and no others. The plan they ended up with cut Democratic New Mexico out of statehood but admitted Montana, split the Republican Territory of Dakota into two new Republican states, and admitted Republican-leaning Washington.
Harrison’s men were eager to admit new western states to the Union. In the eastern cities, the Democrats had been garnering more and more votes as popular opinion was swinging against the industrialists who increasingly seemed to control politics as well as the economy.
Democrats promised to lower the tariffs that drove up prices for consumers, while Republican leaders agreed with industrialists that they needed the tariffs that protected their products from foreign competition. Republicans assumed that the upcoming 1890 census would prove that the West was becoming the driving force in American politics, and admitting new states full of Republican voters would dramatically increase the strength of the Republican Party in Congress. The one new representative each new state would send to the House would be nice, but two new Republican senators per state would guarantee the Republicans would hold the Senate for the foreseeable future.
Then, too, the new states would change the number of electors in the Electoral College, where each state gets a number of electors equal to the number of the state’s U.S. senators and representatives. Harrison’s men were only too aware that Harrison had lost the popular vote and won only in the Electoral College, and they were keen to skew the Electoral College more heavily toward the Republicans before the 1892 election.
In Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, the administration’s mouthpiece, Harrison’s people boasted that Republicans could take Montana, and gleefully anticipated that the new western states would send eight new Republican senators to Washington, D.C., making the count in the Senate forty-seven Republicans to thirty-seven Democrats. The newspaper also pointed out that changing the balance of the Electoral College would stop the Democratic-leaning state of New York from determining the next president.
In May 1889, elections for members of the constitutional conventions in North Dakota, South Dakota, and Washington Territory went Republican. Montana went Democratic, but Republicans blamed the result on Democratic gerrymandering. In October 1889, congressional elections in North Dakota, South Dakota, and Washington confirmed that those territories would come into the Union as Republican states. Frank Leslie’s counted the numbers: Republicans had garnered 169 seats to the Democrats’ 161. Republican legislatures would also give six new Republicans to the Senate, putting the count in that body at forty-five Republicans and thirty-nine Democrats. Frank Leslie’s reported the numbers, then explained what they meant: Republican control of Congress was pretty much guaranteed.
As for Montana, when it appeared the legislature would be dominated by Democrats, Republicans simply threw out the Democratic votes, charging fraud. They did have to admit that a Democrat had won the governorship, but they insisted he had done so by fewer than three hundred votes. The governor, Joseph K. Toole, was so popular that he was reelected twice, but the Republicans tried to weaken him by harping on what Frank Leslie’s called his “arbitrary, partisan, we might almost say indecent official conduct.”
In a little over a week in November 1889, four new states entered the Union. On Saturday, November 2, President Harrison signed the documents admitting North Dakota and South Dakota. On Friday, November 8, he welcomed Montana to the Union. The following Monday, November 11, he declared Washington a state.
Just as they had planned in February, Republicans had added three Republican states to the Union and had come close to capturing a fourth. The West seemed to be the key to maintaining national political power, and it looked as if Harrison’s men had managed to claim the region for themselves. Republican dominance in the new western states, Frank Leslie’s wrote, would tip the scale that had balanced the parties for more than a decade. The votes of the new states would virtually assure the Republicans the presidency in 1892, and the tariffs would be safe.
But by summer 1890 it was no longer clear that the Republicans would keep their majority. The economy was faltering, and Americans blamed the tariffs. They were looking favorably on former president Cleveland, who, after all, had won the popular vote in 1888. The Harrison administration seemed out of touch with the American people. Mrs. Harrison had drawn up plans for a $700,000 addition to the White House with conservatories, winter gardens, and a statuary hall, “so as to make it a fit home for a Presidential family.” The Harrisons’ ne’er-do-well son Russell insisted it was “shameful” for the head of the nation to be forced to live in cramped quarters, although observers noted that the cramping came from the fact that Russell Harrison and his wife and child had moved into the White House with the president and the first lady. And then President Harrison accepted a handsome plate of solid gold from supporters from California on his birthday in August.
Republicans turned again to the idea of protecting their majority by adding more states. They looked toward Wyoming and Idaho. Since Wyoming had boasted a non-Indigenous population of fewer than 21,000 people in 1880 and the Northwest Ordinance had established 60,000 as the necessary population for admission to statehood, it was a stretch to argue that it was ready, but the Republicans were adamant that it should join the Union.
They also wanted to add Idaho, which had a population of fewer than 33,000 in 1880. They were in such a hurry to admit Idaho that they bypassed the usual procedures of state admission, permitting the territorial governor to call for volunteers to write a state constitution, which voters approved only months later.
Democrats pointed out that there was no argument for Wyoming and Idaho statehood that did not apply to Democratic New Mexico and Arizona. “The picking out of the two Territories and plucking them into the Union by the ears looked like an operation that was not to be justified by any sound principle of statesmanship or of public necessity, and that only found justification in the minds of its promoters by the fact that they were thus increasing their political influence in the next presidential election,” a Democratic representative charged.
Republicans countered that Democrats were opposing the admission of new states out of partisanship, saying they would not add a new state unless it pledged allegiance to the Democratic Party.
On July 3, 1890, after a vote that fell along party lines, Wyoming and Idaho were admitted to the Union. The Republicans had added six new states to the Union in less than a year. Administration loyalists were elated, but Democrats and moderate Republicans were not enthusiastic. The Democratic Boston Globe pointed out that the two new states together had a population of “a fair sized congressional district in Massachusetts” but would be represented in Congress by four senators and two representatives.
The moderate Republican Harper’s Weekly was also concerned. It pointed out that the admission of the new states badly skewed congressional representation. The estimated 105,000 people of Wyoming and Idaho, it complained, would have four senators and two representatives. The 200,000 people in the First Congressional District of New York, in contrast, had only one representative. Harper’s Weekly pointed out there were fifteen wards in New York City that each had a population as large as the population of Wyoming and Idaho put together. To get their additional Republican senators, the magazine noted, the Harrison administration had badly undercut the political power of voters from much more populous regions, a maneuver that did not seem to serve the fundamental principle of equal representation in the republic.
Administration men did not stop at redrawing the map to ensure the success of their party. They manipulated the 1890 census to favor Republican districts, projecting their count would give fifteen more Republican congressmen while only seven for the Democrats. They erected statues of Civil War heroes and passed the Dependent Pension Act, which put money in the pockets of disabled veterans, their wives, and their children. And all the while, they blamed their opponents for partisanship. Frank Leslie’s lectured: “It behooves the citizen, regardless of party affiliations to think of the calamities that must in the end result from the intensifying of party feeling and the subordination of right and justice to the desire to advance party success.”
And yet the public mood continued to swing away from the Republicans, who continued to insist that the workers and farmers suffering under the Republicans’ policies were ungrateful and were themselves to blame for their own worsening conditions. In turn, opponents accused Republicans of stealing the 1888 election and believing they didn’t have to answer to voters so long as they had moneyed men behind them so they could buy elections.
In the 1890 midterms, voters took away the Republicans’ slim majority in the House and handed their opponents a majority of more than two to one. A new “Alliance” movement of farmers and workers had swept through the West “like a wave of fire,” Harper’s Weekly wrote, calling for business regulations and income taxes and working quietly through new, local newspapers that old party operatives had largely ignored. Republicans held power in the Senate only thanks to the admission of the new states, but even those did not deliver as expected: Republicans held a majority of only four senators, but three of them opposed tariffs.
In the presidential election of 1892, Harrison won four electoral votes from South Dakota, three from Montana, four from Washington, and three from Wyoming. Idaho’s three electoral votes went to the Populist candidate for president, James B. Weaver. North Dakota split its three votes among the three candidates. It was not enough. Grover Cleveland returned to the White House for a second term, and Democrats took charge of Congress for the first time since before the Civil War.
—
Notes:
The material here is mostly from my Wounded Knee: Party Politics and the Road to an American Massacre but the specific references are below:
New York Times, February 13, 1888, p. 1; February 24, 1888, p. 3; February 15, 1889, p. 5; February 17, 1889, p. 4; February 25, 1889, p. 1.
Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, January 5, 1889, p. 346; March 2, 1889, p. 39; March 16, 1889, p. 91, from New York World.
Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, June 1, 1889, p. 287; October 19, 1889, p. 191. Hubert Howe Bancroft and Frances Fuller Victor, History of Washington, Idaho, and Montana, 1845–1889 (San Francisco: The History Company, 1890), pp. 781–806.
Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, November 2, 1889, pp. 223, 230; November 16, 1889, p. 259; December 14, 1889, p. 331.
Benjamin Harrison, Message to Congress, December 3, 1889, at John T. Woolley and Gerhard Peters, The American Presidency Project.
Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, February 8, 1890, p. 1; March 22, 1890, p. 163; March 29, 1890, p. 171; May 10, 1890, p. 294; May 3, 1890, p. 279; April 26, 1890, p. 259.
Harry J. Sievers, Benjamin Harrison: Hoosier President (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1968), pp. 52–53.
New York Times, November 7, 1900.
Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, March 22, 1890, p. 147. Merle Wells, “Idaho’s Season of Political Distress: An Unusual Path to Statehood,” Montana: The Magazine of Western History, 37 (Autumn 1987): 58–67.
Harper’s Weekly, January 11, 1890, p. 31; July 19, 1890, p. 551. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, April 12, 1890, p. 211; May 3, 1890, p. 275; July 12, 1890, p. 487.
Boston Globe, June 28, 1890, p. 10; July 2, 1890, p. 6; July 3, 1890, p. 4. New York Times, June 28, 1890, p. 1.
New York Times, April 30, 1890, p. 1. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, March 1, 1890, p. 79; April 26, 1890, p. 257 and 259; May 17, 1890, p. 311; May 31, 1890, p. 355. July 12, 1890, p. 487; September 27, 1890, p. 113.
https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/1996/spring/1890-census
New York Times, August 16, 1890, p. 4.
Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, November 22, 1890, p. 278. Harper’s Weekly, November 29, 1890, pp. 934–935.
I am not saying it is a good strategy, I genuinely do not know. But the people behind the scenes, what are they thinking? Did we not just, not too long ago, take out or at least disable some big chunk of the Iranian nuclear assets? So what are we going after this time? Can we really affect regime change without large numbers of troops on the ground? Is there a “Venezuela version” of an Iranian intervention?
My simple model is as follows. The Trump people believe that previous administration, along many dimensions, simply never tried hard enough. They were too bound by previous conventions, too captive to polite society, and also they did not exercise executive power enough. When it comes to foreign policy, they did not threaten other nations enough to achieve American ends. When it comes to military action, they did not summon enough forces backed by enough executive will.
This time around, the goal is to make big threats backed by big, serious forces. Which indeed America is doing. The rest of the details will be filled in later.
If you think the binding constraint in the past was “not enough threats backed by serious enough executive will,” that constraint (it seems?) is being relaxed now.
Of course if the binding constraints lie along other dimensions, or along other dimensions as well, the current strategy could fail badly. The plan is simply not complete enough.
I suppose we are likely to find out.
The post How to make sense of the U.S. Iran strategy appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
I very much enjoyed this exchange, print only, here is the link. Excerpt:
Gaurav: Going back to Iceland for a moment. I’ve never truly appreciated how old that parliament is. A thousand years is extraordinary. What is it about Iceland that has allowed that kind of continuity?
Tyler: Iceland was taken over by Denmark for quite a while. But the Icelanders persisted as an autonomous culture with their own language, not simply becoming Danish. They had this tradition of individualism, which you can read in the Icelandic sagas. Their own kind of common law, a good system of incentives built into the legal code, traditions of autonomy based on food supply and how you deal with the cold and the weather. For a long time, they just played defense. Then after World War II, they had a chance to transform it into what I think is one of the world’s most successful countries.
Their total population is around four hundred thousand. To do that with such numbers in a place that is not always hospitable is remarkable. They have almost entirely green energy. They’re super resourceful, very highly educated. Book sales per capita are through the ceiling. There’s something about their interest in poetry, legal codes, reading, what they do with those long winter nights, that has been quite persistent. That’s an informal institution, and it’s been very durable.
Is there anything in US policy that you see drawing us toward a short-term siren call that makes it harder to create a lasting democracy?
Our government fiscal policy is irresponsible. I hope we can survive it. I’m not a doom-and-gloomer, but thirty-eight trillion dollars in debt is not ideal. I don’t think we should try to run a balanced budget. T-bills play a key role in the world economy, and some amount of debt and deficit is good for us, good for the world. But we’re pushing it too far. We underinvest in our young people, underinvest in parts of our education. But look, we’re a pretty successful country.
There’s this interesting tension between wanting a stable environment to build something that lasts and needing to ride a new wave for something to emerge in the first place.
I was recently thinking about how much the bad weather in the United States is functional for some larger purpose. You learn early that you have to deal with things. You need a certain kind of independence, planning, and preparation.
British weather is quite benevolent. Maybe it’s too gray, but it’s not going to kill you. American weather, hurricanes, blizzards, flooding, is very volatile. We don’t always feel it because we’ve become wealthy, but maybe in part we had to become wealthy to deal with that volatility. That might be a blessing in disguise. It’s related to the earlier point about Iceland. It’s tough there. You’d better be pretty adaptive. A perfectly stable environment is not ideal either.
Interesting throughout, and plenty of fresh material. The weather point I owe to conversations with Henry Oliver and Rebecca Lowe.
The post Gaurav Ahuja interviews me appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Tory Bruno, former CEO of United Launch Alliance, said he decided to join Blue Origin to work on important national security projects, including applications of the company’s Blue Ring spacecraft.
The post Bruno says he joined Blue Origin to work on ‘urgent’ national security projects appeared first on SpaceNews.
Just 24 hours after setting a March 6 launch date for the Artemis 2 mission, NASA said a problem with the Space Launch System upper stage will delay the launch.
The post NASA preparing for Artemis 2 rollback to fix upper stage problem appeared first on SpaceNews.
Up and to the office, where Sir J. Minnes (most of the rest being at the Parliament-house), all the morning answering petitions and other business. Towards noon there comes a man in as if upon ordinary business, and shows me a writ from the Exchequer, called a Commission of Rebellion, and tells me that I am his prisoner in Field’s business; which methought did strike me to the heart, to think that we could not sit in the middle of the King’s business. I told him how and where we were employed, and bid him have a care; and perceiving that we were busy, he said he would, and did withdraw for an hour: in which time Sir J. Minnes took coach and to Court, to see what he could do from thence; and our solicitor against Field came by chance and told me that he would go and satisfy the fees of the Court, and would end the business. So he went away about that, and I staid in my closett, till by and by the man and four more of his fellows came to know what I would do; I told them stay till I heard from the King or my Lord Chief Baron, to both whom I had now sent. With that they consulted, and told me that if I would promise to stay in the house they would go and refresh themselves, and come again, and know what answer I had: so they away, and I home to dinner, whither by chance comes Mr. Hawley and dined with me.
Before I had dined, the bayleys come back again with the constable, and at the office knock for me, but found me not there; and I hearing in what manner they were come, did forbear letting them know where I was; so they stood knocking and enquiring for me.
By and by at my parler-window comes Sir W. Batten’s Mungo, to tell me that his master and lady would have me come to their house through Sir J. Minnes’s lodgings, which I could not do; but, however, by ladders, did get over the pale between our yards, and so to their house, where I found them (as they have reason) to be much concerned for me, my lady especially.
The fellows staid in the yard swearing with one or two constables, and some time we locked them into the yard, and by and by let them out again, and so kept them all the afternoon, not letting them see me, or know where I was. One time I went up to the top of Sir W. Batten’s house, and out of one of their windows spoke to my wife out of one of ours; which methought, though I did it in mirth, yet I was sad to think what a sad thing it would be for me to be really in that condition. By and by comes Sir J. Minnes, who (like himself and all that he do) tells us that he can do no good, but that my Lord Chancellor wonders that we did not cause the seamen to fall about their ears: which we wished we could have done without our being seen in it; and Captain Grove being there, he did give them some affront, and would have got some seamen to have drubbed them, but he had not time, nor did we think it fit to have done it, they having executed their commission; but there was occasion given that he did draw upon one of them and he did complain that Grove had pricked him in the breast, but no hurt done; but I see that Grove would have done our business to them if we had bid him. By and by comes Mr. Clerke, our solicitor, who brings us a release from our adverse atturney, we paying the fees of the commission, which comes to five marks, and pay the charges of these fellows, which are called the commissioners, but are the most rake-shamed rogues that ever I saw in my life; so he showed them this release, and they seemed satisfied, and went away with him to their atturney to be paid by him. But before they went, Sir W. Batten and my lady did begin to taunt them, but the rogues answered them as high as themselves, and swore they would come again, and called me rogue and rebel, and they would bring the sheriff and untile his house, before he should harbour a rebel in his house, and that they would be here again shortly.
Well, at last they went away, and I by advice took occasion to go abroad, and walked through the street to show myself among the neighbours, that they might not think worse than the business is. Being met by Captn. Taylor and Bowry, whose ship we have hired for Tangier, they walked along with me to Cornhill talking about their business, and after some difference about their prices we agreed, and so they would have me to a tavern, and there I drank one glass of wine and discoursed of something about freight of a ship that may bring me a little money, and so broke up, and I home to Sir W. Batten’s again, where Sir J. Lawson, Captain Allen, Spragg, and several others, and all our discourse about the disgrace done to our office to be liable to this trouble, which we must get removed.
Hither comes Mr. Clerke by and by, and tells me that he hath paid the fees of the Court for the commission; but the men are not contented with under 5l. for their charges, which he will not give them, and therefore advises me not to stir abroad till Monday that he comes or sends to me again, whereby I shall not be able to go to White Hall to the Duke of York, as I ought.
Here I staid vexing, and yet pleased to see every body, man and woman, my Lady and Mrs. Turner especially, for me, till 10 at night; and so home, where my people are mightily surprized to see this business, but it troubles me not very much, it being nothing touching my particular person or estate.
Being in talk to-day with Sir W. Batten he tells me that little is done yet in the Parliament-house, but only this day it was moved and ordered that all the members of the House do subscribe to the renouncing of the Covenant, which is thought will try some of them.
There is also a bill brought in for the wearing of nothing but cloth or stuffs of our own manufacture, and is likely to be passed.
Among other talk this evening, my lady did speak concerning Commissioner Pett’s calling the present King bastard, and other high words heretofore; and Sir W. Batten did tell us, that he did give the Duke or Mr. Coventry an account of that and other like matters in writing under oath, of which I was ashamed, and for which I was sorry, but I see there is an absolute hatred never to be altered there, and Sir J. Minnes, the old coxcomb, has got it by the end, which troubles me for the sake of the King’s service, though I do truly hate the expressions laid to him. To my office and set down this day’s journall, and so home with my mind out of order, though not very sad with it, but ashamed for myself something, and for the honour of the office much more. So home and to bed.
I see this term “public intellectual” everywhere nowadays—and it has a nice ring about it. It summons up images of speakers standing on soapboxes proclaiming the truth to passers-by.
That’s actually happened in places like London’s Hyde Park and 125th Street in Harlem. It sounds so very fair and democratic. Not every intellectual teaches at Harvard and Yale. Sometimes they really do exist out in the wild. We ought to nurture and support them.
Not long ago, these same people were often called “working class intellectuals.” I had two uncles who could be described that way—they lacked prestigious degrees and institutional affiliations. They grew up poor, but were smart and well-read and could speak articulately on almost any subject.
A few colleges specialized in educating these working class intellectuals. Consider the case of City College of New York, where the finest minds of the proletariat got book learning on the cheap. (You can find a list of CCNY alums and profs here—it includes an impressive number of Nobel laureates and Pulitzer Prize winners.)
But those days are long gone. Working-class intellectuals have vanished in recent years. Instead we have witnessed the rise of millionaire—or billionaire—intellectuals.
There have always been super-rich people, but in the past they kept a low profile. In my youth, the wealthiest person in the world was Howard Hughes, and he stayed in hiding for the last two decades of his life—you couldn’t even find a current photograph of the man.
He was doing us a favor. Hughes was rumored to have abandoned all the niceties of personal hygiene.
During the last fifteen years of his life, Hughes was described as a tall gaunt skeleton of a man with long, unwashed matted hair, a scraggly beard, and fingernails and toenails of such length that curled in upon themselves. He dressed only in a pair of dirty undershorts or went nude.
Believe it or not, Martin Scorsese cast Leonardo DiCaprio to play Hughes in the biopic. You gotta love Hollywood.
Hughes briefly emerged from seclusion on just one occasion. On January 7, 1972, he made a brief phone call from the Bahamas to seven journalists assembled in a room in a Hollywood hotel. This was necessary because a scamming author had published a fake autobiography attributed to Hughes, and the world’s richest man wanted to denounce it as a fraud.
He spoke on the phone for a few minutes, then signed off. That was the last time the media had any contact with Howard Hughes.
After Hughes’s death, the richest person in the world was Daniel Ludwig. You have probably never heard his name. But that’s no surprise—Ludwig was even more reclusive than Hughes. He lived for 95 years, and only gave one interview during that time.
Fast forward to today. Elon Musk is now the wealthiest person in the world—and he’s making proclamations every day. He even bought his own social media platform, and posts his opinions constantly. He’s the reverse of Howard Hughes. You can’t escape him. And unless he flies off to Mars, you never will.
It’s not just Musk. There are dozens of billionaires who aspire to public intellectual status. Bill Gates serves up book reviews. Peter Thiel gives a lecture series. Tom Steyer makes speeches and offers himself as a candidate for President.
We have come a long, long way from the working class intellectuals and soapbox pundits of yore. Everything now is pay-to-play.
How did this happen? When did the status of public intellectual become something you can buy, like merchandise on the shelf at a Rodeo Drive boutique?
The recent release of the Jeffrey Epstein files gives a clue.
Epstein left NYU without earning a degree, and got dismissed from his teaching gig at Dalton for poor performance. But this didn’t prevent him from getting his own office at Harvard.
Harvard even appointed him as a Visiting Fellow—although the university now admits that “Epstein lacked the academic qualifications Visiting Fellows typically possess, and his application proposed a course of study Epstein was unqualified to pursue.”
Even after his arrest and conviction (forcing him to register as a sex offender), Epstein was given a keycard and passcode access to the facility for Harvard’s Program for Evolutionary Dynamics.
Epstein’s publicist sought to burnish Epstein’s reputation by asking PED to post on PED’s Harvard website links to Epstein’s foundations’ websites, which included both flattering descriptions of Epstein as a science philanthropist and false claims about the level of support he provided to Harvard. In 2014, Epstein’s publicist asked Professor Nowak to feature Epstein in a full page on PED’s Harvard website. Professor Nowak approved each of these requests.
The mention of Epstein’s publicist is important. Epstein had a whole team working on enhancing his reputation.
And this, my friends, is how rich people can become public intellectuals. They pay for it, and money talks.
Epstein acted the part. He gave out book recommendations and literary advice, but in the clumsiest way. He refers to Simone de Beauvoir in one email as “simone de bauvoi,” and in another instance as “simone de beauoirs.”
He was happy to discuss James Joyce’s Ulysses, but there’s evidence that he only ordered a DVD with that title.
Hey, if you have enough cash, all this doesn’t matter. According to one source, “almost everyone” on the board of Scientific American was a friend of Mr. E.
In all fairness, some literary names Epstein gets right. There are 426 references to Vladimir Nabokov (author of Lolita) in the Epstein files. I’ll let you speculate on why that is.
If you really want to see something shameful, watch this video clip (go to the 56 minute 20 second mark)—where Epstein is praised as smarter than any economist in the world.
I’m focusing on Jeffrey Epstein here, but he is hardly a unique case. Sam Bankman-Fried, currently incarcerated in Terminal Island penitentiary, also gained renown as a public intellectual before his conviction on fraud, conspiracy, and money laundering charges.
He was lauded as a major thinker in the Effective Altruism movement (which I’ve critiqued here). But he bragged that he “would never read a book.”
“I’m very skeptical of books. I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that….I think, if you wrote a book, you fucked up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post.”
This is embarrassing—not so much for Bankman-Fried but for the journalists and fanboys who praised his intellectual stature and gave him a platform for his crude, awkward opinions. But this shameful cringing behavior is increasingly the norm in a broken culture where everything is for sale—even from the most prestigious institutions.
I’m not suggesting that the age of public intellectuals is over. In fact, I see many worthy of that title here at Substack, but one measure of their credibility is that they’ve achieved it without a public relations team or criminal behavior.
We’ve interviewed several of them here at The Honest Broker. And we plan to talk to more of them in the future. That’s part of our mission.
They’re the real deal. And they didn’t need to pay off anyone to get where they are. Here at The Honest Broker, we don’t do pay-for-play.
Maybe the media outlets that embarrassed themselves with Jeffrey Epstein and Sam Bankman-Fried should pay more attention to them instead of anointing another wealthy malefactor as a serious thinker.
Even better, why don’t these “elite institutions” nurture and support the next generation of public intellectuals. This time, they can pick people who speak truth to power, and not just sell out to the highest bidder.
That would be a refreshing change.
Update Feb. 21, 12 a.m. EST (0500 UTC): SpaceX confirms satellite deployment.
SpaceX’s most flown Falcon 9 rocket booster launched once again Saturday night, making its 33rd mission to space and back as the company works to certify its boosters for up to 40 flights each.
The Starlink 6-104 mission added another 28 broadband internet satellites to SpaceX’s growing low Earth orbit constellation of more than 9,700 satellites.
Liftoff from Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station happened at 10:47 p.m. EST (0347 UTC). The Falcon 9 rocket flew on a south-easterly trajectory upon leaving the pad.
The 45th Weather Squadron forecast a greater than 95 percent chance for favorable weather during liftoff, citing no specific meteorological concerns.
The 33rd flight of Falcon 9 booster 1067 came about 2.5 months after its previous launch in early December. Its previous missions include four flights for NASA, the European Commission’s Galileo L13, and 20 batches of Starlink satellites.
Nearly 8.5 minutes after liftoff, B1067 landed on the droneship, ‘A Shortfall of Gravitas,’ positioned in the Atlantic Ocean. This was the 143rd landing on this vessel and the 575th booster landing to date for SpaceX.
Links for you. Science:
The impact of long-term levofloxacin on the bacterial gut microbiome of young South African children
How a Black fossil digger became a superstar in the very white world of paleontology
In America science-sceptics are now in charge
‘Do you love me?’: The Viking messages unearthed on Sweden’s rune stones
Controversial Danish vaccine research group faces new allegations
Hotel experiment suggests air mixing can help curb flu transmission
Other:
This Is Just Who Trump Is
‘Grind the country to a halt’: Democrat urges national strike if Trump meddles in midterms (welcome to the resistance, Comrade Gallego. Didn’t see that one coming)
Trump’s War on History
How to tear gas children. After ICE gassed a family-friendly protest in broad daylight, Portland is up in arms.
He Leaked the Secrets of a Southeast Asian Scam Compound. Then He Had to Get Out Alive
NE resident sent to hospital after protesting ICE
Inside the Minneapolis restaurant that has stopped charging for food until ICE leaves the city
New Mexico Senate approves bill to ban ICE detention centers
MAGA’s War on Empathy: This crisis in Minneapolis reveals a deep moral rot at the heart of Trump’s movement.
Grant Guidelines for Libraries and Museums Take “Chilling” Political Turn Under Trump
The Real Story Behind the Midnight Immigration Raid on a Chicago Apartment Building. The Trump administration has claimed the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua had taken over the building. But new documents make no mention of the gang and reveal federal agents had information about “illegal aliens unlawfully occupying apartments.”
Democrats can’t simply react to polls. They must lead.
It Turns Out Waymos Are Being Controlled by Workers in the Philippines
If You Hate Bad Bunny, I Have Bad News for You
DeLauro to pressing clergy: ‘I will not vote to abolish ICE’ (time for a primary; also, this is where I’ve noticed a real age gap in policy–older Boomers and Silents, on the whole–#NotAll…–simply can’t comprehend doing away with ICE)
Bitcoin Is Crashing So Hard That Miners Are Unplugging Their Equipment
California bill bans ICE agents from teaching, policing jobs
Children trapped in Texas immigration facility recount nightmares, inedible food, no school
Undaunted from the Bench: Judge Ana Reyes calls out Trump regime racism
Marco Rubio Will Let 2.5 Million Children Die so Sarah Rogers Can Fund Far Right Extremists in Europe
I Know You are Exhausted But…
VA Speaker Don Scott Calls on Virginia General Assembly Republicans to Denounce Racist Trump Post
Now We Know What All Those People Got From Epstein
How Substack makes money from hosting Nazi newsletters (no mention of the 2023 protest by substackers against this though)
‘Gang Stuff’ and ‘Illicit Trysts’: How Epstein Sought Leverage With the Wealthy
From Epstein to Bezos, the Ruling Class Is Rotten to the Core
Royal colleges leave X because of “harmful content and abusive behaviour”
New Partnership for Public Service survey data points to profound loss of confidence among CBP, ICE employees in agency leadership
Border Patrol employee found ‘covered in vomit’ in St. Paul, charged with drunk driving
TrumpRx has a fundamental flaw
Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber.
A map of how home prices have shifted in the last year. Prices in the midwest and parts of the northeast are up, prices in the south are down. [X]
Interestingly, this map lines up really well with this map of what time period the largest fraction of homes in a given area were built in. In the midwest and northeast, for most areas the largest fraction were built prior to 1939. In the south, for most areas it’s post-2000. [X]
Also, the places with the biggest COVID housing price booms are now the places where it’s the hardest to sell your house. [X]
Bloomberg has a piece looking at different decisions made by homeowners, renters who expect to buy a home someday, and renters who expect never to own a home. One interesting datapoint: for low-income brackets, renters have a higher propensity to invest in crypto, and a higher rate of reporting that they put in low effort at work. [Bloomberg]
Related, in an essay about California’s pivot to anti-growth in the 1960s, I noted how Prop 13, which cut property taxes and locked in extremely low tax rates, cemented the opposition to growth that had been rising since the 1960s, and that there were similar “tax revolts” in states across the country. Now it seems like opposition to property tax is gaining traction again: Florida’s house of representatives just passed a bill that would remove non-school property taxes for all “homesteaded properties” (which, as I understand it, basically means primary residences). [Florida Phoenix]
The Rhodium Group has a good article breaking down why Chinese EVs are so cheap. It doesn’t seem to be about labor productivity (which is lower than Western firms), or subsidies. Instead, the advantage mostly comes from the level of vertical integration they’re operating at. “For BYD, vertical integration is the single most important factor behind the company’s price advantage. That said, even among Chinese OEMs, BYD and Leapmotor are outliers. This helps explain why BYD has been among the companies most consistently leading price decreases over 2024 and 2025. Vertical integration requires higher upfront capex and R&D, but it eliminates supplier markups across a much larger share of the vehicle.” [RHG]
Discussions between Ford and the Trump administration about setting up Chinese car plants in the US via joint ventures. This idea keeps coming up. [Bloomberg]
Thanks to the trade war with China, and the huge amount of chips and other electronics the US is importing from Taiwan for data center construction, the US now imports more from Taiwan than it does from China. [X]
Similarly, thanks to the huge demand for memory chips from AI data centers, computer memory manufacturer Micron is spending billions of dollars on new memory fabs in the US. “In Boise, where the company is based, Micron is spending $50 billion to more than double the size of its 450-acre campus, including the construction of two new chip factories, or fabs…That’s not all. Near Syracuse, Micron just broke ground on a $100 billion fab complex that represents the state of New York’s largest-ever private investment.” [Wall Street Journal]
Likewise, TSMC is planning to spend $100B on four more Arizona fabs. [Tech Powerup]
The WSJ on the EV writedowns of the US auto manufacturers. “More than $20 billion in previously announced investments in EV and battery facilities were wiped out last year, according to Atlas Public Policy, which tracks clean-economy investments. That drove the first net annual decrease in announced investments in years.” [Wall Street Journal] Related, car manufacturer Stellantis sells its stake in a Canadian battery manufacturing plant for $100. [Detroit News]
US vaccine manufacturers are struggling: thanks to RFK’s anti-vaccine efforts at the Department of Health and Human Services, vaccine sales are down, jobs are getting cut, and investments in new vaccines are being scaled back. And it seems like things might get even worse for them. “A major concern for the big companies is whether the Trump administration will do away with the special liability protections afforded to vaccine makers that have helped them stay in the market.” [NYT]
Engineers ran into problems repressurizing the Artemis 2 moon rocket’s upper stage helium tanks overnight Friday, a problem that will require rolling the huge rocket off the launch pad and back to its processing hangar for troubleshooting. The work will push the already delayed mission from March to at least early April, officials said Saturday.
Pressurized helium is used to push propellants to rocket engines for ignition and to purge various fuel lines to clear them out before propellants flow. It’s not yet known what might be preventing helium to flow back into the SLS rocket’s upper stage following a successful countdown rehearsal test that ended Thursday.
“Regardless of the potential fault, accessing and remediating any of these issues can only be performed in the VAB (Vehicle Assembly Building),” NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said in a post on the social media platform X. “We will begin preparations for rollback, and this will take the March launch window out of consideration.”
As an update to my earlier post.
– The ICPS helium bottles are used to purge the engines, as well as for LH2 and LOX tank pressurization. The systems did work correctly during WDR1 and WDR2.
– Last evening, the team was unable to get helium flow through the vehicle. This… https://t.co/Qte3nEXwQb
— NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman (@NASAAdmin) February 21, 2026
The Artemis 2 mission aims to send four astronauts – Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen – on a flight around the far side of the moon and back to thoroughly test the agency’s Orion deep space capsule to help clear the way for a lunar landing mission, Artemis 3, in 2028.
Because of the ever-changing positions of the Earth and moon, and associated changes in lighting and other factors, only a handful of launch opportunities are available each month that meet the Artemis 2 mission requirements. The current launch period ends on March 11. The available launch dates next month are April 1, 3, 4, 5 and 6.
Wiseman, Glover, Koch and Hansen originally hoped to launch early this month, but hydrogen leaks detected during an initial “wet dress countdown” rehearsal ultimately pushed the flight to March.
NASA completed a second fueling test and countdown Thursday, loading the Space Launch System rocket with more than 750,000 gallons of liquid oxygen and hydrogen fuel while working through the steps that will be needed to actually launch the huge rocket on the long-awaited mission.
The test went well, there were no fuel leaks like the ones that derailed plans for a launch earlier this month. Managers said Friday the team would press ahead for a launch attempt on March 6 to send Wiseman and his crewmates to the moon.
Hoping for the best, the astronauts went into pre-flight medical quarantine at the Johnson Space Center Friday evening and planned to fly to the Kennedy Space Center on March 1 to prepare for launch. They now will leave quarantine to await developments.
“I understand people are disappointed by this development,” Isaacman said. “That disappointment is felt most by the team at NASA, who have been working tirelessly to prepare for this great endeavor. During the 1960s, when NASA achieved what most thought was impossible, and what has never been repeated since, there were many setbacks.
“There are many differences between the 1960s and today, and expectations should rightfully be high after the time and expense invested in this program.
“I will say again, the President created Artemis as a program that will far surpass what America achieved during Apollo. We will return in the years ahead, we will build a Moon base, and undertake what should be continuous missions to and from the lunar environment. Where we begin with this architecture and flight rate is not where it will end.”
A second fueling test on NASA's Space Launch System rocket ended Thursday night, giving senior managers enough confidence to move forward with plans to launch four astronauts around the Moon as soon as March 6.
Unlike the first attempt to load propellants into the SLS rocket on February 2, there were no major leaks during Thursday's practice countdown at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Technicians swapped seals at the launch pad after hydrogen gas leaked from the rocket's main fueling line earlier this month. This time, the seals held.
"For the most part, those fixes all performed pretty well yesterday," said Lori Glaze, acting associate administrator for NASA's exploration programs. "We were able to fully fuel the SLS rocket within the planned timeline."
1. Notes on Oman.
2. Colin McGinn on best philosopher ever.
3. Owner wants to give away Green Mountain Campus.
4. More on rising tensions between Ethiopia and Eritrea.
5. New review of Studwell on Africa.
7. Anna Gát reviews Wuthering Heights.
The post Saturday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
There are many differences between medicine and economics, but one of the most striking is the speed of publication.
I publish papers in both fields, so I get to experience very different speeds, of publication and response. Publishing (and therefore also responding--both positively and negatively ) is much slower in economics than in medicine. I've been noticing this because of recent attention to a paper I coauthored that was published in November, 2025, in the journal Transplantation. (It had been submitted in January, was revised and accepted in March, and was published online in May.) In December the journal created and distributed to its subscriber list a narrated video abstract of the paper. You can find the video here https://vimeo.com/1146995735/486989e95c?fl=pl&fe=sh
Our paper suggested ways that information revealed during deceased organ allocation could be used to evaluate organ quality, and expedite (i.e. speed up) the allocation process for organs at risk of being unused. And the first published response, just three month later, suggests how such information could be used in India.
Early Refusal Pattern Phenotyping as a Surrogate for Organ Quality Assessment in Kidney Allocation
Kashiv, Pranjal MD, DM1,2; Pasari, Amit MD, DM2,3; Balwani, Manish MD, DM2,3; Kute, Vivek MD, DM4
Transplantation ():10.1097/TP.0000000000005664, February 09, 2026. | DOI: 10.1097/TP.0000000000005664
"We read with interest the recent article by Guan et al,1 which provides a comprehensive and methodologically thoughtful assessment of refusal behavior in deceased donor kidney allocation. Their distinction between single-patient and multiple-patient simultaneous refusals, derived through timestamp-based clustering, offers a methodologically robust framework that elevates routine offer-response data into a meaningful surrogate for real-time assessment of organ suitability. This approach is particularly valuable in allocation environments where decisions must be made under substantial time pressure and with incomplete ancillary information.
...
" Their observations offer global relevance and hold potential for strengthening allocation efficiency in India’s evolving deceased donor landscape."
######
Earlier:
Here's the blog post that accompanied the publication online...
The Interstate Bridge: A forever project. The proposed $17.7 billion Interstate Bridge Replacement (IBR) Project has already been more than two decades in the making–with planning starting in 2005, and already more than $450 million spent on consultants. Newly obtained project documents show that once construction starts–if it ever does–I-5 between Portland and Vancouver will be torn up for at least another two decades, through the 2040s.
The Oregon and Washington highway departments plan to embark on the project even though they don’t have even a third of the money they need to pay for the whole thing, they’ll just spend what they do have and then ask for more, rinsing and repeating as necessary. And while travelers between Portland and Vancouver will face decades of disruption, consultants will cash in, with staff and consulting costs expect to run at about $3 million a month (before inflation) for the next 20 years.
The market for theatre space in Portland. There are dueling proposals to add or renovate large theatres in Portland. Portland State University is contemplating a performing arts center and civic boosters are looking at possibly renovating the aging Keller Auditorium.
The major source of business for both venues would be touring Broadway shows. It is doubtful that there’s a market for two large theatres in town, but a marketing study claiming that the “optimal” size of a theatre in Portland would be 3,200 seats (slightly larger than the existing or renovated Keller) lacks any serious economic basis. About 90 percent of the venues hosting touring Broadway shows are smaller than 3,000 seats (and the median is 2,500), and it is far from clear that the incremental benefits of 200 more seats would be worth the cost. In addition, there are two privately funded similar sized facilities, aimed primarily at concerts and music, that would likely be major competitors for much of the other auditorium-centered events.
Transportation for America discusses Oregon’s Transportation financial problems as an object lesson for the nation. Transportation for America looks at Oregon’s current mess of a transportation finance system, and says it has important implications for the nation. Instead of obsessing about a relative handful of unaffordable, and questionable mega-projects, we ought to be focusing on taking care of our current system, and assuring that it is safe and functional. The Oregon Department of Transportation has long maintained that it lacks the resources to fix potholes, plow roads, and maintain bridges, but still commits tens of billions of dollars to highway expansion megaprojects. Transportation for America argues that its time to be honest about our situation, particularly if we want the public to support more resources:
A state agency that talks openly about the diminishing returns on highway expansion projects and the benefits of focusing on multimodalism and community needs could change the game, rebuild trust, and lay the groundwork for state investment in transportation.
The logical starting point is to downsize or cancel expensive, mega-projects, like the Interstate Bridge Replacement (now estimated at up to $17.7 billion) and the I-5 Rose Quarter project, and focus on cost-effective preservation expenditures that maximize the life of the public’s massive investment in the existing road system. That’s likely a key to the visceral political reaction to higher taxes that’s repeatedly sunk transportation funding packages.
In Oregon, the legislature could cut its unaffordable megaprojects loose and start focusing on the basics, like repair, safety, and connecting people to destinations. If they get back to basics and focus on results, they can win back Oregonians’ trust and more taxpayer dollars to fund transportation improvements.
The critical role of immigrant talent in propelling the US tech sector. The Trump Administration’s attacks on immigrants are a clear and present danger to long term US economic health. The fact the the US has been a preferred destination for many of the world’s best and brightest, and because of our willingness to welcome and encourage immigrants, our technology industries have flourished. Data compiled by Silicon Valley Bank show that global talent plays a key role in driving the tech sector, especially the fast-growing, high growth “unicorn” firms:
The US tech industry is heavily propped up by foreign-born talent, especially among the highest valued companies. At least 59 of the top 100 highest valued US unicorns have a foreign-born founder. This group includes transformative companies such as OpenAI, SpaceX and Stripe — the three highest valued US unicorns — and collectively accounts for more than $1.5T of aggregate value. In fact, 19 of the top 20 US unicorns have at least one foreign-born founder.
Field of Schemes calls out Oregon’s proposed giveaway to the Portland Trailblazers. The national website that tracks the efforts of billionaire sports franchise owners to extract millions in subsidies for a range of stadiums and arenas takes a look at legislation proposed in Oregon to subsidize the rehabilitation of the Moda Center in Portland.
Proposed legislation would divert income taxes paid by teams playing at the arena (as well as a lot of others) to pay for the $600 million cost of rehabilitating the 30-year old arena, based on
the dubious theory that businesses should keep the income taxes paid by their employees because if they skipped town all that tax money would go away, which 1) it almost certainly wouldn’t and 2) pretty much defeats the whole economic purpose of luring and retaining businesses regardless.
Walkable Cities make people walk more. We reported about this study this past summer, but it was recently featured, along with some compelling new graphics, in Scientific American. The study looks at the connection between human behavior (how far we walk each day) and the characteristics of the built environment, in particular, the relative walkability of neighborhoods. Walkability in this study is measured using Walk Score, which looks at the proximity of common destinations such as shops, schools, restaurants and parks. As we noted earlier, a key advantage of this research is that it overcomes so-called “selection effects” and looks at how people’s behavior changes when they move from one community to a different community, with a different level of walkability.’
“Does Your City Make You Healthier?”, Scientific American Magazine Vol. 334 No. 3 (), p. 82. The original research on which this article is based is:
Althoff, T., Ivanovic, B., King, A.C. et al. Countrywide natural experiment links built environment to physical activity. Nature (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09321-3
Willamette Week quoted City Observatory’s commentary on the dubious claims made about the economic importance of professional sports to local economic prosperity.
And Joe Cortright, a Portland economist who’s made a career out of infusing facts into political arguments, notes that the claims of the Blazer faithful about the consequences of a potential Blazer departure are overblown—as evidenced by how Vancouver, B.C., and Seattle thrived economically despite the loss of their NBA teams in 2001 and 2009, respectively.
“We’ve essentially run the experiment of suddenly depriving a Pacific Northwest metropolis of its National Basketball Association franchise to see what happens to its economy,” Cortright writes at City Observatory. “As it turns out—and pretty much exactly as all the economic studies conclude—pretty much no negative effects on prosperity.”
The Supreme Court yesterday struck down Trump’s IEEPA tariffs, holding that the statute’s authorization to “regulate… importation” doesn’t include the power to impose tariffs. The majority’s strongest argument is simple: every time Congress actually delegates tariff authority, it uses the word “duty,” caps the rate, sets a time limit, and requires procedural prerequisites. IEEPA has none of these.
The dissent pushes back with an intuitively appealing argument: IEEPA authorizes the President to prohibit imports entirely, so surely it authorizes the lesser action of merely taxing them. If Congress handed over the nuclear option, why would it withhold the conventional weapon? Indeed in his press conference Trump, in his rambling manner, made exactly this argument:
“I am allowed to cut off any and all trade…I can destroy the trade, I can destroy the country, I’m even allowed to impose a foreign country destroying embargo…I can do anything I want to do to them…I’m allowed to destroy the country, but I can’t charge a little fee.”
The argument is superficially appealing but it fails due to a standard result in principal-agent theory.
Congress wants the President to move fast in a real emergency, but it doesn’t want to hand over routine control of trade policy. The right delegation design is therefore a screening device: give the President authority he will exercise only when the situation is truly an emergency.
An import ban works as a screening device precisely because it is very disruptive. A ban creates immediate and substantial harm. It is a “costly signal.” A President who invokes it is credibly saying: this is serious enough that I am willing to absorb a large cost. Tariffs, in contrast, are cheaper–especially to the President. Tariffs raise revenue, which offsets political pain. Tariff incidence is diffuse and easy to misattribute—prices creep, intermediaries take blame, consumers don’t observe the policy lever directly. Most importantly tariffs are adjustable, which makes them a weapon useful for bargaining, exemptions, and targeted favors. Tariffs under executive authority implicitly carry the message–I am the king; give me a gold bar and I will reduce your tariffs. Tariff flexibility is more politically appealing than a ban and thus a less credible signal of an emergency. The “lesser-included” argument gets the logic backwards. The asymmetry is the point.
Not surprisingly, the same structure appears in real emergency services. A fire chief may have the authority to close roads during an emergency but that doesn’t imply that the fire chief has the authority to impose road tolls. Road closure is costly and self-limiting — it disrupts traffic, generates immediate complaints, and the chief has every incentive to lift it as soon as possible. Tolls are cheap, adjustable, and once in place tend to persist; they generate revenue that can fund the agency and create constituencies for their continuation. Nobody thinks granting a fire chief emergency closure authority implicitly grants them taxing authority, even if the latter is a lesser authority. The closure and toll instruments have completely different political economy properties despite operating on the same roads.
The majority reaches the right conclusion by noting that tariffs are a tax over which Congress, not the President, has authority. That is constitutionally correct but the deeper question is why the Framers lodged the taxing power in Congress — and the answer is political economy. Revenue instruments are especially easy for an executive to exploit because they can be targeted. The constitutional rule exists to solve that incentive problem.
Once you see that, the dissent’s “greater includes the lesser” inference collapses on its own terms. A principal can rationally authorize an agent to take a dramatic emergency action while withholding the cheaper, revenue-lever not despite the fact that it seems milder, but because of it. The blunt instrument is self-limiting. The revenue instrument is not. That asymmetry is what the Constitution’s categorical division of powers preserves — and what an open-ended emergency delegation would destroy.
The post Why the “Lesser Included Action” Argument for IEEPA Tariffs Fails appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
The conclusion of Justice Gorsuch’s concurrence in the tariff case:
For those who think it important for the Nation to impose more tariffs, I understand that today’s decision will be disappointing. All I can offer them is that most major decisions affecting the rights and responsibilities of the American people (including the duty to pay taxes and tariffs) are funneled through the legislative process for a reason. Yes, legislating can be hard and take time. And, yes, it can be tempting to bypass Congress when some pressing problem
arises. But the deliberative nature of the legislative process was the whole point of its design. Through that process, the Nation can tap the combined wisdom of the people’s elected representatives, not just that of one faction or man. There, deliberation tempers impulse, and compromise hammers
disagreements into workable solutions. And because laws must earn such broad support to survive the legislative process, they tend to endure, allowing ordinary people to plan their lives in ways they cannot when the rules shift from day to day. In all, the legislative process helps ensure each of us has a stake in the laws that govern us and in the Nation’s future. For some today, the weight of those virtues is apparent. For others, it may not seem so obvious. But if history is any guide, the tables will turn and the day will come when those disappointed by today’s result will appreciate the legislative process for the bulwark of liberty it is.
The post A Republic, if you can keep it appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Anyone preparing to run for president is obligated to inflict upon the public a book. Therein, they explain their political philosophy, describe occasions when they heroically stood on principle while everyone around them begged them to be more cynical, and relate the inevitable story in which a grandparent told them that here in the greatest country on Earth they could be anything they want to be if they work hard and tell the truth. These books are, as a rule, both insipid and boring, and I know whereof I speak, because in advance of the 2012 election, in order to write a long review essay in The American Prospect I had to read five of them (by Sarah Palin, Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee, Newt Gingrich, and Tim Pawlenty) back to back, a task so harrowing that I consider it my personal Vietnam.
So I have no plans to slog through Go and Do Likewise: How We Heal a Broken Country by Kentucky governor Andy Beshear, the cover of which testifies that the governor does indeed have a dog. Nor, for that matter, will I likely read Where We Keep the Light: Stories from a Life of Service by Gov. Josh Shapiro, or Young Man In a Hurry: A Memoir of Discovery by Gov. Gavin Newsom, or Crisis of the Common Good: The Fight for Meaning and Connection in a Broken America by Sen. Chris Murphy, or Stand by Sen. Cory Booker, which audaciously contains no subtitle but is being marketed as “An urgent call to rekindle our shared American ideals.”
There’s lots of healing, reconnecting, rediscovering, rekindling, and renewing, most of it no doubt mind-deadeningly banal. But Beshear’s book is attracting a bit of unusual interest (even though it doesn’t come out until September):
“Beshear will share what his own faith has meant to him, how it has informed his family and his public life — and serves as a rebuke to how faith has been hijacked, profaned, misused, and corrupted by Donald Trump and other public figures,” Beshear’s publisher, St. Martin’s Publishing Group, said in a statement.
“By regrounding faith in compassion and kindness, he believes we can start to heal as a country,” the publisher added.
The title of the book, “Go and Do Likewise: How We Heal a Broken Country,” alludes to the biblical story of the Good Samaritan, who helps a stranger; after relating the story, Jesus urges his followers to do the same. Beshear and his wife serve as deacons at their church.
I’ve already seen notes of dissent on this from some lefties, who argue that celebrating politicians like Beshear and James Talarico who foreground their faith in their politics will only further erode the crumbling barrier between church and state. As a Jewish atheist, I’m sympathetic to that argument. It’s a short hop from “I believe in the Good Book” to “My religion must be enshrined in law.” At the moment, some of the most prominent Republicans in the country are giving up any pretensions to the idea of universal religious liberty and church/state separation, and just declaring that ours should be a government of, by, and for Christians, by which they mean only right-wing Christians:
Just the other day, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth welcomed Pastor Doug Wilson to a Pentagon-sponsored prayer meeting; Wilson is a radical cleric whose views can accurately be described as lunatic right. He wrote a pamphlet arguing that slavery was actually pretty darn good for everyone involved (“Slavery produced in the South a genuine affection between the races that we believe we can say has never existed in any nation before the War or since”) and believes we should repeal the 19th Amendment so women will not have the right to vote. Meanwhile in Texas, the Republican primaries have turned into an absolute orgy of anti-Muslim hatemongering.
Almost no one in the GOP is going to utter a discouraging word about any of this. So Democrats are asking: Are religious progressives the best ones to argue against the march to theocracy Republicans are proposing?
The impulse to say no — to argue that the god-talk should simply be avoided, and the proper rejoinder to Christian nationalist campaigning is an appeal to liberty, universal rights, and the Constitution — is one I share. But here’s the problem. Politics is about identity, and if people keep seeing the Republican Party as the Christian one and the Democratic Party as the non-religious one, Democrats are giving up on a path to persuade a lot of people who might be open to their arguments.
One of the most important stories in American religion in recent years has been the dramatic increase in the number of people who say they don’t identify with any particular religion. The “nones” — a combination of atheists, agnostics, and people who have some spiritual beliefs but don’t feel at home in any established tradition — are now about three in ten Americans, and 70 percent of them are Democrats. I think it’s a salutary development, and one that edges us toward our peers in other developed democracies, nearly all of which are far more secular than the United States. But that still means that most Democrats have a religious affiliation, as do most of the people Democrats are trying to appeal to:
There are millions of voters for whom religious faith is a vital part of their lives, their identity, and the communities they’re a part of. It’s important for them to see politicians and advocates who offer a model for them to find a way from that faith to progressive conclusions. For instance, when Beshear vetoed a particularly vicious bill targeting transgender kids, he said “My faith teaches me that all children are children of God and Senate Bill 150 will endanger the children of Kentucky.” I don’t know how many people that persuaded, but at the very least it refuses to cede the ground and allow Republicans to claim that the only place faith should lead is to their retrograde politics.
Or here’s Talarico, giving his spiel on church-state separation and the danger of Christian nationalism:
To deploy an overused phrase, that creates a permission structure for devout Christians to vote for Democrats. The party needs both spokespeople who aren’t religious and demonstrate that you don’t need to believe in a god to have a strong system of moral values, and spokespeople who are religious and demonstrate that their faith guides them toward progressive policies.
To be clear, I’m not arguing that Beshear should be your presidential candidate, or that Talarico should be your Senate candidate if you live in Texas. It’s also possible that Sen. Raphael Warnock, an actual pastor, might run for president as well (and whether Democrats should treat the Black church as more than a place to stop on the Sunday before election day is a whole other subject). My point is only that it’s good to have more high-profile religious Democrats go directly at the religious extremism and hypocrisy of Republicans, especially when conservative evangelicals revealed their true nature over the last decade in their cultish support for the apostle of corruption and hate that is Donald Trump.
As Ed Kilgore notes, “Alongside the faith-based backlash to Trump’s mass deportation effort, which is especially strong among Catholics, we are beginning to receive regular reminders that alongside partisan and ideological polarization is a quiet battle among religious believers spurred by the particularly aggressive version of Christian Nationalism espoused by Trump allies.” The more radical Republicans get, the more Democrats have an opportunity to persuade the religious people who are growing alienated from the GOP. So even if you don’t share the faith of candidates like Beshear and Talarico, or their visible piety makes you a little uncomfortable, don’t forget that Christian nationalism is a growing threat, and fighting it is going to require the help of a lot of Christians.
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I've been wanting to add indications of my various other online activities to my blog for a while now. I just turned on a new feature I'm calling "beats" (after story beats, naming this was hard!) which adds five new types of content to my site, all corresponding to activity elsewhere.
Here's what beats look like:
![Screenshot of a fragment of a page showing three entries from 30th Dec 2025. First: [RELEASE] "datasette-turnstile 0.1a0 — Configurable CAPTCHAs for Datasette paths usin…" at 7:23 pm. Second: [TOOL] "Software Heritage Repository Retriever — Download archived Git repositories f…" at 11:41 pm. Third: [TIL] "Downloading archived Git repositories from archive.softwareheritage.org — …" at 11:43 pm.](https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2026/three-beats.jpg)
Those three are from the 30th December 2025 archive page.
Beats are little inline links with badges that fit into different content timeline views around my site, including the homepage, search and archive pages.
There are currently five types of beats:
That's five different custom integrations to pull in all of that data. The good news is that this kind of integration project is the kind of thing that coding agents really excel at. I knocked most of the feature out in a single morning while working in parallel on various other things.
I didn't have a useful structured feed of my Research projects, and it didn't matter because I gave Claude Code a link to the raw Markdown README that lists them all and it spun up a parser regex. Since I'm responsible for both the source and the destination I'm fine with a brittle solution that would be too risky against a source that I don't control myself.
Claude also handled all of the potentially tedious UI integration work with my site, making sure the new content worked on all of my different page types and was handled correctly by my faceted search engine.
I actually prototyped the initial concept for beats in regular Claude - not Claude Code - taking advantage of the fact that it can clone public repos from GitHub these days. I started with:
Clone simonw/simonwillisonblog and tell me about the models and views
And then later in the brainstorming session said:
use the templates and CSS in this repo to create a new artifact with all HTML and CSS inline that shows me my homepage with some of those inline content types mixed in
After some iteration we got to this artifact mockup, which was enough to convince me that the concept had legs and was worth handing over to full Claude Code for web to implement.
If you want to see how the rest of the build played out the most interesting PRs are Beats #592 which implemented the core feature and Add Museums Beat importer #595 which added the Museums content type.
Tags: blogging, museums, ai, til, generative-ai, llms, ai-assisted-programming, claude-artifacts, claude-code
Taalas serves Llama 3.1 8B at 17,000 tokens/second
This new Canadian hardware startup just announced their first product - a custom hardware implementation of the Llama 3.1 8B model (from July 2024) that can run at a staggering 17,000 tokens/second.I was going to include a video of their demo but it's so fast it would look more like a screenshot. You can try it out at chatjimmy.ai.
They describe their Silicon Llama as “aggressively quantized, combining 3-bit and 6-bit parameters.” Their next generation will use 4-bit - presumably they have quite a long lead time for baking out new models!
Via Hacker News
Tags: ai, generative-ai, llama, llms, llm-performance
ggml.ai joins Hugging Face to ensure the long-term progress of Local AI
I don't normally cover acquisition news like this, but I have some thoughts.It's hard to overstate the impact Georgi Gerganov has had on the local model space. Back in March 2023 his release of llama.cpp made it possible to run a local LLM on consumer hardware. The original README said:
The main goal is to run the model using 4-bit quantization on a MacBook. [...] This was hacked in an evening - I have no idea if it works correctly.
I wrote about trying llama.cpp out at the time in Large language models are having their Stable Diffusion moment:
I used it to run the 7B LLaMA model on my laptop last night, and then this morning upgraded to the 13B model—the one that Facebook claim is competitive with GPT-3.
Meta's original LLaMA release depended on PyTorch and their FairScale PyTorch extension for running on multiple GPUs, and required CUDA and NVIDIA hardware. Georgi's work opened that up to a much wider range of hardware and kicked off the local model movement that has continued to grow since then.
Hugging Face are already responsible for the incredibly influential Transformers library used by the majority of LLM releases today. They've proven themselves a good steward for that open source project, which makes me optimistic for the future of llama.cpp and related projects.
This section from the announcement looks particularly promising:
Going forward, our joint efforts will be geared towards the following objectives:
- Towards seamless "single-click" integration with the transformers library. The
transformersframework has established itself as the 'source of truth' for AI model definitions. Improving the compatibility between the transformers and the ggml ecosystems is essential for wider model support and quality control.- Better packaging and user experience of ggml-based software. As we enter the phase in which local inference becomes a meaningful and competitive alternative to cloud inference, it is crucial to improve and simplify the way in which casual users deploy and access local models. We will work towards making llama.cpp ubiquitous and readily available everywhere, and continue partnering with great downstream projects.
Given the influence of Transformers, this closer integration could lead to model releases that are compatible with the GGML ecosystem out of the box. That would be a big win for the local model ecosystem.
I'm also excited to see investment in "packaging and user experience of ggml-based software". This has mostly been left to tools like Ollama and LM Studio. ggml-org released LlamaBarn last year - "a macOS menu bar app for running local LLMs" - and I'm hopeful that further investment in this area will result in more high quality open source tools for running local models from the team best placed to deliver them.
Via @ggerganov
Tags: open-source, transformers, ai, generative-ai, llama, local-llms, llms, hugging-face, llama-cpp
Reached the stage of parallel agent psychosis where I've lost a whole feature - I know I had it yesterday, but I can't seem to find the branch or worktree or cloud instance or checkout with it in.
... found it! Turns out I'd been hacking on a random prototype in /tmp and then my computer crashed and rebooted and I lost the code... but it's all still there in ~/.claude/projects/ session logs and Claude Code can extract it out and spin up the missing feature again.
Tags: parallel-agents, coding-agents, claude-code, generative-ai, ai, llms
A dozen or so journalists sat around a white oak table. Most of them were stiff and quiet. A few others were more active, clacking away on their keyboards in a bid to note every word tumbling out of the executives’ mouths. Perplexity powers curiosity glowed on a projector screen in a pleasant serif style.
The press wasn’t useful to Perplexity, one of the executives explained. The company doesn’t want to waste time on podcasts. They’re too focused on shipping features to engage in insular, navel-gazing AI drama. We don’t have fancy houses with wonderful dinners to impress you, he added. The chairs creaked in response.
Sometime during this executive’s spiel—maybe after his Epstein joke failed to get a reaction and he anxiously asked if it was recorded—I wrote that Perplexity seemed to have forgotten what it was trying to be.
Ro Khanna is one of the House’s most sophisticated members. He’s also a progressive Democrat representing Silicon Valley, which is … interesting in today’s political and economic environment. We talked about that, wealth concentration, AI and much more. Transcript follows.
TRANSCRIPT:
Paul Krugman in Conversation with Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA)
(recorded 2/19/26)
Paul Krugman: Hi everyone. Very special guest this time. I’m privileged to have gotten Congressman Ro Khanna, you could say the representative for Cupertino who is a progressive Democrat, and right in the middle of a lot of important issues. Welcome. It’s great that you could take time out from your schedule to do this.
Ro Khanna: Thank you. It’s an honor to be on. I’ve been reading you since I was an undergraduate economics major at Chicago and, well, economics at Chicago seemed like math class. I appreciated that you could explain those ideas simply in ways ordinary people can understand.
Krugman: Well. Thank you. There’s a lot to cover, so let’s get right in. Let’s just turn to background. So you’re representing, in a way, the heart of both the cutting edge of technology and also, these days, the cutting edge or bleeding edge of a lot of things that are happening and not all of them good in U.S. politics. What’s it currently like to be a progressive Democrat representing Silicon Valley?
Khanna: It’s hard. My district and the surrounding area has a market cap of about $18 trillion dollars. Five companies worth over $1 trillion dollars. Apple, Google, Nvidia, Broadcom, Tesla. Almost one third of the stock market’s value is there. And yet there’s a lot of inequality, even in the district. You have people in East San Jose who are rent burdened, don’t have affordable housing, people without child care, who can’t afford childcare costs, or health care. And I have advocated for higher taxes on billionaires. That hasn’t gone over well. I have said that we need progressive capitalism, and there’s push back on some of that.
Krugman: Yeah. I want to get to tax proposals further on in this discussion, but, you’re trying to represent all the people in the district and not everybody is a billionaire tech bro. I mean, I lived there in the mid 90s for a couple of years and it was not uniformly prosperous even then and that still must be true.
Khanna: That’s one of the big misconceptions. There are a lot of billionaires and millionaires in and around my district, but there are a lot of other people who can’t afford rent, who are working class and even middle class and there are a lot more of them then there are tech billionaires. In fact, I lost one of my races for congress in 2014 to Mike Honda. And he said, “I knew I had you beat when you came out with all these tech leader endorsements and I had all the PTA leaders and there are a lot more PTA leaders than tech leaders.”
Krugman: Okay. Yeah. This is true. I mean, we still have a democracy for the time being. Even in greater San Jose, that’s what matters. So that’s great. And I guess even within the tech industry, at least from outside reports, there’s a big difference between the people at the top and a lot of the working stiff engineers who tend to be at least socially quite progressive, I believe.
Khanna: Absolutely. The reality is a lot of the engineers at some of these companies are uncomfortable with the massive inequality, with some of the algorithmic addictions that social media is causing, with the concern about AI and job loss and how that’s gonna affect working class Americans. So, there is a sense that some of these folks who clearly believed they were doing good are now more conflicted. They may stay at the tech companies because they’re supporting their families and they believe in the work, but they think that the Valley has become more ruthless from the times of Hewlett Packard or whathaveyou. There was more concern about local communities.
And one thing that’s interesting is how many of the tech leaders don’t know much about the local community. They don’t know the Silicon Valley Community Service Center research, or Second Harvest Food Bank. In the 70s, 80s, 90s, the tech leaders were very much part of the community. Now they’re global and are not as involved in the day to day of the community.
Krugman: That’s an interesting point. I didn’t think about that much. I mean, it’s a little bit like, you know, I live in New York, and often I’m not quite sure why super rich people even bother to live there. Because if you’re going to be driven around in a in a car with tinted windows, you might as well be in Abu Dhabi, right? If you’re not really part of the community. So, yeah. That’s really interesting. But you say that it wasn’t always that way. So it’s part of the way that things have changed.
Khanna: No, it wasn’t that way. There was more of a historical awareness about how much Silicon Valley had benefitted from public investment. There was an understanding that there’s been massive investments by Darpa, NSF. ImageNet, that was part of what led to the creation of AI, was funded by NSF (National Science Foundation). The digital project that led to Google was funded by the government. And I think that this next generation, what they call the PayPal mafia, doesn’t really understand or chooses to ignore a lot of that public investment and is more disconnected from the post-World War Two era, in comparison to Andy Grove or Bill Hewitt or David Packard.
Krugman: Okay. Just for listeners, PayPal Mafia. I know what you mean, but probably a lot of people don’t.
Khanna: Well, these are some of the early folks who funded Paypal. Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Reed Hoffman was part of it, David Sacks. And a lot of them have extraordinary influence in Silicon Valley and in our politics. And they often come from a more libertarian perspective, a perspective that they know best. I mean, I was in a meeting this morning where one of the people said, well, “why do we even need a government? You know, let’s just allow the innovators to allocate capital.”
And they, you know, some of them have said in a different age “we would be conquerors, and we are the folks who best understand how to keep America ahead.” And so from their point of view, wealth concentration isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. They fundamentally believe they are better allocators of that capital than the democratic public and that they are entitled in some ways, based on their genius or their work ethic to lead.
Krugman: Gosh, I didn’t know that people were still talking like that. I thought that libertarian gloss had worn down a bit, but I guess people still talk like that, and you’re much closer to that industry than I am.
Khanna: I don’t know if you’ve ever read Ayn Rand. I read it in high school, but, if you read Fountainhead, there’s a character, Peter Keating who is kind of seen as a bumbling bureaucrat. And a lot of times when people are insulting me, they’ll say, “oh, he’s a Peter Keating character. He’s not a builder. He’s not a founder. He’s not adding value. He’s just one of those paper pushers that is talking about what a just society looks like.” This is not all of Silicon Valley, but it’s definitely a group of people who have disproportionate power in our country.
And I think it’s important to understand their worldview, because a lot of times people feel it’s just transactional. They’re doing this because they want deregulation on AI or they want deregulation in crypto. And in some sense, I wish it was just transactional. But it goes very much to a deeper worldview, of what they think is the right way to govern society. The type that Andrew Mellon had in the 1920s when he was Herbert Hoover’s Treasury Secretary, and he basically said, “The problem in the country is that there’s not enough working people. But there’s a group of people who are lazy and elites are the ones who should be involved in decision making.” And you see a replay of that in some of the folks in Silicon Valley.
Krugman: Yeah, that’s the classic, “liquidate the farmers, liquidate the workers.” But according to Herbert Hoover, that’s what Mellon told him. So, yeah. And by the way, for my sins I did read Ayn Rand in college, although I thought it was funny. My friends and I used to ironically quote passages from Atlas Shrugged to each other. It shows I probably wasn’t in the right spirit.
What you’re saying actually is in some ways, people like Thiel or Musk are idealists. They just have a view of the world, which is quite something. It’s not simple greed. Not to say the greed isn’t there, but it’s part of it.
Khanna: In some ways it’s more dangerous than greed, because it fundamentally assumes a superiority in making governing decisions. I don’t think they’ll tell you they’re necessarily better human beings, but they would say that they’re more capable of adding value to society. And it’s important to understand this mindset because they view themselves as builders and creators.
The other insult that they hurl my way is in some ways I’m a taker. I’m not building things. And this has gotten a great reception with the Trump administration. I mean, he’s surrounded himself with many of these folks.
Krugman: Okay. I want to talk about policy and policy adjacent issues. So you mentioned that there have been several big things that people thought were great and now there’s some conflicted views. And you and I talked, I think probably two years ago, something less than that. But we met up in New York and talked about, among other things, crypto. And I’ve been a huge crypto skeptic, and everybody knows that. But you were more hopeful. Where are you right now in terms of crypto and crypto regulation?
Khanna: Well, I’m certainly dismayed by what Trump has done with it. The meme coins, the World Liberty issue. I don’t know if you follow all of that.
Krugman: For sure.
Khanna: Well, unfortunately, you know, UAE basically facilitated a purchase with Trump’s own World Liberty stablecoin. And, then there was someone who accepted that money, who was pardoned because he’s accepting Trump’s stablecoin. The bottom line is that there’s quite a lot of evidence that you had someone from UAE, and a person who sought a pardon, basically, enrich the Trump family, to influence policy. And that, is a huge concern, something that we’ve called to investigate on the China committee.
More broadly, I believe that there’s got to be regulations on the speculation. And we can have the conversation about whether there’s a use case in terms of the efficient transfers of money overseas. People say that it reduces transaction costs. You obviously said you just disagree with that or don’t think it has unique value, but that’s something that people still maintain, that it has a use case of lowering transaction costs.
Krugman: Yeah. For what it’s worth, I hear better things about transactions with stablecoins than Bitcoin which is still incredibly difficult to use for anything real. Stablecoins are better, but they pose a bunch of other risks. You’ve been involved, at least somewhat with the attempts to bring stablecoins into the regulatory framework.
Khanna: Yes. And to have capital requirements for them. I mean, we obviously want to make sure that there’s capital requirements for those stablecoins and that you don’t have a run on stablecoin. Certainly you don’t want algorithmic stablecoins where they don’t have the deposits to back it up.
Krugman: Okay. Yeah. This could get way too involved to talk about this but it’s fascinating stuff. However, the radical developments are coming too fast to keep up. And I want to get to AI in a bit, but let’s talk about social media which, as you mentioned, some of the people in Silicon Valley, maybe not the people at the very top, but others are somewhat disturbed by. I should be more up on that than I am. But have you been at all trying to do something about social media? You know, a lot of people are worried about social media interactions. Now we’re worried about chatbots. But it’s kind of a starting entry point.
Khanna: Yeah. One, we need to repeal some of the section 230 immunity, especially for the amplification of violent content, of content that is edging people to commit violence or illegal activity. And if we did that, if we had that kind of change, you may see less of the algorithms that are getting the most sensational, outrageous, content that’s been created because of these platforms having blanket immunity.
Krugman: For listeners, section 230 is basically saying, “Hey, Meta or YouTube, they’re just platforms, and they bear no responsibility for what appears on them because people are just using them. They’re just a utility.” And of course, there’s lots of reasons to think that’s not a fair characterization. And particularly the algorithms. People may not quite know. Can you explain about the algorithm and why that’s a problem?
Khanna: Well, basically these engineers at these companies figure out based on people’s data what content they should send to those people, what content they should push on to their feeds. It’s like when you open up X or you open up Facebook, it’s not chronological. There’s a deliberate choice about what you’re getting. And, that is not neutral. A phone doesn’t direct some conversations to you. It’s just an actual neutral entity where two people talk. But these social media companies actually are making determinations.
Now, some of those determinations you would want. You know, search makes determinations. It’s not to say that every algorithm is inherently problematic, but what I believe is when you have algorithms that are pushing content that is either harmful for minors and kids or that is amplifying violence, or is amplifying blatant falsity with disregard of the truth, there should be some liability. And right now, these platforms have no liability.
Krugman: Yeah. I think a lot of us don’t pay enough attention to YouTube which is surprisingly powerful. I’m a heavy consumer of YouTube, but I have two rules. One is no politics ever, because that pollutes my algorithm. The other is no cute animals, which also pollutes my algorithm. So, yeah.
So this is a big deal, although it’s already been overtaken in the public imagination and the political sphere by AI. So, not that anybody really knows, but do you have a view about how big a deal AI is going to be economically? And then we can go on to policy for it.
Khanna: It seems like it’s going to be a big deal. I mean, obviously you have huge capital expenditure right now on data centers that is having an impact on the stock market and on growth numbers. There is genuine concern about the impact on young workers. In fact I think there was some paper from Stanford which showed that for young kids between 22 and 25, there’s 16% more unemployment if they were in jobs that could be affected by AI such as customer support and technology jobs and software jobs being the examples. So I think there’s a real concern about particularly entry level jobs and automation.
And then there are, of course, positives as well, in terms of the impact on finding cures to rare disease and cancer and developing energy sources in terms of making batteries more efficient. So, it seems to me transformative. And what matters is, how we deal with it. And I often say I’m neither an AI accelerationist nor am I an AI doomer, but I’m an AI democrat, meaning we should have democratic accountability for how we develop AI.
Krugman: Yeah. But you probably worry a little bit because you’re probably more sophisticated technically than 430 members of Congress. And you do wonder a little bit about who’s going to be doing this democratic accountability. But I guess that’s why, in principle, we have a government which hires experts.
But, what kinds of regulations would you be seeking on it? I mean, it’s still in its very early days, but what would you be looking to regulate?
Khanna: Well, first I would look at jobs. And I’d be curious of your thoughts on this. I mean, look, when you had the Industrial Revolution, from what I’ve read, that for 60 years you had Britain build enormous wealth, but you had massive inequality. And the working class wages didn’t go up. You didn’t have worker productivity increase. You had a lot of elimination of jobs. So my view is that we should err on the side of keeping human beings in the loop.
I believe that means, for example, we should have drivers on self-driving trucks for certainly a number of years to make sure that we don’t have mass displacement. We should, figure out how we steer AI to augment human workers as opposed to displacing them.
Looking at the tax code, which currently, incentivizes depreciation of hiring robots or digital tools versus hiring workers, I believe we need a big federal sort of program to hire young people, either in their communities doing childcare or elder care or teaching or building the community in infrastructure projects or coming in to the federal government for a few years to do science or biotech so that they can get experience if entry level jobs are being challenged.
But, you know, I think we need to really think about the jobs issue and the adoption issue of AI.
Krugman: That’s interesting. Those are actually very strong proposals. I mean, you’re not giving us legislative language here, but that’s not to say that we’re actually going to intervene to try and limit job displacement and provide maybe something like a job guarantee. That’s a very forward looking proposal. I mean, you’d have a hell of a time getting it enacted but that’s an impressive concept. That’s bolder than I was expecting. That’s a big deal.
Khanna: Well, you remember when we had elevator operators. We had them for a long time. I mean, I guess the question is: if efficiency is the sole metric, at all cost, in my view that comes at a cost to social cohesion. And it’s not like the private sector is perfectly efficient. And I just think that we want to adopt AI, but we want to adopt it in a way that doesn’t have mass displacement of jobs. And that gives workers some say in how they’re participating and has federal intervention in places where we can create some of these jobs.
Krugman: Okay. Yeah. I haven’t made any use of it myself, but when I talk to people who have, I think in some way, people like me look at ChatGPT and all of that and say, “oh, you know, this is producing garbage and it’s hallucinating.” But people who do stuff like coding are extremely impressed with what Claude and other programs can do. And this is a big deal.
Khanna: Right. But let me ask you one question, because John Maynard Keynes wrote that famous article about how we’d all be working 15 hour workweeks. He turned out to be wrong, at least up to now. But do you think AI is different than that? Or do you think we should have a humility about our ability to predict what would happen to the future of work?
Krugman: I mean, the interesting thing is, the rise in productivity that happened in sort of the 60 years after Keynes wrote “Economic Prospects for Our Grandchildren,” I think it was called, it was imagining a world where abundance, due to technological progress, would mean that people would no longer feel the need to work and greed would disappear because people had enough. And the actual progress, the development of productivity and technology was more or less in line with what he imagined.
But in fact, the real striking thing is more or less during my childhood, working hours stopped declining. We used to move to shorter and shorter workweeks and we sort of plateaued at 35 hours a week. And people have not taken out more leisure time, and people have not stopped being greedy because they have enough. And so in some ways, the problem was his view on human nature.
Khanna: Yeah, that’s interesting.
Krugman: What I would say you’re worried about, from an economist’s jargon point of view, is you’re worried that this technology is strongly capital biased.
Khanna: Right.
Krugman: Which is what we think happened during the Industrial Revolution. That for the first 60 or so years, it was strongly, “We’re going to build factories to have a reduced incentive to hire workers,” and that translated into falling or stagnant real wages. And that that could happen again.
Khanna: Exactly. And also, how do we get workers to have some share in this? What are people going to do to have good jobs? And then secondly, if you have AI increasing productivity, then how do we make sure workers either have a shorter workweek or have some share in the profits? And it’s not just going to the shareholders and the capital class.
Krugman: Wow. I mean, people like me tend to say, “oh, you know, we’ve heard these warnings before. Kurt Vonnegut predicted it in 1950 when he wrote Player Piano but it didn’t happen.” But if you go further back in history, it has happened. It might be that too much complacency is a real danger now. And, just to say, how much are you worried about the sort of existential threats? I think we’re already past when Skynet was supposed to kill everybody, but the idea that we’re really maybe creating monsters at some level. Are you paying any attention to that or do you just think that that’s a bit ridiculous?
Khanna: I think it’s a concern. I think the most immediate concern that I hear from people is, “What does this mean for my job? What does it mean for my kids? What does it mean for their economic prospects? Should they go to trade school? Should they go to college?” But it doesn’t strike me as farfetched to say that we should have a federal regulatory agency for AI, just like we have for nuclear technology or aviation safety. And we have something in the Commerce Department that under the Biden administration was becoming pretty robust. And then Trump came in there and he changed the name, actually, from “AI Safety” to basically “AI Innovation.” And he has not pursued this idea that there should be some third party verification for models. That there should be some safety checks.
I don’t know what the danger level is, but it seems to me prudent and reasonable that we would want some federal agency with third party verification to check on that.
Krugman: If I were to make a defense of the Trump administration, which is not something I’m in the habit of doing, but, I would say that, well, you know, we are in a competitive race with China on this. Are you concerned that America is going to fall behind if we get in the way of any of this?
Khanna: Well, first of all, we don’t want to model ourselves on China. I was just in China and one of the things that struck me is they have 18% youth unemployment. So, if we are totally indifferent to the social consequences, then perhaps look at China. But I don’t think that’s how we want our society in the United States.
The second point is that there are places where we should be the guarding our advantage, like our compute power, which will help separate us from China. We probably need to look at more open source models. I mean, the reason that, some of their Qwen and other AI is being adopted is because of open source. But I don’t think the answer to what’s leading the AI race is that we need to have massive displacement of American jobs or American workers, or we don’t need safety standards. I think there are other factors that can allow us to lead the AI race: compute power, or thinking about the right balance with open source, and making sure we have talent here.
You know, one third of the talent of AI is in China. I wouldn’t just have blanket restrictions on immigration. Those things seem to be more important in how we win the AI race. And it seems to me awfully convenient that people use the AI race to justify giving workers less or skirting regulations. And that’s been the age old argument from any debate. “We don’t need environmental standards. We don’t need labor standards. We’re going to lose.” It just seems to be repeating some of the same old arguments.
Krugman: Yeah. Technology changes, but the arguments don’t change much over the decades. I’ve been around for a while, but...
How is the mood about the state of Silicon Valley, the economic state? I mean, there’s a constant drumbeat of, “California is too expensive or too liberal” and it’s all going to move someplace. What are you hearing now? I mean, there was kind of a story about everything was going to move to Austin which sort of isn’t happening, but still.
Khanna: We have 37 times, I think, the venture capital as Austin. And you have Stanford, Berkeley, you have Santa Clara State, San Jose State, UCSF. You have Apple, Google, Nvidia, OpenAI, Tesla still mostly there. So much of the talent. I’m not complacent about Silicon Valley, but this idea that it’s all moving is just factually untrue.
You may have some billionaires who have moved out. But the big challenge in California is the housing costs. It’s the challenge for being working or middle class. We have one of the highest poverty rates when you factor in cost of living. And my concern in my district, at least, and for the state of California is, if you’re working class, if you’re middle class, how are you going to make it? Much more so then, are we going to lose the Silicon Valley economy.
Krugman: Okay. Maybe just pivot to that for a second. I mean, California’s taken some steps on housing, but, what would you be doing? Because it is crazy. I mean, San Francisco is, I guess, the worst. Or, the greater Bay Area is the worst in terms of housing. And it is a huge problem for, well, for everything, even for the technology cluster. What would you be doing that is not currently being done in terms of policy?
Khanna: We should build more housing. I think it starts with that. And we should be renovating more housing that exists for residential use, and we can have a federal government provide grants for cities that would actually have zoning reform, to build more. Elizabeth Warren had a proposal basically, to that end. It’s unfortunate we didn’t get into President Biden’s Build Back Better, but I think there should be a federal incentive. State incentives to build more. And we can talk about other issues.
But I personally am for some rent stabilization and I’d be curious. I know many economists disagree, but my view is, if you have a distorted market, which is that we don’t have enough supply, then you basically have landlords having an unfair advantage in a distorted market. And so we can be encouraging new building while still making sure that there is some rent cap on the disproportionate power landlords have because of the artificial constraints on building.
Krugman: Yeah, it’s tricky stuff. I mean, this is all very live for the Mamdani administration in New York City, with Mamdani saying, Let’s build more housing, but also let’s stabilize rents on some of the legacy stock. Which is not crazy, but, how do you pull that off? But it’s really interesting.
And you were basically for the federal government exerting discreet leverage through funding and so on to push for YIMBY, “Yes In My Back Yard,” policies at the local level.
Khanna: Yes. And I know it’s not a huge issue in the macro statistics, but this idea of private equity buying up single family homes, that also should not be subsidized. My understanding is we intentionally allowed that after the Great Recession because the property values had declined and we were fine with it. But it certainly seems no longer to be necessary and is aggravating in certain places where you have large institutional investors buying up single family homes.
Krugman: Yeah. It’s hard to make the numbers on that look really big, but, I mean, it’s not nothing. And it’s interesting. Have you read the sections on housing policy in Project 2025?
Khanna: A while back. I haven’t read it recently.
Krugman: It’s interesting. They’re all free market everything. No regulation except: we’re going to defend the rights of local communities to prevent housing construction. It’s really very odd that they’re all for deregulation and free money except NIMBYism is legitimized.
Khanna: I did not see that. That is so much opposed to what we need to do and frankly, opposed to some of the things that happened in Austin or Houston or places that did do housing building correctly.
Krugman: On the one hand, California has this reputation, largely because of housing, that’s it’s really unaffordable for middle class, working class people. And on the other hand, you have these enormous fortunes. And I want to get specifically to the California wealth tax proposal in a minute, but you’ve been paying a lot of attention to the issue of extreme wealth concentration. What would you say in general we should be doing about it?
Khanna: Here is, I think, what people find frustrating. In many developing countries, you often have a choice between economic growth and economic development; between making sure people have some equal stake, and making sure that the country is developing. Here we’re producing extraordinary wealth. We don’t have that dilemma that so many developing nations do, but we simply have not, as a matter of society, of values, chosen to make sure people have basic education and basic health care, and a decent option for housing to make it in our society. And I believe that our social contract is broken.
People look at this extraordinary wealth generation and they say, “Where is my stake? In fact, I could go work for one of these companies, these magnificent companies like Amazon as a warehouse worker or in delivery, and my life is not as great as even when someone was in manufacturing. And yet the companies are making trillions of dollars. So where is my stake in it?”
And in that context, I have said we need to have higher taxes on billionaires and multimillionaires so that we can fund the expansion of basically health care and education and childcare for every person. Now, I fundamentally believe that would also ultimately lead to more economic growth, because we’re investing in education and health care.
One paper I still remember from my undergraduate days was Gary Becker writing about paper and technology. And he said, in a technology age, the two biggest investments you can make are in a society’s education and society’s health. So, you know, I would argue it’s smart policy, but at the very least, it is something needed for social cohesion.
Krugman: Yeah. I talked with John Gruber recently about how much helping children is a highly effective and cheap policy. I mean, helping the elderly is also important. But children are cheap, and it takes so little to transform their lives in a way that benefits all of us. We’re not doing that. But what would you recommend as a general strategy to kind of limit or curb extreme wealth?
Khanna: Well, it’s broader than a wealth tax, though I support a wealth tax. But in preparation for this conversation, I actually read your interview with Professor Zucman who has been involved in this. And I think your point that a 1 or 2% wealth tax at a federal level isn’t going to curb billionaire influence on democracy was pretty accurate.
I mean, there are two discrete issues. One is, how do we get revenue to pay for preschool and childcare and expanding health care, which in my view, things like a wealth tax, or step up in basis on an estate tax, or tax and stock buybacks can do. Then there’s a broader issue, which is: you’ve got multi-billionaires putting in hundreds of millions of dollars to get people elected president, and then going and serving in the administration, buying up media, which they want to steer, threatening any member of Congress they disagree with on an issue, saying, “okay, we’ll just start a superPAC.” And how do we deal with the concentration of wealth’s alliance with power in a way that is distorting the voice of citizens in our democracy? And that’s a much deeper question.
I think it means we need to be looking at abolishing super PACs, even under Citizens United. Like, why is it that someone can only contribute $7,000 to me, which is constitutional even under Citizens United, but they can go and write $1 million check to the super PACs? Larry Lessig has been working on initiatives to say you should be able to limit the contributions to super PACs.
We need to have strong antitrust enforcement. We need to, empower citizen contributions to match the billionaires. We need to hopefully see more citizen movement candidates. But I think that’s a much deeper issue and a harder issue to solve then how do we fund a robust social safety net so that people get the chances I did in life, which is to go to a good public school and have basic health care and get loans to go get educated.
Krugman: Yeah, I can’t help mentioning when we were talking about the universities that help support Silicon Valley, that aside from Stanford, they were all public universities. Berkeley, San Jose... It’s amazing how much that libertarian paradise was built by publicly funded universities. And it’s not like Stanford is a standalone private institution without federal contracts either. So yeah, it’s quite something.
So this proposal, which I know you have been speaking favorably about, for a California, one time wealth levy. You want to talk about that and where you stand?
Khanna: Well, the reason I supported it was that 200,000 health care workers are going to lose their jobs in home care, in elder care, in nursing and nurses aides because of the cuts in Medicaid. 2 million Californians will lose their health care based on these cuts to health care services. And so there has to be some way of making up the revenue.
Now, I suppose many other states will just say, okay, that was Trump’s fault, and California could say that. But we have a lot of wealth generation. And I talked to Professor Zucman and Professor Saez and they said, “Look, billionaire wealth has grown 158% over the last three years. So having a one time tax to deal with health care is a reasonable proposal.”
There are parts of it I would have written differently. I don’t think you should be taxing voting shares. And, you know, there are parts of it that could have been better crafted because some of that has led to legitimate criticism. But overall, if the choice is between people losing health care and a one time tax on billionaires, I’m for the one time tax on billionaires.
Krugman: Ok, a lot of people would say you’re a radical leftist, but I don’t think it is. That’s actually no more radical left than the US during the Eisenhower years.
But anyway, yeah. It’s quite something. Just what do you think’s going to happen? I guess that wealth tax proposal first has to get put on the ballot, and it’s a bit of a longshot, isn’t it?
Khanna: It has to get put on the ballot, and that I think is hard. And then it would have enormous money against it if it is on the ballot. But in polls, I mean, I think 80, 85% of Democrats support it. The vast majority of independents support it. And even a third of Republicans support it.
There’s a question coming for the Democratic Party, which is, we have two ways to go, post this Trump moment. One is to say, look, we’re just not going to do his incredibly, damaging things. We’re not going to have a world of blanket tariffs used for retaliation. We’re not going to have ICE agents out there shooting American citizens and conducting raids without people’s due process. We’re not going to dismantle agencies without Congress. We’re not going to just reward our friends and punish enemies. But we’re not going to really make structural change. And I think that would be a big mistake.
My view is that we have to tackle the fundamental economic divides, the frustration people have had—both because of place based inequality, where they’re in towns where they don’t have good paying jobs and prosperity and, the rising cost of childcare and health care—and try for an agenda that is going to have economic transformation where people feel a stake in the American dream and economic independence.
And I believe that the younger generation of Democrats, are pushing for that kind of economic transformation that Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren were probably the most visible spokespeople for.
Krugman: Okay. And I have to say, Elizabeth Warren is wonderful. Bernie Sanders is impressive. But it’s good to see somebody who isn’t quite their age taking the lead. So I’m glad to hear you in that position.
Okay. I’ve been, you know, tracking some of the news coverage. You have complained that you’re always ready to talk about AI and policy, and people want to talk about Epstein. Do you have anything to say about Epstein? Obviously, you’ve seen more than people like me can, but just any comments?
Khanna: It’s the age old story, that extreme wealth can corrupt. Put aside the people who actually went to the island or the ranch and abused these young girls or who watched as his people were abused. What saddens me is how many people felt that being part of this club, being part of this group I called the Epstein class, was sort of socially affirming. In fact, one of the former prince’s girlfriends said, “if you weren’t mentioned in the Epstein files, you were a loser.” Like you weren’t part of the IN club. And how they began to believe that the rules didn’t apply to them.
In some of these cases, it’s a story of human frailty. I don’t come at it on a moral sanctimonious note other than to say that when you have extreme wealth or privilege disconnected from rooted community, it doesn’t just harm people who are left out in that community. It may actually be corrupting for the people with that kind of extreme wealth. And the hope is that [the whole scandal] would move us towards a politics that sees the benefit of everyone in the country having a stake in the economic success, which we haven’t had.
Krugman: I have to say that I’ve been shocked, but somehow not surprised at some of the people who I either know slightly or who had orbits intersecting with mine, seeing their names appear. Because I do understand what you’re saying about the feeling that you’ve made it and you’re in this circle, and I can see how that worked, even though it’s horrifying. But it’s quite something.
Anything else that you’d like to bring up before we close this?
Khanna: I’ll ask you a final question. What is your view of the prospects, post-Trump, assuming that Democrats do succeed in getting back the House, the Senate, and have a chance at the presidency. As a student of American history, is there a possibility of doing economically transformative things, in the direction Biden was, though we weren’t able to get the votes? I mean, FDR and Lyndon Johnson obviously were the two very consequential presidents. But do you think that there could be that kind of a moment again for the country, or do you think it’s going to be very difficult?
Krugman: I mean, the economics say yes. One of the greatest discoveries of my life, in an old paper coauthored by Claudia Goldin, Nobel laureate and one of my favorite Nobel laureates. It said that the middle class society that I grew up in didn’t evolve. It was created basically over the course of a few years by FDR. And so we know that that can be done. It lasted for 30 or 40 years. But the political conditions to make that happen now? I don’t know. I mean, I guess we don’t preemptively surrender. We hope for it.
But wow. I think you and I are on the same wavelength here, which is that we do need some fundamental changes. It’s not enough to just get this one guy out of the White House, though that’s dearly to be desired. But it’s about how the conditions that brought him there will not go away unless we have a really big change in how we run this country.
Khanna: I couldn’t agree more.
Krugman: Well, thank you so much for talking. And what a moment this is. I’m glad I’m not in congress but I have to say, if we come out the other end of this, people like you will be a large part of the reason. Thank you so much.
Khanna: Thank you. I appreciate it.
Me watching Trump’s press conference
According to Donald Trump, several Supreme Court justices are FOOLS, “LAPDOGS,” and “very unpatriotic.” I agree — although I think we have different justices in mind.
In his press conference Trump also asserted both that the Court’s ruling against his tariffs was disastrous and that the Court had affirmed his right to do whatever he wants on tariffs. Not sure where the second part came from. The ruling was in fact scathing and said clearly that Trump’s use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act was a usurpation of taxation authority that belongs to Congress:
We are therefore skeptical that in IEEPA — and IEEPA alone — Congress hid a delegation of its birth-right power to tax …
In that press conference Trump announced that he would immediately use another little-known legal route — Section 122 — to impose immediate 10 percent tariffs across the board. Section 122 tariffs can only last 150 days, but he claimed that during that stretch he would find ways to use other authorities to maintain high tariffs. And it’s just possible that this will be enough to keep average tariffs and tariff revenue where they would have been if the Supremes had ruled in his favor.
I don’t see, by the way, how such alternatives would obviate the need to refund the tariffs already collected. If you seized money without constitutional authority, finding other revenue sources going forward doesn’t make the original seizure legal.
And even if Trump finds ways to keep tariffing, this is a huge defeat. Why? Because Trump’s invocation of IEEPA wasn’t about average tariff rates, or revenue. It wasn’t even about the trade deficit, which, by the way, hasn’t declined at all since he went on his tariff spree.
No, it was all about arbitrary power. Trump has reveled in being able to slap tariffs on Brazil for daring to put Jair Bolsonaro on trial for a failed insurrection, being able to threaten France and Germany with tariffs for getting in the way of his attempt to seize Greenland, and of course giving tariff waivers to businesses that help him build his ballroom.
The desire for that arbitrary power is why he went for IEEPA despite warnings that it might well be ruled unconstitutional.
And alternatives to IEEPA don’t give him that much arbitrary power.
No wonder, then, that he’s throwing a huge temper tantrum.
On Wednesday the Wall Street Journal published an article with the headline “Billionaires’ low taxes are becoming a problem for the economy.” Hey, what do you expect from a woke, left-wing rag?
To be honest, the article didn’t make a very compelling case for its ostensible point, that the growing concentration of wealth at the very top may lead to economic instability. But it did offer a good discussion of both the soaring concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny elite and of the extent to which this elite is able to avoid paying taxes.
Many discussions of inequality in America fail to grapple with the way we have become an oligarchy, with a large share of income, an even larger share of wealth, and a huge amount of political power accruing to a very small number of people. One still sees discussions of the “elite” that focus on the top 20 percent or the top 10 percent, when the real action is much further up the scale. Never mind the 1 percent. To understand what’s happening to us, we need to focus on the 0.1 percent, the 0.01 percent, even the 0.00001 percent.
True, even the economic position of the top 1 percent is widely misunderstood. The WSJ article misleadingly suggested that Americans in the top 1 percent as a whole are heavily taxed, because they pay 40 percent of income taxes. But the income tax isn’t the only tax! In particular, the federal government also collects a lot of revenue from payroll taxes, which fall much more heavily on low- and middle-income Americans than on the upper class. As a result, the top 1 percent only pays 27 percent of total federal taxes:
Source: CBO
Furthermore, state and local taxes are strongly regressive:
Source: ITEP
Overall, the top 1 percent as a group pay at most a slightly larger share of U.S. taxes than their share of pretax income.
Furthermore, most people within the top 1 percent are what Leona Helmsley called “little people,” as in “Only the little people pay taxes.” The ultra-rich — the 0.1 percent, the 0.01 percent, the 0.00001 percent — pay much lower tax rates than the merely rich. I’ll explain how they pull this off shortly. First, let me make the point that it’s the ultra-rich, who account for only a tiny fraction of the 1 percent, who have been pulling away from the rest of the nation.
The data from the Federal Reserve’s Distributional Financial Accounts are startling. It turns out that the share of total wealth held by the merely rich — those in the top 1 percent but not in the top 0.1 percent — has actually declined since the 2010s:
At the same time, the wealth share of the top 0.1 percent, the ultra-rich, has soared:
In 2022, the minimum wealth required to be in this category was $46 million. It’s more now.
And much of the rise in wealth of the 0.1 percent is accounted for by the super-billionaire class, a tiny sub-group of almost inconceivably wealthy individuals. Reposting a chart from Wednesday’s post:
Source: Gabriel Zucman
Why are the ultra-rich pulling away from everyone else? Partly because they pay much lower taxes than the little people. Some manage a full Leona Helmsley, paying no taxes at all. On average, according to recent estimates by Balkin, Saez, Yagan and Zucman, they pay a total tax rate — federal, state, and local — of only 24 percent. That’s less than the average for the whole population, around 30 percent. And it’s much less than the tax rate for “top labor income earners.” That means people who receive big paychecks — but who do receive paychecks. In contrast, the incomes of the ultra-rich flows largely from or through businesses they own.
Put it this way: The “$400,000 a year working Wall Street stiff, flying first class, and being comfortable,” mocked by Gordon Gekko in the movie Wall Street, pays around 40 percent of his income in taxes. The modern equivalents of Gekko — who make orders of magnitude more money than the financial predators Gekko was modeled on — typically pay only around half as much.
How do the ultra-rich pull this off? Most of their success at tax-dodging presumably reflects tax avoidance rather than tax evasion. Avoidance, as opposed to evasion, involves strategies that are legal, although they shouldn’t be. Balkin et al emphasize the way the ultra-rich arrange to ensure that most of their income accrues not directly to themselves but to businesses they control, and are able to benefit from their wealth without ever turning that wealth into taxable income.
The WSJ notes one example:
Amassing assets like stocks, borrowing against them rather than selling during the owner’s lifetime, and passing them to the next generation after death is sometimes called the “buy borrow die” tax-avoidance strategy.
It’s clear that by any reasonable standard the extremely rich pay much less than their share in taxes.
Why doesn’t the U.S. government try to close the loopholes that allow the extremely rich to pay so little? Don’t say that it would be technically difficult or that it would hurt the economy. We were able to tax the rich for a generation after World War II, a generation during which the U.S. achieved the best growth in its history. In general, governments in advanced nations have enormous ability to achieve their goals, if they want to.
The problem, of course, is that too many politicians don’t want to collect taxes on the superrich, because the ultra-wealthy have used their wealth to achieve immense political power. And the failure to tax them effectively is reinforcing the vast accumulation of wealth at the top.
It’s a vicious circle. And whatever you think of specific proposals for wealth taxes and other approaches toward reining in America’s billionaire class, we had better take action before it’s too late.
MUSICAL CODA
We’ve made GPT-5.3-Codex-Spark about 30% faster. It is now serving at over 1200 tokens per second.
— Thibault Sottiaux, OpenAI
Tags: openai, llms, ai, generative-ai, llm-performance
Andrej Karpathy talks about "Claws"
Andrej Karpathy tweeted a mini-essay about buying a Mac Mini ("The apple store person told me they are selling like hotcakes and everyone is confused") to tinker with Claws:I'm definitely a bit sus'd to run OpenClaw specifically [...] But I do love the concept and I think that just like LLM agents were a new layer on top of LLMs, Claws are now a new layer on top of LLM agents, taking the orchestration, scheduling, context, tool calls and a kind of persistence to a next level.
Looking around, and given that the high level idea is clear, there are a lot of smaller Claws starting to pop out. For example, on a quick skim NanoClaw looks really interesting in that the core engine is ~4000 lines of code (fits into both my head and that of AI agents, so it feels manageable, auditable, flexible, etc.) and runs everything in containers by default. [...]
Anyway there are many others - e.g. nanobot, zeroclaw, ironclaw, picoclaw (lol @ prefixes). [...]
Not 100% sure what my setup ends up looking like just yet but Claws are an awesome, exciting new layer of the AI stack.
Andrej has an ear for fresh terminology (see vibe coding, agentic engineering) and I think he's right about this one, too: "Claw" is becoming a term of art for the entire category of OpenClaw-like agent systems - AI agents that generally run on personal hardware, communicate via messaging protocols and can both act on direct instructions and schedule tasks.
It even comes with an established emoji 🦞
Tags: definitions, ai, andrej-karpathy, generative-ai, llms, ai-agents, openclaw
"A ghost in the Milky Way…” says Christian Bertincourt,
Almost every article on today’s tariff decision includes, somewhere two or three paragraphs down, a note which explains that it’s unclear how or whether the federal government will issue refunds for illegally collected tariffs. The Court’s decision doesn’t address this. I’m not sure why it would really need to address this. The tariffs were illegal. The government had no legal authority to collect them. So it should be a simple matter for importers to go to court and compel the government to refund their money. But set all that aside. Is it really so uncertain? I’ll bet the White House is going to find a way to issue those refunds. Why? Because Trump insiders, especially the family of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, have reportedly made huge, huge bets on the tariffs being tossed. They and their clients now, per a July report that prompted a Senate investigation, stand to make tens or even hundreds of billions on those refunds. Given that Lutnick is a primary player in White House tariff policy, I’m pretty confident that they’re going to find a way to issue those refunds.
How does this work? I discussed this in a post from Sept. 1 of last year. The gist is this: When he became commerce secretary, Lutnick gifted his sons his Wall Street firm Cantor Fitzgerald. (In the link above I explained how they structured this handoff — which as a bonus allowed Lutnick to pay zero capital gains on the entire transaction.) Twenty-something failson Brandon Lutnick is now chairman of the firm. Brother Kyle, apparently another business prodigy from the same family, is vice chairman. Soon after Trump’s tariffs were announced last fall, Brandon Lutnick — no doubt in a totally, totally arms-length way — started buying up the rights to tariff refunds at about 25% of their sticker value.
I base this on reports of these trades from last summer; Wired broke the story in July. A day after the original publication of that article, Wired updated the story with a less-than-denial denial from Cantor Fitzgerald. Erica Chase, a spokesperson for Cantor, said: “Cantor is not in the business of positioning any risk or taking views in litigation claims including tariffs.”
Just this evening, after the original publication of this article, I received a statement from a Cantor press rep which states: “Cantor Fitzgerald has never executed any transactions or taken risk on the legality of tariffs. Any report suggesting otherwise is completely false.” This is a much more definitive statement than the one they released at the time. Based on this new statement, Semafor published a story this evening which takes the Cantor denial at face value and argues that the original reports were based on the claims of an over-enthusiastic Cantor salesman. To date, however, Wired has not updated or withdrawn its reporting.
To understand how transactions like the one described by Wired work, think of it like this. Corporation X pays $100 in tariffs to the federal treasury. Cantor offered them $25 for the right to collect any refund they might eventually be entitled to if the tariffs are rejected by SCOTUS. If the tariffs are overruled every quarter invested becomes a dollar.
By mid-summer, that percentage was getting closer to 30%, per that Wired report, and one imagines that the percentage went up a lot after an appellate court ruled the tariffs were illegal. It’s not clear just how many refund rights Cantor Fitzgerald bought up. And Cantor Fitzgerald now claims the whole story was based on some misunderstanding. But last July, according to Wired, Cantor Fitzgerald said it had “the capacity to buy the rights to hundreds of millions of dollars.” In other words, the payoff on these bets could be astronomical.
Keep an eye on this. There could be crazy sums at stake.
Ed. Note – 2.20.26, 9:24 p.m.: This article has been updated to incorporate Cantor Fitzgerald’s denial.
The depth of the Supreme Court’s corruption has forced us to find new language to describe its actions. Today’s decision, undoing Trump’s massive array of tariffs that upended the global financial system, is a case in point.
We say the Court “struck down” these tariffs. But that wording is inadequate and misleading. These tariffs were always transparently illegal. Saying the actions were “struck down” suggests at least a notional logic which the Court disagreed with, or perhaps one form of standing practice and constitutional understanding away from which the Court decided to chart another course. Neither is remotely the case. There’s no ambiguity in the law in question. Trump assumed a unilateral power to “find” a national emergency and then used this (transparently fraudulent) national emergency to exercise powers the law in question doesn’t even delegate. It is, among other things, an example of the central tenet of current conservative jurisprudence: to determine what law or constitution would require if words had no meaning. We could go into the further digression over whether Congress could “delegate” such powers, given the Constitution’s clarity on congressional authority over tariffs or whether any purported ambiguity in the law invokes yet another of the corrupt Court’s made-up doctrines. But doing so would be nothing more than ceding to the Court an authority to compel us to expend time exploring the vaporous logical intricacies of its bullshit doctrines.
It’s tempting to see this decision as some big win. And it is a win to the extent that it’s better that a rogue president be barred from illegal acts than permitted to continue them. But it’s a mistake to imagine that the Court is any less corrupt on the evidence of this decision.
This is a case where the legal merits of the President’s action were just too transparently bogus even for this Court to manage and — critically — his actions and the theories undergirding his claims to the power were, for the Corrupt majority, inconvenient. The architect of the current Court — the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo — was behind the litigation that undid the tariffs. That tells you all you need to know. In this case Trump’s claim to power was neither in the interests of the Republican Party — the Court’s chief jurisprudential interest — nor any of their anti-constitutional doctrines. So of course they tossed it out. This may sound ungenerous. It’s simple reality.
Indeed, today’s decision is actually an indictment of the Court. These tariffs have been in effect for almost a year. They have upended whole sectors of the U.S. and global economies. The fact that a president can illegally exercise such powers for so long and with such great consequences for almost a year means we’re not living in a functional constitutional system. If the Constitution allows untrammeled and dictatorial powers for almost one year, massive dictator mulligans, then there is no Constitution.
Part of the delay of this ruling is the fact that most major corporations were afraid to bring litigation because they didn’t want to go to war with the president. But that’s also an indictment of the Supreme Court’s corruption. Because they made clear early on that there was little, if any, limit they would impose on Trump’s criminality or use of government power to impose retribution on constitutionally protected speech or litigation. So that’s on the Court too. But it’s only part of the equation. The Court also allowed the tariffs to remain in place while the government appealed the appellate decision striking down the tariffs back in August. Let me repeat that: back in August, almost six months ago.
In other words, most of the time in which these illegal tariffs were in effect was because of that needless stay. The logic of the stay was that deference to President’s claim of illegal powers was more important than the harm created by hundreds of billions in unconstitutional taxes being imposed on American citizens. It’s a good example of what law professor Leah Litman — one of the most important voices on the Court’s corruption — earlier this morning called the Court’s corruption via “passivity,” empowering anti-constitutional actions through deciding not to act at all or encouraging endless delays it could easily put a stop to in the interests of the constitutional order.
The Court is corrupt. There’s no future for the America republic without thoroughly reforming it of its current corruption. Today’s decision is simply one of those cases where the Constitution happens to coincide with the Court’s partial and illegitimate self-interest.
What if you saw your shadow on Mars and it wasn't
With the lights back on and freight beginning to move again, in November South Africa won its first credit upgrade in two decades after S&P Global Ratings lifted the sovereign rating by one notch to double B.
Investor confidence is also up. According to Nedbank, private sector investment announcements tripled last year to more than R382bn ($23.6bn). Since the end of 2023, the South African rand has been the world’s best performing major currency on a spot basis reflecting immediate exchange rates, up nearly 15 per cent against the dollar. Over the past 12 months, the JSE all-share index is up 37 per cent in rand terms.
Growth reached 1.2 per cent in 2025, hardly transformative, but double the rate of the previous year. For the first time in a long time, economists are talking enthusiastically about “green shoots” and forecasting year-on-year expansion.
Here is more from David Pilling, Joseph Cotterill, and Monica Mark at the FT.
The post South Africa facts of the day appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
So, um … eh …
I pulled up to the wrong address.
It was earlier this morning. I wrote down the location for an anti-ICE rally in Irvine, arrived and … nothing. Some buildings. A pigeon or two. A sidewalk. And I thought to myself, “Hmm, maybe the mojo has vanished. Maybe people are tired. Maybe it’s a Friday afternoon, and HBO is airing a ‘Winning Time’ marathon, and people are a wee-bit exhausted.”
Then, I looked at my GPS. Wrong address.
So I hopped back in the car and headed toward 2020 Main Street, where—outside the offices of MGR Real Estate—a shit ton of people stood and barked and marched and waved signs and chanted chants and … and …
The spirit remains alive.
Hell, there were even bagpipes. And one can never go wrong with bagpipes1 …
For me, rallies are a merging of six Red Bulls and a couple o’ lines of coke. And while I’ve never drank a Red Bull or snorted cocaine, I’ve been told the immediate impact (well before the shakes and 15 months of rehab) is a jolt of unbridled energy. That’s what this rally was—energy. Powerful energy. The type of energy that screams, EVEN THOUGH ALL OFTEN FEELS LOST AND SOMETIMES YOU’RE PROFOUNDLY LONELY IN YOUR PATRIOTIC DEPRESSION, HOPE IS ALIVE AND PEOPLE ARE GOOD AND TRUMP IS A VILE VOMIT PUDDLE WHO IS FAR CLOSER TO DEATH THAN BIRTH.
Deep breaths, Jeff.
Deep breaths.
In short, I love the rallies. And here are a few things I’ve noticed of late:
• More and more young people are attending. Which is no small trick, because the whole political puzzle is finding ways to engage folks under, oh, 40. I’m seeing actual engagement.
• Sign creativity is at a premium. They just keep getting better and better. And game raises game. For example …
• Trump is increasingly unpopular. And so are his initiatives. I don’t know how much is Epstein-driven, but, man … very few Americans are happy with what’s going down. And even though Orange Blog Douche views his power as absolute, it’s anything but. Just look at what happened today with the Supreme Court. Trump whined about the court’s “lack of loyalty.” Bruh, it doesn’t work that way.
• Honking. More honking. More honking. When these rallies began, you’d hear reluctant honking of support. That has changed. People are honking—LOUDLY. Proudly. It’s dope.
PS: MGR Real Estate has been accused of renting space to ICE. The company is denying such. We will look into this and report back.
Unless they’re being played at your funeral. But, since it’s your funeral, you wouldn’t even know there are bagpipes. So you’re good.
Today, in a 6–3 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court found that President Donald J. Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs were unconstitutional.
Shortly after he took office, Trump declared that two things—the influx of illegal drugs from Canada, Mexico, and China, and the country’s “large and persistent” trade deficits—constituted national emergencies. Under these emergency declarations, he claimed the authority to raise tariffs under the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA).
The U.S. Constitution is clear that Congress, and Congress alone, has the authority to tax the American people, and tariffs are taxes. But with the IEEPA, Congress gave the president the power to respond quickly to an “unusual and extraordinary threat…to the national security, foreign policy, or economy of the United States” that originates “in whole or substantial part outside the United States.” The law specifies that any authority granted to the president “may only be exercised to deal with an unusual and extraordinary threat with respect to which a national emergency has been declared for purposes of this chapter and may not be exercised for any other purpose.”
Although the law does not mention tariffs, Trump claimed the authority under IEEPA to impose a sweeping new tariff system that upended the free trade principles that have underpinned the economy of the United States and its allies and partners since World War II.
Trump promised his supporters that foreign countries would pay the tariffs, but in fact, studies have reinforced what economists always maintained: the cost of tariffs falls on businesses and consumers in the U.S. Similarly, Trump promised his tariffs would make the economy boom and bring back manufacturing jobs, but the latest report on U.S. economic growth in the fourth quarter of last year, released just this morning, shows that tariffs and the government shutdown slowed growth to 1.4%, bringing overall growth down from 2.8% in 2024 to 2.2% in 2025.
While the U.S. added 1.46 million jobs in 2024, it added only 181,000 in 2025. Manufacturing lost about 108,000 jobs in 2025.
Trump also used tariffs to justify his extension of the 2017 tax cuts on the wealthy and corporations, insisting that fees on foreign countries would fund the U.S. government and cut the deficit.
It was always clear, though, that Trump’s reliance on tariffs was mostly about seizing power. Trump’s advisors appear to be using the strategy of Nazi political theorist Carl Schmitt, who opposed liberal democracy, in which the state enables individuals to determine their own fate. Instead, he argued that true democracy erases individual self-determination by making the mass of people one with the state and exercising their will through state power. That uniformity requires getting rid of opposition. Schmitt theorized that politics is simply about dividing people into friends and enemies and using the power of the state to crush enemies.
Much of Schmitt’s philosophy centered around the idea that in a nation that is based in a constitution and the rule of law, power belongs to the man who can exploit emergencies that create exceptions to the constitutional order, enabling him to exercise power without regard to the law. Trump—who almost certainly has not read Schmitt himself—asserted this view on August 26, 2025: “I have the right to do anything I want to do. I’m the president of the United States. If I think our country’s in danger—and it is in danger in the cities—I can do it.”
Trump should be able to get his agenda passed according to the normal constitutional order, since the Republicans have control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate. Instead, he has operated under emergency powers. Since he took office thirteen months ago, Trump has declared at least nine national emergencies and one “crime emergency” in Washington, D.C. Since 1981, presidents have declared on average about seven national emergencies per four-year term.
Having declared his power to do whatever he wished with tariffs, Trump used them for his own ends in both foreign policy and economics, punishing countries for enforcing the law against his allies—like Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, jailed after trying to overthrow the elected government—or strong-arming countries like Vietnam into giving real estate deals to his family.
Trump changed tariff rates apparently on his own whim. As Chief Justice John Roberts noted, a month after imposing a 10% additional tariff on Chinese goods, he increased the rate to 20%. A month later, he removed the legal exemption for Chinese goods under $800. Less than a week after imposing reciprocal tariffs, he increased the rate on Chinese goods from 34% to 84%. The very next day, he jacked them up to 125%. That meant the total tariff rate on Chinese goods was 145%.
Trump’s tariffs destabilized the global economy, while the wild instability made it impossible for U.S. companies to plan. Increasingly, other countries have simply cut the U.S. out of their trade deals, while U.S. growth has slowed. The Tax Foundation estimated that Trump’s tariffs cost the average American household about $1,000 in 2025. They projected that cost to be $1,300 in 2026. Congress’s Joint Economic Committee–Minority, made up of Democrats, estimates that number to be low. They say the actual cost has been $1,700 per household.
It was a huge tax increase on the American people, imposed without reference at all to Congress, which is the only government body with the power to raise taxes. Now the Supreme Court has said that the chaos and cost of Trump’s tariffs was for nothing. Trump’s claim of authority to levy tariffs under IEEPA was unconstitutional all along.
Simon Rosenberg of the Hopium Chronicles wrote of the decision: “[A]ll this reinforces that the tariffs were arguably both the most reckless act and the greatest abuse of power by a President in American history.” He added: “In most democracies Trump’s reckless and wild abuse of power through his tariffs would cause the government to fall or the leader to be removed. The imposition of these tariffs against the will of Congress, the courts, our allies, and the American people. It’s clear grounds for removal.”
As Ryan Goodman of Just Security pointed out, the justices in the majority expressed “deep skepticism of claims to open-ended emergency powers,” although it is not clear that they will recognize the same problem in other contexts.
Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo noted that “today’s decision is…an indictment of the Court…. [T]hese tariffs have been in effect for almost a year. They have upended whole sectors of the U.S. and global economies. The fact that a president can illegally exercise such powers for so long and with such great consequences for almost a year means we’re not living in a functional constitutional system. If the Constitution allows untrammeled and dictatorial powers for almost one year, massive dictator mulligans, then there is no Constitution.” Marshall said there is no future for the American republic without thoroughly reforming the court of its current corruption.*
Trump did not take news of the court’s decision calmly. Trump was at a private breakfast with governors at the White House when an aide handed him a note about the decision. A source told Reuters White House reporter Jarrett Renshaw that Trump was “visibly frustrated” and said he “had to do something about the courts.” Then he left the room.
Three hours later, Trump delivered a public response in which he lambasted the justices in the majority, including two of the three on the court he nominated. He said the justices appointed by Democrats are “against anything that makes America, strong, healthy and great again. They also are a, frankly, disgrace to our nation, those justices.” The Republicans in the majority are “just being fools and lapdogs for the RINOs and the radical left Democrats and, not that this should have anything at all to do with it, they’re very unpatriotic and disloyal to our Constitution.” As a whole, he claimed, “the court has been swayed by foreign interests and a political movement that is far smaller than people would ever think.” He asserted that “obnoxious, ignorant and loud” people were frightening the justices to keep them from doing what was right.
Trump heaped praise on his appointee Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who joined Justice Samuel Alito and Justice Clarence Thomas in the minority.
Trump continued in this vein for forty-five minutes, ranting that he had created a booming economy that “all of the Nobel Prize winners in economics” had said was impossible. He returned to his fantasy identity as peacemaker, reiterating that he had “settled eight wars, whether you like it or not,” saving 35 million lives, and claimed tariffs had made that possible. He claimed that he “was very modest in my ask of other countries and businesses” because he didn’t want to sway the court. He said: “I want to be a good boy.”
He told reporters that there were other ways to impose tariffs and that he intended to do so. Indeed, he said, “the Supreme Court’s decision today made a president’s ability to both regulate trade and impose tariffs more powerful and more crystal clear, rather than less. I don’t think they meant that. I’m sure they didn’t. It’s terrible…. There will no longer be any doubt, and the income coming in and the protection of our companies and country will actually increase because of this decision. I don’t think the court meant that, but it’s the way it is.”
Trump’s tariffs are unpopular enough that he could have interpreted the Supreme Court decision outlawing them as providential, but instead he vowed to sign an order imposing 10% global tariffs under a law that permits him to do so for 150 days. When a reporter asked him why he couldn’t “just work with Congress to come up with a plan to push tariffs,” Trump answered: “I don’t have to. I have the right to do tariffs, and I’ve always had the right to do tariffs. And it’s all been approved by Congress, so there’s no reason to do it.”
Tonight Trump posted on social media that he had signed an order to impose “a Global 10% Tariff on all Countries, which will be effective almost immediately.” Economist Justin Wolfers asked: “What problem is Trump’s new global 10% tariff meant to solve? If it’s about leverage, ask: How much leverage do you get from a tariff that disappears in 150 days? If it’s onshoring: Who builds new factories based on tariff[s] that disappear before the factory is built? It’s a tax. That’s all it is.”
The court did not say anything about how the government should remedy the economic dislocation the tariffs caused or, for that matter, return the billions of dollars it took illegally. Simon Rosenberg wrote that “Democrats can now credibly call for the repeal of the Trump tax cuts and the clawing back of the additional ICE funding as a way of offsetting the revenue loss from the ending of the illegal tariffs.”
But Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told an interviewer: “I got a feeling the American people won’t see” refunds. Nonetheless, Representatives Steven Horsford (D-NV) and Janelle Bynum (D-OR) immediately introduced a bill to require the Trump administration to refund tariff revenue to U.S. businesses within 90 days.
This afternoon, Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker sent an invoice to Trump, charging him $8,679,261,600, or $1,700 for every family in Illinois, as “reimbursement owed to the Illinois families for illegally imposed tariffs.” It said: “Illinois families paid the price for illegal tariffs—at the grocery store, at the hardware store, and around the kitchen table. Tariffs are taxes and working families were the ones who paid them. Illinois families paid the bill. Time for Trump to pay us back.”
In a cover letter, Pritzker said: “Your tariff taxes wreaked havoc on farmers, enraged our allies, and sent grocery prices through the roof. This morning, your hand-picked Supreme Court Justices notified you that they are unconstitutional…. This letter and the attached invoice stand as an official notice that compensation is owed to the people of Illinois, and if you do not comply we will pursue further action.”
—
*Edited at 12:00 on February 21. I wrote last night that "In August 2025, almost six months ago, the Supreme Court stayed a lower court decision striking down the tariffs as illegal." That is incorrect. In fact, the lower courts stayed their own injunctions to allow Trump to appeal to the Supreme Court. I apologize for the error.
—
Notes:
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/24-1287_4gcj.pdf
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/50/chapter-35
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2026/02/20/gdp-2025-economy-tariffs-trade/
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/economy/january-jobs-revisions-trump-rcna258398
https://www.kcra.com/article/manufacturing-jobs-us-tariffs/70304916
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/13/books/review/carl-schmitt-jd-vance.html
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c78x9256pn7o
https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/democrats/press-releases
https://thehill.com/homenews/5747651-trump-supreme-court-tariffs-disgrace/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2026/02/20/gdp-2025-economy-tariffs-trade/
https://globalnews.ca/news/11676133/donald-trump-tariffs-supreme-court-reaction-transcript/
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/us/politics/trump-national-guard-chicago-dictator.html
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/dont-be-fooled-by-the-corrupt-courts-tariff-decision
Bluesky:
muellershewrote.com/post/3mfd223kp7s2e
startribune.com/post/3mfcirkh3e22w
rgoodlaw.bsky.social/post/3mfchj2w47k2j
simonwdc.bsky.social/post/3mfci6kxxis2t
acyn.bsky.social/post/3mfcjxwco762z
carlquintanilla.bsky.social/post/3mfcr5wjzcs2o
atrupar.com/post/3mfcsiafgun2v
factpostnews.bsky.social/post/3mfcvspjrxo25
In the United Kingdom this morning, Thames Valley Police arrested Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, formerly Prince Andrew, on suspicion that he committed misconduct in public office. Mountbatten-Windsor was stripped of his royal titles last October because of his ties to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Documents released by the U.S. Department of Justice suggest that when Mountbatten-Windsor represented the United Kingdom as a trade envoy, he gave confidential government documents to Epstein.
Mountbatten-Windsor’s arrest is the first arrest of a senior royal since 1647, when supporters of Parliament arrested King Charles I during the English Civil War. Today is Mountbatten-Windsor’s 66th birthday.
King Charles III said the investigations into his brother have his “wholehearted” support and that Buckingham Palace will cooperate. He said that “the law must take its course.”
In South Korea, Seoul Central District Court Judge Jee Kui-youn sentenced former president of South Korea Yoon Suk Yeol to life in prison after he was found guilty of leading an insurrection against the government. With his approval rating plummeting as his administration was engulfed by scandals, on December 3, 2024, Yoon declared martial law and tried to paralyze the parliament by using troops to blockade the National Assembly building and arrest opposition politicians. As Lim Hui Jie reported for CNBC, five other conspirators have also received prison sentences of up to 30 years.
During the trial, prosecutors told the court that Yoon had declared martial law “with the purpose of remaining in power for a long time by seizing the judiciary and legislature.” Yoon claimed that he was within his constitutional authority to declare martial law and that he did so to “safeguard freedom and sovereignty.”
After Yoon declared martial law, 190 of the 300 lawmakers in the National Assembly fought their way into the chamber and overturned his edict, forcing Yoon to back down about six hours after his martial law announcement. Lawmakers impeached him 11 days later and removed him from office. Prosecutors had asked for the death penalty for Yoon. The judge said that in sentencing Yoon, he had taken into consideration that Yoon is 65 and that he did not order his troops to use lethal force during the period in which he declared martial law.
In Washington, D.C., today, President Donald J. Trump held the first meeting of his so-called Board of Peace at the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP), newly renamed the “Donald J. Trump U.S. Institute of Peace,” a change being legally challenged. Last year, officials from the Trump administration seized the USIP building, which housed an independent entity created by Congress in 1984, and fired nearly all the employees.
Trump has made it clear he wants his new board to replace the United Nations. Twenty-seven countries have said they will participate, but so far none appear to have tossed in the $1 billion that would give them permanent status. The countries participating include Albania, Argentina, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Belarus, Bulgaria, Cambodia, Egypt, El Salvador, Hungary, Indonesia, Israel, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Kosovo, Mongolia, Morocco, Pakistan, Paraguay, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam. Trump extended invitations to Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, both of whom have been indicted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes.
Trump withdrew an invitation to the board from Canada after Prime Minister Mark Carney denounced Trump’s foreign policy at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, so Canada is out. Rejecting Trump’s invitation are Austria, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Slovenia, Sweden, the United Kingdom, Ukraine, and the Vatican. They cite their continuing support for the United Nations, concerns about Russian influence in Trump’s board, and concerns about the board’s organization, which gives Trump final say in all decisions, including how to spend the board’s money.
Today, Trump announced that the U.S. will put $10 billion into the Board of Peace, although since Congress is the only body that can legally appropriate money in our system, it’s unclear how he intends to do this.
The event at the board appeared to be the Trump Show. Representatives from the countries who had accepted Trump’s invitation stood awkwardly on stage waiting for him while his favorite songs blared. Once he arrived, he rambled for an hour and then appeared to fall asleep at points in the meeting as dignitaries spoke.
Lena Sun and Jacob Bogage of the Washington Post reported today that having pulled out of the World Health Organization (WHO), the Trump administration has called for creating an alternative run by the U.S. that would recreate WHO systems. The cost would be $2 billion a year funded through the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), up from the $680 million the U.S. provided to the WHO. The secretary of HHS is Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Public health experts told the journalists it was unlikely that any new U.S.-based system could match the reach of the WHO. Director Tom Inglesby of the Center for Health Security at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health said: “Spending two to three times the cost to create what we already had access to makes absolutely no sense in terms of fiscal stewardship. We’re not going to get the same quality or breadth of information we would have by being in the WHO, or have anywhere [near] the influence we had.”
Only sovereign nations can join the WHO, but California, Illinois, New York, and Wisconsin, as well as New York City, have joined the WHO’s Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network.
Today Trump’s Commission of Fine Arts swore in two new members, including Chamberlain Harris, Trump’s 26-year-old executive assistant, who has no experience in the arts. Then the commission, now entirely made up of Trump appointees, approved Trump’s plans for a ballroom where the East Wing of the White House used to stand, although the chair did note that public comments about the project were over 99% negative.
According to CNN’s Sunlen Serfaty, Harris said the White House is the “greatest house in [the] world. We want this to be the greatest ballroom in the world.” Trump says the ballroom is being funded by private donations through the Trust for the National Mall, which is not required to disclose its donors.
Today workers hung a banner with a giant portrait of Trump on the Department of Justice building.
On Air Force One as Trump traveled to Georgia this afternoon for a speech on the economy, Peter Doocy of the Fox News Channel asked Trump about the arrest of Mountbatten-Windsor. “Do you think people in this country at some point, associates of Jeffrey Epstein, will wind up in handcuffs, too?”
Trump answered: “Well, you know I’m the expert in a way, because I’ve been totally exonerated. It’s very nice, I can actually speak about it very nicely. I think it’s a shame. I think it’s very sad. I think it’s so bad for the royal family. It’s very, very sad to me. It’s a very sad thing. When I see that, it’s a very sad thing. To see it, and to see what’s going on with his brother, who’s obviously coming to our country very soon and he’s a fantastic man. King. So I think it’s a very sad thing. It’s really interesting ‘cause nobody used to speak about Epstein when he was alive, but now they speak. But I’m the one that can talk about it because I’ve been totally exonerated. I did nothing. In fact, the opposite—he was against me. He was fighting me in the election, which I just found out from the last three million pages of documents.”
In fact, Trump has not been exonerated.
When he got to Georgia, Trump’s economic message was that “I’ve won affordability.” More to the point was his focus on his Big Lie that he won the 2020 election and that Congress must pass the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) America Act to secure elections. In fact, in solving a nonexistent problem, the law dramatically restricts voting. Republicans in the House have already passed it. If the Senate passes it, Trump told an audience in Rome, Georgia, “We’ll never lose a race. For 50 years, we won’t lose a race.”
—
Notes:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2026/02/19/uk-police-arrest-ex-royal-prince-andrew/
https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/19/uk/andrew-mountbatten-windsor-arrest-what-we-know-intl
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2026/02/19/world/yoon-korea-martial-law-president
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-mixes-diplomacy-flattery-peace-board-meeting-2026-02-19/
https://time.com/7379643/trump-board-peace-countries-joining-rejected-invitations-membership/
https://thehill.com/policy/international/5745297-trump-funding-board-of-peace/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2026/02/19/alternative-world-health-organization-proposal/
https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/19/politics/trump-white-house-ballroom-commission
https://www.axios.com/2026/02/10/new-york-who-global-outbreak-alert-response-network
https://www.aol.com/articles/trump-says-hes-totally-exonerated-001041657.html
https://www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/trump-republicans-will-never-lose-save-america-act/
https://newrepublic.com/post/206784/donald-trump-sleep-board-peace-launch
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/02/19/trump-sotu-georgia-rally-00790155
X:
atrupar/status/2024576037477027958?s=20
Bluesky:
governor.ca.gov/post/3mfahp6e7s22w
atrupar.com/post/3mfadaghzzk2k
onestpress.onestnetwork.com/post/3mfa34ad6js2m
With Rasheed Griffith and Diego Sanchez de la Cruz. Here is one excerpt:
Rasheed: Tyler, if El Salvador were to become a success story, what would it likely be a success at first? Manufacturing, migratory investment, investment tourism, or something more unusual? Because those typical answers feel like maybe they have missed the boat.
Tyler: I think El Salvador has turned itself into a very safe country which is great news. I think you and I both saw that when we were there. I think under all scenarios they have a very hard time becoming much richer. So I don’t think it’s manufacturing through no fault of their own. But most of the world is de-industrializing. So manufacturing is not a source of growing employment due to automation. But there’s other issues for Central America such as scale and the cost of electricity. El Salvador is not the best in Latin America for either of those compared say to Northern Mexico. So I don’t see what its relative advantage is. And it’s just a small place.
I checked with ChatGPT. one estimate places about third of the population, living in the United States on average. That’s probably the more ambitious one third. So there’s considerable brain drain. I do think in terms of levels they can do much more with tourism. They have an entire Pacific Coast which is quite underdeveloped, and could be developed very fruitfully. Sell condominiums, have people do more surfing. Try to have something a bit more like the next Acapulco, but even there you’re competing against Cancun among other locations and it will boost their level but it won’t be a permanently higher rate of growth.
And that’s the case with many touristic developments. They don’t self compound forever and give you many other productivity improvements. So I expect El Salvador to do much better but I know a lot of people who read Bukele on social media and they think it’s about to be the next Singapore or something and I just don’t know how they’re gonna do that under really any scenario. I do think it will improve and they’ll get more foreign investment and more tourism.
Rasheed: How much is “much better”? That’s doing a lot of work there.
Tyler: When you look at the Pacific Coast and you and I sat right next to the water [it could develop much more]. So that could create quite a few jobs. But in the longer term steady state I think they’ll have a hard time averaging more than 2% growth. So they can attach themselves more closely to the US economy. They use the dollar and let’s just assume their governance does not go crazy. That’s another risk right? So Bukele or whoever succeeds them could overreach. The checks and balances the constitutional protections there seem quite weak. Another possible risk there that even despite his best efforts the country becomes dangerous again. You look at Costa Rica which had been quite safe and did all the right things, and is larger and has many more resources and that’s now becoming a more dangerous place because it was targeted by external, in some cases Mexican drug traffickers. And that could happen to El Salvador as well. So even if think the current campaign is gonna work forever it doesn’t mean the country stays safe forever. It’s not really in a very safe region. So that’s a side risk which will also keep down foreign investment. I don’t know, I’m I am definitely seeing the upside but not super duper optimistic there.
Plenty of fresh material, with transcript, recommended.
The post I podcast on Spain and Latin America appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Rain panels? Rain panels.
researchers have found a way to capture, store and utilize the electrical power generated by falling raindrops, which may lead to the development of rooftop, power-generating rain panels.
Reading the citations on the original paper, it works kinda but research is ongoing. Science rather than technology still.
RELATED:
Wild Video Shows Entire Mountain Range in China Covered With Solar Panels (2025).
HEY:
Here’s a prediction I made in 2007:
By 2037, China, by virtue of their ability to see and manage environment impact on a larger scale than other countries, will have invented cheap renewables to reduce their dependancy on fossil fuels, and will be working on fixing the atmosphere (perhaps they’ll also have genetically engineered rafts of algae on the Pacific, excreting plastics). The West will rely on Chinese innovation to dig us out of our ecological mess.
Mind you I also predicted that our peak pop media would be from India. Turns out it’s South Korea so I got the country wrong.
Pavlok is a wrist band that gives you electric shocks by remote control:
“I have been biting my nails for 25 years…I shocked myself every time I bit my nails… my husband had a good time shocking me when he caught me biting my nails… this helped with … quitting nail.”
Those ellipses… doing a lot of work… on… the “how it works” page. Also, husband.
You know that friend who won’t eat Taco Bell anymore after she got a terrible case of food poisoning?
That’s how it works: "That’s aversive conditioning. We’ll help you use it to your advantage."
Well why not.
The wrist band also has an alarm clock function.
RELATED:
What do you call execution by electricity? It was debated in 1889 (2021).
Ok. We’re in the middle of the Second Punic War (218–201 BC), part of an existential struggle between Rome and Carthage that lasted over a hundred years.
At the end of the the First Punic War, Carthage was destroyed.
But they returned, established a new empire in Iberia (now Spain) and founded New Carthage on the Iberian coast. Hannibal famously crosses the Alps with elephants etc and lays waste to Italy.
Striking back: Scipio audaciously captures New Carthage, and Carthage in Iberia is on the brink of defeat.
Hannibal’s brother Mago, army destroyed, flees to the island of Menorca (which is beautiful).
There he founds the city of Mahon, which today is the capital and remains a port, and it still bears his name.
BUT MORE IMPORTANTLY, named for the city:
"The typical local egg sauce that has conquered the world is known as mayonnaise."
As mentioned in The Rest is History ep. 641, Hannibal’s Nemesis (Part 2) (Apple Podcasts) along with this grand claim:
the only thing you’d have in a fridge that’s named after a Carthaginian general.
A fact too good to check on ChatGPT but I can’t see why it shouldn’t be true.
The legendary and much-loved email app Eudora was released for free in 1988.
Version 6 introduced MoodWatch, which labeled incoming and outgoing messages with chili peppers and ice cubes, depending on the presence of possibly offensive language. People loved it!
Oh the chili peppers!
You’d write an email with a few curse words and some YELLING and get those chilis.
I vaguely remember there was a feature to enforce a cooling off period? Like you couldn’t send a 3 chili email immediately?
Let’s bring that back:
Apple should license Pavlok technology and hide it under the track-pad. About to send an unhelpfully-worded email to a colleague? A prim little AI instantaneously adjudicates and electroshocks you as you click the Send button, right up the finger.
More posts tagged: filtered-for (121).
This week we’re going to take a look at mercenaries in the ancient Mediterranean world! This was one of the runners-up in the latest ACOUP Senate poll, coming out of quite a few requests to discuss how mercenaries functioned in antiquity. In order to keep the scope here manageable and within my expertise, I am going to confine myself to mercenaries in the Classical (480-323) and Hellenistic (323-31) Mediterranean, but we’ll have more than enough to talk about within that framework.
Mercenary soldiers make frequent appearances in our sources for these periods and as a result also are often prominent in modern representations of warfare in the ancient Mediterranean, showing up, for instance, as a standard feature of strategy games (Rome: Total War; Imperator, etc.) set in the period. That said, while our sources often note the presence of mercenaries, the actual mechanics – who serves, how are they recruited, how are they paid and so on – are often more obscure (though not entirely so!). So that is what we are going to focus on here, not an exhaustive list of every known mercenary outfit in antiquity (you can consult the short bibliography below for that) but rather an outline of the subject with a focus on mechanics.
I do want to note there are two things I couldn’t fit in here. The first was a complete discussion of the Carthaginian army and the different soldiers who served in it. We’re going to do that, but not here and not right away (this year, though, I think). The second is that I do not really get into here how specific mercenary troops fought – Tarantine cavalry tactics, Cretan archery, thureophoroi and so on. We’ve discussed some of that, actually, in our treatment of Hellenistic armies, but the rest of it will have to wait for another day. In my defense, this post is already 7,600 words long.
But first, as always, if you like what you are reading here, please share it; if you really like it, you can support me on Patreon; members at the Patres et Matres Conscripti level get to vote on the topics for post-series like this one! If you want updates whenever a new post appears or want to hear my more bite-sized musings on history, security affairs and current events, you can follow me on Bluesky (@bretdevereaux.bsky.social). I am also active on Threads (bretdevereaux) and maintain a de minimis presence on Twitter (@bretdevereaux).
(Further Reading Note: For a very long time, the standard references on this topic were H.W. Parke, Greek Mercenary Soldiers from the Earliest Times to the Battle of Ipsus (1933) and G.T. Griffith, The Mercenaries of the Hellenistic World (1935). These days, Parke has largely been replaced as a reference by M. Trundle, Greek Mercenaries: from the late archaic period to Alexander (2004), while Griffith remains the standard reference for mercenary service in the Hellenistic period. For a somewhat broader but still Mediterranean focus, S. Yalichev, Mercenaries of the Ancient World (1997) offers a lot of coverage. Note also S. English, Mercenaries in the Classical World to the Death of Alexander (2012), which is one of those examples of a quite solid book languishing as a Pen & Sword title; I’d say Trundle is to be preferred to English, but the latter is by no means bad – I detected no great or terrible errors in it and it may be easier to get a hold of.)
However before we can even dive into outlining mercenary service in antiquity, we need to clarify exactly who we mean when we discuss mercenaries. One of the challenges in discussing mercenaries is that some of our sources – most notably Polybius – are deliberately slippery with their use of terms. As a result, it is often very easy to end up in a situation where a translation (faithfully translated!) describes a given set of soldiers as ‘mercenaries’ who are not, by modern definitions, mercenaries at all! Indeed, much of the notion of ‘mercenary armies’ evaporates when we actually investigate the conditions under which many of these so-called ‘mercenaries’ were recruited.
The primarily culprit here is a Greek word, μισθοφόρος (misthophoros), which is often translated as ‘mercenary’ and indeed had that meaning in antiquity, but our sources – again, particularly Polybius – play fast and loose with the broad meaning of the term and the narrow meaning. The narrow meaning of misthophoros is that of a mercenary soldier – a soldier serving purely for pay with no real attachment to the state they fight for – but the broad meaning is its literal one: ‘wage-bearing’ (a μισθός being a wage, distinct from σίτος or σιτώνιον, both literally “bread [money/supply]” and thus ‘basic maintenance’ – μισθός is pay in excess of basic maintenance).1 So while a misthophoros could be a foreign mercenary serving for pay – that misthos – they could equally be a domestic soldier who, for whatever reason, was paid a wage.
When we think of mercenaries, we generally think of foreign soldiers fighting for a country for the sake of money, rather than any commitment to the cause. Greek authors can easily make this clear by describing soldiers as ξενικός, (xenikos, ‘foreign’), but they often don’t or blur these categories. The issue is that, of course many soldiers who are not mercenaries might still be paid a wage in excess of basic maintenance.
And that brings us to Polybius, the worst offender in the ‘fudging the definition of mercenaries’ category. Polybius is famously the source for the claim that Carthage’s armies were both “foreign” (xenikos) and “mercenary” (misthophoros).2 Generations of readers and scholars have carelessly accepted that description but it is fundamentally a deception. This isn’t the place to fully describe the Carthaginian military system (I discuss this more in my book project!) but the backbone of Carthaginian armies were infantry drawn from Carthage’s North African territories. Polybius is happy to describe these fellows as misthophoroi and let his readership follow his lead into assuming the narrow (‘mercenary’) definition, which is wrong, rather than the broad definition (‘wage-bearing’) where he is accurate.
Polybius rarely lies to your face, but he absolutely bends words and facts to make his arguments seem more plausible. In particular, Polybius is looking to set up a contrast between what he views as the inferiority of Carthage’s ‘mercenary’ armies as compared to the martial excellence and moral purity of Rome’s armies of citizen soldiers. So he wants to emphasize the mercenary nature of Carthage’s armies and minimize the same about Rome.
But here’s how those North African troops were organized. Carthage had expanded its control over many communities in North Africa and evidently alongside the taxes they had to pay to Carthage, part of subordination was that they were liable for conscription. When Carthaginian generals raised armies, after enrolling any Carthaginian citizen volunteers, they would head out into Carthage’s African subject communities and conscript troops (ἐπιλέγειν, ‘to pick out’) from these communities.3 These conscripts were then evidently paid a wage for their service and seem to have functioned something like semi-professional forces, often serving on quite long campaigns. These are not mercenaries by our definition! They are not foreign, but rather subject communities being conscripted from within the territory that Carthage controlled – not very different from how Rome raised the forces of the socii (the main difference being Rome made the socii communities pay their soldiers; Carthage taxes its subjects and then pays the soldiers out of those taxes).
Likewise, we know that early on in Carthaginian history, the Carthaginians recruited Iberian soldiers – men from the Mediterranean coast of Spain – as mercenaries for their armies.4 Fair enough. But by the Second Punic War (218-201), Carthage – or more correctly the Barcids – control the Iberian homelands in Spain. The Barcids – Hamilcar, his son-in-law Hasdrubal the Fair and biological son Hannibal – have moved in with an army, defeated the locals and set themselves up essentially as ‘warlords of warlords’ in a non-state military hierarchy. So when Hannibal and his brother Hasdrubal (different Hasdrubal) raise absolutely massive numbers of Iberians to fight for them, these aren’t mercenaries either, but the native military forces of what are essentially Hannibal’s vassal warlords (what the Romans term reguli, ‘petty kings’). At this point, these Iberians are forces again internal to Carthage’s empire.
Meanwhile Hannibal’s Gauls are also mostly not mercenaries but rather they understand their polities to be allies of Carthage in a joint war against Rome which Hannibal is leading, something made clear in the treaty Carthage makes with Philip V of Macedon, which specifies these allied forces.5 Under that framework relatively few of Carthage’s soldiers in the Second Punic War are actually mercenaries! Instead, Carthage’s army is a patchwork of subject-community conscripts, local allies, vassal levies and troops raised by individual generals through personal relationships – a system that is more akin to the Roman army than any other force in the Mediterranean.
But saying that does nothing for Polybius’ arguments either about Roman martial virtue or his glorification of the Roman citizen-soldier ideal (which one rather gets the impression he thinks the Greeks back home ought to adopt), so he – without ever quite lying – lets the reader believe Carthage’s armies are mostly mercenaries and this is why they are less effective in the field (Polyb. 6.52). It’s a definitional fudge to heighten the contrast.
It isn’t even the only time Polybius plays this trick! In his description of the Ptolemaic army at the Battle of Raphia, Polybius (5.65.6) groups together the cavalry ‘from Greece’ (actual mercenaries from Greece hired by the Ptolemies) with the ‘mercenary [misthophoroi] cavalry’ in a single unit, making it sound like this is a single unit of mercenary cavalry from Greece and elsewhere. But in fact the misthophoroi hippeis, ‘wage-bearing cavalry’ are a well-attested unit of Greek-speaking military settlers in Egypt serving as cavalry.6 Polybius’ narrative is one in which the moribund Ptolemaic army is whipped into shape but a set of mercenary Greek commanders (Polyb. 5.63.8-14), a fresh infusion of Greek martial spirit into the army and this fudge lets him make it seem that while the ‘native’ (Macedonian) Ptolemaic cavalry on the left was wholly defeated it, the battle was won by the – he will let the reader understand incorrectly, mostly mercenary – cavalry on the right, when in fact much of the cavalry on the right is also ‘native’ Greek-speaking cavalry from Egypt.
In practice, Ptolemaic victory at Raphia seems to depend a lot more on the fact that, having at last incorporated native Egyptians into the phalanx, the Ptolemies arrive on the field with almost twice as many heavy infantry phalangites as the Seleucids, forcing Antiochus III to try to oppose the Egyptian phalanx with much lighter forces, to his misfortune.
The result of all of this is we need to be quite careful about how we define ‘mercenaries’ in ancient armies, since our sources are very slippery with their terms, sometimes willing to term any soldiers paid a wage beyond basic maintenance – even if native to the state they fight for – mercenaries. In particular, when we say mercenaries, we mean soldiers recruited from outside a given state, serving for pay. That is to say, these are not domestically recruited professional soldiers (like the legions in the Roman imperial period) or domestically recruited non-citizen auxiliaries (like the imperial Roman auxilia or Egyptians in the Ptolemaic army) or allied forces fighting in an army because their own state is a party to the conflict (like Hannibal’s Gauls or Eumenes II’s Pergamon troops at Magnesia) or vassal levies present because their own polity is subordinated to the main party in the war (like the Roman socii or Hannibal’s Iberians). All of those soldiers are notionally fighting for the state to which they belong. We want soldiers fighting purely for money, for a state to which they do not belong.
That said, there were absolutely mercenaries by this definition in service in the ancient Mediterranean, so lets talk about them!
Our evidence for mercenaries in broader ancient Mediterranean world prior to the Classical period is quite thin, but certainly suggests – as we’d expect – that the profession is an old one, perhaps as old as the state itself. We have evidence, for instance, of foreigners on the standing royal guard of Sargon of Akkad (r. 2334-2279), including a unit of Amorites (a foreign people), which would seem to suggest the hiring of mercenaries even at this early point.7 We can’t be certain why Sargon resorted to foreign soldiers, but it may well have been the same reason that many kings through history maintained foreign, mercenary bodguards: a guard of foreign mercenaries would lack any political connections, making them notionally entirely reliant on the king for their status and thus more loyal. Likewise we have some evidence from the Old Kingdom onward of Nubians in Egyptian military service who were probably mercenaries and even a tomb inscription commemorating an Egyptian Harkhuf who brought back – among other goods – mercenaries for the Egyptian King Merenre Nemtyemsaf I (r. c. 2300) from his trade expeditions into Nubia, an early mercenary-recruiter.8
Greeks seem to have served as mercenaries across the Eastern Mediterranean from an early point as well – we have evidence for Ionian Greeks, seemingly on mercenary service, in Babylon and for Greeks in Egyptian mercenary service by the seventh century.9 We often cannot see these early mercenaries very well – their terms of service, methods of recruitment and so on are obscured to us by the limited evidence – but they serve as a useful reminder that mercenary service was not invented in the Classical period (480-323) when it becomes increasingly visible to us.
That said, I want to focus on how ancient mercenaries might function in the Classical (480-323) and Hellenistic (323-31) periods because this is where my expertise is best.
The first thing that is worth stressing here is that we shouldn’t think of the ancient Mediterranean world in either the Classical or Hellenistic periods as having something like a single linked ‘mercenary market’ that all states had access to. Instead, mercenary recruitment was generally highly localized, with each state having access to different regional ‘pools’ of manpower they could hire. This limitation is somewhat obscured by the tendency both in our sources and in modern scholarship to focus on Greek mercenaries, which can be somewhat deceptive simply because the Aegean ‘mercenary market’ was the one that almost every central or eastern Mediterranean state had some access to. But this is just a complicated way of saying that the states which had contact with Greece (and thus are of concern to our Greek sources) had contact with Greece (and were thus able to contract mercenaries there).
There is a tendency in the popular imagination to image mercenaries functioning as an entirely separate ‘pool’ of manpower from ‘regular armies.’ That is how they function in most strategy games, for instance. But in practice, of course, the supply of men in any of these societies able to equip themselves to fight – something that demanded either a degree of wealth or social standing – was always limited. A ruler recruiting mercenaries was thus reaching into the ‘manpower pool’ of other polities, sometimes in similar ways to how those polities would themselves have recruited their residents. So the question here is essentially how does a leader gain access to the military manpower supply of a foreign polity?
In practice there were two main methods. The first and easiest was through diplomacy: a ruler might, because they already had an existing diplomatic relationship with another power, be able to negotiate access to the military population (however composed socially and economically) that their friendly neighbor controlled. For most of the Classical period in particular, friendship with Sparta acted as the key that unlocked access to Greek mercenaries from the Peloponnese – with various Mediterranean powers being relatively eager to hire Greek mercenaries presumably because the Greek style of heavy infantry combat had proved quite effective during the Greco-Persian Wars (492-478).
Thus for instance in 380, when both Egypt (under the Pharoah Hakor (r. 392-379)) – having revolted from Persian control in 404 – and the Persians were seeking Greek mercenaries, they both courted Athens for access to them: the Egyptians reached out to the Athenian general Chabrias to command a force for them and the Persians responded by sending envoys encouraging the Athenians to recall Chabrias and instead send the general Iphicrates to put together a force for them (Diod. Sic. 15.29.1-4). Likewise, when the Egyptian king – Egypt having revolted from Persian control in 404 – Nectanebo I (r. 379-360) wanted to raise a force of Greek mercenaries in c. 361 he did so directly through one of the Spartan kings, Agesilaus II (Xen. Ages. 2.28-31). This was hardly only a game for non-Greeks: Dionysius I, Tyrant of Syracuse (r. 406-367) used his friendly relationship with Sparta to enlist substantial numbers of mercenaries from the Greek mainland to supplement his Sicilian-Greek army (Diod. Sic. 14.44.2).
The above, of course, is hardly an exhaustive list. That said, as you might imagine, it is often really tricky to separate this kind of mercenary recruitment – where the mercenaries are sometimes coming under the leadership of a ‘mercenary captain’ who is also a political leader in another state – from allied or vassal forces. I keep saying we need to discuss the Carthaginian army another time (we will, I promise), but Carthage recruits this way all the time, with Carthaginian generals maintaining friendly relationships with Numidian princes or Iberian warlords who they can then call upon for soldiers – the line between a mercenary force, an allied force or a vassal force gets extraordinarily blurry in these sort of situations. You have some clear examples of mercenaries drawn up this way – the 4,000 Celtiberians raised by Hasdrubal Gisco, for instance are clearly external mercenaries (Polyb. 1.67.7), the Celtiberian Meseta being outside of Carthage’s political control – but other examples, like the 2,000 Numidians Hamilcar Barca gets in exchange for a pledge to marry his daughter to the Numidian prince Naravas seem to be more allies-and-vassals than mercenaries (Polyb. 1.78.1-9).
Those lines can even blur over time: early on Carthage is sending ambassadors to Spain to negotiate for mercenaries using trade goods (Diod. Sic. 13.44.6, 13.80.2) in what is clearly the sort of mercenaries-recruited-through-diplomacy relationship, which appears to be how Carthage recruits Iberians at least through 241 (Polyb. 1.66-7). But then of course the Barcids go and conquer the place and so post-237 the Iberians we see in Carthage’s army – probably the largest single manpower source in the Second Punic War (218-201) – are not external mercenaries but rather internal vassal levies, raised by local warlords who have been subjugated by the Barcids.
Again, I promise we’ll talk about Carthage’s military machine in detail. Later.
For leaders who could not take the expedient of recruiting mercenaries directly through the state apparatus like this, the alternate method was to recruit mercenaries through the dispatch of a ‘mercenary captain,’ though I should be clear that ‘mercenary captain’ was not generally a specialized career – these tended to be exactly the same sort of men who might hold high office (like that of general) in a Greek polis or be major elites with retinues in a non-state polity. Often these particular men might be politically on the outs, in exile, or in similar conditions – which would put them in the court of a foreign leader who might trust them and want the use of their talents – but of course they retained the kind of experience, influence and connections to put out the call for fighting men in a given region or within a given polity.
The classic example of this sort of recruitment, rendered unusually visible to us by Xenophon’s report of it, was the recruitment of the 10,000 by Cyrus the Younger for his attempt on the throne of Persia in 401. Cyrus recruited his mercenary force in a number of separate detachments to conceal his preparations for civil war. His own territory – he was satrap in Asia Minor – included the poleis of Ionia, where he recruited domestically (Xen. Anab. 1.1.6), but to supplement this Cyrus used his connections to employ a number of prominent Greeks as mercenary recruiters and captains. He sends Clearchus, a Spartan exile into Greece with a large sum of money to recruit troops (feigning that they were for a war in Thrace, Xen. Anab. 1.1.9) in the Chersonese (but probably drawing primarily Peloponnesians). To Thessaly, he sent Aristippus, a Thessalian in political difficulties to recruit there (Xen. Anab. 1.1.10); to Boeotia a Boeotian named Proxenus and in Achaea two Achaeans named Symphalian and Socrates (Xen. Anab. 1.1.11). Again, what we’re told about these fellows implies they were all men of local political significance, who had become friends (read: political allies) of Cyrus and so by giving them access to his money Cyrus could use them to access the manpower pool of Greece.
The system of recruitment doesn’t really change all that much for mercenary recruitment outside of Greece or later in the Hellenistic period.10 As Griffith notes, for the major Hellenistic powers, access to Greek manpower was an important strategic consideration and so the relations of these Macedonian dynasts with friendly Greek cities often included promises to allow free transit for mercenary recruiters (ξενόλογοι) in their territory and to bar the same from the king’s enemies. Equally, we regularly see the appearance of men who – although we do not get the detail Xenophon gives us for the early leaders of the 10,000 – appear to be the same sort of mercenary recruiters discussed above. Thus for instance we get the roster of mercenary captains involved in preparing the Ptolemaic army for Raphia: Echecrates from Thessaly, Phoxidas of Melita, Eurylochus the Magnesian, Socrates the Boeotian and Cnopias of Allaria (Polyb. 5.63.11-12). In 203, Ptolemy V’s court dispatches an Aetolian mercenary captain, Scopas, to his native country in an effort to recruit more Greeks (Polyb. 15.25.16).
Given those two primary means of getting access to sources of men willing to fight for pay – either using diplomatic channels to gain access or employing a local notable who already has access – it is now not hard to see why each state or leader is going to have access to different ‘pools’ of mercenaries, based on who is in their court available and sufficiently trustworthy to be tasked to do mercenary recruiting or on what diplomatic arrangements they have. On the latter point, while in some cases these diplomatic arrangements are essentially between states and basically treaty arrangements, you will note above in many cases they are fundamentally personal in nature: not just ‘is your state friendly with Sparta’ but ‘do you, personally, have a relationship with, or a way to contact a key leader like Agesilaus II personally to have him broker the arrangement.
That said in the Hellenistic Mediterranean there are so very ‘standard’ sources of mercenaries we see show up frequently in a lot of armies. The most obvious and persistent one is Greeks, particularly Greeks from the Aegean – that is, mainland Greece, the Aegean Islands and Ionia. Alexander the Great’s conquests and the states that his empire fragmented into meant that effectively every major Eastern Mediterranean power was Greek-speaking with substantial cultural and personal ties in Greece. Because these kingdoms relied substantially on a ruling class made up to at least some degree (primarily made up in the case of the two largest, Ptolemic Egypt and the Seleucid Kingdom) by Greek military settlers meant that they had a rapacious demand for these fellows. But at the same time, for states whose capitals (Alexandria, Seleucia-on-the-Tigris and the Syrian tetrapolis (which included Seleucia Pieria and Antioch)) were new, large Greek-speaking urban foundations with a river of royal money flowing through them, it meant that any Hellenistic ruler had an ample supply of the sort of fellows who could be sent with a bunch of cash (or promises of cash) to Greece to put out the call to enlist men.
Indeed, if you were such a fellow from Greece – a politically important exile or an experienced military commander on the outs – the obvious place to go was one of the Hellenistic capitals, whose kings could pay you lavishly for your abilities and connections.
The odd result of this persistent demand for Greek mercenaries was the very brief emergence of a fixed ‘clearing house’ of sorts for Greek mercenaries in the fourth century: Taenarum (modern Cape Matapan, on the very southern tip of the Peloponnese). I find that interested students of antiquity often assume, encountering Taenarum in this function, that it must have been one of many such ‘mercenary marketplaces’ but in fact it really does seem to be the only spot quite like it. It was hardly the only place to recruit mercenaries, but it is the only place where it seems like large numbers of prospective mercenaries simply hung out, waiting to be recruited. It seems to have filled this role from at least the 320s onward (see Diod. Sic. 17.108.7, 17.111.1). That said, Taenarum itself seems to have faded in importance and we get no references to it continuing as a mercenary rallying point in the third century, nor does any other place take up its role. Instead, the recruitment of Greeks largely continues along the lines above: through diplomacy or recruiting captains.
A notable sub-component of Greek mercenaries were units of ‘Cretan’ or ‘Neo-Cretan’ troops. These seem invariably to be archer mercenaries, although it is not always clear if ‘Creten’ here signifies them being from Crete or trained to fight in the Cretan manner. Nevertheless such soldiers show up with regularity in the armies of Alexander, the Antigonids, the Ptolmies, the Seleucids and the states of Greece proper, inter alia. This is one thing that is tricky in assessing mercenary units: they’re almost always described with an ethnic marker, but it is sometimes unclear if this indicates where the men are from, or how they fight or both.
The nature of polis armies clearly has something to do with why the Greek world seems to produce mercenaries, perhaps rather more than we might expect. These states, after all, maintain citizen militia forces with both heavy infantry hoplites (much in demand) and lighter infantry troops (peltasts in the Classical period, thureophoroi in the Hellenistic). Since these fellows all self-equip, that means in peacetime there is no shortage of men with the necessary equipment and experience to fill these battlefield roles who might – either out of a desire for adventure or the need for the money – be tempted into mercenary service. The turmoil of polis politics must also have often thrown off these men when they found themselves on the wrong side of a political restructuring in their community – and of course it will also have produced no shortage of exiled or politically unpopular generals and captains to organize them.
We shouldn’t overstate their numbers: Greece was not awash with tens of thousands of mercenaries. It is striking that when Cyrus the Younger essentially attempts to recruit everyone he can in 401, he ends up with 10,000 of them. For the Battle of Raphia (217), when Antiochus III, the Seleucid King, and Ptolemy IV (of Egypt) essentially both try to recruit everyone they can get their hands on, the Seleucids have 5,000 Greek mercenaries and another 1,000 Cretans and the Ptolemies have around 8,000 Greek mercenaries and another 1,000-3,000 Cretans and Neo-Cretans (some number of whom may be settlers) for a total of something like maybe 3,000 or so Cretans and 13,000 Greek mercenaries available. So we might say something to the effect that after 40411 or so, there were around 10,000 to 15,000 or so mercenaries available to be had in the Greek world. Obviously not a small number, but also not a number so large that one could predicate an entire major army on them (but plenty for a small polis to figure they could get away with a mostly mercenary army and spare the rich citizens the annoyance of hoplite service, as some seem to have done).
Another key source of mercenaries were non-state or early/weak-state peoples caught in the orbit of these large kingdoms. We’ve talked about how ‘tribal’ polities – which sometimes consolidated into weak kingdoms (e.g. Odrysian Thrace) – recruit internally through the networks of individual powerful aristocrats (with their retinues). That volatile mixture means these societies have a bunch of local notables who could potentially raise a significant amount of military force for a private agenda, whose power and influence is in part based on their ability to demonstrate martial valor. At the same time, those men also have sons, the ‘youths’ in our sources who also have a social need to demonstrate military virtue and who might get more than a bit ‘antsy’ if there is no conflict at present in which to do so.
Meanwhile neighboring states have access to cash (that is, actual coined money) and prestige goods that these non-state/weak-state societies – with less economic specialization – often do not produce. Those prestige goods are quite valuable for aristocrats (and their sons) in the non-state societies because they can use them to demonstrate their own wealth and connections or as valuable gifts to retainers. The potential for a state to leverage that to recruit these aristocrats – with their retinues – as mercenaries are fairly obvious and through this interaction mercenaries from these societies become a standard feature of Mediterranean armies in the Hellenistic period.
Carthage, of course, has the most notable reputation for this kind of recruitment, recruiting substantial numbers of Iberians and Gauls this way, before Barcid expansion in Spain and Hannibal’s invasion of Italy fundamentally change those relationships into a non-mercenary character (Diod. Sic. 13.44, 13.80; Polyb. 1.17.4, 1.67.7). As an aside because this fits nowhere else, Carthage also seems to have been able to access at least some sources of Greek mercenaries, but one gets the sense these were never a major part of their manpower pool.
The three major Hellenistic powers utilized these sources as well, with the most consistent non-state/weak-state mercenary draws being Gauls and Thracians. The Seleucids also regularly employed Gallic mercenaries, but whereas Carthage’s Gauls were drawn from what today would by southern France and northern Italy, the Seleucid supply came from the Galatians, a Gallic people who had migrated from the lower Danube through Greece (quite violently) before settling in central Anatolia; some 3,000 infantry and 2,500 cavalry of this sort are part of the Seleucid array at Magnesia. The Ptolemies, able in the third century to project substantial naval power of the Eastern Mediterranean, also employed smaller numbers of Gallic and Thracian mercenaries, which show up at the only Ptolemaic order of battle we have, the one for Raphia. The Antigonids, controlling the Macedonian heartland – which is next to Thrace and Gallic peoples in the Danube River Basin – also employed substantial numbers of these as mercenaries. Perseus (r. 179-168) when he brought his whole army together for review, had 2,000 Gauls and 3,000 ‘free’ Thracians (along with 2,000 allied Thracians from the Odrysian Kingdom) in his army, alongside 3,000 Cretan mercenaries and around 1,000 Greeks from various places.12
Other sources of mercenaries appear only briefly in our sources rather than showing up consistently. The Seleucid King Demetrios I recruited Jewish mercenaries (I. Macc. 10.36). The Seleucids also employed a substantial number of troops from areas around the edges of their empire – Dahae, Thallians, Carians, Cilicians – who might be mercenaries but in many cases might equally by subjects or vassals (Livy 37.40). The Mamertines, who will end up starting the First Punic War were a body of Campanian mercenaries who were hired by Agathocles, tyrant of Syracuse (r. 317 – 289) and afterwords set themselves up as the rulers of Messina in Sicily.
That said, Italy is notable by how it doesn’t throw off large numbers of mercenaries (neither does Carthaginian North Africa, once we cut through Polybius’ fudging). The Carthaginians employ some mercenaries (but again, fewer than generally supposed), but they do not seem to allow anyone else to really hire from their own recruiting pools, while the Romans largely do not employ any meaningful number of mercenaries and also appear to keep their military resources locked up. The fact that the Roman Republic is essentially a non-actor in the mercenary market – neither a supplier nor a consumer – is remarkably striking, though it makes a degree of sense when you remember that the Roman military-economic machine generated soldiers in tremendous quantity (with their equipment) but relatively little hard cash. Why pay for the one thing you have in abundance? The more curious question is why no one else tries (or succeeds?) to hire Romans. In any case, Rome and Carthage both seem notably not to generate the sort of ‘floating supply’ of mercenary military men that Greece does.
We can conclude very briefly with a sense of how mercenaries might serve and be paid.
For the most part, when we hear about mercenaries, they are being raised for specific campaigns, but every so often we get hints of standing bodies of mercenary troops as well. I’ve already mentioned mercenary royal guards, but we also see mercenaries serving as effectively garrison forces for states they did not want to keep their citizen-militia or military-settler population (raised for major campaigns) ‘in rotation’ in peacetime. The Ptolemies seem to have maintained substantial garrisons this way – we’re told in preparation for the Battle of Raphia that the advisors of Ptolemy IV put together a force of some eight thousand mercenaries which seem to mostly have been drawn from garrison duty, particularly in Ptolemaic overseas holdings (Polyb. 5.65.4). Interestingly, we also see the Greek poleis, still fighting their smaller wars in the shadows of Hellenistic giants, sometimes raising small standing units of paid citizen soldiers and they sometimes employed mercenaries (Athens quite frequently), but the impression, sometimes given in the older scholarship that the Hellenistic period was an age of Greek warfare-by-condottieri is overblown: citizen soldiers remained the mainstay of polis forces.13
Mercenaries seem generally to have served in defined units under the captains who recruited them. In our sources, these units generally show up with ethnic signifiers, which often indicate both where mercenaries were from and also how they fought. Mercenaries were expected to provide their own equipment for a specific style of fighting, which naturally restricted who could be a mercenary. If you wanted to be a hoplite mercenary, you needed to have hoplite equipment! However this meant mercenary forces could be a way for a state to ‘buy’ a kind of warfare it could not produce effectively itself, with the most obvious example – but hardly the only one- being the Persian appetite for Greek heavy infantry.
The precise terms of payment varied and were often negotiated and sometimes renegotiated as campaigns wore on. Unfortunately, we cannot see the payment terms of basically any non-Greek mercenaries clearly, so we’re largely in the dark about how Iberian, Thracian, Gallic, etc. mercenaries were paid. Diodorus’ indication that Carthaginian mercenary recruiters went to Spain μετὰ πολλῶν χρημάτων, “with lots of stuff” is frustrating in its vagueness, since χρήματα could equally be trade goods or actual coined money (Diod. Sic. 13.44.6). What is, I think, fairly clear is that Carthage is not – pace Hoyos – paying their mercenaries nearly as much or in the same way as the Hellenistic states of the East, if for no other reason than their budget probably could not support it.14
By contrast, we can see the arrangements for the pay of Greek mercenaries fairly well. Compensation, while subject to negotiation generally came in two components: what we might term ‘maintenance’ (σίτος, ‘bread [money]’ in the Classical period, σιτώνιον or σιταρχία sometimes in Hellenistic sources, with the same meaning), essentially an allowance for the soldier to survive, and the actual wages for labor (μισθός, ‘wages’ or ὀψώνιον, ”relish [money] ‘salary,’ literally ‘relish money,’ from ὄψον, ‘relish, delicacies, sauces’ – anything used to go with bread to make a tasty meal – making ὀψώνιον wonderfully evocative phrase, essentially ‘pay for the nicer things in life’).
Naturally, the maintenance pay had to be handled at least a little bit in advance and had to be doled out to any kind of soldier in installments as their service progressed. Any kind of wage payment in our sources is almost always expressed as a daily sum, but mercenaries probably did not receive their σιτώνιον on a daily basis but probably in larger pay periods. These expenses could, of course, be handled in two ways: mercenaries might receive an allowance with which to buy rations from local markets (in cash this is the narrow meaning of σιτώνιον) or, of course, they might be issued rations and other basic supplies, which goes by the term σιτομετρία (literally ‘measured bread’ but really ‘rations’).
By contrast Greek and Macedonian soldiers expected wages – the μισθός – to be paid in cash, specifically in silver.15 Whereas maintenance pay came in advance (albeit sometimes in installments), μισθός came at the end – either of a pay-period or a campaign. The ideal way to handle wage expenses was to keep them ‘on the books:’ soldiers were issued their maintenance pay at regular intervals but merely had their actual wages credited to their account – the idea being that soldiers would then be ‘cashed out’ at the end of the campaign. That freed the army (and the soldiers) from the requirements to carry huge amounts of minted silver coinage with them wherever they went…but of course also gave the employer all sorts of cheeky opportunities to withhold or delay payment. Generals might often promise to find the money for wages from the loot and spoils of a successful campaign (e.g. the Spartan Teleutias, Xen. Hell. 5.1.14-18); this worked fantastically well if you fought for Alexander the Great and perhaps less so if you fought for basically anyone else.
We can see the obvious catch that system creates in the start of Carthage’s Mercenary War (241-237; Polyb. 1.66-72). Under the terms of the peace at the end of the First Punic War (264-241), Carthage had withdrawn its army from Sicily and brought it back to North Africa, but Carthage was financially exhausted by the war and caught in a bind: the campaign being over, it now had to settle the arrears of the men’s pay. Those arrears were considerable – this had been a really long war – and Carthage simply didn’t have the money. The Carthaginians initially are able to kick the can down the road by scraping together money for the maintenance pay – they can scrape together the σιτώνιον – but absent the ability to pay the arrears of μισθός, the army – both mercenaries and also regular North African soldiers (who made up the bulk of the force, but were paid a wage as well) – mutinied and then backed a revolt of Carthage’s subject communities in North Africa, which was eventually put down by Hamilcar Barca.16
For a mercenary employer who found himself unable to pay out the silver demanded by his mercenaries, the normal result was either mutiny or the mercenary unit melting away. However for larger states, there was an alternative to pay in something other than silver the soldiers would accept and here the obvious candidate was land. This certainly seems to be a significant part of what is happening with Hellenistic military settlements: Greek and Macedonian soldiers, serving in East (where Macedonian dynasts have land and peasants in abundance) are being paid at the end of their service in part by lavish plots of land (often large enough to live as rentier elites, rather than as farmers!) presumably in lieu of hard cash the king might not be prepared to spend. And as an added bonus the land both sustains the former-mercenary-now-settler’s household in perpetuity and at the same time renders him (and his descendants) liable for future military service. That said, such settlements could run into problems: recall that many of Alexander the Great’s less-than-fully-willing military settlers revolted when he died, seeking to just go home (Diod. Sic. 18.7.1).
We have a few examples of attested pay rates, invariably for Greek or Macedonian soldiers. While maintenance was often handled in kind, the standard rate of μισθός for military service is almost invariably a drachma (=six obols) a day, which as we’ve noted before was a good wage – a bit above typical – for a day’s work. The evidence for maintenance pay as a money-amount is exceedingly tricky (epigraphic and papyrus evidence that often comes with interpretive problems) but 2-3 obols per day seems to be the ‘cash value’ of a mercenary’s maintenance, making a Greek or Macedonian mercenary’s ‘gross pay’ around 8 or 9 obols per day. That was also, coincidentally, seems to be about what the Seleucid and Ptolemaic kingdoms – competing for the scarce supply of ethnically Greek and Macedonian manpower – seem to have paid their domestic Greek and Macedonian (but not native) soldiers (once you adjust for the lighter Ptolemaic currency standard). By contrast, the Antigonids and Romans, conscripting their own peasants, seem to have paid them 4 and 2 obols (=3 Roman asses) per day, respectively.
If you are wondering why the Seleucids and Ptolemies are ‘overpaying’ so badly for their military manpower…questions answered in my book project! Which I promise will, at some point, actually come out! Doubtless it will arrive at roughly the same time your mercenary pay arrears are cashed out.
No one is getting rich on a drachma a day (plus maintenance), but on the flipside a mercenary serving on a campaign or garrison deployment already had their expenses covered and might get to the end with some loot and – once they were ‘cashed out’ – a chunky pile of very spendable silver. For substantially unmonetized17 non-state peoples, this might be one of the few ways to get a chunk of cash, which in turn could be a significant status marker and provide economic and social opportunities otherwise unavailable at home. Assuming your employer actually paid your wages, this was not a bad economic bargain.
The rise of Rome brought a slow but steady end to this system, because the Romans largely didn’t use it and in any case steadily extinguished all of the other states that did. While it is common to see the armies of the Late Roman Republic or early Imperial period also termed ‘mercenary armies,’ that is really a misnomer. The armies of the Late Roman Republic were still mostly citizen-soldier armies, while the army Augustus and Tiberius created was a long-service professional standing army recruited from citizens and subjects of Rome, not a mercenary force. It is striking that the braggart mercenary soldier – a staple stock character of Hellenistic comedy – appears in Roman comedy in Plautus’ Miles Gloriosus (set in Ephesus in the Greek world), written in the late third century BC as the Romans are beginning to expand beyond Italy in a two-century run of conquest that will render the braggart mercenary himself a thing of the past.
Aalto is turning to Australia as a key operating base to bolster the business case for initial commercial services of its stratospheric pseudo-satellite over Japan, now pushed to 2027 amid regulatory hurdles and ongoing system-integration work.
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NASA is targeting a March 6 launch for Artemis 2 after completing a countdown test with few problems.
The post NASA targeting March 6 for Artemis 2 launch appeared first on SpaceNews.
The company opened a new facility in El Segundo to support Millennium’s missile-warning satellite backlog
The post Boeing to boost production of missile-tracking sensors for military satellites appeared first on SpaceNews.
NASA completed a second wet dress rehearsal for the Artemis 2 mission on Feb. 19 without any of the hydrogen leaks seen in the first such test earlier this month.
The post NASA completes second Artemis 2 fueling test appeared first on SpaceNews.
I like this one.
As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.
Up and by water with Commissioner Pett to Deptford, and there looked over the yard, and had a call, wherein I am very highly pleased with our new manner of call-books, being my invention. Thence thinking to have gone down to Woolwich in the Charles pleasure boat, but she run aground, it being almost low water, and so by oars to the town, and there dined, and then to the yard at Mr. Ackworth’s, discoursing with the officers of the yard about their stores of masts, which was our chief business, and having done something therein, took boat and to the pleasure boat, which was come down to fetch us back, and I could have been sick if I would in going, the wind being very fresh, but very pleasant it was, and the first time I have sailed in any one of them. It carried us to Cuckold’s Point, and so by oars to the Temple, it raining hard, where missed speaking with my cosen Roger, and so walked home and to my office; there spent the night till bed time, and so home to supper and to bed.
SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 rocket carrying 25 Starlink satellites from California early Saturday, after days of delay.
Liftoff from Space Launch Complex 4 East at Vandenberg Space Force Base occurred at 1:04:19 a.m. PST (4:04:19 a.m. EST / 0904:19 UTC). The company had originally planned to launch the Starlink 17-25 mission Feb. 18 but it was delayed three times due to severe weather in central California. The rocket took a southerly trajectory on departure from the launch pad.
SpaceX was flying Falcon 9 first stage B1063 for a 31st time. With this flight it is the joint-second most flown booster in the SpaceX fleet. It previously launched 20 batches of Starlink satellites, three batches of Starshield satellites for the U.S. military, and the Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich, DART, Transporter-7, Iridium OneWeb, SDA-0B and NAOS missions
After separating from the first stage, the booster targeted a landing on the drone ship, ‘Of Course I Still Love You,’ positioned downrange in the Pacific Ocean. Touching down on the deck of the autonomous landing platform about eight and half minutes after launch.
The 25 Starlink satellites were due to deploy from the rocket’s upper stage about an hour after launch.
Links for you. Science:
SARS-CoV-2 reinfections and subsequent risk of hospital-diagnosed post-acute sequelae in Denmark (2020–2022): a nationwide cohort study (caveat on frequency: “…diagnoses were made in hospital settings and thus predominantly capture severe presentations. As a result, only a fraction of individuals experiencing post-acute sequelae are likely represented, underestimating the true risk of sequelae following SARS-CoV-2 infection.”)
Public Health Workers Are Quitting Over Assignments to Guantánamo
RFK’s Overhauled Autism Committee Is Even Worse Than It Looks. Kennedy has stacked another HHS panel with his fellow travelers in the anti-vaccine and pseudoscience world.
The Unlikely New Director of U.S. Environmental Health Research
New Mexico warns against consuming raw milk after newborn dies from listeria. While the New Mexico Department of Health said it can’t pinpoint the baby’s exact cause of death, officials believe it could have been linked to the mother’s drinking raw milk during pregnancy.
We have a miraculous anti-aging vaccine. Why aren’t more people getting it?
Expansion Microscopy Has Transformed How We See the Cellular World
Other:
How the men in the Epstein files defeated #MeToo
Federal Agent in Coon Rapids: ‘The more people that you lose in Minnesota, you then lose a voting right to stay blue.’ (these are the dumbest federal agents I’ve ever heard of)
Why Delia Ramirez thinks DHS needs to be dismantled
Gelernter tells dean he stands by praising student’s looks to Epstein
Twitter is not real life. Voters who get their news from Twitter are markedly different in our polls than the median voter (clock stopped twice a day…)
Epstein Files Reveal How Pathetic Richard Dawkins & Other Men Are
What ICE Should Have Learned from the Fugitive Slave Act
Snowstorms Are Hell for Wheelchair Users—But They Don’t Have to Be
Former Stanford professor Nathan Wolfe ’92 planned sexual behavior research, described interns with Epstein
Trump’s New “Prison Camp” Threat Unleashes Fury Even in MAGA Country
The brothers behind Platform Ventures could choose not to sell out Kansas City to ICE
The Church at the Center of Don Lemon’s Arrest Has Ties to Christian Nationalism
Inside the resistance with Will Stancil (noted without comment)
This is what democracy looks like
What it’s like to see ICE tear gas kids
ICE Detains MAGA Influencer Who Claimed Only ‘Crooks’ Get Deported
After Charles Tillman transformed football, he joined the FBI. Then the immigration raids started
Trump Administration Knew About Minnesota Fraud And Did Nothing. A former USDA official tells HuffPost that his superiors ignored the case that would inspire today’s deadly immigration crackdown.
Mamdani puts his pen where his mouth is on immigration
Waymo admits robotaxis are “guided” by humans in the Philippines
GOP’s new voter suppression bill won’t SAVE anything
The Washington Post Vision
CNBC host toys around with racist conspiracy theory
How Things Work
Trump’s latest extortion threat should get him impeached
The Roots of the Youth Sports Gold Rush
Lower courts can’t fix what’s broken in Minnesota
DOGE Lives On Through Russell Vought. Trump’s White House OMB director has quietly institutionalized the government demolition agenda set in motion by Elon Musk’s wrecking crew.
U.S. Dealers In Full Panic Mode After Canada Green-Lights Chinese Cars
Before Trump ban, universities were slowly making faculties more diverse
Congratulations to Alysa Liu for winning a gold medal in the women’s individual figure skating. It was the first time in a long time it felt like watching figure skating wasn’t just waiting around for a catastrophe, but was actually fun to watch. And she did it her own way, with her own style. Superb job.
That said, it’s also worth noting her background, given the political climate: she is the daughter of an asylum seeker, who had to flee China in 1990. It’s hard to think about what would have happened to him, had he applied for asylum more recently, and had to appeal to the Trump administration.
We are better with her.
The language and arguments in the Supreme Court’s seismic slap down of Donald Trump’s signature tariff declarations are highly technical.
But the meaning for anyone not Donald Trump cannot be mistaken. Trump overstepped in ignoring Congress to set a new set of sales taxes called tariffs, interpreting presidential power in a way that the court could not stomach.
Trump vowed to evade the court’s ruling, trashing the justices who opposed him, and refusing to see that this was about a Constitutional line rather than about his ability to act unilaterally.
Finally, the court noticed that Trump thinks himself the center of a universe accountable to no one and must come to Congress for tax policy.
Still, the 6-3 decision on behalf of several businesses who sued over misuse of emergency powers likely will carry more political punch than any immediate change in prices or Trump arbitrariness on import costs.
Trump said he was “deeply disappointed” in the decision, saying he was “ashamed” of justices ruling against him, calling them unpatriotic and open to “foreign” influence. He insisted that he was issuing justification of executive orders to shift existing tariffs to other relevant statues. Trump insisted on viewing the whole issue as one about U.S. economic and diplomatic leverage with other countries, and not about separation of powers. Trump concluded there is now “certainty” about the rightness of tariffs, misstating what the decision found.
In Trump’s interpretation, he still has sweeping tariff powers despite the court decision – not acknowledging that tariffs are taxes paid by Americans. Indeed, the court said it was not ruling on tariff powers not argued in this case.
The Ripples
The decision is sure to spread global chaotic responses about the practical details – and more lawsuits. For businesses large and small that need certainty for planning months ahead, the welcome news that Trump’s tariffs are illegal may sound good today – but without a plan for what’s ahead.
The six justices voting to halt tariffs may think they kept the issue as narrow as possible, but the practical details will echo globally and repeatedly. It was only in the dissent from Justice Brett Kavanaugh, joined by Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, that the court acknowledged that the practical impact of unraveling tariffs would be a “mess.”
In fact, the majority opinion spelled out no details about what is supposed to happen next, and specifically whether refunds are in order and to whom. Even if a business were to receive a refund, how would that come to you and me?
If you think there will be a check in the mail with the extra couple thousand dollars your household was forced to pay for imported goods from wine and coffee to cars and appliances, forget it. So too for small businesses backed into having to raise prices to account for tariffs or manufacturers whose supply lines have been disrupted or companies overseas forced to find new markets.
The Trump administration already had indicated that it will find more legally acceptable means to address what it sees as unfair trade deficits with different countries.
Inside The Decision
At least, the decision squashed one repeated Trump lie: The decision makes clear that tariffs are a tax paid by Americans on every imported shirt and fruit, not some punishing fee paid by foreign governments.
Given the sheer magnitude of the effects of halting Trump’s central economic plank, the first order of business will focus on how Trump resets. Too many businesses in the U.S. and abroad need clarity, and Trump needs to save political face.
If Trump resorts to more legally acceptable ways that still avoid Congress and insist that only he can set fees on imports, he will pay a political price payable in November. If he goes to Congress now basically to ask for the permission he skipped earlier, he will face bipartisan questions about the arbitrariness with which he has dealt tariffs almost at random.
Trump has one rule: Trump decides. The rest of the world has another, based on consistency and law.
Much of the language of the decision and dissent center on phrasing in the emergency economic powers act known as IEEPA that allows the president to “regulate . . . importation” and whether tariffs are taxes. They are filled with case law and historical references on each side, but, of course, are light on detailing just how arbitrary Trump has been about setting differing tariff rates based on some nation’s domestic politics, like Brazil, or Trump’s perception of tone of expressed cooperation, like Canada or Switzerland.
For Trump critics, yesterday felt a breakthrough in the court’s continuing support for growing presidential powers in dismantling federal agencies, in dismissals of federal employees, in ignoring congressional limits on spending in specific ways. As a vote of confidence in separation of powers for taxation, there even was a hope that a moribund Congress could stand up and demand its say not only about taxes and tariffs, but on ICE tactics, the release of Epstein documents, White House grift allegations, on education, environment and health policies.
That this court, with its right-leaning majority, could support a clear Constitutional provision felt like a stand against authoritarian rule.
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On Thursday, the Center for American Progress, a prominent left-leaning think tank that often cultivates policy ideas later adopted by the Democratic Party, proposed a two-year freeze on the prices of 24 food items, such as strawberries and ground beef.
Grocers would voluntarily agree to capping the cost of food in exchange for paying lower fees on credit card transactions, according to the proposal, which was written by a group led by Jared Bernstein, who chaired the White House Council of Economic Advisers during Joe Biden’s presidency.
That, in effect, would force credit card companies to absorb the cost of subsidizing food purchases, a highly unusual arrangement. A draft of the proposal said the Federal Reserve could force credit card companies to do so via its regulatory oversight, though that provision was removed after questions from The Washington Post.
It is not clear how else the government might persuade credit card companies to foot the bill, nor how many grocers would agree.
Here is more from The Washington Post. Elsewhere in The Great Forgetting, three Supreme Court Justices seem to have forgotten what the Constitution says.
The post The Great Forgetting, a continuing series appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Let’s continue with the AI theme. We’ve done the dire warnings of doom, so now let’s be a little more pragmatic and optimistic.
A friend called me up the other day and asked me what I thought Democrats could offer Americans in terms of economic policy in this day and age. We discussed the limitations of the progressive economic program that coalesced in the late 2010s and was implemented during the Biden years. We then talked about possibilities for how AI might affect the economy, and what Democrats could offer in various scenarios. I promised my friend I would write a post outlining my thoughts, so here you go.
My basic argument is that the next Democratic policy offering should be robust to uncertainty. AI technology is changing very fast, and it will probably end up changing other technologies very quickly as well — robotics, energy, software, and so on. That rapid technological progress creates great uncertainty. Looking even just 10 years into the future, we basically don’t know:
What kind of jobs humans will be doing (and which will pay well)
What the macroeconomy — inflation, growth, and employment — is going to look like
How the distributions of income and wealth will change
Those are essentially all of the biggest questions in economics, and we don’t really know any of them. So what do you do when you can’t predict the future? You come up with ideas that will be likely to work no matter what the future ends up looking like. In other words, you try to be robust. AI is like a storm that’s buffeting the whole economy; Democrats need to be the rock in that storm.
In fact, I have several ideas for how Democrats can create a robust economic offering even in the face of radical uncertainty. My three basic principles are:
Abundance
Government taking an ownership stake in the corporate system
Policies to promote human work
Before I talk about those, however, I want to briefly go over what the 2010s progressive program looked like, and why Democrats can’t just keep pushing that.
The progressive economic ideas of the 2010s were, in large part, a reaction to the Great Recession and to the rise of inequality since the 1970s. But they also had their roots in political considerations — progressive activism, and the need to manage the emerging Democratic political coalition.
In a nutshell, the progressive program was:
Have the government spend money to sustain full employment
Spend money on subsidizing health care, education, and child care
Spend money on cash benefits for people with children
Spend money on mitigating climate change
Fund this spending by taxing billionaires
Attack corporate power in order to reduce political opposition to the progressive agenda
This was a pretty cohesive program — there was at least a bit of real research to back up most of these ideas,1 and these proposals seemed like they would both satisfy the core Democratic interest groups while also potentially having broad appeal.
But it turned out there were lots of problems with this approach. The first, as I wrote back in 2024, was that it basically assumed we were still in the macroeconomic environment of 2009 or 2016:
In 2009 or maybe even 2016, the economy still had a shortage of aggregate demand — spending more money had the potential to create jobs while also bringing inflation back to target. In fact, a high-pressure economy, along with higher local minimum wage laws, did raise low-end wages disproportionately in the 2010s.
But by the time progressives actually got into power in 2021, progressives’ diagnosis was no longer correct. In the years after the pandemic, America’s main macroeconomic problem was no longer underemployment — it was inflation. And by pushing aggregate demand even higher with massive deficit spending, the Biden administration probably exacerbated that inflation.
The warnings were there in advance. In 2021, the macroeconomist Olivier Blanchard used a standard, simple Keynesian economic analysis — the same kind of back-of-the-envelope exercise that would have been screaming “spend more money!” back in 2009 — to predict that Biden’s American Rescue Plan would raise inflation. Progressives ignored these warnings and charged ahead anyway. The result — exacerbated inflation — probably contributed marginally to Kamala Harris’ election loss in 2024.
The second problem was the natural tension between providing jobs in care industries and actually providing care services cheaply to the American populace. If you subsidize health care, education, and child care, the prices of these things will go up. This is exactly what happened with artificially cheap student loans, which drove up the cost of college. I pointed this out in 2021:
The progressive retort was that it doesn’t matter if the price that care providers charge goes up, as long as the price consumers pay goes down. The subsidy makes up the difference — it makes care services feel cheaper to the public, but also creates jobs in those industries. This is expensive, of course, but progressives planned to square the circle by taxing billionaires.
The problem was that the billionaire taxes never happened. Biden and Harris and progressives in Congress made a lot of noise about taxing the super-duper-rich, but it turns out that it’s very hard to get super-duper-rich people’s money. It’s a lot easier to get money from millionaires instead of billionaires, but millionaires had become the Democrats’ base, so they were reluctant to do this. And so instead, subsidies for care industries became giant deficit-funded make-work programs.2
Meanwhile, core parts of the progressive agenda turned out not to be as popular as their creators had hoped. Cash benefits failed to garner broad support, and Americans ended up not caring that much about climate change.
This is not to say that the progressive economic program failed completely, either in an economic or in a political sense. A high-pressure economy really did lift wages at the bottom and reduce wage inequality. Biden’s cash benefits and climate subsidies did some good for a while. And the program probably did help Biden get elected in 2020.
Overall, though, the progressive program was pretty underwhelming. And more importantly, the economic situation has changed so much that the program is no longer relevant. Democrats can’t just cruise on autopilot on the promise of more health care subsidies, more child tax credits, more green jobs, and more promises of billionaire taxes. In the late 2020s and early 2030s, this will be neither a winning program nor an effective one.
Which brings me to my own ideas about what the Democrats should do next.
The world is on fire – and I’ve often been at a loss for how to constructively contribute to public discourse. For decades, I have shared knowledge gained through fieldwork to offer a different perspective on complex sociotechnical matters. Too often these days, I find myself banging my head against the wall while navigating the cacophony of anguish that is emerging in all directions. For better or worse, I chose this time to turn my attention locally. I have found joy trying to find my footing as a professor and think more directly about how to prepare the next generation. And amidst it all, I’ve also had a series of wins, which I thought I’d share.
While putting the finishing touches on the book, I’ve been working on three new research projects. I am super grateful to the Sloan Foundation for naming me as a 2026 Sloan Research Fellow to support this work.
This semester, I’m going to keep chugging along on these different projects – while teaching “Theories to Think With” and “Trust & Safety in Online Platforms” – but I hope to have a lot more research and ideas to share shortly.
In the meantime, stay safe and protect your neighbors. And keep reading history… it’s a good reminder that this too shall change. (My book this week was Overthrow – which is basically the history of US’s obsession with regime change from the author who documented the CIA coup in Iran in 1953. Le sigh.)
PS: I also pay to maintain a newsletter at Ghost.io. Subscribe there to not miss anything!
1. Firms are replacing freelancers with AI.
2. General disorder does not seem to be increasing.
3. Fei-Fei Li.
4. India does deepfakes of the dead. It is an interesting question which cultures want this most.
5. Post-patent, future markets in everything? Data, at the very least.
6. Isn’t Harvard supposed to be cutting back?
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A year ago, I speculated that there might be some sort of deep underlying link between two broad trends of the 21st century—the rise of artificial intelligence and the collapse of fertility. In retrospect, I believe I missed the most important connection—replacement anxiety:
The fear among some white people that their race will be replaced by non-whites, due to trends in fertility and immigration.
The fear among workers that their jobs will be replaced by AI.
The fear among US policymakers than China will replace us as the world’s hegemon. This fear is linked to both China’s large population, and its success in AI research.
The fear among Taiwanese people that their democracy will be replaced with the PRC’s autocracy. The Taiwanese see TSMC as a sort of “silicon shield”.
The fear among older conservatives that our Christian culture will be replaced by a younger generation that welcomes gay marriage, trans rights, polyamory and rejects organized religion. These cultural practices are often seen as being linked to Bay Area rationalism.
The fear that often difficult to deal with human spouses will be replaced by compliant artificial spouses.
I’m sure that one could find numerous other examples.
Throughout history, older people have often worried that their way of life was disappearing, as society evolved toward a new set of cultural practices. But the world has never seen anything like AI—or more specifically what AI is expected to eventually be capable of doing. And the world has never seen anything like the enormous (and somewhat uneven) decline in fertility that is currently underway. In the past, high birth rates assured that populations bounced back from even a devastating plague or famine.
In a sense, the replacement of humans with machines may have already begun. In my view, the best theory for the decline in fertility is “it’s the phones”. People talk about how specific aspects of Korean society have pushed fertility down to 0.80, but what’s caused fertility in places like Chile, Thailand and Poland to fall close to 1.0? No country specific factor like “more tall apartment buildings” can fully explain what is going on all over the world. That is, nothing except a truly global cultural change—like spending all your time mesmerized by entertainment on your phone. And while fertility has been falling for decades, the truly dramatic decline is associated with the smartphone.
[As an aside, only 9% of Americans owned a TV set in 1950. That increased to more than 50% in 1955. The birth rate in the US peaked in 1957, and then declined sharply for several decades. Before it was the phone, it was the TV. Stop inventing things that are more fun than children!!]
Because the decline in fertility is greater in more developed countries, residents increasingly fear being overwhelmed by immigrants from poorer parts of the world. A similar anxiety is developing with respect to AI, especially among more populist voters. Here’s the FT:
“We support Trump’s efforts to win the AI race, but we don’t want to do it at the expense of human dignity,” said Byron Keelin, head of Freedom Principle, a rightwing group that this summer rallied its members to oppose the president’s attempt to ban state legislation. “We are trying to protect citizens from being taken advantage of by big corporations.”
In Washington, Josh Hawley, Missouri’s senior senator and one of Trump’s strongest supporters, has warned the AI revolution is “working against the working man, his liberty and his worth”. He has introduced federal legislation that would force AI companies to verify users’ ages and ban them from providing virtual “companions” to minors. . . .
Residents of Independence, meanwhile, feel whiplashed by the pace of change.
Garrett said: “I’ve listened to [Elon Musk] talk about . . . how quickly it is happening and I don’t know, I just think sometimes things need to be slowed down a little bit, put some thought into it.”
Replacement anxiety occurs along many different dimensions. Much of the NIMBY movement in America is motivated by a desire to preserve the character of specific residential neighborhoods, with single family homeowners especially leery of replacement by lower income renters. But AI and fertility decline seem like special cases, likely to supercharge replacement anxiety in a wide range of areas. I suspect that these two issues will be the dominant factors driving political change during the 21st century.
PS. Off topic, but did you notice that the US trade deficit was virtually unchanged in 2025 (falling from $903.5 billion to $901.5 billion):
By country, the shortfall with China narrowed sharply — reaching about $202 billion, the smallest in more than 20 years and a reflection of the higher tariffs Trump put on Chinese imports. Trade has instead been largely rerouted through other countries like Mexico and Vietnam, where deficits widened to respective records.
Meantime, the gap with Taiwan last year widened to a record $146.8 billion, while the annual shortfall with Canada narrowed.
Meanwhile, total employment in manufacturing declined by 108,000 during 2025. Investment in new factories also declined. Interested readers may wish to revisit one my post-Liberation Day posts, where I discussed misconceptions about trade balances:
And contrary to the Treasury claim, tariffs reduce both imports and exports and have little or no effect on trade balances (as we saw during the first Trump administration.) That’s not to suggest that the trade deficit cannot get smaller—deficits generally shrink during recessions. Trump should hope his plan once again does not “work”.
He got lucky, it didn’t work. No recession.
Next time you meet an advocate of “industrial policy”, ask them how Trump’s tariff policy is working out.
The world we live in is as tumultuous as ever. Our everyday lives are often more defined by disorder than stability. We’re inevitably faced with challenges each day, and the chaos of our days can have a definite impact. But how we make sense of this chaos affects our ability to respond effectively, innovatively, and creatively.
Strength and resilience are the two most foundational aspects for navigating these turbulent waters. Yet, they remain in the abstract without implementing practical techniques. For those interested in learning how to support mental well-being more deeply, pursuing an online masters degree in mental health counseling can help turn everyday techniques into meaningful, professional skills.
Stay with us as we discuss techniques to help you thrive during chaos and upheaval.
When the world around you feels like it is spiralling out of control, the first and foremost step is to narrow your focus. While it’s important to stay informed, constantly bombarding yourself with information about things that you cannot control can severely erode your sense of well-being.
You can, however, control your daily habits, set boundaries, and reflect on how you respond to stress. Ask yourself, ‘What is within my control right at this moment?’ It may seem like a small question, but it cultivates an important mindset shift. By doing this, you redirect your brain toward making actionable decisions that yield immediate results, developing a sense of agency, which is especially important in uncertain times.
The reality? Your smartphone can often become a main pipeline constantly pumping cortisol, the stress hormone, into your brain. On the flipside, using it can also flood your mind with dopamine, the ‘feel-good’ hormone, which can make us dependent on our phones, like a drug.
When it comes to smartphone connectedness, there’s a fine line between staying informed and overexposure: the latter has been proven to perpetuate stress. A 2022 study found that ‘doomscrolling’ in particular causes high levels of psychological distress and negative effects on mental health and well-being. If you find yourself reading headlines in bed, watching political commentary during lunch, and scrolling before sleep, you likely need a detox.
An easy way to do this is to start setting boundaries, such as choosing when you check the news and how long you are to do this (e.g., setting a timer). Another way is a ‘news fast’, where you abstain from checking any news or media updates for a given period of time, whether that be on weekends or a particular day.
Overexposure through doomscrolling can also be avoided by setting screentime limits or turning off notifications entirely; these options are available on all modern phones. Limiting our exposure can make us feel calmer and more focused amidst the chaotic world we live in, as well as allowing us the space to replace news consumption and doomscrolling with more productive and uplifting activities, such as creative hobbies.
When we are uncertain, the brain instinctively tries to predict the future, and often defaults to the worst-case scenario. This is referred to as catastrophizing or negative bias. It’s an embedded survival mechanism in our brains, but it largely works against us in modern life. Some examples of this include vicious cycle-eseque thought loops, such as constantly asking yourself ‘What if I lose my job?’ or ‘What if things never get better?’, even when nothing bad is happening.
An effective practice to put a halt to these thought loops is to recognize these thoughts, challenge them, and separate them from what is true. Our fears are most often predictions, not facts. Practicing this type of mental reframing ensures that you are the one controlling your thoughts, not letting them control you. Meditation, mindfulness, self-reflection, and positive affirmations are other helpful techniques that can assist with this.
Anxiety and stress don’t just live in your head. They can be expressed physically as well, whether that be headaches, inflammation, or a decline in immunity.
For this reason, self-care becomes especially important when stuck in a perpetual fight-or-flight state. Moving around, breathing routines, and physical exercise are some of the many powerful ways to ensure we do not spiral out of control amidst potential disorder or chaos. They also protect and care for the nervous system.
Getting outdoors is essential for restoring balance, and doing so can actually change your brain for the better. The sounds of birds, the greenery around you, and the clear blue sky can be the most effective reset button, either before the day begins or after the day to wind down.
Allocate a time during the day to take a short walk. Even that can dramatically shift your mood; it releases mood-boosting endorphins, those remarkable neuropeptides that can elevate your mood for the rest of the day.
Humans are social beings, and having connections with others is not a want, but a basic need for our functioning. Connection with others is a crucial element to providing emotional balance; having healthy relationships actively counterbalances stress, anxiety, and feelings of despair.
Connecting with others does not have to be long and profound; it can be simply emailing or texting a friend, sharing some banter with a coworker, or even just sitting on a couch with a loved one and doing nothing.
The best connections are the ones where you can both thrive through the chaos together, the power of the shared story. Your network does not have to consist of tons of friends and family; having a few quality relationships can go a long way in providing you with emotional support and a sense of belonging during times of stress.
Finally, the precondition of thriving is retreat and rest. Designating a personal sanctuary for yourself is the first step towards this. This space can be in your own home, or a small corner with a comfy chair, a room with your favorite books, or even a spot in your backyard garden.
These spaces are where you can calm down immediately, and if you use them as frequently as possible, you will discover the harmony between the mental and the material (mind and body). These are spaces for both relaxation and joy. The next time you feel drained, use them to reset your mind and take notice of how your mood shifts.
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A no deposit bonus is promotional credit awarded by casinos without requiring players to fund their account first, allowing immediate access to real money gameplay. These bonuses come with specific wagering requirements, game restrictions, and maximum cashout limits that determine how winnings can be converted to withdrawable funds, making them fundamentally different from deposit match promotions.
No deposit bonuses eliminate initial financial commitment while providing gameplay experience on real money games without personal spending. This promotional model allows casinos to attract new players by removing the barrier of requiring an upfront deposit. Players receive either free casino credits or free spins on specific slot machines immediately upon account creation and verification.
The main advantage of the no deposit bonus casino is accessing real money gambling completely free, though this comes with strict terms limiting your actual profit potential. By choosing no deposit offers, you gain risk-free access but inevitably sacrifice higher profit caps and flexibility compared to deposit match bonuses.
These bonuses typically range from $10 to $50 in free credits or 20-100 free spins depending on the casino and current promotions. The availability and terms vary significantly between operators, with some casinos offering no deposit bonuses regularly while others reserve them for specific campaigns.
Casinos offer several distinct no deposit bonus formats, each with different mechanics and winning potential. Understanding these differences helps you identify which bonus type suits your playing preferences and bankroll goals:
Free cash bonuses offer maximum flexibility since you control bet sizing and game selection, while free spin bonuses restrict you to specific games but sometimes feature better payout percentages on those titles.
Wagering requirements multiply your bonus amount and must be completed before withdrawal eligibility, representing the most critical factor determining actual bonus value. These requirements create a mathematical hurdle converting bonus credits into withdrawable winnings. Understanding how wagering requirements work prevents disappointment when your $25 bonus requires playing through $250 in total bets before cashing out. By accepting no deposit bonuses, you gain free credits but inevitably accept high playthrough multipliers that reduce realistic winning potential. The main compromise of no deposit bonuses is that wagering requirements of 5-50x typically prevent most players from converting bonuses into actual cash.
Wagering requirement calculations vary between casinos and game types, with different games contributing different percentages toward completing requirements. Slot games typically contribute 100% while table games may contribute only 10-25%, creating strategic game selection considerations.
Breaking down wagering requirement mathematics reveals the true value of no deposit offers. Here is how bonuses translate into realistic withdrawable funds based on typical contribution rates:
| Bonus Amount | Wagering Requirement | Total Playthrough Required | Estimated Withdrawable Amount | Completion Difficulty |
| $25 | 5x | $125 | $10-15 | Easy |
| $25 | 20x | $500 | $5-10 | Moderate |
| $50 | 30x | $1500 | $10-20 | Difficult |
| $100 | 50x | $5000 | $20-40 | Very Difficult |
These realistic withdrawal amounts account for average RTP percentages during playthrough, with actual results varying based on game selection and individual luck. Bonuses with 5-10x requirements become manageable for most players, while 30x and higher requirements rarely result in successful withdrawals for casual players.
Game restrictions limit which games qualify for bonus play and how much each game contributes toward wagering requirement completion. Not all casino games accept no deposit bonus funds, and some games contribute only partially toward completing playthrough requirements. Slot games universally accept bonus funds and contribute 100% toward requirements, making them the fastest completion method. Table games like blackjack and roulette typically contribute 10-25%, making them inefficient for requirement completion despite offering lower house edges. By choosing slots for bonus completion, you maximize contribution rate but inevitably face higher volatility and variable winning patterns compared to table games.
Live dealer games rarely qualify for no deposit bonus play at all, and specialty games like keno may contribute 0%, eliminating them from strategic bonus completion planning.
Choosing appropriate games for bonus completion directly impacts your withdrawal success rate. Consider these guidelines when planning your no deposit bonus strategy:
Maximum cashout caps typically range from $100-500, regardless of your actual winnings during playthrough, making betting strategy secondary to meeting wagering requirements on games with highest contribution rates.
Bonus validity periods create time-sensitive windows for completing requirements and converting credits into withdrawable funds. Most casinos provide 7-30 days to complete wagering requirements before bonuses expire and remaining credits vanish. Understanding these deadlines prevents losing your entire bonus by missing expiration dates. By accepting extended validity periods (20-30 days), you gain more time to complete requirements but may lose motivation or forget about deadlines. The main compromise of short validity periods is that you must commit concentrated play sessions within compressed timeframes.
Weekly no deposit offers provide fresh bonuses on fixed schedules, allowing strategic planning around regular bonus drops rather than time-sensitive deadline pressure.
Fine print terms frequently contain restrictions surprising players during withdrawal attempts. Account verification requirements demand government identification and address proof before bonus activation becomes possible. Some casinos restrict no deposit bonuses to specific countries or payment methods, invalidating promotions for otherwise eligible players. Additionally, casinos may forbid bonus stacking or using multiple no deposit offers simultaneously. These hidden restrictions reduce the flexibility that makes no deposit bonuses attractive. Understanding all terms before claiming bonuses prevents frustration and wasted time on ineligible offers.
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The 2026 March Madness odds show a tournament being shaped by separation at the top. A handful of powerhouse programs have pulled away on the futures board, earning short odds and carrying championship expectations into March. The gap between the favorites and the rest of the field is wider than usual.
That widening spread reshapes the entire Big Dance. Solid contenders and even bluebloods are priced like long shots, while bettors and oddsmakers alike are betting that the title runs through the elite. All of it sets the stage for a Big Dance defined by pressure on the favorites and desperation from everyone chasing them.
The 2026 NCAA men’s tournament futures are headlined by a small group of powerhouse teams with strikingly short odds. Arizona sits around +450 to win it all, followed closely by Michigan at roughly +500, with Duke the only other team in single digits at about +600. These elite programs have clearly separated themselves in the eyes of oddsmakers, backed by dominant regular-season play and deep, title-ready rosters.
It wasn’t always this lopsided at the top of the board earlier in the season. A cluster of co-favorites gave way as Michigan briefly surged ahead in the odds to win march madness before Arizona’s undefeated run pushed the Wildcats into the lead. That shift has created a top-heavy odds landscape, with the gap between the front-runners and the rest of the field widening as March approaches.
Beyond the top three or four teams, the championship odds jump sharply, pushing mid-tier contenders into much longer price ranges. Programs like Houston and Duke sit around 11-1 in the odds to win March Madness, while reigning champion Florida is roughly 14-1 to repeat. No team outside the top tier is even in single-digit odds territory, underscoring how strongly bookmakers favor the elite.
Several high-quality programs that would normally be viewed as serious threats are grouped deeper in the mid-tier. Illinois and Iowa State are priced around 20-1, while perennial contender Gonzaga sits closer to 22-1. While these teams are respected, their longer odds signal a clear gap, with oddsmakers viewing them as outsiders unless they catch lightning in a bottle during March.
Several traditional college basketball powers have been relegated to long-shot status this season, underscoring how top-heavy the odds board has become. Kentucky sits around 80-1 to win the 2026 championship, while Louisville has slid to roughly 65-1 after an uneven campaign. Seeing blueblood programs priced like deep underdogs signals how little confidence oddsmakers have in their current rosters.
The bottom half of the odds board is flooded with teams carrying triple-digit prices that label them as extreme outsiders. North Carolina is hovering around 100-1, while dozens of other programs are listed at 150-1, 200-1, or even longer. This glut of heavy underdogs highlights that only a select few teams are viewed as legitimate title threats, with everyone else needing a miracle run.
Sportsbook trends are reinforcing the divide between the favorites and the rest of the field. The bulk of the money to win the national title has landed on top teams like Arizona, UConn, Michigan, Houston, and Purdue, with bettors clearly backing the perceived juggernauts. One $50,000 wager on Arizona at +450 has already made the Wildcats the book’s biggest liability, underscoring how heavily the action is concentrated at the top.
There is still a strong appetite for long shots, driven by the allure of massive payouts. Bettors have sprinkled money on teams like St. Louis at 200-1, Texas Tech at 30-1, North Carolina at 80-1, and St. John’s at 90-1 in hopes of catching lightning in a bottle. That split mirrors the odds board itself, with most confidence pooled around the elites while the rest of the field fuels March Madness dreams of chaos.
The widening chasm in odds has clear implications for competitive balance in the 2026 Big Dance. A small group of powerhouses could dominate the later rounds, creating a more top-heavy tournament than usual. The betting gap reflects a perceived talent disparity, pointing to fewer true title contenders and a potentially more predictable Elite Eight and Final Four.
Still, March Madness has a long history of defying expectations. Florida’s 2025 championship run proved that pre-tournament odds aren’t guaranteed and that underdogs can break through. But if the 2026 odds hold, any surprise champion would be more shocking than usual, with favorites under pressure to deliver and long shots swinging to upend the order.
The 2026 March Madness odds make one thing clear: the title picture is narrower than usual, with a small group of favorites separating from the field. Elite programs sit atop the board with short prices, while mid-tier contenders and bluebloods alike are pushed into long-shot territory. Bettors have followed suit, pouring money into the favorites while sprinkling smaller wagers on unlikely Cinderellas. That imbalance indicates a tournament shaped by expectations at the top and hope elsewhere. In short, the gap between favorites and challengers isn’t just growing but also defining the entire Big Dance.
Photo: Eslam Mohammed Abdelmaksoud via Pexels.
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Welcome to Edition 8.30 of the Rocket Report! As I write this week's edition, NASA's Space Launch System rocket is undergoing a second countdown rehearsal at Kennedy Space Center, Florida. The outcome of the test will determine whether NASA has a shot at launching the Artemis II mission around the Moon next month, or if the launch will be delayed until April or later. The finicky fueling line for the rocket's core stage is the center of attention after a hydrogen leak cut short a practice countdown earlier this month.
As always, we welcome reader submissions. If you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets, as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.
Who is actually investing in sovereign launch? No one will supplant American and Chinese dominance in the space launch arena any time soon, but several longtime US allies now see sovereign access to space as a national security imperative, Ars reports. Taking advantage of private launch initiatives already underway within their own borders, several middle and regional powers have approved substantial government funding for commercial startups to help them reach the launch pad. Australia, Canada, Germany, and Spain are among the nations that currently lack the ability to independently put their own satellites into orbit, but they are now spending money to establish a domestic launch industry. Others talk a big game but haven’t committed the cash to back up their ambitions.
Last year we hosted the second annual Progress Conference. The 2025 conference was bigger than 2024: more days and more people, bringing together over 350 builders, academics, policy makers, investors, and writers who care about progress. Many attendees said it was yet again one of the best (or the best!) conference they had ever attended. We shared more about our reflections here, including a list of writeups from attendees and Big Thinks special issue The Engine of Progress, featuring original reporting, essays, and interviews from conference speakers, attendees, and RPI fellows.
Hosted by: the Roots of Progress Institute, together with Abundance Institute, Foresight Institute, Foundation for American Innovation, Human Progress, the Institute for Progress, the Institute for Humane Studies, and Works in Progress.
When: October 8–11, 2026
Where: Berkeley, CA—back for a third year at the Lighthaven campus which received rave reviews the last two years.
Speakers: We’ll announce an initial slate of speakers by April. Last year’s speakers included Sam Altman, Tyler Cowen, Jennifer Pahlka, and many others. You can see all 2025 speakers on this page (scroll down) and watch recorded talks here.
Program: The main two-day conference will happen all day Friday and Saturday, same as 2025. Attend speaker talks on topics from robotics to education to construction, workshop new projects, sign up to run an unconference session, and more. Thursday and Sunday will be optional add-on days, with factory tours, interest group events, and other activities.
Our mission is to establish a new philosophy of progress for the 21st century, and to build a culture of progress. Bringing the members of the progress movement together is a core part of our strategy: the large annual conference is a first step; we’re also organizing more in person and virtual events.
The post Save the date: Progress Conference 2026 appeared first on Roots of Progress Institute.
We present the GABRIEL software package, which uses GPT to quantify attributes in qualitative data (e.g. how “pro innovation” a speech is). GPT is evaluated on classification and attribute rating performance against 1000+ human annotated tasks across a range of topics and data. We find that GPT as a measurement tool is accurate across domains and generally indistinguishable from human evaluators. Our evidence indicates that labeling results do not depend on the exact prompting strategy used, and that GPT is not relying on training data contamination or inferring attributes from other attributes. We showcase the possibilities of GABRIEL by quantifying novel and granular trends in Congressional remarks, social media toxicity, and county-level school curricula. We then apply GABRIEL to study the history of tech adoption, using it to assemble a novel dataset of 37,000 technologies. Our analysis documents a tenfold decline of time lags from invention to adoption over the industrial age, from ~50 years to ~5 years today. We quantify the increasing dominance of companies and the U.S. in innovation, alongside characteristics that explain whether a technology will be adopted slowly or speedily.
That is from a new NBER working paper by .
The post GPT as a Measurement Tool appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Esther Duflo sent me a link to the story below in Le Monde, describing the difficulty facing married doctors in France who wish to match to first jobs in the same city.
If I understand correctly, the old system ranked students by their exam results on the épreuves classantes nationales (ECN), after which the students then chose among the jobs available to them in rank order. A couple could decide to choose jobs at the same time, by waiting till the turn of the worse ranked member of the couple. In this way they could choose two jobs in the same city. But a new system ranks doctors differently, by specialties, and resolves itself for everyone at the same time. So couples can now have no way to assure themselves of being matched in the same city.
Here's the article (which I sense isn't completely clear either in English translation or in the original French):
"We are pawns to be moved": the geographical conundrum of medical intern couples
Since the last reform of medical studies, the algorithm that distributes future interns in the university hospitals of France no longer guarantees their assignment in the same city as their partner. By Diane Merveilleux
" Since 2023, the three-day ECNs giving rise to a single national ranking have been replaced by a sixth year punctuated by tests in the form of multiple-choice questions (MCQs) in October, then oral exams in the spring, which make it possible to establish 13 rankings by specialty groups.
"When summer comes, each student makes up to 80 wishes, a wish corresponding to a specialty in a city. Then an algorithm makes it possible to assign each person an assignment according to the ranking of their wishes. This algorithm will run eight times, each time simulating a final result and allowing students to adapt their wishes and review their ambitions. Their final assignment falls at the same time for everyone, at the end of the last round, in September. They are then hired for four to six years of boarding in the same place, without any possibility of change.
"For young medical couples, this is where the problem lies: those who would like to spend these years in the same city have no way of being sure.
...
"Thus, until 2023, the national ranking led students to choose their assignment one after the other – the first, then the second, and so on. In this configuration, the member of the couple who had obtained the highest score could "downgrade" themselves to join their partner's level so that they could make their decision at the same time. "Today, this downgrading is no longer possible, it's the very principle of the algorithm: we have a system that is totally different," says Philippe Touzy."
##########
It seems that the couples algorithm that they have abandoned is much more primitive than the Roth-Peranson algorithm* now used in the American medical match, which allows couples to submit much more expressive joint preferences over pairs of jobs.
As it happens, just a few years ago there was a proposal for a two-part match that would have inadvertently disabled the US couples match. Itai Ashlagi and I were able to convince the American Medical Association (which had sponsored the proposal) that it was a bad idea. We ran the match under a variety of conditions. So Itai has an efficient implementation of the Roth-Peranson algorithm available if it could be helpful in France.
Here’s a blog post about that…
########
*
If our ethical beliefs come from our social environment, how do some people find the moral courage to defy convention?
- by Dane Leigh Gogoshin
Long running agentic products like Claude Code are made feasible by prompt caching which allows us to reuse computation from previous roundtrips and significantly decrease latency and cost. [...]
At Claude Code, we build our entire harness around prompt caching. A high prompt cache hit rate decreases costs and helps us create more generous rate limits for our subscription plans, so we run alerts on our prompt cache hit rate and declare SEVs if they're too low.
Tags: prompt-engineering, anthropic, claude-code, ai-agents, generative-ai, ai, llms
Courtesy of an anonymous TPM Reader, I wanted to share a fascinating, if mundane document with you. This is a report from the city of Social Circle, Georgia (a very conservative area) reporting on their discussions with the Department of Homeland Security about the department’s plans to build an ICE facility in the city. It contains a remarkable degree of transparency about the city’s discussions with DHS, a helpful reminder of the resilience or the promise of local self-government.
But what caught my attention is the slapdash way in which DHS is really trying to run roughshod over local jurisdictions and generating resistance for reasons quite separate from political opposition to ICE’s mass deportation program. I really recommend taking a few moments to read it.
Pensions cost the government 10% of GDP. If no reforms are made by 2050, Brazil will spend more on pensions as a share of GDP than many richer and greyer countries… Though Brazil’s share of young people is similar to that in Chile or Mexico, its pension spending is already at Japan’s level. That is despite a modest reform in 2019 that introduced a minimum retirement age. The population is ageing rapidly. Without reform, its social-security deficit, or the shortfall between contributions and payments, is set to rise from 2% of GDP today to over 16% by 2060.
Brazil’s courts cost 1.3% of GDP —the second-most expensive in the world—mostly because of generous pensions. The typical soldier retires before turning 55 on a pension equivalent to their full salary.
Here is more from The Economist. By the way, Brazil cannot change its pension system without amending the constitution.
The post Brazil facts of the day appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Lydia Mee, reporting for Motorsport:
IMAX has announced that a select number of races will be shown live in IMAX locations across the United States in 2026. The new fan viewing experience is part of a collaboration with Apple TV, which has taken over the broadcasting rights for the championship in the US on a multi-year deal from 2026.
“F1 is a rapidly growing force in sports and culture in the US, and by bringing F1 on Apple TV live to IMAX theatres nationwide, we’re delivering the energy and excitement to even more screens in a truly immersive way,” said Oliver Schusser, Apple’s vice president of music, sports, and Beats.
You know what would add even more screens in an immersive way? If Vision Pro users had access to the same live screenings on virtual IMAX screens.
High winds coupled with dry conditions fueled fast-spreading wildland fires in the U.S. southern Plains in winter 2026. On February 17, several large blazes broke out on the Oklahoma Panhandle and burned quickly through tens of thousands of acres of grasslands and shrublands. The winds also caused dust storms and low visibility throughout the wider region.
Smoke from multiple fires as well as wind-borne dust streamed across the Plains on the afternoon of February 17, when the MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) on NASA’s Aqua satellite acquired this image. The Ranger Road fire, the largest of the group, started that day shortly after noon near Beaver, Oklahoma, and spread rapidly throughout the afternoon. By the evening, it had burned into Kansas and consumed an estimated 145,000 acres (587,000 hectares), the Oklahoma Forestry Service reported. Combined with other fires nearby, including the Stevens and Side Road fires near Tyrone, Oklahoma, more than 155,000 acres burned that day, the agency said.
The Ranger Road fire exhibited features of a “fast fire,” a particularly dangerous and destructive type of fire characterized by rapid spread. These blazes usually burn in grasslands and shrublands rather than forests, often occur in autumn and winter when fuels are dry, and are propelled by strong winds. Wind gusts up to 70 miles (110 kilometers) per hour were measured across the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles on February 17, the National Weather Service said.
The fires destroyed several structures, threatened farmland and livestock, and prompted evacuation orders for parts of western Oklahoma and southern Kansas, according to news reports. Oklahoma’s governor declared a disaster emergency for counties in the Panhandle.
Persistent winds and dry conditions led to further fire growth on February 18. The Ranger Road and Stevens fires approximately doubled in size that day, the Oklahoma Forestry Services reported. On February 19, a red flag warning remained in effect for the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles, with forecasts calling for wind gusts up to 40 miles (64 kilometers) per hour and very low relative humidity.
Wind-blown dust created other serious hazards across the region. Near Pueblo, Colorado (west of this scene), poor visibility led to a deadly pileup of dozens of vehicles on Interstate 25, according to reports. And in southern New Mexico, officials warned travelers of dangerous conditions due to blowing dust.
NASA Earth Observatory image by Lauren Dauphin, using MODIS data from NASA EOSDIS LANCE and GIBS/Worldview. 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.
Lightning likely ignited several large fires that sent smoke pouring over the Canadian province in early September 2025.
Satellite-based maps show northern wildland fires becoming more frequent and widespread as temperatures rise and lightning reaches higher latitudes.
Tens of thousands of people fled to safety as blazes spread throughout the country’s Biobío and Ñuble regions.
The post Winds Whip Up Fires and Dust on the Southern Plains appeared first on NASA Science.
In the specific sector I work in (previously law and now tech), I am surprised by how few US companies hire in Canada. The Canadians I know in these fields are typically on par with the Americans, but doing the same work at half the price. This superficially looks like an economic puzzle: with no timezone difference, language barrier, or cultural friction, why would American companies not hire the much cheaper Canadians? I believe the answer brings together everything I’ve touched on in this essay. The reason is legibility. There aren’t enough Canadians with resumes that American hiring algorithms recognize. If an American tech company uses “Previously worked at a company like Amazon” as a filter, a software engineer from RBC, despite being equally talented, does not pass the filter. If Canada wanted to see more of its citizens hired by US companies, the strategy shouldn’t be better education or training. It should be subsidizing large US companies to open offices in Canada, purely to brand candidates as “Amazon Product Managers.” Because once they have the badge, the market will finally see them.
Here is more from Daniel Frank, note the post covers some quite different issues, all related to talent. Via Watt.
The post Why don’t American companies hire more in Canada? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
NASA and contractor engineers pumped more than 750,000 gallons of supercold propellants into the agency’s huge Space Launch System rocket Thursday without any signs of hydrogen leaks or any other significant problems in a major step toward launching four astronauts on a flight around the moon as early as March 6.
The practice countdown began Tuesday night, kicking off a carefully choreographed series of steps to ready the world’s most powerful operational rocket for what amounted to a simulated launch Thursday at 8:42 p.m. EST. Controllers then carried out additional tests to make sure the team can recycle, hold and restart an actual launch countdown as needed to handle unexpected problems.
The initial stages of the rehearsal countdown went well and at 9:35 a.m. Thursday, Launch Director Charlie Blackwell-Thompson gave her “go” to begin the multi-hour process of pumping 196,000 gallons of liquid oxygen and 537,000 gallons of liquid hydrogen fuel into the SLS rocket’s first stage. The second stage was loaded with another 22,500 gallons of oxygen and hydrogen propellants.
Unlike the rocket’s first fueling test earlier this month, when hydrogen leaks forced the team to call off the countdown, sensors detected no significant leaks the second time around and the rocket’s tanks were topped off without incident.
For the remainder of the dress rehearsal, propellants were added as needed to make up for the relatively small amounts of hydrogen and oxygen that normally warm and “boil off” in their tanks. Another milestone presumably was reached in the final 10 minutes of the countdown when the propellant tanks were to be pressurized as they would be for an actual launch. Again, no problems were noted.
While detailed analysis remains to be completed, the preliminary results were a positive sign Artemis II commander Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen may, in fact, be cleared for launch in just two weeks. Hoping for the best, the crew planned to enter pre-flight medical quarantine Friday.
It will be the first piloted flight to the moon since the final Apollo landing in 1972, carrying the crew farther from Earth than any astronauts in history. Wiseman and his crewmates will also be the first to ride into space atop the 322-foot-tall Space Launch System rocket, making only its second flight, and the first to fly aboard an Orion deep space crew capsule.
More important, the flight will serve as a major step toward the follow-on Artemis III mission to land astronauts near the moon’s south pole in 2028.
NASA originally planned to launch the Artemis II mission early this month, but NASA engineers and contractors ran into problems during an initial dress rehearsal countdown when hydrogen leaks were detected near the base of the rocket.
Sensors in a cavity between umbilical plates where the fuel lines are attached to the SLS first stage began detecting hydrogen gas buildups when flow rates were increased after an initial “slow fill” period.
After troubleshooting, engineers were able to press ahead with the test, keeping leak rates within acceptable limits by varying flow rates and temperatures. That allowed them to safely fill the first and second stage propellant tanks and then to replenish them as needed.
But late in the countdown, when engineers began pressurizing the first stage as they would for an actual launch, the leak rate in the fueling umbilical suddenly shot up, climbing toward concentrations of 16% in the inert nitrogen gas flowing through the cavity. Beyond that, the risk of fire becomes a real threat.
The dress rehearsal was called off before the team could work through the planned countdown recycle options.
After studying test data, engineers decided to replace two seals that were thought to be responsible for the leak. A second “mini” tanking test was carried out last Thursday when a small amount of liquid hydrogen was pumped into the core stage to confirm a leak-free environment.
But a filter in the ground system apparently froze, reducing the flow rates. Even so, NASA said in a blog post, “the test provided enough data to allow engineers to plan toward a second wet dress rehearsal this week.” No other details were provided, but the seals apparently worked as required during the fueling exercise Thursday.
I liked it very much, noting it is not one for the purists. The visuals and soundtrack added to the general passionate feel. I can recommend the Jonathan Bate review and the Louise Perry review (WSJ). The other version of this movie I can recommend is the Luis Buñuel Mexican interpretation, also full of passion and that poor pig. At its heart, this is a very Mexican story and no way should it be done in a Masterpiece Theater kind of style.
The post Wuthering Heights, the movie appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
An independent review of the first, and so far only, piloted flight of Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft concluded the test represented a potentially life-threatening “type A” mishap resulting from multiple technical problems and management miscues, NASA officials said Thursday.
“This was a really challenging event and … we almost did have a really terrible day,” said Amit Kshatriya, NASA associate administrator. “We failed them.”
He was referring to now-retired astronauts Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Sunita Williams, who were launched in June 2024 expecting to spend eight to 10 days in space. They ended up remaining in orbit for 286 days, hitching a ride home aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule after NASA ruled out landing aboard the Starliner.
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said NASA will continue working with Boeing to make the Starliner a viable crew transport vehicle, adding that “sustained crew and cargo access to low Earth orbit will remain essential, and America benefits from competition and redundancy.”
“But to be clear, NASA will not fly another crew on Starliner until technical causes are understood and corrected, the propulsion system is fully qualified and appropriate investigation recommendations are implemented,” he said.
He made the comments as the agency was releasing the results of a months-long independent investigation of the Starliner mission. The panel’s report cited a long list of management failures and technical issues that were not fully understood at the time but were still considered acceptable for flight.
The panel concluded the problems experienced during the mission were representative of a “type A mishap” meaning an unexpected event that could have resulted in death or permanent disability, damage to government property exceeding $2 million and the loss of a spacecraft or launch vehicle.
Isaacman said the eventual cost of the Starliner’s woes exceeded the $2 million threshold “a hundred fold.”
“Starliner has design and engineering deficiencies that must be corrected,” he said. “But the most troubling failure revealed by this investigation is not hardware. It’s decision making and leadership that, if left unchecked, could create a culture incompatible with human space flight.”
Isaacman said the investigation revealed pressure within NASA to ensure the success of the agency’s Commercial Crew Program, which is based on having two independent astronaut ferry ships. That advocacy “exceeded reasonable bounds and placed the mission the crew and America’s space program at risk.”
“This created a culture of mistrust that can never happen again and there will be leadership accountability,” Isaacman said.
The report quoted unnamed personnel saying things like “there was yelling in meetings. It was emotionally charged and unproductive.” Another said “if you weren’t aligned with the desired outcome, your input was filtered out or dismissed.” Yet another told the panel, “I stopped speaking up because I knew I would be dismissed.”
Equally troubling, according to one NASA worker quoted in the report, “NASA wasn’t blaming Boeing, but everybody else was. […] You know, it’s our program. We’re responsible too. Nobody said that. And nobody within NASA [or outside of NASA] has been held accountable. Nobody. We’re 11 months after it happened, and there’s been no accountability at all, from any organization.”
Isaacman promised that “lessons will be appropriately learned across the agency and there will be accountability.”
In the wake of the space shuttle’s retirement in 2011, NASA awarded multi-billion-dollar contracts to Boeing and SpaceX in 2014 to build independent ferry ships to carry astronauts to and from the space station. SpaceX, awarded an initial $2.6 billion contract, has now launched 13 piloted Crew Dragon flights for NASA and seven purely commercial missions.
In contrast, Boeing, awarded an initial $4.2 billion contract, ran into multiple problems during an unpiloted Starliner test flight in 2019 that eventually required a second crew-less test flight before Wilmore and Williams were finally launched on June 5, 2024, on what has been the ship’s lone crewed test flight.
The trip to space atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket went smoothly and the crew successfully docked with the International Space Station the next day. But the capsule experienced multiple helium propulsion system leaks along the way and several maneuvering jets did not produce the expected thrust.
“During the rendezvous and proximity operations, propulsion anomalies cascaded into multiple thruster failures and a temporary loss of six-degree-of-freedom control,” Isaacman said Thursday. “The controllers and the crew performed with extraordinary professionalism … and docking was achieved.
“It is worth restating what should be obvious,” he said. “At that moment, had different decisions been made, had thrusters not been recovered or had docking been unsuccessful, the outcome of this mission could have been very different.”
Williams and Wilmore downplayed the malfunctions during the flight, which was originally expected to last about eight days. But NASA and Boeing ended up extending their stay in orbit, carrying out weeks of tests and analysis to determine whether the Starliner could be trusted to safely bring its crew back to Earth.
By August 2024, Boeing managers were convinced engineers understood the problems and the crew could safely come home in the Starliner. But NASA managers ruled that option out. Instead, they decided to keep the astronauts aboard the station until early 2025 when they could hitch a ride back to Earth aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon ferry ship.
To make that possible, a Crew Dragon was launched in September 2024 with just two astronauts aboard instead of four as originally planned. That freed up two seats for Wilmore and Williams after the SpaceX crew completed their six-month stay in space.
The Starliner, meanwhile, successfully made an uncrewed return to Earth in September 2024 even though, the investigation report revealed, additional propulsion problems left the craft with no available backup options had another failure occurred.
The mission, “while ultimately successful in preserving crew safety, revealed critical vulnerabilities in the Starliner’s propulsion system, NASA’s oversight model and the broader culture of commercial human spaceflight,” the investigation team concluded.
The panel issued 61 formal recommendations “across technical, organizational, and cultural domains to address these issues before the next crewed Starliner mission.”
“The report underscores that technical excellence, transparent communication, and clear roles and responsibilities are not just best practices, they are essential to the success of any future commercial spaceflight missions,” the team said. “The lessons from CFT must be institutionalized to ensure that safety is never compromised in pursuit of schedule or cost.”
For its part, Boeing said in a statement the company had made “substantial progress” on corrective actions “and driven significant cultural changes across the team that directly align with the findings in the report.”
“NASA’s report will reinforce our ongoing efforts to strengthen our work … in support of mission and crew safety, which is and must always be our highest priority. We’re working closely with NASA to ensure readiness for future Starliner missions and remain committed to NASA’s vision for two commercial crew providers.”
Update Feb. 19, 9:34 p.m. EST (0234 UTC): SpaceX confirms successful landing on the droneship.
For just the second time, a Falcon 9 booster returned to Earth on a drone ship stationed among the islands of the Bahamas during a mission to deploy 29 Starlink satellites for SpaceX’s satellite internet service.
Liftoff of the Starlink 10-34 mission from pad 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station happened at 8:41:40 p.m. EST (0141:40 UTC).
The 45th Weather Squadron forecast a greater than 95 percent chance for favorable liftoff during the window. Meteorologists cited not notable items that would provide a constraint to launch from a weather perspective.
SpaceX launched the mission on Falcon 9 first stage booster B1077. This was its 26th flight after launching previous missions, including Crew-5, CRS-28 and NG-20.
Less than 8.5 minutes after liftoff, B1077 landed on the drone ship, ‘Just Read the Instructions,’ situated off the coast of Exuma island in The Bahamas. This was the 150th landing on that vessel and the 573rd booster landing for SpaceX to date.
It was one year ago this week that SpaceX first landed a booster within the territorial waters of The Bahamas during the Starlink 10-12 mission on Feb. 18, 2025.
In the lead up to that flight, SpaceX announced it was planning to use that first mission as a stepping stone to enabling a crewed mission to a polar orbit, which it eventually did with the flight called Fram2.
However, Fram2 did not feature a booster landing adjacent to The Bahamas. Reportedly, there was environmental concern on the part of the government of The Bahamas following the in-flight break-ups of SpaceX’s Starship rocket during Flight 7 and Flight 8 in 2025.
The two entities have since come to an understanding in the intervening time, paving the way for this second booster landing near the island nation.
Falcon 9 lands on the Just Read the Instructions droneship off the coast of The Bahamas pic.twitter.com/h5Ju4ndXSj
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) February 20, 2026
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