That was then, this is not now?

The 1941 Anglo-Soviet invasion destroyed Reza Shah — but not the Pahlavi state.  The two Allies — joined by the United States in December 1941 — realized that the Iranian state could be useful in achieving the two goals for which they had invaded the country: physical control over oil — the British nightmare in World War II, even more so than in World War I, was loss of these vital supplies: and a land “corridor” to the Soviet Union…To facilitate the flow of both oil to Britain and supplies to the Soviet Union, the Allies found it expedient to remove Reza Shah but to preserve his state…the Allies kept his state but engineered his removal in part to curry much-needed favor among Iranians.  “The Persians,” he wrote, “expect that we should at least save them from the Shah’s tyranny as compensation for invading their country.”

That is from Ervand Abrahamian’s A History of Modern Iran.

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Thoughts on a New Civic Contract

Yesterday I noted G. Elliott Morris’s argument that extremely poor consumer sentiment in the U.S. is no mystery once you look properly at what Americans mean when they talk about prices and inflation. In short, just because prices stopped going up in the second half of Joe Biden’s presidency didn’t mean the public stopped being mad about them going up (and staying up) in the first half of his term. I’m pretty certain that this explains a lot about what sank Biden’s presidency and the dynamics of the 2024 election. But does it explain what’s happening now? When I wrote yesterday’s post, TPM Reader SB agreed, but argued that it went beyond that — that the still-declining consumer sentiment, the extremely sour public mood goes beyond the post-COVID inflation shock. It’s also about extreme wealth inequality, SB argued. Then, this morning, Paul Krugman began what he says will be a series of posts on his Substack in which he argues that while he agrees with the “excess price” framework, he’s not sure it’s a sufficient explanation.

Krugman didn’t really get into what exactly he thinks it is. As I said, he said he’ll address it in a series of posts. But the gist is that there’s a larger politico-economic explanation that goes beyond how long people stay mad about prices. Krugman says he thinks the deepening sense of economic gloom is driven by the fact that the public was upset about inflation, voted to move in a direction and then had the new guy do basically everything he could to stoke more inflation into the economy and generally whipsaw the economy in 20 different directions for a series of bizarre and obscure ideological fascinations.

I’m not sure whether it’s income inequality or the bait-and-switch of the second Trump presidency. But I was never convinced that the oddities of the 2024 election were about right-wing media dominance. It’s part of the equation — but it’s not a sufficient or satisfying explanation. There’s a deeper breakdown of the civic contract. I’m not certain what that breakdown is. I have lots of ideas. But I’m cautious about my — and everyone’s — tendency to fill in the blank with what they want the answer to be, what fits our own preconceptions. So I’m curious to hear what Krugman proposes.

What I’m more clear on is that democracy, as we often think about it, is a thin vision. I think many of us grew up taking for granted that allotting political power on the basis of adult voting was an obvious good and efficiency. And with the growth of electoral democracies after the World War II, and then with the end of the Cold War, it was just a kind of unfolding process by which the rest of the people in the world either figured this out or had the opportunity to partake in it. Probably most of us would not put it quite so naively. But still, that’s kind of the backdrop of a lot of the post-Cold War era. The rule of feral billionaires, wealth inequality generally, the ebbing of a relative freedom to live full lives — all things that are eating away at confidence in public institutions and leaders. I’ve mentioned a number of times that the post-World War II and post-Cold War systems have been irrevocably broken. Something new has to be built on top of it. Functioning elections and baseline adherence to the rule of law aren’t sufficient. They’re the shell, the superstructure in which a certain kind of common, but plural American life is possible.

Where we got off track as a country was imagining that those were the whole thing. And that blinded us to a lot of internal rot and decay. These are the questions Democrats, or really the civic democratic opposition to Donald Trump, need to figure out to set the country on a new and better direction. A new civic contract is necessary. Things don’t stay divided and dark forever.

Saturday assorted links

1. Cato Handbook on affordability.

2. Are first-generation college students overrated?

3. No Detectable Economic Effect of Extreme Heat After Correcting for Dependence.  Here is analysis from Claude 4.7.

4. When Hayek visited Brazil.

5. AI and the early history of electricity.  Good claims.

6. Betting on how well various pundits predict the future.

7. On Jensen.

8. Ross Douthat (NYT) on lessons from Hungary.

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Pete Hegseth Nailed It. No Really.

You’ve probably seen the story about how, at a DOD presentation, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth quoted what he apparently thought was a bible verse but was in fact the faux biblicalism delivered by Samuel L. Jackson’s character, Jules Winnfield, in Pulp Fiction. There’s a lot here. Yes, the faux godly Hegseth should really be a bit more versed in the bible. But it’s really perfectly apt that he’s not. If you remember, Winnfield is a hitman, a killer, a man of meaningless violence. He wraps his murders in stylized bible verse imitations to give them some mix of giving them retributional ooomph and just for kicks. Is there any better description of Pete Hegseth? I can’t think of one. Hegseth’s brand of Christian nationalism is a permission structure for domination and violence. The biblical text is a source of handy quotes to the extent it advances those aims. But he’s neither smart enough nor serious enough to mine the text in any serious way. He’s just a different version of Jules Winnfield.

Reading bleg

What is the best and most sophisticated defense of architectural modernism, both from an aesthetic and a social point of view?

I thank you all in advance for your wisdom.

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Links 4/17/26

Links for you. Science:

Wildflower folk remedy shows modern potential for tackling antibiotic resistance
Remembering public health pioneer Barry Bloom: a scientist, a mentor, a mensch
Analysis: Why the research money isn’t flowing from NSF and NIH
Lyme disease vaccine shows over 70% efficacy in phase 3 trial
Why mathematicians are boycotting their biggest conference
World’s oldest dog identified at ancient hunter-gatherer site

Other:

Kristi Noem husband’s cross-dressing was ‘an open secret in DC’: While the ousted DHS secretary’s initial statement expressed shock, White House and Homeland Security officials had been gossiping about Bryon Noem’s alleged fetishes for months, according to a report (no outlet covered this while she was the head of our national security apparatus–and her husband could be blackmailed, which has national security implications.)
‘Amateur hour at the U.S. attorney’s office’: L.A. prosecutors face more losses in protest cases
Red Lobster Set to Bring Back Endless Shrimp That Drove It to Bankruptcy
Jews paused Indiana’s abortion ban — by turning a religious freedom law against the evangelical right
I Had the Literary Scoop of the Year. The New York Times Stole It from Me
More than 3,700 immigrants arrested during Operation Metro Surge, per new data
DHS staff celebrate as ‘glamour shots’ of Kristi Noem that lined the halls are finally removed
IN DEFENSE OF MIDDLE-CLASS WHITE RESISTERS, AND THE WORD “NORMIE”
How to Measure the Good Life
ICE Barbie’s Alleged Lover Fired in Middle of Exotic Getaway
American Airlines Center opens investigation into Nazi salute by Stars fans
Small Businesses Are Being Left Out of Tariff Refund Process, CBP Data Suggests
Is It Wrong to Write a Book with A.I.?
Over 9.9 Million Are Floored By This Tweet From A MAGA Voter Who Says Her Son Won’t Talk To Her Anymore
What Happened to the SPLC—and Me. Union breaking, Gaza, and fear of MAGA turned the SPLC into an organization that abandoned its own civil rights principles.
Grandmother Faces Trial in Alabama for Wearing Penis Costume to No Kings Protest
Blocking Trump’s replacements for Alito and/or Thomas
CBP: Border wall will go through National Butterfly Center
The most overlooked Epstein email
The Incel Global Order: modern autocracy as a cult of masculinity
Trump’s dollar coin is pathetic
Tenn. library director fired over refusal to move LGBTQ+ books to adult section
‘It’s been terrible’: Tough year for maple syrup production in Eastern Mass.
Their tiny church is on the cover of JD Vance’s new book. They don’t know him.
The secret life of Boston’s street corner fire alarm boxes
The Supreme Court Absolutely Shredded Trump’s Birthright Citizenship Case
Sorry, Pam Bondi. Trump has no loyalty
Fact-Checkers Anonymous: Getting a job at The New Yorker felt like an arbitrary stroke of luck. Getting fired was quite the opposite.
Christian Nationalism Is Thriving, and “We Should Be Concerned”
Tiger Woods Plus Donald Trump: A Tragedy Made in the USA


Artemis II pilot talks about what it was really like to fly and land in Orion

The crew of Artemis II spoke with the media on Thursday, six days after returning to Earth following their mission around the Moon. After a news conference, the astronauts gave a handful of interviews, and Ars was able to speak with Orion's pilot, Victor Glover.

Glover and Ars first connected nearly a decade ago as part of our homage to Apollo, The Greatest Leap. Glover now stands at the vanguard of our modern Apollo program, named Artemis, which aims to return humans to the Moon and establish a semi-permanent base there.

Glover, an accomplished naval aviator, first went to space in November 2020 as the pilot on the first operational Crew Dragon mission to the International Space Station. Two years after he landed back on Earth, Glover was assigned to the Artemis II mission and tasked with a majority of the test piloting of the Orion spacecraft during the outbound and return journey from the Moon.

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Hasan Piker is bad for the Democrats

The other day on X, leftist Twitch streamer Hasan Piker got into an argument with a commentator known as Swann Marcus. Marcus had scoffed at the notion of Piker trying to connect with blue-collar workers. In retaliation, Piker claimed that Marcus had written a “how to” manual about sex tourism in Asia:

As you can see, Community Notes quickly corrected Piker. The person who wrote the “how to” articles about sex tourism was actually a rightist influencer named Matt Forney. Apparently, some leftists had — intentionally or unintentionally — gotten Marcus mixed up with Forney because Marcus had made a documentary about Burmese missionaries. But Piker refused to delete his accusation against Marcus, even after being informed of his mistake.

Recently, a video resurfaced of Hasan Piker launching a profanity-laced tirade against a Vietnamese refugee named Bach Hac. The refugee complains of suffering under Vietnam’s communist regime. Piker responded by saying “Fuck you old lady. Shut the fuck up you stupid idiotic old lady. Suck my dick, old lady. God damn, Yo, fuck this refugee”. He then tells her to go back and live in “South Vietnam”. Piker later deleted the stream, but has never apologized.

During a recent speech at Yale, Hasan Piker declared that “The fall of the USSR was one of the greatest catastrophes of the 20th century.” This is an almost direct quote from Vladimir Putin, who said in 2005 that “The demise of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” This would be news, of course, to the countries that fought to escape Soviet communist rule, and whose economies flourished after the USSR’s collapse.

Recently, Ezra Klein wrote a New York Times op-ed urging Democrats to open a dialogue with Hasan Piker instead of trying to freeze him out of the party. The Times gave Klein’s post the headline “Hasan Piker is not the Enemy”. On a podcast, Piker then declared that Hamas is “1000 times better than Israel”. The New York Times promptly changed the headline of Ezra Klein’s post:

This kind of behavior is par for the course for Piker. Jeremiah Johnson had a good roundup back in December:

Infinite Scroll
Democrats have their own extremist problem
For the last few weeks, I’ve been grappling with one of the worst colds/flus I’ve had in my life. During that stretch, I leaned on one of my guilty internet pleasures - watching livestreamers on Twitch. The content on these streams is rarely good, but it’s often comfortingly bad, like the terrible daytime television I used to watch when I stayed home si…
Read more

Some excerpts:

When questioned about China’s lack of LGBT rights, Hasan said the country is ‘gay as hell’ and defended the CCP banning gay dating apps as a ‘privacy issue’…He went on state television to talk about how great China is, and dismissed criticism of the CCP as ‘rumors’ and ‘misunderstandings’ and ‘lies’ that he wanted to help correct…He’s downplayed the genocide in Xinjiang, calling the concentration camps there ‘re-education’ camps and claiming they’re all closed now.2 He’s said that Chinese colonialism in Tibet was a good thing

He’s defended the idea of socialist re-education programs explicitly. He wishes the USSR had won the Cold War, he’s cool with Hezbollah, he thinks the Houthis are awesome and he’s used his platform to give a voice to literal, actual terrorists. He defended Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea, and while he doesn’t outright defend Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine he sure does spend a lot of time blaming the American government for somehow starting the conflict. He said that America deserved 9/11. He repeats neo-Nazi talking points about the Holocaust. He promotes political violence.

It should be pretty clear at this point what kind of guy Hasan is. His ideology is standard leftist “campism” — the idea that America is bad, and that any country or group that opposes America is therefore good. His style is that of a typical “shock jock” radio host — he says extreme and vulgar things in order to get attention and excite his listeners. It’s basically the same shtick that Michael Savage used back in the 2000s, but with the right-wing politics swapped out for Cold War-era anti-Americanism.

And yet Democrats and progressives are starting to treat this radio shock jock as an important voice in their party. Here’s what Ezra Klein had to say in his NYT post:

[P]ick over Piker’s years of streaming, and you can find offensive things he’s said.“…Streamer has said offensive things” isn’t really a news story…The impulse to cut off those with whom we disagree reaches far beyond Piker…It sits at the heart of cancellation as a political tactic. It relies on a belief in the power of gatekeepers that might have been true in an earlier age but no longer reflects the way attention is earned and held. Tucker Carlson was ejected from Fox News and grew stronger on X and YouTube. Nick Fuentes was banned from major social media platforms and gathered strength in the shadows. Trump went from being banned by every major social media platform to retaking the presidency.

According to Ezra’s line of thought here, the Republican Party and mainstream conservative institutions like Fox News would be smart to embrace Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes — and therefore the Democrats and mainstream liberals would be smart to embrace Hasan Piker.

Let’s think through the implications of that line of reasoning. If the mainstream should always include extremists in the conversation — if gatekeeping is useless and counterproductive — then all you have to do in order to force extremist ideas into mainstream discourse is to grab some attention. If you get a Twitch stream or a podcast and you start screaming that the Holocaust was fake, or that the USSR was good, etc., and you manage to get a decently big audience by doing this, you should now have a say in how the country is run.

The obvious problem with this idea is that it creates a competitive market for extremism. If being more extreme and profane and outrageous than the next guy is what gets attention, and if attention is what gets you influence in the Democratic Party or the GOP, then there’s a huge incentive for would-be influencers to be as extreme and outrageous as possible. Everyone will just keep one-upping their competitors until all the right-wing commentators are Hitler fans and all the left-wing commentators are Stalin apologists.

One could argue that this is exactly what has happened on the right, with the ascent of Carlson,1 Fuentes, Candace Owens, and similar rightist extremists. The Heritage Foundation’s embrace of Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes last year was very similar to Ezra Klein’s embrace of Piker; Heritage declared that although they disagreed with the ideas of Carlson and Fuentes, those commentators were so popular that they had to be allowed inside the mainstream debate.

But there’s another, less obvious problem with the idea of mainstreaming popular extremists. In the internet age, the bar for what counts as “popular” has been dramatically lowered. In the 1990s, Rush Limbaugh had between 15 and 27 million weekly listeners for his radio talk show. Nowadays, Tucker’s shows get about 1 million listeners. The internet has fragmented audiences, so that even the most popular commentators get a lot less attention than they used to.

This means we lower the bar for who we think of as “popular”. Hasan Piker’s stream gets about 6.5 million hours of attention per week. That’s about 10% of the viewership of Fox News’ Sean Hannity, and about a third of CNN’s Anderson Cooper. But Hasan is considered far and away the biggest political streamer, because streamers who talk about politics a lot just tend not to be that popular. Podcast audiences are harder to compare, but if we assume that about half of podcast downloads eventually get listened to, then Hasan is probably in the top 10 political commenters in the U.S., but not in the top 5. Joe Rogan — who, as Ezra points out, is not consistently conservative, but who supported Trump in 2024 — has many times Hasan’s audience.

International audiences lower the bar even further; only about half of Hasan’s audience is American. Ezra Klein is ready to embrace Piker as an important voice within the Democratic coalition based on his popular appeal, but a significant fraction of that appeal is to audiences who can’t even vote in American elections.

On top of all that, Piker gets a boost because as a left-wing talk show host, he’s a bigger fish in a smaller pond. Liberals tend to read the news, while conservatives are more likely to watch or listen to it. This is why there are relatively few right-wing writers, so the ones who rise to the top of the heap tend to be of lower quality. This is also why most of the top political podcasters, radio hosts, and TV commentators are right-wing. And this is probably why Hasan Piker can become an important influencer in the Democratic Party even as he declares he wouldn’t vote for Gavin Newsom over JD Vance.

All these structural factors can help explain why a cruel, vicious man like Hasan Piker, who supports totalitarian governments, spreads blatant lies about his critics, advocates political violence, makes excuses for terrorists, and vilifies the Democratic Party, can manage to shock, shout, and bully his way into being respected by mainstream progressives like Ezra Klein.

But there’s another important factor here, which is the content of Piker’s message. Whereas the leftist shock jocks of the previous cycle — self-described “dirtbags” like Chapo Trap House — tended to focus on economic issues, Hasan focuses squarely on foreign policy. And his main foreign policy focus is opposition to Israel.

Anti-Zionism is still taboo within the Democratic Party establishment, because of the Palestine movement’s association with antisemitism. But as Israel has done more and more bad things, grassroots anti-Israel sentiment has spread on both sides of the political aisle. In his post about Piker, Ezra talks a lot about the importance of including anti-Israel voices in the Democratic conversation:

We are living through a rupture in both the meaning and the reality of Israel. A Gallup poll from February found, for the first time, that more Americans sympathized with the Palestinians than with the Israelis. Among Democrats, the gap was overwhelming, with 65 percent who sympathized more with the Palestinians and 17 percent with the Israelis. The difference, as I have argued, is largely generational: Older Americans still view the Israelis more sympathetically, but among Americans ages 18 to 34, 53 percent sided with the Palestinians and 23 percent with the Israelis. This is new. Before 2023, young people and Democrats were more likely to side with the Israelis.

This is not the result of an international psy-op or a profusion of memes. The Israel that young people know is not the Israel that older people remember. It responded to the savagery of Oct. 7 by flattening Gaza in a brutal campaign that killed at least 70,000 Gazans, taking control of more than half of the territory and herding Gazans — more than two million people — into the remainder. Life there remains hellish. Israel has made hopes for a two-state solution fanciful by slicing the West Bank up into Israeli settlements and abetting constant settler violence and keeping a boot on the throat of the Palestinian Authority. It has used the Iran war as an opportunity to launch an invasion of Lebanon, displacing more than a million people and announcing that as many as 600,000 won’t be allowed to return to their homes until Israel decides otherwise. The Knesset just voted to legalize hanging as a punishment for Palestinians who are convicted of killing Israelis in terrorist attacks…

Israel, as it is behaving today, and as it is constructing itself for tomorrow, is incompatible with any normal understanding of liberal values…Anti-Zionism is rising as a response to what Israel is doing.

Ezra is right about Israel’s plummeting popularity in America:

Source: Pew
Source: Pew

And Ezra doesn’t even mention the fact that Netanyahu helped convince Trump to launch the disastrous Iran War, which has resulted in high oil and gas prices. Israel hasn’t just violated human rights and international norms against territorial conquest — it has been a highly problematic ally for the U.S., and is quickly becoming an outright liability.

American public opinion is slowly but inexorably turning; Ezra sees this, and is getting out in front of the shift. To some degree, he’s using Hasan Piker’s popularity, such as it is, as an excuse to advocate for a deeper, substantive policy shift — a turn away from staunch, reflexive U.S. support for Israel.

I view this as a mistake. If mainstream liberals want to drop their support for Israel, they should just do it on the merits. They should not bring in a guy like Hasan Piker to do it for them, because then they have to accept all the baggage that Piker brings with him. Mainstreaming Piker means that Democrats have to take seriously the notion that the Soviet Union were the good guys in the Cold War, that China and Russia are the good guys in the world today, and that America itself is — and has always been — an Evil Empire.

That message is likely to resonate poorly with many voters, especially older ones who remember a time before Trump and before the War on Terror. Pride in America has fallen significantly since Trump came on the scene, but that doesn’t mean the solution is to tell Americans that their country is the Great Satan. I doubt that Democrats and Independents want to destroy the U.S.; I think they want to restore and redeem it. Piker’s message is inimical to that goal.

And mainstreaming Piker and his anti-American ideology will inevitably lead to a deterioration in the quality of the people the Democrats elect and appoint to high office. This has absolutely happened with the Republicans. In 2024, the MAGA movement embraced the idea that America is an Evil Empire, spreading woke values around the world, and that we should realign ourselves with Russia. This led to the appointment of Tulsi Gabbard as the Director of National Intelligence, the end of most American support for Ukraine, the right-wing turn against Europe, and to the tearing up of most of America’s alliances. It notably did not lead to fewer American wars; it just led to dumber, more evil wars.

Why should Democrats willingly walk down this same path? Do we really want the next Democratic administration to have staffers and appointees who think the Soviets should have won the Cold War? Are we prepared to realign America towards China, as Trump has realigned us toward Russia, and for the backlash this would generate?

Maybe so, but I hope not. Instead of embracing anti-American shock jocks like Hasan Piker, mainstream liberals should simply levy their own criticisms of Israel instead. You don’t have to believe America is evil and communist empires are virtuous in order to say that Israel has become crueler, more totalitarian, and less reliable as an ally. Those arguments are easy to make within the framework of liberalism, instead of by embracing someone who says he wants a “post-liberal America”.

I’ve sat here for years and watched the Republicans embrace their worst extremists. I’ve watched as those extremists turned the right away from mainstream conservatism, and drove them to embrace insane, self-destructive ideas. I don’t want to see the Democrats do the same. Maybe the incentives of the social media age are just too powerful, and every major party is destined to be forced down this road. But I say we should keep trying to resist the extremist impulse for as long as we can.


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Note that Carlson used to be a mainstream conservative, and pivoted to rightist extremism when it gained him more views. This strongly suggests that it’s the incentives of the ecosystem, rather than the personal preferences of media personalities themselves, that drives the overall slant of popular commentary.

Friday Squid Blogging: New Giant Squid Video

Pretty fantastic video from Japan of a giant squid eating another squid.

As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.

Blog moderation policy.

Rocket Report: Starship V3 test-fired; ESA's tentative step toward crew launch

Welcome to Edition 8.37 of the Rocket Report! NASA is still climbing down from the high of the Artemis II mission, the first flight by humans to the Moon since 1972. What a mission it was! Now, attention turns to completing development of a lander to get astronauts down to the Moon's surface. Among other things, we chronicle the latest progress of NASA's two lunar lander contractors, SpaceX and Blue Origin, in this week's Rocket Report.

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.

Moonshot from the last frontier. Israel-based space launch company Moonshot Space will site its first electromagnetic accelerator in Fairbanks, Alaska, under a memorandum of understanding signed at Space Symposium with spaceport operator Alaska Aerospace Corporation (AAC), Aviation Week & Space Technology reports. Moonshot, which emerged from stealth mode in December with $12 million in fundraising, is developing a high-power electromagnetic launcher system to propel payloads and enable cargo deliveries into space at hypersonic speed using electricity rather than chemical fuels, The Times of Israel reports.

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April 17, 2026

This morning, after a 10-day ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon took effect Thursday, Iran announced the Strait of Hormuz was open to commercial ships. Israel has been bombing southern Lebanon, where Iran-backed Hezbollah militants operate, and Iran’s leadership has said it would not recognize a ceasefire with the United States until Israel’s bombing of Lebanon stopped.

With Iran’s announcement the strait was open, Trump hit the media circle, announcing through interviews and social media posts that the war with Iran was over and peace talks were all but done, although Trump said the U.S. Navy will continue to blockade Iran’s ports. Ron Filipkowski of MeidasTouch noted that Trump posted thirteen times in an hour claiming total victory.

He claimed that Iranian leaders had “agreed to everything,” including the removal of its enriched uranium, and that “Iran has agreed never to close the Strait of Hormuz again.” He promised that Iran had agreed to end its nuclear program forever and that talks “should go very quickly.” He said that the United States would work with Iran at “a leisurely pace” to retrieve and capture Iran’s highly enriched uranium and that Iran would receive no money for its cooperation despite a report from Axios that the U.S. is considering the release of $20 billion in frozen Iranian funds in exchange for Iran giving up its stockpile of enriched uranium.

Right on cue the stock market jumped and the price of oil futures dropped. Trump declared the breakthrough was “A GREAT AND BRILLIANT DAY FOR THE WORLD!” and asked why media outlets questioning the alleged deal didn’t “just say, at the right time, JOB WELL DONE, MR. PRESIDENT?”

But, as Ashley Ahn of the New York Times reported, Iranian officials’ interpretation of events was quite different from Trump’s characterization. Iran’s top negotiator, speaker of parliament Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, posted on social media that Trump had made seven claims in an hour, and all seven of them were false. Iran rejected Trump’s claim that it had agreed to hand over its uranium stockpile, and also said that the strait was open for commercial vessels—not military ships—but would close again if the U.S. blockade continued.

Tonight on Air Force One, after the stock market closed, when asked if Iran would turn over its nuclear material, Trump said: “We’re taking it. We’re taking it. Very simple. We’re taking it. With Iran. We’re going in with Iran. We’re taking it. We will have it. I don’t call it boots on the ground. We’ll take it after the agreement is signed. After there— there’s a very big difference. Before and after. BC. It’s before, and after. And after the agreement is signed, it’s a lot different than before. We would have taken it. If we didn’t have an agreement, we would take it. But I don’t think we’ll have to.”

When a reporter asked Trump whether he would extend the ceasefire “if you don’t have a deal by Wednesday” when it ends, the president answered: “I don’t know. Maybe not. Maybe I won’t extend it. But the blockade is gonna remain. But maybe I won’t extend it. So you have a blockade, and unfortunately we’ll have to start dropping bombs again.”

While being able to announce the end of the Iran war—at least for now—relieves Trump’s immediate crisis, there are many others in the wings. This evening, an article in The Atlantic by Sarah Fitzpatrick portrayed Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director Kash Patel as a poor manager who is terrified he is going to lose his job and whose overuse of alcohol, tendency to disappear, and purges of FBI agents who had investigated Trump endangers our national security. Fitzpatrick notes that Patel has kept his job thanks to his willingness to use the FBI to target Trump’s perceived enemies, but his focus on things like whether FBI merchandise looks “fierce” has made officials think “we don’t have a real functioning FBI director.”

Writ even larger than the behavior of the director of the FBI is the growing focus on corruption in the Trump administration. On Wednesday, House Democrats announced they have created a task force to reinforce ethics rules and highlight the Trump family’s self-dealing when in office. The task force is made up of members from across the country and from different caucuses in the Democratic Party. Representative Joe Morelle, a fellow New Yorker and close ally of House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries who is the top-ranking Democrat on the House Administration Committee, will lead the task force along with Kevin Mullin of California, Delia C. Ramirez of Illinois, and Nikema Williams of Georgia.

Also on the task force are the top-ranking Democrat on the House Oversight and Reform Committee, Robert Garcia of California, and the top-ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, Jamie Raskin of Maryland, as well as Congressional Progressive Caucus members Greg Casar of Texas and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and the head of the moderate New Democrat Coalition, Brad Schneider of Illinois.

They will be looking into self-dealing like Trump’s current negotiations with the Internal Revenue Service to settle the $10 billion lawsuit he filed against it after an IRS contractor during his first term leaked some of his tax information, along with that of more than 400,000 other taxpayers, to two news outlets during Trump’s first term. Trump, along with his sons Donald Jr. and Eric, said the leak caused “reputational and financial harm, public embarrassment, unfairly tarnished their business reputations, portrayed them in a false light, and negatively affected President Trump, and the other Plaintiffs’ public standing.”

Peter Nicholas of NBC News noted in February that $10 billion is more than 80% of last year’s IRS budget.

Fatima Hussein of the Associated Press notes that several watchdog organizations have filed briefs challenging Trump’s lawsuit. Democracy Forward argued that the case is “extraordinary because the President controls both sides of the litigation, which raises the prospect of collusive litigation tactics,” and that “the conflicts of interest make it uncertain whether the Department of Justice will zealously defend the public [treasury] in the same way that it has against other plaintiffs claiming damages for related events.”

On Wednesday, Democratic representatives Jamie Raskin of Maryland and Dave Min of California, along with Democratic senators Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and minority leader Chuck Schumer of New York, introduced the Ban Presidential Plunder of Taxpayer Funds Act to ban presidents and vice presidents from stealing taxpayer money.

Pointing to the Department of Justice’s recent settlement of $1.2 million with Trump’s former national security advisor Michael Flynn, who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russians before Trump took office, after he sued for $50 million on the grounds that the criminal case against him was malicious prosecution, Raskin warned of an “emerging MAGA grift of suing the government as a ‘plaintiff’ on bogus grounds and then settling the suit as a ‘defendant’ for big bucks.”

“Over the past 15 months, we have seen unprecedented corruption from this administration, but this new abuse of power of providing huge cash payments to ‘settle’ baseless lawsuits brought forward by Trump and his allies is a new low. The bill that Senator Warren, Leader Schumer, Ranking Member Raskin, and I are bringing forward would stop this backdoor bribery and bring some accountability back to the federal government,” said Representative Min.

In February, when the lawsuit came to public attention, Trump noted that it seemed odd for him to be negotiating with himself over the issue, but told reporters that he would give whatever monies he was awarded to charity. “We could make it a substantial amount,” he said. “Nobody would care because it’s going to go to numerous very good charities.”

Notes:

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/17/world/middleeast/trump-iran-war-truth-social-posts.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2026/04/17/hormuz-strait-reopens-iran-us-war/

https://www.cbsnews.com/live-updates/iran-war-us-trump-strait-of-hormuz-diplomacy-ceasefire/

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/16/trump-israel-lebanon-ceasefire-iran-war.html

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/04/kash-patel-fbi-director-drinking-absences/686839/

https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2026/apr/17/middle-east-crisis-live-news-israel-lebanon-ceasefire-iran-war-us-latest-updates

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/starmer-macron-strait-of-hormuz-iran-war-trump-b2959902.html

https://www.axios.com/2026/04/17/iran-us-deal-20-billion-frozen-funds-uranium

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/house-democrats-attempt-anti-corruption-message-to-gain-traction-against-trump

Meidas+
Today in Politics, Bulletin 351. 4/17/26
… Trump made 13 posts in an hour today on Truth Social claiming total victory in the Iran War with the concepts of a peace agreement allegedly imminent. However, as with all things Trump, the reality and details never seem to match up with his claims. It appears that may be the case yet again…
Read more

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/4/17/world-reacts-to-the-opening-of-the-strait-of-hormuz-amid-us-iran-conflict

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/25/irs-contractor-leaked-hundreds-of-thousands-of-returns-00205980

https://apnews.com/article/trump-treasury-irs-lawsuit-tax-whistleblower-c710244db618b066f3070a65e75820a5

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trumps-10-billion-suit-government-go-sideways-rcna257483

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/ap-report-justice-department-settles-lawsuit-from-trump-ally-michael-flynn-for-1-2-million

https://democrats-judiciary.house.gov/media-center/press-releases/raskin-warren-schumer-min-introduce-new-bill-to-stop-president-vp-from-abusing-power-to-steal-taxpayer-funds

https://www.lloydslist.com/LL1156947/Strait-of-Hormuz-open-says-Iranian-foreign-minister

Bluesky:

meidastouch.com/post/3mjphsktvvs27

atrupar.com/post/3mjqksok2tp2h

atrupar.com/post/3mjqky7nhiv26

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The Republicans Seem Frantic

American Conversations: Representative Joe Morelle

The diffusion of space warfare: commercial satellites play a role in (everyone's) battlefield intelligence

There's now a vibrant market for real-time commercial satellite photos.  

Defense One has the story from the Persian Gulf:

US must adjust to Iran’s use of commercial satellite photos, Space Command says CENTCOM’s declaration of “space superiority” hasn’t prevented Tehran from putting space to use.
By Thomas Novelly

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colorado—Iran’s use of commercial space imagery to strike U.S. and allied targets will force the Pentagon to adjust, the head of U.S. Space Command said.

“We have to recognize that the rest of the world can now see the entire planet transparently and almost 24/7 and so we have to be able to operate in that environment successfully,” Gen. Stephen Whiting, the head of U.S. Space Command told reporters Tuesday during the Space Symposium conference here. "

Birthright Citizenship and Youth Crime

This paper studies the impact of birthright citizenship on youth crime. We leverage a German reform which automatically granted birthright citizenship to eligible immigrant children born in Germany after January 1, 2000 and administrative crime data from three federal states. We find that immigrant youth who acquired citizenship at birth are substantially less likely to engage in criminal activity, with estimates indicating a 70% reduction in crime. These results are particularly relevant in light of ongoing debates in the U.S. about abolishing birthright citizenship. Our findings suggest that inclusive citizenship policies can reduce crime and its associated costs, which in turn could strengthen social cohesion.

That is from a new NBER working paper by Leander AndresStefan BauernschusterGordon B. DahlHelmut Rainer Simone Schüller.

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SpaceX to attempt 600th Falcon booster landing amid West Coast Starlink mission

File: SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket stands at Space Launch Complex 4 East at Vandenberg Space Force Base ahead of the Starlink 17-31 mission on March 13, 2026. Image: SpaceX

Update: Launch has slipped to Sunday.

SpaceX is positioned to complete its 600th Falcon booster landing during a Starlink mission now planned for Sunday morning. The Falcon 9 rocket will fly on a south-southwesterly trajectory upon departure from Vandenberg Space Force Base.

A launch attempt on Saturday was postponed. SpaceX typically does not explain the cause of such delays.

The Starlink 17-22 mission will add another 25 broadband internet satellites into the company’s low Earth orbit constellation that consists of more than 10,200 spacecraft.

Liftoff of the Falcon 9 rocket from Space Launch Complex 4 East is now scheduled for Sunday, April 19 during a launch window that opens at 7 a.m. PDT (10am EDT / 1400 UTC).

Spaceflight Now will have live coverage beginning about 30 minutes prior to liftoff.

SpaceX will fly the mission using the Falcon 9i first stage booster with the tail number B1097, which will fly for a seventh time. It previously launched Sentinel-6B, Twilight, and five previous batches of Starlink satellites.

A little more eight minutes after liftoff, B1097 will land on the SpaceX drone ship, ‘Of Course I Still Love You.’ If successful, this will be the 191st landing on this vessel.

Follow-Up Regarding App Store Reviews, Which Are Definitely Busted

I wrote yesterday:

And the apps that do the right thing — like Godier’s Current — and never solicit a review like a needy hustler are penalized.

On Mastodon, Steven Troughton-Smith responded:

Review prompts are the difference between a great app getting five positive reviews, and thousands of positive reviews. I would never recommend to a developer to not implement the APIs. It’s App Store Editorial suicide for most apps, since Apple tends to only pick things up when they have that body of review data.

I can see how my describing not prompting for reviews as “the right thing” looks like I’m suggesting developers should not prompt for reviews. That wasn’t my intention.

You have to play the game as the game stands, and Apple controls the game. And in the game as it stands, apps need 5-star reviews to gain traction in the App Store, perhaps especially so for apps in crowded categories. And for most apps, the only way to achieve that is through prompting. But it’s still the right thing to do, by users, not to do it.

That’s the problem with how Apple has set this up — to be competitive, apps need to do the wrong thing. I’m a competitive bastard. If I had an app in the App Store today, I’d almost certainly prompt for reviews. That’s the game. I admire developers who refuse to play this part of the game. It’s noble. But it’s not a winning strategy. I want Apple to fix the game — that’s the only real solution.

The system is so twisted that even Apple itself begs for these reviews from its own apps, even the system apps built into iOS. When else does Apple ever ask for anything? It looks needy and pathetic. Real Gil Gunderson vibes.

The funny thing is, this morning while I was reading the Mastodon thread with Troughton-Smith’s post, Ivory prompted me for a rating. Which I dutifully submitted. 5 stars, of course. Which brings me to another follow-up point. A few readers have emailed to object to the argument that it hurts developers to give apps anything short of a 5-star rating. (A few of these readers are from Germany, no surprise.) It’s logical, I agree, that a 4-star rating ought to be considered fair and just for a good app with obvious room for improvement. But anything short of 5 stars pulls down any good app’s average, because the overwhelming majority of users who rate apps only ever assign 5 stars for apps they like, or 1 star for apps they’re angry about. In a system where the overwhelming majority of users only ever assigns 1 or 5 stars, assigning 4 stars is effectively a mildly negative review. That sucks. Apple should fix it. But until they do (which, let’s face it, they probably won’t), obstinately ignoring that this is how App Store ratings work does not help good apps get the attention you think you’re helping them get with a 4-star rating.

 ★ 

Apple’s Developer Guidelines for Ratings and Review Prompts

Apple Design:

Avoid pestering people. Repeated rating requests can be irritating, and may even negatively influence people’s opinion of your app. Consider allowing at least a week or two between requests, prompting again after people demonstrate additional engagement with your experience.

Prefer the system-provided prompt. iOS, iPadOS, and macOS offer a consistent, nonintrusive way for apps and games to request ratings and reviews. When you identify places in your experience where it makes sense to ask for feedback, the system checks for previous feedback and — if there isn’t any — displays an in-app prompt that asks for a rating and an optional written review. People can supply feedback or dismiss the prompt with a single tap or click; they can also opt out of receiving these prompts for all apps they have installed. The system automatically limits the display of the prompt to three occurrences per app within a 365-day period. For developer guidance, see RequestReviewAction.

There are a lot of apps that eschew a lot of these guidelines. I mean, how do you avoid pestering people when the entire idea of an alert asking for a rating/review is, by nature, pestering? It’s an oxymoron, like saying “Don’t pester people when you pester them.”

I actually knew about the system setting to opt out of these prompts. On iOS it’s in Settings → Apps → App Store: In-App Ratings & Reviews. On MacOS, it’s in the App Store app’s Settings window. On both platforms, it’s on by default. This is one of several settings that I would change, personally, but choose not to, as a critic / pundit / know-it-all, so as to have more of the standard experience that most users get. If you’re annoyed by these prompts though, you should feel free to turn them off.

 ★ 

Emergent Ventures India, 16th cohort

Roumak Das, a grade 11 student from West Bengal, and Samik Goyal, a 12th grader from Patiala, received their grants to travel to the International Olympiad in Artificial Intelligence 2025 in Beijing, where Roumak won a gold medal and Samik a silver medal. Roumak’s grant also supports his college applications, and Samik’s grant supports SPOI, dedicated to teaching informatics to school students.

Ishaan Gangwani, 17, received his grant to develop InkVell, an AI-native LaTeX editor, and to support his travel to the International Olympiad in Artificial Intelligence 2025 in Beijing.

Ronald Abraham received a career development grant for Veeraa, to build a crowdfunding and growth platform for India’s community leaders.

Tristan Wagner received his grant to explore low-cost autoinjectors for treating anaphylaxis and snakebite envenoming in India.

Michael Grasa received his grant to test a transparent, falsifiability-first approach to decoding the Indus Valley script, releasing versioned overlays and open datasets for replication or refutation.

Jasraj Budigam, 16, received his grant to develop CapNav-Lite, an adaptive AI navigation system that personalizes power-wheelchair control to each user within minutes on everyday hardware.

Mannat Kaur, 17, freshman at Stanford University, received her grant to continue developing research on wastewater recycling and its integration into the built environment and low-carbon housing.

Vineela Upadhyayula, Hari Krishna Upadhyayula, and Phani Madhav Upadhyayula received their grant for NeuraEase, to build a wearable-driven AI detection and management of acute dysregulation events in neurodivergence and neurological disorders, including autistic meltdowns.

Arnav Kumar and Gavneesh, cofounders of Vyobha Aerospace, received their grant to build regional eVTOL aircraft with fractional ownership at the cost of a car.

Aditya Raj Chopra, a high school senior, received a general career development grant.

Ansh Mishra, 17, received his grant to build reliable and accessible bionic prosthetic hands.

Vasu Dubey, 22, received his grant to build a machine-learning-based medical device for speech restoration in laryngectomy patients.

Snehadeep Kumar, 21, received his grant for Nebula Space Organisation, to build ultra-low-cost Earth-imaging CubeSats and a global imagery platform that makes space data accessible to everyone.

Uttam Singh and Ayush Das received their grant for Nakshatra Maps, to help people navigate indoor and outdoor public spaces with dynamic hyperlocal interactive maps, AR navigation, and smart emergency evacuation.

Mankaran Singh received his grant to build frictionless human-robot interaction for machines operating in human-centric environments.

Sommaiya Angrish, 21, an alt Hindi-pop musician, received his grant to work on his third album, rooted in his personal healing journey.

Achyut Tiwari, 24, received his grant for GeoLiquefy, an AI system forecasting earthquake-related soil liquefaction from geotechnical data for engineers, insurers, and risk assessors.

Devayan Das, 19, a biotech undergraduate, received his grant to develop dissolvable tissue culture nutrient blocks that simplify lab workflows and turn lab prep into a plug-and-play process.

Ayush Kale, a materials engineer, received his grant for EarthSprint Solutions, to transform agricultural waste into low-carbon, high-performance cement blocks.

Mohd Fahad Eqbal, 24, received his grant for Chakraswap, to scale an affordable battery swap network for e-rickshaw drivers.

Satyamedh Hulyalkar received his grant to develop a LoRa-based self-healing mesh network for agricultural and monitoring use cases.

Shivam Parashar received his grant for GreenScore, to build an industrial effluent monitoring system combining machine learning and IoT to keep Indian rivers clean.

Anand Unni received his grant for Nayaneethi Policy Collective, to develop a public policy curriculum and a community of public policy thinkers and analysts in Kerala, and strengthen the demand side of public policy.

Those unfamiliar with Emergent Ventures can learn more here and here. The EV India announcement is here. More about the winners of EV India second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth, eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth cohorts. To apply for EV India, use the EV application, click the “Apply Now” button and select India from the “My Project Will Affect” drop-down menu.

And here is Nabeel’s AI engine for other EV winners. Here are the other EV cohorts.

If you are interested in supporting the India tranche of Emergent Ventures, please write to me or to Shruti at srajagopalan@mercatus.gmu.edu.

TC: This post is from Shruti, and I thank her for her amazing work on this!

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Adding a new content type to my blog-to-newsletter tool

Agentic Engineering Patterns >

Here's an example of a deceptively short prompt that got a lot of work done in a single shot.

First, some background. I send out a free Substack newsletter around once a week containing content copied-and-pasted from my blog. I'm effectively using Substack as a lightweight way to allow people to subscribe to my blog via email.

I generate the newsletter with my blog-to-newsletter tool - an HTML and JavaScript app that fetches my latest content from this Datasette instance and formats it as rich text HTML, which I can then copy to my clipboard and paste into the Substack editor. Here's a detailed explanation of how that works.

I recently added a new type of content to my blog to capture content that I post elsewhere, which I called "beats". These include things like releases of my open source projects, new tools that I've built, museums that I've visited (from niche-museums.com) and other external content.

I wanted to include these in the generated newsletter. Here's the prompt I ran against the simonw/tools repository that hosts my blog-to-newsletter tool, using Claude Code on the web.

This got me the exact solution I needed. Let's break down the prompt.

Clone simonw/simonwillisonblog from github to /tmp for reference

I use this pattern a lot. Coding agents can clone code from GitHub, and the best way to explain a problem is often to have them look at relevant code. By telling them to clone to /tmp I ensure they don't accidentally end up including that reference code in their own commit later on.

The simonw/simonwillisonblog repository contains the source code for my Django-powered simonwillison.net blog. This includes the logic and database schema for my new "beats" feature.

Update blog-to-newsletter.html to include beats that have descriptions - similar to how the Atom everything feed on the blog works

Referencing blog-to-newsletter.html is all I need here to tell Claude which of the 200+ HTML apps in that simonw/tools repo it should be modifying.

Beats are automatically imported from multiple sources. Often they aren't very interesting - a dot-release bug fix for one of my smaller open source projects, for example.

My blog includes a way for me to add additional descriptions to any beat, which provides extra commentary but also marks that beat as being more interesting than those that I haven't annotated in some way.

I already use this as a distinction to decide which beats end up in my site's Atom feed. Telling Claude to imitate that saves me from having to describe the logic in any extra detail.

Run it with python -m http.server and use `uvx rodney --help` to test it - compare what shows up in the newsletter with what's on the homepage of https://simonwillison.net

Coding agents always work best if they have some kind of validation mechanism they can use to test their own work.

In this case I wanted Claude Code to actively check that the changes it made to my tool would correctly fetch and display the latest data.

I reminded it to use python -m http.server as a static server because I've had issues in the past with applications that fetch data and break when served as a file from disk instead of a localhost server. In this particular case that may not have been necessary, but my prompting muscle memory has python -m http.server baked in at this point!

I described the uvx rodney --help trick in the agentic manual testing chapter. Rodney is browser automation software that can be installed using uvx, and that has --help output designed to teach an agent everything it needs to know in order to use the tool.

I figured that telling Claude to compare the results in the newsletter to the content of my blog's homepage would be enough for it to confidently verify that the new changes were working correctly, since I had recently posted content that matched the new requirements.

You can see the full session here, or if that doesn't work I have an alternative transcript showing all of the individual tool calls.

The resulting PR made exactly the right change. It added an additional UNION clause to the SQL query that fetched the blog's content, filtering out draft beats and beats that have nothing in their note column:

...
union all
select
  id,
  'beat' as type,
  title,
  created,
  slug,
  'No HTML' as html,
  json_object(
    'created', date(created),
    'beat_type', beat_type,
    'title', title,
    'url', url,
    'commentary', commentary,
    'note', note
  ) as json,
  url as external_url
from blog_beat
where coalesce(note, '') != '' and is_draft = 0
union all
...
And it figured out a mapping of beat types to their formal names, presumably derived from the Django ORM definition that it read while it was exploring the reference codebase:
const beatTypeDisplay = {
  release: 'Release',
  til: 'TIL',
  til_update: 'TIL updated',
  research: 'Research',
  tool: 'Tool',
  museum: 'Museum'
};
Telling agents to use another codebase as reference is a powerful shortcut for communicating complex concepts with minimal additional information needed in the prompt.

Tags: ai, llms, prompt-engineering, coding-agents, ai-assisted-programming, generative-ai, agentic-engineering, github

Join us at PyCon US 2026 in Long Beach - we have new AI and security tracks this year

This year's PyCon US is coming up next month from May 13th to May 19th, with the core conference talks from Friday 15th to Sunday 17th and tutorial and sprint days either side. It's in Long Beach, California this year, the first time PyCon US has come to the West Coast since Portland, Oregon in 2017 and the first time in California since Santa Clara in 2013.

If you're based in California this is a great opportunity to catch up with the Python community, meet a whole lot of interesting people and learn a ton of interesting things.

In addition to regular PyCon programming we have two new dedicated tracks at the conference this year: an AI track on Friday and a Security track on Saturday.

The AI program was put together by track chairs Silona Bonewald (CitableAI) and Zac Hatfield-Dodds (Anthropic). I'll be an in-the-room chair this year, introducing speakers and helping everything run as smoothly as possible.

Here's the AI track schedule in full:

(And here's how I scraped that as a Markdown list from the schedule page using Claude Code and Rodney.)

You should come to PyCon US!

I've been going to PyCon for over twenty years now - I first went back in 2005. It's one of my all-time favourite conference series. Even as it's grown to more than 2,000 attendees PyCon US has remained a heavily community-focused conference - it's the least corporate feeling large event I've ever attended.

The talks are always great, but it's the add-ons around the talks that really make it work for me. The lightning talks slots are some of the most heavily attended sessions. The PyLadies auction is always deeply entertaining. The sprints are an incredible opportunity to contribute directly to projects that you use, coached by their maintainers.

In addition to scheduled talks, the event has open spaces, where anyone can reserve space for a conversation about a topic - effectively PyCon's version of an unconference. I plan to spend a lot of my time in the open spaces this year - I'm hoping to join or instigate sessions about both Datasette and agentic engineering.

I'm on the board of the Python Software Foundation, and PyCon US remains one of our most important responsibilities - in the past it's been a key source of funding for the organization, but it's also core to our mission to "promote, protect, and advance the Python programming language, and to support and facilitate the growth of a diverse and international community of Python programmers".

If you do come to Long Beach, we'd really appreciate it if you could book accommodation in the official hotel block, for reasons outlined in this post on the PSF blog.

Tags: conferences, open-source, pycon, python, ai, psf

datasette 1.0a28

Release: datasette 1.0a28

I was upgrading Datasette Cloud to 1.0a27 and discovered a nasty collection of accidental breakages caused by changes in that alpha. This new alpha addresses those directly:

  • Fixed a compatibility bug introduced in 1.0a27 where execute_write_fn() callbacks with a parameter name other than conn were seeing errors. (#2691)
  • The database.close() method now also shuts down the write connection for that database.
  • New datasette.close() method for closing down all databases and resources associated with a Datasette instance. This is called automatically when the server shuts down. (#2693)
  • Datasette now includes a pytest plugin which automatically calls datasette.close() on temporary instances created in function-scoped fixtures and during tests. See Automatic cleanup of Datasette instances for details. This helps avoid running out of file descriptors in plugin test suites that were written before the Database(is_temp_disk=True) feature introduced in Datasette 1.0a27. (#2692)

Most of the changes in this release were implemented using Claude Code and the newly released Claude Opus 4.7.

Tags: datasette

Lies, Damned Lies and Economic Vibes

A graph with blue lines

AI-generated content may be incorrect.

According to Donald Trump, the U.S. economy is doing great. We’re enjoying a huge boom, there’s no inflation, and we’re all getting tax cuts. We have prosperity like nobody has ever seen before.

But it’s probably not news to you that reality doesn’t agree. Inflation was stubbornly elevated even before the Iran debacle, while growth has been sluggish. Jobs for entry-level workers are hard to find while mortgage and car loan rates are up. Gas-pump prices are above $4 on average and around 10 million Americans are projected to lose health insurance by 2028. Yet the one economic variable that stands out, that really is like nothing anyone has ever seen before,is consumer confidence: The long-running University of Michigan index of consumer sentiment just hit its lowest point ever recorded.

And that’s a puzzle. Obviously, I’m no defender either of Trump’s policies or of his lies. But while the U.S. economy isn’t nearly as good as he claims, it’s objectively not bad enough to justify the worst consumer sentiment in history — worse than during the stagflation at the end of the 1970s, worse than in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis.

Warning: Today’s post is wonkier than usual, at least in tone. It basically ends with a question mark. My main goal today is to share a puzzle with readers and explain why I’m not satisfied with the answers smart people — especially two of my favorite data analysis gurus, Jared Bernstein and G. Elliott Morris — are offering. They argue that it’s all about the level of prices. While that is certainly an important factor, I believe that there is more to the story. I believe that the current extremely negative sentiment is a result of Americans’ correct sense that they have been lied to. To discuss this fully will take a couple of posts. So today I will introduce the puzzle and enlarge on the range of explanations in the next post.

Start with the puzzle: Why are Americans so down on an economy that, while not the greatest, isn’t terrible by the usual measures? This isn’t a new question: Kyla Scanlon coined the term “vibecession” in 2022 for a situation in which people feel bad about an economy that doesn’t look that bad by the numbers. But the puzzle has intensified over time, both because the bad feelings have gotten worse and because the vibecession has been so persistent.

Historically, consumer sentiment tracked objective measures of the state of the economy. In fact, you could predict sentiment fairly well using just one variable: the so-called “misery index,” the sum of inflation and the unemployment rate. Here, using annual averages (and the first three months of 2026) is what the relationship between the misery index and consumer sentiment has looked like since 1990:

You can get an even better fit to pre-Covid consumer sentiment by adding other economic variables, such as the performance of the stock market. But any way you cut it, since 2022 Americans have felt much worse about the economy than conventional economic measures say they “should.” Moreover, that pessimism has gotten worse over time: consumer sentiment is much worse now than it was in 2023 and 2024.

Many observers have attempted to explain these unusually bad feelings by claiming that the economy is worse than it looks, especially for working-class families. Going through those arguments would take me too far afield right now. But let me just say that some of those arguments, like claiming that ordinary workers didn’t share in the post-Covid recovery, are just wrong. Others, like pointing to much higher interest rates on mortgages and other loans, have validity. But they aren’t sufficient to explain why consumer sentiment is now worse than it was under stagflation and mass unemployment.

So what does explain the current dismal consumer sentiment? Both Bernstein and Morris argue that it’s about the price level as opposed to the rate of inflation.

The chart below illustrates what they mean. It shows the log of the Consumer Price Index since 2014. I use the log because this means that a given vertical distance always corresponds to the same percentage change, and the slope of the line shows the rate of inflation:

A graph showing a price increase

AI-generated content may be incorrect.

The U.S. experienced a bout of high inflation in 2021-22, largely because of disruptions to supply chains in the aftermath of Covid, plus fallout from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. This inflation spurt ended as supply chains became unsnarled and oil prices stabilized, and inflation since 2023 has been only modestly higher than it was pre-Covid. However, prices have never come back down and have remained persistently higher than the pre-2020 trend would have predicted.

And the story is that consumers aren’t fully mollified by the fact that inflation — the rate at which prices are rising — has slowed. They’re angry and upset that the level of prices remains much higher than they expected.

Both Bernstein and Morris find that if one adds a price-level variable to an equation predicting consumer sentiment, it tracks the data well. Morris concludes,

When it comes to how Americans feel about the economy today, whether you are measuring using objective structural price data or the polls, it’s the prices, stupid.

Why am I not fully convinced by this explanation? I have three questions:

First, does correlation imply causation? Consumer sentiment fell off a cliff after 2020. Also, prices surged after 2020. But lots of things changed with Covid. How sure are we that the second observation explains the first? Morris points to other survey data that support the prices to confidence link, but we’re still talking about basically one observation, which is always problematic.

Or to use a bit of jargon, is including the jump in prices in your equation just introducing a dummy variable? That is, is it simply a marker that something changed, but not a clear indication of what?

Second, shouldn’t this story have a sell-by date? The big price surge began five years ago. That’s a long time. Do you remember what groceries cost in April 2021? I don’t, not really. At some point one would expect people to recalibrate their expectations of what things “should” cost. Yet the vibecession is if anything deepening with the passage of time.

Third, what about Morning in America? Joe Biden presided over rapidly falling inflation for the second half of his term, yet received no credit because, we’re told, people were upset that prices hadn’t actually come down. But you know who else presided over falling inflation but a still-rising price level? Ronald Reagan. Here’s what happened to the overall level of consumer prices during Reagan’s first term and the Biden presidency:

A graph with a line going up

AI-generated content may be incorrect.

The two presidents’ track records on prices were almost identical. Yet Reagan ran a triumphant reelection campaign on the theme that it was Morning in America, while the Biden economy was vilified. What was that about?

Jared is too good an economist to be unaware of this puzzle. He has shared with me a draft of a forthcoming paper with Daniel Posthumus, in which they do indeed find that the level of prices historically didn’t matter the way it seems to now. They suggest that the long era of relatively low inflation since the mid-1980s may have made people more sensitive to price shocks:

Our findings suggest that a huge storm after a long calm can be more upsetting to people who are not used to bad weather.

Indeed. But why has consumer sentiment gotten so much worse over the past year, even as the low prices people remember recede further into the past?

My speculative answer is that it has a lot to do with the lies of 2024. Remember, millions voted for Trump because he promised to reduce grocery prices “on Day One” and promised to cut energy bills in half. Now they know that they were had.

To be continued …

MUSICAL CODA

Europa Missions

Before resurfacing, they promise to inspect the ice for any evidence of hockey-playing life.

Eleventy

11ty in a pastoral setting

When I started this blog in 2011, I built it using Jekyll. Jekyll served me well for fifteen years. It was fast enough, and though it would take me an hour or two to get the system reinstalled when I switched laptops, it mostly just worked. But late last year, I was in the midst of updating all of my local installations to the latest versions of their runtimes, and when I tried to update Jekyll to Ruby 4, it wouldn't go. The Jekyll project did eventually merge support for Ruby 4 (a one-line fix) in February , but I took this as a sign to get going.

I probably could have kept on with Jekyll for another few years, but there's no denying the project has slowed down, and my optimization stack for this blog has gotten a little more complicated - it'd be nice to use a tool more optimization-minded and simplify my toolchain.

So: I switched to 11ty. Or, as it is about to be called Build Awesome. I switched and started to write this blog post before all of the hubbub: I have some thoughts, but that's not the point.

Why eleventy for macwright.com?

The 800 pound gorilla is Astro, not Eleventy. There are lots of other static site generators, like hakyll (in Haskell) or dodeca (in Rust). I could build one myself, as many have before.

For this site, I don't have any other stakeholders. I don't have to onboard anyone to new tech, or impress anyone with my decisions. There are a few simple priorities for this website:

  1. Simplicity
  2. Longevity
  3. Speed

I care about both internal and external simplicity: both the simplicity of the API as well as the implementation. This is because for any tool, I expect it to break, and I want to be able to open it up and find the problem. It's also a key factor because complex projects are dramatically harder to maintain, so they tend to have lower longevity if they don't achieve dominance.

Longevity is hard to predict. The Lindy Effect is a good shortcut:

the future life expectancy of some non-perishable thing, like a technology or an idea, is proportional to its current age

But in tech, the newest solution could also be the best one. You have to do a little bit of predicting. Large contributor bases are also indicative, but only if they represent multiple entities. A project with lots of contributors from the same company can get quiet very quickly if they lay everyone off. It also counts if the project has survived multiple changes in control and power.

For this website, I care more about end-user speed than development speed. Whether it takes 100ms to preview a Markdown change for me doesn't matter as much as how long a pageload takes for a reader. Most static site generators are pretty fast if you don't do silly things anyway. In my experience, SSGs that were "slow to build" had nested loops that soaked up most of the time.

Eleventy checks enough of these boxes. The contributor base is quite small, but Zach is very persistent and has been through it all. It's both fast to build websites, and has lots of tools for optimizing websites - tools that let me replace custom code I had written for macwright.com. And, in sharp contrast to Astro, it is written with internal simplicity as a priority. It is both a small project in terms of lines-of-code, and it is also not dependent on mega-dependencies. A fresh install of Astro includes 246 dependencies, including Vite and esbuild. Eleventy includes about half - 116 dependencies, and they weigh 14.6MB instead of 87.9MB.

I think Eleventy could be even simpler (and made a small PR in that direction while writing this post) by cutting some old dependencies with unnecessary micro-dependencies in them. The e18e project to remove and shrink dependencies is so needed!

SSGs are a tough way to make a living

Of course, there's the news: Eleventy is now Build Awesome. This comes on the tails of lots of similar announcements from other projects:

Because these are open source projects, the word "acquired" deserves an asterisk: usually they're hiring the team, maybe getting the trademark, and whatever business lines were there.

Zach got a bit of heat for this move. I agree that 'Build Awesome' sounds millenial and Eleventy was a cooler name. The rebrand was odd.

But overall, I get it. You can't slowly trickle out a big strategy and product launch and consult everyone. Eleventy fits fairly well with the rest of the Web Awesome products: icons, web components, and a static site builder. They're all good web tools in the traditionalist rather than frontend-maximalist vein.

I think as we've seen, it's also extraordinarily difficult to monetize low-level tooling, in large part because every developer is ready to start building their own SSG for any reason or no reason at all because it sounds like a fun side-project. You can monetize higher-level content tooling - Kirby, Sanity, and a few other site generators with a CMS component have done that and built small, sustainable businesses. But something in the exact shape of Eleventy doesn't work as a small product business. You'd have to do services, at the bare minimum.

So, the outcomes are kind of like:

  1. They get acquired by some large, possibly public company as a way to increase the platform for their hosting / CDN product. This is the fate of Astro, Nuxt, Gatsby, Remix, and to some extent, Begin. Jekyll was this from the start: it was created by Tom Preston-Warner at GitHub and was the jet fuel for making GitHub Pages a success.
  2. The maintainer never goes full time and has some lightweight day job or indirect way of making money. This I also heavily associate with the pleasure of living in a country with a strong welfare state and affordable healthcare. I really appreciate how much long-term, high-quality software comes out of this scenario but cannot emphasize how bad it is to buy your healthcare on the exchanges every month.
  3. They attempt to build a company around it, directly related to the tool. Remix did this early on, selling licenses, and Astro attempted to launch some products. Eleventy is trying this out, in combination with launching a CMS and some other features.

It's not easy: you can't achieve #2 if you live in America and have a family, and #1 is perhaps an 'ignorance is bliss' kind of solution in that open source isn't really sustainable if it's only a loss-leader.

Eleventy so far

So anyway, I've been using Eleventy since January, how is it going?

Mostly good! Some highlights include using the Image plugin to optimize my images even more than they used to be optimized, and pulling HTML minification straight into the build process with a little optimize plugin. Building the site is a bit faster than it used to be, and using Eleventy's powerful-but-confusing directory data files, I've been able to simplify each blog post, using directories instead of frontmatter for categories.

Templating is fun: using Vento templates is mostly great because they let me write arbitrary JavaScript in templates. And unlike Liquid, they don't quietly fail.

WebC is a source of joy and pain for me. In one sense, it's an absolutely golden tool: it lets you embed components in pages with server-side rendering, automatic bundling, and excellent performance. It's simple, too! The package is small because it doesn't pull in a big JavaScript transpiler like esbuild. I used WebC recently for the chart on In the Atmosphere and the demo in Color dithering.

But there is pain, too. It's a very unique tool with lots of constraints, and if you mess something up it fails hard. The documentation merely gestures at its potential and leaves lots and lots of questions unanswered. I think it could be amazing and is already quite good, but it needs a lot more love, as Zach admitted in a recent talk.

For both WebC and Eleventy, I have mixed feelings about the non-adoption of TypeScript. WebC had a bug that would be trivially identified by TypeScript or even just a linter. I think the tooling for these projects could be a bunch better.

But complaining is overrated: I've been trying to contribute to the projects. Mostly this means contributing to the documentation, which could still use a lot of work. The commercialization of Eleventy complicates this, which is partially why I've been stalled on documentation updates since February: it opens the question of whether there'll be some great, paid documentation contributor swooping in and making everything I do irrelevant. Maybe the Kickstarter campaign will do really well and there'll be multiple funded maintainers, or at least Zach will be comfortably full-time. I hope that at least it frees up enough time for 11ty and all if its related projects to get lots of pull requests reviews and merged, because unfortunately the pace there has been slow.


Should you use Eleventy? Maybe! Building a new static site generator from scratch is fun, but participating in a community and improving a popular tool is enriching in a totally different way.

Eleventy has a lot less buzz than Astro. And it has a lot of its own issues. But like other software, it's an expression of a vision and a bunch of values, and a lot of that resonates with me. I hope that it's the right kind of software, and I'll still be using it in 15 years.

Oh, and if you're excited about the Build Awesome launch, sign up for its Kickstarter. I'll probably chip in a few bucks too.

Friday 17 April 1663

Up by five o’clock as I have long done and to my office all the morning, at noon home to dinner with my father with us. Our dinner, it being Good Friday, was only sugarsopps and fish; the only time that we have had a Lenten dinner all this Lent.

This morning Mr. Hunt, the instrument maker, brought me home a Basse Viall to see whether I like it, which I do not very well, besides I am under a doubt whether I had best buy one yet or no, because of spoiling my present mind and love to business.

After dinner my father and I walked into the city a little, and parted and to Paul’s Church Yard, to cause the title of my English “Mare Clausum” to be changed, and the new title, dedicated to the King, to be put to it, because I am ashamed to have the other seen dedicated to the Commonwealth.

So home and to my office till night, and so home to talk with my father, and supper and to bed, I have not had yet one quarter of an hour’s leisure to sit down and talk with him since he came to town, nor do I know till the holidays when I shall.

Read the annotations

Companies make the case for commercial space station markets

CLD panel

Companies proposing to develop commercial space stations are pushing back against claims by NASA that a market for such stations has yet to develop.

The post Companies make the case for commercial space station markets appeared first on SpaceNews.

D2D services are at risk of becoming too complicated and siloed

At the recent Mobile World Conference 2026 in Barcelona, the strong presence of Direct-to-Device (D2D) satellite services and the avalanche of press releases related to contracts signed between D2D satellite service providers and Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) gave the impression that large scale implementation of D2D services by MNOs is imminent. However, the truth is […]

The post D2D services are at risk of becoming too complicated and siloed appeared first on SpaceNews.

Qingzhou prototype cargo spacecraft completes rendezvous tests in orbit

China has conducted rendezvous and proximity operations tests involving a prototype cargo spacecraft and a satellite in a step towards low-cost orbital infrastructure.

The post Qingzhou prototype cargo spacecraft completes rendezvous tests in orbit  appeared first on SpaceNews.

India’s TakeMe2Space sets sights on 50-kilowatt data center

COLORADO SPRINGS – After announcing a $5 million seed round in January, Indian startup TakeMe2Space seeks to raise $55 million to establish a 50-kilowatt orbital data center. “What is key for us is to demonstrate that we can play the orbital data center game globally,” TakeMe2Space founder Ronak Kumar Samantray told SpaceNews. “There’s a lot […]

The post India’s TakeMe2Space sets sights on 50-kilowatt data center appeared first on SpaceNews.

Countering missile threats ‘left of launch’

COLORADO SPRINGS – U.S. government agencies are working with industry to develop tools to disrupt missiles before they take flight, a timespan called ‘left of launch.’ “We’re looking at different aspects of the threat as it evolves,” Erich Hernandez-Baquero, Raytheon Intelligence and Space vice president of space intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, said at the Space Symposium. […]

The post Countering missile threats ‘left of launch’ appeared first on SpaceNews.

Taiwan floats shared satcom constellation amid calls for more space collaboration

Taiwan’s space agency chief has called on other countries to band together on a shared communications constellation to match the scale and growing strategic importance of networks like Starlink.

The post Taiwan floats shared satcom constellation amid calls for more space collaboration appeared first on SpaceNews.

Hormuz is (apparently) unblocked. Energy markets remain a mess

Mines, mistrust and missing ships will keep markets tight for months

NorthStar to go public via SPAC to expand space-based SSA network

NorthStar Earth and Space plans to raise funds to expand the space-based sensor network behind its space situational awareness business by merging with Viking Acquisition Corp. I, a publicly listed shell company.

The post NorthStar to go public via SPAC to expand space-based SSA network appeared first on SpaceNews.

Shenzhou-21 astronauts complete third spacewalk, mission extended by a month

China’s Shenzhou-21 astronauts conducted an extravehicular activity outside the Tiangong space station Thursday, installing debris-protection hardware and inspecting the orbital outpost.

The post Shenzhou-21 astronauts complete third spacewalk, mission extended by a month appeared first on SpaceNews.

Artemis 2 astronauts praise performance of Orion

Artemis 2 crew

The astronauts who flew around the moon on Artemis 2 said they were confident the Orion spacecraft is ready to support future missions.

The post Artemis 2 astronauts praise performance of Orion appeared first on SpaceNews.

New EU Space Act draft seen as a step backward

Kubilius

A revised draft of a proposed European Union space regulation is a step backward, creating uncertainty about how the law would be applied outside the EU, critics argue.

The post New EU Space Act draft seen as a step backward appeared first on SpaceNews.

That was then, this is now

From 1857:

The Persians were great sticklers for ceremony, it turned out, and now that the treaty was ratified, they expected an exchange of gifts to mark the important occasion.  At Spence’s [a leading diplomat of the time] insistence, the United States spent $10,000 (close to $1 million in today’s money) on diamond-studded snuffboxes and weapons for the shah.  The State Department protested bitterly, as it was not in the habit of spending such outrageous sums, but Spence put his foot down, knowing that these gifts paled in comparison with what Persia had received from Napoleon and others.  Spence’s brother Charles was dispatched to Tehran to deliver the gifts in person — a gesture the shah appreciated so much that he decorates the young man with the Order of the Lion and the Sun, the country’s highest honor.

That is from John Ghazvinian America and Iran: A History, 1720 to the Present, a very good book.

The post That was then, this is now appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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Fireside Friday, April 17, 2026

Hey folks! Fireside this week; next week we’ll be back to seperating out the components of Carthaginian armies, looking at the real backbone of those armies, which are Carthage’s North African subjects.

Ollie (left) looking shocked and Percy (right) looking annoyed that their Itty Bitty Kitteh Committee has been interrupted by a photo-op.

But for this week’s musing, I wanted to talk a bit about how different historians approach our craft when the evidence is both limited and hostile and Carthage provides a good opportunity to do so. As we noted last week, the evidence for Carthage – its armies, politics, society, all of it – is quite difficult. The literary evidence that we have for Carthage is both very limited (relatively few ancient authors say much about them) and also quite hostile: Carthage’s history was written by its enemies. We know that pro-Carthaginian histories (notably that of Philinus of Agrigentum) existed, but their work does not survive to us. So for any given event or institution, we often only have one source (or at least one real source in cases where we have Polybius and several other authors whose source is also Polybius) and so not only is that source is almost invariably hostile to Carthage, we have no reliable other source against which to compare.

Now in other situations where this is the case – for instance in Greek treatments of the Achaemenids – we have a backup option, which is that we may have archaeology or shorter, more fragmented sources (epigraphy, papyri, temple records) against which to ‘check’ our literary tradition. But here, Carthage gives us very little as well. We have some inscriptions from Carthage, but they’re very few and quite short and limited. Likewise, archaeology has certainly confirmed the presence of Carthage and its Punic material culture, but it struggles to answer a lot of the questions we have.

So we have sources, which are to some degree unreliable, but which we are generally unable to ‘check’ with other kinds of evidence, but those sources are all we have. What is a historian to do?

In practice, there tend to be two responses and Carthage is also convenient as a demonstration here because those approaches can be neatly summed up in the English-language scholars who exemplify them: Dexter Hoyos and Nathan Pilkington.

The first approach – employed by Dexter Hoyos, I’d argue – is to assume that the sources are basically accurate unless you have reason to suppose otherwise. So assuming what Diodorus is saying is not absurd, we assume it happened and often even when what Herodotus or Diodorus is saying seems a bit ‘out there’ (like the size of the armies at the Battle of Himera (480)), we assume the event probably occurred, if perhaps in a more reasonable way (the armies being smaller, for instance). Implausible things (the Carthaginians attacking Syracuse in 480 in coordination with the Achaemenid invasion of Greece) can be discarded, but if there isn’t a good reason to doubt something, then we do not doubt it.

This approach is often married to a ‘positivist’ historical approach, which aims to establish objective facts in so far as they can be nailed down (and less interested what it views as interpretation). At its worst, it can be ‘under-theorized’ – that is, failing to think critically or analytically enough about sources or cause-and-effect and just presenting facts – though I would hardly level that accusation at Hoyos, who is well aware his sources are not always to be trusted.

The alternative, of course is the reverse: rather than assuming the sources are trustworthy, unless proven otherwise, the sources are assumed to be untrustworthy unless confirmed by some other sort of evidence or reasoning. This is, I think, fairly close to Nathan Pilkington’s approach in The Carthaginian Empire (2019). To return to the question of the Battle of Himera (480), Nathan Pilkington, well, questions the existence of the Battle of Himera and indeed contends that there may not have been a meaningful Carthaginian presence on Sicily at all in the early fifth century, because our only evidence that there was are these motivated, untrustworthy Greek writers.

There is a risk, in this kind of approach, for the resulting history to be, in a way, over-theorized. After all, if the sources are untrustworthy, they must be replaced by something. Ideally, they might be replaced by archaeology (this is Pilkington’s preference) and that can be valuable, but as we’ve discussed time and again, archaeology often cannot answer our most important questions. The first danger is that over-theorizing: the ‘blank spaces’ created by discounting the sources are in turn filled with theoretical frameworks, how it ‘must have been,’ which risk ending up as houses of cards: it is one thing to build a theory which fits the available evidence, but another thing to build a theory into the absence of such evidence (Pilkington, I should note, largely avoids this pitfall). But the alternative danger is the ‘council of despair’ – that despite having sources which comment on a period, the historian essentially throws up their hands and declares that nothing can really be known (or at least very little) – whole chunks of history consigned to dark ages created entirely by critique. Naturally, the positivist-inclined historians will rebel against this determination to declare that nothing can be known when there is evidence right there.

For my part, I think readers can guess that I am closer to the Hoyos end of this spectrum than the Pilkington. My tolerance for yawning uncertainty is fairly low, which is why I steadfastly refuse to work on basically anything in the Roman world before 264 when Polybius at last lets me put at least one foot firmly on the ground. But once there, my tendency is to assume the sources are broadly right unless I have a good reason to suppose they’re not. That isn’t to say Pilkington’s book is bad – I don’t think it is, even though I often disagree with it – I think it is valuable precisely because it overturns a bunch of apple carts. It is good and useful to send historians holding the consensus view scrambling to defend it – more often than not they succeed, but the result is a stronger, more clearly reasoned position.

But I think there is a real risk in attempting to read ‘against the current’ of one’s sources, which can become a sort of motivated reasoning. To take another example, I find N.L. Overtoom’s effort in Reign of Arrows (2020) to reframe Antiochus III’s victory over the Parthians as something closer to defeat or at least a clever feint and retreat by the Parthians, when the sources – admittedly, fragmentary and difficult – seem quite clear that they understand Antiochus III to have won a great victory and also we see Parthia brought back under Seleucid control (albeit not for very long) after the campaign. It’s an effort to take a theoretical construct (Parthian feigned flight as both a tactical and operational principle) and apply it against the sources. This, I think, we cannot do unless we have some really good reason to do so (like some clear evidence that Parthia’s position remained strong afterwards; they were vassalized, so evidently it didn’t).

But sometimes some suspicion about the sources is warranted. As I noted in last week’s post, there is an odd pattern in our sources where – up until Polybius kicks in and we have more reliable sources – Carthage seems to only ever lose battles and yet somehow Carthaginian power seems to keep expanding. One is left wondering not if the Greek victories over Carthaginian armies are fake (I don’t think they are) but rather if some Carthaginian victories have perhaps been forgotten or de-emphasized in the retelling.

In either case, there is no sure solution here. Momentum has been building for a while for scholars to be more skeptical – in some cases, extremely skeptical – of our Greek language sources when they discuss non-Greek cultures, especially ones (Persians, Parthians, Phoenicians) they view largely as enemies, an approach which has value if just to act as a ‘check’ on the rest of us (and often more than that). On the other hand, there is a strong pressure towards positivism in publication: no one wants an introductory textbook that just says, “we don’t know” on every page and folks buying books also want to be told what was, rather than what could not be known. I suspect as a result the skeptical approach will remain a strong undercurrent in the scholarship, while major publications continue to be dominated by works of a somewhat more loosely positivist bent.

On to recommendations:

Starting on a bit of a pop-culture note, I really enjoyed Peter Raleigh’s take over at The Long Library on Martin Scorsese’s criminal characters particularly in the context of Killers of the Flower Moon (2023). Peter’s essays on film are always a treat – even though he often picks movies rather more obscure than what I tend to watch – but this is a particularly incisive look at the way Scorsese paints his criminal characters (both protagonists and villains) and how his entire body of work really explores the kind of person and the kind of thinking that leads to that sort of criminality. A particularly good read for reminding you that however charismatic some of these characters (in movies other than Killers of the Flower Moon) are, the point of these movies is almost invariably that their behavior is both socially destructive and also self-destructive.

Meanwhile, on the historical side, I’ve recommended Partial Historians before, but let me do so again, as they have just now gotten to the Gallic sack of Rome (390) and so are starting to move into a period where our sources start to be on slightly firmer ground (though hardly very firm ground even at this point). For those who missed previous recommendations, Partial Historians is a podcast with two historians (Dr. Fiona Radford and Dr. Peta Greenfield) who are moving through the history of Rome on a year-by-year basis, comparing and contrasting the sources we have for each year as they go. It’s a great way to get a sense, especially for these early years (though they are now beginning to move into what we’d call the Middle Republic – historians differ somewhat on the exact start-date for that) how tricky the sources can be. Give it a listen!

And over at Astroclassical Musings, Oliver Clarke, curatorial assistant at the Ashmolean Museum, had as his ‘coin of the week’ a fascinating Punic coin with a pegasus design on its obverse. It’s a wonderful coin and Clarke uses it as a jumping off point for a fascinating discussion of the size of the coin, where the images come from and even the modern history of how the Ashmolean ended up with this particular coin. In particular, he argues that the coin may reflect an effort by Carthage to communicate its claim to control of Sicily, having a coin with Tanit on one side – the chief goddess of Carthage – and the Sicilian Pegasus on the other.

For this week’s book review, I’ll be a bit late to the party and recommend P. Wyman, The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World, 1490-1530 (2021). We’ve touched on the topic of the ‘Great Divergence’ – or as I tend to frame it, the ‘Why Europe?’ question – and The Verge serves as a remarkably readable introduction to the answers to that question. The book is organized not as a dry discussion of these factors, but as a series of nine biographical sketches – a mix of powerful leaders and ‘smaller’ people living within those changes – which serve to illustrate the key factors which Wyman sees as responsible for setting Europe on the path to reshaping the world. The result is a narrative that is engaging to read and strongly grounded, complete with the literary flourish of short passages at the beginnings and ends of the chapters that adopt an almost historical-fiction vividness, attempting to describe the feeling that a figure has of being in a given moment.

The four major shifts that Wyman sees as responsible for the Great Divergence are the specific strain of capitalism that Europe developed, the (re)emergence of states in Europe (albeit very much not yet the powerful modern administrative states of later centuries), the military revolution and finally the printing press, leading to the more rapid dissemination of ideas outside of a narrow elite. This multi-factor approach is well suited for the structure – each chapter focused on a specific person can feature a focus on different elements or blends of these four factors. It also does a good job of reflecting current scholarly consensus in a way that I think is helpful for someone looking to start understanding early modern Europe, providing a platform from which to look at more focused scholarly treatments of specific elements of these factors.

I am, of course, not without my quibbles. While the military revolution is very clearly part of Wyman’s narrative, it is somewhat less prominent than I’d have it. For instance early statements that there wasn’t a clear reason why European ships led exploration and economic predation (piracy and raiding) – Wyman prefers to focus on the economic culture that created the raiding-trading-exploring naval entrepreneurs, which is absolutely a major factor here – struck me as a bit off. The European shipbuilding tradition really did have an edge by the 1500s in producing ocean-going multipurpose vessels that could fight effectively with cannon; there’s a reason that even at vast logistical distance, local fleets of dhows, junks, atakebune and so on found they couldn’t ever quite prohibit European warships from plying their waters, even when they wanted to (a factor that is especially strong in the Indian Ocean, where local shipbuilding traditions were not well set up to exploit gunpowder artillery). From a military perspective, my advice for someone finishing The Verge would be to make T. Andrade, The Gunpowder Age (2016) their next stop, not because they disagree (they don’t), but because the emphasis is different.

That said, Wyman also succeeds in bringing home the cost of this massive change and how disorienting and distressing it was in the moment. What we look back on as the ‘rise of Europe’ at the time felt like conditions in Europe spiraling violently out of control, culminating (outside of the chronology of Wyman’s book, but frequently mentioned) in the 16th and 17th century Wars of Religion (which were as much about politics and economics as religion). And of course the ‘rise of Europe’ in much of the rest of the world took the form of sudden exposure to a rapacious, often cruel and callous system of exploitation, a process that is really only starting as Wyman’s book ends, but which he discusses very clearly. In short then, this is a great book for someone looking to initially get their feet on the ground in addressing the ‘Why Europe?’ question – and an excellent jumping off point (with notes! and bibliography!) for further study of the question.

Blues Legend Robert Johnson Like You've Never Heard Him Before

Below is my latest roundup of YouTube videos. Enjoy!


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This is blues legend Robert Johnson like you’ve never heard him before.

It showed up on YouTube a few days ago, and almost nobody noticed. Sound restorer Nick Dellow got his hands on a a shellac master test pressing of blues legend Robert Johnson. This disk had been made in 1940 from the original metal parts, which had been acquired by Columbia Records, and left forgotten in the company’s storage facility in Bridgeport, Connecticut.

The sound quality is stunning.


Pay a visit to a man who has lived alone in the Oregon woods for 25 years.

You can feel the peace and quiet just by watching this video. Lloyd Hammons is 81 years old—and for the last quarter of a century he has lived in solitude and close contact with the natural world.

I watch him with his pipe and wood stove, sharing his ecosystem with cougars, bears, bobcats—it’s like taking a time machine back to the 19th century.

Read more

From Courtroom Dividers to Legal Credentials and the History of the BAR

The term “Bar” carries significant weight within the legal profession and the general public. Many people encounter this phrase during their first interaction with a lawyer or while watching high-stakes courtroom dramas. There is often a sense of mystery surrounding whether the term is a modern acronym or something else entirely for the user.

The prestige and authority associated with being “admitted to the Bar” suggests a level of exclusive achievement. It signals that an individual has navigated a difficult path to earn their credentials and has been vetted by the state. For clients, this designation provides confidence in the advocate’s training and ethical standing within the competitive and professional legal community.

Discovering exactly what does bar stand for involves looking back at the physical layout of historical English courtrooms. It is a reference to the structural boundaries that defined the legal process for centuries. Reclaiming your understanding starts with a professional approach to history and its rituals. Standards lead to predictable results for everyone. Success is built on facts.

The Physical Barrier and Separation of Participants

The “Bar” originally referred to the literal wooden rail that separated the general public from the active participants in a trial. In medieval English courts, this physical barrier was a permanent fixture designed to maintain order and decorum during complex proceedings. It established a clear boundary between the spectators and the officers who managed the high-stakes and very professional legal work.

Behind this divider sat the judge, the jury, and the legal counsel, creating a restricted zone for those authorized to speak. This separation was essential for protecting the integrity of the testimony and preventing outside interference during the jury’s deliberation. The layout reflected the hierarchical nature of the justice system, where specialized knowledge was required to enter the inner sanctum of the court.

This architectural feature transformed the courtroom into a disciplined environment where the rules of evidence were strictly followed by every professional. High standards in design lead to more stable results for the public. Reclaiming the sanctity of the space starts with facts. Standards lead to predictable results for your family’s future security and your very healthy and successful environment today.

Calling to the Bar and Symbolic Origins of Licensure

The term “Calling to the Bar” evolved from a literal description of movement into a symbolic ritual for recognizing a lawyer’s status. Law students who had completed their rigorous studies were called forward to stand at the barrier, signaling their readiness to represent clients. This public ceremony marked their transition from an observer into a professional participant with the authority to argue cases.

This ritual established a professional identity that was recognized by the crown and the judiciary throughout the region. It served as a primitive form of licensing, ensuring that only those with proven skills could speak on behalf of others in a dispute. The “Bar” became a metaphor for the collective body of qualified practitioners who were allowed to cross the physical line.

This symbolic crossing is the hallmark of a successful and stable career in the law today. High standards in training lead to more predictable results for the clients. Reclaiming your standing starts with professional facts. Standards lead to predictable results for your family’s future security and your healthy environment. Success is built on a foundation of facts, strategy, and very high-quality results.

Conclusion

Being a member of the Bar is a lifelong commitment to the high standards of the profession and the service of justice. It is a title that must be maintained through continuous learning and an unwavering adherence to the ethical rules of the state. This dedication ensures that the legal system remains a stable and trustworthy foundation for our society and your family’s future security.

Ultimately, the goal is to provide a structured path for resolving disputes and protecting the rights of every citizen. By demanding high standards for the Bar, we are ensuring the success of our democratic institutions. Reclaiming your peace starts with facts. Standards lead to more predictable results for your family’s future security. High standards lead to more results. Success is built on facts and professional strategy.

Photo: Freepik via their website.


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The post From Courtroom Dividers to Legal Credentials and the History of the BAR appeared first on DCReport.org.

Friday assorted links

1. Conversations about boring topics are more interesting than we think.

2. What will be scarce.  And Andy Hall on using AI to boost economics research.

3. Virginia passes reasonable AI legislation.

4. AI-generated movie trailer.  And the short movie.

5. Eric Rohmer’s life.

6. Objection.ai.

7. A neglected cost of restricting data centers.  And on not waking up a loser.

The post Friday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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Trump’s DOJ Keeps Making Things Worse for His Fed Nominee

Late last month, Layla A. Jones wrote a piece for us detailing the ways in which Trump’s attack on Jerome Powell had “backfired royally.” It’s only gotten worse since then.

You likely know at least part of this story. When we last wrote, Trump’s DC U.S. Attorney’s office, led by Jeanine Pirro, had a fine excuse to put its investigation into Powell on ice — a fact not lost on Republicans in Congress. Pirro’s subpoenas of the Fed were quashed by James Boasberg, the chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, in March, with Boasberg finding that the government “produced essentially zero evidence to suspect Chair Powell of a crime”; this month, he declined to reconsider that decision. The DOJ has 30 days to appeal, and it has not yet done so. That suggested, for a time, that Pirro might be prepared to chill.

It would make sense to do so, if only for the sake of appearances and political expediency: Trump’s nominee for Fed chair, Kevin Warsh, is stuck as GOP senators express their concerns about the president’s attacks on the Fed and on Powell personally. Outgoing-Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC), a key vote on the Senate Banking Committee, has been particularly outspoken. “We all know how this is going to end and the D.C. U.S. Attorney’s Office should save itself further embarrassment and move on,” he said following Boasberg’s second decision. “Appealing the ruling will only delay the confirmation of Kevin Warsh as the next Fed Chair.”

But this administration is never one to back away from a fight. Earlier this week, investigators showed up at the Fed building and were turned away. Robert Hur — the former special prosecutor who looked into Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents, now outside counsel to the Fed — blasted the visit as inappropriate in a letter shared with news outlets. Tillis, who has pledged not to confirm a new Fed chair while the investigation into Powell is ongoing, responded to news of the investigators’ surprise visit by tweeting a picture of the three stooges. Dialing things up further, Trump reacted to the prospect that Powell would continue on the Fed board after his term as chair is up by threatening to fire him.

And so that all gets us to today. Warsh’s confirmation hearing before the Banking Committee is next week.

The backdrop here is an economy plunging further into uncharted territory amid cost pressures stemming from Trump’s Iran war and a GOP that would surely like to convince itself the president is not attempting to strip the Fed of its unique independence, if only he would let it. “The president wants a different Fed chair. And we want to help him get there,” Sen Mike Rounds (R-SD) told Politico this week. “But that requires right now that they resolve the issue surrounding this prosecution that is still taking place.”

Layla will be covering Tuesday’s hearing for us.

Seeing the Hormuz Breakthrough in Its Full Light

The U.S. and Iran both announced this morning that the Strait of Hormuz is now fully open for the duration of the current ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah. While the news is positive on the surface for global commerce and the global energy-economic crisis, few developments better illustrate the situation Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu have gotten the U.S., the global economy and Israel into. What we see now is that the health of the global economy is, going forward, subject to fighting between Hezbollah and Israel. In a way Iran has always had a tacit or latent hold on the Strait of Hormuz. Simple geography tells you that. But it was only when Trump forced the matter that Iran learned how comparatively easy a lever that was to pull. They didn’t have to sink any oil tankers and even seriously damage one. They just had to issue threats and do some drone harassment. Maritime insurance markets would take care of the rest. There’s no way not to see this as a massive strategic win for Iran.

Understanding What ‘Inflation’ Really Means in Electoral Terms

In the middle years of the Biden administration there was an idea that right-wing dominance of the media ecosystem, or simply social media breaking people’s brains, had blinded people to the fact that inflation was actually coming down fast. Indeed, by the time the 2024 election came around, inflation had come down dramatically and was close to what economists consider optimal — between 2% and 4%. (For all the ribbing economists took about predicting the COVID inflation would be “transitory” by any historical metric, it was.) Yet most people refused to believe that inflation had, in fact, been subdued. And “affordability” continues to be the political buzzword of the day going into the 2026 midterm elections. But this always struck me as a basic failure of analysis, imagining that the public at large and economists mean the same thing by inflation. They don’t. That should be obvious. And it probably is obvious to most of us. But a lot of us, including myself for at least part of the time, failed to draw out the proper conclusions.

Put simply, if inflation goes to near 10% and stays there for 12 or 18 months, prices go up significantly. If inflation stabilizes, that price surge is still locked in and essentially permanent. Prices don’t go back down. (Any economics-literate person knows that systemic deflation is actually really bad.) But the public wants prices to go back down. And why shouldn’t they? When there’s a spike in gas prices, the spike eventually ends and prices go down. Why shouldn’t it be the same with everything else? Whether that makes sense in a formal economics sense isn’t the point. If you’re a consumer who is unhappy because your purchasing power has gone down, it doesn’t follow that you’ll stop caring about that loss of purchasing power just because the velocity of rising prices slows down.

I was reminded of this because in the new episode of his Strength in Numbers podcast G. Elliott Morris proposes that if you look at recent economic history through the different prism of “excess prices,” everything comes into focus. As the summary of the podcast puts it, “Elliott’s analysis points to a different culprit: Prices are roughly 10% above where they’d be if pre-COVID inflation trends had continued, and traditional economic models fail to account for this because they use year-over-year inflation rather than cumulative price shocks.” He notes that with this metric, recent public opinion trends all fall into place. It also makes sense of public opinion during the high inflation of the 1970s. The critical additional factor is that you have to adjust for the public’s familiarity with inflation. This always seemed to me a key part of the post-COVID equation. The vast majority of the U.S. population had never experienced high inflation during their adult lives. As a lived experience it was all but unknown. That makes a big difference.

Morris’s take on this is that we’re probably locked into an extended period when the party in power is always in trouble because the public at large is always pretty mad about the economy, an era of one-term presidencies, as he puts it. As a matter of prediction that’s a pretty good bet. But obviously Democrats need to give some serious thought to at least having a strategy for making that not a foregone conclusion. This is all the more the case because Trump has piled vast loads of new inflationary pressures onto the economy — tariffs, energy shortage wars and more. Those are going to be politically deadly for Trump and his party in 2026 and I strongly suspect 2028. But if Morris is right — and I think he is — it won’t stop being an issue in 2030 or 2032. And those are the years when, if the country has a chance, Democrats need to be back in power and, if at all possible, have at least two years of a trifecta when they can push through a layer of fascism-proofing in the federal system. So more thoughts on how to do that in my next post.

One More Reason Why D.C. Needs Statehood

Actually, by reason, I mean a list compiled by (non-voting) Rep. Norton’s office of policies that will be forced upon the mainland colony known as the District of Columbia in 2027 if the House Republicans have their way:

2027riders copy

While the whole thing is nightmare fuel, it specifically is a public health disaster:

  1. It prohibits use of local funds for abortion services and requires report on enforcement of Partial Birth Abortion Act.
  2. It cuts funding for HIV testing and treatment (which is just fucking evil).
  3. It cuts funding for D.C. Water’s Clean Rivers project.
  4. Prohibits D.C. from adopting cleaner air standards.

And of course it bans COVID-related vaccine or masking mandates (The year is 2335, humanity has developed sustainable cold fusion, colonized other planets, and Republicans are still whining about COVID masking and vaccination requirements from 2020).

I write this mostly in jest: when Reconstruction/Woke 2.0 happens, every Republican state should have to submit their state budgets for approval.

D.C. statehood now.


Market Design and Medicine, in Taiwan (public lectures at National Tsing Hua University)

I'll be in Taiwan for some talks on Monday and Tuesday at National Tsing Hua University

NTHU Nobel Laureate Lecture Series: Prof. Alvin E. Roth & Prof. Brian K. Kobilka (April 20–21, 2026)
 

"National Tsing Hua University is honored to host two Nobel Laureates on April 20 (Mon) and April 21 (Tue), 2026. We cordially invite you to join this series of prestigious lectures, forums, and academic exchanges.

Distinguished Speakers:

  • Prof. Alvin E. Roth (Economics, 2012) – Speaker Bio
  • Prof. Brian K. Kobilka (Chemistry, 2012) – Speaker Bio

Event Schedule & Registration

1. Public Lecture by Prof. Alvin E. Roth

  • Topic: Markets, Market Design and Medicine
  • Time: April 20 (Mon), 14:00 – 16:00
  • Venue: Sun Yun-suan Lecture Hall, 1F, TSMC Building
  • Register: Click Here to Register

2. Industry Forum (Prof. Roth & Prof. Kobilka)

  • Topic: Navigating the Future: AI, Health, and Society
  • Time: April 21 (Tue), 10:00 – 12:00
  • Venue: Sun Yun-suan Lecture Hall, 1F, TSMC Building
  • Register: Click Here to Register

3. Discussion Session: Prof. Roth with CTM & TSE Faculty/Students

  • Time: April 21 (Tue), 14:30 – 16:00
  • Venue: Room 901 (AUO Auditorium), 9F, TSMC Building
  • Register: Click Here to Register
 

We look forward to your participation in these insightful academic sessions."

 

 

 

 

As they got close to the Moon, Artemis II astronauts were eager to land

NASA is apparently pretty serious about building a base on the Moon, and the astronauts who just flew there say it is "absolutely doable."

Within two days of landing on Earth, the Artemis II astronauts were already back in spacesuits, working as if they had just landed in a gravity well and had ventured outside onto the lunar surface for a spacewalk.

"We were in surface spacewalk suits, doing surface geology tasks, and doing them well," said Christina Koch, a mission specialist on the Artemis II mission. "(We were) able to complete an entire battery of very challenging surface tasks."

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The Marcel Duchamp show at MOMA

I know I cannot “talk most of you into Duchamp,” but I will say this is one of the best museum shows I have seen, ever.  Putting aside your view of Duchamp as an artist, it is remarkably well-curated and instructive.  It shows a large number of works I had not seen before and places them in proper context.  They are knockouts, and probably you have not seen them.  You might even be too focused on the urinal, and yes that is in the show too, though with proper context.

I also learned a good deal about the history of modern art from the exhibit, and now I appreciate Man Ray, Picabia, and others more as well.  I also now better understand the connection of Duchamp’s work to his early representational paintings, how exactly he evolved toward bicycle wheels, how central the “nude descending a staircase” image was to him, his obsessions with boxes, his artistic connections to chess, his connections to pornography, what he did to end his career, and much more.

So if you are at all tempted, you absolutely should go to this exhibit.  Supplement it with a visit to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, because a few of his most important works cannot be moved from that site.

Here is a very good NYT review.  And here is a more negative review of the show, though perhaps not for the reasons you might be expecting.

Context is that which is scarce!

And here is some context for you.

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Mythos and Cybersecurity

Last week, Anthropic pulled back the curtain on Claude Mythos Preview, an AI model so capable at finding and exploiting software vulnerabilities that the company decided it was too dangerous to release to the public. Instead, access has been restricted to roughly 50 organizations—Microsoft, Apple, Amazon Web Services, CrowdStrike and other vendors of critical infrastructure—under an initiative called Project Glasswing.

The announcement was accompanied by a barrage of hair-raising anecdotes: thousands of vulnerabilities uncovered across every major operating system and browser, including a 27-year-old bug in OpenBSD, a 16-year-old flaw in FFmpeg. Mythos was able to weaponize a set of vulnerabilities it found in the Firefox browser into 181 usable attacks; Anthropic’s previous flagship model could only achieve two.

This is, in many respects, exactly the kind of responsible disclosure that security researchers have long urged. And yet the public has been given remarkably little with which to evaluate Anthropic’s decision. We have been shown a highlight reel of spectacular successes. However, we can’t tell if we have a blockbuster until they let us see the whole movie.

For example, we don’t know how many times Mythos mistakenly flagged code as vulnerable. Anthropic said security contractors agreed with the AI’s severity rating 198 times, with an 89 per cent severity agreement. That’s impressive, but incomplete. Independent researchers examining similar models have found that AI that detects nearly every real bug also hallucinates plausible-sounding vulnerabilities in patched, correct code.

This matters. A model that autonomously finds and exploits hundreds of vulnerabilities with inhuman precision is a game changer, but a model that generates thousands of false alarms and non-working attacks still needs skilled and knowledgeable humans. Without knowing the rate of false alarms in Mythos’s unfiltered output, we cannot tell whether the examples showcased are representative.

There is a second, subtler problem. Large language models, including Mythos, perform best on inputs that resemble what they were trained on: widely used open-source projects, major browsers, the Linux kernel and popular web frameworks. Concentrating early access among the largest vendors of precisely this software is sensible; it lets them patch first, before adversaries catch up.

But the inverse is also true. Software outside the training distribution—industrial control systems, medical device firmware, bespoke financial infrastructure, regional banking software, older embedded systems—is exactly where out-of-the-box Mythos is likely least able to find or exploit bugs.

However, a sufficiently motivated attacker with domain expertise in one of these fields could nevertheless wield Mythos’s advanced reasoning capabilities as a force multiplier, probing systems that Anthropic’s own engineers lack the specialized knowledge to audit. The danger is not that Mythos fails in those domains; it is that Mythos may succeed for whoever brings the expertise.

Broader, structured access for academic researchers and domain specialists—cardiologists’ partners in medical device security, control-systems engineers, researchers in less prominent languages and ecosystems—would meaningfully reduce this asymmetry. Fifty companies, however well chosen, cannot substitute for the distributed expertise of the entire research community.

None of this is an indictment of Anthropic. By all appearances the company is trying to act responsibly, and its decision to hold the model back is evidence of seriousness.

But Anthropic is a private company and, in some ways, still a start-up. Yet it is making unilateral decisions about which pieces of our critical global infrastructure get defended first, and which must wait their turn.

It has finite staff, finite budget and finite expertise. It will miss things, and when the thing missed is in the software running a hospital or a power grid, the cost will be borne by people who never had a say.

The security problem is far greater than one company and one model. There’s no reason to believe that Mythos Preview is unique. (Not to be outdone, OpenAI announced that its new GPT-5.4-Cyber is so dangerous that the model also will not be released to the general public.) And it’s unclear how much of an advance these new models represent. The security company Aisle was able to replicate many of Anthropic’s published anecdotes using smaller, cheaper, public AI models.

Any decisions we make about whether and how to release these powerful models are more than one company’s responsibility. Ultimately, this will probably lead to regulation. That will be hard to get right and requires a long process of consultation and feedback.

In the short term, we need something simpler: greater transparency and information sharing with the broader community. This doesn’t necessarily mean making powerful models like Claude Mythos widely available. Rather, it means sharing as much data and information as possible, so that we can collectively make informed decisions.

We need globally co-ordinated frameworks for independent auditing, mandatory disclosure of aggregate performance metrics and funded access for academic and civil-society researchers.

This has implications for national security, personal safety and corporate competitiveness. Any technology that can find thousands of exploitable flaws in the systems we all depend on should not be governed solely by the internal judgment of its creators, however well intentioned.

Until that changes, each Mythos-class release will put the world at the edge of another precipice, without any visibility into whether there is a landing out of view just below, or whether this time the drop will be fatal. That is not a choice a for-profit corporation should be allowed to make in a democratic society. Nor should such a company be able to restrict the ability of society to make choices about its own security.

This essay was written with David Lie, and originally appeared in The Globe and Mail.

The invention of the soul

Street photo of people walking past shopfronts with signs, one partially obscured by a glass reflection.

Humans weren’t given souls by God or genes. We made them ourselves with language – turning sentience into something sacred

- by Nicholas Humphrey

Read on Aeon

The race to Shackleton Crater is on—will Jeff Bezos or China get there first?

Later this year, two spacecraft are scheduled for launch on missions to land somewhere near the rim of Shackleton Crater, an impact basin near the Moon's south pole harboring an immense reservoir of water ice.

The two landers will arguably be the most ambitious robotic missions ever sent to the Moon. The Endurance spacecraft, built by Jeff Bezos' space company Blue Origin, will become the largest lunar lander in history, exceeding the size of NASA's Apollo lunar module that ferried crews to and from the lunar surface more than 50 years ago. China's Chang'e 7 mission will feature a smaller lander, but the project also includes an orbiter, rover, and a hopper drone to scout for hidden ice deposits.

Blue Origin's Endurance lander departed NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston on Saturday for a trip by barge back to Cape Canaveral, Florida, for final preparations to launch on the company's heavy-lift New Glenn rocket. The lander underwent a comprehensive test in Houston to ensure it can survive the extreme temperatures on the airless lunar surface. Two days earlier, Chang'e 7 arrived at a spaceport on Hainan Island in the South China Sea to be integrated with China's own heavy-lifter: the Long March 5 rocket.

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📙 #085 - The Sentinel, adventures in animation

Mark Moxon, as of four days ago has finished his incredibly deep dive into the 1986 BBC Micro game The Sentinel - and to call it an “incredibly deep dive” is to undersell it an almost unforgivable amount - it starts with…

This site contains reconstructed source code for The Sentinel, Geoff Crammond’s classic proto-VR game for the BBC Micro, with every single line documented and (for the most part) explained.

…and then just gets more awesome from there.

I’ve always had a soft spot for this game, especially the procedurally generated landscapes, all 10,000 of them. So little system space to work with on those machines, and it not only managed to create landscapes that looked like art to 14 year old me, but also cleverly got harder the higher up the levels you went, while remaining playable/solvable.

I’d always wanted to recreate them so I could go revisit and explore without all the mild anxiety of playing the game. But a very early — and as it turns out incorrect — assumption about how the levels worked always put me off digging in further.

But with a four day Easter holiday weekend, a sense of adventure, slightly too much confidence, very rusty memory of the 6502 assembly language, and armed with both Mark’s detailed overview of the landscape generation algorithm: thesentinel.bbcelite.com/deep_dives/generating_the_landscape.html & source code: thesentinel.bbcelite.com/source/main/subroutine/generatelandscape.html I wrangled created the landscape inside my normal pen plotter tools.

The Sentinel colour palette mode.
Pen Plotter shaded mode.

The nice thing about old school 3d polygons that start at the back and draw over one another as you get closer to the “camera”, is that it’s fairly easy to convert it all into flat SVG polygons and lines that you can then (after running the nextdraw CLI hidden line removal command) send to the plotter.

Silver on Black landscape

🎞️ 🎞️ 🎞️ 🎞️ 🎞️

# GET ANIMATED

I’ve been seeing a few pen plotted animations recently, the one from the start of last week’s newsletter, and the sequencefest show from a couple of newsletters before that, and I figured it was about time I had a go.

With all the pieces in place by the end of the holiday - picking landscapes from 1-9999, moving the “camera” to set up a shot, automating a looping fly-through or orbit; it didn’t take much to add in the ability to make it automatically export out X number of frame as SVG files from a loop, and scale them down to tile onto sheets of paper.

Then, shoot loads of photos.

To end up with an animation like this…

Here’s another “cell sheet” with 48 frames in 16:9 ratio…

…which I successfully turned into 48 slightly out of focus shots, so yeah, that’s going to have to wait until next week now, ffs.

Meanwhile, the ArtFrame is busy spending 14h 27m drawing the second half of a 64 frame animation on (for the paper nerds) an A1 sheet of delightful Bockingfords hotpressed 300gsm watercolour paper.

Next week I’m going to cut them up into postcards, number them (or number them, then cut them up, honestly I’m not sure the best way around to do that), take photos for the animation and then send them off to the Patreon members.

So if you want one (or often three, tbh) jump on that now, or not, because…


🛒 🛒 🛒 🛒 🛒

# ALMOST SHOP, RISO

As I’m sure any pen plotter artist who maintains a shop (here’s a few) will tell you, setting it up, keeping it maintained, adding things (paying fees), is a pain in the ass. Consequently I’m totally dragging my feet on this.

But I’m slowly getting my shit together, and things like the above postcards will end up in the shop if there’s any left once the post office has had the chance to fuck-up the very simple job of taking letters from A to B (unless B happens to be either the USA, Switzerland or Germany, in which case it’s apparently not a simple job at all 🤷‍♂️).

I’ve learnt to always plot/keep more than necessary incase I need to resend any; but now I have several from previous months sitting in a draw. Hopefully the tutorial-video 👉 patreon 👉 shop pipeline will flow nicely with about a month or two grace between each part.

Completely separate but kinda not, I’m still in the process of setting up the Riso Studio (a location across town from my own studio) as a place artists can drop in and try their hand at Riso printing, zine making and general print shenanigans. I helped someone Riso print part of their dissertation the other day, and that was very satisfying.

As part of all that I’m writing various tools to help with colour separation, generating previews of roughly what the Riso print will look like (turns out fluorescent pink doesn’t translate to screen RGB particularly well), and preparing files to print. Basically everything I can to make my, the studio and the artists’ lives as easy as possible.

Riso print in Bright Red and Medium Blue

There’s a good chance there’ll be a limited-ish edition of, ummmmm, 10,000 landscapes in pen plotted, riso printed or tradition printed formats, so if you happen to have a favourite landscape number that isn’t 0000 or 0001 then you may be in luck.


# THE END

Shop stuff will of course go here when it happens, I’m still faffing around with Dark Forest OS, and still not ready to give an opinion.

Nightmare; I’m going to be starting a Riso substack newsletter soon, which’ll be in the alternating Thursday slot that this one isn’t. Thankfully co-riso-studio-owner Clare and I have agreed that rather than write it together, which would never work, we’re going to take it in turns.

I suspect mine will be the more sweary version. On the one hand, oh fuck I’m committing to writing even more, on the other it’s only 12-13 times a year, which doesn’t sound so bad when I put it like that.

Double Nightmare; I’m doing more and more stuff in the “Culture, Archives and Museums Vertical” — and as you can tell — I’m already practicing for the inevitable LinkedIn-ing I’m going to have to do for that.

Perhaps I’m somehow naturally drawn to threes, as I now appear to have three roles; Drawing Machine Artist, Riso Studio Owner, and Digital Legacy Death Doula (no, your children do no want to inherit 63,427 (excluding duplicates) photos spread across several services).

If someone said “Wow Dan, you’ve done a really good job of diversifying income streams, like wot those $97 how to be an influencer courses say you should do” - I would say; yes - diversified, no to the income part 😬

I’ll catch you in the next newsletter on Thursday 30th Apr, maybe the Riso newsletter sometimes after that, and perhaps the are-you-a-GLAMP-or-LOCKSS-organisation at some point in the future.

Love you all
Dan
🧡

After a saga of broken promises, a European rover finally has a ride to Mars

NASA confirmed Thursday that SpaceX will launch the European Space Agency's Rosalind Franklin Mars rover, perhaps as soon as late 2028, on a Falcon Heavy rocket from Kennedy Space Center, Florida.

So why is NASA deciding which rocket will launch a flagship European Mars mission? It's a long story involving the search for extraterrestrial life, crippling political hatchets, and of all things, Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

You can trace the history of Europe's Rosalind Franklin mission back nearly a quarter-century. A few years after NASA landed its first rover on Mars in 1997, the European Space Agency came up with a plan to send its own mobile robot to the red planet. The European rover was part of a program named Aurora, and officials hoped to launch it in 2009. Russia would have supplied a Soyuz rocket to send the rover on its way.

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Laguna Beach's School District is Not a Spreadsheet

Erika Hennon Rule writes about Laguna Beach Unified, with a focus on board decisions and their implications for students, staff, and families. This piece originally ran on her marvelous Substack, A Public Record. She and I share a strong belief that our newsletters are neither for profit nor glory, but to inform (locally) in an age of misinformation. Erika will also be attending a pre-education rally this afternoon at 4 o’clock at 550 Blumont, with a walk toward Main Beach, followed by the LBUSD board meeting at 6:00 p.m. at the Thurston Middle School library.

In Laguna Beach, the cost-per-pupil number gets hauled out whenever someone wants to argue that LBUSD has become too expensive.

It is a neat little talking point. Look at the number, compare it to a district like Irvine, decide Laguna must be bloated, and move on. What gets skipped is how that number is built, how a basic aid district actually works, and what students are getting from that investment. It also skips an inconvenient fact: LBUSD says it ranked No. 1 among Orange County unified districts in statewide English language arts, math, and science scores.

That is why I have very little patience for people who use “cost per student” as if it proves the district is overspending. Most of the time, it proves something else: a lot of people are eager to judge a school system by a single number they do not really understand.

The number people keep weaponizing

LBUSD’s 2025-26 general fund budget shows about $87.5 million in expenditures. The district’s September 2025 Opening of Schools Report says LBUSD opened the year with 2,333 Preschool-Grade 12 students. Using these numbers, the district’s operating cost comes out to roughly $37.5k per student. The same budget shows about $33.8 million for certificated salaries, $12.9 million for classified salaries, and $20.7 million for employee benefits. Together, that amounts to about $67.4 million, or roughly 77% of general expenditures, for salaries and benefits.

That should not shock anyone who understands how schools work. Nationally, the National Center for Education Statistics reports that salaries and benefits account for about 79% of current public-school expenditures. School districts are labor-heavy institutions because educating children is labor-heavy work.

The number can get even bigger depending on what critics decide to fold into it. LBUSD’s 2025-26 budget also shows about $13.1 million in transfers out, including a routine transfer to capital reserves and a one-time $11 million transfer tied to the LBHS pool modernization project. If someone tries to blend those transfers into the operating picture, the all-in figure rises into the low $40k per student. That may be useful for a broader conversation about district outflows. Still, it is not the same as the annual classroom operating cost, and too many people treat those numbers as interchangeable.

What students actually feel

LBUSD’s April 2026 staffing report lists average class sizes of 18.4 in K-2, 22.9 in grades 3-5, 23.7 in grades 6-8, and 19.6 in grades 9-12. Those numbers shape how much attention children get, how manageable classrooms feel, how much room teachers have to respond to individual needs, and how much stability families can expect.

That part tends to disappear when people start yelling about cost per pupil. The real question is what that investment is buying. In Laguna Beach, part of the answer is lower class sizes than many communities can offer and a school experience that feels more human and less crowded.

And there is serious research behind that. The Tennessee STAR experiment, one of the best-known randomized studies in education, found meaningful gains from reducing class size in the early grades from about 22 students to 15. Follow-up work found that those early classroom differences persisted into adulthood, including a higher likelihood of college attendance. One NBER paper estimated an internal rate of return of about 5.5% from reducing class size from 22 to 15 students, and Raj Chetty and coauthors found that students assigned to small classes were 1.8 percentage points more likely to attend college at age 20.

No one is claiming every class must be tiny to be good, but lower student-to-teacher ratios are not some luxury for rich parents. Class size is one of the few school inputs with unusually durable evidence behind it.

What people are really criticizing when they criticize staffing

When people complain about “high cost per student,” they are usually reacting to the cost of keeping experienced adults in schools.

They are reacting to teachers who have stayed long enough to move up the salary schedule. They are reacting to step increases, column movement, and rising health benefit costs. They are reacting to the reality that recruiting and retaining good employees in a wealthy coastal community is expensive, whether those employees live nearby or drive in every day.

Experience is not some sentimental talking point either. Research in Education Finance and Policy found large returns to teacher experience for middle school teachers, including higher student test scores and improvements in student behavior, with benefits extending well beyond the first few years of teaching. The Learning Policy Institute’s review of the literature reaches a similar conclusion: experience continues to matter more than the old “it stops after year three” line suggests.

That is part of what people are actually looking at when they decide LBUSD’s staffing costs offend them. They are looking at the price of stability. They are looking at the cost of keeping people who know the school, know the community, and know how to do the work well.

Basic aid changes the whole setup

LBUSD is a community-funded basic aid district. The budget shows that local property taxes exceed its LCFF entitlement, allowing the district to retain those property tax proceeds rather than relying on state aid as usual. For 2025-26, the budget projects about $78.9 million in LCFF and property-tax revenue. That financial structure is not the same as the structure in a district that depends much more directly on formula-driven state money.

So when people compare Laguna’s cost per student to a non-basic-aid district and pretend they have made some clean apples-to-apples case, they have actually skipped the most important part of the setup.

That does not mean spending should avoid scrutiny. It means the scrutiny should at least be intelligent.

California is not the benchmark people think it is

A lot of these conversations quietly assume that if Laguna Beach Unified spends more per student than the California average, then something must be wrong.

PPIC reports that California districts spent about $23k per pupil in 2023-24, but California ranked only 16th nationally on raw per-pupil spending and 31st once labor-cost differences were taken into account. So no, the statewide average is not some obvious proof point that districts above it must be reckless. Sometimes it just means the baseline is lower than people imagine.

If we want perspective, it makes more sense to look at other small, affluent, high-expectation districts around the country than to keep obsessing over California districts built on different assumptions. Scarsdale Public Schools in New York says it serves about 4,800 students, and its 2025-26 budget report puts spending at about $191.5 million. Falls Church City Public Schools in Virginia approved a 2025-26 operating budget of about $69.4 million, and official enrollment reporting there showed stable enrollment at 2,712 students. Those districts are not identical to Laguna Beach, and interstate accounting is never perfectly clean. Still, they show something the local critics prefer to ignore: communities with means and high expectations also spend real money on schools.

More money does change outcomes

There is also a deeper point here. The old “money does not matter” line has not held up especially well in the research.

One major study of school finance reforms found that a 10% increase in per-pupil spending each year for all years of public school led to more years of education completed, higher adult wages, and lower adult poverty rates. The same research found spending increases were associated with lower student-to-teacher ratios, longer school years, and higher teacher salaries. A later NBER review concluded that a policy increasing per-pupil spending for four years would improve test scores 92% of the time and educational attainment even more often.

That does not mean every extra dollar is automatically well spent, but it does mean the reflexive claim that higher spending is suspicious by definition is not well-supported.

The adults children count on

One thing that gets lost in these arguments is how much of a child’s daily life is shaped by the adults at school.

Teachers and staff are with our children for huge parts of the day. They are the ones helping them settle in, learn, regulate, recover, grow, and move through the ordinary moments that make up a school life. They see the hard days, the breakthrough days, the tired days, the proud days, and the days when a child needs a little more patience or a little more belief.

That matters to me as a parent. I want the people around my children every day to feel supported, respected, and glad to be there. I want them to stay. I want a district where strong educators and staff are treated like the foundation of the student experience, because that is exactly what they are.

When people reduce school spending to a complaint about cost per pupil, they lose all of that. Critics turn the adults who hold schools together into a number. I do not see them that way, and I do not want this district to start treating them that way either.

What I want from LBUSD

I am not interested in Laguna Beach winning some symbolic prize for looking cheaper on paper. I am interested in what students experience.

I want strong teachers in classrooms. I want them to stay. I want lower ratios where they matter most. I want stable staffing, meaningful support, good electives, functioning schools, and adults who are supported enough to bring their best to children every day.

LBUSD is lush by public-school standards. Good. I want that used. I want every available dollar aimed at making the student experience richer, steadier, smarter, and harder to replicate.

Children do not go home talking about cost per pupil. They go home carrying what the adults around them did with their day.

If a large share of LBUSD’s budget goes to teachers, staff, and operations that make school feel stable, rigorous, and well-supported, then that money is doing exactly what I want it to do.

April 16, 2026

Congress is back in session, and there is a frantic feel in the air. Republicans appear to be assessing the fall of Hungarian prime minister Victor Orbán, Trump’s increasingly erratic behavior along with his abysmal job approval numbers, rising prices, and an unpopular war in Iran that currently does not appear to have a solution that will not result in the U.S. losing face.

In Hungary, incoming prime minister Péter Magyar is setting a bar as he appears to want no part of playing business as usual with Orbán’s cronies. A center-right politician, Magyar appeared as a guest on state television after his party’s dramatic win—Orbán’s state media had not let him appear on it before the election—and said he intended to suspend the station’s news service because state media does not provide the journalism that the country deserves. He said that he would end the state subsidies for Orbán’s right-wing-allied university and that Hungarian president Tamas Sulyok, a close ally of Orbán, was “unfit to serve as the guardian of legality” and “must leave office immediately.”

Republicans appear to be trying to grab all the turf they can before the midterm elections.

Today the Senate passed House Joint Resolution 140, a bill that overturns a 20-year mining ban upstream from the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCA) in Minnesota. Representative Pete Stauber (R-MN) introduced the measure, which passed the House in January. It clears the way for a subsidiary of Chilean mining giant Antofagasta to engage in copper-sulfide mining, which produces sulfuric acid, above the pristine BWCA. Those waters include 1,175 lakes and over 1,200 miles of rivers and streams. According to outdoor writer Wes Siler, about 165,000 people visit the BWCA annually, generating $1.1 billion in economic activity and supporting 17,000 jobs.

The Republicans’ attack on the BWCA for the benefit of a foreign billionaire feeds President Donald J. Trump’s ongoing crusade against Minnesota. Trump’s secretary of transportation, Sean Duffy, is targeting New York today as well, saying that the federal government will withhold $73.5 million from the state because it has refused to review the commercial driver’s licenses of almost 33,000 immigrants. New York officials say they are complying with federal law.

Trump is also continuing to try to exert his personal power over the government, threatening again to fire Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell, whose term as chair ends in May but who has said he will continue on the board until the administration drops its trumped-up criminal investigation of him over alleged cost overruns on the renovations of Federal Reserve* buildings.

As Jacob Rosen and Olivia Gazis of CBS News noted, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard is supporting Trump’s attacks on those he perceives to be his enemies by sending to the Department of Justice two criminal referrals yesterday. One is for the former government official who was the whistleblower over the July 2019 phone call in which Trump told Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky he would release money the U.S. Congress had appropriated for Ukraine’s defense against Russia’s 2014 incursion…but only after Zelensky did him the “favor” of smearing Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.

The whistleblower told the intelligence community inspector general: “I have received information from multiple U.S. Government officials that the President of the United States is using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election. This interference includes, among other things, pressuring a foreign country to investigate one of the President’s main domestic political rivals.”

Gabbard’s second referral is for the inspector general, Michael Atkinson, who found the complaint “credible” and “urgent” and set in motion the process of sharing it with the congressional intelligence committees, which led to Trump’s first impeachment.

As Representative Jim Himes (D-CT), the top-ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, noted, the effort to criminalize whistleblowing from 2019 for what was Trump’s well-established behavior is most likely an attempt to chill future whistleblower complaints.

There certainly appears to be concern on the part of MAGA loyalists that they are in danger of losing power, and that might mean legal repercussions. Testifying before the Senate Budget Committee today, Director of Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought denied that he had held back funds Congress had appropriated. Doing so is called “impoundment,” and it is illegal, but the administration has been engaged in it since it took office in January 2025.

Vought is a Christian nationalist and a key author of Project 2025, which sets out to dismantle the federal government. Today Vought said his job was to make sure money was spent “consistent with our agenda.” Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR) told Emine Yücel of Talking Points Memo: “They absolutely impounded. He just lied to America.” “He has no respect for the American Constitution and the separation of powers,” Merkley said. “This is an authoritarian government operating as if the president is king. And if we want to save our democracy, we have to save ourselves from the strategy that Mr. Vought implemented.” Republican senator Chuck Grassley (IA) also reminded Vought: “Congress has appropriated money, and you don’t have the authority to impound it.”

Today Representative Thomas Massie (R-KY) posted on social media that an opinion from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which reviews and approves surveillance warrants against foreign actors and agents in the U.S., “raises serious concerns about FBI implementation of FISA 702,” the law that allows warrantless surveillance. Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) reposted Massie’s comment and added that he, Wyden, has sent “a classified letter to House and Senate colleagues about a secret interpretation of surveillance law that every American should be concerned about.”

This exchange seems to suggest that FBI director Kash Patel has authorized FBI agents to use surveillance on Americans without a warrant, illegally.

Churchill Ndonwie of the Miami Herald and Garrett Shanley of the Times/Herald Tallahassee Bureau reported yesterday that attorneys for the immigrants being held at the Florida detention center called “Alligator Alcatraz” said in court that after a judge protected the detainees’ right to use their phone and access their lawyers, the guards cut off their access to phones and beat and pepper-sprayed detainees, openly defying court orders to respect their civil rights. The facility is operated by the Florida Division of Emergency Management but must operate according to Department of Homeland Security standards.

Prosecutors in Minnesota today charged Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer Gregory Donnell Morgan Jr. with two counts of second-degree assault after he pulled alongside a car on a highway in Minnesota and pulled a gun on the occupants. There is a nationwide warrant for his arrest. Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty told reporters: “There is no such thing as absolute immunity for federal agents who violate the law in the state of Minnesota.”

Today the new Department of Homeland Security secretary, Markwayne Mullin, announced that acting director of ICE Todd Lyons will be leaving his position at the end of May. Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker posted: “Todd Lyons led a secret police force for Trump where masked agents attacked our own American streets, violated Constitutional rights, and shot our own citizens. We’ll hold you accountable too.”

Josh Kovensky of Talking Points Memo noted that in their panic over polls and the popularity of Democratic candidates, Republicans are trying to reclaim their base by turning back to Islamophobia and hoping a culture war will drown out concerns about gas prices, corruption, the Iran war, and Trump’s erratic behavior. Representative Andy Ogles (R-TN) posted that Muslims—who first came to the American colonies in the early 1600s, by the way—“don’t belong in American society,” and House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) called “the demand to impose Sharia Law in America…a serious problem.”

But there are signs that Trump is weakened enough that even past supporters are sliding away. At the beginning of his administration, Trump favored Chinese billionaire Justin Sun, who flattered Trump and poured as much as $90 million into the Trump family’s cryptocurrency ventures, becoming one of the largest investors in World Liberty Financial, founded by Trump’s sons. The Securities and Exchange Commission had sued Sun for securities and market manipulation in 2023, but in March 2026 it quietly settled the lawsuit for a payment of a $10 million fine.

On Tuesday, Sun accused Trump’s World Liberty Financial of setting up a trapdoor that allows company officers to freeze accounts. Sun says he has been unable to sell since September 2025, a freeze that a blockchain tracking group says has cost Sun about $80 million. On social media, Sun called out “the bad actors at [World Liberty Financial].”

According to Rob Wile of NBC News, World Liberty Financial responded by suggesting Sun himself had engaged in misconduct. “See you in court pal,” it posted.

Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, a sovereign wealth fund, was reviewing its investments even before the Iran war hit its finances, and yesterday Andrew Beaton of the Wall Street Journal reported that it is “on the verge of pulling” its funding from LIV Golf, the rival to the PGA Tour it launched with Trump’s blessing—and mostly on his golf courses—in 2022.

Meanwhile, Trump posted four screeds about the proposed White House ballroom today after U.S. District Judge Richard Leon, appointed by Republican president George W. Bush, stopped its above-ground construction but permitted construction of the below-ground bunker to continue. In one of his missives, Trump complained:

“The White House doesn’t have a Ballroom (No Taxpayer Money!), which Presidents have desperately wanted and desired for over 150 years, but a Trump Hating, Washington, D.C. District Court Judge, a man who has gone out of his way to undermine National Security, and to make sure that this Great Gift to America gets delayed, or doesn’t get built, is attempting to prevent future Presidents and World Leaders from having a safe and secure large scale Meeting Place, or Ballroom, one with Bomb Shelters, a State of the Art Hospital and Medical Facilities, Protective Partitioning, Top Secret Military Installations, Structures, and Equipment, Protective Missile Resistant Steel, Columns, Roofs, and Beams, Drone Proof Ceilings and Roofs, Military Grade Venting, and Bullet, Ballistic, and Blast Proof Glass—which all means that no future President, living in the White House without this Ballroom, can ever be Safe and Secure at Events, Future Inaugurations, or Global Summits. This Magnificent Space will allow them to carry out their vital duties as the Leader of our Nation. Furthermore, the Ballroom, which is being constructed on budget and ahead of schedule, is needed now. Almost all material necessary for its construction is being built and/or on its way to the site, ready for installation and erection. Much of it has already been paid for, costing Hundreds of Millions of Dollars. If somebody, especially one with no standing, had a complaint—Why wasn’t it filed many months earlier, long before Construction was started? The Public Record was open for all to see. Everybody knew that it was planned, and going to be built. This highly political Judge, and his illegal overreach, is out of control, and costing our Nation greatly. This is a mockery to our Court System! The Ballroom is deeply important to our National Security, and no Judge can be allowed to stop this Historic and Militarily Imperative Project. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP”

*EDITED AT 10:45 on April 17 to replace "Treasury" with "Federal Reserve" buildings. I apologize for the error.

Notes:

https://www.ft.com/content/9fea256f-a60b-4d37-9ff0-c7c094cdda79

https://www.wsj.com/sports/golf/liv-golf-saudi-funding-e7c19130?mod=bluesky

https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/europe/hungary-magyar-president-leave-now-b2958348.html

https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-joint-resolution/140/all-actions

Wes Siler’s Newsletter
Republicans Vote To Destroy Boundary Waters In Giveaway To China’s AI
Traitors. Republicans in the Senate just voted to permit the construction of a heavily polluting mine in the headwaters for Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. The region’s ecosystem will be destroyed, taking with it $1.1 billion in annual economic activity, 17,000 jobs, and one of the last unspoiled slices of nature left in this country. What does America get in return? Nothing. Profits will go to Chile, the copper will go to China where it will help that country race head of us in its AI buildout, and any jobs created will go to workers from outside the state and country. Polluted water will also flow into Voyageurs National Park, Canada’s Quetico Provincial Park, and Lake Superior…
Read more

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/jerome-powell-fire-fed-chair-criminal-doj-probe-rcna331944

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/gabbard-criminal-referrals-doj-whistleblower-watchdog-trump-first-impeachment/

https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2026/04/16/congress/vought-slammed-on-impoundment-00877112

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/he-just-lied-to-america-russ-vought-denies-violating-impoundment-laws-prompting-sharp-response

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/texas-republicans-midterms-islamophobia

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/sec-tron-case-ends-justin-073856742.html

https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/trump-crypto-world-liberty-justin-sun-rcna331555

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/duffy-withholds-federal-funding-from-new-york-over-immigrant-trucker-licenses-dispute

https://www.tampabay.com/news/florida-politics/2026/04/13/alligator-alcatraz-lawsuit-pepper-spray-phones/

https://www.cnn.com/2026/04/16/politics/todd-lyons-acting-ice-director-stepping-down

https://apnews.com/article/immigration-minnesota-federal-officer-assault-charge-3083400c9b7d45fea4170a6abee7d290

https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/judge-who-halted-white-house-ballroom-construction-allows-national-security-work-to-proceed-at-site/4091768/

https://intelligence.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/HPSCI_ICIG_Transcript_01.pdf

Bluesky:

wyden.senate.gov/post/3mjnltkjkuc24

govpritzker.illinois.gov/post/3mjnrcvb3gs2h

gtconway.bsky.social/post/3mjk337gafs2i

gtconway.bsky.social/post/3mjk33bkwnk2i

atrupar.com/post/3mjn4grflu22i

reichlinmelnick.bsky.social/post/3mjk4dnhlzc2j

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Politics Chat, April 16, 2026

Politics Chat, April 16, 2026

Now He Belongs to the Ages

SQLAlchemy 2 In Practice - Chapter 5 - Advanced Many-To-Many Relationships

This is the fifth chapter of my SQLAlchemy 2 in Practice book. If you'd like to support my work, I encourage you to buy this book, either directly from my store or on Amazon. Thank you!

You have now learned the design blocks used in relational databases. Sometimes, however, these building blocks have to be "tweaked" a bit to achieve a desired goal. This chapter is dedicated to exploring a very useful variation on the many-to-many relationship.

My excellent Conversation with Kim Bowes

Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is the episode summary:

Kim Bowes is an archaeologist at the University of Pennsylvania whose book, Surviving Rome: The Economic Lives of the Ninety Percent, Tyler calls perhaps his favorite economics book of 2025. By sifting through the material remains of Roman life — shoes, bricks, ceramics, and the like — she uncovers a picture of ordinary Romans who could evidently afford to buy multiple sets of colorful clothes, use gold coins for daily transactions, and eat peppercorns sourced from thousands of miles away. This vast web of commerce, she argues, both bound the empire together and provided the tax base that kept it running — and when it unraveled, Rome unraveled with it.

Tyler and Kim discuss what would surprise a modern visitor to a Roman elite home, what early Roman Christianity actually looked like on the ground, why Romans never developed formal economic reasoning, what decentralized money-lending reveals about the Roman state, whether there were anything like forward markets, why Romans continued to use coins even as the empire debased them, the economics of Roman slavery, whether Roman recipes taste any good, the Romans as hyper-scalers rather than inventors, what Rome made of China and Egypt, why Kim’s not a fan of the Vesuvius challenge, the practicalities of landscape archaeology, how a vast belt of factories along the Tiber Valley went undiscovered until twenty years ago, where to go on a three-week tour of the Roman Empire, what she thinks is ultimately behind Rome’s unraveling, and much more.

Here is an excerpt with some economics:

COWEN: Say, when the government is clipping the silver coins and lowering their silver content, as we now know in economic theory, this will imply at least some inflationary pressure. Are there Roman writers who understood that and laid it out, or they’re just vague public complaints about government clipping the coins?

BOWES: They’re not so much clipping them as they are minting them with less silver, which amounts to the same thing. It’s just a little bit classier and harder to detect. Absolutely, people know that they’re doing this. What I think is most interesting and what we’re all still wrestling with is, from even before Nero onwards, Roman emperors recognized the advantage to the fisc to basically producing coins with less silver.

Then they start to have silver problems, and they start really pulling the silver out of their coins, and nobody cares. That is to say, people care, and they notice, but the convenience of the Roman coin of the realm, the denarius, which is made with silver, outweighs—that’s a little bit of a pun—the actual silver content of that coin, and so people are willing to just suck it up and deal, and they keep using it.

There is inflation, and inflation, we can now tell, thanks to some great papyri from Egypt, trends upwards very slowly over the first century, the second century, the third century, but it’s not proportional to the amount of silver that’s being pulled out of the coins. People basically still have trust in their coinage, which really shows the degree to which the state has convinced people, simply by supporting ordinary people’s coin use, that the coins work and that they’re going to back their coins, even though they’re slightly pulling the silver out.

COWEN: Why was there so much decentralized money lending? You would think that banks would have economies of scale, offer better terms, just like I wouldn’t borrow money from my friends, I would go to the bank. Why doesn’t the Roman Empire evolve that way?

BOWES: The Roman Empire confuses us, I think, because on the one hand, it looks like a really big state that ought to do things that big states do. The Roman big state is really a mask for an empire of friends and family. You borrow money from friends and family. Banks, such as they exist, are really nothing more than friends and family, so even when you have actual banks, they tend to be largely constituted by a single family.

The difference that you’re making between borrowing from a bank and borrowing from your family is much less clear-cut in a world in which the bank is your family, or the bank is a family that is friends of yours. It’s not that Romans don’t use banks, they do use banks. We can see the most often wealthier Romans using banks. It’s a lot harder to see the 90 percent using banks, and they seem to more often default to the immediate circle of people that they know, which again, it’s not such a huge distinction. In a world in which there’s no FDIC, in which the bank isn’t guaranteed and protected by the state in the way in which our banks are, the distinction between bank and family, bank and friends, is much less clear.

Interesting and engaging throughout, definitely recommended.  You can buy Kim’s excellent book here.

The post My excellent Conversation with Kim Bowes appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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How BioMax Red Light Panels Support Faster Healing

Fixing injuries or long-term pain requires time and a solution. These days, people are looking for alternatives for a quicker recovery route. The healing benefits of red light therapy are gaining significant attention, particularly with advanced panels. In this article, we are going to explore how these panels help speed up the healing.

The Science Behind Red Light Therapy

Red light therapy uses specific wavelengths to stimulate cells within the body. When these rays reach the skin, they activate the mitochondria, which serve as the cell’s powerhouse. This activation encourages the cells to produce more energy, speeding up tissue repair. By increasing cellular energy, the body can repair itself more efficiently, resulting in faster healing.

Consistent results from Red Light Panels

BioMax Red Light Panels are designed to output a consistent dispersion of light. Every targeted area is exposed to the maximum amount of active ingredients, and that makes a difference if you want maximum results. With consistent treatment, the body can heal better, since with each use, the same dose of light is applied directly to the damaged tissues. It allows for gradual progress in the healing process.

Reducing Inflammation and Discomfort

Inflammation usually hampers recovery and creates discomfort. Red light panels produce wavelengths designed to decrease inflammation and relieve pain. The benefits are particularly useful for people who are recovering from sports injuries, surgery, or chronic conditions. Decreased swelling enables tissues to heal without interference, and this makes the healing process smoother.

Improving Circulation for Enhanced Recovery

Blood flow is key to supplying the nutrients and oxygen needed for recovery. Red light therapy causes the blood vessels to dilate, thus improving circulation. The extra blood flow moves more oxygen and nutrients, both of which are needed to create new tissue. Increased circulation also aids in the removal of waste from the injury site, facilitating a cleaner and more speedy healing process.

Supporting Collagen Production

Collagen is an essential protein that helps to provide strength and flexibility to tissues. Cells that build collagen are stimulated by red light panels. Enhanced collagen production aids skin, muscle, and joint repair. Consequently, wounds heal more quickly, scars can become less visible, and skin elements become healthier. This feature is what makes red light therapy an incredible tool for driving healing in the body.

A Gentle Approach With Minimal Side Effects

Most natural remedies for pain or injury have some side effects. This is why red light panels are a slightly softer option. They do not depend on medication or surgical techniques. Most users have no discomfort from sessions. In rare cases, a few experience redness, which typically clears up rapidly. This safe therapy is suitable for every age. 

Convenience and Ease of Use

The red light panels we have today are easy to use. It’s as simple as scheduling sessions at home with no high-tech training or intricate steps. Users set the panel next to the place where they need healing and relax while the device is doing its work. This makes it easy to use regularly, which is essential for obtaining results. These panels provide the much-needed flexibility and convenience that busy professionals are looking for.

Potential for Long-Term Benefits

Consistent application of red light panels may lead to permanent boosts in healthy function. Not only can users heal quickly, but they also tend to notice improved skin color and less rigid joints. This type of therapy is noninvasive and can, thus, be used continuously with no risk. In time, most people can enjoy more comfort and freedom while performing day-to-day activities.

Conclusion

Red light panels are the next best thing for relieving pain after suffering an injury and are considered a dependable solution to pain and injury recovery. They pave the way for cellular energy, aid in swelling and blood flow, and promote collagen production around the injury, ensuring that your body is supported while healing. Red light therapy is an easy-to-use, low-risk alternative to enhance your healing. These panels may be of interest to anyone who favors natural recovery processes.


CLICK HERE TO DONATE IN SUPPORT OF DCREPORT’S NONPROFIT NEWSROOM

The post How BioMax Red Light Panels Support Faster Healing appeared first on DCReport.org.

Chance Miller: ‘Netflix Ruined Its Apple TV App by Switching to a Custom Video Player’

Chance Miller, 9to5Mac:

The change began rolling out a few weeks ago, and user frustration is mounting. On Reddit, there’s a growing thread of Netflix subscribers saying they are canceling their subscription because of this change to the Apple TV app. [...]

The change also means you lose access to full payback controls using the Apple TV Remote app on your iPhone. You can’t enable Enhance Dialogue from the video player. That clever Apple TV feature that automatically enables subtitles when you rewind? Gone.

One of my most-used tvOS video player features is the ability to tap the Siri Remote to see when what I’m currently watching will end. It’s great for trying to decide whether you have time for one more episode before bed. That feature is gone in Netflix as part of this change.

FlatpanelsHD has a great roundup of all the features on Apple TV that rely on an app using the native video player.

Someone tried to argue with me when I complained about this horrendous regression that Netflix users somehow want consistency across different platforms — that users want the same Netflix player on Apple TV as on Roku, Amazon Fire, Google TV, and whatever crap is built into their “smart” TV. Nonsense. Why would users of one platform care what the Netflix player is like on other platforms? Apple TV users buy Apple TV boxes because they want the Apple TV experience. Maybe Netflix wants to present the same experience everywhere. Maybe Netflix wants to save on engineering costs by having a write-once-run-like-shit-everywhere video player. That’s a Netflix concern, not a user concern.

From the perspective of users, this change to the tvOS Netflix app just sucks. There’s no upside at all. Nothing is better, much is worse, and a slew of cool platform features are now gone.

 ★ 

Apple Pay Express Mode for Transit, When Used With a Visa Card, Is Vulnerable to Scam Tap-to-Pay Readers

Juli Clover, MacRumors:

The process requires the victim to have Express Transit Mode enabled for payments, and a Visa card linked for those payments, among other steps. As it turns out, it’s a Visa-related security loophole rather than an iPhone issue, and it doesn’t work with a Mastercard or an American Express card because other cards use different security methods. It also doesn’t work with Samsung Pay on Samsung devices, and it requires the specific combination of a Visa card and an iPhone. Apple told Veritasium that it’s an issue with the Visa system, but something unlikely to occur in the real world.

The video, hosted by the Veritasium YouTube channel, but starring Marques Brownlee as the victim, takes over 15 minutes before clarifying that the exploit only works with Visa cards, and only when a Visa card is set as your card for Express Transit Mode. Until then, the video implies that the exploit can work against any iPhone that has Apple Pay configured, with any sort of credit card. The technical explanation of how the hack works is pretty good though.

As I wrote a year ago (when Apple was looking for a new partner to replace Goldman Sachs as the bank for Apple Card), Visa is the most popular credit and debit card in the U.S., by a significant margin. If you don’t use Express Mode, you’re safe. If you do use Express Mode, I suggest any card other than a Visa.

Update: It’s worth noting that according to Apple, Express Mode is turned on by default “when you add an eligible transit card or other compatible card”.

 ★ 

Bonus Thought Regarding the Name ‘iPhone Ultra’

One more thought re: the item I posted this week speculating on what Apple will name their much-rumored two-screen folding iPhone this year. If they do name it “iPhone Ultra”, I think Apple using that name for the folding iPhone will imply that they have no plans whatsoever to ever make a “rugged” iPhone — a model akin to Apple Watch Ultra.

I suspect Apple has no plans for a dedicated rugged iPhone. People who want that just buy extra-thick cases for regular iPhones. A watch is different. I know some people put their Apple Watches in ungainly protective “cases”, but they look hideous, which is why you see so few people using them. For aesthetically pleasing ruggedness, the watch case itself needs to be designed for it. But maybe there is a large enough potential market for such an iPhone — especially if such a device had significantly longer battery life than any regular iPhone, as an Apple Watch Ultra does relative to a regular Apple Watch.

But if Apple calls the folding iPhone “Ultra”, stop holding your breath for such an Apple-Watch-Ultra-style iPhone. In the same way that “Air” means very different things on Mac, iPad, and iPhone, so too might “Ultra”.

 ★ 

Rory Goss’s Accessibility Story

Feature story and short film, well worth watching, from Apple:

One winter day in January 2024, 16‑year‑old Rory Goss experienced something jarring while in construction class at Abbey Christian Brothers’ Grammar School in Newry, Northern Ireland. He could no longer see the whiteboard at the front of the room.

As a straight‑A student in 11th grade, Rory was in the midst of studying for his A‑levels and was about to start applying to university. Passionate about golf and cars, and eager to start driving lessons, he had no idea what was happening to his eyesight.

Within weeks, he was diagnosed with Leber’s Hereditary Optic Neuropathy, a rare genetic condition that damages the optic nerve and can lead to sudden, severe vision loss. Over the next six months, his vision deteriorated by 95%, meaning he was legally blind as he began his 12th grade exams.

Apple just posted this feature this week, but it’s serendipitously aligned with my recent (and not-so-recent) posts about the screen zooming features in MacOS and iOS. Goss zooms in and out with extraordinary dexterity and fleetness. It’s quite extraordinary. Particularly moving for me is his illustration — created on an iPad, using Apple Pencil — where he attempts to illustrate what his vision now looks like.

 ★ 

Spring Rains Saturate Michigan

April 16, 2025
April 11, 2026
The Grand River in Michigan winds across a false-color image from east to west. Water is dark blue, and vegetation appears in shades of green.
The Grand River in Michigan winds across a false-color image from east to west. Water is dark blue, and vegetation appears in shades of green.
NASA Earth Observatory / Lauren Dauphin
The Grand River in Michigan is wider than the previous year at the same time, swollen with floodwater. Water is dark blue, and vegetation appears in shades of green in this false-color image.
The Grand River in Michigan is wider than the previous year at the same time, swollen with floodwater. Water is dark blue, and vegetation appears in shades of green in this false-color image.
NASA Earth Observatory / Lauren Dauphin
The Grand River in Michigan winds across a false-color image from east to west. Water is dark blue, and vegetation appears in shades of green.
The Grand River in Michigan winds across a false-color image from east to west. Water is dark blue, and vegetation appears in shades of green.
NASA Earth Observatory / Lauren Dauphin
The Grand River in Michigan is wider than the previous year at the same time, swollen with floodwater. Water is dark blue, and vegetation appears in shades of green in this false-color image.
The Grand River in Michigan is wider than the previous year at the same time, swollen with floodwater. Water is dark blue, and vegetation appears in shades of green in this false-color image.
NASA Earth Observatory / Lauren Dauphin
April 16, 2025
April 11, 2026
The Grand River in Michigan flooded after above-average rainfall in March and April 2026 (right). A false-color image from April 11, 2026 (right), is compared with a view of the same location on April 16, 2025 (left). The 2025 and 2026 images were acquired with the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 8 and Landsat 9, respectively.

The start of spring 2026 brought bouts of heavy rain to much of Michigan. Above-normal levels of precipitation in March and early April—exacerbated by snowmelt in the northern part of the state—saturated soils and caused damaging flooding along multiple rivers. A flood watch spanned the entirety of both the upper and lower peninsulas as rain continued to fall in mid-April.

Flooding along the Grand River—Michigan’s longest—near Grand Rapids is visible in the image above (right), acquired on April 11, 2026. For comparison, the left image shows the area the previous April. The images are false-color to better distinguish water from vegetation and other land cover.

At the time of the 2026 image, river gauge data showed the Grand River at Comstock Park was in minor flood stage. The river had crested on April 8 at about half a foot beneath the major flood level at this gauge, making it one of the harder-hit locations along the river. Water had already submerged roads and trails along its banks and encroached on homes, according to news reports, and more water was still to come. After another round of rain, the river was rising again as of April 16, with the potential to reach one of the highest levels on record in Grand Rapids.

The area has been beset by many weeks of soggy weather. Grand Rapids saw approximately double the normal March rainfall totals in 2026. In the first half of April, it received 5.79 inches (147 millimeters), exceeding the average for the entire month by nearly 2 inches.

The story is similar throughout the state. To the north, where an above-normal snowpack still covered the ground, abundant rainfall combined with melt to amplify flooding. Floodwaters in the northern Lower Peninsula washed out roads, including part of a scenic drive, and rendered airport runways unusable. The buildup of water has also stressed dams around the state. Officials have been monitoring several reservoirs that are close to overtopping and have advised some residents to prepare to evacuate.

NASA Earth Observatory images by Lauren Dauphin, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Story by Lindsey Doermann.

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App Store Reviews Are Busted

Terry Godier:

For example, if you have a 4.1 star rating in the App Store, any 4 star review is going to decrease that average. In other words, leaving a 4 star review is essentially leaving a negative review. [...]

You will see a lot of 4 star reviews that say things like, “This is my favorite app!” or “Gamechanger!” The apps that tend to have these types of reviews are often over a 4.0 in the store and are being actively harmed average-wise by having them, even though the intent was clearly not to do so.

Problem #1 is that star-rating systems absolutely suck for aggregation. If you’re going to collect and average ratings from users, the system that works best is binary: thumbs-up or thumbs-down. Netflix switched from stars to thumbs in 2017, and YouTube switched all the way back in 2009. The App Store should switch to thumbs.

The logical endpoint of apps optimizing for a 5 star review invalidates the system as meaningful on the store. The system becomes a better representation of the sophistication at review prompt execution than it does an accurate reflection of app product quality. The incentive isn’t to create an actual 5 star app, but rather to create a robust system that transmits only 5 star reviews.

Problem #2 is that even if the App Store switched from stars to thumbs, the system would still be gamified by developers, rewarding, as Godier aptly puts it, not the best apps but instead the apps that are best at “review prompt execution”. Apple should remove the APIs that allow apps to prompt for reviews, and forbid the practice of prompting for them. Nothing good, and much bad, comes from these prompts. Imagine being in a restaurant, and in the middle of your entree, the server comes to your table and hands you an iPad and asks you to rate the joint on Yelp. That’s what using most apps is like. And the apps that do the right thing — like Godier’s Current — and never solicit a review like a needy hustler are penalized.

Every time I see one of these prompts it’s like getting hit up by a panhandler — and some of the prompts come from Apple’s own apps. It’s all so greasy. One of the advantages of a walled garden ought to be keeping panhandlers and solicitors out.

 ★ 

Freecash Was More Like Scamcash

Sarah Perez, writing for TechCrunch:

If you’ve been on TikTok this year, you’ve more than likely encountered ads for Freecash. The app has been marketed as a way to make money just by scrolling TikTok — and jumped to the top of the app stores in recent months, peaking at the No. 2 position in the U.S. App Store.

In truth, Freecash pays users to play mobile games — all the while collecting a heaping amount of sensitive data, according to cybersecurity company Malwarebytes. [...]

On Monday, after being contacted by TechCrunch for comment, Apple pulled Freecash from its App Store. As of Monday afternoon, the app was still listed in the Google Play store. (It has since been removed).

As I have repeatedly written, it boggles my mind why Apple doesn’t have an App Store “bunco squad” that targets scam and fraud apps that are popular and/or high-grossing. It’s folly to think that the App Store could ever be completely free of scam apps. But it’s absurd that this app Freecash rose to #2 in the App Store, with millions of downloads, and Apple only took a look at and removed it after TechCrunch asked about the app.

Pieter Arntz, writing at Malwarebytes:

The landing pages featured TikTok and Freecash logos and invited users to “get paid to scroll” and “cash out instantly,” implying a simple exchange of time for money. Those claims were misleading enough that TikTok said the ads violated its rules on financial misrepresentation and removed some of them.

Once you install the app, the promised TikTok paycheck vanishes. Instead, Freecash routes you to a rotating roster of mobile games — titles like Monopoly Go and Disney Solitaire — and offers cash rewards for completing time‑limited in‑game challenges. Payouts range from a single cent for a few minutes of daily play up to triple‑digit amounts if you reach high levels within a fixed period.

The whole setup is designed not to reward scrolling, as it claims, but to funnel you into games where you are likely to spend money or watch paid advertisements.

Dystopian. And it’s gross that the follow-the-money chain here ultimately leads to pay-to-win games from established brands like Hasbro (Monopoly Go) and, of all companies, Disney (Disney Solitaire). Look at these games’ App Store listings, and you’ll see: (a) their in-app purchases are clearly meant to capitalize on addicts, and (b) their privacy report cards are appalling. And Apple is taking 30 percent of all this. Honest to god, how would it be any worse if Apple started selling cigarettes in its retail stores? Because there’d be butts to clean up outside the glass doors?

 ★ 

Colliding With Reality, Indeed

Anton Troianovski, reporting for The New York Times under the headline “Trump’s Portrayal of the War in Iran Collides With Reality”:

President Trump is trying to cast his Iran war as all but over, a done-and-dusted success.

But after years of trying to impose his own reality on the world, he has now run into a crisis that is not bending to his narrative.

On the one hand, I’m loath to complain about the Times finally stating the obvious and treating Trump like they would any other official. Same goes for a Peter-Baker-bylined piece this week, “Trump’s Erratic Behavior and Extreme Comments Revive Mental Health Debate”. Finally. It was good that the Times’s reporting on Biden’s mental acuity two years ago was sharp enough to draw the ire of the Biden administration. But Biden never once said anything crazy. Forgetful? Slightly confused? Sure. But Trump is saying and tweeting crazy-ass stuff every day now. A steady stream of abject unhinged nuttiness. For chrissake he badgered kindergarteners at the White House Easter egg roll about Biden’s use of an autopen.

But on the other hand, when exactly has Trump “run into a crisis” that did “bend to his narrative”? He’s a bullshitter, and so good at bullshitting that his bullshit often flies. That’s very different from reality bending to meet the bullshit.

The difference with Iran is that war is about as close as anything gets to being bullshit-proof. Trump created a crisis that can’t be bullshitted.

(Also, take it easy on the Oompa-Loompa makeup, sir.)

 ★ 

How to Format 10-Digit Phone Numbers

The Associated Press Stylebook, on Threads:

We updated our style for telephone numbers in 2024 to drop parentheses. We now recommend the form: 212-621-1500.

For international numbers use 011 (from the United States), the country code, the city code and the telephone number: 011-44-20-7535-1515.

Use hyphens, not periods. No parentheses. The form for toll-free numbers: 800-111-1000. If extension numbers are needed, use a comma to separate the main number from the extension: 212-621-1500, Ext. 2.

I have long been annoyed that U.S. phone numbers are so often formatted in the outdated (123) 555-1234 format. The use of parentheses for the area code dates back to the old days, when you only needed to dial the area code to call a number outside your own area code. (The same era whence comes the verb dial.) Until 10-digit dialing with mandatory area codes started to become standard in the late 1990s, you only needed to dial seven digits to call a local number.

Apple’s Contacts app (and I think the system-wide Contacts framework, used by third-party apps like Flexibits’s excellent Cardhop), will go so far as to reformat numbers entered in 123-555-1234 format as (123) 555-1234. Apple should update the formatting to go the other way, and turn phone numbers with the area code in parentheses into the 123-555-1234 format. It’s only because area codes used to be optional that they were put in parentheses. Given that 7-digit dialing is never going to return, we should abolish the parentheses too.

 ★ 

llm-anthropic 0.25

Release: llm-anthropic 0.25

  • New model: claude-opus-4.7, which supports thinking_effort: xhigh. #66
  • New thinking_display and thinking_adaptive boolean options. thinking_display summarized output is currently only available in JSON output or JSON logs.
  • Increased default max_tokens to the maximum allowed for each model.
  • No longer uses obsolete structured-outputs-2025-11-13 beta header for older models.

Tags: llm, anthropic, claude

Qwen3.6-35B-A3B on my laptop drew me a better pelican than Claude Opus 4.7

For anyone who has been (inadvisably) taking my pelican riding a bicycle benchmark seriously as a robust way to test models, here are pelicans from this morning's two big model releases - Qwen3.6-35B-A3B from Alibaba and Claude Opus 4.7 from Anthropic.

Here's the Qwen 3.6 pelican, generated using this 20.9GB Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-UD-Q4_K_S.gguf quantized model by Unsloth, running on my MacBook Pro M5 via LM Studio (and the llm-lmstudio plugin) - transcript here:

The bicycle frame is the correct shape. There are clouds in the sky. The pelican has a dorky looking pouch. A caption on the ground reads Pelican on a Bicycle!

And here's one I got from Anthropic's brand new Claude Opus 4.7 (transcript):

The bicycle frame is entirely the wrong shape. No clouds, a yellow sun. The pelican is looking behind itself, and has a less pronounced pouch than I would like.

I'm giving this one to Qwen 3.6. Opus managed to mess up the bicycle frame!

I tried Opus a second time passing thinking_level: max. It didn't do much better (transcript):

The bicycle frame is entirely the wrong shape but in a different way. Lines are more bold. Pelican looks a bit more like a pelican.

I don't think Qwen are cheating

A lot of people are convinced that the labs train for my stupid benchmark. I don't think they do, but honestly this result did give me a little glint of suspicion. So I'm burning one of my secret backup tests - here's what I got from Qwen3.6-35B-A3B and Opus 4.7 for "Generate an SVG of a flamingo riding a unicycle":

Qwen3.6-35B-A3B
(transcript)
The unicycle spokes are a too long. The pelican has sunglasses, a bowtie and appears to be smoking a cigarette. It has two heart emoji surrounding the caption Flamingo on a Unicycle. It has a lot of charisma.
Opus 4.7
(transcript)
The unicycle has a black wheel. The flamingo is a competent if slightly dull vector illustration of a flamingo. It has no flair.

I'm giving this one to Qwen too, partly for the excellent <!-- Sunglasses on flamingo! --> SVG comment.

What can we learn from this?

The pelican benchmark has always been meant as a joke - it's mainly a statement on how obtuse and absurd the task of comparing these models is.

The weird thing about that joke is that, for the most part, there has been a direct correlation between the quality of the pelicans produced and the general usefulness of the models. Those first pelicans from October 2024 were junk. The more recent entries have generally been much, much better - to the point that Gemini 3.1 Pro produces illustrations you could actually use somewhere, provided you had a pressing need to illustrate a pelican riding a bicycle.

Today, even that loose connection to utility has been broken. I have enormous respect for Qwen, but I very much doubt that a 21GB quantized version of their latest model is more powerful or useful than Anthropic's latest proprietary release.

If the thing you need is an SVG illustration of a pelican riding a bicycle though, right now Qwen3.6-35B-A3B running on a laptop is a better bet than Opus 4.7!

Tags: ai, generative-ai, local-llms, llms, anthropic, claude, qwen, pelican-riding-a-bicycle, llm-release, lm-studio

The $50,000 Underwater Drone - EP 66 Ulysses

Guinness. Sharks. American manufacturing. These are a few of the interests I share with the founders of Ulysses, a San Francisco startup building autonomous underwater drones.

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The idea for Ulysses started when one of the four co-founders was on a surf trip and learned how much of humanity depends on a single marine plant: the humble seagrass. He spent a weekend designing a robot to plant it. Two years later, the group of Irishmen — and for diversity, a Scot — have moved well beyond ecological restoration. They’re providing services for the Great Barrier Reef Foundation and selling their drones to the U.S. Navy.

Left to right: Akhil Voorakkara (CEO), Jamie Wedderburn (CTO), Colm O’Brien (COO), Will O’Brien (President) │ Credit: Theo Richard

The robots are called Mako. They’re two meters long, weigh about 400 pounds, and can dive 5,000 feet for up to 72 hours at a time. They’re also modular — payloads swap in and out like Legos, so the same vehicle that plants seagrass in Australia one week can inspect a submarine cable in the Baltic the next. A base Mako costs $50,000. Most legacy underwater drones built by big defense contractors can run between $1 million and $20 million each.

On this episode of the Core Memory podcast, we’re joined by Will O’Brien and Akhil Voorakkara, co-founders of Ulysses. They build these drones out of an office in San Francisco — for conservation, for academia, for national defense. They just raised a $38 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz through its American Dynamism fund. We discuss what it actually takes to make robots for the most hostile environment on Earth, why the ocean is about to have its SpaceX moment, and the surprisingly thin line between planting seagrass and defending NATO.

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The Trouble With the "DoorDash Grandma" - and All Republican Reg'lar Folk Avatars

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“This doesn’t look staged, does it?” said President Trump to the cameras after answering a door at the White House to greet Sharon Simmons, now known as the “DoorDash Grandma,” who was bringing him two bags of much-needed nourishment from McDonald’s. Because every day is another episode in the TV show of which he is executive producer, the president can’t resist calling attention to the artifice of it all.

This was, of course, not a real DoorDash delivery — among other things, Simmons lives in Arkansas, so she wouldn’t be the one bringing it to him anyway (even if the news media bizarrely characterized it as such). It was a media event coordinated between DoorDash and the White House to promote the provision in the Republican tax cut bill passed last year that exempts some tips from income taxes.

Chatting with the president, Simmons said she saved a whopping $11,000 from this change in tax law, which is impossible (see below). But she’s only the latest in a long line of Regular Folk Avatars: ordinary people who are plucked out of their quotidian lives to become symbols of some condition, policy, or grievance one party or the other wants to highlight.

Both parties do it, and have for some time. You probably remember some of them. Khizr Khan, the father of a soldier killed in Iraq, who spoke at the 2016 Democratic convention to criticize Donald Trump over his xenophobic anti-immigrant bigotry. Laken Riley and the other murdered white girls Trump uses to claim that no one is safe from homicidal immigrants. Joe Wurzelbacher, aka “Joe the Plumber,” the small business owner crippled by Barack Obama’s cruel tax increases (who in fact was only an aspiring business owner and was almost certainly not harmed by Obama’s tax policies). Oliver Anthony, the theretofore obscure musician with confused class politics whom the GOP made a hero for his song “Rich Men North of Richmond.” Kyle Rittenhouse, the teenager who killed two people in Kenosha.

The Republican Regular Folk Avatars are distinct in that they all have one thing in common: they are chosen to deceive voters about the GOP, its policies, or something about the country. Which is part of the reason why their stories often fall apart upon examination.

An $11,000 savings? No.

I want to be clear about this: I mostly feel bad for Sharon Simmons, because like all such avatars, she probably had no idea what she was getting into when she agreed to be used in this way. She did previously testify before Congress on the Trump administration’s behalf on this issue, so she’s been around the track at least once, but that was nothing compared to the level of attention she’s getting now. These avatars usually agree to participate in what Daniel Boorstin in 1961 termed “pseudo-events” without fully grasping what it will mean for the rest of their lives, especially their privacy. Inevitably, many wind up wishing it had never happened to them, even those who do their best to monetize their new-found fame.

While debunking the DoorDash Grandma isn’t my main point here, because I’m a pedantic scold, I can’t resist. And it does matter, because part of the Trump playbook is to exaggerate and lie about just how much GOP policies are transforming the lives of the proletariat for the better, to divert attention from the real beneficiaries of those policies. But I’ll be brief.

At the White House, Simmons told Trump that she saved $11,000 on her taxes this year because of the no-tax-on-tips provision. Or to be more specific, he said it first, and she confirmed it, which means that it was a figure she gave the White House and they prepared for him to cite. But it is simply impossible for her to have saved that much from this provision. Not unlikely, but impossible.

That’s because the no-tax-on-tips rule only allows you to deduct $25,000 in tips. Even if she earned the full $25,000, to save $11,000 she’d have to be paying a 44% tax rate on her total income (and keep in mind that this rule does not apply to payroll taxes, which have to be paid in full). No one pays that high a rate; the top tax bracket in 2025 was 37%, which applied to those earning over $626,351.

To illustrate this with an example more grounded in reality, let’s say that Simmons and her husband earned $100,000 last year. According to this handy calculator (I tried a couple others and got almost identical numbers), since she’s married and elderly, her income tax bill would be $7,551 (I’m assuming she’s over 65, but if she’s younger than that her bill would go up by just a couple hundred dollars, and the net effect of these calculations would be the same). If you reduced that taxable income to $75,000 by deducting the full amount of tips, her tax bill would be $4,551, or a savings of $3,000. Still pretty good, but not $11,000.

And guess what: After the White House repeatedly touted the idea that she got $11,000 in tax savings from the GOP tax bill, she went on Fox News and clarified, saying “I made over $11,000 in tips.” She declined to say how much she actually saved, but it was probably something in the range of $1,300. Again, nice to have, but not as much as the White House would like you to believe.

What the Grandma is supposed to communicate

So yes, Republicans and the conservative media machine celebrating Simmons are using her to exaggerate the effects of the no-tax-on-tips provision, which will help only a sliver of the population and give even them only modest benefits. The larger point they’re trying to make, just as they did with Joe the Plumber and many other avatars, is this: Republicans are for working people. Which is one of the most important messages the GOP must continually communicate, because when your party is so singularly devoted to the interests of the economic elite, you have to find ways to convince voters to ignore the truth of who your real constituents are.

Avatars are an important tool in that effort, because we’re all attracted to human stories; it’s a more effective way to grab attention and persuade an audience than showing people a bunch of charts and graphs. That’s why news stories (which are, after all, called “stories”) often begin and end by describing an individual who embodies the issue being reported on in a personal way. Once you realize how critical a feature this is of contemporary journalism, you’ll see it all the time. Writing about the effects of tariffs on the economy? Open with a small business owner having to pay them. Writing about the millions of Americans who are losing their health coverage? Begin with a portrait of one of those unfortunate American families.

Speaking of which, Simmons says that the tax break she got was particularly helpful to her and her husband, since he’s undergoing cancer treatment and it helps pay the medical bills. This is where we truly see what’s at work here. Instead of settling into a comfortable retirement — or even a busy one of volunteering and helping to care for her family — not only does Simmons have to run around town making deliveries for a company with a reputation for exploiting and abusing its workers, like millions of other gig workers she gets few if any benefits from this job.

And because of the gaps in our health insurance system — gaps that Donald Trump and the Republican Party have worked tirelessly to maintain and worsen — her family is saddled with bills for her husband’s cancer treatment that they have difficulty paying. Now just imagine if not only did she earn reasonable wages, her husband had no medical bills, because we had a national health insurance system in which everyone was covered and no one was crushed financially when they got sick.

Trump and Republicans tell us that is a naïve fantasy, that there is no way we can have such a system. But that’s how people live in every industrialized country on Earth — except for the United States. And because of the very tax bill that gave Simmons a four-figure break, 13.7 million Americans will lose their health coverage, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

That’s the real story here, the one Trump and the entire conservative movement are working to keep everyone from understanding or thinking about. But maybe all those people losing their health insurance or facing ballooning premiums can join the DoorDash grandma and get second jobs delivering food, in the hope that at the end of the year they’ll get a few bucks back on their taxes.

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Trump Wants Regime Change at the Fed

No time for a regular post today, so here’s a video.

Transcript

When Donald Trump took us to war with Iran, he dismissed warnings from the experts, from the military, from the intelligence community, saying that this was a highly risky proposition. Now he wants to bring that same level of clarity and judgment to monetary policy, and we should all be very afraid.

Hi, Paul Krugman here. Today, I’m going to do a video rather than a proper post because I just have too much stuff going on. I’ve been too busy to actually do the charts and quantitative analysis that would be involved in actually writing a post about this stuff. I’m recording this on Wednesday afternoon.

The news to which I’m reacting is that in the midst of everything else that’s going on, Trump is doubling down on his attempt to turn the Federal Reserve into a personalized institution that will do what he wants, and never mind the fact that it’s set up to have substantial independence, never mind the fact that there’s a long tradition of respecting the Fed’s independence. Trump thinks that he should be, as George Bush would say, the decider on monetary policy.

This would be a bad thing even if Trump was somebody who generally had good judgment. Monetary policy, what the Fed does — control of short-term interest rates, control of the money supply— monetary policy is technical. Doing it right does require that you know quite a lot about what’s going on. It’s something that you really do want, technocrats at least having a strong role in the decision-making process. And in fact we generally leave it up to technocrats.

Part of the reason for doing that is it’s too easy. It doesn’t require legislation to change interest rates. It just requires a phone call to the open market desk in New York City. So it’s really easy for a president who wants to rev up the economy, wants to juice things up before an election or just plain has crackpot economic ideas, it’s just too easy for a president to do a lot of damage.

So we put layers of insulation. Members of the Federal Reserve Board are appointed for long terms. The whole setup is one that is designed to at least take some time. It doesn’t allow a madman in the Oval Office to muck with monetary policy.

It’s especially bad if the guy in the Oval Office is somebody like Trump, who is impulsive, very much short-term reward-centered, and, of course, doesn’t read, doesn’t study, doesn’t listen to experts. And we know that Trump has a bee in his bonnet, that interest rates should be drastically lower than they are now, which is simply not supported by any of the facts about what’s happening to the economy.

Inflation is running hotter than it should be. The Fed has a target of 2 percent inflation on the PCE price index. It’s actually running at around 3.

That’s not good conditions for a rate cut. The economy doesn’t need a rate cut, at least it doesn’t appear to right now. We’re not in a recession. So technocrats at the Federal Reserve will not actually deliver the rate cuts Trump wants unless he’s able to exert personal control.

Now, the way he’s been trying to do that is itself outrageous. His minions at the Justice Department have tried to force Lisa Cook off the Federal Reserve Board based on totally spurious charges about her mortgage applications long before she was at the Fed. And they’re trying to force Powell out over allegations of cost overruns in Federal Reserve construction projects. This is crazy stuff, and nobody takes it seriously. Nobody thinks those are genuine charges. This is all about trying to use the mechanisms of the Justice Department to intimidate monetary policy makers and turn them into instruments of the presidential will.

The presidential will here, aside from being utterly self-centered, is also deeply uninformed. If you read what Trump has had to say about monetary policy, it’s clear that he doesn’t think of interest rates as a tool to manage the economy, as a tool to control inflation, and so on. He thinks of low interest rates as a gold star that you get if we have a great economy. So he keeps on saying that it’s a wonderful golden age, the economy is terrific, none of which is actually true. It’s not a golden age. Inflation is running high.

None of that is true, but in any case, that’s not how it works. Monetary policy is not a reward for good behavior. It’s not a reward for achievement. It’s something that is a tool for keeping the economy on an even keel. If he does get his way, this will be bad.

The Federal Reserve has credibility, the fact that people making decisions, particularly decisions about pricing, believe that the Fed will keep the economy on an even keel, that it will not allow inflation to remain stubbornly too high. It did allow some inflation for 21-22, which was arguably the right thing to do to allow some, but it quickly took the steps needed to bring it back down again. And that credibility, the fact that people believed that the Fed would do the right thing actually helped it to do the right thing, allowed us to have “immaculate disinflation,” a big fall in the inflation rate without a big rise in the unemployment rate.

If Trump gets his way, that will all be gone. The credibility of the Federal Reserve will be shot. Now, I don’t think he’ll get his way there. I don’t think he will get his way on monetary policy. But he might.

And more than that, what the fight over the Fed is telling us is that Trump has learned nothing. You would think that the debacle in Iran would lead to some loss of self-confidence, some dent in the arrogant ignorance, the belief that just because the intelligence agencies and the generals and the admirals say that this is very risky and what about the Strait of Hormuz, never mind, I know this will be a quick, easy war.

And apparently the fact that it hasn’t turned out that way hasn’t led to any questioning of his own impeccable, perfect judgment. So the attack on the Fed is a bad thing in itself, and it’s also a symptom of “this is not a guy who should be in the White House.”

And the fact that he still commands so much deference from his own party and so much timidity on the part of people who should be standing up to him really makes me worried about the future of America and the world.

Australia will run an overt command economy by 2040

Australia’s Fiscal Point of No Return

Last September I wrote about Australian economic stagnation — how taxation past the Laffer curve’s point of peak growth, zero public sector productivity improvement since 2001, and the systematic eradication of manufacturing and ICT from the economy have combined to produce economic stagnation and flatlining living standards. The NDIS and similar social spending were the only parts of the economy “growing,” but because this spending is not cumulatively generative, it’s not able to sustain long term high quality public benefits. In other words, we’re burning the seed corn.

The post generated a question I couldn’t answer at the time: when exactly does this become irreversible? During my recent visit in December 2025, I paid close attention to the function (and dysfunction) of the service economy and was forced to the uncomfortable realization that government spending already controls and distorts such a large fraction of the market that it is not clear whether the Hayek knowledge problem is being solved at all.

In other words, the economy is producing gross shortages and excesses of many goods because government interference in natural pricing mechanisms is so excessive that information transfer through prices no longer exists in a functional way. This is clear in the case of housing, education, healthcare, and now fuel, but also occurs almost invisibly in nearly every other economic edge node that Australians routinely use.

This motivated me to investigate the situation more thoroughly. The answer is not unexpected but quite dire. Australia passed the point of no return in 2013, and is now 13 years into a probably irreversible zombie-fication of its economy.

What GDP Actually Measures

Australia’s headline GDP is $2.75 trillion. It grew 1.3% in the year to March 2025. GDP per capita fell, for the ninth time in the last eleven quarters. The standard interpretation is that we’re in a “per capita recession” but the total economy is still growing. This is wrong in a way that matters.

GDP doesn’t distinguish between a dollar spent building a factory (i.e. becoming long term productive capital) and a dollar spent on a plan manager coordinating a support coordinator to arrange, say, an NDIS claim. Both show up the same. But only one of them leads to capital accumulation and becomes an engine of generational wealth growth.

Both the private economy and the government spend on a range of things with a range of long term productivities, but as a de facto welfare monopoly and monopsony with the unique power of taxation, it is unavoidable that the government appropriates and ultimately compromises and destroys a lot of productive capital. Well and good, provided the economy can regenerate it at least as fast as it is harvested. Is this the case, remembering that the goal is to shear the sheep, not skin them!

Let’s break down Australia’s economy by public and private spending.

Strip everything tax-funded out of GDP. Government healthcare. NDIS. Aged care. Welfare. Defence. Public administration. Debt interest. To be complete, we need to include the nominally-private sector that exists solely to bill the government. NDIS plan managers. Private hospitals billing Medicare. The entire private health insurance industry, a $25B/year regulatory artifact that adds 15% administrative overhead to redirect money from taxpayers through insurers back to the same hospitals. What’s left is the wealth-generating economy that compounds over time.

That tax-funded economy is about 34% of GDP and growing at 4–5.5% real, despite flat productivity since 2001. The productive remainder is ~66% and growing at maybe 1.0–1.5%, generously. Decompose per-capita GDP to exclude the care economy’s above-GDP growth, and the productive economy per Australian has been shrinking since roughly 2016. Not stagnating. Shrinking.

What’s propping up headline GDP? Two things. First, mass immigration, keeping total population growing and consumption increasing. Second, government spending on itself, the public sector’s 5%+ growth rate dragging up the average. But neither of these factors actually supports long term economic growth or increases the growth rate. Mass immigration dilutes wealth and increases strain on public sector services that lack a market mechanism to respond to demand or to innovative on productivity. And public expenditure on welfare and services, while serving laudable social goals, consumes rather than produces net new wealth.

Communism Via the Back Door

Here’s the part that made me uncomfortable.

If the only “growing” part of the economy is government-funded services, and government-funded services are by definition centrally planned — administered prices, administered eligibility, administered supply — then what we’re watching is the gradual adoption of a command economy through the back door. Nobody voted for communism. But every year the tax-funded share of GDP ratchets up another fraction of a percent, another tranche of the economy moves from price-signal allocation to bureaucratic allocation, and another cohort of workers shifts from producing things people voluntarily pay for to producing things the government has decided they should have. We are sleepwalking into a planned economy, funded by the shrinking productive sector that hasn’t yet noticed it’s being eaten alive. The Fabians would be thrilled. The rest of us should be terrified.

This isn’t hyperbole. The NDIS is already closer to central planning than to a market. The government defines eligible populations, approved services, price caps, and quality standards, then funds everything through a single agency. Medicare is a monopsony with administered prices. Aged care is shifting to government-set pricing through the Independent Health and Aged Care Pricing Authority. At some point the “private provider” wrapper becomes pure overhead on what is functionally a state employment and service delivery system. Australia won’t choose a command economy. It will discover it’s already in one.

The parallels are even stronger. In a capitalist economy, workers are free to move to work in different fields for different employers, they’re free to critique (productively or otherwise) their industrial sector, and generally enjoy liberty and the freedoms we take for granted. In a communist economy, a government bureaucratic official decides what you are paid, what you do, where and when you do it, how you can do it, controls access to clients/customers, controls licensing, insurance, and explicitly prohibits any form of criticism internally or externally, lest it harm public trust in the service. Government policy on provisioning and rationing of inherently scarce public services is routinely updated, but you’ll never hear a word of commentary or constructive criticism from the actual people who work in those sectors, which is strange until you realize that some unelected unaccountable bureaucrat can simply revoke your right to work in your profession with no due process, depriving you of your livelihood. When any society or sector moves to crush dissent, it destroys the feedback system necessary for the most qualified and motivated people to advocate for reforms that help everyone.

And here’s the kicker: a competent command economy would at least be cheaper. Strip out the plan managers, the support coordinators, the LACs, the NDIA assessors, the AAT appeal lawyers, the compliance officers, the fraud investigators — the entire intermediation layer consuming 15–20% of NDIS costs — and just employ the support workers directly. You’d lose consumer choice. You’d save $7–9B a year on the NDIS alone. The current system manages to combine the allocative inefficiency of central planning with the transaction costs of market intermediation. We have the worst of both worlds, and nobody seems to have noticed.

When Did We Pass the Point of No Return?

Four key dates matter. At each of these times, Australia locked in a different dimension of the trap.

2007–08 (Structural). Productivity growth permanently downshifted from ~1.5% to ~1.0% after the mining capex boom ended. From here, the productive economy’s growth rate dropped below the care economy’s structural growth rate and never recovered. The share of GDP consumed by tax-funded services started rising monotonically and hasn’t stopped. The mining boom had been masking this for years. Once the mask came off, the underlying rot was already advanced.

2013 (Political). The NDIS was legislated with bipartisan support. This created a fourth uncapped, demand-driven entitlement — joining Medicare, PBS, and the Age Pension — with no fiscal cap, no means testing, and no GDP-linked growth constraint. Originally scoped for ~410,000 people. Now at ~740,000. Projected to hit a million by 2034. The scheme costs $46 billion this year and is growing at 8–12% per annum. The 2023 Intergenerational Report projected NDIS costs reaching 6.3% of GDP by 2062 without reform — higher than projected health spending over the same period.

The issue isn’t that the NDIS is a magnet for fraud, though of course there is some and of course the optimal amount of fraud is non-zero. NDIS currently spends about $12b a year on administration, part of which is intended to limit fraud, while Bill Shorten called estimates of $2 billion per year in fraud “egregious.” The Grattan Institute found that projected fraud savings over three years total $424 million — less than 0.3% of scheme expenses. Fraud isn’t the core problem. The core problem is uncapped demand in a system without effective eligibility gatekeeping creating incentives for large swaths of society to see themselves as permanently disabled instead of pursuing the dignity of meaningful and sustained contributions to our society despite the depredations of time and fortune that will ultimately take us all.

2013 was the point of no return. The only variable was speed.

2015–17 (Fiscal). The per-worker extraction rate — tax-funded economy divided by productive economy, weighted for working-age population share — permanently exceeded per-worker productivity growth. Each productive worker started falling further behind every year, and hasn’t stopped. By 2024 the extraction ratio hit roughly 66%: for every dollar of GDP the productive economy generates, 66 cents goes to fund the tax-funded economy. That number is heading for 80% by the mid-2030s and 100%+ by 2040 — a mathematical impossibility resolved only by unbounded debt growth, money-printing, or collapse.

~2024 (Democratic). Healthcare workers (~2M), NDIS participants and families (~2.2M), pensioners (~2.6M), aged care recipients (~1.3M), and public servants (~2.1M), after overlap adjustment, add up to about 50% of the voting population. Once a majority of voters depend on the tax-funded economy, no democratic government can run on structural reform. Every election becomes a bidding war to expand public spending. This is the Italian/Greek path, except without the EU backstop. Meanwhile, the once vibrant and vital productive engine of economic growth through primary and secondary production is now a strip mined, abject minority of the economy, colonized from within, extracted until nothing remains.

Demographics: The Locked-In Accelerant

The model gets worse when you add demographics, because the previous numbers assume a constant working-age share, but this is not the case.

Australia’s total fertility rate hit a record low of 1.48 in 2024. Below replacement since 1976 — fifty years running. Each generation is roughly 30% smaller than needed to replace itself. The working-age share of the population falls from 64.5% today to ~57% by 2050. The 85+ population doubles by 2042, and an 85-year-old costs roughly 9x per capita in healthcare versus a working-age adult. That’s assuming that healthcare costs don’t continue to increase.

Fewer workers. Exponentially more expensive dependents. The denominator shrinks while the numerator accelerates. Every threshold in the model shifts 3–6 years earlier once you account for this. The per-worker burden reaches 80% around 2036 and exceeds 100% before 2040.

The 2040s tax base was determined by births happening (or rather, not happening) right now. Even if fertility magically recovered to 2.1 tomorrow, those children don’t enter the workforce until 2045, but the fiscal math has been terminal since 2013 and workers who entered the workforce in 2013 will be nearing retirement by 2045, if retirement is a thing our society will be able to afford then.

Immigration doesn’t fix this, it just masks it. Median immigrant income is $45,351 versus $52,338 for the whole population — a 13% discount. More importantly, 30–40% of migrant labor goes directly into the tax-funded economy: healthcare, aged care, NDIS, education, public administration. Another ~20% into low-productivity domestic services that exist to service population growth itself — circular GDP. No more than 40–50% enters genuinely productive sectors. Counting an imported NDIS support worker’s wages as “productive immigration” is double-counting: the government funds the NDIS plan, the plan pays the worker, the worker’s income shows up as GDP and immigration statistics as economic contribution. We are importing today’s workers and tomorrow’s dependents, and congratulating ourselves on the headline GDP number, but doing nothing to ensure Australia’s long term economic productivity.

The Feedback Loop

Government expands spending → shows up as GDP → masks private sector contraction → government sector competes for labor → wages bid up in healthcare/NDIS → crowds out productive sectors → tax base erodes → more government spending required → repeat.

Meanwhile the government suppresses provider prices through Medicare fee schedules while simultaneously creating insatiable demand through NDIS and aged care entitlements. The gap shows up as wait times, workforce burnout, quality degradation, cost-shifting to emergency departments, and the steady monotonic ratcheting up of government control over more and more aspects of healthcare without ever noticing that control destroys the dynamism which actually delivers cost reduction and service improvement. This dynamic does not show up directly in GDP.

This is Baumol’s cost disease fused with a monopsony that prevents price signals from doing their job, inside a democracy where the beneficiaries now constitute a voting majority. Every year the productive sector that funds the machine gets a little smaller, and the machine gets a little bigger, and the people who run the machine tell us the solution is to make it bigger still.

How Bad Compared to the US?

The natural comparison is the United States, which has its own healthcare cost disease. The US passed its structural point of no return earlier (2003 — Medicare Part D created ~$8T in unfunded liabilities with no revenue source) and its political point later (2010 — ACA). US healthcare spending hit $5.3 trillion in 2024 — 18% of GDP and growing at 5.8% per year versus 4.3% GDP growth. Administrative overhead alone runs $800B–1.1T/year, 3–4% of GDP. More than most countries spend on healthcare total. The US healthcare system is already past the point where a straight command economy — an NHS — would be more efficient for the bottom 80% of the population. That’s a remarkable thing to be able to say and it’s not wrong.

But the US has two things Australia doesn’t. The reserve currency, which lets it run 6%+ of GDP deficits more or less indefinitely. And a productive economy large and dynamic enough — tech, energy, finance, defence — to carry the spending overhead. For now.

The US hits a discrete crisis first (~2033, trust fund exhaustion forces Congress to act). But Australia’s structural position is worse because there’s no forcing function for reform and no reserve currency to monetize deficits. Australia will slowly degrade until an external shock, e.g. commodity bust, China slowdown, AUD crisis, forces emergency austerity.

Neither country’s productive economy is growing fast enough to escape. Both are at about 1.0% real in their productive sectors. Both need sustained 3.5%+ to outrun the tax-funded economy’s growth rate. No technology revolution in the history of either country has closed a gap that large on a sustained basis. The IT revolution came closest — about 1.3 percentage points of productivity acceleration — and it lasted eight years before reverting. AI would need to be almost twice as impactful and last three times as long. And Baumol’s disease guarantees that much of AI’s benefit in healthcare gets captured as more expensive treatments rather than cheaper ones. More diagnoses, more drugs, more procedures, more cost. Every healthcare technology innovation in history has increased total spending. AI will not be the exception.

Escape Velocity

The only thing that has ever produced a sustained 2+ percentage point productivity acceleration is a cheap energy revolution. Steam. Electrification. Petrochemicals. Each time, abundant cheap energy unlocked a step change in industrial productivity that grew the denominator fast enough to outrun the numerator.

Australia is sitting on the best natural resources in the developed world and doing approximately nothing useful with it at industrial scale. Indeed, Australia spent 50 years after WW2 painstakingly building domestic oil and gas autarky, and the 30 years since then tearing it apart, as revealed plainly during the current gulf crisis and also overlapping nicely with Australia’s recent three decades of economic stagnation.

The fiscal math doesn’t care about your feelings. It doesn’t care about your policy preferences. If Australians want sustainable publicly funded services, the fiscal math needs a denominator that grows at 3.5%+, and nothing short of an energy revolution has ever produced that.

Alice Hudson and Women in Cartography

Alice Hudson, chief of the New York Public Library’s map division from 1981 to 2009, died in 2024. Last month The Cartographic Journal published a long look at Hudson’s life and career, written by Daniel… More

Thursday 16 April 1663

Up betimes and to my office, met to pass Mr. Pitt’s (anon Sir J. Lawson’s Secretary and Deputy Treasurer) accounts for the voyage last to the Streights, wherein the demands are strangely irregular, and I dare not oppose it alone for making an enemy and do no good, but only bring a review upon my Lord Sandwich, but God knows it troubles my heart to see it, and to see the Comptroller, whose duty it is, to make no more matter of it. At noon home for an hour to dinner, and so to the office public and private till late at night, so home to supper and bed with my father.

Read the annotations

Parkinson's

Fantasy uses the trope of a line of desolation & destruction slowly, inexorably advancing across the land, killing whatever it touches. Steven King’s The Mist. Miyazaki’s Sea of Corruption in Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. The Nothing in Ende’s The Neverending Story.

I have been diagnosed with Parkinson’s. Parkinson’s is like that advancing line of destruction, but operating on the brain. Alpha-synuclein (a protein) misfolds and, a little like prions, the misfolded proteins convince normally folded proteins to join the dark side. (This stuff is all so unspeakably cool if only it wasn’t happening to people.)

The proximate cause for this announcement is all the questions I’ve gotten from folks watching Still Burning & seeing my hand shake. By the time tremors appear, that line of misfolding has progressed far enough to destroy the 60-80% of the substantia nigra. The substantia nigra creates the dopamine that helps regulate movement (not the dopamine that used to form memories—I told you this shit was cool!)

Feelings

Not gonna lie—this has been an emotional shock for me. I’ve tried to figure out why it’s been so hard. I just turned 65 & I’ve been keenly aware of the advance of time for a while. I think the disturbing aspect of my new situation is that my best case scenario for aging just got a lot worse. My 90-year-old ex-father-in-law is still sharp & reasonably mobile. I comforted myself that I might grow old like that.

Now…not gonna happen. Over the next 5-15 years the tremors will worsen & spread (just my left forearm & thigh at the moment). Then my balance will go, followed by, well, it gets worse. Look it up if you want the details.

I call it the time value of time. If I can do something this year it’s more valuable to me than doing the same thing next year & way more valuable than doing it in 5 years.

The expectation of increasing limitations has got me shifting my personal & business priorities. It’s the time value of time. If I can do something joyous this year it’s more valuable to me than doing the same thing next year & way more valuable than doing it in 5 years.

Business

Part of me wishes I could just say to hell with it & retire. I have a copy of Pauling’s General Chemistry I’ve been meaning to plow through, then Alberts’ Biochemistry of the Cell. I want to use the tools I’ve always used to stare this thing in the face.

I can’t afford to stop my business. I need to make as much progress towards financial security as I can as quickly as possible. However, I won’t earn at the expense of enjoying my best, most mobile years. Offer me $100m/year for 3 years of 60-hour days and I’ll just laugh. Go ahead, try it. In practice I’ll either get lucky or I’ll muddle through. But I sure as hell won’t do something I don’t want to do in exchange for distant futures.

(If you were thinking of booking me for coaching, consulting, or a talk for your team, might I suggest you contact my business manager sooner rather than later?)

Next?

I see no reason to waver from my mission of helping geeks feel safe in the world. I’m certainly going to keep coding interesting projects. Art & music are going to get more difficult but I have some ideas. Thinkies are taking on a life of their own. This newsletter will still be mostly on topic with occasional excursions because I have fewer fucks to give. Other than that, we’ll just see.

I’ll leave you with this poetic summary of the situation.

Common Road Hazards That Lead to Bicycle Accidents

Bicyclists face a unique set of dangers on the road that motorists in enclosed vehicles usually do not consider. Obstacles that a car or truck can pass over without consequence, such as a crack in the pavement or a misaligned drainage grate, can cause a cyclist to lose control in an instant. Because bicyclists lack the protection of a vehicle frame, airbags, or seatbelts, the resulting injuries are often severe.

California law recognizes that bicyclists have the same rights and responsibilities as motorists on public roadways. When a road hazard causes an accident, determining liability requires an examination of who created or failed to address the dangerous condition. A Los Angeles bicycle accident lawyer can investigate the source of the hazard, identify the responsible parties, and pursue compensation on behalf of injured cyclists who were harmed through no fault of their own.

Cracked and Uneven Pavement

Potholes, cracks, raised pavement edges, and uneven surfaces created by utility repairs or root damage can catch a bicycle wheel and throw the rider to the ground. While motorists may think of them as minor inconveniences, they pose a serious risk of falls, fractures, and head injuries for cyclists.

In California, the government entity responsible for maintaining a roadway may be held liable when a known dangerous condition causes injury. However, pursuing these claims requires victims to file an administrative tort claim within six months of the accident. This timeline is significantly shorter than the standard two-year statute of limitations for personal injury cases, making prompt legal action essential.

Loose Gravel and Road Debris

Sand, gravel, leaves, broken glass, and other debris accumulate along roadways, particularly at intersections, shoulders, and curves where cyclists frequently ride. These materials reduce tire traction and can cause a bicycle to slide unpredictably, especially during turns or braking. Construction zones are a particularly common source of loose materials that spill onto adjacent travel lanes without adequate warning or cleanup.

When debris results from a construction project, the contractor responsible for the work zone may bear liability for failing to maintain safe conditions for all road users. California Vehicle Code § 23112 prohibits any person from depositing material on a highway that could create a traffic hazard, providing a statutory basis for negligence claims in these situations.

Poorly Designed or Maintained Drainage Grates

Drainage grates with slots that run parallel to the direction of travel are a well-known hazard for bicyclists. These openings can trap a bicycle tire and abruptly throw the rider forward. While many municipalities have transitioned to bicycle-safe grate designs, older installations remain in use across numerous roadways.

Government agencies responsible for storm drainage infrastructure have a duty to ensure that grates do not pose an unreasonable risk to lawful road users, including cyclists. When a known hazardous grate design contributes to an accident, the maintaining agency may be held liable for failing to replace or retrofit the fixture.

Inadequate Signage and Road Markings

Faded lane markings, missing warning signs, and the absence of designated bicycle lane indicators can leave cyclists without the information they need to navigate safely. Abrupt lane reductions, unexpected merges, and unmarked changes in road surface are particularly hazardous when they occur without advance warning.

California’s Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices establishes standards for road signage and markings. When a government entity fails to install or maintain signage in accordance with these standards and a cyclist is injured as a result, the agency’s noncompliance can serve as evidence of negligence.

Obstructed Bicycle Lanes

Even where dedicated bicycle infrastructure exists, the lanes themselves can become hazardous when obstructed by parked vehicles, delivery trucks, trash bins, or overgrown vegetation. Cyclists forced to merge into general traffic to avoid these obstructions face an elevated risk of collision with motor vehicles.

California Vehicle Code § 21209 prohibits motorists from driving or parking in designated bicycle lanes except under limited circumstances. When these actions force a cyclist into traffic and a collision occurs, the driver of the obstructing vehicle may be held responsible.

Construction Zones

Road construction projects frequently alter traffic patterns, reduce lane widths, and create uneven surfaces without providing adequate accommodations for bicyclists. Temporary steel plates, abrupt grade changes, and the absence of clearly marked detour routes for cyclists all contribute to an increased risk of accidents in these areas.

Contractors and government agencies overseeing construction projects are obligated to maintain safe passage for all road users throughout the duration of the work. Failure to provide appropriate signage, barriers, or alternative routes for bicyclists can establish the basis for a negligence claim.

Conclusion

Road hazards that may seem minor to motorists can have serious consequences for bicyclists. Each of these conditions creates a foreseeable risk that the responsible party has a duty to address. Cyclists injured by preventable road hazards have the right to pursue compensation from the entities whose negligence allowed the dangerous condition to persist.

Photo: prostooleh via Freepik.


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Foreign Investment Flows into Canada Signal Renewed Global Confidence

From Q4 2025 to Q1 2026, Canada has recorded sustained foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows, reaching a new multi-year high. This is not a random coincidence but the reflection of investors’ confidence in Canadian markets.

Global Confidence Spurs Canada’s FDI to 18-Year High

The global economy endured several shocks, especially from US tariffs announced early in the year and from geopolitical instability that impacted the energy market. For many countries like Canada, adjusting to the tariff war meant an uptick in frontloading activities and structural adjustments to strengthen local industries. This led to massive inflows from long-term trading partners like the US and UK, as well as new markets in Asia and South America.

But trade uncertainty was not the only factor driving investment decisions. Canada quickly became a financial safe haven as the economy remained largely stable throughout the year, and the loonie held its own against the US dollar. Investors speculating on CAD/USD on their forex trading app recorded months of steady price action, with no disruptions.

And not just in the currency markets; across other sectors, foreign direct investment into Canada reached its highest level since 2007 in 2025. Canada ranked second on the 2025 FDI Confidence Index global rankings by Kearney, only outranked by the US.

Key FDI Stats: Trade, Transportation, and Financial Management lead

Trade and transportation received the highest concentration of Canada’s investment gains in 2025. Management of companies and enterprises and manufacturing also ranked in the leading sectors, driven by increased merger-and-acquisition (M&A) activity. The US remained the major source of FDI in 2025, with about $52.5 billion invested (the amount remained consistent with 2024 levels).

In terms of the gross domestic product (GDP) contributions, wholesale trade and finance & insurance contributed CAD$125.5 billion and CAD$ 171.442 billion, respectively. In that record-breaking year, Canada’s inward gains indicate strong foreign interest and is a primary driver for growth in 2026.

FDI Outflows Decreased in 2025

The investment flowed outwards, too. Canada’s Direct Investment Abroad (CDIA) fell to $79.4 billion in 2025, marking its lowest since 2020. This is because Canada reduced its investments in the U.S. markets to $27.6 billion, less than half of its 2024 total.

This was a strategic pullback to manage trade headwinds, focusing on trade and transportation for outward direct investment. But the energy, mining, insurance, and finance sectors dragged on growth. In the same vein, Canada also reduced its outward investment in non-U.S. markets, especially the UK, falling from $62.2 billion in 2024 to $48.6 billion in 2025.

Canadian currency notes

Trends Shaping FDI Inflows

In 2026, seven key trends will shape FDI inflows, with some continuing from 2025 and others showing marked deviations.

  • Large-scale acquisitions: According to Maria Solovieva, economist at TD Economics, UK investors have shown strong interest in Canada’s tech sector, with many acquisitions of software companies.
  • Increased inflow activity: Analysts expect inflows to continue and even increase in 2026. With the energy market experiencing high volatility, investors will look to Canada for oil imports and a stable investment environment.
  • Sectoral Modifications to green, tech, mining, finance, and insurance: In Q4 2025, there was an uptick in M&E, especially with AngloTech and Onyx. These deals bring in significant foreign investment and will continue in 2026. Strategic supply chain integration will incentivize U.S. firms to invest in Canada this year.
  • Regulatory scrutiny: the Government is implementing stricter national security reviews under the Investment Canada Act. Investments will be cleared only with strict conditions.
  • Policy focus: Canada wants to reduce trade-related fees, improve regulatory efficiency, encourage investments in innovation, and provide the infrastructure. These, in turn, will influence stronger FDI flows as investors seek stable returns.
  • Reinvestment increased: More established companies renewed their investments in Canada, opting to expand their operations for long-term stability. These include companies like Rio Tinto, Nvidia, AMD, and investment giants such as the UAE entities and Qatar Investment Authority.
  • Regional expansion: Reinvestment trends across Greater Montreal, Ontario & Western Canada will also shape the country’s FDI this year. Last year, Montreal accounted for over 75% of the $2.6 billion investment, which came from companies already established there.

Economic Impact

From boosting local industries to strengthening investors’ confidence, the FDI impacts the economy in many important ways.

  • Renewed global confidence: The 2025 capital inflow record is a marked reversal from 2022, when capital outflows exceeded inflows. The turnaround shows a confidence rebound in the economy as more investors explore the economy.
  • Strategic growth: Key government officials, including Prime Minister Mark Carney, note the impact of higher FDI on the economy, including upscaling and expanding career opportunities. With more capital, local industries, especially construction, will boom.

Cargo ship cranes

  • Positive impact on the current account: The increase in foreign investment has helped Canada to manage its current account deficit through 2025. The deficit reduced to $0.71 billion in Q4, down from $5.27 billion earlier in the year. This has lowered the risk of a sudden pause in capital inflows, making Canada more attractive to international investors. It also supports the loonie’s stability in global markets.

A Steady Path Forward for Canada
As global economies adjust to fluctuating markets, Canada maintains a strong position that strikes confidence in investors. The FDI hit new highs in 2025 with increased activity, a trend that could continue in 2026. The country will look to maintain its foreign investment destination status and rebuff external trade pressures.


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Links 4/16/26

Links for you. Science:

Inside the NIH Forecast Graveyard: What NIH Is Canceling, What It Is Burying, and What It Means
No one is happy with NASA’s new idea for private space stations
Phages communicate across species to shape microbial ecosystems
San Diego cancer breakthroughs at risk from funding cuts and delays, experts say. Researchers say changes in how the National Institutes of Health approve and distribute grants are putting patients, cures and the entire biotech industry in peril.
‘No kings, just vaccines!’: demonstrators gather at NIH headquarters to protest against cuts to medical research
Deepwater discoveries: scientists find more than 110 new fish and invertebrate species in the Coral Sea

Other:

The One Phrase That Explains Trump’s Twisted Psychology
My Front-Row Seat to the Making of Michael Wolff—and the Jeffrey Epstein Predator Class (excellent)
‘Fidgeting’ Trump had to be moved during Supreme Court hearing: ACLU attorney
IL-09: An Election for the Ages. Age drove differences in candidate support in IL-09’s primary, underscoring a growing generational divide in Democratic politics.
Let’s Be Very Clear: Trump’s Iran War Is Making You Poorer
They Got What They Wanted
Hegseth has intervened in military promotions for more than a dozen senior officers
More people requesting ‘unvaccinated’ blood for themselves or their children
Could a Democrat really replace Marjorie Taylor Greene? This retired Army general is trying.
A new map is fueling a debate on housing and displacement in D.C.
Mayor Muriel Bowser Pitches Legislation To Pave the Way for Medical Cannabis Drinks Via Local Breweries
The Paralympic Village Was Proof That Truly Accessible Cities Can and Should Exist
D.C. Council Defies Mayor Muriel Bowser Four Times Over, Including Veto Override
The Intellectual Right Is Mad at the Mess It’s Made
Wilson Building Bulletin: Pepco and politics
Frequently asked questions about the missing Georgetown Metro station
Parks are crucial public spaces. The National Park Service owes us better.
You Gotta Hand It to Chuck Schumer This Time
The Mythology of Pete Hegseth: The Iran War cheerleader-in-chief embraces a dangerous alternate history of the 21st Century
Congratulations, here’s a pay cut
Useful: The conservative media machine doesn’t want Jaden Ivey to get help. It wants him to keep talking.
Edward ‘Big Balls’ Coristine Is Helping Out on Viral Fraud Videos Now
Does your tap water smell like chlorine? There’s a reason why.
Iran has put a tollgate across the Strait of Hormuz. This fundamentally changes the global economy.
‘You should be lynched,’ Florida Republican tells a Black man
Mr. Trump, We Are Eager To Implement Your Plan If You Tell Us What It Is
The Trump Dictatorship Is Cracking Up. In the president’s warped world, his increasingly deranged demands are never the problem—only his underlings’ failures to meet them.
Who’s the Next Lady on Trump’s Chopping Block
Pam Bondi’s portrait already taken down at Justice Department
‘Incredibly chilling’: Advocacy groups raise alarm over Trump’s demand for list of Jewish faculty at Penn

Healthcare Insurance, Power, and Control

This piece, about the massive shift in film industry jobs from Atlanta to the UK, came across the transom yesterday (boldface mine):

Across the U.S., 29% fewer movies and TV series with budgets above $40 million started filming in 2024 versus 2022, according to data company ProdPro. In the U.K., that number grew by 16%. Its tax credit is similar to Georgia’s, but workers there are generally paid less, and studios don’t have to cover their health insurance.

If business owners’ and managers’ opposition to universal healthcare (e.g., Medicare for All*) were grounded in money, such as additional taxes, they should support it in a heartbeat because they would not bear the full cost of healthcare themselves–and when has an American business not wanted to externalize costs to other parties?

But if you view employer-based health insurance as a way to keep employees docile, then opposition makes sense. And many business owners and managers are more concerned about employees getting uppity than they are saving money, even if occasionally they do make cost-based decisions like Marvel did.

*Medicare for All is sort of a misnomer: what most non-experts who support Medicare for All envision would be more akin to Medicaid for All.

Aethero developing Titan satellite to advance space-based data center ambitions

Aethero is preparing to deploy its most powerful computing payload yet this fall, aiming to bring data center-style processing to orbit and expand the scale of AI workloads that can be handled in space.

The post Aethero developing Titan satellite to advance space-based data center ambitions appeared first on SpaceNews.

PlanetiQ secures $15 million Air Force STRATFI contract

COLORADO SPRINGS – Commercial satellite operator PlanetiQ will develop and launch spacecraft equipped with next-generation instruments to gather terrestrial and space weather data with a $15 million U.S. Air Force Strategic Funding Increase (STRATFI) contract announced April 16. The STRATFI agreement is “a big indication from the U.S. government that our technology matters and they […]

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Space Force reorg signals end of SDA as standalone agency

Officials say the Space Development Agency’s ‘go fast’ model will live on under new portfolio-based organization

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Seraphim forms space advisory council

Early-stage space investor Seraphim Space has formed a global advisory council of industry, policy and investment leaders to inform its long-term strategy as geopolitical and technology advances rapidly reshape the sector.

The post Seraphim forms space advisory council appeared first on SpaceNews.

How space weather forecasting keeps astronauts (and satellites) safe

Solar data collection via spacecraft and ground-based tools at the Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colorado. Credit: Barbara David

BOULDER, Colorado – The sun’s volatile outbursts, such as storms, flares and other space weather, can cause serious harm to astronauts like the Artemis 2 crew who recently came home, and to satellites. That’s why the Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) in Boulder, Colorado — part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — is […]

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NASA seeks commercial and exploration links for new Earth science missions

The Fleet for the Atmosphere Linking Commercial Observations with NASA (FALCON) spacecraft will study clouds, convection and the atmosphere. Credit: NASA

Two new proposed NASA Earth science missions will attempt to address key research topics while leveraging both commercial and exploration capabilities. During NASA’s “Ignition” event March 24, the agency announced two new Earth science mission concepts, called EAGLE and FALCON. The announcements were largely overlooked at an event that focused on development of a lunar […]

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The optimism in the space economy with Alyssa Goessler

In this episode of Space Minds, Mike Gruss talks with Alyssa Goessler on what’s driving the optimism in the space economy. They discuss the rigor needed in evaluating companies, the […]

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Artemis 2 is a benchmark in our space exploration program — and it depends on steady NASA funding

Artemis 2 splashdown

Now that the Artemis 2 mission has been successfully completed, it’s worth taking a look at where NASA stands on the role of humans in exploring space and what its path forward should be. Doing this is especially important today, with some people questioning on line whether we can afford the cost of sending humans […]

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Voyager to fly private astronaut mission to ISS

The International Space Station, photographed in 2021. Credit: NASA

Voyager Technologies will be the third company to fly a private astronaut mission to the International Space Station, gaining experience for its commercial station.

The post Voyager to fly private astronaut mission to ISS appeared first on SpaceNews.

Boeing and its subsidiary Millennium Space team on new mid-size satellite

The new satellite platform is being positioned to compete in the emerging “micro GEO” market for space-based communications and sensing

The post Boeing and its subsidiary Millennium Space team on new mid-size satellite appeared first on SpaceNews.

All Points signs agreement to build payload processing facilities at KSC

All Points KSC

All Points Logistics has signed an agreement with NASA’s Kennedy Space Center to construct satellite processing facilities on center property.

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Global imbalances are back. Who’s to blame?

The suspects look familiar

Pakistan’s deft diplomacy is an economic blessing. And a curse

It allows the country’s rulers to put off necessary reforms

In Development magazine

A new venture, focusing on evidence-based approaches to economic development globally.  Here is Paul Niehaus on GiveDirectly and the evidence for cash-based transfers.  Here is the home page and a link to subscribe.

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No Signs of Atmosphere on TRAPPIST-1 b or c

Waiting to learn what next generation telescopes will reveal is tantalizing in the extreme. In terms of space-based instruments, we’re getting close to launch of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which has been the subject of many posts here under its former name WFIRST (Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope). Part of its remit will be to image nearby planetary systems, assuming it can survive NASA budget battles that have threatened to cancel it. Launch could occur late this year if these issues are resolved.

Needless to say, the European Space Agency’s PLATO mission (Planetary Transits and Oscillations of Stars), with a 2026 launch expected, has my full attention. Here we have a focus on terrestrial exoplanets in the habitable zones of their stars, to be followed up with ESA’s Ariel (Atmospheric Remote-sensing Infrared Exoplanet Large-survey), designed within a few years to be launched for the study of planetary atmospheres. On the ground, the European Southern Observatory’s work on its 39-metre instrument continues, with first light projected for 2029 and regular observations beginning the following year.

Meanwhile, the James Webb Space Telescope continues to deliver outstanding results. The latest to catch my eye involve the TRAPPIST-1 system, with its seven terrestrial-sized planets orbiting an M-dwarf in Aquarius. At about 40 light years out, this system is close enough to reward intense scrutiny, especially since all seven planets transit the star. In new work just published in Nature Astronomy, we get our first look at planetary atmospheres – or the lack of same – on the two inner worlds, TRAPPIST-1b and TRAPPIST-1c.

Image: This artist’s impression displays TRAPPIST-1 and its planets reflected in a surface. The potential for water on each of the worlds is also represented by the frost, water pools, and steam surrounding the scene. Credit: © NASA/R. Hurt/T. Pyle.

The question of atmospheres is a fraught one given that the tight habitable zones around an M-dwarf mean that planets there are subject to violent flare activity that can potentially strip an atmosphere entirely. The two inner worlds are not in the habitable zone (TRAPPIST 1-e, f and g are, but are not part of this study). We learn in the paper that no atmospheres can be detected here, but the question of the other planets remains open. This is the first time that astronomers have mapped climate features on Earth-sized planets.

We can continue to speculate on tidal lock, which will be a factor on planets in the habitable zone of any red dwarf star. A permanent day on one side, permanent night on the other are the result, but there are mechanisms that could keep a planet like this able to sustain life. Brice-Oliver Demory (University of Bern), a co-author of the study, comments on the importance of the work:

“The presence of an atmosphere around these tidally locked planets could allow for energy transfer between the day and night sides, resulting in more moderate temperatures across the planet, which would have a significant impact on their potential habitability. Successfully detecting the atmosphere of one of these planets has therefore become a key objective for our community, highlighting the importance of the TRAPPIST-1 system with the JWST.”

Sixty hours of observation with JWST tracked the two inner planets in the infrared through a full orbit, allowing readings of surface temperature to a high degree of precision. What tells the story is the marked temperature contrast between night and day sides, with the inner TRAPPIST-1b at 200 degrees C on the dayside, while planet c comes in at 100 degrees C. The night side of each registers at below -200 degrees C, indicating that thermal energy is not being transferred, a likely consequence of early atmospheres being stripped away.

How far out from the star do we have to go to find a surviving atmosphere? Emeline Belmont (University of Geneva) points to our own Solar System as reason for optimism. Whereas Mercury has been stripped of any atmosphere, both Venus and Earth clearly had no problem forming and keeping their own. That would leave the three TRAPPIST-1 worlds in the habitable zone continuing candidates for follow-up, and eventually spectroscopic study of atmospheric components. Will a future telescope register a biosignature on one of these?

We can expect the investigation of TRAPPIST-1 to accelerate. Out of curiosity I ran a quick check on the Astrophysics Data System (ADS), requesting papers with TRAPPIST-1 in their abstracts published since the beginning of this year. 36 entries came up, some of them only referencing the system, but most homing in on various issues involving it. Today’s paper particularly caught my eye given lead author Michaël Gillon (University of Liège), who led the international team that discovered the system in 2016 and subsequently identified its full extent.

The paper is Gillon et al., “No thick atmosphere around TRAPPIST-1 b and c from JWST thermal phase curves,” Nature Astronomy 3 April 2026 (abstract).

The Power of Possibility

It’s rare that you get to see work that directly helps those who most deserve it, but I want to tell you about the opportunity we so seldom get to actually contribute in a way that we know will have real impact.

I’ve been on the board of the Lower Eastside Girls Club for about a decade, getting a front row seat to seeing what a truly community-focused and effective organization can do for those in need when things are done the right way. This is the model of what we want our public institutions to be — laser-focused on the needs of its members, extremely ambitious in its goals, and measurably effective in its outcomes.

I’m asking you to support the Girls Club in one of two ways:

  • You can donate directly to support the work that the Girls Club does (If you know what a donor-advised fund is — now’s your chance to use it!)
  • Or if you’re in NYC on May 7, join us at Webster Hall for our incredible 30th Anniversary Gala where we are going to throw down

Actually changing lives

The Girls Club serves girls who are amongst the most in-need in all of New York City, and boosts important measures like graduation rates to levels 15% higher than the district average. The way that the club does it is by providing year-round programming in the arts, STEM, civic engagement, leadership, wellness, college and career pathways, and much more — including a deep connection to a sense of community. All of this happens in a facility that is nothing short of magical, where there’s a green roof, a full recording studio, a commercial-grade kitchen, a wonderful crafting room, and even an actual planetarium. And all of these resources are made available to the girls entirely for free.

The programs and support that the team provide to the girls work. It changes their lives. I know this because I’ve seen it. Now that the club has been around for a generation, we’ve seen girls grow up to become incredible students, leaders in the community, entrepreneurs, activists, artists, and even a new generation of mentors in the Girls Club itself.

Then, the backlash against DEI and this kind of community support threatened the very survival of the Girls Club.

Even though the club has always had its share of ups and downs, there had almost never been as much of a concerted attack on its foundations until the dark times of this last year. It’s taken a toll on the club and its staff, and threatened to put the programming and support for the girls at risk. After a decade on the board, I stepped up to become chair of the board to try to help.

Because the truth is, the team at the club does what works: specific, local action, that considers individuals as whole humans, and tends to their needs in a complete way. We’ve given out tens of thousands of free meals to the community as needed ever since COVID began, because people can’t learn when they are hungry. We’ve added multi-generational classes on things like wellness, because it takes the support of entire families to keep kids on the right track for their education, or to support them making big, ambitious choices to change their lives for the better. And of course there is support for every form of creativity from technology to sewing to DJing to, yes, exploring the stars in the planetarium. Because, for too long, those were areas of imagination that didn’t always get presented as options on Avenue D.

Here’s what I can promise you: every single penny that you give to support this organization will be used incredibly efficiently. The staff of the organization show up every single day to fight for these girls, and their families, and this community. I can personally attest to how accountable and effective their work is. If you are able to donate, I’ll give you a personal tour the next time you’re on the Lower Eastside, and take you through the amazing facility so that you can see for yourself the impact that you’ll be having on the future of our city, and these girls.

There’s always room for joy

Years ago, not long after I’d first joined the board of the Girls Club, we were trying to capture the spirit of what makes this place so special. It’s hard to articulate the energy, the brilliance, the optimism and spirit that the girls bring to the place through their sheer creativity and engagement. But eventually we settled on a few words that ended up becoming the slogan for the entire organization:

Joy. Power. Possibility.

I come back to those words a lot, even when things are hard, because I see it embodied in the work that has been done as alumni of the Girls Club have gone out into the world as young women who are now leaders and innovators and fearless voices across the city and across the country. We’re going to need your help to make sure we’re able to ensure that another generation of vulnerable kids get that same chance.

And the best part is that you can really experience the “joy” part of that motto if you join us at the Gala. Our annual fundraisers are not the usual stuffy nonprofit affairs. We’ve got a few tickets left for Webster Hall on May 7, where we’re honoring actress, writer, director, producer, activist and Lower Eastside legend Natasha Lyonne, H&M America’s Head of Inclusion and Diversity Donna Dozier Gordon, and our very own Lower Eastside Girls Club emerita Miladys Ramirez. Expect signature cocktails, an unforgettable dinner, and a dance floor you won't want to leave! I hope to see you there, or you can just give what you can and be there in spirit.

The MacBook Neo Guide

You can read all the reviews you want about new hardware, but if it’s hardware you touch, there is one test that can only be performed in person, and it’s important: you hold it in your hand and you feel the answer to the question, “Is this a piece of junk?”

I was skeptical about the MacBook Neo until I walked to my local Apple Store and held the machine in my hand. This is not a piece of junk.

Similar to The Apple Charging Guide, I researched and built a MacBook Neo Guide to what’s inside, but, more importantly, what’s changed in Apple’s DNA to allow them to build the Neo. The punchline: Apple’s DNA didn’t change. Economics did — Apple Silicon made it possible to hit $599 without compromising the experience. The most expensive component was already paid for.

MacBook Neo

the $599 mac that shouldn’t exist
Apple’s answer to a question Steve Jobs said couldn’t be answered — a sub-$600 laptop that isn’t junk. Nothing new. Nothing wasted.
ChipiPhone 16 Pro silicon. R&D bill: already paid.
Display13.6″ Liquid Retina — same panel class as the Air
PortsTwo USB-C. One’s 20× faster. Good luck guessing.
Memory8GB. Baked in. No upgrade. Ever.
RepairScrews, not glue. Modular ports. No parts pairing.
Price$599 / $699.

Thursday assorted links

1. Kasparov analyzes the rise of Sindarov.

2. Podcast on Houellebecq’s Submission.  With transcript.

3. “A majority of Australian children under age 16 still use social media apps despite a ban implemented in December, according to new research.

Sixty-one percent of Australian children between the ages of 12 and 15 told researchers from a prominent UK foundation and an Australian youth research agency that they can still access accounts on major platforms just as they did before the ban was put in place.”  Link here.

4. “If anything, nationalists are fighting to reassure pro-EU voters. Marine Le Pen has softened her line on Brussels over the years to remain electorally competitive in France. Giorgia Meloni has mostly co-operated with the EU during her three-and-a-half surprising years as a hard-right Italian prime minister. Both will have watched events in Hungary over the weekend and felt themselves vindicated. Of all the varied reasons for Viktor Orbán’s landslide defeat, the public’s desire to mend relations with the EU was prominent. The election winner Péter Magyar, no kind of liberal, and in fact a former Orbán man, favours a “return to Europe”.” (Ganesh in the FT)

5. Ancient DNA reveals pervasive directional selection across West Eurasia.  And a useful thread.

6. Alex Imas on the evolution of employment with AI.

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Robert Skidelsky, RIP

Here is one appreciation.  His three-volume biography of Keynes (better than the one-volume condensation!) is in my opinion one of the very best books ever written, up there with Caro on Moses, etc.

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Flailing Republicans Pivot to a Throwback Rallying Cry: ‘Sharia Law’

There is a lot that has Republicans divided right now. Is it actually good to demand the pope stay in his lane? JD Vance thinks so. Catholics aren’t so sure. Is it actually good for the president to post a picture of himself as the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ? Evangelicals aren’t so sure. Is there some irony in a president who campaigned on opposition to forever wars launching attacks that kill the leadership of a powerful country of 93 million? There may be. Are young Republicans and right-wing influencers too antisemitic, or, in fact, not antisemitic enough? Opinions among the increasingly Groyperfied class of up-and-coming GOP staffers vary.

It’s against this backdrop that we have Josh Kovensky’s piece this morning, which finds Republicans in Texas doing a hard pivot to Bush II-type freakouts about “Sharia law” as a way to get the base energized and juice turnout in Texas’ Republican primaries and runoffs — and, they hope, ultimately in the midterms. With so much dividing Republicans, Ken Paxton, Greg Abbott, activists throughout the state and beyond have found it prudent to take their bigotry back to the basics and focus on ginned up claims of a fake Islamic threat. Texas’ Muslim residents are the collateral damage.

This piece follows another, related Josh K. dispatch from Texas, looking at conservative influencers’ attempts to stoke panic around a growing Dallas-area Indian community. (To support more of this on-the-ground journalism, become a member!)

Blue Origin hot fires its first previously flown booster, prepares for weekend launch

Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket roars to life during a roughly 20-second static fire test of its seven BE-4 engines. Image: Adam Bernstein/Spaceflight Now

Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket roared to life in a critical pre-launch demonstration of its main engines Thursday, less than an hour after the Sun crested over the horizon in Florida.

The seven BE-4 engines fired for about 20 seconds, at 7:45 a.m. EDT (1145 UTC). Engineers will now pore through the data and if everything looks good, the launch with AST SpaceMobile’s BlueBird-7 satellite could take place as soon as Sunday, April 19.

About five seconds prior to ignition, the water deluge system sprang to life, dumping thousands of gallons of water on the launch pad to dampen the sound from the engines. Each BE-4 can produce 640,000 lbf (2,846 kN) thrust at sea level.

The upcoming launch of what Blue Origin calls NG-3 marks a critical milestone for the company’s heavy-lift rocket. The booster, ‘Never Tell Me the Odds’, is partially being reused after previously flying and successfully landing during the NG-2 mission in late 2025.

Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp said that the engines are not the same as the ones that powered the rocket to deliver NASA’s EscaPADE satellites to orbit.

“With our first refurbished booster we elected to replace all seven engines and test out a few upgrades including a thermal protection system on one of the engine nozzles,” Limp wrote in an April 13 post on X. “We plan to use the engines we flew for NG-2 on future flights.”

Blue Origin is just the second company to successfully land an orbital class rocket booster in a vertical descent, after SpaceX, which has reflown boosters more than 550 times at this point.

Both companies use remotely-operated landing vessels to recover their boosters. SpaceX also has two landing pads in Florida, along with one in California. Blue Origin hasn’t announced plans for a landing pad just yet.

Blue Origin said it’s designing its boosters to support up to 25 flights each, but it’s unclear if that will include reusing the same set of engines 25 times along with the rest of the booster structure.

Limp recently unveiled their next booster in development, which the company named ‘No, It’s Necessary.’ Presumably, this will be the booster used to launch Blue Origin’s Blue Moon Mk. 1 lunar lander, but that hasn’t been formally announced.

The Moon-bound lander recently finished thermal vacuum chamber testing at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, and is currently on a barge back to Florida for final checkouts and prelaunch preparation.

That cargo lander is a precursor to the larger Blue Moon Mk. 2, which will carry humans to the Moon’s surface on future Artemis missions. NASA is closely watching the development progress of this lander since it and SpaceX’s Starship are poised to dock with the Orion spacecraft in low Earth orbit during the Artemis 3 mission, which is scheduled for sometime around mid-2027.

Frederick Hillier (1936-2026)

 I never took a course from Fred Hillier when I was a PhD student in the Department of Operations Research at Stanford from 1971-73, but as an assistant professor at the University of Illinois from 1974 I taught undergraduate OR from the introductory OR textbook by Hillier and Lieberman.

Here's his Stanford obituary:

Influential textbook author Frederick S. Hillier dies at 89
Hillier’s work shaped operations research theory and practice at Stanford and beyond, with his textbooks introducing the field to generations of learners worldwide.

"Frederick S. Hillier, professor emeritus of operations research in Stanford Engineering’s Department of Management Science and Engineering, passed away on Jan. 9, 2026. He was 89.
...
"Hillier was best known for co-authoring Introduction to Operations Research, first published in 1967. “His textbook played a major role in defining what operations research is,” said Peter W. Glynn, professor of management science and engineering at Stanford. “It helped people in adjacent fields understand what the field is and how it works.” 

...

"When he arrived at Stanford, Hillier was assigned Gerald J. Lieberman as his freshman adviser. Lieberman introduced Hillier to the emerging field of operations research and became Hillier’s undergraduate mentor, doctoral advisor, department chair, and eventually his co-author.

...

"Following Lieberman’s encouragement, Hillier stayed at Stanford for graduate school. He earned an MS in statistics in 1959 and a PhD in operations research in 1961. He joined the Stanford faculty as an assistant professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering that same year.

...

"Hillier retired in 1996 and continued revising his textbooks into his late 80s. The 11th edition of Introduction to Operations Research was published in 2020, and he completed the manuscript for the 12th edition in 2023." 

Revising Modern Principles

Here’s a revision  I made to Modern Principles, my textbook with Tyler. Some things change dramatically, some things never change.

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Join the dots

Photo of a galaxy cluster with a zoomed-in section highlighting a red object amidst numerous bright celestial bodies.

Peering into the origins of our Universe, astronomers found something that shouldn’t be there: what are those little red dots?

- by Jenny Greene

Read on Aeon

Human Trust of AI Agents

Interesting research: “Humans expect rationality and cooperation from LLM opponents in strategic games.”

Abstract: As Large Language Models (LLMs) integrate into our social and economic interactions, we need to deepen our understanding of how humans respond to LLMs opponents in strategic settings. We present the results of the first controlled monetarily-incentivised laboratory experiment looking at differences in human behaviour in a multi-player p-beauty contest against other humans and LLMs. We use a within-subject design in order to compare behaviour at the individual level. We show that, in this environment, human subjects choose significantly lower numbers when playing against LLMs than humans, which is mainly driven by the increased prevalence of ‘zero’ Nash-equilibrium choices. This shift is mainly driven by subjects with high strategic reasoning ability. Subjects who play the zero Nash-equilibrium choice motivate their strategy by appealing to perceived LLM’s reasoning ability and, unexpectedly, propensity towards cooperation. Our findings provide foundational insights into the multi-player human-LLM interaction in simultaneous choice games, uncover heterogeneities in both subjects’ behaviour and beliefs about LLM’s play when playing against them, and suggest important implications for mechanism design in mixed human-LLM systems.

Evolution of Paris

3D model of an historic city map with detailed buildings, rivers and greenery.

The evolution of Paris across millennia – from Celtic fishing village to world capital – in three animated minutes

- by Aeon Video

Watch on Aeon

You are what you consume

Photo by Tom Page via Wikimedia Commons

Sorry for posting less than usual this week; I’ve had a family tragedy. Posting frequency may also be reduced over the weekend.

I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while, and now the AI revolution has given me an excuse.

I was standing in a Whole Foods on Long Island, sometime in the early 2010s, staring at a cheese counter, when I had a sudden revelation. All my life, I realized, I had been told that it was people’s work that gave them meaning — that what you produce makes you special. Few people say this explicitly, but it’s baked into many elements of our culture.

In San Francisco, when you meet someone, the first question you typically ask is: “What do you do?” Some people will give teasing answers — “I race boats”, or “I take care of rabbits” — but everyone knows that the question is about your job. Nor is SF particularly unusual; Americans tend to identify each other by their occupation. “This is Steve, he’s a professor,” and so on. In Japan, people are more likely to identify by the company they work for, but their identity is still fundamentally about production.

Or think about movies and TV shows. Yes, there are some stories about people whose hobbies become the most important things in their lives — High Fidelity, Shall We Dance?, Schultze Gets the Blues, and so on. But in most narratives, it’s people’s career that defines their life objective, their success or failure as a person, and their identity as a character.

Consumption, on the other hand, is typically trivialized, or even denigrated. Every culture has words like “lazy”, “shiftless”, or “playboy” to make fun of people who spend their time consuming instead of producing. A “hobby” is far less noble than a “calling” or a “vocation”.

In fact, the value of work over play is one of the few ideas that traditionally united the political left and right. In the 20th century, leftists decried the “consumer society” and called for “workers” to be in control of society. Conservatives, meanwhile, value hard work and complain that the welfare state makes people lazy, while rightists view consumer societies as decadent and weak. The “degrowth” movement is all about reducing Westerners’ so-called “overconsumption”; it’s hard not to hear a moralistic message in addition to the environmental one. Production is virtuous, consumption is wicked.

Why should what you produce, rather than what you consume, be the most important thing about you? Why shouldn’t the fact that you race boats or watch anime or drink matcha lattes be what defines your identity? Why should I call myself a “writer” rather than a “science fiction fan” or a “rabbit dad”? Just imagining introducing myself as the latter makes me cringe a little. But why?

One seemingly obvious answer is that the market values production over consumption. In fact, this is almost the definition of the two terms — work is what you get paid to do, while consumption is what you have to give up something in order to enjoy. But this doesn’t explain why culture and society should give additional accolades to production over consumption. You already get paid for going to work; why should you get praised for it too?

One cynical answer is that praising people for their work ethic is a way of trying to lower labor costs, by paying workers in status instead of money. Plenty of research in both economics and psychology indicates that people will accept lower salaries in exchange for working at a job where they think they’re doing something good for society; this helps explain why wages at nonprofits are so low. This might be why tech companies traditionally tell their young employees that finding new ways to sell ads is “making the world a better place”; it might allow them to pay less than hedge funds for the same class of talent. Professors, meanwhile, often forego lucrative careers in industry in exchange for the pride and status that comes from being an academic.

A less cynical answer is that in premodern times, most work wasn’t rewarded by the market; families and villages had to persuade, bully, or cajole people into plowing the fields or cooking dinner, so they “paid” people for productive effort with compliments instead of wages; this traditional culture may have carried over into the modern day.

And there are reasons to make production the center of your identity beyond the fact that society praises you for it. Your productive power represents a key point of leverage over society; the more the world needs you to produce stuff, the less likely you are to have to depend on the largesse of others. Pride in your productive power means pride in your independence.

But at the end of the day, it’s consumption, not production, that defines you as an individual.

That might sound like an odd thing to say, especially if you’ve grown up believing — as my liberal parents taught me — that advertising is a form of mind control that greedy corporations use to force you to consume things you don’t really need. But you don’t have to trick people into buying most of what they buy; people all over the world want modern conveniences like dishwashers and cars and AI chatbots, and it doesn’t take a lot of ads to convince them to buy those things. Without ads, people would still watch movies and listen to music and wear nice-looking clothes.

The truth is that merchants advertising their wares to you are begging you to buy their brand instead of their competitors’. Everyone wants your money; you are the one who gets to choose who gets it.

That choice is yours and yours alone. Every day that you exist as a consumer in a capitalist society, you are forced to make dozens of decisions about what to spend your money on. Should you buy coffee at Starbucks or Peet’s? Should you buy a new skirt or a new pair of jeans? Should you go watch a Marvel movie or an indie film? Should you subscribe to Noahpinion or to Slow Boring?1

Each time you make one of those choices, you are forced to interrogate your own preferences. You are forced to look inside your heart/mind/soul/utility function/whatever and decide which brand of coffee you want, which type of clothing you want, which blog you want to read, and so on. It’s all about you.

There’s some research demonstrating this effect. Here’s Cheek et al. (2022):

Across six studies (total N = 3,549), we find that participants who were randomly assigned to choose from larger assortments thought their choices were more self-expressive, an effect that emerged regardless of whether larger sets actually enabled participants to better satisfy their preferences.

And here’s Nanakdewa et al. (2021):

When people think of their actions as choices, they feel larger and stronger than others, are attracted to ideas of independence, and feel empowered to voice their opinions. Choosing what to eat and which shampoo to buy may seem like trivial acts, yet the current research finds that the salience of choice alone can have a range of powerful psychological effects.

Is every choice of product or fashion going to reveal some deep truth about you to yourself? Of course not. But consumption choices force you to develop the habit of self-examination. And when you think about more complex life choices — what kind of personality to present to the world, how to behave in your romantic relationships, how to express yourself through art or music — that habit will come in handy. In fact, economists would say that social interaction, romance, and self-expression are also forms of (non-market) consumption.

Production is very different. Your decision of what to produce is not fully your own; the market gets to decide. If what you really want to do all day is carve wood, but the market doesn’t pay a woodcarver a living wage, then you’ll have to find something else to do for money. Lawyers and software engineers and brain surgeons undoubtedly take pride in their careers, but the high salaries society pays for those occupations were undoubtedly a reason they went into those fields. Those salaries are a reflection of someone else’s preferences — someone else’s demand for legal services, software, and brain surgery.

What about jobs that involve self-expression, like art and music and writing? In fact, these are simply bundles of production and consumption. I love writing, and I’m lucky enough to get paid for it. But if I really buckled down and spent a lot of effort building my brand, writing what the audience wanted to hear, covering every breaking topic before other writers did, and generally treating this blog more like work, I could make a lot more money doing it. The lower income I accept in exchange for greater self-expression is actually a form of consumption. It’s no coincidence that artists who “sell out” tend to enjoy their craft less.

To sum up: When you decide what to consume, you ask: “What do I want?”. When you decide what to produce, you ask: “What do other people want me to do?”. The former is a lot more individuating than the latter.

We can observe this effect at the level of whole societies. The World Values Survey shows that richer countries tend to value “self-expression” more:

Source: WVS

And in general, surveys consistently find that as countries grow richer, they become more individualistic. Japan often gets stereotyped as a collectivist society, but surveys show that hasn’t been true since the early 1980s — the first generation brought up in affluence became the “me generation”. America’s Boomers were undoubtedly similar.

We can argue about how much individualism versus how much collectivism is good at the societal level. But on a personal level, it seems clear to me that the standard story we grow up hearing — that your job is what makes you you, while what you consume is dictated by corporations — has it exactly backwards. In fact, consumption shapes you into a unique individual, while your job exists at the whim of the collective.

This is what I realized, staring at all that cheese.

As I said, this idea has been rattling around in my head for a while, but it’s the advent of AI that finally made me decide to write it up. A lot of people have been saying that by disrupting traditional careers and devaluing lots of human capital, AI is going to cause a crisis of meaning in our society.

I do agree that this will probably happen. If you’re an economist who prides himself on being able to do the difficult algebra required to turn a conjecture into a concrete theory, and now suddenly AI comes along and can do that at the touch of a button, you might lose some of the pride and sense of meaning that your previously rare skills had given you, even if tenure protects you from losing your income. If you were a software engineer who prided himself on being able to write good code, and now your job consists of checking the code written by Claude, you might feel less meaning in your job, even if your salary is higher.

But I don’t think this has to happen. I think it’s possible for us to reorient our identities away from what we produce, and toward what we consume, and to find meaning in the latter.

That might sound speculative, but in fact I’ve lived in a society where people’s sense of self and their social position was defined at least in part by what they consumed. It was called college. Although I worked part-time during my school years, many people didn’t — and even with my job, I still had plenty of time for leisure. I spent that time learning what music I liked, learning how to make better friends, learning about romance, and learning how to express myself better.

That was all consumption. Even my coursework contained an element of consumption — yes, studying physics built up my human capital, but it was also just fun, and my anthropology and film electives certainly weren’t about increasing my future earning power. Because I went to an elite school, I was able to have some confidence that the signaling component of my school’s pedigree, along with the human networks I built up, would save me from the risk of poverty. So I could spend college having fun and expressing myself — and my fellow students, who mostly didn’t have jobs and lived entirely on their parents’ largesse, could do so even more.

If your reaction to that is “Well good for you, jerk,” I don’t blame you. The American university system is not fair, and I was very lucky to land where I did.2 But imagine a society where everyone could have a college experience like mine — a time of self-discovery and self-expression, where work was done for enrichment instead of for money. And now imagine a society in which people could keep living that college life far past the age of 22.

Doesn’t that sound a little like paradise? Well, perhaps with AI, we can make that a reality. If we create robust institutions to redistribute the material gains from the intelligence explosion, perhaps we can create a society where all of life looks like an elite American school — where people spend their day reading interesting books, doing math because it’s fun, going to parties, making cool outfits, learning about their friends, playing in amateur bands, or having long drunken conversations about the meaning of life until 4 AM without worrying about going to work in the morning.

That’s a vision of a consumption society, but not one that’s meaningless or empty. Instead, it’s a vision of technology freeing us to become more like ourselves. I don’t think this happy outcome is inevitable, but I think it’s getting ignored in most of the discussions about our future.


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1

Both, obviously!

2

Interestingly, the Japanese university system is even more weighted towards leisure, even at schools that are lower in the prestige hierarchy; college is sometimes labeled “moratorium”.

The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics, 1969-2025

The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics has been awarded annually since 1969. Who wins the prize is a topic of much interest and tracks the whole course of the academic discipline over the last 57 years. Explaining who wins the prize in any given year is a complex process, which involves the subtle endogeneity of the choice of the field and the individual(s) who should be honoured. Citations, track records, networks of past winners, institutional factors along with field rotation and Economic Prize Committee composition may all play a role. A dynamic sample involving a changing stock of would-be candidates along with a moving flow—both into and out of the sample—add complexities to the modelling. We find robust evidence that the Nobel Prize rotates in a semi-regular way between the fields of economics. Earlier awards were for a single paper, later ones for a body of work. Networks do not matter, but having a Nobel student or co-author does. There is some evidence that the personal preferences of Committee members had an effect on either field or individual winner. The Committee’s decisions changed after Lindbeck retired.

That is from a new paper by Peter J. Dolton and Richard S.J. Tol.  Via Niclas Berggren.

The post The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics, 1969-2025 appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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April 15, 2026

On the evening of April 14, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln and First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln went to Ford’s Theater in Washington, D.C., to see a production of the comedy Our American Cousin. The Lincolns had spent the afternoon taking a carriage ride together and discussing the future, including the travel they hoped for, to Europe and to California to see the Pacific Ocean.

One of the last men to speak with the president before he left for the theater said it seemed the cares of the previous four years were melting away. The Confederacy was all but defeated, and the nation seemed to be on its way to a prosperous, inclusive new future.

The very heavens seemed to reflect the dawn of a new era. Poet Walt Whitman noted that after months of fog and clouds, the weather had cleared. “The western star, Venus, in the earlier hours of evening, has never been so large, so clear,” he wrote. “It seems as if it told something as if it held rapport indulgent with humanity, with us Americans.”

When the Lincolns and their guests arrived at the theater at about 8:30, the people in the audience leaped to their feet to applaud and the actors stopped the production while the orchestra played “Hail to the Chief.” About a half-hour later, the president felt chilly and put on his overcoat but was clearly relaxed and enjoying the play. Shortly after 10:00 the Lincolns were holding hands, and Mrs. Lincoln worried their public affection would scandalize the young Clara Harris, daughter of New York senator Ira Harris, who shared their box with her fiance, Major Henry Rathbone. Mrs. Lincoln whispered to her husband that she wondered what Clara would think of them holding hands, and Lincoln answered: “She won’t think anything about it.”

They would be the last words he ever spoke. On the stage, the play had just reached its best joke, and as the audience roared with laughter, actor John Wilkes Booth entered the presidential box and shot Lincoln in the head, then slashed Rathbone’s arm as the officer tried to stop him from getting away. He jumped to the stage, breaking his leg, and shouted the state motto of Virginia, “Sic Semper Tyrannis,” thus always to tyrants.

As Booth escaped, news spread that Secretary of State William Henry Seward had also been attacked, and in the days to follow, the euphoria of the last days of the war gave way to grief. The windows in Washington, D.C., were hung with black garlands. And then the rain came back. In New York City, Whitman wrote in his diary: “Lincoln’s death—black, black, black—as you look toward the sky—long broad black like great serpents slowly undulating in every direction—New York is distinguished for its countless gay flags—every house seems to have a flag staff—on all these the colors were at half mast.”

At first, Americans wanted revenge against the men who had slain their president. After a two-week investigation in which they questioned hundreds of people, investigators identified ten people they believed responsible for Lincoln’s death. Booth himself had been killed on April 26 as officers tried to take him into custody. Another conspirator had fled the country. The other eight stood trial for seven weeks before a military commission in May and June 1865. Four were sentenced to death by hanging; four were imprisoned.

But while Americans mourned Lincoln, the new president, Andrew Johnson, restored the political power of Confederates. On May 28, he issued a blanket pardon for most former Confederates except certain leaders and wealthy southern planters. Those he said could apply to him directly for a presidential pardon, which he promised would be “liberally extended.” They were. By December 1865 he had pardoned all but about 1,500 former Confederate leaders.

At the same time, Johnson either looked the other way or cheered as southern state legislatures passed Black Codes, laws that worked to push Black Americans back into subservience. Congress had adjourned in March 1865, the day of Lincoln’s second inauguration, and Johnson refused to call it back into emergency session after Lincoln’s death. When it convened in December, Johnson told the congressmen that Reconstruction was over. Northern congressmen simply had to seat newly elected southern congressmen—some of whom had led the Confederacy less than a year before—to end the unpleasantness of the war years.

Congress fought back, trying to protect the principles for which Lincoln had died, but with no accountability for a war that had left 620,000 Americans dead and cost more than $5 billion, the ideas of the Confederacy never became odious. Former Confederates still talked to newspapermen, gave speeches, ran for office, and garnered support.

By the 1870s, after the establishment of the Department of Justice meant that discrimination based on race could result in federal charges, former Confederates switched their rhetoric from race to economics. Because most Black men were impoverished, their votes for roads and schools and hospitals translated into tax levies on white men with property. Former Confederates argued that Black voting was just a redistribution of wealth from white taxpayers to Black Americans, a form of socialism.

That rhetoric appealed to northern Americans who worried about immigrants voting in cities. Increasingly, they listened as former Confederates began to argue that their fight had not been to spread human enslavement—despite their many declarations saying exactly that—but to preserve individualism from a grasping federal government.

By the 1890s, towns not only across the South but also in the North and West were putting up statues of Confederate soldiers as symbols of true America.

In the 1930s, with the southern economy dependent on New Deal programs from the federal government, Confederate iconography fell out of sight, but it sprang back to popularity after President Harry S. Truman, a Democrat, ordered the integration of the U.S. military in 1948. That year, the Democratic Party split in two as half of the party followed Truman and half refused. Southern racists under then–South Carolina governor Strom Thurmond—who had fathered the child of his family’s teenaged Black housekeeper in 1925—formed the segregationist States Rights Democratic Party, called “Dixiecrat” in a play on the South’s nickname, and took the Confederate battle flag as their party flag.

The ruling of a unanimous Supreme Court that racial segregation in the public schools was unconstitutional in the May 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, decision resurrected Confederate ideology more widely. In Georgia the Ku Klux Klan had reformed near Stone Mountain outside of Atlanta in the early twentieth century, and the United Daughters of the Confederacy set out to create a giant carving of Confederate leaders on the side of the mountain. The plan had been abandoned by 1928 as interest in the project waned, but it was reborn after Brown v. Board. Vice President Spiro Agnew dedicated the monument, which features Confederate leaders Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Stonewall Jackson, in May 1970.

The idea that those embracing the iconography of the Confederacy were simply defending individual liberty against an overreaching government became an article of faith among the radical right, especially as the Republican Party complained that the taxes necessary to run a modern government that included everyone were promoting socialism.

Former Army gunner Timothy McVeigh wrote to a newspaper in 1992, saying: “Taxes are a joke. More taxes are always the answer to government mismanagement…. Is a Civil War Imminent? Do we have to shed blood to reform the current system? I hope it doesn’t come to that. But it might.”. Three years later, McVeigh set off a bomb at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, killing 168 people, including nineteen children younger than six, and wounding more than 800 others. When captured, he was wearing a T-shirt with a picture of Abraham Lincoln and the words “Sic Semper Tyrannis.”

In 2009, Elmer Stewart Rhodes, a lawyer and former paratrooper who had been a staffer for Representative Ron Paul (R-TX), started a right-wing gang called the “Oath Keepers.” Claiming to take their inspiration from the patriots who stood against the British regulars on Lexington Green in 1775, they pledged to stand against what they considered a tyrannical government.

In 2021, Rhodes and the Oath Keepers, along with the right-wing Proud Boys, were part of the planning and execution of the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol when they tried to stop the counting of the electoral votes that would make Democrat Joe Biden president. Biden had won both the electoral vote and the popular vote by more than 7 million votes, but the insurrectionists wanted their own leader, President Donald Trump, to stay in office. One of the rioters accomplished what the southern troops during the Civil War had never been able to: he carried the Confederate flag into the United States Capitol.

In November 2022 a federal jury convicted Rhodes of seditious conspiracy for using force and violence to try to stop the process of the democratic election of a president. Juries found at least a dozen other Oath Keepers guilty of seditious conspiracy or other serious crimes.

As soon as he retook office in 2025, Trump issued a sweeping pardon to the participants in the January 6 attack who had been convicted of crimes, including the crimes of using a deadly weapon and causing serious bodily injury to an officer, removing accountability for their attempt to overturn the nation’s democratic process and releasing them back into the streets. At the time, he commuted the sentence of fourteen of the leading Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, ending prison sentences that had been as long as 22 years.

Because he did not pardon those leaders, but commuted their sentences, their cases continued to work their way through the appeals court. Yesterday the Department of Justice moved to wipe out the seditious conspiracy convictions altogether. “The United States has determined in its prosecutorial discretion that dismissal of this criminal case is in the interests of justice,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Daniel Lenerz of the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington, D.C., wrote.

Exactly 161 years before, on the night of April 14, 1865, bystanders at Ford’s Theater had carried the grievously wounded Lincoln to a boardinghouse across the street, where members of his Cabinet crowded around his bed. At 7:22 on the morning of April 15, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln breathed his last. His secretary of war, Edwin Stanton, stood heartbroken by the bedside of the man who had tried to preserve American democracy and said, “Now he belongs to the ages.”

When he tried to put his own loss, and that of the nation, to poetry, Walt Whitman thought back to the heady days of Spring 1865 when the heavens themselves seemed to promise a glorious democratic future, and their contrast to what came after.

“When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d,” he wrote, “And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,

“I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.”

[Image of Abraham Lincoln by Alexander Gardner, 1863]

Notes:

Excerpts from Walt Whitman’s Diary, reprinted in Charles I. Glicksberg, “Walt Whitman and the Civil War,” PhD thesis (Philadelphia: n.p., 1933), pp. 174–175.

https://www.nps.gov/foth/learn/historyculture/the-lincoln-conspirators.htm

https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-speeches/may-29-1865-proclamation-pardoning-persons-who-participated

David Willman, “McVeigh Lashed Out at Government in ‘92 Letters,” Los Angeles Times, April 27, 1995.

Ryan Lucas, “Who Are the Oath Keepers” Militia Group, Founder Scrutinized in Capitol Riot Probe, WBUR, April 10, 2021.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/oath-keepers-founder-convicted-of-seditious-conspiracy-for-role-in-jan-6-attack

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/11/10/donald-trump-pardon-2020-election-allies-00646073

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y7l47xrpko

https://www.cnn.com/2026/04/14/politics/justice-department-vacate-seditious-conspiracy-convictions-proud-boys-oath-keepers

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The Raphael show at the NYC Met

This is self-recommending if there ever was such a thing.  What I found so striking is how many mini-exhibits were embedded in the broader show.  Those include:

1. The early large pieces from Colonna and Castello — how many of you are going to get there to see them in situ?

2. A mini-exhibit of works from Perugino, Raphael’s teacher and mentor, and a wonderful painter in his own right.

3. A small set of knockout Leonardo drawings.

4. Two Roman sculptures that showed some background influences behind Raphael’s work.

5. Three full-size “derivations” based upon the Vatican tapestries, from 16th century Flemish studios.

6. Plenty of light-sensitive drawings, which are not displayed much or are held in very scattered locales.

It is rare to have so much original content in a single exhibit, and of such high quality, and unrelated to previous exhibits one might have seen.  This was an event.

The Alba Madonna, in DC’s National Gallery, still strikes me as Raphael’s best creation.

My main beef: the opening panel of explanation for the show was just plain, flat out stupid, and started by referring to Raphael as “One of the most important influencers of all time…”, followed by nothing of any substance.

This exhibit needs no endorsement from me, but ultimately it did not elevate Raphael into the tier of my very very favorite painters.  He is at the top for beauty and charm, but very few of his paintings confound me in say the way that a top Leonardo or Velazquez might.  Perhaps the Castiglione portrait from the Louvre would qualify there, but the others not.  His was nonetheless a remarkable achievement, and this is very likely the best view of it you will get in this lifetime.

It was crowded, but on a Monday not intolerable and I had good views of the art works most of the time.

The post The Raphael show at the NYC Met appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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Eyeing the Richat Structure

A large "bull's-eye" feature composed of concentric rock formations of various colors is imprinted on the edge of a dark plateau flanked by desert sands.
The Richat Structure appears as a giant “bull’s eye” on a plateau in Mauritania in this mosaic, composed of images captured by the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 9 and Landsat 8 on March 5 and March 6, 2026, respectively.
NASA Earth Observatory/Lauren Dauphin

In a remote part of northern Mauritania on the Adrar Plateau lies a desert landscape rich in human history. This region of northwestern Africa is sprinkled with Paleolithic stone tools, Neolithic cave paintings, and the remains of medieval towns once used by caravans crossing the Sahara Desert.

When viewed from space, the landscape appears to be shaped most prominently by natural forces. Wind sculpted the seas of colorful sand dunes and scoured plateaus capped with dark desert pavement, while ancient flowing water carved valleys and networks of dried river channels.

But the region’s most eye-catching feature when seen from above is the Richat Structure—a large geologic formation made of concentric ridges on the eastern side of the plateau. French geographers first described the feature in the 1930s, calling it the Richat “buttonhole.” NASA astronauts Ed White and James McDivitt helped bring wider global attention to what became known as “The Eye of the Sahara” after photographing it during their history-making Gemini IV mission.

The 40-kilometer-wide (25-mile-wide) structure was initially thought to be an impact crater because large meteors can produce circular features on Earth’s surface. However, researchers later showed that it is actually a deeply eroded geologic dome formed by the uplift of rock above an underground intrusion of igneous material. Over time, differing erosion rates among rock types in the exposed upper dome led to the development of circular ridges known as cuestas. The orange and gray colors reflect differences in sedimentary and igneous rock types across the structure and the surrounding landscape.

NASA Earth Observatory image by Lauren Dauphin, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Story by Adam Voiland.

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So Close to Getting It

David Pierce, last week in his Installer column/newsletter for The Verge, singing the praises of the version 5.0 update to Sofa (the praises of which I just sang):

Sofa 5. A huge update to an Installerverse favorite, this app is now a great way to manage everything you want to watch, read, play, and even do IRL. I never quite made it stick when it was mostly just movies and shows, but now I think of it as like a Notion for my personal life. Apple devices only, alas, but boy do I love this app.

Pierce, I just noted today, also just wrote a feature story at The Verge about his decision to buy a new iPhone — after trying an array of new Android phones and admitting to a (questionable, IMO) personal preference for Android over iOS — because there are so many better apps on iOS that don’t have equivalent-quality counterparts on Android. In that earlier piece, Pierce wrote:

Lots of the apps I use every day — apps like Puzzmo, NotePlan, Mimestream, and Unread — either don’t exist on Android at all or only exist as web apps. Most of the ones that do work on both platforms are better on iOS. And forget about the kind of handcrafted, small-developer stuff — apps like Acme Weather, Current, and Quiche, just to name a few recent favorites — that’s all over the App Store and absolutely nowhere to be found on Android.

These apps don’t just happen to be both exquisitely crafted and exclusive to iOS (and in some cases, MacOS). They’re exquisitely crafted because they are idiomatic native apps designed to adhere to Apple’s platforms. Not all native apps are great, of course, but most great apps are native — and most great native apps are native to iOS or MacOS.

So there ought be no “alas” to describe Sofa being exclusive to Apple devices, but instead a “thank you” to developer Shawn Hickman for keeping it exclusive, and thus keeping it great.

 ★ 

Sofa 5.0

Shawn Hickman:

A show you started last month. A book on your nightstand. A game you keep meaning to get back to. Finding something new is easy. Remembering where you left off is the hard part.

Sofa 5 helps you keep track of this stuff. Progress rings show up on covers throughout the app so you can see where you stand at a glance. Your home screen shows what’s next with one-tap checkboxes to keep things moving.

Five ways to track, depending on what fits: just enjoy with zero setup, tap to log, count pages, check off episodes, or keep a journal as you go. Pick one and switch anytime.

It’s a well-established cliché that no one ever finds the perfect to-do app or “task management system” unless they create it themselves. That’s certainly true for me (and resulted in my co-creating Vesper). Keeping track of things you want or need to do is too close to codifying how you think and remember things in your own mind, and we all think and remember in unique ways. We thus crave unique apps or systems to manage our tasks, ones that fit our minds just right. That’s why there are a zillion to-do apps, including a bunch that are actually good. And, these days, that’s why there are so many people creating their own personal to-do apps using AI coding systems.

Because media-tracking apps are just a subset of to-do apps, all the same things hold true for them. So, just like how I occasionally flit back and forth between general-purpose to-do apps, or become enamored with a new one, I’ve switched between several media-tracking apps over the years. These are apps where you keep lists of movies and shows you want to watch, books you want to read, and then log them, perhaps with notes or ratings, as you watch them.

It’s an endlessly fascinating app genre. Sofa is a really good example, one that I’ve used on and off for years. (Disclaimer: I started using Sofa when it was the weekly sponsor on DF back in 2022, but I’ve kept using it since then because it’s so good.) I’ve been using Sofa v5 for months now, including while it was in beta, and it is a big improvement to an already very good, very thoughtful app. A lot of people use general-purpose to-do apps to track movies and shows to watch, books to read, and games to play. Sofa 5 goes the other way, and expands what started as a dedicated media tracker into something you can use to track, well, anything you want to do.

Sofa is quite useful for free, and super useful with a paid subscription. If you’re even vaguely unsatisfied with your current app or system for tracking media to watch / read / play, you should check it out.

 ★ 

datasette 1.0a27

Release: datasette 1.0a27

Two major changes in this new Datasette alpha. I covered the first of those in detail yesterday - Datasette no longer uses Django-style CSRF form tokens, instead using modern browser headers as described by Filippo Valsorda.

The second big change is that Datasette now fires a new RenameTableEvent any time a table is renamed during a SQLite transaction. This is useful because some plugins (like datasette-comments) attach additional data to table records by name, so a renamed table requires them to react in appropriate ways.

Here are the rest of the changes in the alpha:

  • New actor= parameter for datasette.client methods, allowing internal requests to be made as a specific actor. This is particularly useful for writing automated tests. (#2688)
  • New Database(is_temp_disk=True) option, used internally for the internal database. This helps resolve intermittent database locked errors caused by the internal database being in-memory as opposed to on-disk. (#2683) (#2684)
  • The /<database>/<table>/-/upsert API (docs) now rejects rows with null primary key values. (#1936)
  • Improved example in the API explorer for the /-/upsert endpoint (docs). (#1936)
  • The /<database>.json endpoint now includes an "ok": true key, for consistency with other JSON API responses.
  • call_with_supported_arguments() is now documented as a supported public API. (#2678)

Tags: annotated-release-notes, datasette, python

datasette.io news preview

Tool: datasette.io news preview

The datasette.io website has a news section built from this news.yaml file in the underlying GitHub repository. The YAML format looks like this:

- date: 2026-04-15
  body: |-
    [Datasette 1.0a27](https://docs.datasette.io/en/latest/changelog.html#a27-2026-04-15) changes how CSRF protection works in a way that simplifies form and API integration, and introduces a new `RenameTableEvent` for when a table is renamed by a SQL query.
- date: 2026-03-18
  body: |-
    ...

This format is a little hard to edit, so I finally had Claude build a custom preview UI to make checking for errors have slightly less friction.

I built it using standard claude.ai and Claude Artifacts, taking advantage of Claude's ability to clone GitHub repos and look at their content as part of a regular chat:

Clone https://github.com/simonw/datasette.io and look at the news.yaml file and how it is rendered on the homepage. Build an artifact I can paste that YAML into which previews what it will look like, and highlights any markdown errors or YAML errors

Screenshot showing two side-by-side views of a datasette.io news preview tool. The left panel shows a dark-themed YAML editor with news entries containing date and body fields in Markdown format, with a red validation error at the bottom indicating the date field has an invalid format. The right panel shows the rendered preview output with formatted headings by date (April 2026, 18th March 2026), displaying 115 news entries with linked release names, inline code snippets, and changelog descriptions. A red badge with "1" appears on the left panel header indicating one validation error.

Tags: vibe-coding, claude, tools, datasette

datasette-export-database 0.3a1

Release: datasette-export-database 0.3a1

This plugin was using the ds_csrftoken cookie as part of a custom signed URL, which needed upgrading now that Datasette 1.0a27 no longer sets that cookie.

Tags: datasette

The Democratic Voters’ Billboard

One Place for All To See

I’m starting a crowd funding campaign to put up a billboard in some middle-American location that declares what Democrats in power could mean. Why? Democrats are bad at centralized or coherent messaging. This is a private effort to provide that. A billboard makes it something physical, something real, something committed to. I will be asking Democratic candidates to endorse it, making it semi-official. The more individual voters who have supported it the more candidates will feel they need to join the bandwagon. Please go to the web page DemBillboard.com.

You can pledge as little as $1. Lots of supporters. It needs lots of supporters.
But please pledge all you can. There are some people with real muscle for this kind of thing who have expressed interest in this but want to see it reach that initial goal first.
(Pledges can be named or anonymous. At this point they are just pledges, not charged. That comes later if we meet certain goals. Then they are processed through CrowdBlue, a Democratic and progressive organization promoting such candidates and causes.)

I’ve written here on DCReport numerous times about Democrats not having very clear or powerful messaging. This project is an attempt to address that need. You can see the information on it at the project page but here it is as well.

The Democratic Voters’ Billboard declares a list of top things for Democrats to do if they regain power. The party has no central place for voters to get some idea of what Democrats in power could do. The billboard provides that, and makes it something physical. One billboard in one prominent location in a city in the middle of the country.

In part it serves to urge Democratic leaders what to focus on. The more people like yourself who support and endorse it the more influence it has on the party. The other part is it can become semi-official if candidates or party leaders endorse it. If a lot of candidates and leaders endorse it then it becomes a declaration from the party. If the party wanted to fully take ownership of the billboard then it would become an official declaration from the party.

The Democratic party’s unfocused communication needs this. Plus Democratic voters wanting to light a fire under party leadership can use this as one way to do that.

About The List:

  • The billboard would have several lines of bullet points permanently printed. Below that would be one digital scrolling line that can add further points and details.
  • It is not intended to be a complete or detailed list. There is very limited space. Some points indicate a general theme, such as “Speed transition to renewable energy” which implies an overall concern for the environment and focus on climate change.
  • As far as possible they are measurable goals, not just vague wishes. For instance, “Democrats would be concerned about the environment” is a vague wish whereas, “Democrats would speed transition to renewable energy” is something that in the years that follow could be looked back on and measured to see if they really did something.
  • They are about the goals, not the hurdles on the way. Undoing Trump’s damage or reducing money in politics are hurdles on the way to goals. Goals like, addressing climate change, or expanding affordable healthcare coverage. Focus on the goals and the hurdles will be dealt with.
  • As far as possible they are not about promises of government money to solve all sorts of problems. There’s never enough money and the promises amount to wishful thinking. Rather the list is about definite goals (like get Putin out of Ukraine) and about empowering people (like expand collective bargaining to raise wages).

For info contact comments@tomcantlon.com. And see more of my work here.

Items for the scrolling digital line:
– Ensure women’s health choices
– Fund research to be ready for the next pandemic
– Break up monopolies, and employment monopolies too
– Tax wealthier paychecks to strengthen social security
– Get closer to Medicare-for-all or ACA-for-all
More items to come

The post The Democratic Voters’ Billboard appeared first on DCReport.org.

Near the eastern horizon before sunrise, Comet C/2025 R3 Near the eastern horizon before sunrise, Comet C/2025 R3


Showers and Thunderstorms for the Eastern Third of the Country; Fire Weather Concerns; Flooding Issues for the Great Lakes Region