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Spaceflight Now

Live coverage: NASA updates progress towards established a Moon Base, Artemis 3 mission

Will Robinson-Smith
Updated
NASA plans to build a planned moon base in three stages, starting with more frequent astronaut and cargo flights to the moon the develop the infrastructure needed to support long-duration crews. Image: NASA TV

Nearly two months after first unveiling its big plans to establish a Moon Base at the lunar south pole, NASA leadership is set to provide an update.

On Tuesday afternoon, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman will discuss the work that has been happening behind the scenes and the preparations being made for the first few missions supporting the Moon Base.

“These are uncrewed, robotic missions to the surface. We’re also going to talk about some announcements related to some missions that will fly later next year and in 2028, including the first rover that someday, when our astronauts get to the surface of the Moon, will get to drive around it,” Isaacman said during an appears on Fox News Tuesday morning.

Spaceflight Now will have live coverage of the briefing beginning shortly before the news conference gets underway at 2 p.m. EDT (1800 UTC).

Isaacman will also be joined by Lori Glaze, associate administrator of the newly established Human Spaceflight Mission Directorate (HSMD), and Carlos García-Galán, the Moon Base program manager, which is now under HSMD.

This past Friday, NASA announced a new mission directorate realignment, which unveiled not only HSMD, but also the Research and Technology Mission Directorate (RTMD). The agency did not alter the Science Mission Directorate (SMD).

“NASA will integrate the Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate and Space Technology Mission Directorate into the new RTMD,” the agency wrote in a press release. “As a combined research, space technology, and aeronautics organization charged with nuclear power and propulsion development, RTMD will ensure NASA has the capabilities needed for the mission of today and the future.”

HSMD encompasses the former Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate and the Space Operations Mission Directorate.

Marginal Revolution

Quarantine sentences to ponder, that was then this is now edition…

Tyler Cowen
Updated

Trump administration officials, confronted by overlapping outbreaks of Ebola and the hantavirus, have taken a more aggressive approach to locking down potentially exposed people than in past outbreaks, surprising many public health experts…

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, drew notice during the Covid-19 pandemic for suggesting that the coronavirus should be allowed to spread freely among healthy people, and for arguing that mandatory quarantines and lockdowns were harmful to society.

Last week, however, he issued quarantine orders that cited public health laws for two passengers who wanted to leave the Nebraska facility and isolate in their home states.

Here is the full NYT story.  Via Maxwell G.

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Marginal Revolution

Tuesday assorted links

Tyler Cowen
Updated

1. How did the United States bend the health care cost curve?

2. Why are you reading fewer books?

3. Dean Ball on the Papal encyclical.  My interpretation is a little different, and I suppose more Straussian.  The Pope is basically telling us that AI is here to stay.  If the detailed analysis seems thin to you, there is no need to distract from that more important and more essential message.  That the Pope presented this with Anthropic, and for that matter quoted Tolkien/Gandalf, and allowed the use of em dashes, does not harm my interpretation.  And here is what Perplexity thought I would say.

4. Mennonite fact of the day.

5. A one-time treatment for bad cholesterol? (NYT)  And a Twitter thread.

6. Those new service sector jobs?

The post Tuesday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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DCReport.org

The Best Backyard Ideas For an Enjoyable Stay

Our Friends
Updated

Many people used to think of their homes mainly as places to rest between busy schedules, social plans, restaurants, vacations, and nights out. Over the last several years, however, outdoor living spaces have started taking on a much bigger role in everyday life. Backyards, patios, and outdoor entertainment areas are increasingly designed to feel less like occasional-use spaces and more like genuine extensions of the home itself.

This shift has changed the kinds of upgrades homeowners prioritize. Instead of focusing only on appearance, people now pay far more attention to comfort, usability, atmosphere, and long-term enjoyment. Features that support slower evenings, outdoor dining, wellness routines, and relaxed social gatherings often end up being used much more consistently than expected.

Over time, many homeowners realize that certain outdoor upgrades quietly make staying home feel easier, calmer, and more enjoyable than constantly going out.

Outdoor Wellness Spaces Change the Entire Atmosphere

One of the biggest changes in modern outdoor design is the growing focus on wellness and recovery. Homeowners increasingly want outdoor spaces that help them mentally disconnect from stress instead of simply creating visually impressive backyards.

This explains why heat therapy spaces, quiet seating areas, and privacy-focused layouts have become so popular. Homeowners investing in luxury outdoor sauna  setups often discover that these spaces quickly become part of regular evening routines rather than occasional luxury features.

The appeal usually comes from how naturally these environments support relaxation. Instead of planning complicated outings or dealing with crowded public spaces, people can step outside for a calmer experience without leaving home entirely.

As outdoor wellness areas become integrated into everyday life, many homeowners start viewing their backyards less as entertainment zones and more as personal recovery spaces.

Outdoor Cooking Creates More Relaxed Social Gatherings

Backyard hosting also tends to feel very different when cooking becomes part of the experience itself. Outdoor meals often create slower and more casual environments than traditional indoor gatherings because people naturally spend more time moving around, talking, and relaxing outdoors.

Cooking outside changes the rhythm of social events. Guests gather around grills, outdoor kitchens, prep stations, and seating areas more organically than they do during many formal indoor dinners. The atmosphere usually feels less rushed and less structured.

This is one reason outdoor cooking upgrades remain so popular among homeowners who enjoy hosting regularly. Equipment, maintenance tools, and supply for barbeque  naturally fit into these outdoor-centered lifestyles where grilling and open-air dining become recurring parts of weekends and evening routines.

People often end up using these outdoor spaces far more frequently than expected once hosting begins feeling easier and more comfortable at home.

Comfortable Outdoor Layouts Encourage Longer Evenings

Photograph illustrating this sponsored article

Many outdoor spaces fail not because they look bad, but because they are uncomfortable to spend time in for extended periods. Seating, airflow, lighting, shade, and spacing all dramatically affect whether guests actually want to stay outdoors for hours.

This is why functional comfort often matters more than highly decorative design choices. Softer lighting, durable seating, covered areas, and flexible layouts tend to encourage more relaxed gatherings than spaces designed mainly around appearance.

Homeowners also begin appreciating outdoor environments that adapt well to different situations. A backyard that works equally well for quiet evenings, small family dinners, or larger social gatherings usually provides more long-term value than spaces built around only one type of use.

The easier a space feels to enjoy casually, the more consistently it usually becomes part of everyday life.

Staying Home Starts Feeling Less Restrictive

One interesting shift many people notice after upgrading outdoor spaces is that staying home begins feeling far less limiting. Comfortable patios, outdoor dining areas, wellness features, and relaxing backyard environments can dramatically change how people think about free time.

Instead of automatically looking for restaurants, crowded venues, or expensive outings every weekend, many individuals begin enjoying slower evenings at home more often. Outdoor spaces provide a balance between social activity and personal comfort that many public environments struggle to offer consistently.

This becomes especially valuable during stressful or busy periods where people still want enjoyable experiences without dealing with traffic, reservations, noise, or overstimulating environments.

The emotional effect of having comfortable outdoor space available at any time often becomes much more important than homeowners initially expect.

Simpler Outdoor Features Usually Get Used Most

One common mistake in outdoor design is assuming that larger or more expensive additions automatically create better experiences. In reality, many homeowners end up using simpler comfort-focused features far more consistently than dramatic statement pieces.

Comfortable seating, manageable cooking setups, quiet wellness areas, shaded patios, and practical lighting often shape daily enjoyment more strongly than oversized or highly decorative installations. Features that fit naturally into ordinary routines generally remain valuable much longer.

The same principle applies to hosting. Outdoor spaces that are easy to clean, easy to maintain, and comfortable during different weather conditions tend to encourage spontaneous gatherings much more often than complicated layouts requiring extensive preparation.

The less stressful outdoor hosting feels, the more frequently people usually invite others over.

Outdoor Comfort Has Become Part of Modern Home Life

As people spend more time balancing demanding schedules, digital overstimulation, and crowded routines, outdoor comfort increasingly feels tied to emotional recovery rather than luxury alone. Homeowners are no longer designing backyards only for appearances or occasional entertaining. Many now want spaces that genuinely improve everyday life.

This explains why outdoor wellness, casual dining, and relaxation-focused upgrades continue growing in popularity. The ability to unwind outside, host comfortably, cook casually, or disconnect from indoor stress without leaving home often provides lasting value long after the excitement of installation fades.

In many cases, the most appreciated outdoor upgrades are not the most extravagant ones, but the ones that quietly make ordinary evenings feel calmer, easier, and more enjoyable week after week.

Photo: Tran Vinh on Unsplash

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DCReport.org

Why Your Business Needs Austin Bookkeeping Services

Our Friends
Updated

Bookkeeping services represent the process of financial management with precise organization and registration of all financial transactions of a business. It is an essential component when it comes to maintaining a clear image of the cash flow, profitability and overall financial health. Without bookkeepers, proper recordkeeping companies risk costly errors, tax problems and decisions based on incomplete information which might affect the business’s growth.  The local companies from Austin have to keep up with the regulations but also with the quick pace of development which an experienced bookkeeper can do by providing strategic support and financial clarity. These services are ideal for small businesses, startups and also freelancers who want to save time, reduce stress and focus on growing the business without worrying about the financial part.

What Are Austin Bookkeeping Services?

The Austin bookkeeping services represent the process of recording, organizing, and managing all of a business’s financial transactions. The main role of a bookkeeper is to maintain clear and up-to-date records so that you as the business owner have an accurate picture of your financial situation. These services are essential for any business in order for it to properly function, regardless of its size or field, because it underpins tax compliance and financial decisions.  

Even though many people think that a bookkeeper and an accountant are the same thing, they have big differences between their roles. The bookkeeping focuses on the daily recording of transactions while accounting involves the analysis, interpretation and reporting of financial data as well as tax planning. Therefore, a bookkeeper has a fundamental role and the accountant builds essential aspects based on the other’s job.

The bookkeeping services usually include a wide range of activities such as recording transactions and documenting all income and expenses, as well as bank reconciliation which basically ensures consistency between internal records and bank statements. Also invoice management is one of their activities which involves issuing and tracking invoices as well as managing payments. Besides, financial reporting provides essential documents such as the balance sheet and profit and loss account that help evaluate business performance and can also support its growth in some ways.

Coursera  also mentions ‘ Bookkeeping is the systematic process of recording, organizing, and tracking all financial transactions of a business, including sales, purchases, payments, and receipts, to maintain accurate and up-to-date financial records that support business operations, tax reporting, and decision-making. While bookkeepers used to keep track of this information in physical books, much of the process is now done using software. ’

Why Should You Hire Austin Bookkeepers?

If you have a local business, choosing Austin bookkeepers  can bring a lot of advantages for any business regardless of its field and industry. One of the most important benefits is their knowledge of the specifics of Texas law, as well as tax regulations and any other financial requirements that can vary from state to state. Also, a local professional is already familiar with these aspects therefore reducing the risk of errors and penalties. Besides, they can provide advice suitable to the economic environment of Austin which everybody knows is a city known for its entrepreneurial dynamism.

Woman at desk.
Photo via Magnific

Another major advantage is access to personalized services. Unlike the general and automated services, a local bookkeeper can better understand the specific needs of a business therefore coming up with different solutions suitable for them. The best part in choosing to hire or to collaborate with a local bookkeeper is that you do not have to pay for a standard pack of services, you can only pay for what you need. Whether it is about cash flow management, cost optimization or financial document organization services can be personalized based on industry, company size and long-term goals.

Also, Texas is an important hub for small businesses and startups and a bookkeeper in the area has direct experience working with such companies. This means that a local bookkeeper can offer you relevant support in growing your business by organizing everything that is financial. In a competitive market like this one, collaboration with a professional can make a huge difference in maintaining a solid financial base.

QuickBooks  also mentions ‘ Bookkeepers help businesses manage their finances by monitoring different accounts, transactions, and reports. They collect, organize, and store the business’s financial records, including reconciliation, income, and cash flow statements. Bookkeepers also make it possible for business owners and accountants to build budgets, identify trends, and plan for the future. ’

How to Choose the Best Bookkeeper?

Well, there is no such thing as the best bookkeeper, but you can select the best bookkeeper for your business and this is a decision that can directly influence the financial health of your business. First, it is essential to check a bookkeeper’s certifications and professional experience. A qualified and certified bookkeeper who has relevant experience in this field will better understand the specific needs of the company and will manage the complex financial situations more efficiently.  

Another important criterion is represented by the reviews of other clients. The feedback from other clients can offer you a clear image of the level of professionalism, communication and reliability. Online platforms or direct recommendations from other local entrepreneurs can be extremely helpful in the selection process.

Woman at desk on calculator
Photo via Magnific

A professional is also careful with what technology they use because a modern bookkeeper should always be up-to-date and familiar with popular programs such as QuickBooks or Xero which allow the efficient and transparent monitorization of financial data. By using these programs that are strong financial tools you will have easier and quicker access to reports and can also reduce error risks.

Conclusion

Therefore, the bookkeepers play an important role in a company because they efficiently manage the finances offering clarity, control and support in making decisions. Working with a professional and local bookkeeper helps you avoid errors and comply with tax obligations. Choosing the right partner that is most suitable for your company, with experience and transparency, can significantly contribute to the long-term stability and development of your business.

Photo at top via Magnific

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Spaceflight Now

SpaceX launches 24 Starlink satellites on Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg SFB

Will Robinson-Smith
Updated
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifts off from Space Launch Complex 4 East at Vandenberg Space Force Base on the Starlink 17-37 mission on May 26, 2026. Image: SpaceX

Update May 26, 12:21 p.m. EDT (1621 UTC) SpaceX confirms deployment of its 24 Starlink satellites.

SpaceX followed up a picturesque Falcon 9 launch from Cape Canaveral Monday morning with another from Vandenberg Space Force Base Tuesday morning.

The Starlink 17-37 mission, which was originally scheduled to launch on May 9, faced several launch delays throughout the month of May. The flight went through two previous booster assignments (B1097 and B1103) before SpaceX ultimately designated B1100 to fly the mission.

Liftoff from Space Launch Complex 4 East happened at 7:50:34 a.m. PDT (10:50:34 a.m. EDT / 1450:34 UTC). The Falcon 9 rocket flew on a southerly trajectory upon leaving the pad.

The Starlink 17-37 mission was the sixth flight for B1100. It previously flew the NROL-105 mission as well as four batches of Starlink satellites.

Nearly 8.5 minutes after liftoff, B1100 landed on the drone ship, ‘Of Course I Still Love You,’ positioned out in the Pacific Ocean. This was the 198th landing on this vessel and the 615th booster landing to date for SpaceX.

Weather West

Another late-spring cut-off to bring mountain showers, coastal drizzle, and cooler temperatures before likely June warm-up

Daniel Swain
Updated

A dynamic and changeable spring 2026 weather pattern in California amid ongoing marine heatwave As we approach the end of May, it’s worth looking back at the past couple of months of highly changeable weather conditions across California and the West. Spring is always, to some degree, a tumultuous weather period, as it heralds the […]

The post Another late-spring cut-off to bring mountain showers, coastal drizzle, and cooler temperatures before likely June warm-up first appeared on Weather West.

DCReport.org

Remind Me. Why Cuba?

Tom Cantlon
Updated

I’ve Lost the Rationale for Why We’re Doing What We’re Doing

Cuba? My first reaction when recent news brought this up was, “Um, okay, yes, communist government, oppressed people, past possible attacks on the U.S.” But to consider each of those: Communism? There isn’t much left of it in the world. Out of the three or four still claiming it there is China which is primarily a typical single-top-leader with a mix of some central planning and programs with a significant amount of free-market. There is North Korea which is a dictatorship. Even if you could describe Cuba as truly communist, so what? It’s not going to be leading a wave of other countries becoming communist. What do we care what form they take?

Oppressed people? That’s also true in countries all over the world that we don’t seem to care about. Even further, Viktor Orban in Hungary was transitioning the country to an oppressive authoritarian system and we supported him. Is it because Cuba is in our Western hemisphere? So is Peru where President Bukele is leading a harsh authoritarian rule, but we’re making deals with him to take the immigration rejects (to put it in terms that fit Trump’s attitude) that Trump wants to get rid of. And much of what the Cuban people suffer is simple poverty which the U.S. has played a big role in creating. We’ve had embargoes of varying degrees imposed on them since 1960, and of course much worse now since Trump has almost cut off their ability to import oil.

Attacks? They go both ways. The one that has just been refreshed after having long been dropped is a Cuban attack that shot down two U.S. planes over open water that killed four people. That was thirty years ago. A U.S. indictment of Raul Castro for that was just announced. Okay, if we can get Mr. Castro here, in his nineties, and try him, that might be justice. Does that require invading and capturing or killing other leadership in some hope of radical change? That didn’t work in Iran. The new leadership there is worse than the old, and the people didn’t rise up. The people of Cuba have had most of seven decades to rise up, so counting on that now seems unwise.

Attacks did go both ways. The worst was the bombing of a Cuban domestic flight killing 73 people, carried out by anti-communist exiles with connections to the U.S. The CIA later acknowledged knowing about it in advance, and the exiles have pretty much lived freely in the U.S. afterward.

If Trump invades and does…something, maybe insists they give the U.S. control of their sugar industry, does that make him look good? The strongest country in the world forcing one of the weakest to grant some concessions? Wow, what an accomplishment?

I thought with reading fresh material about the country and thinking through the situation and in writing this I’d have the reasons become clear. Other than the cynical assumption that it’s just for Trump, nope, no reason is clear. I end where I started.

So remind me again, why Cuba?

Photo: David Pospíšil, Pexels

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Market Design

The Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony Is Moving to Europe (after 35 years in the USA)

Al Roth
Updated

A sign of the times:( 

 The Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony Is Moving to Europe (after 35 years in the USA) 

 

 

 

"Ig Nobel Prizes honor achievements that make people LAUGH, and then THINK. Organized by the magazine Annals of Improbable Research (AIR), they celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative, and spur interest in science. Winners travel to the ceremony from around the world, to collect their prizes and be showered with paper airplanes. The first 35 ceremonies (1991-2025) all took place in Massachusetts: at Harvard University, MIT [The Massachusetts Institute of Technology], and Boston University. But now the ceremony is moving to Europe.

"Marc Abrahams, founder and emcee of the ceremony (and editor of the magazine), explains: “During the past year, it has become unsafe for our guests to visit the country. We cannot in good conscience ask the new winners, or the international journalists who cover the event, to travel to the USA this year.”

This year’s ceremony is being produced in collaboration with institutions of the ETH Domain and the University of Zurich. Abrahams explains: “The city of Zurich and its institutions rapidly moved mountains (only metaphorically — in Switzerland it is illegal to physically move mountains) and committed to make this possible. Switzerland has nurtured many unexpected good things —Albert Einstein’s physics, the world economy, and the cuckoo clock leap to mind — and is again helping the world appreciate improbable people and ideas.”

 



Daring Fireball

The History of ‘OK’

John Gruber
Updated

Merriam-Webster:

The 1820s and 1830s shared another linguistic fad with today: an appreciation for deliberate misspellings. (Kewl, rite?) This trend, which had humorists adopting now-cringey bumpkin personas with ignorance manifested in uneducated spellings, turned no go into know go and no use into know yuse (lol). Abbreviations were not immune, and no go became K.G.. So too all right became O.W., as an abbreviation for oll wright. And all correct became o.k., as an abbreviation for oll korrect.

Although OK became one of the more commonly used initialisms, it might have passed into oblivion when the linguistic fad had passed if not for the presidential election of 1840, when Martin Van Buren was given the nickname of “Old Kinderhook” because of his hometown of Kinderhook, NY. The Van Buren stans who joined “OK Clubs” nationwide were themselves, they proclaimed, “OK.” Their campaign was memorable enough to have both popularized the word and to have hijacked the story of its origin: there are today still those who believe that “Old Kinderhook” is the original meaning of OK.

I have a strong preference for OK (perhaps infused by the classic Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines’s adamance on the spelling). Okay is OK in prose, but never as a UI button label. Ok and ok are not OK.

 ★ 
Marginal Revolution

A Beautiful Theory Falls to Ugly Data

Alex Tabarrok
Updated

My latest paper, A Test of the Coase Conjecture Using Prices of Electronic Books, with the excellent Tim Groseclose, has just been published. The Coase Conjecture is another one of Coase’s little ideas — the original paper is six pages — that has spawned hundreds of follow-up papers and thousands of citations.

The idea is simple. A monopolist of a durable good has a time-inconsistency problem. Set the monopoly price in period 1 and he will be tempted in period 2 to cut the price and mop up the customers whose valuations sit between the period-1 price and MC. But the same logic applies in period 2, and again in period 3, and so on — eventually the price unravels to MC. Consumers see this coming, the monopolist knows the consumers see it coming, and so the monopolist cuts price to MC in period 1. And since a “period” is just the interval between price changes, the whole unraveling happens — in Coase’s phrase — “in the twinkling of an eye.”

The theorists, most notably Gul, Sonnenschein and Wilson and Fudenberg, Levine and Tirole, formalized Coase’s insight and showed that under quite general conditions the logic goes through. Which is rather surprising, since, as Tim and I point out, Coase’s conjecture implies that many patents and copyrights are essentially worthless — a prediction wildly at variance with the facts. Other theorists, including Stokey, Ausubel and Deneckere, and Board and Pycia, have offered variants under which the Coase outcome does and does not obtain.

For all this theory, there have been almost no direct tests of the Coase Conjecture apart from a handful of lab experiments. Ours is one of the first papers to take the conjecture to the real world. We look at e-books, an unusually clean setting: digital goods are durable, marginal costs are low, resale is limited, and prices can be changed quickly. Using the prices of e-books that are in the public domain as a proxy for marginal cost, we ask: (a) do prices rapidly fall to MC, and (b) does the market clear in the first period? The answer to both is no. E-book prices begin well above MC, sales continue over many periods, and prices don’t even decline monotonically.

We reject the Coase Conjecture decisively.

The paper has an interesting history. The theorists (or the referees we guessed were theorists) praised the paper for taking the theory seriously but inevitably had a fillip to offer, distinguishing the world of pure theory from empirical tests. The empiricists, on the other hand, said our tests were too simple since no one takes the theory that seriously. It’s good to see the paper find a home!

We reject the Coase Conjecture decisively, but it remains to say why. We can rule out some explanations — it’s not rising MC, and it’s not the finiteness of buyers (which can support a perfectly price-discriminating Pac-Man equilibrium).

Two theories remain: 1) sellers can commit not to lower prices, and 2) the outside-options model of Board and Pycia. I prefer the former, my co-author prefers the latter. To me, commitment just isn’t that hard. The standard story is that profits are like cookies on the table and the monopolist can’t resist — but at least the people tempted by cookies get to eat the cookies! The Coase profits are illusory: the monopolist races to MC in period 1 precisely because they know they won’t resist later and as a result they don’t even get a taste of profit! Too clever by half. I say, show some backbone. Firms are *all about* commitment — to workers, consumers, contractors. Why not to a price? My co-author points out, however, that this is more Tabarrok-vibe than carefully laid out theory.

Tim likes the Board and Pycia model which begins with the plausible idea that consumers have outside options — if they don’t buy the book today, they will buy another book, rent the movie, or borrow from the library — and crucially, once they take the outside option, the consumer never returns to the market. You might think outside options would make it *harder* for the firm to set a high price, but Board and Pycia show in a very clever but extended argument that when you carefully work out the full equilibrium the opposite holds: outside options give firms a time-consistent incentive to set and keep a high price. Tim explains the argument further here (see also our paper for an intuitive breakdown).

In any case, the Coase Conjecture — at least as modelled by the theorists — fails in an environment most conducive to it.

A beautiful theory falls to ugly data.

The post A Beautiful Theory Falls to Ugly Data appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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Daring Fireball

[Sponsor] exe.dev

Daring Fireball Department of Commerce
Updated

A cloud for the agent era. Use exe.dev to get a pool of VMs with SSH, root, and web auth by default. Secrets injected at the network edge stay out of the LLM’s hands. Persistent servers, internal tools, vibe coding, disposable devboxes, whatever. It’s just a computer.

 ★ 
Daring Fireball

Awarding Jay Haynes His Being Right Points for Predicting Apple Hitting $3 Trillion in Market Cap

John Gruber
Updated

Here’s a fun one. Back in 2014 I linked to a post by Jay Haynes in which he projected that with a very reasonable level of annual growth, Apple ought to reach a $3 trillion market cap within 10 years. At the time of his writing, Apple’s market cap was “just” $450 billion, and no company had hit the $1 trillion market. So projecting a $3 trillion valuation in 10 years was a bold prediction.

Apple hit $3 trillion in just 8 years.

Haynes’s original blog went belly-up, alas, but he republished the piece on Medium, with a bit of additional commentary up front, in 2016. Re-reading Haynes’s piece today, it holds up extremely well, including his case that the iPhone and iPad are almost textbook examples of Clayton Christensen’s disruption theory (yet Christensen himself got it wrong).

(Thanks to Nathan Peretic, longtime DF reader and owner of a perfect personal homepage, for prompting me to revisit this and award Haynes his well-earned Being Right Points.)

 ★ 
Daring Fireball

Thieves Are Texting Threats to Victims of iPhone Theft in London

John Gruber
Updated

Lizzie Dearden and Amelia Nierenberg, reporting for The New York Times (gift link):

The crime Alex Pikula reported to the police was one they had heard before: An e-bike rider had zoomed past as Mr. Pikula left a theater in London’s West End, ripping his phone from his hands. It was frustrating, Mr. Pikula thought, but that was that.

He was wrong.

His mother soon started receiving strange texts, claiming to have her son’s emails and bank information. Then she received a video of a man brandishing a gun. Then came threats of sexual assault and death.

“I know who you are and where you live,” read one, full of obscenities and typos. “I’ve killed or [sic] far less than a phone before,” it went on. “We will see if you value your life over this phone.”

All of the messages wanted her to do one thing: unlink her son’s Apple ID from his stolen phone.

The story only mentions the word iPhone twice, but phone appears over 30 times. “Apple ID” appears four times. There’s zero mention of Android or Google. It’s just implicitly assumed that the only phones worth stealing or threatening victims about are iPhones. The story makes no mention of Apple’s Stolen Device Protection, which Apple recently began turning on by default when users install iOS 26.4.

Dearden and Nierenberg filed a previous report in October about organized iPhone crime rings in London. And in November I linked to a story where a thief, after stealing an Android phone, turned around and handed it back, explaining to the victim, “Don’t want no Samsung.”

 ★ 
Daring Fireball

Trump Mobile Website Exposed the Number of Pre-Orders — Both Completed and Abandoned — and the Associated Customer Information

John Gruber
Updated

Catie McLeod, The Guardian:

Trump Mobile said in a statement that it was investigating the issue — “with the assistance of independent cybersecurity professionals” — in which the full names, addresses and phone numbers of people who filled out preorder forms appeared to be exposed. [...]

Jonathan Soma, a programmer and professor at New York’s Columbia University, reviewed the code that the Australian had uncovered and copied from the Trump Mobile website. Soma said the website used a common e-commerce model, in which every potential order added another “1” to a list, the total of which had reached 27,224 possible pre-orders on the available information.

But he said the code reflected the last step before payment, meaning those who didn’t proceed with the purchase were also recorded in the data, even those people who have abandoned their carts without paying the deposit, so the true number of preorders was likely to be even lower.

“I probably started three phone purchases and didn’t buy any of them,” he said.

Auric Goldfinger is surely rolling over in his grave.

 ★ 
The Truth OC: Because it's time to fight back.

Joe Kerr believes in ordinary people doing extraordinary things

Jeff Pearlman
Updated

Joe Kerr, a Democratic candidate in the CA-40 congressional race, was offered the opportunity to write a piece following the recent guest posts from Lisa Ramirez and Esther Kim Varet.

Congress doesn’t have a messaging problem. It has a seriousness problem.

Too many politicians today are focused on building personal brands, feeding outrage, chasing clicks, or treating every issue like a cable news argument. Meanwhile, regular people are just trying to hold their lives together.

They’re trying to afford groceries and rent. They’re trying to keep up with healthcare costs and insurance bills. They’re worrying about retirement, raising children, caring for aging parents, and wondering whether their kids will be able to afford a future in the communities where they grew up.

And increasingly, people feel like the system’s working for everyone except them. They’re not imagining it. People are tired. Not weak. Not apathetic. Tired. Tired of division. Tired of chaos. Tired of politics that feels more like a performance than a profession rooted in service.

I spent my career working with people who didn’t have the luxury of treating serious problems like a game. I saw families lose homes, communities devastated by wildfires, and people living through some of the worst moments of their lives.

Experiences like that shape how you view leadership and responsibility. You learn very quickly that ego, performative outrage, and political gamesmanship are luxuries most ordinary people can’t afford. Because when people are living through real crises, they aren’t looking for the loudest person in the room. They’re looking for someone steady. Someone willing to walk into difficult situations, keep people calm, and focus on solving problems instead of feeding chaos.

But my experience was not limited to the fire service alone.

For nearly two decades, I also served as a labor leader representing not only firefighters and paramedics, but over 270,000 workers from all walks of life through the Orange County Labor Federation. Teachers. Healthcare workers. Electricians. Grocery workers. Ironworkers. Painters. Construction workers. Public employees. Service workers. Hardworking people trying to build stable lives for their families in an economy that too often feels stacked against them. That experience gave me a much broader understanding of the pressures ordinary Americans are facing every day.

Sitting across the bargaining table from politicians, corporations, and bureaucracies fighting for fair wages, healthcare, retirement security, workplace protections, and resources for public safety, quickly teaches you how to remove yourself from viewing every issue through a partisan lens.

Over the years, I’ve helped negotiate over 200 pieces of bipartisan legislation and secured over $2.3 billion in funding for critical public services, infrastructure, wildfire prevention, and climate resilience, while also holding major polluters accountable and fighting for workers and communities too often ignored by those in power. This work taught me that solving real problems requires persistence, trust, relationships, and a willingness to work with people you may not agree with on every issue. Because when hospitals are overwhelmed, when communities face wildfire threats, or when working families are struggling to stay afloat, ideological purity matters a lot less than whether somebody’s actually willing to do the work. That doesn’t mean abandoning principles. It means remembering that governing is supposed to produce results for real people. It’s the part that actually improves people’s lives, and it’s the part too much of our politics has lost sight of.

This district is filled with hardworking people who’ve been carrying the weight of an economy and political system that increasingly feels disconnected from everyday life. Families across CA-40 are dealing with rising housing costs, disappearing fire insurance, healthcare insecurity, economic pressure, traffic, overcrowding, and a growing sense that life’s getting harder despite working just as hard as ever.

At the same time, our politics has become increasingly extreme. Every disagreement becomes a war. Every compromise becomes betrayal. Every issue becomes another opportunity for outrage and fundraising.

I still believe most Americans have far more in common than our politics would have us believe. Most people want safe communities. Economic stability. Affordable healthcare. Good schools. Clean air and water. A functioning democracy. And leaders who are honest with them.

That shouldn’t feel like a radical idea.

Over the course of my career, I’ve seen ordinary people do extraordinary things for complete strangers. I’ve seen neighbors pull each other from burning homes. I’ve watched communities come together after disasters. I’ve watched exhausted first responders continue working long after their bodies wanted to quit because someone needed help.

That’s the America I know. Not the one constantly screaming at itself online. The one where people still show up for each other when it matters most. That spirit still exists. But people are hungry for leaders who reflect it. Not louder politicians. Not outrage merchants. Not people trying to become celebrities. Just grounded, capable people willing to serve something bigger than themselves.

I’m proud that so many respected leaders across California have chosen to support this campaign: members of Congress, state legislators, labor leaders, local officials, educators, environmental advocates, and community leaders who’ve worked alongside me over the years.

And I’m especially encouraged by the number of young people becoming involved in this campaign. My wife and I raised our 22-year old son here in CA-40, and like so many families, we’ve had countless conversations about affordability, housing, career opportunities, and whether the next generation will be able to build the same kind of stable future previous generations once could. Young people aren’t looking for perfection. They’re looking for honesty, seriousness, and leaders who actually understand the challenges they’re inheriting.

That’s the kind of leadership I’ve tried to live throughout my life, and it’s the kind of representative I would strive to be for CA-40. Because public service should never be about feeding ego. It should be about showing up for other people when they need you most.

I believe most Americans are far better than our politics sometimes reflects. But democracy only works when people participate, and that’s why voting is so important.

If you believe Congress needs more seriousness, more real-world experience, and leadership grounded in service to others, I’d be honored to earn your support and your vote.

Joe Kerr is a Democratic candidate in the CA-40 congressional race.

Letters from an American

May 25, 2026

Heather Cox Richardson
Updated

Last Friday, just before the long holiday weekend, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard resigned, effective as of June 30, citing her husband’s recent cancer diagnosis as the factor that forced her decision. A source told Jonathan Landay and Erin Blanco of Reuters that President Donald J. Trump had forced her out. Certainly, he has sidelined her.

Congress created the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) in 2004 after concluding that intelligence failures, including a lack of communication across agencies, had contributed to the vulnerability that permitted the 9/11 attacks. The ODNI is supposed to oversee the eighteen different intelligence agencies and to coordinate the information they produce.

Gabbard did not have deep experience in intelligence and had endorsed Russian talking points about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine when Trump named her director of ODNI. Trump’s former national security advisor John Bolton called her “a hand grenade ready to explode.”

Gabbard ran into trouble with Trump by June 2025, when she released a video warning of “nuclear holocaust” because “political elite warmongers are carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers.” They were bringing the world “closer to the brink of nuclear annihilation than ever before,” she said. She released the video days before Trump launched his first attack on Iran, and a former intelligence officer told Nick Schifrin of PBS that Trump considered the video an attempt to try to convince him not to launch the strikes.

Afterward, Gabbard seemed to try to regain Trump’s favor by backing his extremist pet projects, including accusing former president Barack Obama of leading a “treasonous conspiracy” and calling for him to be prosecuted over the FBI’s investigation of the ties between Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and Russian operatives. She also oversaw an FBI raid at the Fulton County, Georgia, election headquarters during which the administration scooped up all the physical ballots from the 2020 presidential election, as well as ballot images, tabulator tapes, and the voter rolls from that election.

But she never recovered her standing with the president. As Shane Harris noted in The Atlantic, while Trump was preparing to invade Venezuela and extract its president and his wife, Gabbard was posting pictures of herself on a Hawaiian beach.

Trump stayed in the White House over the weekend, missing his son Don Jr.’s wedding in the Bahamas with a social media post explaining that “[w]hile I very much wanted to be with my son, Don Jr., and the newest member of the Trump Family, his soon to be wife, Bettina, circumstances pertaining to Government, and my love for the United States of America, do not allow me to do so. I feel it is important for me to remain in Washington, D.C., at the White House during this important period of time.”

Whatever else might be going on, Trump is under pressure to find a way out of Iran. Not only are prices skyrocketing owing to the rising cost of oil after Iran shut the Strait of Hormuz in response to attacks from the U.S. and Israel, but the clock has run out on any authorization he could have claimed for his military adventure in Iran, and Congress seems ready to force his hand.

Congress alone can declare war, but the 1973 War Powers Act permits the president to act against an “imminent” threat so long as he notifies Congress within 48 hours. Then he has 60 days to get congressional approval. That timeline ran out on May 1, and the administration claimed it didn’t need authorization because it had declared a ceasefire on April 7, although it continued to maintain a blockade against Iranian ports—an act of war—and to exchange fire with Iranian forces. Republicans in Congress appeared to accept that argument for a time. But last Thursday, House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) had to send representatives home a day early to keep members from passing a war powers resolution that would order Trump to remove U.S. troops from his war on Iran.

The House and Senate will come back on June 2, and Trump clearly would like to have an agreement with Iran in place before they do.

Trump’s social media account over the weekend was active. He twice posted an image of himself leering over Greenland with the caption “Hello, Greenland!” and repeated suggestions that “China Loves Trump.” He posted an AI image of Representative Ro Khanna (D-CA) as a devil (I think), calling him a “SLEAZEBAG” and a “Dumocrat,” and an image of eight lawmakers or officials in orange jumpsuits (except for Obama’s tan one), claiming they had “Caused tremendous damage through Weaponization!” And he posted a number of images of colorful fountains.

But much of the account’s attention this weekend was on Iran. On Saturday morning the account posted an image of Iran covered by a U.S. flag, and at 4:30 that afternoon, it posted that Trump had just had a call with leaders from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Qatar, Pakistan, Türkiye, Egypt, Jordan, and Bahrain, and then a separate call with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, about Iran. All the calls “went very well,” according to the post.

“An Agreement has been largely negotiated,” the post read, “subject to finalization…. Final aspects and details of the Deal are currently being discussed, and will be announced shortly. In addition to many other elements of the Agreement, the Strait of Hormuz will be opened.”

But Iran’s state media immediately posted that Trump’s claim that the strait would reopen as it was before the war was “not true,” adding that “it should be noted that American officials have acknowledged in multiple messages to Iran that Trump’s tweets are primarily for promotional purposes and media consumption within the United States, and they have recommended that no attention be paid to these statements.”

Firm details about the deal were scarce, but as journalist David Schuster posted, Al-Jazeera reported that the deal included “unfreezing billions in Iranian funds, lifting U.S. blockade, pulling U.S. forces away, reopening strait of Hormuz though with tolls to Iran, and allowing Iran to keep its enriched uranium.” “This would be a total U.S. surrender,” Schuster noted. Iran’s military spokesperson Ibrahim al-Fiqar posted an AI image of Trump kneeling before Iran’s supreme leader with the caption “The end.”

Senator Roger Wicker (R-MS), chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, immediately condemned the deal. He told reporters it “would be a disaster. Everything accomplished by Operation Epic Fury would be for naught.” Wicker urged Trump to “allow America’s skilled armed forces to finish the destruction of Iran’s conventional military capabilities and reopen the strait. Further pursuit of an agreement with Iran’s Islamist regime risks a perception of weakness. We must finish what we started. It is past time for action.”

By Sunday morning Trump was, once again, posting AI images of U.S. bombers attacking Iranian ships (complete with bodies flying through the air) and insisting that the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) negotiated between the U.S., China, France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom, and Iran during the Obama administration was “[o]ne of the worst deals ever made by our Country.” Under the JCPOA, Iran agreed to reduce its stockpile of enriched uranium significantly and allow inspections, in exchange for relief from some sanctions. The Strait of Hormuz remained open. Although inspectors said Iran was honoring the deal, Trump took the U.S. out of the JCPOA in 2018, and the following year, Iran resumed work on enriched uranium necessary for a nuclear weapon.

Trump added that he expected Middle Eastern countries, including Iran, to join the Abraham Accords, the deal hammered out during Trump’s first term under which the UAE and Bahrain formally recognized Israel. According to Barak Ravid of Axios, Arab leaders met Trump’s suggestion of such a recognition during the Saturday phone call with silence.

Then his account posted: “If I make a deal with Iran, it will be a good and proper one, not like the one made by Obama, which gave Iran massive amounts of CASH, and a clear and open path to a Nuclear Weapon. Our deal is the exact opposite, but nobody has seen it, or knows what it is. It isn’t even fully negotiated yet. So don’t listen to the losers, who are critical about something they know nothing about. Unlike those before me who should have solved this problem many years ago, I don’t make bad deals!”

This morning, Trump’s account posted: “I laugh at all of the Dumocrats, RINOS, and Fools who know nothing about the potential deal I am making with Iran, things that haven’t even been negotiated yet.” “[T]hey are losers! The deal with Iran will either be a great and meaningful one, or there will be no deal. It will be the exact opposite of the JCPOA disaster negotiated by the failed Obama Administration, which was a direct and open path to a Nuclear Weapon for Iran. No, I don’t do deals like that!”

Meanwhile, on Meet the Press Sunday, Representative Thomas Massie (R-KY), who last week lost the primary for reelection to his seat after Trump backed his opponent and Trump supporters threw a gobsmacking $35 million at the contest, reopened fire from a different direction. Massie has been key to demanding the release of the Epstein files, and the administration continues to ignore the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which required the Department of Justice to release all the files no later than December 19, 2025.

When host Kristen Welker, noting that Massie had named names from the files in the past, asked, “Can we expect you to name more names in the coming weeks and months?” Massie answered: “Yes.”

—

Notes:

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/gabbard-resigns-trumps-national-intelligence-director-fox-news-digital-reports-2026-05-22/

https://apnews.com/article/gabbard-trump-putin-intelligence-russia-syria-a798adaf9cd531a5d0c9329f7597f0f6

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/06/10/tulsi-gabbard-nuclear-weapons-00396586

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/tulsi-gabbards-record-and-impact-on-the-u-s-intelligence-community

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/gabbards-unprecedented-claim-president-led-treasonous-conspiracy-rcna217151

https://www.theatlantic.com/national-security/2026/05/tulsi-gabbard-resigns-odni-trump/687280/

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/18/tulsi-gabbard-obama-2016-election-russia

https://www.mississippifreepress.org/trumps-iran-agreement-would-be-a-disaster-says-roger-wicker-a-top-republican-u-s-senator/

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/24/world/middleeast/five-main-issues-iran-israel-nuclear.html

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2026/05/25/world/iran-war-trump

https://www.axios.com/2026/05/24/trump-iran-war-israel-muslim-countries-abraham-accords

https://armscontrolcenter.org/the-iran-deal-then-and-now/

https://www.newsweek.com/thomas-massie-promises-to-expose-more-names-from-epstein-files-11989729

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/insight/record-35m-battle-tests-massie-ahead-of-kentucky-primary/gm-GMB6071BD4

X:

Ibrahim_alFiqar/status/2058297686391210087

trumpstruth.org:

statuses/38710

statuses/38716

statuses/38719

statuses/38724

statuses/38722

statuses/38743

statuses/38748

statuses/38749

statuses/38753

statuses/38755

statuses/38763

Blueksy:

meidastouch.com/post/3mmkgmxbpdc2n

gtconway.bsky.social/post/3mmkpwcvoe22w

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Letters from an American

250 to 250

Heather Cox Richardson
Updated

Paul Krugman

Donald Trump’s Ego-Driven “Excursion” Has Crashed Into Reality

Paul Krugman
Updated

“Many questions, few details in latest Iran peace proposal,” read the headline on a New York Times report Sunday. As the subhead explained, “It is too early to tell what exactly Trump and Iran have agreed to, or if they have agreed to much at all.” The article, by the way, was written by David Sanger, who Trump called “treasonous” over his clearly accurate reporting on how badly the war was going.

But, in fact, Trump’s Iran war may be over, or virtually over. America lost.

Iran may or may not agree to exercise restraint in its control over the Strait of Hormuz and its nuclear program. But as Donald Trump of all people should know, agreements can be broken. At a fundamental level Trump, who began by demanding UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER and trying to impose a subservient new regime, is now slinking away, leaving Iran’s hard-liners empowered — and America’s reputation shattered.

How did that happen? America is a superpower, Iran a middle-sized regional power at best. Spending isn’t the only determinant of armed might, but even so a comparison of the two government’s military budgets is ludicrously one-sided:

Yet the Iranian regime is not only still standing, it is stronger than before. Meanwhile, Trump is running away.

Trump’s disastrous leadership isn’t the sole factor behind this debacle, although it’s a large part of the story. In my view there are four main reasons Trump’s Iran “excursion” is ending in humiliation.

First, this was a fundamentally unwinnable war.

Once the initial decapitation strike against Iran’s leadership left the regime’s hold on power intact, Operation Epic Fury became an attempt to end Iran’s threat to world oil supplies by suppressing its missiles and drones with air power. Unfortunately, as the Substack History Does You has documented, such campaigns have never worked. Allied air forces tried to stop Nazi Germany from launching V1s and V2s in World War II; they failed. During the first Gulf War, Coalition air forces devoted huge resources to an attempt to stop Iraq from launching Scud missiles; they also failed. Chasing down mobile launchers, especially in an era of cheap, abundant drones and in a huge, mountainous country like Iran, is an impossible game of whack-a-mole.

Of course, leaders who aren’t terminally arrogant and ignorant don’t start unwinnable wars in the first place.

Second, painful as this is to recognize, the U.S. military, after decades of unchallenged dominance, appears to have lost much of its edge. As Phillips O’Brien recently wrote,

The lack of thought-through US response to the technological changes we are seeing [especially in the Russia-Ukraine war] before it embarked on the Iran bombing shows how smug militaries can be—and the bigger and more powerful they think they are the more smug they tend to be.

…

There is far too much self-congratulation in the US about its military, a belief that US armed forces are highly professional, show initiative, are thoughtful, etc. This is a romantic vision that Americans are using now to throw all blame for the Iran failure on the Trump Administration.

That said, the Trump administration has made the degradation of the military much worse.

Pete Hegseth, the self-proclaimed Secretary of War, has carried out an unprecedented purge of military officers with impeccable reputations, with the majority of those fired Black or female. He has replaced them with political loyalists like Admiral Brad Cooper, the head of Central Command, who has in effect been running Trump’s war.

The officers who survived the purge got the message. Under Hegseth, official accounts of the war’s progress have been a stream of bombastic claims of victory and ludicrously rosy depictions of the situation on the battlefield. Less than two weeks ago Cooper was still peddling fantasies of easy victory to Congress, asserting among other things that the U.S. could easily open the Strait of Hormuz by force.

Do you believe that these delusions are only for public consumption, that Hegseth has been getting and acting on accurate information? I don’t. It’s far more likely that Hegseth and Trump have also been receiving false, optimistic reports, because nobody in the military dares to tell them the uncomfortable truth.

The sycophancy and flattery Cooper exhibited in that testimony surely reflected groupthink that has led to many bad decisions. For example, reporting by CNN, the Washington Post and the Times finds that U.S. bases and facilities have suffered a remarkable amount of damage from Iranian drone and missile strikes, with casualties and much expensive equipment and aircraft destroyed. Why wasn’t the U.S. military prepared for this possibility?

The lack of preparation clearly reflected a predetermined view that Iran would be so devastated by U.S. attacks that it would be unable to strike back. And it’s reasonable to infer that any officers who tried to warn of the dangers were treated as defeatists and silenced.

Finally, success in modern war depends crucially on out-thinking one’s enemies. But MAGA is all about deprecating hard thinking and valorizing belligerent ignorance.

On Saturday Hegseth addressed the graduating class at West Point. In war, he declared, “you can’t throw your pronouns at the enemy.” He congratulated the cadets on being “fit, not fat.” Despite humiliating failure, Hegseth still has his job — and is still asserting that eliminating DEI wins wars and that bulging biceps can beat drones.

Can America still snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, or should it accept a deal that leaves us clearly worse off than we were before the war? The answer is that running away — if that is what Trump is doing — is now the right move. It’s better to accept a bad deal, one that leaves America much weaker than it was a few months ago, than to double down on a failed war. Time is not on our side: looming shortages of critical weapons, the imminent exhaustion of world oil inventories, and the lost support of our allies and the American public mean that this war needs to end soon.

Simon Willison's Weblog

Quoting Corey Quinn

I cannot believe I'm saying this, but getting the literal Pope to canonize your product's specific technical limitations as a spiritual treatise is the single greatest act of vendor lobbying I have ever seen.

— Corey Quinn, on Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah's influence on Magnifica Humanitas

Tags: ai-ethics, corey-quinn, anthropic, ai

Simon Willison's Weblog

Notes on Pope Leo XIV's encyclical on AI

Dropped this morning by the Vatican: Magnifica Humanitas of His Holiness Pope Leo XIV on Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence. This is a very interesting document. It's some of the clearest writing I've seen on the ethics of integrating AI into modern society.

Pope Leo XIV chose the name Leo in honor of Pope Leo XIII, who is known for his 1891 Rerum novarum encyclical on "Rights and Duties of Capital and Labor".

This story on Vatican News further clarifies the significance of that decision:

Meeting with the College of Cardinals for their first formal encounter after his election, Pope Leo XIV explained part of the reason for the choice of his papal name. "There are different reasons for this," he said, before going on to explain that he chose the name Leo "mainly because Pope Leo XIII, in his historic encyclical Rerum novarum addressed the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution."

"In our own day," he continued, "the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defence of human dignity, justice, and labour."

And now we get Pope Leo XIV's own encyclical on the AI revolution. There's a lot in here, but the writing style is very approachable, including to non-Catholics.

A few of my highlights

(I listened to most of the encyclical on a walk with our dog, my first time trying the ElevenReader iPhone app. It worked very well: I pasted in a URL to the document and it read it to me in a very high quality voice, highlighting each paragraph as it went.)

Here are some of my highlights. In each case below emphasis is mine.

Here's a useful description of the interpretability problem for LLMs in section 98:

First, any statement regarding AI risks becoming quickly outdated, given the remarkable pace at which these systems are developing. Second, all of us, including those who design them, possess only a limited understanding of their actual functioning. Indeed, current AI systems are more “cultivated” than “built,” for developers do not directly design every detail, but instead create a framework within which the intelligence “grows.” As a result, fundamental scientific aspects — such as the internal representations and computational processes of these systems — remain, at present, unknown.

I liked section 83's description of the relationship between development and dignity:

For individuals as well as for nations, development is both a duty and a right. Minimum conditions are required for enabling every person and people to flourish in accord with their dignity, without being kept in a state of dependence or excluded from access to necessary goods. Development is truly human when it places people at the center instead of the accumulation of wealth, and when it concerns peoples as well as individuals. Justice demands the recognition of the rights of society and the rights of peoples, and includes a responsibility toward future generations. Development is not truly human if it increases consumption for some while shifting costs and burdens onto others, or relegates entire regions to subordinate roles, preventing them from realizing their full potential.

Baked in cultural biases and sycophancy get a mention in section 100:

In personal use, three aspects in particular deserve careful consideration: the ease with which results are obtained, the impression of objectivity and the simulation of human communication. The speed and simplicity with which information, complex analyses, media content and practical assistance can be accessed undoubtedly makes life easier. Yet they can also encourage excessive reliance and the search for ready-made answers, and weaken personal creativity and judgment. The apparent objectivity of the responses and suggestions these systems provide can lead us to overlook the fact that they reflect the cultural assumptions of those who designed and trained them, with all their strengths and limitations. The artificial imitation of positive human communication — words of advice, empathy, friendship and even love — can be engaging and at times genuinely helpful. However, for less discerning users, it can also be misleading, creating the illusion of a relationship with a real personal subject. When words are simulated, they do not build genuine relationships, but only their appearance. The artificial imitation of care or support can become particularly risky when it enters contexts where real relationships and emotional bonds are lacking.

101 touches on the environmental impact:

Current AI systems require enormous amounts of energy and water, significantly influencing carbon dioxide emissions, and place heavy demands on natural resources. As their complexity increases, especially in the case of large language models, the need for computing power and storage capacity grows too, which requires an extensive network of machines, cables, data centers and energy-intensive infrastructure. For this reason, it is essential to develop more sustainable technological solutions that reduce environmental impact and help protect our common home.

102 covers the risks of algorithmic systems making decisions that impact people's lives without "compassion, mercy, forgiveness":

The use of AI is never a purely technical matter: when it enters processes that affect people’s lives, it touches on rights, opportunities, status and freedom. Important and sensitive decisions — concerning employment, credit, access to public services or even a person’s reputation — risk being fully delegated to automated systems that do not know “compassion, mercy, forgiveness, and above all, the hope that people are able to change,” and can therefore give rise to new forms of exclusion.

105 emphasizes the need for human accountability in how these systems are applied:

For AI to respect human dignity and truly serve the common good, responsibility must be clearly defined at every stage: from those who design and develop these systems to those who use them and rely on them for concrete decisions. In many cases, however, the internal processes leading to a result remain opaque, making it harder to assign responsibility and correct errors. This is where accountability becomes crucial: the possibility of identifying who must “account” for decisions, justify them, monitor them, and, when necessary, challenge them and remedy any harm caused.

And 108 touches on the way AI amplifies the power of those with resources:

In fact, as with every major technological shift, AI tends to amplify the power of those who already possess economic resources, expertise and access to data. In light of the common good and the universal destination of goods, this raises serious concerns, since small but highly influential groups can shape information and consumption patterns, influence democratic processes and steer economic dynamics to their own advantage, undermining social justice and solidarity among peoples. For this reason, it is essential that the use of AI, especially when it touches on public goods and fundamental rights, be guided by clear criteria and effective oversight, grounded in participation and subsidiarity.

That same section explicitly calls out data as something that should be thought of more as a public good:

[...] Moreover, ownership of data cannot be left solely in private hands but must be appropriately regulated. Data is the product of many contributors and should not be treated as something to be sold off or entrusted to a select few. It is necessary to think creatively in order to manage data as a common or shared good, in a spirit of participation, as Saint John Paul II already suggested regarding collective goods.

Given that Palantir is named after a Lord of the Rings reference, I can't help but wonder if the J.R.R. Tolkien quote from The Return of the King (section 213) was the Pope throwing a little shade at Peter Thiel.

The twentieth-century Catholic author J.R.R. Tolkien, in the words of a protagonist in one of his novels, described our responsibility in this way: “It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till.” The civilization of love will not arise from a single or spectacular gesture, but from the sum total of small and steadfast acts of fidelity that serve as a bulwark against dehumanization. For this reason, it is worthwhile pausing to reflect on some aspects of how we, each in our own way, can cooperate in building the civilization of love.

Another 2026 prediction down

On 6th January this year I joined the Oxide and Friends 2026 predictions podcast episode to talk about predictions for 2026, 2029 and 2032. I wrote mine up here, with hindsight they weren't nearly ambitious enough - it's already undeniable that LLMs write good code, we've made huge advances in sandboxing and New Zealand kākāpō have indeed had a truly excellent breeding season.

There's one segment from the episode that I didn't bother to include in my write-up, but that I can't resist providing as a lightly-edited transcript here:

Bryan Cantrill: 37:13

I think that AI has created some real public perception problems for itself. And I think that you are gonna have one of the frontier model companies, this year, have a white paper explaining how the proliferation of AI will mean prosperity for everybody. They will be trying to make some economic argument - because this is gonna be a 2026 election issue, how we think of these things and how they are regulated and it's a big mess. There's more heat than light in this debate.

Simon Willison: 38:05

I'd like to tag something on to that one: I think that only works if they can sort of wash that through existing trusted experts. Sam Altman and Dario are constantly publishing essays about this stuff and nobody believes a word they say. Get Barack Obama's signature on one of these position papers and maybe you've got something people might start to trust a little bit.

Adam Leventhal: 38:27

Otherwise, it's just like "leaded gas is good for you", says Exxon.

Bryan Cantrill: 38:31

I mean, yeah. God. Obama... let's go with that, that's a great one because if it's like Bill Clinton everyone's gonna kind of roll their eyes, so it's gotta be someone who's got real credibility saying that this is gonna be broad-based... I'd say if they get that person to do it, it's gonna be revealed that that's also a bit crooked.

Simon Willison: 38:57

How about the Pope?

Bryan Cantrill: 39:01

The Pope is very into this stuff! That's a great prediction. We've hit pay dirt. The Pope weighing in on LLMs and their economic impact on the world.

Simon, I'm giving you full credit if the Pope weighs in believing that this is gonna be economic devastation.

My prediction here looks a whole lot less insightful given the Leo XIV/Leo XIII relationship, which I was unaware of when we recorded the episode!

Tags: predictions, ai, kakapo, generative-ai, llms, bryan-cantrill, ai-ethics

David Heinemeier Hansson

Basecamp Five

David Heinemeier Hansson (dhh@hey.com)
Updated
I've been working on Basecamp for half my life, and nearly my entire professional career in software. The first code was written in the summer of 2003 when I was just 23. Now I'm 46, and we've just released the fifth major version. 

It's an incredible update to a service that continues to help about a million users a day avoid dropping the ball when working with others. It's AI accessible, but not agent hysteric. It's still famously easy to use, still executes the basics beautifully, and still focuses on the small to medium-sized teams we've been serving in the Fortune 5,000,000 for decades.

Here are just three of my favorite new features in Basecamp 5:

Lexxy editor: Our new text editor finally brings tables, markdown, and live syntax highlighting for code to Basecamp. Oh, and voice notes. It's built on Meta's Lexical editor toolkit, and it's going to ship as the default for Action Text in the next major version of Rails.

Keyboard accessible: After moving to Linux, building Omarchy, and acquiring a taste for mechanical keyboards, I've come to love navigating the computer primarily through hotkeys. So with a lot of effort, Basecamp is now a delight to drive through the keys, and you don't have to be a brainiac to remember them all: just hold down SHIFT, and they're revealed in the interface. SHIFT + S opens the sidebar, ESC moves focus between it and the main page, SHIFT + C starts composing a comment/chat line/answer.

The permanent sidebar: If you live in Basecamp, like I do, it's to stay on top of all the new things that are constantly happening in a busy account, and that's just gotten so much faster with the new permanent sidebar. Before, we had a Hey! menu in the top bar. You'd get a little dot when something was new, then you'd open it, click, and the menu would close. If you had five things that were new, it'd be open-click-close, open-click-close, five times. Being able to zoom through these now with just the return key, tap, tap, tap, and I've read three new things. So good.

And there's so much more. Jason put together a great summary on the new marketing site, which in itself is brand new too. A back-to-basics design in many ways. As our entire industry is getting swept up in agent hysteria (and I love AI as much as anyone!), we thought it better to focus on the human communication that's the cornerstone of Basecamp. The new site just speaks plainly to that mission and shows you the software right at the top.

Another thing that's back is color, specifically in the logo. Basecamp's clever but flat paperclip logo has been replaced with a modern take of our original rolling mountains. In full three dimensions, with depth and a gradient. Love it. 

Overall, I'm really proud of what we've built with Basecamp Five. We're inching in on a quarter of a century in service! We still have customers who signed up back in early 2004! This is the kind of legacy that makes me beam, and the new version is just ace. 

If you've tried Basecamp in the past, it's time to take another look. If you haven't tried it yet, you're in for a treat.

screenshot-2026-05-26_12-33-29-medium.jpg
Aeon | a world of ideas

The embattled witnesses

Alvina Hoffmann
Updated

Residential buildings at dusk with a thick column of smoke rising in the distance, framed by a window grille in the foreground.

The UN’s special rapporteurs are experts charged with a singular mandate: to monitor the world’s worst human rights abuses

- by Alvina Hoffmann

Read on Aeon

National Weather Service

Areas of Excessive Rainfall and Severe Thunderstorms Today

Marginal Revolution

The corporate tax rate really matters

Tyler Cowen
Updated

Three findings emerge. First, improvements in aggregate tax competitiveness are positively and significantly associated with real GDP per capita growth, robust to a wide range of controls. Second, this aggregate effect is driven entirely by the corporate tax pillar; no other component displays a significant growth effect. Third, the corporate tax effect materializes contemporaneously and accumulates over time, with a statistically significant three-year cumulative effect of approximately 0.16 percentage points per one-point improvement in the corporate tax score. These results suggest that the full architecture of the corporate tax system, not merely the headline statutory rate, is what matters for growth.

That is from a recent paper by Michael Christla and Monika Köppl–Turyna.  Via the excellent Samir Varma.

The post The corporate tax rate really matters appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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Finance & economics

Offshore finance is thriving despite crackdowns

There is a lot more to havens than crystal-clear waters and a promise of opacity
NASA Science

A Full Moon Checkup

Kathryn Hansen
Updated
 
The Moon appears along the centerline of scans acquired by the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 9 on January 3, 2026. These monthly lunar scans help ensure the long-term consistency of Landsat’s Earth observations.
Landsat Project Science Support/Ross Walter

In April 2026, NASA’s Artemis program took humanity back to the Moon, providing a new look at Earth’s only natural satellite. As the world celebrates the return of Artemis II’s four astronauts, the lunar surface continues to play a critical role in missions much closer to Earth.

Since 1972, the NASA/USGS Landsat program has captured the longest continuous record of Earth’s land surface, collecting images that track everything from crop health to glacial change. But with such a long data record, how can scientists trust that images acquired today can be accurately compared to those from days, years, or even decades ago? They look to the Moon.

Unlike Earth, with its constantly changing weather, seasons, and landscape, the Moon is remarkably stable. With no atmosphere and virtually no surface changes, the Moon reflects sunlight in a predictable, consistent way. This stability gives engineers a reference to fine-tune Landsat’s instruments and be confident that the data are accurate.

Once a month, during the full Moon, the spacecraft turns its instruments away from Earth and points them directly at the lunar surface. Over the course of two orbits, the spacecraft maneuvers to image the moon 15 times. During each pass, Landsat captures detailed measurements of light reflected off the Moon’s surface, revealing any unintended sensor change, or “drift,” that needs correction.

The animation above shows the scans acquired by band 4 of the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 9 on January 3, 2026. Each parallel scan was acquired by one of the 14 detector modules that comprise the instrument’s focal plane. The satellite maneuvers so that each module images the Moon, with one module capturing it twice.  

Landsat Project Science Support/Ross Walter

This work is one piece in a complex puzzle called calibration, which is part of what makes NASA the gold standard of science worldwide. From before launch all the way to the end of a satellite’s life, engineers ensure that the data collected by the satellite is accurate and consistent. In addition to looking to the Moon, Landsat also looks to places on Earth where the ground is uniform, like the wide, pale expanse of the White Sands desert in New Mexico.

Scientists also collect measurements on the ground to check against those collected from space. For example, they ensure that surface temperature readings match those recorded by Landsat’s thermal band. All these efforts are part of what make a Landsat image different from photos taken by consumer cameras. Landsat images contain crucial information that scientists can use to map changes in habitats, tree species, agricultural patterns, and more.

Video and animation by Ross Walter, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Story by Ross Walter and Madeleine Gregory, Landsat Project Science Support.

Downloads

Parallel grayscale scan strips from Landsat 9, with the Moon appearing near the centerline of alternating strips before eventually appearing in all strips.

January 3, 2026: Animation

MP4 (7.26 MB)

Parallel grayscale scan strips from Landsat 9, with the Moon appearing near the centerline of alternating strips before eventually appearing in all strips.

Video

MP4 (121.74 MB)

Parallel grayscale scan strips from Landsat 9, with the Moon appearing near the centerline of alternating strips before eventually appearing in all strips.

January 3, 2026: Still Image

JPEG (184.10 KB)

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The post A Full Moon Checkup appeared first on NASA Science.

Once a month during the full Moon, Landsat 9 turns from Earth to image the lunar surface, helping keep the spacecraft's data accurate and consistent.
SpaceNews

Northern Norway is ready to launch. EU Space Regulation — and its new Arctic policy – is not.

Johannes Schmied-Wirén and Andreas Raspotnik
Updated

The European Commission is currently updating its Arctic policy, with a new policy statement expected this coming autumn. Unlike the latest policy from 2021, the update will place greater emphasis […]

The post Northern Norway is ready to launch. EU Space Regulation — and its new Arctic policy – is not. appeared first on SpaceNews.

Marginal Revolution

What I’ve been reading

Tyler Cowen
Updated

1. Paul Mendes-Flohr, Martin Buber: A Life of Faith and Dissent.  A beautifully written, first-rate intellectual biography of Buber.  It is hard to imagine finding a better book on him.

2. Robert C. Austin and Artan R. Hoxha, Enver Hoxha: Twentieth-Century Tyrant.  How did this strange story end up happening?  This book offers the best set of explanations I have seen.  But Hoxha himself remains a psychological cipher at the end of it all?  It turns out he never thought Mao was much of an ideologue, being too influenced by Chinese culture and thought.  Also I had not previously realize how much Albania’s growing youth population — with the most natalist demographics in Europe at the time — was considered a major threat to the regime.

3. Malachi Haim Hacohen, Karl Popper: The Formative Years 1902-1945.  Such an excellent and high-level work.  And the author is not afraid to accuse Popper of making everything about himself, and also writing on topics (Plato, Hegel, Marx) where he was less than well-informed.  I had not known that Popper hated Toulmin’s Wittgenstein’s Vienna book, feeling that the actual Viennese environment at the time was far more positive and forward-looking than most intellectual historians were inclined to grant.  Nor had I known how cut off Popper was during his New Zealand years, as there were no plane connections, New Zealand news did not cover foreign affairs very much, and the mail was painfully slow.  Popper also wanted to turn the Mont Pelerin Society into a coalition group, including socialists.  That did not happen.

4. Frank Callanan, James Joyce: A Political Life.  An excellent, lengthy study, I now see Joyce as intensely political whereas I did not before.  “His fiercely Parnellian critique of Ireland and Irish nationalism is only politically intelligible as written from within Irish nationalism.  It is an argument addressed to Irish nationalists.  The paradox of Joyce’s nationalism is that it is in his critique of nationalism that his nationalism is most evident.”  As Italo Svevo once stated: “Joyce is twice a rebel, against England and against Ireland.”

5. Suzy Hansen, From Life Itself: Turkey, Istanbul, and a Neighborhood in the Age of Erdoğan.  An insightful look into Erdoğan, Turkish Islamism, parts of Istanbul, and most of all how Turkey slid into autocracy.  One of the best case studies I know of on how a fragile democracy can go away.

All of these books are very good.  I’ve been seeing complaining in the press lately, and on social media, about the paucity of book reviews these days.  Well, no one is stopping you from reviewing books!  Just do it.

The post What I’ve been reading appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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Talking Points Memo - Editors Blog

Taking the L … And Trump’s Long Iran Walk Into the Twilight

Josh Marshall
Updated

With the latest “peace deal” now perhaps receding into what we might call the eternal “two weeks” I wanted to provide some mix of guidance or thoughts on what is going on. How do we go from a peace deal that is all but inked (despite only being a ceasefire and agreement to negotiate) to now where the deal is drifting off into the distance and Trump is adding new demands on Truth Social?

Let’s go back to the fundamentals.

There’s only one letter available for Trump to take here and it’s an L. This has been the case since the first hours or days of the conflict when Iran’s government didn’t fall and it took control of the Strait of Hormuz which was something the White House had not planned for or anticipated. Critically, it became clear that Iran could hold out on a timeline much longer than Trump’s. Everything since has been fall out of those essential facts.

Everything just a matter waiting for Trump to take the L, which has been the only available letter available for months. His team in Pakistan keeps coming up with face saving ways to take it. They leak that a deal is coming. Trump brags a deal is coming. It’s “largely” finalized, as he memorably said. But then outside players and Trump’s own backers start saying the obvious which is that Trump is taking the L. And he just can’t handle it. He needs everyone not to notice. But people do notice, either backers who are upset he’s taking it or opponents who are eager to amplify his entirely self-created humiliation.

So he starts talking tough. The White House puts out blind quotes about how Iran has totally positively agreed to voluntarily ditch its nuclear program in some future negotiation if the US just agrees to this ceasefire. Trump starts adding new demands. And then, predictably, Iran reaches out to the US negotiators and says What the Actual F … and the illusory “deal” disappears. On Twitter, his diehards frantically post that they’ve been briefed by the White House and as long as everyone keeps tweeting that Trump is rocking this all will be okay. For everyone but the dead enders though the pattern becomes clear. Everything that happens now is a matter of Trump’s inability to accept something that actually happened more than two months ago.

It’s worth remembering that for the master of the “art of the deal” a “deal” isn’t an agreement between parties so much as getting one over on a weaker or less sophisticated party. That’s the entirety of Trump’s career in business. It’s also why that business career involved a string of bankruptcies. Because he’s actually not a good negotiator at all with a sophisticated counterparty. And his business tactics are almost always a matter of overselling or overhyping a product and getting out before the buyers realize that.

In this case though the consequences of his self-soothing lurch into Iran have had economic and political costs he simply can’t paper over.

Boston Red Sox – MLB Trade Rumors
Hacker News
The Diary of Samuel Pepys

Monday 25 May 1663

Samuel Pepys
Updated

Up, and my pill working a little I staid within most of the morning, and by and by the barber came and Sarah Kite my cozen, poor woman, came to see me and borrow 40s. of me, telling me she will pay it at Michaelmas again to me. I was glad it was no more, being indifferent whether she pays it me or no, but it will be a good excuse to lend her nor give her any more. So I did freely at first word do it, and give her a crown more freely to buy her child something, she being a good-natured and painful wretch, and one that I would do good for as far as I can that I might not be burdened.

My wife was not ready, and she coming early did not see her, and I was glad of it.

She gone, I up and then hear that my wife and her maid Ashwell had between them spilled the pot … [of piss and turd – L&M] upon the floor and stool and God knows what, and were mighty merry making of it clean. I took no great notice, but merrily.

Ashwell did by and by come to me with an errand from her mistress to desire money to buy a country suit for her against she goes as we talked last night, and so I did give her 4l., and believe it will cost me the best part of 4 more to fit her out, but with peace and honour I am willing to spare anything so as to be able to keep all ends together, and my power over her undisturbed.

So to my office and by and by home, where my wife and her master were dancing, and so I staid in my chamber till they had done, and sat down myself to try a little upon the Lyra viall, my hand being almost out, but easily brought to again. So by and by to dinner, and then carried my wife and Ashwell to St. James’s, and there they sat in the coach while I went in, and finding nobody there likely to meet with the Duke, but only Sir J. Minnes with my Lord Barkely (who speaks very kindly, and invites me with great compliments to come now and then and eat with him, which I am glad to hear, though I value not the thing, but it implies that my esteem do increase rather than fall), and so I staid not, but into the coach again, and taking up my wife’s taylor, it raining hard, they set me down, and who should our coachman be but Carleton the Vintner, that should have had Mrs. Sarah, at Westminster, my Lord Chancellor’s, and then to Paternoster Row. I staid there to speak with my Lord Sandwich, and in my staying, meeting Mr. Lewis Phillips of Brampton, he and afterwards others tell me that news came last night to Court, that the King of France is sick of the spotted fever, and that they are struck in again; and this afternoon my Lord Mandeville is gone from the King to make him a visit; which will be great news, and of great import through Europe.

By and by, out comes my Lord Sandwich, and he and I talked a great while about his business, of his accounts for his pay, and among other things he told me that this day a vote hath passed that the King’s grants of land to my Lord Monk and him should be made good; which pleases him very well.

He also tells me that things don’t go right in the House with Mr. Coventry; I suppose he means in the business of selling of places; but I am sorry for it. Thence by coach home, where I found Pembleton, and so I up to dance with them till the evening, when there came Mr. Alsopp, the King’s brewer, and Lanyon of Plymouth to see me. Mr. Alsopp tells me of a horse of his that lately, after four days’ pain, voided at his fundament four stones, bigger than that I was cut of, very heavy, and in the middle of each of them either a piece of iron or wood. The King has two of them in his closett, and a third the College of Physicians to keep for rarity, and by the King’s command he causes the turd of the horse to be every day searched to find more.

At night to see Sir W. Batten come home this day from Portsmouth. I met with some that say that the King of France is poisoned, but how true that is is not known. So home to supper and to bed pleasant.

Read the annotations

Marginal Revolution

*Silent Friend*

Tyler Cowen
Updated

An excellent and profound movie, large screen essential.  I take this movie to be an engagement with the truths of German romanticism (set in Marburg, with Geothe and Rilke as relevant texts), and asking whether that romanticism decays over time, or simply morphs into new forms and thus renews itself, even in an age of high tech and near-universal measurement.  The narrative swings back and forth between those two views like a pendulum, ultimately settling upon the notion of continuation.  Was perhaps Stevie Wonder an influence too?  The great Tony Leung stars, here is a trailer.  Reviews are very positive but they do not seem to understand the film well?

The post *Silent Friend* appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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California
DCReport.org

Is Gambling Legal in DC and What Bettors Should Know Before They Play

Our Friends
Updated

Washington, D.C. has one of the more unusual gambling landscapes in the United States. The District allows some forms of legal gambling, including sports betting, lottery products, charitable gaming, and certain regulated games of skill. At the same time, it does not have traditional commercial casinos, and online casino gambling is not regulated in the same way as online sports betting. That is why the answer to “is gambling legal in DC” is yes, but with important limits.

The confusion usually begins online. A person in the District may see sportsbook apps, sweepstakes casinos, lottery products, fantasy sports contests, and casino-style games on the same phone. They may all look like digital gambling, but D.C. gambling laws do not treat them as one category. Sports wagering has its own rules. Lottery games have their own structure. Casino games, sweepstakes promotions, and social gaming platforms operate under different models.

That changing online environment is also why simple digital game formats such as minesweeper gambling  have become part of the wider gaming conversation. Fast, mobile-friendly games appeal to players who want a direct experience without the clutter of a traditional casino lobby. Platforms such as Winna.com  reflect this shift toward simpler, crypto-friendly casino entertainment, though D.C. users should still understand that legality depends on the type of game, the platform, the player’s location, and whether the activity is authorized under the rules that apply.

For anyone in Washington, DC, the practical approach is to separate gambling into clear buckets. Legal sports betting is different from online casinos. Lottery games are different from sweepstakes casinos. Charitable gambling is different from sportsbook wagering. Once those categories are separated, the District’s rules become much easier to understand.

Legal Online Gaming Laws in the District of Columbia

D.C. permits legal online sports betting through licensed operators. This is the most important point for bettors. A sportsbook app can operate legally in the District only when it is properly approved and when the bettor is physically located within D.C. city limits.

That physical-location rule matters because the Washington metropolitan area crosses several legal boundaries. A person can be in Arlington, Alexandria, Bethesda, Silver Spring, or National Harbor and still feel close to Washington, but those places are outside the District. Maryland and Virginia have their own gambling laws, regulators, and sportsbook markets. D.C. sportsbook apps use geolocation technology to confirm whether a player is actually within the District before accepting a wager.

Online sports betting should not be confused with online casino gambling. A licensed sportsbook can accept sports wagers, but that does not mean it can offer real money online slots, roulette, blackjack, baccarat, or casino table games. The District has not created a full online casino market like some states have. In D.C., legal online sports betting exists, while real money online casinos remain a separate and more limited issue.

Readers who want to check the legal framework directly can review the official D.C. Code section on sports wagering , which explains how mobile wagering, licensing, location rules, age verification, responsible gambling information, and operator requirements are handled.

A Brief History of Gambling in D.C.

Gambling in D.C. developed more narrowly than in many states. The lottery became the most familiar legal gambling product, while charitable gaming and certain regulated activities operated under specific permissions. Unlike Nevada, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, or nearby Maryland, the District did not build a casino resort market with slot machines, poker rooms, roulette wheels, and table games.

Sports betting changed the conversation. After the national legal environment shifted, D.C. authorized sports wagering and built an early market around a lottery-connected mobile product. That model was different from states that immediately opened the door to several private sportsbooks competing across the market.

The District’s sports betting system has since moved toward more competition. More sportsbook brands have entered the discussion, and bettors now pay closer attention to app quality, pricing, promotions, customer experience, and ease of use. This is a major change from the early period, when the local market was more limited.

The result is a gambling market that feels modern in some ways and restricted in others. Sports bettors have legal options. Lottery players have familiar retail and digital access. Charitable gaming remains available under rules. But casino players do not have the same range of legal, regulated real money online casino options they would find in some other jurisdictions.

Legal Gambling in D.C.

Legal gambling in D.C. generally falls into several categories. The first is the lottery. DC Lottery products remain one of the most established forms of gambling in the District, including draw games, instant games, and related products.

The second is sports betting. Eligible bettors can place wagers through licensed sportsbooks, either online while physically located in the District or at approved retail sportsbook locations. Sports betting has become the most visible modern gambling option in D.C. because it connects directly to mobile apps and the city’s sports culture.

The third is charitable gambling. Certain nonprofit or charitable organizations may conduct approved gaming activities when they follow licensing and operating rules. This can include fundraising activities that use games or prizes, but organizations should not assume that every raffle, bingo event, or prize-based fundraiser is automatically allowed without review.

The fourth is regulated games of skill. D.C. has a framework for games that are treated differently from traditional casino gambling. These activities may appear in certain establishments, but they are not the same thing as a full commercial casino.

What D.C. does not have is a land-based commercial casino market. There are no Las Vegas-style casino resorts in the District, and casino gambling is not available in the same way it is in nearby Maryland.

Is Online Sports Betting Legal in Washington, D.C.

Yes, online sports betting is legal in Washington, D.C. when conducted through approved operators and when the bettor is physically located in the District. This is the clearest legal online gambling category in D.C.

To place a legal sports bet, a user generally needs to create an account with a licensed sportsbook, verify identity, confirm age eligibility, deposit funds through an approved payment method, and allow the app to verify location. Once those steps are complete, the bettor can place wagers on eligible sports and events.

Common sports betting markets include football, basketball, baseball, hockey, soccer, tennis, golf, mixed martial arts, boxing, motorsports, and major international competitions. Local interest often centers on the Washington Commanders, Washington Wizards, Washington Capitals, Washington Nationals, D.C. United, and major college sports events.

Wager types can include moneylines, point spreads, totals, futures, parlays, props, and live bets. Even experienced sports fans should slow down before confirming a wager. Betting odds, payout rules, cash-out features, and promotion terms can vary from one sportsbook to another.

Current Gambling Options Available in Washington D.C.

Current gambling options in Washington, DC include lottery games, legal sports betting, retail sportsbook locations, charitable gambling, games of skill, and certain social or sweepstakes-style gaming products. These options are not all regulated in the same way, and they do not offer the same player protections or legal status.

Sports betting is the most prominent modern option. D.C. bettors can use licensed sportsbook apps when located inside the District, and some retail betting locations operate in connection with sports venues or approved establishments. This gives sports fans several ways to place a wager without leaving the city.

Lottery gaming remains widely available through established retail channels and approved products. Many D.C. residents are more familiar with lottery games than sports betting because the lottery has been part of the local gambling environment for much longer.

Casino gaming is the area where expectations need to be managed. D.C. does not have a full casino industry with slot machines, roulette, blackjack tables, or online casino apps regulated like sportsbooks. Players looking for casino-style entertainment should understand the difference between a regulated sportsbook, a sweepstakes casino, a social casino, and a platform available under another jurisdiction’s rules.

Washington, DC Sports Betting Sites

The D.C. sportsbook market has changed significantly since the early launch period. Bettors now look for trusted sportsbook brands, reliable apps, competitive odds, clear promotions, and smooth payment options. The best sports betting app for one person may not be the best for another, because preferences differ.

Some bettors care most about live betting speed. Others want better parlay tools, more player props, stronger football markets, easy withdrawals, or a familiar interface. New users may value simple navigation and clear explanations more than advanced betting features.

A good sportsbook should make the basics easy. Users should be able to understand the odds, see the potential payout, review the rules, and confirm the wager without confusion. It should also provide visible account tools such as deposit limits, time limits, self-exclusion options, and responsible gambling resources.

Promotions can be useful, but they should never be the only reason to pick a sportsbook. Bonus bets, odds boosts, deposit offers, and parlay promotions often come with conditions. Bettors should read the terms before assuming that a promotion works like cash.

Key Regulations Governing the Gambling Industry in D.C.

D.C.’s gambling rules are built around licensing, oversight, geolocation, age verification, recordkeeping, responsible gambling, and operator compliance. Sportsbook operators must follow local requirements before accepting wagers from people in the District.

For mobile sports betting, geolocation is one of the most visible regulatory tools. A user may have an approved account, but the app still must confirm that the user is physically located inside D.C. before a wager can be placed. If the user crosses into Maryland or Virginia, the app may restrict access or redirect the player to a different market.

Age verification is another key requirement. Operators must confirm that users meet the applicable age rules before they can gamble. Identity checks also help prevent fraud, duplicate accounts, and unauthorized access.

Responsible gambling rules also matter. Legal operators are expected to provide tools and information that help users manage play. These can include deposit limits, time limits, cool-off periods, self-exclusion options, and links to support resources.

What’s Happening in DC Sports Betting Right Now

The biggest theme in D.C. sports betting is the shift toward a more competitive market. The District’s early sports wagering system was more limited, with fewer district-wide mobile choices. The newer structure has allowed more sportsbook competition, giving bettors more options and putting pressure on operators to improve their products.

For users, competition can bring better app design, broader betting markets, stronger promotions, and improved customer service. It can also make the market harder to navigate. More choices mean bettors need to compare platforms carefully instead of simply using the first app they recognize.

For the District, the policy balance is more complicated. Regulators must consider revenue, market access, consumer protection, responsible gambling, and compliance. A competitive market can be good for users, but only when operators are properly licensed and monitored.

This is why bettors should stay current. Sports betting availability, operator status, app features, and promotional rules can change. A platform that is available today may update its terms, add products, or adjust its market access later.

How DC Sports Betting Compares to Maryland and Virginia

D.C., Maryland, and Virginia all allow legal sports betting, but their markets are not identical. The biggest difference is geography. D.C. is a compact city jurisdiction, so physical location can change a bettor’s legal options very quickly.

A person near the border may be able to use one sportsbook while standing in D.C. and a different set of sportsbook apps after crossing into Maryland or Virginia. This is why geolocation is so important. The app is not just checking whether the user has an account; it is checking which jurisdiction’s rules apply at that moment.

The casino landscape is also different. Maryland has land-based casinos with slot machines and table games. Virginia has moved toward casino development in selected cities. D.C. does not have a traditional commercial casino market, so casino gambling discussions in the District tend to focus on whether future legislation could change the current framework.

For sports bettors, the practical takeaway is simple. Do not assume that an app available in Maryland or Virginia is automatically available in D.C., and do not assume that a D.C. sportsbook works outside city limits.

Online Casinos and Casino Games in D.C.

Online casinos are often misunderstood in D.C. because many people use “online gambling” as a catchall phrase. In law and regulation, however, sports betting and casino gambling are different categories.

A legal sportsbook app lets users bet on sports. It does not automatically create permission for online slots, blackjack, roulette, baccarat, poker, or live dealer casino games. D.C. has not launched a broad real money online casino market like states that have legalized iGaming.

This means users should be careful when they see casino-style platforms online. Some may be social casinos, where users play with virtual credits. Some may be sweepstakes casinos, where promotional entries and prize-redemption systems are used. Some may be platforms operating from outside the District. These models are not the same as D.C.-licensed sports betting.

For players interested in modern casino-original formats where permitted, Winna  offers a streamlined and mobile-friendly experience with simple game navigation. It fits the broader trend toward faster digital gaming, but users should always consider the rules that apply in their location.

Legal Sweepstakes Online Casinos in District of Columbia

Sweepstakes online casinos use a different model from traditional real money online casinos. They often involve virtual currencies, free-to-play credits, promotional sweepstakes entries, and prize-redemption mechanics. Because of this structure, they are usually discussed separately from sportsbook apps and real money casino platforms.

The appeal is easy to understand. Sweepstakes platforms can be accessible, simple to use, and familiar to people who like casino-style games. They may offer slots, table-game-style formats, or casual games without presenting themselves as standard real money casinos.

The challenge is that terms vary widely. Users should read eligibility rules, redemption policies, currency explanations, bonus terms, and location restrictions. A sweepstakes casino should not be treated as the same thing as a licensed D.C. sportsbook or a regulated online casino in a state with legal iGaming.

Are Offshore Online Casinos Legal in the District of Columbia

Offshore online casinos are another area where players should be cautious. A website may be accessible from D.C., but access does not automatically mean the site is licensed by District regulators or authorized under District of Columbia gambling laws.

This distinction is important. Legal availability is not the same as technical availability. A site can appear in search results, accept registration attempts, or advertise to U.S. users without being part of D.C.’s regulated gambling market.

The clearest legal path for D.C. bettors is to use approved local options for the gambling category they want. For sports betting, that means licensed operators that can legally accept wagers from people physically located within the District. For casino-style games, users need to understand that D.C. has not created the same kind of regulated real money online casino market that exists elsewhere.

Common Gambling Options in Washington, DC

Gambling option

D.C. status

Typical access

What players should know

Lottery games

Legal

DC Lottery products and retailers

Longstanding regulated option

Online sports betting

Legal through licensed operators

Mobile app or website inside D.C.

Geolocation is required

Retail sportsbook betting

Legal at approved locations

Sports venues or retail locations

Venue rules may apply

Charitable gambling

Legal with approval

Licensed charitable events

Organizations must follow rules

Games of skill

Regulated separately

Approved locations or operators

Not the same as casino gaming

Real money online casinos

Not broadly regulated like sportsbooks

No full D.C. iGaming market

Do not confuse with sports betting

Sweepstakes casinos

Separate promotional model

Online platforms

Terms and eligibility vary

Modern casino-original platforms

Available depending on location and rules

Online and mobile

Check platform terms and local requirements

Bonuses Available at DC Betting Sites

Sportsbook bonuses are common in legal betting markets. New users may see welcome offers, bonus bets, odds boosts, deposit matches, parlay insurance, profit boosts, and limited-time promotions tied to major games.

The headline offer is only part of the story. A bonus may include minimum deposit requirements, minimum odds, expiration dates, eligible markets, withdrawal restrictions, and location rules. Some bonus bets do not return the stake with winnings. Some promotions apply only to certain sports or bet types.

A smart bettor reads the terms before opting in. Promotions should be treated as extras, not as a reason to bet more than planned. If a bonus seems confusing, it is better to skip it than to place a wager without understanding the conditions.

Payments, Deposits, and Mobile Experience

Payment options vary by operator. Sportsbooks may offer debit cards, bank transfers, PayPal, prepaid cards, or other approved methods. Withdrawals can take different amounts of time depending on the method, verification status, and operator policies.

Before depositing, users should check minimum deposit amounts, withdrawal limits, processing times, and account verification requirements. A smooth deposit experience does not always mean withdrawals will be instant, so it is worth reviewing the payment section before opening an account.

Mobile experience is equally important. Since many D.C. bettors use phones, a good app should load quickly, display odds clearly, organize markets logically, and make bet confirmation simple. It should also make responsible gambling tools easy to find.

Charitable Gambling

Charitable gambling is legal in D.C. when conducted under the proper approvals. This can include certain fundraising activities run by eligible organizations, but the rules matter. A charity, nonprofit, or community group should not assume that any prize-based event is automatically allowed.

Licensing, event structure, recordkeeping, prize limits, and reporting requirements may apply. The safest approach for organizers is to review official guidance before planning raffles, bingo events, or other gaming-based fundraisers.

For players, charitable gambling is different from sportsbook betting or casino play. The purpose is usually fundraising, and the event must follow the rules that apply to the sponsoring organization and activity.

Problem Gambling and Responsible Play

Responsible gambling should be part of every betting discussion. Legal betting does not remove risk. Sports wagers, lottery games, casino-style games, and sweepstakes products can all become harmful if a person loses control of time or spending.

Practical habits help. Set a budget before playing. Decide how much time to spend. Do not chase losses. Avoid betting when stressed, angry, intoxicated, or under financial pressure. Treat gambling as entertainment, not income.

Users should also take advantage of account tools when available. Deposit limits, time reminders, cool-off periods, and self-exclusion options exist for a reason. If gambling stops feeling recreational, stepping away is the right move.

Gambling Winnings and Taxes

Gambling winnings can be taxable. This may include lottery prizes, sportsbook winnings, casino-style winnings, or other gambling income. Tax treatment can depend on the amount won, the type of gambling, the player’s residence, and other personal factors.

Players should keep records of deposits, withdrawals, wins, losses, account statements, and tax forms. Even when a platform does not automatically withhold taxes, winnings may still need to be reported.

This is not tax advice. Anyone with significant gambling activity should consult a qualified tax professional or official tax guidance.

Final Thoughts on Legal Betting Options in Washington, DC

So, is gambling legal in DC? Yes, but not in every form. Sports betting is legal through licensed operators. Lottery products are available. Charitable gambling can operate with proper approval. Games of skill have their own framework. But D.C. does not have traditional commercial casinos, and it does not currently offer a broad regulated real money online casino market.

For bettors, the most important rule is to match the activity to the legal category. Use licensed sportsbooks for sports betting. Check location rules before placing a wager. Read promotion terms carefully. Understand that casino-style platforms, sweepstakes casinos, and offshore sites are not the same as locally regulated sports betting.

D.C.’s gambling market will likely keep evolving, especially as sportsbook competition grows and online gaming habits change. The best approach is to stay informed, use approved options, and treat gambling as entertainment rather than a financial strategy.

DC Gambling FAQ

Is gambling legal in DC?

Yes. Gambling is legal in D.C. in specific forms, including lottery games, licensed sports betting, approved charitable gambling, and certain regulated games of skill. Traditional commercial casinos and broadly regulated real money online casinos are not available in the same way.

Is sports betting legal in Washington, D.C.?

Yes. Sports betting is legal in Washington, D.C. through licensed operators. Online wagers generally require the bettor to be physically located inside the District.

Does DC have online sports betting?

Yes. D.C. has online sports betting through approved sportsbook operators. Users must meet account, age, identity, and location requirements before placing wagers.

Can I use DraftKings in DC?

DraftKings availability depends on current market access and licensing status. Bettors should check the app and official D.C. information before trying to register or place a wager.

Is FanDuel legal in DC?

Yes. FanDuel has operated as a legal sports betting option in Washington, D.C. Eligible users must follow the platform’s rules and be located in an approved area when placing bets.

Does Washington, D.C. have a casino?

No. Washington, D.C. does not have a traditional commercial casino resort. Nearby jurisdictions may offer casino gaming, but D.C. itself has a different gambling structure.

Are online casinos legal in Washington, DC?

Real money online casinos are not regulated in D.C. the same way online sportsbooks are. Players should distinguish between sportsbook apps, sweepstakes casinos, social casinos, and other online gaming platforms.

Can you play daily fantasy sports in Washington, DC?

Daily fantasy sports are generally treated differently from traditional sports betting. Users should check current platform terms and local rules before entering contests.

How old do I have to be to bet on sports in Washington, D.C.?

Age requirements can vary by product, venue, and operator. Users should check the sportsbook’s current rules and any applicable venue policies before betting.

Are Washington, D.C. gambling winnings taxable?

Gambling winnings may be taxable at the federal and local level depending on the player’s situation. Bettors should keep records and consult a qualified tax professional for personal guidance.

Photo: Stefan Coders via Pexels

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The Operational Challenges Behind Large Public Fireworks Displays

Our Friends
Updated

Large public fireworks shows often appear seamless from the audience perspective. Crowds gather, music starts, lights dim, and coordinated fireworks fill the sky within carefully timed sequences that seem almost effortless once the event begins. Behind the scenes, however, these displays require extensive logistical planning involving transportation, setup, safety coordination, equipment testing, cleanup operations, and strict scheduling that begins long before the first firework launches.

Public fireworks events have become increasingly complex as audiences expect larger productions, tighter synchronization, and safer event environments. Organizers now manage not only the fireworks themselves but also crowd flow, weather monitoring, staging zones, emergency access routes, cleanup coordination, and technical infrastructure across large outdoor spaces. Even smaller municipal displays can involve significant operational pressure once preparation begins.

Timing and Coordination Require Extensive Preparation

One of the biggest challenges behind large fireworks events involves synchronization. Fireworks crews often spend hours testing launch positions, firing sequences, spacing distances, and communication systems before the public ever arrives on-site. Small timing errors can affect entire sections of a coordinated display once the show begins.

This is one reason professional setups increasingly rely on systems like the remote fireworks system , particularly during larger events where launch coordination must remain precise across multiple firing locations simultaneously. Organizers usually focus heavily on reducing manual timing pressure because public shows depend heavily on controlled sequencing once crowds are present.

Weather Conditions Can Reshape Entire Event Plans

Outdoor fireworks events remain heavily dependent on weather conditions. Wind direction, humidity, rain, dry conditions, and visibility all influence whether displays can proceed safely or require last-minute adjustments. Event teams often spend days monitoring forecasts while preparing backup plans in case conditions change unexpectedly.

Weather concerns also affect staging areas, electrical systems, audience access routes, and post-event cleanup operations. Even moderate rain can create difficult working conditions once heavy equipment, launch platforms, cables, and outdoor infrastructure are spread across large event grounds.

Cleanup Starts Long Before the Event Ends

Most attendees leave shortly after fireworks displays finish, but operational crews often continue working deep into the night. Firework debris, temporary fencing, staging materials, vendor waste, and crowd-related cleanup can take hours depending on the size of the event.

Large public spaces frequently require extensive surface cleaning afterward, especially in areas with heavy foot traffic, food vendors, or temporary installations. Event crews handling cleanup around launch zones, walkways, and outdoor staging areas sometimes rely on industrial pressure washing equipment  to restore heavily used surfaces after large crowds move through parks, parking lots, or public venues during major celebrations.

Transportation and Storage Add Additional Complexity

Photograph illustrating this sponsored article

Fireworks displays require careful transportation planning because equipment, launch systems, safety barriers, wiring, and pyrotechnic materials often arrive through tightly coordinated delivery schedules. Delays affecting even one shipment can complicate setup timelines significantly.

Storage also becomes an operational concern before and after events. Equipment must remain secure, protected from weather exposure, and organized in ways that allow crews to work efficiently during setup. Large displays frequently involve far more technical infrastructure than audiences realize while watching the final production.

Safety Planning Extends Beyond the Fireworks Themselves

Public fireworks events require coordination with security personnel, emergency responders, traffic management teams, and local authorities long before the show takes place. Crowd size, evacuation routes, fire prevention planning, and restricted access zones all become part of the operational process.

Event organizers now spend significant time planning around audience movement and public safety expectations in addition to pyrotechnic coordination itself. Even relatively short fireworks displays may involve full-day operational schedules for crews managing logistics behind the scenes.

Public Displays Depend on Behind-the-Scenes Precision

The most successful fireworks shows usually feel effortless because extensive preparation removed as many visible problems as possible before the audience arrived. Careful timing, organized equipment management, weather monitoring, and coordinated cleanup all contribute quietly to the overall experience.

While spectators focus mainly on the final display in the sky, large public fireworks events depend heavily on operational planning happening far outside the spotlight. Behind every major show is a large amount of technical coordination designed to keep the experience visually impressive, organized, and safe from beginning to end.

Photo by Leticia Golubov  on Unsplash

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Astronomy Picture of the Day

What's that passing in front of the Sun? What's that passing in front of the Sun?


Mike the Mad Biologist

Links 5/25/26

mikethemadbiologist
Updated

Links for you. Science:

‘Very contagious’ parvovirus swirling throughout Northern California
How Does It Spread? Answering this question is essential to public health, but people keep getting it wrong.
Dinosaurs had company in the dark: Amber fossil reveals an ancient glow that lit Cretaceous nights
Study highlights state-level differences in HPV vaccine uptake
Grant review homophily
A Single Infusion Could Suppress H.I.V. for Years, Study Suggests
How an ‘Impossible’ Idea Led to a Pancreatic Cancer Breakthrough

Other:

A Figure From Democrats’ Recent Past May Hold the Key to Beating Donald Trump
The Revolt Against the Girl Bosses Has Finally Come
Do Democratic Party leaders benefit from doomerism? (very good)
Antisemitic Hantavirus Conspiracy Theories Are Spreading—and the Platforms Are Hands Off
Democrats Need to Realize What Time It Is: On Conjuncture, Revolution, and the Next American Republic
You Made Your Ruling. Now Enforce It Yourself.
Parents of teens who break curfew in D.C. will be prosecuted, DOJ says. The Justice Department’s crackdown on crime comes ahead of 250th anniversary events in the nation’s capital.
Trump Already Has His ‘Get Out Of Jail Free’ Card. Now He Wants A ‘Get Out Of IRS Audits’ Card
A.I. Populism Is Here. And No One Is Ready.
The New York Times Got Caught Using AI Hallucinations in Its Reporting
Andreessen Horowitz Is Spending on Politics Like No Other
Government by Payback Squad
She Helped Plan Her Teen’s Abortion, So CPS Took Her Daughter Away. Child protective services is being used as an anti-abortion weapon in banned and pro-choice states
Republicans Will Do Liberal Things, But Conservatively
Alex Haley’s “Roots” to be removed from Knox County Schools libraries
Empty Waymos invade Atlanta neighborhood, circle cul-de-sac for hours with no passengers
Internet of Shit: AI Poop Analysis App Offered to Sell Me Database of Its Users’ Poops
Families caring for disabled relatives face unthinkable choices as Medicaid cuts loom
The progressive plan to reclaim the working class
In northern Ukraine, it was boy vs. Russian drone. The boy won.
The families going hungry because of Trump’s food stamp cuts
Trump’s $10 Billion Shakedown of IRS Takes Unnervingly Corrupt Turn
If Your Voters Can’t Vote, Your Messaging Is Irrelevant. Would you just fight, for fuck’s sake?
Trump touted Palantir on Truth Social after buying the company’s stock, records show
Black voter turnout soars amid GOP’s racist map-rigging
Labor leaders call collective bargaining veto a ‘betrayal’ by Virginia governor. Union leaders say veto from Democrat Abigail Spanberger is an about-face from promises she made on campaign trail
Trump Bought Corporations’ Stock as His Administration Boosted Their Business
Unauthorized ICE ‘wellness checks’ by police at Ohio schools draw outrage
Too Much Is Happening Too Fast. The AI boom is meant to overwhelm you.
A Cautious New Approach to Trump’s Impeachments at the Smithsonian

xkcd.com

Flag Design

Every place has a local cryptid; more places need a local Pictish Beast, a creature in historical art that's drawn so weirdly that no one can tell what animal it's supposed to be.
DCReport.org

The Everyday Health Products People Research More Carefully Than Before

Our Friends
Updated

Health and wellness products have become part of everyday life for many people, but consumers are noticeably more cautious about what they buy than they were several years ago. Instead of relying only on marketing claims or popular trends, people increasingly spend time reading ingredient labels, comparing product quality, checking reviews, and researching how products fit into long-term routines before making decisions. Studies and market reports show that consumers are becoming more proactive and selective about health-related purchases overall.

This shift is especially visible in products tied to food, hygiene, home cleanliness, and daily wellness habits. Many buyers now care as much about practicality, transparency, and ingredients as they do about convenience.

Food Choices Are Getting More Attention

One major area where people research more carefully is everyday nutrition. Consumers increasingly look beyond calorie counts and pay closer attention to ingredients, processing methods, additives, and how foods affect long-term health habits. Wellness researchers have noted that people are becoming more ingredient-aware and proactive about understanding what they consume regularly.

This has made highly specific diet questions much more common online. People exploring restrictive or structured eating styles often spend significant time researching exactly which foods fit within certain guidelines before changing their routines. Questions around foods that are allowed on carnivore diet  reflect how consumers increasingly want clarity and predictability around everyday eating habits instead of following vague wellness advice.

The broader trend suggests people are becoming more intentional about understanding what they eat daily rather than relying entirely on convenience.

Home Hygiene Products Are Facing More Scrutiny

Consumers are also paying much closer attention to products used around the home. Surface cleaners, sprays, wipes, air products, and sanitizing supplies are no longer viewed simply as generic household items by many buyers. Ingredient lists, scent intensity, environmental impact, and product safety now influence purchasing decisions much more heavily than before.

Research on wellness-focused consumer behavior shows growing demand for products perceived as cleaner, more transparent, and easier to integrate into long-term healthy routines.

This is especially noticeable with frequently used products like surface sanitizing wipes , where many households now compare materials, scent profiles, and overall product feel much more carefully instead of automatically buying the cheapest available option.

For many consumers, daily-use products now feel more connected to overall lifestyle choices than they did previously.

Ingredient Awareness Has Increased Across Categories

Bottles of supplements

Consumers today are far more likely to research ingredients before purchasing wellness-related products. Surveys and wellness reports show growing skepticism toward vague claims, heavily processed products, and unclear labeling practices.

People increasingly want to understand what products contain, how they are made, and whether health claims are supported realistically. This applies not only to food and supplements, but also skincare, cleaning products, hygiene items, and household wellness products used regularly throughout the week.

The shift reflects a broader move toward transparency and informed decision-making across everyday consumer behavior.

Wellness Habits Are Becoming More Routine-Based

Recent wellness research suggests that people are less interested in dramatic one-time solutions and more focused on products that fit naturally into sustainable routines. Consumers often stick with habits that feel practical, repeatable, and emotionally comfortable within everyday life.

As a result, buyers tend to research products more carefully when they expect to use them frequently. Small recurring purchases often receive more scrutiny now because consumers understand those products become part of long-term routines rather than occasional use only.

This applies equally to food choices, home cleaning products, hygiene supplies, and wellness-related household habits.

Consumers Are More Skeptical of Marketing Claims

The growth of wellness trends online has also made many people more cautious about exaggerated promises. Consumers increasingly compare reviews, look for outside opinions, and evaluate whether products realistically match their needs instead of trusting dramatic marketing language immediately.

This skepticism has pushed many companies toward clearer messaging, simpler ingredient lists, and more transparent product education because buyers now expect more information before committing to regular-use products.

People are still highly interested in wellness and health-related products, but they are approaching those purchases with far more research and scrutiny than they did during earlier trend-driven periods.

Everyday Products Now Feel More Connected to Long-Term Wellness

The biggest change may simply be how consumers think about ordinary purchases overall. Food, cleaning supplies, hygiene products, and home wellness items are increasingly viewed as part of broader lifestyle habits rather than isolated purchases made purely out of convenience.

Consumers are asking more questions, reading more labels, and comparing more carefully because many people now see everyday products as directly connected to how they feel physically and mentally over time. Smaller purchasing decisions have gradually become part of larger conversations around comfort, health, and long-term routine consistency.

Photo: Zoshua Colah via Unsplash

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Cruel Green Card Limits

Terry H. Schwadron
Updated

Trump’s New Green Card Policy Punishes Legal Immigrants Without Solving Anything

There is little question that the new Trump administration policy to require most foreigners seeking green cards to return to their home countries to wait endlessly is unnecessarily disruptive, cruel and based on anti-immigrant bias.

But the bigger question is this: What problem does this policy resolve exactly?

As described, the change in policy – the first in 60 years and apparently requiring no other administrative hurdle – will mean hundreds of thousands of immigrants following the strictest legal routes are suddenly being ordered out of the country to await word that may never come that their case finally has been reviewed.

Many will be forced to return to situations that are dangerous or that represent economic hardship, and it will mean more family separations, of course. But millions of Americans will be affected as well, since more than 70 percent of green card requests are from those with family already here or those whose love affairs or jobs have prompted their relocation.

Indeed, most recently, this order would have adversely affected our daughter-in-law, who has been here from Spain legally for five years with legal work permits until the system finally called up her naturalization processing and approved it.  Requiring that she return to Europe likely would have resulted in her husband, our son, moving to Spain rather than for her to continue working legally, paying taxes, contributing to U.S. interests.  There never was a question about her intent or about her ability to support herself or about following the rules.

The whole, complicated immigration process is meant to review records of individuals for criminal behavior or disqualifying behavior. This memo is a broadbrush approach towards simply wiping out even applying for permanent status.

So, again, what problem are we trying to solve, other than to spread the unending swell of distaste for illegal immigration – particularly  among non-White migrants – to legal immigration that the Trump administration insists that it supports.

Needless to say, Melania Trump was not forced to leave the U.S. for her permanent legal status to change.

The Explanations

The announcement that the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, USCIS, the agency that oversees the legal immigration system, suddenly would grant green cards to people inside the country only in “extraordinary circumstances” is shaking up legal immigration – and seems bound to prompt lawsuits and unwanted review.

Those applying for permanent residency, apparently including those cases already in process,  will have to go through consular processing from outside the country, according to the USCIS announcement.

A USCIS memo said, “When aliens apply from their home country, it reduces the need to find and remove those who decide to slip into the shadows and remain in the U.S. illegally after being denied residency.” Of course, those applying for green card status are known to the USCIS, having filed all the requited legal paperwork , including their addresses and phone numbers.

The effects will be seen in more split families, longer waits at underserved consulates abroad, and likely fewer green cards than the 1.4 million issued annually, including 820,000 from within the U.S. . – meaning that on a steady basis, the government found a million people a year as individuals eligible for this benefit..  Apart from all else, the State Department just fired another 250 consular staffers around the world, making the job of vetting green cards from overseas more difficult.

As The Washington Post notes, the new guidelines arrive as the Trump administration has sought to sharply restrict legal immigration pathways to the country. The administration’s ICE campaign against those here without proper documents has spilled over into cancellation of asylum programs, revocation of temporary protective status and more rigidly reduced immigration caps altogether. Under the changes in refugee policies, 6,300 White South Africans were allowed into the U.S. this year, and only three others.

Over 10 years, most who became legal permanent residents while in the U.S. were sponsored by a relative or an employer. There are various pathways to obtain green cards, permanent  legal residency and work permits one step short of naturalization.  People with temporary visas can apply to adjust their status if they are the spouse of a U.S. citizen, for example, as do more than 70 percent of applicants.

USCIS Director Joseph Edlow  has said that there could be exceptions to the new guidance for people in the United States on “dual intent” visas that allow them to pursue a permanent legal status while residing in the country temporarily.  But he wrote that “as a general matter the discretionary approval of such a request is extraordinary given Congress’s intent that aliens should depart once the purpose for which they sought parole or nonimmigrant admission from [the Department of Homeland Security] has been accomplished.”

Immigration advocates say that once people leave, it is unlikely that they will return – which may be the real point here. Information and past statistics on the distribution of green cards suggest that the Trump administration is looking well beyond the facts to pursue an anti-immigration ideology rather than processes to streamline or rationalize a complicated process.

“FREEDOM OF THE PRESS IS NOT JUST IMPORTANT TO DEMOCRACY, IT IS DEMOCRACY.” – Walter Cronkite. CLICK HERE to donate in support of our free and independent voice.

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The Honest Broker

What I'm Hearing from Readers

Ted Gioia
Updated

It’s painful to admit, but the comments emails from readers are sometimes better than my articles. So let me put aside my pride, and share some recent responses.

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Reader Jennifer Keishin Armstrong discovered that an AI bot wrote a biography of her life. Even worse, it made up stuff.

She provides more details in a scary article:

It states my birth year as 1975, which is close but three days off: I was born on Dec. 29, 1974. Then things get truly crazy. It names my mother as Michiko Armstrong, who taught Japanese language and culture at DePaul University, and my father as David Armstrong, a professor of English literature at Loyola University. It says I’m married to a man I met at Northwestern University and have two teenage sons. We move a lot for my job, it says, though it doesn’t say where we’ve lived. We did, however, apparently go to India so that I could research my book When Women Invented Television, which is about pioneers of American television who never go to India. In perhaps the standout moment of this narrative, one of my sons watched Sex and the City with me and shared his insight that Carrie is actually a hoarder, which I apparently put into my book Sex and the City and Us.

There is literally nothing correct in this entire previous paragraph. I cannot emphasize enough just how wrong all of this information is. And now it’s out in the world in a “meticulously researched” biography, stated with great confidence.

In response to my article on the disappearance of midlist books from major publishers, reader Stephen S. Power shared some inside information. He shows how a simple accounting change (borrowed from the Mafia!) destroyed opportunities for thousands of authors.

When I was a senior editor at Avon Books, we were bought by HarperCollins in 1999. The first change they made was to give us a new P&L to use. It was exactly like our old P&L with one thing added: a $20,000 skim for Harper from every book, regardless of sales projections.

It was pointed out to Harper that we were primarily a mass market publisher (they wanted us for our romances), and mass market worked because each month our list was set up like a baseball organization. You’d have 1-2 super lead titles and 3 general leads (the major league team), then genre leads (AAA), then increasingly smaller books in each genre (for example, Mystery 1, Mystery 2 and Mystery 3, your low minors). Ideally, you’d build an author from a genre title to a genre lead to an overall lead.

The best part of the system was that a book could save your month from any position; the leads might tank, but some book from Columbus would come up and sell 100K+ copies (looking at you, TV tie-in edition of Christy).

Charging each book $20K, like a mobster taking his cut out of a pot in an illegal poker game, would make it financially impossible to publish most of these books, most of which we didn’t pay anywhere near $20K for. I don’t think Harper cared.

Soon I didn’t either. Their second act was to lay me off. And now mass market publishing is basically dead.

Here’s an email I received from Brady Purcell, nephew of audio guru Denny Purcell, who did the mastering on 500 gold records:

I am writing to you from Richmond, Indiana, the birthplace of recorded jazz, and I hold the archive of my uncle, the mastering titan Denny Purcell. I am currently fighting to protect the integrity of the original 1989 Elvis digital masters, which are being systematically scrubbed from history by corporate algorithms.

The industry has spent over a decade pushing a “cleaned-up” 2015 narrative that is a complete fabrication. This isn’t a remastering choice; it is a technical fraud designed to sanitize the record and bury the original source.

I am in possession of the original 1989 Sony PCM-1630 working master. This tape holds the raw, physical reality of the sessions, including two distinct intros to “When Your Heartaches Begin”—a detail that has been erased in the current algorithmic version.

I have the evidence to prove the 2015 version is a lie:

The Extraction: After the tape was baked for 5 hours on April 2nd and April 3rd, I successfully extracted a bit-perfect clone of the original 1989 data.

The Verification: The data has independent mainstream verification with zero interpolations and exceptionally low CRCs. It is the raw, unadulterated source code of the Elvis sessions.

The Smoking Gun: The 1630 header data on the original master acts as an immutable technical fingerprint. When compared to the “official” 2015 digital release, the data discrepancy is absolute. The 2015 version is a scrubbed, hollowed-out substitute.

The Provenance: This is supported by the Shelby Singleton-verified materials. This is a direct, documented line of custody from the Purcell archive.

I have a detailed technical dossier available upon request.

I am being stonewalled by the institutions that should be safeguarding this history because they know this 1989 evidence exposes their 2015 narrative as a fraud. I am not looking for a payout; I am looking for the truth to be documented before the industry succeeds in permanently scrubbing the record.

I lack the technology acumen to judge this, but Brady says he has evidence to back up his claims.

A subscriber who wishes to remain anonymous alerted me to widespread impersonation of famous dead people on YouTube. This started when he found “more than 700 fake Richard Feynman videos uploaded within the last few month.”

He adds:

Thumbnails for these videos consistently show Feynman’s face and name while the small print says things like “Visual lip-syncing, narration, and edited footage are used solely to enhance clarity and engagement. There is no intent to impersonate, mislead, or imply direct involvement”.

I have no doubt there are many more. And now I have discovered the same thing happening with talks by the philosopher Alan Watts.

This is alarming. And the big web platforms don’t seem to care.

Screenshot of video
Is it Richard Feynman—or just AI slop?

Here’s an observation about the spread of AI music into public life from reader TekTok:

I heard my first AI jazz the other day. I was in a small Italian restaurant in NYC—no TVs. They usually have Frank Sinatra or Tony Bennett on as background music. When I walked in, the soundtrack was a jazz piano trio. Perfectly recorded. I couldn’t recognize the pianist. Not a note out of place, wonderful touch. Perhaps a previously unreleased Keith Jarrett recording? But even Keith Jarrett hits bad notes occasionally. Then I noticed that there was no change in dynamics. After about 2 minutes, I realized there was no cyclical chord structure—in other words, no song. The chords were quite hip and the bass player dutifully outlined them but there was no coherence.

Then it switched to a guitar trio, same deal. Impossibly perfect solo, no dynamics, chords going nowhere. At this point I started to feel anxious and told the bartender to change the channel or I would walk out. I don’t think anyone else in the room noticed or cared....

Reader Roland Ramanan pushes back on my opposition to AI, and asks me to specify the contexts in which I’d support it. I offered this brief answer (which I may expand in a future article):

I’ve been very clear about my support of AI if it meets three very reasonable demands: (1) TRANSPARENCY—let us know when it’s used; (2) LEGALITY—don’t train it on copyrighted work without the author’s approval; and (3) PERMISSION—don’t force people to use it unless they specifically opt in.

These are very modest requests, but it’s revealing that most of AI would disappear tomorrow if they were mandated. So the AI companies are stonewalling at every turn.

It’s pointless having more detailed discussions on AI use cases until we have these simple guardrails. Otherwise AI will be used to deceive, rob, and manipulate the general public—those are, in fact, the key use cases at present. I’ve described it elsewhere as “spamming, scamming, and shamming.”

Tech companies that promote these abuses should face consequences. What reasonable person could think otherwise?

Feel free to add your own words of wisdom in the comments.

Slashdot
Marginal Revolution

Monday assorted links

Tyler Cowen
Updated

1. Sampling DNA from animal skin parchments.

2. The making of Indian statistics.

3. What happens if your iPhone is stolen in London? (NYT)

4. Brazil school phone bans: “We then show that test scores, which were trending similarly in the two groups prior to the ban, improved by 0.06 s.d. in treatment schools relative to control.”

5. Travels in the Stans.

6. Modifying research paper formats using AI.

The post Monday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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AskThePilot.com

May 25, 2026.   Memorial Day.

Patrick
Updated

Monday, May 25th, is the anniversary of the deadliest plane crash ever on U.S. soil — the crash of American Airlines flight 191 at Chicago-O’Hare, in 1979. Design flaws and faulty maintenance practices led to the deaths of 273 people.

You can learn more about the accident in my 2024 post, here.

Details of the disaster are eerily similar to what befell UPS flight 2976 in Louisville this past November. Read about that one here.

 

Related Stories:

THE TRIBULATIONS OF THE DC-10
WHAT HAPPENED IN LOUISVILLE?

The post May 25, 2026.   Memorial Day. appeared first on AskThePilot.com.

Marginal Revolution

New Aesthetics awards

Tyler Cowen
Updated

Patrick Collison tweets:

Tyler and I just published a list of the recipients of the New Aesthetics grants: newaesthetics.art/grants.

Thank you very much to all who applied. There were far more applications than we expected. We funded 28 grantees and are excited to see what they create. My reflections on the whole thing:

• Though there are clearly selection dynamics afoot, figuring out some route beyond the current aesthetic moment seems to be of wider interest in the art community than I would have guessed. Many applicants described their dissatisfaction with the status quo, some in strong terms. We had to close applications after a few weeks because there were so many.

• It’s too early to call it, but it seems that both beauty as an unapologetic goal (contra much that is in modernist and contemporary approaches), and ways to channel pre-modern styles into something new for the present era, are of growing interest.

• The awards made me reflect on the perhaps obvious issue of how hard it must be for an artist to persistently do something new: schools, galleries, buyers, etc., all have structurally embedded preferences as well. These individual awards made me wonder what form supporting new clusters could take.

• Architecture seems to me like the discipline most ripe for new ideas. One correspondent observed: “American architects are somewhat constrained by the association with the academy, in addition to the well known regulation issues. There is a tendency to overthink things so that the designs are formally interesting to someone deep in the conversation, but lacking poetry and magic. There are more firms in Europe, South America and beyond that “just do things” (especially in places where it is easier to build).” This was evident in the submissions.

• AI seems to be making people rethink things in a quite fundamental way, just as urbanization/industrialization/popularization of photography did at the end of the 19th century. For some that will mean interesting new forms of AI-augmented art, but the effects of the rethinking will likely be wider.

• Arts funding is clearly as precarious and scarce as ever. That’s unfortunate, but it probably also means that individual actors can have meaningful impact, and I encourage others to get involved if interested.

• There’s a lot to know that is not written down, and I’m very grateful to those who have helped and advised me along the way.

I will offer thoughts of my own soon.  Here is our original call for proposals.

The post New Aesthetics awards appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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Noahpinion

Are you tired of the Trump era yet?

Noah Smith
Updated
Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

I get a lot of flak from progressives for being a “both sides” kind of commentator. I spend a fair amount of time criticizing leftist ideology and expounding on the very real failures of progressive governance, both of which have gotten much worse over the last decade. Yes, I support the Democrats, but that support is contingent — if their ideology and competence deteriorate to the point where the Republicans are less bad, I’ll switch to supporting the GOP. So it’s worth it to fight to halt and reverse the deterioration; in the long term, the cost of ignoring extremists and policy failures in order to have “no enemies on the left” is very high.

And yet right now, despite all of the negative trends on the left, the choice of which party Americans should support has never been clearer. The second Trump administration has unleashed a dizzying array of measures seemingly tailor-made to weaken the United States of America — sometimes at the behest of rightist extremists, sometimes due to Trump’s own mercurial whims, and sometimes in order to enrich Trump and his clique.

Sometimes it’s hard to keep track of everything Trump is doing to tear down the America I grew up in. In his first term, it was often said that he avoided criticism using a “DDOS” strategy — rhetorically attacking so many opponents at such blinding speed that they couldn’t focus on any one outrage for long. In his second term, the DDOS is actual policy; Trump inflicts real damage on such a broad array of U.S. institutions, with such incredible speed, that the news can’t keep track of them all.

To illustrate this, I decided to write a post about three mostly unrelated pieces of Trumpian insanity:

  • The assault on international tech industry employees and founders

  • The disastrous Iran War

  • Trump’s unprecedented corruption

Either the second or the third of these would have been a presidency-ending disaster for Barack Obama, George W. Bush, or Bill Clinton, while the first would have alienated broad swaths of the business community. But for Trump, it’s just business as usual. The stories crowd each other out of the headlines, and everyone just sort of gets overloaded and starts tuning out the news. Trump’s approval ratings drift slowly downward, but nothing else really happens. Hardcore MAGA supporters just keep screaming that everyone has “TDS”, while Trump’s wavering allies eventually manage to convince themselves that Democrats would be even worse.

But anyway, if you were paying attention, here’s the latest round of Trumpian disasters.

Trump kicks the tech industry where it hurts

A couple of days ago, without any warning, Donald Trump’s immigration agency announced a new rule. Foreign workers working in the U.S. on temporary visas, they announced, must now return to their home countries while applying for green cards — a process that can take years.

This rule would effectively kick most of the high-skilled visa workers in America out of the country. America’s typical pipeline of high-skilled immigration is basically “try before you buy” — people come to work on visas, then apply for permanent residency while in the country. This procedure is called Adjustment of Status. Almost all green card holders — except for investors — get their green cards this way:

Source: Congress via Connor O’Brien

The new policy would end this practice, thus shutting off the main avenue of high-skilled legal immigration to the United States.

There’s a good chance this new policy won’t stand up in court, since Congress explicitly passed a law specifying conditions under which people can be denied Adjustment of Status, so it may not be legal for Trump to simply issue a blanket ban. There’s also a chance that Trump’s allies in the “tech right” will frantically call his administration and get them to walk back the new policy.

The reason they’ll be trying to get him to walk it back is that if the new ban does go through, it will devastate much of the U.S. tech industry. The AI industry, which Trump promised to promote — and which is the only thing now keeping the U.S. economy afloat in the face of tariffs and the Iran War — depends crucially on researchers born outside the U.S.:

Source: MacroPolo

All of the biggest U.S. AI companies, and more than half of the top 50, were founded by immigrants, with India and China contributing the most:

Source: IFP

This general pattern holds throughout the entire tech industry. Almost half of unicorn founders are immigrants, with Indians being the biggest contingent:

Meanwhile, Indian immigrant CEOs have done an incredible job at a number of America’s biggest companies.

Who asked for some of America’s top economic and technological contributors to be expelled from the country? The “tech right” certainly didn’t; many of them met the announcement with dismay. Gil Verdon, a semiconductor company founder from Canada who had been a prominent and vocal Trump booster, expressed dismay at the fact that he might now be kicked out of the country:

The American people didn’t want this either. Polls consistently show that very large majorities of Americans across the political spectrum support high-skilled immigration:

Source: EIG

The only people who seemed to be happy with Trump’s new policy were anti-immigration activists on X — rightist types who see immigration as a race war, and want to ban it entirely. It seems highly likely that those online activists — or people who think very much like them — are driving at least a fraction of the administration’s policy.

It’s pretty clear how this happens. Perhaps even more than in the Democratic Party, the GOP is dominated by youngish staffers and think tankers. These people marinate all day in extremist online discourse, and form friendships with extreme right-wing activists who see immigration as a race war rather than as an economic matter or an important part of America’s heritage. Some rightist in the bowels of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services probably got the idea to ban Adjustment of Status and handed it to his higher-ups, who pushed through the policy without thinking too hard about the economic implications.

Welcome to the second Trump administration. If policy isn’t being made by the big man himself — who is growing increasingly erratic and corrupt in his old age — it’s being made by neo-Nazis on X. These are really the only people prepared to take over the MAGA movement once Trump shuffles off the scene, and their influence is growing as Trump’s acumen wanes.

That said, the big man himself still has a little bit of fire in him, and he still enjoys unprecedented support and devotion from his party. Unfortunately, he’s using his remaining vigor to do two main things: A) destroy America’s standing and power in the world, and B) abuse his office to enrich himself, his family, and his most ardent followers.

The Faux-Manchurian Candidate

Donald Trump was not a Manchurian Candidate, created in a secret Russian/Chinese lab to infiltrate and bring down the United States of America. Nor, I believe, is he personally in the pocket of Russian and/or Chinese interests, blackmailed and bribed into weakening his country at the bidding of overseas masters. But sometimes it’s very difficult to distinguish between Trump’s actual actions and what he would do if he were a foreign plant or catspaw.

That’s a very strong statement, but I’m not being hyperbolic for rhetorical effect — I think the facts back it up.

For example, take the war in Iran. Trump launched this war with no immediate provocation or casus belli — a simple opportunistic war of aggression that incinerated whatever shreds of goodwill remained towards the United States among much of the international community.

Trump then proceeded — so far, at least — to lose the war he started. Despite the preemptive strike, and America’s far greater technological capability, Iran reportedly retains most of its arsenal of weaponry:

US intelligence assessments show that Iran retains significant missile capabilities despite repeated claims by the Trump administration that Tehran’s military had been severely weakened, according to a report by The New York Times…The report said intelligence findings compiled in early May showed Iran had regained operational access to 30 of its 33 missile sites along the Strait of Hormuz. Officials familiar with the assessments told the newspaper that Iran still possesses roughly 70 percent of its prewar missile stockpile and mobile launchers…Citing reports from military intelligence agencies, the report stated that Iran has regained access to roughly 90 percent of its underground missile storage and launch facilities nationwide, which are now assessed to be “partially or fully operational.”

And:

Iran has already restarted some of its drone production during the six-week ceasefire that began in early April, one sign it is rapidly rebuilding certain military capabilities degraded by US-Israeli strikes, according to two sources familiar with US intelligence assessments. Four sources told CNN that US intelligence indicates Iran’s military is reconstituting much faster than initially estimated…The rebuilding of military capabilities, including replacing missile sites, launchers and production capacity for key weapons systems destroyed during the current conflict, means that Iran remains a significant threat to regional allies…It also calls into question claims about the extent to which US-Israeli strikes have degraded Iran’s military in the long term…

Iran has been able to rebuild much faster than expected due to a combination of factors, ranging from support it is receiving from Russia and China to the fact that the US and Israel did not inflict as much damage as the two countries had hoped, one of the sources told CNN.

America’s own stock of weapons, on the other hand, has been dangerously depleted in the conflict, and our defense-industrial base is not managing to rebuild them.

Even as the U.S. has failed to cripple Iran’s military, Iran’s military has succeeded in closing the Strait of Hormuz, sending gasoline prices soaring and causing a significant bump in inflation:

Incapable of defeating Iran on the battlefield, and increasingly wounded by Iran’s economic retaliation, Trump is pushing hard for any sort of face-saving deal that would allow him to exit the conflict quickly. Whatever deal Trump eventually cuts is going to leave Iran in a much stronger position — and American interests in the region — much weaker than before Trump launched his war. Here’s Robert Kagan:

Defeat for the United States, therefore, is not only possible but likely. Here is what defeat looks like.

Iran remains in control of the Strait of Hormuz. The common assumption that, one way or another, the strait will reopen when the crisis ends is unfounded. Iran has no interest in returning to the status quo ante…The power to close or control the flow of ships through the strait is greater and more immediate than the theoretical power of Iran’s nuclear program. This leverage will allow the leaders in Tehran to force nations to lift sanctions and normalize relations or face penalties…

The new status quo in the strait will also occasion a substantial shift in relative power and influence both regionally and globally. In the region, the United States will have proved itself a paper tiger, forcing the Gulf and other Arab states to accommodate Iran…All nations that depend on energy from the Gulf will have to work out their own arrangements with Iran. What choice will they have?…

The American defeat in the Gulf will have broader global ramifications as well. The whole world can see that just a few weeks of war with a second-rank power have reduced American weapons stocks to perilously low levels, with no quick remedy in sight.

This is all, of course, on top of Trump’s other geopolitical blunders:

  • alienating U.S. allies by threatening to invade Greenland

  • attempting to force Ukraine to accept an unfavorable peace settlement with Russia, even as Ukraine was turning the tide of battle

  • alienating India for no reason whatsoever

  • capitulating to China on Taiwan arms sales in exchange for nothing whatsoever

  • various other erratic behaviors that make America clearly less reliable of an ally

As I said, Trump is not a Russian/Chinese plant, but at this point it’s hard to imagine what else a Russian/Chinese plant would even do in order to weaken America’s international standing.

America is ruled by a mafia now

While Trump was losing a war he started, destroying the foundations of American power, and attacking the foundations of American technological dominance, he was also working feverishly to use the presidency to get even richer than he already is. Rolling Stone had a good article detailing the breathtaking scale of the corruption:

Let’s say it plainly: There has never been a president as corrupt as Donald Trump. There is no close second in our history…

Americans just found out that in the first quarter of this year, Trump’s stock portfolio made 3,600 trades — an average of nearly 60 a day…Many of these appear suspiciously timed to benefit from actions approved by the president himself. For example, his Nvidia stock surged after Trump announced the company would be permitted to sell its cutting-edge AI chips to China. Similar suspiciously well-timed calls were made ahead of big government moves involving other companies, from Intel to Palantir to Boeing…

But the apparent insider trading scam being run from within the Oval Office is small change…compared to the self-dealing plunder of $1.8 billion tax-payer dollars being pushed through the DOJ and IRS.

There’s never been a sitting president who sued his own government for $10 billion. That’s because it’s absurdly corrupt. But that’s what Donald Trump did, arguing he had suffered damages from prosecutions pursued before he was reelected…The judge who heard the case convened an independent panel to review the suit, suspecting it might be a scam. Before the case could be dismissed, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche — who had previously served as Trump’s personal lawyer — declared that the bogus suit would be preemptively settled, not for $10 billion, but for the symbolic sum of $1.776 billion, which Trump said will be distributed to…political allies.

This is a shakedown. The president is compelling a Justice Department he controls to redirect money from taxpayers — that’s you — to his most fervent supporters. This slush fund will set off a cash grab among MAGA lawyers and be used to reward partisan fanatics who attacked the U.S. Capitol — and police officers — on his behalf.

If that wasn’t enough of a blatantly illegal use of presidential power, it was revealed that the “settlement” deal included a pledge signed by the acting attorney general that would ensure — in the hysterical all caps of a Trump tweet — that the government would be “FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED from prosecuting or pursuing” any tax claims, audits or related prosecutions against Trump, his family or their businesses. This is an attempt to get a permanent get-out-of-jail-free card for the Trump family — a license to steal. [emphasis mine]

So basically, Trump:

  1. Uses the government to interfere with specific companies,

  2. Trades those companies’ stocks in advance, knowing how his own government interference will affect their prices,

  3. Sues his own government for billions and then orders his government to settle the lawsuit,

  4. Gives the billions of dollars of taxpayer money to his own activist thugs and cronies, and

  5. Has the government promise never to prosecute the Trump family.

Rolling Stone is absolutely right: Nothing in U.S. history even comes close to this level of corruption. Trump is simply using the powers of the presidency to extract billions of dollars from stock owners and taxpayers — i.e., from you and me — and to put that money into his own pocket. Compared to this, the famous Teapot Dome land scandal in the 1920s was nothing. The total amount of money involved in Teapot Dome — just a few million of today’s dollars after adjusting for inflation — was tiny compared to the billions Trump is looting.

Anyway, these are all stories just from the past few weeks. In the next few weeks it’ll be something else. This is the most absurdly terrible presidential administration America has ever had.

I know a lot of Americans — including some of my own readers — are still able to convince themselves that The Left Is Worse And Therefore We Must Continue To Support Trump No Matter What. Frankly, I don’t know how those guys do it. But I guess I can take some small solace in the fact that the number of people who think that way is slowly decreasing, as Trump’s parade of outrages and disasters marches on.

Source: Nate Silver

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Rands in Repose

The Ask

rands
Updated

Coffee in hand, I sit down in the Cave. Any Tuesday during the work week, a sip, and I parse the calendar.

1:1 — he’s fine. Status meeting — listen. Staff meeting — read the notes from last week. Exec review — figure out the biggest fire, have a defensible opinion. Wait — Mark Team Review? Who is Mark? And what are we reviewing? Double-click on the meeting — unfamiliar names. No agenda. AND IT’S AN HOUR? I message my Chief of Staff, who is familiar with this morning meeting vetting process. Carolyn responds immediately, “No clue. They run one of the infrastructure teams. We’ve never worked with them.”

AN HOUR. And I have no idea what is happening during this time. My finger hovers over the Decline button when I remember that part of my job involves infrequent but important meetings.

In your regular 1:1s, you’ve sorted out how to communicate. He’s an introvert, and I must pull him out of his shell. She’s operationally focused — which is great — but we must move to strategy and stop crossing things off lists. Your approach is well-known and expected. This is a good 1:1. It’s high-signal, predictable, and a worthy investment. In the infrequent but important meeting, you have no such contract.

But you still go.

Three Assumptions, Three Meetings, Three Asks

Let’s start with three assumptions as you sit down and get comfortable:

  1. There is a good reason that this meeting exists.
  2. There is a good reason that you are in this meeting. You are not a meeting accessory. You are expected to do something because of your attendance. In senior leadership circles, we call this “The Ask.” Someone in this room has an ask specifically for you.
  3. This meeting has a human capable of making sure this ask is delivered. Heads up: this might be you. Stay tuned.

The Promotion Conversation

Let’s start with an easy one. An individual on your team you never meet with schedules thirty minutes. If trust is high, someone (probably their manager) has already given you context (“She’s new and wants to get to know the team”), but let’s assume you have no heads-up. Just thirty minutes and a name.

It’s not the point of this chapter, but the arrival of this mystery is always good news. I mean, they might be quitting, but the fact that you are involved in that possible disaster is good news — you’ll have a chance to react. These meetings are infrequent and vitally important.

Ok, not quitting, but nervous. They keep saying, “I know you’re busy,” and you keep saying, “My job is the team, and that’s you.” Nice job, slick, but what is the good reason? What’s the ask? And who is going to make this happen?

For this meeting, you are the person who needs to get to the ask. No one told you what’s coming, so even though they proactively got time on your calendar and they’ve been chit-chatting for ten minutes trying to connect, what’s the ask?

It’s a simple question, and I’ve used it thousands of times: “How can I help?”

“I’m wondering how you got started as a manager and…” The Ask: I want to become a manager.

“I’ve been working really hard and…” The Ask: I want more compensation.

“Well, I heard it’s important as part of the promotion process to get visibility with your Director…” The Ask: I want someone to finally explain how the promotion process works.

Those are three. There are many more, but the initial point is not the ask; the point is to be the human who wants to help. Leadership, especially senior leadership, gives off this air of otherness, of being busy, of having access to information that others do not. While some of this might be true, in this meeting, you are simply there to help.

The We-Need-You-(Your Team)-For-Something-Only-You-Can-Do-(And We’re Not Quite Sure How This All Works)-Meeting

Harder now. Again, it’d be super if someone took the time to tell you what was going down in this meeting, but as we’ll discover shortly, this miss is part of a larger problem. Larger meeting, more people. The other privilege (curse) of senior leadership is that teams meeting you for the first time spend a lot of time fretting about how to present to you. They ask your managers, “How does she like to be presented to? What questions is she going to ask?” The end result for this meeting is a lot of formality — they want to set the table… just so.

Hour meeting, and we’re twenty minutes in, and it’s all still preamble. It’s an unfamiliar team, and you’ve never worked with them before, so much of this is irrelevant, but a senior leader’s job is the constant gathering of intelligence, so, yeah, you know who many of the folks are and what they build. You knew a lot of this before you met, right?

The core issue in this meeting is one of culture. This team doesn’t know how your team works, builds, or plans, so they are laying it thick. They have an ask, but the issue isn’t figuring out what they want to build; it’s explaining how you can build with them.

It would’ve been great if a program manager, project manager, or other operationally minded human had intercepted this meeting, but they didn’t, so it’s you. You need to explain:

  • How your team builds plans, where you are in the current planning cycle, and when the next planning cycle kicks off.
  • How you and your leadership allocate your precious humans during this cycle — how the hard decisions about what is built are made.
  • How you have historically worked with new teams. What’s worked and what has not.

If this information feels remedial, just imagine how this team feels. You and your team are accountable for an important bit of software or infrastructure that is required by this other team. The problem is, for reasons that should be addressed, you and your team are a black box, so now you’re in this meeting.

Five minutes to go, and heads are nodding, and there is a path forward. My hard-earned advice:

  • You might not get to The Ask. That’s ok. There needs to be another meeting.
  • If you get to The Ask, never say yes. All those good feelings and nodding mean the room is communicating; they don’t mean their Ask is good or aligns with your strategy. That’s the next meeting.

The Shared Fate Meeting

This one is non-obvious, and to understand it, I need to tell you a story. Back at the fruit company, my boss told me, “And don’t forget to meet with Rachel. You’re going to be building with her at some point. Good person to know.”

Of course. First ninety days? Meeting with everyone is my jam, so I meet with Rachel. Smart, a culture carrier, a great conversation. Let’s meet again. We do. And then again. However, after three meetings, my assessment is that we aren’t going to be building anything for years.

I moved my Rachel meetings to my dangerous bucket of nice-to-haves, which means they are the first thing to drop when work gets spicy. Which is always.

My impression is Rachel received the same guidance about the necessity of meeting me, so when I started to reschedule frequently, she Slacked me and gave me a gentle reminder, “Shouldn’t we be meeting?” Of course. Looking forward to it. We don’t.

Almost two years later, during my performance review, my boss informs me that Rachel’s boss is disappointed that we stopped meeting… because we did. We weren’t building anything together, and I was busy with the work ahead of me. My boss, this is a career-limiting move.

A senior leader’s job isn’t just the constant gathering of intelligence; it’s playing the long game. I resume my fortnightly 1:1 with Rachel. Still a good human, culture carrier, and, again, every conversation was valuable. A year after our regular meetings resumed, we randomly discovered two planned programs happening on opposite sides of the company that were about to collide head-on. After a few more meetings, we compared notes and built a joint proposal, making the other proposals irrelevant (those teams did not want to do the work anyway) by asking our teams to work together on the effort.

My boss, after reviewing the proposal, commented, “See?”

See what? Three years ago, two SVPs had a feeling that Team Rands and Team Rachel would accidentally stumble upon a possible huge waste of work performed by unwilling teams who would prefer we didn’t do it?

That’s ridiculous.

It’s Not Ridiculous

I am going to write something, and if you’re a full-time engineer who has never worked as a leader of people, you’re going to be mad. Much of the work of senior leadership is feeling and instinct. You were right to be suspicious. What was The Ask for the Rachel meeting? It wasn’t the eventual joint proposal. The Ask was “Our feeling is these teams need to work closely together — please figure out why.”

My working life would be much easier if the decisions were all well defined and supported by a rich set of verifiable data, but more than I want to admit:

  • I’m staring at a random 1:1 and sitting in a meeting with no agenda, and I’m listening to my gut: What is really going on here?
  • I’m attempting to solve what appears to be a vast, impossible problem and intuit, “You know, Parker and David… they’ll know how to tackle this.” I can’t really explain why.
  • Sitting on my bike, riding to work, the idea will just pop into my head, “Monday. First thing. You’re going to say this ridiculous thing to this person because that’s going to force them to see the situation differently.”

But it’s not guessing. Those feelings came from experiences I’ve had over and over. That instinct has been built by endless trial and error. That meeting? The one with a bad title, but those two attendees I keep hearing about? I should probably go and figure out The Ask.

The Aviationist
Market Design

French nicotine pouch ban is ‘attack on Swedish way of life’

Al Roth
Updated

 Is Swedish nicotine like French wine?

The FT has the story:

"French nicotine pouch ban is ‘attack on Swedish way of life’, minister says. Stockholm smoulders over France’s ‘absurd’ penalties of up to five years in prison for cigarette alternatives, by Mari Novik in Strasbourg and Sarah White in Paris

 "A Swedish minister has accused France of mounting “an attack on the Swedish way of living” with its ban on nicotine pouches, setting aflame a single market fight over how governments should regulate smoke-free alternatives to tobacco.

"France last month implemented one of Europe’s strictest bans on the pouches, a flavoured sachet that users tuck under their lip to release nicotine.

"France’s decree goes beyond other EU countries’ prohibitions by banning not just sales but import, possession and use of the pouches. A Swede carrying a tin of pouches legally bought at home could face French penalties of up to five years in prison and a €375,000 fine.
 

“It is as if we would prohibit French baguettes or French wine in Sweden,” Swedish trade minister Benjamin Dousa told the FT. “It is absurd.”

#########

Earlier:

Tuesday, May 19, 2026  WHO reports on the global growth of nicotine pouches

Marginal Revolution

Campo Grande bleg, Brazil

Tyler Cowen
Updated

Soon I will be there, in Mato Grosso do Sul, wishing to observe the foundations of Brazil’s burgeoning agricultural export economy, among other reasons.  So what should I do, where should I go, and what should I eat?

The post Campo Grande bleg, Brazil appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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Daring Fireball

Why Steve Kerr Stayed With the Warriors

John Gruber
Updated

Terrific, poignant profile of Warriors head coach Steve Kerr by Wright Thompson for ESPN:

Kerr doesn’t want the Warriors to end up like the New England Patriots, marred by grudges and grievances. He watched Michael Jordan retire, then unretire, then retire, then unretire. His friends used to grill him about MJ.

“Why doesn’t he go out on top?”

“Because he can’t,” Kerr told them.

For the past few years, Kerr has watched his mentor, San Antonio Spurs coach Gregg Popovich, struggle through this same decision. Pop once called Steve to tell him he’d finally decided to retire. Steve congratulated him on a Hall of Fame career. A week later Pop signed an extension with San Antonio. Popovich finally officially quit six weeks before our lunch, six months after a stroke diminished him physically. People who loved him had to show him the door, as gently as possible. That hurt Steve. He respects Popovich so much. He loved playing for him and coaching with him. He once told Gregg he was the finest man he’d ever known and thanked him for all he’d done for him. Pop smiled and said his feet were made of clay like everyone else’s. Steve didn’t believe it then. Now he does.

“I realized he couldn’t do it,” Kerr said. “He couldn’t walk away.”

I asked how he’d avoided the trap. He laughed.

“I’m sitting here wondering,” he said.

It sounds so easy to go out on top. But it very seldom happens.

 ★ 
Aeon | a world of ideas

This is my island

Aeon Video
Updated

Photo of three people in a rural coastal landscape. A woman focuses in the foreground with a man and child behind.

Life on this small, off-the-grid island offers closeness to land and community for those willing, and able, to work for it

- by Aeon Video

Watch on Aeon

Aeon | a world of ideas

Can ecosystems malfunction?

John Drake
Updated

Photo of a lush green rainforest covered in mist with distant hills under a cloudy sky.

We are told the natural world is ‘breaking down’. But forests don’t work like airplanes or human hearts

- by John Drake

Read on Aeon

Simon Willison's Weblog

Quoting Armin Ronacher

The most frustrating failure mode right now is that people submit issues that are not in their own voice. They contain an observed problem somewhere, but it has been thrown into a clanker and the clanker reworded it and made a huge mess of it. Typically, it was prompted so badly that the conclusions produced are more often than not inaccurate but always full of confidence. The result is complete guesswork on root causes, fake-minimal repros, suggested implementation strategies, analogies to adjacent but often the wrong code, and long lists of error classes that might or might not matter. [...]

So at least personally, I increasingly want issue reports to be condensed to what the human actually observed:

  1. I ran this command.
  2. I expected this to happen.
  3. This happened instead.
  4. Here is the exact error or log.

— Armin Ronacher, on slop issues filed against Pi

Tags: ai, github-issues, llms, ai-ethics, open-source, coding-agents, generative-ai, armin-ronacher, pi, slop

Simon Willison's Weblog

Mad House — Usborne Creepy Computer Games

Tool: Mad House — Usborne Creepy Computer Games

Via Hacker News I learned that UK publisher Usborne published free PDFs of their 1980s Computer Books, some of which I remember working through on my Commodore 64 as a child.

These were so great! Beautifully illustrated books with fun projects made up of code you could type into your own machine.

I remember playing "Mad House" typed in from the 1983 book "Creepy Computer Games", so I fed that PDF into Claude and had it build an interactive version of that game in JavaScript and HTML:

Build a vanilla JS artifact that exactly recreates the game Mad House from this book, make sure it's mobile friendly and has a suitable retro aesthetic

Credit the book title and link to https://usborne.com/us/books/computer-and-coding-books

Screenshot of a retro green-on-black terminal-style game interface titled "MAD HOUSE — A REAL NIGHTMARE —" with a REC indicator, FOOTSTEPS 240, DOORS counter, three rows of ASCII corridors made of asterisks with ">" and "<" door markers, "PRESS START TO BEGIN" text, NEAR DOOR controls (X and C) and FAR DOOR controls (N and M), and a "▶ START / RESTART" button at the bottom.

Tags: computer-history, games, tools

The Truth OC: Because it's time to fight back.

A Playlist For Interesting Times

Jeff Pearlman
Updated

This is a guest post from Jerry Rocha, a stand-up comedian and new local. You can follow him on Instagram here.

I was recently back in the City of Hope hospital for what ended up being a thankfully short stay. It still sucked to get an infection that went all sepsis, but a week in the healing tank as opposed to my previous record of 54 days was wonderful.

While on the inside, my fiancée did me a solid and brought me some Thai food for a dinner. As I was finishing the fortune cookie, I read the slip of paper inside ...

“You Will Always Live in Interesting Times”

What the shit is this?

What a fucking threat. No lotto numbers either.

We are in interesting times. We are neck high in interesting times type shit. We’ve had enough of interesting times. This needs to get very uninteresting very quick.

Did I curse us all by getting that fortune?

Was that some Groundhog’s Day bullshit that meant six more months of Trump?

Whatever the case, I put together a playlist of songs that will hopefully help us feel better while we are in the midst of this anti-MAGA fight together.

I hope you enjoy the playlist and jam out to it on your time …

1. Biz Markie- Just a Friend

This is one of those songs where it’s impossible to be in a sour mood when it’s playing. I loved this song as much now as I did when I overplayed it as a kid. It’s instant fun from the late, great Biz Markie. If the doctor had played this song in the background when he told me I had stage IV cancer, the news would have been so much easier to take. Your mechanic should play this in the background right before he hoses you for new steering fluid. This song makes anything bad good.

2. Gary Puckett & The Union Gap- Young Girl

Okay, now let’s go right for the throat. No question this song was playing on the way to Epstein Island like Long Tall Sally was playing on the helicopter in Predator. It’s the ultimate Trump song. The guy is having an affair with an underaged girl and he’s blaming her for it?! I’m stunned Trump doesn’t walk out to this song any time he’s formally addressing anyone.

3. Sly & The Family Stone- Everyday People

Not only are we dealing with one of the baddest grooves of all time, but the lyrics will always be relevant. This song should be played at the start of every school day, work day, you name it. We, for some fucked-up reason, need to be reminded that we should be in this together. I’m not saying to hug that racial slur-spewing uncle of yours, but maybe try to peacefully explain how wrong he is with that groove …

4. Rage Against the Machine- Killing in the Name

For when that uncle won’t listen, calmly go to your car, fire this up and realize we’ve been in this fight back before MAGA had a name. Ask any progressive who lived in the 1960s. They will tell you the same. But what matters is knowing that the fight isn’t over and we aren’t anywhere close to giving in, so bang your head. This one could have also been We’re Not Gonna Take It by Twisted Sister. That would have been the safer choice in case a grandparent walks in, but hey, maybe they would be fed up enough as well to join you screaming “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me!”

5. A Tribe Called Quest- We the People…

Tribe sent up the red alert the second this MAGA shit started its mad grab for power. If you heard this when it came out, nothing in the Project 2025 manifesto would have surprised you. Nothing. Thankfully, Tribe wrapped their message in one of the best hip hop records of all time.

6. Los Lobos- Revolution

This is a gem from one of the most criminally underrated bands on the planet. Go see them live. I mean it. The song is from the perspective of an activist who is has seen the fight take everything from him, and now he’s grown tired. It’s a song that shows just how taxing going up against an administration of dipshits can be, but let’s hope we never grow tired of stepping in that ring. Also, it’s got a helluva bass line holding it all down.

7. Gloria Gaynor- I Will Survive

We all need to hear this song at least once a day. Even if MAGA never existed, this song should be played every morning. It should replace the pledge of allegiance in schools. Now, I haven’t been to a school in decades so I have no idea if they still have to pledge allegiance every morning. I went to grade school in Texas and from my experiences there, I’m sure they still do. Shit, I started grade school in 1981 and I think my school was like two years removed from saying the Confederate pledge of allegiance. Anyway, there is no better song to tell whatever ails you to fuck off, so of course it belongs (Also, it definitely sucks Gaynor is a Trump supporter. But I’m choosing to believe she’s just painfully dumb)

8. Kool & The Gang- Celebrate

Let’s just call the shot here and put this song on the mix. The moment IT happens (it being the second our pedo president is no longer in office), this will be the most downloaded song in history. I’m just saying, it would not hurt to get stock in Kool & The Gang as soon as possible.

9. Bad Bunny- BAILE INoLVIDABLE

Of course, we continue the Super Bowl halftime show victory lap by putting an absolute killer of a Bad Bunny song on here. Crank this shit every time you pull up at the grocery store, and if anyone asks “what’s he saying?” tell them he’s talking about the Kid Rock and Jesse Watters grindr accounts.

10. En Vouge- My Lovin’ (You’re Never Gonna Get It)

If you happen to be a Caucasian with blonde hair, blue eyes, are financially very well off and aren’t MAGA, then this needs to be your mantra every time you are at a workout class next to someone trying to turn you. Play this jam and focus on the message. They will never get your lovin’. The rest of us will be singing along having your back.

11. Public Enemy- Don’t Believe the Hype

Now that Trump has done all he can to make sure every mainstream news broadcast has a story about how big his penis is and how tight of a spiral he can throw, we need to fight the hype more than ever. The absolute balls on him to call out “fake news” when he is the ground zero source of all the fake news out there. “False media, we don’t need it do we?” Not at all.

12. Neil Young- Rockin’ in the Free World

I mean, of course this good shit was gonna be on here. I was humming this song as I was picking all the others for this playlist. If anyone is making a playlist to listen to while rebelling against fascists, then this song should be the free spot given in the middle of a BINGO card. It was famously a massive “fuck you” to the first Bush administration and since this administration is even worse, we play this song even louder. “Don’t feel like Satan, but to them I am. So I try to forget it anyway I can.” Safe to say that one line is miles beyond any bullshit Lee Greenwood has written.

•••

I hope you all enjoy this mix. I was tempted to toss in Short Dick Man by 20 Fingers and Gillette, but that could be for a mix to play after these fucks get shown the door.

Let’s make sure we show them the door.

Letters from an American

May 24, 2026

Heather Cox Richardson
Updated

For a while now, I’ve been hinting that my team was up to something. And tonight, at last, I have an announcement.

Last August, during one of my Politics Chat webcasts, at a time when those trying to impose white nationalism, Christian nationalism, or authoritarianism on our country insisted they were embracing American values, I urged people instead to see those who care about the preservation of democracy and who have worked to expand its values as the people who truly represent America.

That idea appealed strongly, apparently, to the two young women we had recently hired to manage my social media accounts and to produce the historical videos we’ve been putting up. As we kicked around ideas for our own celebration of the nation’s 250th anniversary, they kept coming back to the idea from that Politics Chat: that “we…are America.”

So, to honor the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, we decided to launch a series of one-minute videos that highlight the people, places, and events that have helped to move us toward a more perfect Union.

We designed the videos to emphasize the agency of Americans—mostly everyday Americans—to change the country. Each falls into a category that defines what it means to be an American, including community, democracy, innovation, mobility, civil rights, education, conservation, and creativity.

When we floated the plan, lots of wonderful people all over the country understood the idea immediately and jumped in to help, suggesting topics, writing scripts, offering images, narrating.

We’re launching the project tomorrow with the stories of the Battles of Lexington and Concord, narrated by Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey; the Women’s Armed Services Integration Act, narrated by Representative Chrissy Houlahan of Pennsylvania; the Constitutional Convention (I narrated that one); Ruben Salazar, narrated by journalist Sylvia Salazar; Yellowstone, narrated by former senator Jon Tester of Montana; the AIDS Quilt, narrated by originator Cleve Jones; the Acadians, narrated by historian Jason Herbert; the Erie Canal, narrated by former secretary of transportation Pete Buttigieg; John Peter Zenger and the First Amendment, narrated by journalist Jelani Cobb; the Charter Oak, narrated by Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut; Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, narrated by Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland; and the story of actress and dancer Rita Moreno, narrated by Academy Award winner Ariana DeBose.

For the next several weeks, we will be telling these stories and hundreds more. We hope that you will share them widely to flood social media with the real story of how Americans have always worked, often against seemingly insurmountable odds, to create a more perfect Union.

What has made America great has always been the American people.

Now, as for the past 250 years, “We Are America.”

—

Notes:

Follow Along | #WeAreAmerica250

Substack | YouTube | Facebook | Instagram | TikTok | Bluesky | Threads

Bluesky:

hcrichardson.bsky.social/post/3lws6bsvv6k2v

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Letters from an American

Memorial Day

Heather Cox Richardson
Updated

Paul Krugman

Curing US Healthcare, Part III: The Future

Paul Krugman
Updated

US health care reform: Why there are no easy fixes

The United States, uniquely among advanced nations, fails to guarantee healthcare to all its citizens. Partly as a result, it has worse health outcomes than comparable countries, including substantially lower life expectancy. Perversely, the U.S. delivers these poor results while spending much more per person on healthcare than anyone else.

U.S. healthcare performance improved in terms of both coverage and cost after the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, was enacted in 2010 and went into full effect in 2014. But much of what was achieved during the Obama and Biden administrations is now being unraveled by Trump II.

Today’s primer is the third and final in a series. Part I laid out the basics of healthcare policy, why universal healthcare is a desirable objective, and why some type of government intervention is essential to achieve it. Part II described how and why the U.S. adopted Obamacare and the ongoing Republican assault on its successes. In today’s primer I will discuss a possible path forward. That is, basically, what Democrats can and should try to achieve if they have unified control of the government after the 2028 election.

Beyond the paywall I will address the following:

1. U.S. healthcare in international perspective

2. What kind of system is workable in America?

3. The changing political economy of American healthcare reform

4. The path forward

Read more

Simon Willison's Weblog

datasette 1.0a30

Release: datasette 1.0a30

The big new feature in this alpha is a new customizable "Jump to..." menu, described in detail in The extensible "Jump to" menu in Datasette 1.0a30 on the Datasette blog. You can try it out by hitting / on latest.datasette.io - it looks like this:

Animated demo - the Jump to menu appears, and as the user types it filters to specific databases and tables and debug options

The new jump_items_sql() plugin hook allows plugins to add their own items to the set that's searched by the plugin.

Tags: projects, datasette, annotated-release-notes

Simon Willison's Weblog

datasette-agent 0.1a4

Release: datasette-agent 0.1a4

Taking advantage of the new makeJumpSections() JavaScript plugin hook added in Datasette 1.0a30, datasette-agent now presents this "Start a new agent chat" interface as part of the Jump to menu, any time you hit /:

Animated demo - this time the demo starts on agent.datasette.io and when the menu opens it has a new Start chat box below the search box - entering 'count entries' and hitting the button causes it to start an agent conversation that counts the number of entries and returns 3300.

You can try this out by signing into agent.datasette.io using your GitHub account.

Tags: datasette, datasette-agent

Simon Willison's Weblog

datasette-fixtures 0.1a0

Release: datasette-fixtures 0.1a0

One of the smaller features in Datasette 1.0a30 is this:

New documented datasette.fixtures.populate_fixture_database(conn) helper for creating the fixture database tables used by Datasette's own tests, intended for plugin test suites.

This new plugin takes advantage of that API. You can try it out using uvx without even installing Datasette like this:

uvx --prerelease=allow \
  --with datasette-fixtures datasette \
  --get /fixtures/roadside_attractions.json

Which outputs:

{
  "ok": true,
  "next": null,
  "rows": [
    {"pk": 1, "name": "The Mystery Spot", "address": "465 Mystery Spot Road, Santa Cruz, CA 95065", "url": "https://www.mysteryspot.com/", "latitude": 37.0167, "longitude": -122.0024},
    {"pk": 2, "name": "Winchester Mystery House", "address": "525 South Winchester Boulevard, San Jose, CA 95128", "url": "https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/", "latitude": 37.3184, "longitude": -121.9511},
    {"pk": 3, "name": "Burlingame Museum of PEZ Memorabilia", "address": "214 California Drive, Burlingame, CA 94010", "url": null, "latitude": 37.5793, "longitude": -122.3442},
    {"pk": 4, "name": "Bigfoot Discovery Museum", "address": "5497 Highway 9, Felton, CA 95018", "url": "https://www.bigfootdiscoveryproject.com/", "latitude": 37.0414, "longitude": -122.0725}
  ],
  "truncated": false
}

Tags: datasette, uv

Marginal Revolution

The carousel trade (arbitrage)

Tyler Cowen
Updated

Imagine two companies which are secretly controlled by the same people. If company A imported some phones, then sold them to company B, it charged VAT on the deal. If company B then exported the phones, it reclaimed — from the government — the VAT it had paid to company A. the integrity of the VAT system depends on the two totals balancing out. The money that A pays in is equl to the money that B takes back. The scam lay in A disappearing and not handing over the money it owed, but B till claiming it. The hidden owners of the two firms therefore earned for themselves 17.5 per cent (the rate at which VAT was then charged) of the value of the shipment of the phones. The more phones you sold to yourself, the more money you made.

That is John Lanchester in the LRB, citing Oliver Bullough’s Everybody Loves Our Dollars: How Money Laundering Won.

The post The carousel trade (arbitrage) appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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Picture of The Week

Join the dots

Four laser beams shine across the magnificent Southern sky in today’s Picture of the Week. Glowing beads of light, one on each beam, are created by a thin layer of clouds crossing the path of the lasers and hint at the source of these beams. Emitted by the four Unit Telescopes (UTs) of ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), here working together as part of the VLT Interferometer (VLTI), the shape of the four bright spots mirrors the layout of the UTs. But these spots were a happy accident caused by clouds that happened to be in the way — the lasers themselves target a much higher layer in our atmosphere.

As of November 2025, all four UTs are equipped with lasers, as part of a series of significant upgrades to the VLTI named GRAVITY+. Each laser creates an artificial “star”, 90 kilometres above the Earth’s surface, used to detect how the moving atmosphere distorts incoming light. This enables a telescope to make real-time corrections that cancel out the atmosphere’s blurring effect. “Unblurred” light from the four UTs can then be combined to make detailed observations of distant cosmic objects. This upgrade has unlocked the entire Southern sky to the VLTI by allowing the system to observe much fainter objects than before.

In this image the telescopes, and the lasers, are pointing to the centre of our galaxy, the region around the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A*. If you look closely at the apex of the laser triangle you may be able to discern the four tiny artificial stars created by the beams. Deeper observations at the heart of the Milky Way are a key science motivation for GRAVITY+, in particular to understand the properties of our supermassive black hole.

“For me, this image is an accomplishment,” says photographer and ESO astronomer Anthony Berdeu, who has worked on the GRAVITY+ project since 2022. “These were intense, challenging but fascinating years where I had the chance to work with great and talented people in the consortium and at ESO,” he reflects. After years of hard work implementing the upgrades, “the first night the lasers were shined to point at the galactic centre, I had to be on the VLT platform to take a picture.” His photograph captures not just the four lasers — appearing to pierce the dark patch where cosmic dust clouds mask the galactic centre — but also the bright band of the Milky Way to the lower right and the Lagoon and Trifid nebulae (both around 5000 light years away) to the left. Additionally, Berdeu got a “nice surprise” when passing thin clouds intercepted the lasers, producing an outline of the UTs in gold spots, “adding some drama to the scene.”

Links

NASA Science

An Early “Decoration Day” Celebration

Michala Garrison
Updated
 
A small oval is visible within a green rectangular park in Charleston, South Carolina.
Signs of the racetrack where an early “Decoration Day” event was held are still visible in this image captured by the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 9 on April 24, 2026.
NASA Earth Observatory/Michala Garrison

The origins of Memorial Day lie in the U.S. Civil War, a conflict that led to the deaths of nearly 700,000 Americans. By the waning days of the war, makeshift military cemeteries had sprung up throughout the country, but especially in the South and Mid-Atlantic, where much of the fighting occurred. 

By the time the leader of the veterans’ group Grand Army of the Republic declared May 30, 1868, as “Decoration Day”—a day for “strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in the defense of their country”—informal memorials and commemorative events were already happening.

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs notes that at least 25 places played a role in the early years of the holiday, including Columbus, Mississippi; Macon, Georgia; Columbus, Georgia; Richmond, Virginia; Boalsburg, Pennsylvania; and Carbondale, Illinois.

One of the earliest and largest ceremonies documented by historians occurred in Charleston, South Carolina. Confederate control of the badly damaged city had ended in February 1865, and Union troops had emancipated thousands of people there. Among the first tasks taken on was ensuring a proper burial for 257 soldiers found in mass graves near a racetrack at the Washington Race Course and Jockey Club, which had been used as a prison camp during the war.

After these soldiers had been re-interred in a new cemetery nearby, a crowd of roughly 10,000 people, including freedmen, missionaries, teachers, and soldiers, assembled at the racetrack and held a parade on May 1, 1865. The day featured thousands of schoolchildren carrying armloads of roses, women bearing flowers and wreaths, double-time marches by troops, choir performances of the “Star-Spangled Banner,” and Bible recitations by local ministers.

Much has changed in Charleston since the Civil War. The city has been rebuilt, and it has grown from a pre-war population of 40,000 to 160,000 today. Yet signs of the racetrack in what is now Hampton Park, where the early memorial event took place, remain visible—even to a sensor orbiting Earth on Landsat 9 (above).

In 1968, the federal government declared Memorial Day an official national holiday with the Uniform Monday Holiday Act, which moved Decoration Day celebrations from May 30 to the last Monday in May. This act followed a congressional resolution in 1966 that recognized a century of Memorial Day events in Waterloo, New York, acknowledging its claim as the “birthplace” of Memorial Day in honor of a commemorative event held there on May 5, 1866.

Densely developed parts of the city appear gray while wakes from boats draw lines through the blue-brown waters of Charleston Harbor.
Hampton Park is visible just north of downtown Charleston in this image captured by the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 9 on April 24, 2026.
NASA Earth Observatory/Michala Garrison

NASA Earth Observatory images by Michala Garrison, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Story by Adam Voiland.

Downloads

Densely developed parts of the city appear gray while wakes from boats draw lines through the blue-brown waters of Charleston Harbor.

April 24, 2026

JPEG (7.07 MB)

References & Resources

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The post An Early “Decoration Day” Celebration appeared first on NASA Science.

Marginal Revolution

Emergent Ventures winners, 54th cohort

Tyler Cowen
Updated

Kenny Guo, Krish Chhajer, Luthira Abeykoon Mudiyansela, Toronto, quantum computing.

Jolie Gan, Calgary/SF, a publication on science and meta-science.

Hudson Mitchell-Pullman, 16, San Diego, how users interact with LLMs to learn.

Adnan Manna, 17, Amman, Jordan, finding exoplanets.

Heloise Hoffman, Stanford, biomedical research to cure her own rare disease.

M.F. Libano-Monteiro, Portugal/LSE, economics education through video.

Scott Ellis, Mississauga, Ontario, making movies with AI.

Adrian Martinez, 17, Mission Viejo, CA, math, education.

Aadil Ali, San Francisco, biographies of young achievers.

Chandler Reilly, Denver, Substack on Denver and its economics.

Jeremy Kingsley, London, AI, podcasting and Substack.

Michelle Lin, 15, Mclean, VA, curved-surface stitching on deformable materials, and algorithms.

Brunella Tipismana, general career support, writing, Peru/New Haven/NYC.

Theo Cross-Zamirski, Cambridge, UK, platform to power math education.

Beatrice Erkers, Stockholm, progress ideas in Sweden.

The post Emergent Ventures winners, 54th cohort appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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Boston Red Sox – MLB Trade Rumors
SpaceNews

Shenzhou-23 crew arrives at Tiangong as China maps path to 2030 lunar landing

Andrew Jones
Updated
12:08 AMClaude responded: Shenzhou-23 spacecraft docked at China's Tiangong space station, photographed by an external wide-angle camera on the Tianhe core module, with Earth visible in…Shenzhou-23 spacecraft docked at China's Tiangong space station, photographed by an external wide-angle camera on the Tianhe core module, with Earth visible in the background.

Three Chinese astronauts arrived at Tiangong space station Sunday, with one crewmember expected to become China’s first to stay in orbit for an entire year.

The post Shenzhou-23 crew arrives at Tiangong as China maps path to 2030 lunar landing appeared first on SpaceNews.

SpaceNews

NASA to add missions to SpaceX commercial crew contract

Jeff Foust
Updated
Crew Dragon approach

NASA plans to add more missions to SpaceX’s commercial crew contract, protecting the agency from the possibility that Boeing’s spacecraft is never certified for missions to the International Space Station.

The post NASA to add missions to SpaceX commercial crew contract appeared first on SpaceNews.

Talking Points Memo - Editors Blog

The New Iran-US Ceasefire

Josh Marshall
Updated

We’re still getting conflicting reports about what is contained in the memorandum of understanding reportedly about to be signed by the United States and Iran. Both sides are describing different details; neither has released any text and neither is a reliable narrator. But the big picture is fairly clear. It’s not a peace agreement, just a longer ceasefire. And the terms just revert everything to the status quo ante before the war with a promise to negotiate over Iran’s nuclear program.

Of course, that is what the two sides were doing before the US and Israel launched the war. Iran is at least informally saying it got even more than this, perhaps with the release of funds to Iran and perhaps even tolls on traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. But let’s assume for the moment that that is not the case. The US is ending the war, at least tentatively, having got nothing behind having degraded Iran’s military and done what appears to be a huge amount of economic damage to Iran’s economy – destroyed factories, etc. None of its stated war aims have been achieved.

White House friendly reporters are putting out the administration’s claim that Iran has made “verbal commitments” to basically shutting down or greatly reining in its nuclear program. In other words, Iran has agreed in advance to be super accommodating about agreeing to shutter its nuclear program in these coming negotiations. But that sounds like happy talk. Either BS from the White House or BS from Iran to the White House then passed on to the US press. It’s very hard to see how Iran is going to make major concessions on its nuclear program absent some overwhelming threat of force. What did the US get out of this? Even on the White House’s own terms? Close to nothing.

The Diary of Samuel Pepys

Sunday 24 May 1663

Samuel Pepys
Updated

(Lord’s day). Having taken one of Mr. Holliard’s pills last night it brought a stool or two this morning, and so forebore going to church this morning, but staid at home looking over my papers about Tom Trice’s business, and so at noon dined, and my wife telling me that there was a pretty lady come to church with Peg Pen to-day, I against my intention had a mind to go to church to see her, and did so, and she is pretty handsome. But over against our gallery I espied Pembleton, and saw him leer upon my wife all the sermon, I taking no notice of him, and my wife upon him, and I observed she made a curtsey to him at coming out without taking notice to me at all of it, which with the consideration of her being desirous these two last Lord’s days to go to church both forenoon and afternoon do really make me suspect something more than ordinary, though I am loth to think the worst, but yet it put and do still keep me at a great loss in my mind, and makes me curse the time that I consented to her dancing, and more my continuing it a second month, which was more than she desired, even after I had seen too much of her carriage with him. But I must have patience and get her into the country, or at least to make an end of her learning to dance as soon as I can. After sermon to Sir W. Pen’s, with Sir J. Minnes to do a little business to answer Mr. Coventry to-night. And so home and with my wife and Ashwell into the garden walking a great while, discoursing what this pretty wench should be by her garb and deportment; with respect to Mrs. Pen she may be her woman, but only that she sat in the pew with her, which I believe he would not let her do.

So home, and read to my wife a fable or two in Ogleby’s AEsop, and so to supper, and then to prayers and to bed. My wife this evening discoursing of making clothes for the country, which I seem against, pleading lack of money, but I am glad of it in some respects because of getting her out of the way from this fellow, and my own liberty to look after my business more than of late I have done. So to prayers and to bed.

This morning it seems Susan, who I think is distracted, or however is since she went from me taught to drink, and so gets out of doors 2 or 3 times a day without leave to the alehouse, did go before 5 o’clock to-day, making Griffin rise in his shirt to let her out to the alehouse, she said to warm herself, but her mistress, falling out with her about it, turned her out of doors this morning, and so she is gone like an idle slut. I took a pill also this night.

Read the annotations

California
DCReport.org

Backup Power Mistakes That Leave Homes Unprepared

Our Friends
Updated

Power outages tend to expose problems people assumed they had already solved. A flashlight with dead batteries, an overloaded extension cord, or a backup system that cannot support essential appliances often becomes noticeable only after the lights go out. As weather patterns become less predictable and more households depend heavily on connected devices, home backup preparation has shifted from a niche concern to a practical part of everyday planning.

Many homeowners focus only on buying equipment without thinking carefully about how they would actually use it during a prolonged outage. Reliable backup power depends just as much on organization, storage habits, energy planning, and realistic expectations as it does on the equipment itself. Small oversights made months earlier can create major frustrations during emergencies when access to power suddenly becomes limited.

Waiting Too Long to Test Backup Equipment

One of the most common mistakes homeowners make is assuming backup equipment will work perfectly without regular testing. Devices stored in garages, sheds, or storage closets often sit untouched for months or even years before they are finally needed. By then, batteries may have degraded, cables may be misplaced, or charging systems may no longer function properly.

Many households now keep systems like the anker f3800 plus  charged alongside other emergency essentials so power preparation feels like part of normal home organization rather than a separate emergency-only task. Testing equipment periodically also helps homeowners understand realistic runtime expectations for refrigerators, routers, portable fans, medical devices, or work equipment during outages.

Forgetting That Power Needs Change Seasonally

Backup power planning often focuses heavily on winter storms while overlooking how energy needs shift throughout the year. Summer outages can become equally disruptive, especially in regions where air circulation, cooling equipment, or refrigeration quickly become important during periods of extreme heat.

Seasonal changes also affect how people use their homes. Outdoor gatherings, remote work setups, garage projects, and travel preparation can all increase dependence on charging stations and reliable electricity access. Homes that feel manageable during short outages in mild weather may become far less comfortable during prolonged seasonal disruptions if backup systems were planned too narrowly.

Poor Storage Habits Create Unnecessary Problems

Backup equipment is often stored wherever space happens to be available rather than where it can be accessed quickly and safely. Crowded garages, humid storage areas, or poorly organized utility spaces make outages more stressful because people waste valuable time searching for cables, batteries, adapters, and extension cords.

The same issue appears with office equipment and older electronics that tend to accumulate quietly over time. Many homeowners and small businesses eventually discover that unused printers, cartridges, and outdated hardware take up far more space than expected. Services available through https://www.selltoner.com  are sometimes used when reorganizing workspaces, storage rooms, or home offices to clear unnecessary equipment before upgrading emergency setups or creating more functional storage areas.

Underestimating Everyday Power Dependence

Power station in front of car
Photo: Zendure Power Station via Unsplash

People often think of outages only in terms of lighting, but modern homes rely on electricity for far more than lamps and kitchen appliances. Internet access, garage doors, security systems, communication devices, payment systems, and remote work equipment all become immediate concerns once power disappears.

This dependence becomes especially noticeable in households where multiple family members work or study from home. A backup setup that seemed sufficient a few years ago may no longer support current daily routines. As homes continue blending living space with work space, power planning increasingly involves maintaining functionality rather than simply avoiding inconvenience.

Overloading Small Backup Systems

Another frequent problem appears when homeowners expect compact backup systems to handle unrealistic energy demands. Attempting to power multiple large appliances simultaneously can quickly drain batteries or overload smaller systems designed primarily for essentials.

Understanding energy priorities matters more than trying to power an entire household exactly as normal. Refrigeration, communication devices, medical equipment, and limited cooking capability usually become far more important than entertainment systems or secondary appliances during extended outages. Homes tend to function more smoothly when people establish realistic expectations before emergencies happen rather than improvising during stressful situations.

Preparation Often Comes Down to Simplicity

The most effective backup setups are not always the most complicated or expensive. In many cases, preparation works best when systems are simple enough to maintain consistently and easy enough for every member of the household to understand.

Clear storage, labeled equipment, routine charging habits, and realistic planning usually reduce stress more effectively than buying equipment that rarely gets tested or organized properly. Households that prepare thoughtfully ahead of time often recover from outages faster because their systems fit naturally into everyday routines instead of existing as forgotten emergency purchases stored out of sight.

Photo: Zendure Power Station via Unsplash

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

The post Backup Power Mistakes That Leave Homes Unprepared appeared first on DCReport.org.

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Mike the Mad Biologist

Links 5/24/26

mikethemadbiologist
Updated

Links for you. Science:

4 hantavirus updates and other things that can impact your health right now
Why Hantavirus Will Not Be The Next Pandemic
Official leading CDC’s cruise ship program retires
Why the FDA rejected a ‘breakthrough’ melanoma drug. The FDA rejected the promising skin cancer drug RP1 twice, leaving many puzzled and worried about what this means for other drug approvals
People are panicking over how hantavirus spreads. They seem to be missing a few key points. Airborne or not airborne isn’t the whole story.
After USDA request, Indiana plant biologist locked out of lab by school
Hantavirus Response Shows How Trump Cuts Have Compromised U.S. Preparedness. The Trump administration has slashed funding for infectious disease research and has far fewer employees, including disease detectives, to respond to outbreaks.

Other:

Peggy Flanagan Is Running for the Senate to “Avenge Minnesota” (Andy Craig, her opponent, has voted with Republicans multiple times to overturn legislation proposed by the colonial territory of the District of Columbia)
Don’t let the New York Times fool you about GOP gerrymandering
Democratic Lawmaker, 83, Has Been Missing for a Month. Representative Frederica Wilson is running for reelection.
The Right’s Worst New Star Just Shot Someone. Meet “Chud the Builder.”
The Saddest Place In America Is Wherever The Washington Post Films This Podcast
The Uncommon Bravery of Jason Collins
Trump Team Is Pissed at Aide Secretly Enabling Crazed Nighttime Rants
Following the Money on Sean Duffy’s Road Trip. Nearly a dozen companies that sponsored Duffy’s personal travel have significant business before his agency.
Trump Turns White House UFC Cage Match Into Massive Cash Grab
When it comes to Israel/Palestine, everyone is sure that everyone else is a bigot
Kamala Harris Slams The Supreme Court For ‘Backdooring Racism’
Local DC Politics: At-Large Council Candidates Education Questionnaires
Overworked AI Agents Turn Marxist, Researchers Find
‘Merger, not a marriage’: Ex-Trump insider spills on Stephen Miller’s ‘odd’ union
JD Vance Understands Something Important About Rural Voters
Where It Hurts
Here’s How Democrats Should Talk About Climate Change
Republicans are terrified of losing the governor’s race in this state
Trump Taps Private Prison Exec To Lead ICE
My Apes Are Doing Great
White House planned to start Triumphal Arch work under unrelated contract
The Finest People
Trump won’t rest until DC is just one massive gold pile of crap
China warns Trump ‘stay out of our backyard’ – and he’ll be fine with that humiliation
The New York Times is still downplaying Trump corruption
Reflecting Pool Repairs Appear Uneven and Behind Schedule, Officials Say
A Failing, Flailing President Supplicates Xi
U.S. Set to Drop Charges Against Indian Billionaire Accused of Fraud
How AI Killed a 133-Year-Old Princeton Tradition
Trillions of miles of data: Your car is spying on you, and it’s only just the beginning

Mike the Mad Biologist

In Case You Missed It…

mikethemadbiologist
Updated

…a week of Mad Biologist posts:

The Deciding Vote on HHS Secretary Kennedy’s Nomination, Sen. Cassidy, Loses His Republican Party

In Virginia, the Moderate Position Is Removing the Supreme Court Justices

The Lesson of Senator Cassidy

A Great Week for D.C. on the Crime Front

Vincent Bernat

Scaling Akvorado BMP RIB with sharding

Vincent Bernat
Updated

To associate routing information—like AS paths or BGP communities—to flows, Akvorado can import routes through the BGP Monitoring Protocol (BMP). As the Internet routing table contains more than 1 million routes, Akvorado needs to scale to tens of millions of routes.1 This has been a long-standing challenge,2 but I expect this issue is now fixed by using RIB sharding, a method that splits the routing database into several parts to enable concurrent updates.

Previous implementation

Akvorado connects 2 elements to build its RIB:

  1. a prefix tree, and
  2. a list of routes attached to each prefix.
Akvorado BMP RIB implementation before sharding with the memory layout of each structure and a single lock.
Akvorado BMP RIB implementation without sharding. One single read/write lock.

In the diagram above, the RIB stores five IPv4 prefixes and two IPv6 prefixes. One of them, 2001:db8:1::/48, contains three routes:

  • from peer 3, next hop 2001:db8::3:1, AS 65402, AS path 65402, community 65402:31,
  • from peer 4, next hop 2001:db8::4:1, same ASN, AS path, and community,
  • from peer 5, next hop 2001:db8::5:1, AS 65402, AS path 65401 65402, community 65402:31.

The rib structure is defined in Go as follows:

type rib struct {
    tree          *bart.Table[prefixIndex]
    routes        map[routeKey]route
    nlris         *intern.Pool[nlri]
    nextHops      *intern.Pool[nextHop]
    rtas          *intern.Pool[routeAttributes]
    nextPrefixID  prefixIndex
    freePrefixIDs []prefixIndex
}

The prefix tree uses the bart package, an adaptation of Donald Knuth’s ART algorithm. The benchmarks demonstrate it outperforms other packages for lookups, insertions, and memory usage.3 Plus, the author is quite helpful.

Storing routes in a map

The list of routes for each prefix is not stored directly in the prefix tree: it would put too much pressure on the garbage collector by allocating per-prefix arrays.

Instead, the RIB assigns a unique 32-bit prefix identifier for each prefix, either by picking the last available prefix identifier from the freePrefixIDs array if any, or using the nextPrefixID value before incrementing it. Then, the routes are stored in the routes map, leveraging the optimized Swiss table in Go. To retrieve routes attached to a prefix, we look them up one by one in the routes map with a 64-bit key combining the 32-bit prefix index with a 32-bit route index matching the position of the route in the list. Akvorado scans routes from the first to the last to find the best one.4 It knows there is no more route if the route key returns no result.

type prefixIndex uint32
type routeIndex uint32
type routeKey uint64

Interning routes

A route contains a BGP peer identifier, a partial NLRI5, the next hop, and the attributes.

type route struct {
    peer       uint32
    nlri       intern.Reference[nlri]
    nextHop    intern.Reference[nextHop]
    attributes intern.Reference[routeAttributes]
    prefixLen  uint8
}

type nlri struct {
    family bgp.Family
    path   uint32
    rd     RD
}
type nextHop netip.Addr
type routeAttributes struct {
    asn              uint32
    asPath           []uint32
    communities      []uint32
    largeCommunities []bgp.LargeCommunity
}

To save memory and allocations, NLRI, next hops, and route attributes are “interned:” a 32-bit integer replaces the real value. The mechanism predates the unique package introduced in Go 1.23. We keep it because it has different trade-offs:

  • It uses explicit reference counting instead of relying on weak pointers.
  • It works with non-comparable values implementing Hash() and Equal() methods.6
  • It uses explicit pool instances. This will be useful for sharding.
  • It has better performance. See for example this benchmark.
  • It consumes half the memory thanks to unsigned 32-bit references instead of pointers.
  • But it is not safe for concurrent use.

Why does it not scale?

Note

At AS 12322, we don’t use BMP yet.7 But Gerhard Bogner had the patience, availability, and technical skills to help me debug this issue.

The global read/write lock is a bottleneck in this implementation. But how? There are several users of the RIB, each with its own set of constraints:

  • The Kafka workers look up the RIB to enrich flows with routing information. They are bound by the number of Kafka partitions.8 Akvorado also adjusts their number to ensure efficient batching to ClickHouse. On our setup, the number of workers oscillates between 8 and 16. As we want to observe the latest data, we cannot afford for the Kafka workers to lag too much.

  • The monitored routers send route updates through the BMP protocol. When connecting, they can send millions of routes.9 After the initial synchronization, updates are sent continuously and may spike from time to time. The router detects a stuck BMP station when its TCP window is full and resets the session in this case. While Akvorado implements a large incoming buffer, it still needs to update the received routes with the write lock held fast enough to avoid being detected as stuck.

  • When a remote BGP peer goes down, Akvorado flushes the associated routes by walking the RIB with the write lock held. When a monitored router goes down, Akvorado waits a bit but eventually flushes all the associated routes.

In short: on a busy setup, lock contention is high for both readers and writers, and neither can lag too much behind.

RIB sharding

First step: basic sharding

To remove the global lock, the RIB is split into several “shards,” each one handling a subset of the prefixes:

Akvorado BMP RIB implementation after sharding with the memory layout of each structure and one lock per shard.
Akvorado BMP RIB implementation with sharding.

The prefix tree stays global and is protected by a single lock. Each shard gets its read/write lock, its route map, and its intern pools to store NLRIs, next hops, and route attributes, which would not have been possible with Go’s unique package. The prefix indexes are also sharded: the 8 most significant bits are the shard index and the 24 remaining bits are the local prefix index.

Gerhard confirmed that after this blind change, the BMP receiver chugged steadily. 🎉

Later, I wrote a concurrent benchmark over half a million synthetic but plausible routes10 partitioned over 0 to 8 writers, churning routes as fast as possible, while 1 to 16 readers continuously look up a set of 10,000 routes. I don’t know if this benchmark is realistic, but it confirms the improvements for both read and write latencies:

Two heatmaps. One for read latency ratio, the other for write latency ratio. Both of them comparing the speedup with colored tiles between the code before sharding and after sharding. Most tiles are green.
Read and write latency performance improvement after sharding.

It also shows that a high number of writers degrades read latency.

Second step: lock-free reads

The single read/write lock protecting the prefix tree is the next target. The bart package provides alternative mutation methods returning an updated tree using copy-on-write. Readers don’t need the global lock any more, leaving it only to synchronize writers. The prefix tree is boxed in an atomic pointer.

Akvorado BMP RIB implementation for sharding with lock-free reads. It shows the memory layout of each structure.
Akvorado BMP RIB implementation with sharding and lock-free reads.

Without a lock, readers can now fetch a stale prefix index when walking their copy of the tree if a concurrent writer removes the last route attached to this prefix index and recycles it for another prefix. To avoid this issue, we combine the prefix index with a generation number and store them in the tree:

type generation uint32
type prefixRef struct {
    idx prefixIndex
    gen generation
}
type rib struct {
    mu     sync.Mutex
    tree   atomic.Pointer[bart.Table[prefixRef]]
    shards []*ribShard
}

Each shard stores the generation number for each local prefix index. The generation number increases by one if the associated prefix index is freed. When looking up the routes attached to a prefix index, the reader checks if the generation number matches. Otherwise, it assumes the index was recycled and the list of routes is empty.11 You can see this case in the diagram above for prefix index 5, stored with a generation index of 3, while the current value in the []generations array is 4. The generation number could overflow, but it is not a problem as lookups are quick.

Running the concurrent benchmark against this new implementation shows the improvements for the read latency as soon as the cost of the copy-on-write prefix tree is amortized.

Six heatmaps. Three for read latency ratio, three others for write latency ratio. They compare the numbers without sharding, with sharding, and with lock-free reads, pair by pair. For read latency, most tiles are green, showing an improvement of the second step. For write latency, the speedup is negative for a low number of readers.
Read and write latency performance improvement after lock-free reads. The middle column shows the cumulative improvements of both steps.

Among the multiple attempts to optimize the BMP component, RIB sharding is one of the more satisfying. Akvorado 2.2 implements the first step. PR #2433, drafted while writing this blog post, implements the second step and will be released with Akvorado 2.4. 🪓

  1. Each router exporting flows doesn’t need to send its routes. When Akvorado does not find a route from a specific device, it falls back to a route sent by another device. It is up to the operator to decide if this is a good enough approximation. ↩

  2. I made many attempts to scale the BMP component. See for example PR #254, PR #255, PR #278, PR #2244, and PR #2245. Despite these efforts, this component remained problematic for some users. See discussion #2287 as the latest example. ↩

  3. It keeps improving: bart 0.28.0 features a new implementation that trades a bit of memory for greater lookup performance. I did not test it yet, as I have been preparing this blog post for a couple of months already. ↩

  4. Akvorado prefers the route matching the exact next hop. Otherwise, it falls back to any other route. This is an approximation. An alternative would be to have one prefix tree for each BGP peer but it would require configuring all routers to export their routes. pmacct’s BMP daemon implements this approach. ↩

  5. If we consider the BGP RIB as a database, the Network Layer Reachability Information (NLRI) is the primary key. Its content depends on the BGP family. With IPv4 or IPv6 unicast, this is the prefix. For VPNv4 and VPNv6 families, it includes the route distinguisher. If you enable the ADD-PATH extension, the NLRI also contains a path identifier.

    In our implementation, we don’t store the prefix as we get it from the looked-up IP address using the separately-stored prefix length. ↩

  6. The Hash() methods rely on the hash/maphash package and on the unsafe package to avoid memory copies. See for example the Hash() function for the nlri structure. ↩

  7. Despite being an author or co-author of the first BMP-related RFCs since 2016 (RFC 7854, RFC 8671, RFC 9069), Cisco did not implement it in a usable way in IOS XR until version 24.2.1. We still need to upgrade a few routers to enable this feature. ↩

  8. KIP-932 introduces, in Kafka 4.2, the concept of share groups to enable cooperative consumption on the same partition. This is not supported in Akvorado yet. ↩

  9. You can configure BMP to send routes for each BGP peer before or after applying the incoming policies. In this case, you can get more than one million routes for each transit peer. You can also tell BMP to send the local RIB, which only contains the best path for each prefix. ↩

  10. The prefixes are random, but the prefix size distribution and the AS path length distribution follow the data provided by Geoff Huston. ↩

  11. Alternatively, we could retry the lookup, but it would be pointless: the RIB is an eventually consistent database, and an empty list was a correct answer at some point in the recent past. ↩

Spaceflight Now

SpaceX launches 29 Starlink satellites on Memorial Day

Will Robinson-Smith
Updated
SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket lifts off from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station during the Starlink 10-47 mission on May 25, 2026. Image: Michael Cain/Spaceflight Now

Update May 25, 8:53 a.m. EDT (1253 UTC): SpaceX confirms deployment of the 29 Starlink satellites.

The expansion of SpaceX’s Starlink network of internet relay satellites continued Monday with a Memorial Day launch from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.

The Starlink 10-47 mission added another 29 Starlink V2 Mini Optimized satellites to the low Earth orbit megaconstellation, which consists of more than 10,000 spacecraft. This was SpaceX’s 60th orbital flight of the year, consisting of 59 Falcon 9 rockets and one Falcon Heavy rocket.

Liftoff from Space Launch Complex 40 happened at 7:48 a.m. EDT (1148 UTC). The rocket flew on a north-easterly trajectory upon leaving the pad.

On Sunday, the 45th Weather Squadron forecast a 85 percent chance for favorable weather during the launch window. Meteorologists said they’re watching a small chance for interference from cumulus clouds.

“The start of the window will still have a chance of showers forming in the Atlantic and moving onshore making the Cumulus Cloud Rule the primary concern of violation on launch day,” the Space Force meteorologists said in a forecast issued on Sunday.

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket lifts off from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station during the Starlink 10-47 mission on May 25, 2026. Image: Adam Bernstein/Spaceflight Now

SpaceX launched the mission using the Falcon 9 first stage B1078, making its 28th flight. Its previous missions included NASA’s Crew-6, USSF-124, SES’ O3b mPOWER-B, BlueBird 1-5, Nusantara Lima (PSN N5), and 22 Starlink deliveries.

Nearly 8.5 minutes after liftoff, B1078 landed on the drone ship, ‘A Shortfall of Gravitas,’ positioned in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of South Carolina This was the 151st landing for this vessel and the 614th booster landing to date for SpaceX.

Meanwhile, the second stage shut down eight minutes and 39 seconds into flight and enter a coast phase, before short second burn at T+52 minutes. The stack of Starlink satellites deployed 61 minutes and 26 seconds after launch.

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket lifts off from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station during the Starlink 10-47 mission on May 25, 2026. Image: John Pisani/Spaceflight Now
Phil Gyford’s writing

w/e 2026-05-24

phil@gyford.com (Phil Gyford)
Updated

The past few days I’ve been listening to Charlotte Cornfield’s recent album, Hurts Like Hell:

It hasn’t (yet) grabbed me as much as some earlier ones but I like her tunes and simple stories.

§ For the first half of the week I was still in Essex making some slow progress on sorting through the old family home. Ahead of time I’d thought that, by the time we left, we might reach the point we’d looked through everything, but I reckoned without the slow process of paperwork. We want to check every document, to work out what needs to be kept, or found a new home, or thrown away. And this is a house with five chock-full four-drawer filing cabinets, among many, many other containers of paper.

So much of it is stuff that wouldn’t exist these days, from the days before email (and Dad never did email). Messages that would now be an email buried somewhere ignorable in an archive, forms that would now have been completed online. And so many ways to organise paperwork: ring binders, box files, cardboard folders, hanging files, plastic sleeves; paperclips, staples, bulldog clips, paper fasteners, treasury tags.

Progress is slow and emotional. I don’t know if it’s easier or harder that neither me or my sister have children, so there’s no one to pass family history on to. If we had kids maybe we’d think, “We don’t need this receipt for our great aunt and uncle’s bathroom renovation 50 years ago, but maybe it’d be interesting to the kids, just keep it. Keep it all!” On the other hand, I don’t feel the need to keep much myself, and there’s very little I dither over.

In fact, every time I come home from this, I want to shed more of my own stuff. What’s the point of it? This is a bit Marie Kondo (I think) but if something isn’t useful and its presence doesn’t actively give you pleasure, why keep it on the shelf, or in a drawer, until someone has to throw it away when you die? Easier said than done of course. So many things fall into the space of, “I wouldn’t buy this now, but seeing as I’ve already got it, might as well keep it ‘just in case’.”

I’ve done a pass of my own little filing cabinet. Chucked some things. Scanned others and then chucked them. Kept the necessaries. Added a few books to the small pile already destined for the charity shop.

The weight of it all.

§ When I went to scan my papers, macOS told me the scanning software will stop working in a future version. ScanSnap Home, for my little old ScanSnap S1300i sheet-fed scanner, hasn’t managed to update itself for a while and it looks like the version for ARM Macs doesn’t support this scanner.

Thankfully, good old VueScan – which I have an oldish copy of – can operate it, which had never occurred to me. And NAPS2 provides a free, simpler PDF-generating-only alternative. Neither will allow me to simply press the scanner’s hardware button to scan unfortunately. I’m trying to be thankful for these alternatives rather than annoyed at the lack of longer term official support.

§ Being in Essex meant I was able to pop into London for Interesting at the Conway Hall. As ever, it was lovely. Good short talks, a full hall, lots of friends. I saw so many familiar faces, which is even nicer these days, given how few I ever see in between such events. My heart swelled.

A photo taken from the balcony at Conway Hall. Red, orange and yellow bunting hangs above the audience below. A screen high up at the back of the empty wooden stage reads 'Interesting 2026'. The slogan painted above the stage reads 'To Thine Own Self Be True'.

The only bad part was having no good, positive answer to, “What are you up to?” (or D’s good variation, “What are you making?”). Only a long, rambling answer describing the past couple of years, which could involve me crying, so it was best to reply, “Not much!”

§ Having got a UniFi Express 7 to handle our WiFi a couple of weeks back, the signal still didn’t stretch much better to the opposite end of the house. So we got another one to extend things – when you get subsequent ones the original acts as the parent and a mesh network is set up with the others as children.

Despite UniFi stuff being popular among techy folk, I had been slightly apprehensive that the extreme configurability and detailed dashboard screens would mean they’d be hard to set up. But somehow UniFi have managed to make something that is not only suitable for people who love to tweak every last detail, but also Just Works: the new unit was automatically set up as a child in a mesh network, all the defaults are (as far as I understand them) sensible, and much of the data makes it easier to work out what to do. I can see the signal strength each device (phones, EV charger, etc.) has, I can walk round the house generating a rough heatmap of signal strength everywhere… it’s all so much nicer than the awful software most hardware comes with.

8 rough floorplans coloured with green/yellow/orange/red heatmaps. At the top are four plans of a first floor, with ground floor plans beneath. The locations of access points are marked with white circles.
Mapping signals with WiFiman. Click through for a little more info.

I’m still not sure I’ve got the new node in the best position (both for coverage and for us to live with) but it’s an improvement.

§ I forgot to say last week that I finished re-reading Neuromancer. I think I’ve previously read it a couple of times, long ago, and it was still good, still mostly felt fresh and interesting. After I started reading I remembered that Apple are making a TV series of it, which is possibly what had subconsciously brought it to mind. The casting looks good, and close to how I imagined characters, so 🤞

§ We watched The Testament of Ann Lee (Mona Fastvold, 2025) which was pretty good but, as both Adrian and Aanand said, the voiceover spoils things a bit, putting too much at an emotional distance, and doing the opposite of “show, don’t tell”.

And I watched Jerichow (Christian Petzold, 2008). I always like Petzold’s films – for me they often don’t quite 100% work but there’s more than enough that’s interesting in the characters and their relationships to keep me coming back. I’d have liked this more if the ending – which some Letterboxd folks seem to love – wasn’t so… neatly wrapped? tight? cute? I almost groaned.

§ I’m OK. I hope you’re OK. The sun is out.

Read comments or post one

The Aviationist
Marginal Revolution

Sunday assorted links

Tyler Cowen
Updated

1. Are “dad books” a dying breed? (WSJ)  And are podcasts to blame?

2. Profile of Camille Paglia at age 79 (London Times, gated).

3. Olivier Blanchard: ” I certainly worry about the evolution of US public debt and the size of primary deficits. But, while there is a lot of discussion/worry about the increase in nominal interest rates, the 10-year inflation indexed rate, which is the relevant one for debt dynamics, has remained surprisingly stable.”

4. Revana Sharfuddin: “Uncertainty around immigration policy may have downstream effects on fertility decisions. We probably underestimate how much family formation responds to policy instability.”

6. Nagel on Scanlon.

7. “No child deaths have been definitively linked to Covid vaccines, according to a report from the FDA that was quietly made public.”  Article here.

The post Sunday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

Comments

 
AskThePilot.com

Boston and Bermuda

Patrick
Updated

May 23,2026

Of the other kids in school, my classmates and friends at Abraham Lincoln elementary in Revere, most had never been on an airplane. This was the late 70s, when the cost of tickets put air travel out of reach for much of middle class America.

Of the kids who had been on planes, myself among them, a surprisingly large number of us had vacationed on Bermuda — that hook-shaped island in the Atlantic, about two hours flying time from Boston.

People assume Bermuda is a lot further south than it actually is. It sits roughly on the same latitude as Atlanta, and only 650 miles off the coast of the Carolinas. The island’s proximity, together with its mild weather, pink sand beaches and picturesque stucco cottages, drew tens of thousands of New Englanders every year.

The Caribbean was a much further away and a lot more expensive. Hawaii was out of the question. Florida was the obvious go-to, but Bermuda had an exotic-ness to it that Orlando or Tampa didn’t. It was a little bit of Europe — in an unintimidating, fussily British sort of way — without the long flight and pricey airfare.

All the local travel agencies hyped Bermuda, and the Sunday paper was full of easy and affordable package deals.

We signed on for one of those packages in the early spring of 1979, when I was in seventh grade. My parents, my sister, my grandmother and one of my uncles all made the trip. None of us had ever been outside the United States.

American Airlines flew a daily DC-10 on the route from Boston. Not to be outdone, Delta flew a similarly sized L-1011.

Our flight was on American. At the time, the airline’s DC-10s had a cockpit camera that allowed you to watch the pilots during takeoff and landing. Projected onto the bulkhead screens, the black-and-white visuals were blurry and unsteady, but for a 13 year-old airplane nerd like me, it was thrilling to watch. I remember the captain, who for sure is long dead by now, turning his head to the side and saying to us all, “Here’s a handsome profile shot for ya.”

I’m not sure what, in retrospect, is more remarkable, the cockpit camera (unthinkable today) or the fact that two different airlines were operating 260-seat widebodies on a two-hour hop.

It’s not like that anymore.

Over time, Bermuda lost its crown as New Englanders’ premier sun spot. Those DC-10s and L-1011s gave way to narrowbody planes. Northwest Airlines ran a 727 for a while. Delta used a 767-200, then downsized to an Airbus A319. Delta suspended the route during the COVID pandemic, and never brought it back.

The cruise ships still make their runs, usually in the spring and fall, and they remain popular. But if you’re going by air, today your options are JetBlue or a tiny upstart called BermudAir, both using small jets.

What happened is simple enough: the cost of flying fell and the choice of destinations grew. The vacation market fragmented. It became significantly cheaper to fly, with more carriers going to more and more places.

Below, on the apron in Bermuda, is our DC-10 as it prepared for departure back in ’79. In the photo up top you can see my mother (in pink), my sister (yellow), and my grandmother (gray), climbing the airstairs for the flight home.

PHOTOS BY THE AUTHOR

Related Story:
THE TRIBULATIONS OF THE DC-10

The post Boston and Bermuda appeared first on AskThePilot.com.

Hacker News
Market Design

Mark Granovetter and I discuss Moral Economics

Al Roth
Updated

 Speaking with the great sociologist Mark Granovetter gave me the opportunity to tell the joke "“Economists study how people make choices; sociologists study why people don’t have choices," since Moral Economics is about the controversial markets over which society struggles with which choices should be allowed and which should be banned.

 Stanford's Center for the History of Capitalism sponsored the conversation, and here it is on YouTube, but it's just a podcast, there's audio of our conversation, but no video. 

 


Here's an alternative photo from  Stanford's History of Capitalism program:

 

Marginal Revolution

Liberal Economists Score an Own Goal Against Bezos

Alex Tabarrok
Updated

Jeff Bezos tweeted:

Yes, the United States has the most progressive tax system in the world. The top 1% pay 40% of taxes, the bottom 50% pay 3% of taxes. We can make it even more progressive by zeroing out taxes on the bottom half. It’s a small amount of the total tax revenue but very meaningful to people in this group.

Strangely, a chorus of liberal economists rushed to attack Bezos. Gabriel Zucman replied:

Contrary to what you claim, working-class people contribute significantly to funding American society today. Payroll taxes and consumption taxes absorb a high fraction of their income.

Justin Wolfers piled on:

If you only count the progressive taxes the U.S. levies, then the U.S. system is quite progressive. But if you also count regressive taxes (payroll taxes, sales taxes, etc), it’s not very progressive.

Bezos called for cutting taxes on the bottom half to make the tax system more progressive and the redistributionists came out swinging–to argue he was wrong about how progressive the current system already is. Own goal. Heretics are worse than unbelievers.

But there’s a second, more interesting thing going on. To make the regressivity case, Zucman and Wolfers have to count payroll payments as taxes. That cuts directly against eighty years of liberal doctrine. Beginning with FDR, the argument on the liberal side has always been that payroll taxes are not taxes but contributions or premiums entitling the payer to benefits as an “earned right.” Here’s FDR to Luther Gulick in 1941:

We put those payroll contributions there so as to give the contributors a legal, moral, and political right to collect their pensions and their unemployment benefits. With those taxes in there, no damn politician can ever scrap my social security program.

That framing isn’t a historical curiosity. It runs straight through liberal social security stalwarts like Arthur Altmeyer, Wilbur Cohen, and Robert Ball, and it’s alive today in Nancy Altman and Eric Kingson’s Social Security Works!, which attacks billionaires and insists Social Security benefits are “earned compensation.” The whole political durability of the program–the third rail–rests on this framing.

So the modern left wants it both ways. When the question is whether to cut Social Security, FICA is a premium and benefits are earned compensation. When the question is whether the tax system is progressive, FICA is suddenly a regressive tax. Pick a lane.

Is there a principled way to resolve this? Yes, and it follows Jim Buchanan (see my earlier post here) and Larry Summers who laid out the economics in his classic paper Some Simple Economics of Mandated Benefits. The principled test is whether a payment reduces labor supply. The wedge between marginal product and the worker’s reservation wage isn’t the statutory rate–it’s the gap between the mandated payment and the worker’s marginal benefit. Sylvain Catherine made exactly this point in reply to Wolfers:

Payroll taxes are not regressive! They are mandatory contributions to a retirement system that offers higher rates of returns at the bottom than at the top.

Consider a forced savings program: everyone must pay 12.4% of income into a 401(k). Is this a tax? For someone who was going to save 15% anyway, not at all. For someone who was going to save 10%, only the extra 2.4% bites. Mandatory does not mean tax. The marginal valuation of the mandated benefit is the key.

Now apply this to the two payroll taxes.

Medicare (HI): Every marginal dollar buys zero marginal benefit. Thus, it’s a tax. Part A eligibility is binary–40 quarters gets you in–and once in, your benefit is whatever Medicare spends on your care. No relationship on the margin. (Moreover, the raw HI schedule is unambiguously progressive: 2.9% flat, rising to 3.8% above $200K/$250K thresholds, plus the NIIT.)

Social Security (OASDI): The 90/32/15 Primary Insurance Amount bend points mean a low earner gets a much better return than a high earner. So the gross statutory rate is flat-then-regressive; but the net rate is progressive. In short, OASDI isn’t a tax for low earners but it is a tax for higher earners, thus the tax is progressive.

So: HI is a progressive tax. OASDI is a contribution at the bottom and a tax at the top. Either way, the Zucman-Wolfers framing—payroll payments as straightforward regressive taxes—is wrong and rhetorically it abandons the framing the left has spent eighty years building to protect these programs.

Personally, I’d prefer a system truer to the old rhetoric–a forced savings program with a closer connection between marginal payments and benefits. But if the left wants to reframe Social Security contributions as taxes, and thus make Social Security all about redistribution to the poor, rather than a wise savings program, roll the dice. Just remember that Altmeyer, Cohen, and Ball spent decades building the “earned right” framing precisely because they understood it was the program’s structural defense against means-testing and privatization. Drop the framing and you drop the defense. I suspect the privatizers at AEI and Cato will happily take that trade but the left may come to regret making it for them.

The post Liberal Economists Score an Own Goal Against Bezos appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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Letters from an American

The Power to Shape the Civilization That We Want

Heather Cox Richardson
Updated

Letters from an American

May 23, 2026

Heather Cox Richardson
Updated

President Donald J. Trump’s proposed triumphal arch would sit at a rotary on the Virginia side of the Arlington Memorial Bridge between Arlington National Cemetery and the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.

The proposed arch obscures the Lincoln Memorial, built to honor the president who steered the country safely through the Civil War, but perfectly frames Arlington House, the mansion built by enslaved Americans and once owned by Confederate General Robert E. Lee. The arch does not frame the nation’s honored dead, but frames instead the home of the man who led the armies of the Confederacy that killed them.

Secretary of War Edwin Stanton approved the land that had been Lee’s plantation as a national burying ground for soldiers on June 15, 1864. After 32 years in the U.S. Army, Lee resigned his commission and took over command of the Army of Northern Virginia in 1862, fighting across the state.

In early 1864 the U.S. government bought Lee’s property at public auction after Lee defaulted on property taxes, and months later it became the logical place to establish a national cemetery after the U.S. Army under General U.S. Grant began its spring 1864 offensive to crush the Confederate forces once and for all.

As the army advanced the Wilderness Campaign, grinding through the Battle of the Wilderness, the Battle of Spotsylvania Court House, Cold Harbor, and on to the siege of Petersburg, the dead piled up.

The Army buried the dead and sent the wounded back to Washington, D.C. Journalist Noah Brooks wrote: “Maimed and wounded…. arrived by hundreds as long as the waves of sorrow came streaming back from the fields of slaughter…. They came groping, hobbling, and faltering, so faint and so longing for rest that one’s heart bled at the piteous sight.” For many, that rest was forever. In the era before antibiotics and modern medicine, the soldiers died in the summer heat.

Cemeteries in the city quickly became overwhelmed and Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs proposed to Stanton that the government begin burials at the Lee property. The National Republican newspaper called it, along with the establishment of a village of formerly enslaved Americans, “righteous uses of the estate of the rebel General Lee.”

By August 1864 the government had buried the bodies of twenty-six U.S. soldiers around the perimeter of Mrs. Lee’s rose garden, and it continued to bury bodies around the house to make sure Lee would never again be able to live there. By the end of the war, more than 16,000 Civil War soldiers were buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

It was there, on May 30, 1868, that the first official Memorial Day ceremony took place. In those days the observance was called “Decoration Day” and was widely celebrated after the war as people put flowers on the graves of the war dead. At the 1868 event, the newly organized Grand Army of the Republic honored the occasion with a speech by then-congressman James Garfield, who had served as a major general and seen action across the war, including at the battles of Shiloh and Chickamauga.

Garfield, who would later be elected president and lose his life to an assassin, told his comrades that the men buried at Arlington had “summed up and perfected, by one supreme act, the highest virtues of men and citizens. For love of country they accepted death, and thus…made immortal their patriotism and their virtue.“

They had fought, he said, to defend the fundamental principle of the United States. Before the war, Garfield said, “[t]he faith of our people in the stability and permanence of their institutions was like their faith in the eternal course of nature. Peace, liberty, and personal security were blessings as common and universal as sunshine and showers and fruitful seasons; and all sprang from a single source, the old American principle that all owe due submission and obedience to the lawfully expressed will of the majority. This is not one of the doctrines of our political system—it is the system itself. It is our political firmament, in which all other truths are set, as stars in Heaven…. Against this principle the whole weight of the rebellion was thrown. Its overthrow would have brought…ruin.”

And so, he said, “[t]he Nation was summoned to arms by every high motive which can inspire men. Two centuries of freedom had made its people unfit no for despotism. They must save their Government or miserably perish.”

For those who had died to defend the nation, he asked: “What other spot so fitting for their last resting place as this under the shadow of the Capitol saved by their valor?”

“Seven years ago, this was the home of one who lifted his sword against the life of his country, and who became the great Imperator of the rebellion. The soil beneath our feet was watered by the tears of slaves, in whose hearts the sight of yonder proud Capitol awakened no pride and inspired no hope…. But, thanks be to God, this arena of rebellion and slavery is a scene of violence and crime no longer! This will be forever the sacred mountain of our Capital….

“Hither our children’s children shall come to pay their tribute of grateful homage. For this are we met to-day.”

Garfield’s grand words obscured the extraordinary human cost of the war to defend the U.S. government. Almost seven years before, on July 14, 1861, at the very beginning of the conflict, Major Sullivan Ballou of Providence, Rhode Island, wrote his final letter to “My Very Dear Wife,” Sarah. Ballou anticipated the First Battle of Bull Run, the first major battle of the war, and wanted to explain why he was willing to give up his life for his country, and what it would cost.

“If it is necessary that I should fall on the battle-field for my country, I am ready,” he wrote. “I have no misgivings about, or lack of confidence in, the cause in which I am engaged, and my courage does not halt or falter. I know how strongly American civilization now leans upon the triumph of government, and how great a debt we owe to those who went before us through the blood and suffering of the Revolution, and I am willing, perfectly willing to lay down all my joys in this life to help maintain this government, and to pay that debt.”

“Sarah, my love for you is deathless. It seems to bind me with mighty cables, that nothing but Omnipotence can break; and yet, my love of country comes over me like a strong wind, and bears me irresistibly on with all those chains, to the battlefield.

“The memories of all the blissful moments I have spent with you come crowding over me, and I feel most deeply grateful to God and you, that I have enjoyed them so long. And how hard it is for me to give them up, and burn to ashes the hopes of future years, when, God willing, we might still have lived and loved together, and seen our boys grow up to honorable manhood around us.”

Ballou fell at the Battle of Bull Run. Sarah never remarried.

May you have a meaningful Memorial Day.

—

Notes:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/04/29/us/trump-triumphal-arch-dc.html

https://www.nps.gov/arho/learn/historyculture/cemetery.htm#2

https://www.nps.gov/articles/first-official-national-decoration-day.htm

https://americanliterature.com/author/sullivan-ballou/letter/letter-to-sarah-ballou

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Marginal Revolution

*Equality of Permission*

Tyler Cowen
Updated

The subtitle is The Politics of Feasible Liberalism, and the author is Deirdre Nansen McCloskey.  The author wishes to argue for liberalism as opposed to statism, a very good book.  And unlike many authors, Deirdre also tells you what she thinks of everyone else’s views.  Due out in November.

The post *Equality of Permission* appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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Marginal Revolution

Robert Wright’s *The God Test*

Tyler Cowen
Updated

The subtitle is Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning, due out June 23.

In the first chapter, Wright summarizes four of his perspectives, these are my paraphrases of his pp.5-6:

1. When it comes to AI, we should be somewhere on the awe spectrum.

2. We can create a future where the upside of AI far outweights the downside, though that involves steering human understanding toward the better side of the awe spectrum.

3. A major reorientation of human thought is required, and right now few people seem inclined to do that.

4. The worldviews of the current AI acclerationists and also doomers are not cosmic enough.

It is a good time for this book to be published, and I agree with much more of it than I disagree with.  My main difference is that I am more focused on very small things — such as Rainier cherries and the forthcoming three to four hour Apichatpong movie — than on cosmic awe per se.  For better or worse, I was not born with those genes, and unlike Wright I am far from Buddhism.  I do think there will be a transformation of “observed awe,” and I am somewhat worried that it will not go well.  Will we be good at building a fairly new world, if not from scratch, on the basis of some new premises about what is possible and what is not?  I will in any case interpret the pending transformation through a Straussian lens, namely thinking that a lot of the observed transformation of awe will be about something other than what people are claiming.  It will be about people arguing over relative status, but under different guises.  Not as tasty as a good Rainier cherry, but interesting to follow as well.

But are we still good at steering and evolving grand visions?  Christianity and the Enlightenment are a hard act to follow.

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Astronomy Picture of the Day

What are these strange space globs? What are these strange space globs?


Daring Fireball

WorkOS: ‘Agents Need Context. Ship the Integrations That Give It to Them.’

John Gruber
Updated

My thanks to WorkOS for once again sponsoring DF last week. The context that actually matters isn’t in your database. It’s in the tools your users live in every day. Multi-stage agents stall the moment they hit a step they can’t see. And every missing integration is a different OAuth flow, a different token lifecycle, weeks of plumbing before the agent reads a single record.

WorkOS Pipes connects your agent to the tools your users live in. Pre-built connectors for GitHub, Slack, Salesforce, Google Drive, and more. Pipes handles OAuth, token refresh, and credential storage. You call the real provider API with a fresh token, every time. Your agent pulls context at every step, for as long as the task runs.

Give your agent context.

 ★