File photo of a Falcon 9 fueled for launch at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. Image: SpaceX.
SpaceX is counting down to a West Coast launch of another batch of satellites for its Starlink internet service Thursday.
Liftoff of the Starlink 17-17 mission is scheduled during a launch window that opens at 4:03 p.m. PDT (7:03 p.m. EDT / 2303 UTC). The mission was original scheduled for March 24 but was delayed two days for unknown reasons, presumably payload or vehicle issues.
Spaceflight Now will have live coverage of the launch starting about 30 minutes before liftoff.
The Falcon 9, with 25 Starlink satellites inside its payload fairing, will take a southerly trajectory on departure from Space Launch Complex 4E at Vandenberg Space Force Base, in California.
The first stage booster for this mission, serial number B1081 is making its 23rd flight. It entered service on the East Coast with the launch of the Crew 7 space station mission in August 2023. It went on to fly the CRS-29, PACE, Transporter-10, EarthCARE, NROL-186, Transporter-13, TRACERS, NROL-48 and COSMO-SkyMed Second Generation FM3 missions, plus 12 previous Starlink deliveries.
About 8.5 minutes after liftoff, B1081 will make a landing on the drone ship, ‘Of Course I Still Love You,’ it will mark the 186th touchdown on this vessel and the 591st booster landing for SpaceX to date.
The stack of Starlink satellites will be deployed from the Falcon 9’s second stage just over an hour into flight.
The day before drafting this paragraph, I blogged a paper on confidence gaps between men and women. It was a paper written by economists, published in the prestigious American Economic Review, the profession’s number one journal. Is this actually sociology, or personality or social psychology, or part of some gender studies field? No one in the economics profession cares to discuss that anymore. It is not that there is a dogmatic attachment to what used to be called “economic imperialism,” rather the view is that if the paper is good enough … it is good enough to publish. I also recently read a paper on using cell phone data to estimate how many people actually were attending church. Freakonomics guru Steve Levitt wrote and published well-known papers on the choice of baby names and corruption in Sumo wrestling116See Exley and Nielsen (2024), and on cell phones see Pope (2024)..
The dirty little secret is that what distinguishes economics as a field, right now, is a mix of higher standards, harder work, better math, and higher IQs. That is the real (dare I say marginal?) contribution of “empirical economics today,” not marginalism per se, though of course contemporary models typically are consistent with marginalist reasoning…
One modest sign of all these changes is how many advisors, when speaking to individuals considering economics graduate school, recommend math or even computer science as a possible background undergraduate major. While most are still undergraduate economics majors, if only because that is where their interest in economics came from, no one seems to mind if they are not. These days, a background in mathematics or computer science is at least as useful for the graduate work to come. Once you get to graduate school, you will have to learn plenty of math and programming anyway, so why not start off in those fields? The prevailing attitude is that the economics you can figure out along the way, or for some topics you may not need to know much of it at all. How complicated are all those economic principles anyway? General skills of apprenticeship and plain ol’ hard work are growing in importance too, as top graduate programs increasingly want their incoming students to have done a “predoc” with an accomplished researcher somewhere along the way.
That is from the chapter on the future of economics in a world with advanced AI.
Addendum: On The Marginal Revolution book, I would most of all like to thank Jeff Holmes for the great job he did on the project, all of the actual work (other than the writing) is from him. He is also producer of CWT, I owe much to him!
Yesterday Trump told reporters that Iran “gave us a present and the present arrived today. It was a very big present worth a tremendous amount of money,” he said. “It wasn’t nuclear-related, it was oil and gas-related,” he added.
Today Katherine Doyle, Courtney Kube, and Dan De Luce of NBC News reported that U.S. military officials have kept Trump up to date on events in the war on Iran by showing him a two-minute montage video of “the biggest, most successful strikes on Iranian targets over the previous 48 hours,” or, as one put it: “stuff blowing up.”
Although Trump also receives briefings through conversations with military and intelligence officers, news reports, and foreign leaders, some of Trump’s allies expressed concern to the reporters that he is not “receiving—or absorbing—the complete picture of the war, now in its fourth week.” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt called their observation “an absolutely false assertion coming from someone who has not been present in the room,” but officials noted that briefings tend to focus on U.S. successes rather than Iranian actions.
The story of corruption in the Trump administration broke open after Trump fired Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem as stories about contracting irregularities have leaked into the media. The suspicious timing of trades in S&P 500 and oil futures on Monday about fifteen minutes before Trump announced his team had been negotiating with Iran—although it hadn’t—has raised public accusations of insiders trading on national security information and thereby endangering Americans.
Yesterday Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the top-ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, wrote a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi in response to a disclosure the Department of Justice (DOJ) had made, likely inadvertently. As part of the Republicans’ attempt to smear special counsel Jack Smith, who investigated Trump’s retention of classified documents when he left office after his first term, on March 13 the DOJ provided the House Judiciary Committee with documents related to Smith’s investigation.
Raskin noted that some of those documents potentially violate the gag order Judge Aileen Cannon placed on that material as part of the attempt to keep it from public scrutiny. This suggests, he wrote, that the DOJ appears to take the position “that it can violate Judge Cannon’s order and grand jury secrecy whenever it sees an opportunity to smear Jack Smith.”
The documents also “include damning evidence” against Trump. The documents show that highly classified documents from his time in office were mingled with material from after he left, suggesting he illegally retained documents.
The documents the DOJ provided to the committee, Raskin wrote, “suggest that Donald Trump stole documents so sensitive that only six people in the entire U.S. government had access to them, that the documents President Trump stole pertained to his business interests, and that Susie Wiles, then the CEO of Donald Trump’s super PAC, witnessed President Trump showing off a classified map to passengers on his private plane. This glimpse into the trove of evidence behind the coverup reveals a President of the United States who may have sold out our national security to enrich himself.”
A prosecutor’s memorandum provided to the committee by the DOJ suggested that “the disclosure of these documents represented ‘an aggravated potential harm to national security.’ The prosecutors also wrote that these were ‘highly sensitive documents—the type of documents that only presidents and officials with the most sensitive authority have.’ One ‘particularly sensitive document was accessible by only 6? people, including the president.’”
Raskin noted that Trump took classified documents on a flight to his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, possibly showing people on that flight, including now–White House chief of staff Wiles, a classified map. Raskin also pointed out that at about the same time, Trump was entering into business partnerships with Saudi-backed LIV Golf and a state-linked Saudi real estate company, and that Trump told a ghostwriter he had “classified records relating to the bombing of Iran.”
Raskin wrote: “It is now clear that DOJ is in possession of evidence that President Trump has already endangered national security to further the interests of Trump family businesses. It is time for you to stop the cover-up and allow the American people to know what secrets he betrayed and how he may have cashed in on them. Our country is at war, American lives are at stake, and the answer to these questions has never been more pressing.”
Raskin asked the DOJ to answer questions about what was on the classified map Trump showed people on his plane, which documents Trump retained were important to his businesses, which family members knew what was in the classified documents, which document was so sensitive that only six people had access to it, whether any of the documents Trump stole or showed to others related to plans for war in the Middle East, and which, if any, foreign actors tried to access—or succeeded in accessing—the documents. He gave it a deadline of March 31 to answer these questions, and a deadline of April 14 to produce “all remaining investigative files” from Smith’s investigations.
Zach Everson of Public Citizen’s Trump Accountability Project noted that when Trump left office in 2021, his businesses were mainly real estate and hospitality and he had massive amounts of debt coming due. At the time, he had no interests in crypto and Trump Media didn’t exist.
Today the DOJ announced a settlement with right-wing activist Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security official who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his conversations with Russian operative and ambassador Sergey Kislyak before Trump took office. Trump later pardoned him, and Flynn worked to overturn results of the 2020 presidential election to say Trump won.
In 2023 Flynn sued the DOJ for $50 million in damages, claiming he was wrongly prosecuted because of his association with Trump. A federal judge threw out the lawsuit in 2024, but Flynn’s lawyers renewed their case when Trump was reelected, and the DOJ engaged in negotiations. Today’s settlement notice did not specify a financial amount but said there will be a payment of “settlement funds.” Alexander Mallin of ABC News reported this evening that the amount was approximately $1.2 million.
In the New York Times yesterday, Lauren McGaughy reported that White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller is urging Republicans in state legislatures to pass extremist legislation on issues like immigration that Congress cannot, especially if one or both of the chambers in Congress flip to the Democrats in 2026. Texas House Republican Caucus chair Tom Oliverson told McGaughy that legislatures like that of Texas “can be a place where some of those ideas can be tried out because they’re difficult to do at the federal level.” Miller has called, for example, for Texas to pass a bill to end public education for undocumented children despite the 1982 Supreme Court decision striking down such a law.
But Democrats are also working at the state level to expand their own vision of equality before the law and government protection of ordinary people, including in places like Minnesota, where officials yesterday sued the Trump administration for access to information about shootings by federal officers, including the shootings that led to the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti.
Those state-level efforts to defend everyday Americans resonate tonight because today is the anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911, in which 147 workers, mostly girls and women, died either from smoke inhalation or from their fall as they jumped from high factory windows after their employer had locked the fire escape to prevent them from stealing the blouses they were making.
The horrors of that day led New Yorkers to demand the government stop such workplace abuses. “I can’t begin to tell you how disturbed the people were everywhere,” recalled Frances Perkins, a young social worker who witnessed the tragedy. “It was as though we had all done something wrong. It shouldn’t have been. We were sorry…. We didn’t want it that way. We hadn’t intended to have 147 girls and boys killed in a factory. It was a terrible thing for the people of the City of New York and the State of New York to face.”
Perkins joined a committee charged with investigating working conditions in New York, including long hours, low wages, the labor of children, and so on. It worked with a Factory Investigating Commission set up by the New York State legislature that examined working conditions around the state. They found children working in factories, women bending over poisonous chemicals, and overcrowded factories that workers could not escape in case of emergency.
New York City politicians like Al Smith cheered on the “do-gooders” but remained convinced that only political changes could make the deep and lasting changes to society necessary to improve the lives of everyday Americans. He worked to build a coalition to create those changes, and managed to usher 36 new laws regulating factories through the state legislature in three years.
Lawmakers in other states began to write similar measures of their own, and when voters elected New York’s Franklin Delano Roosevelt to the presidency in 1932, the nation was ready to take such legislation national. Roosevelt brought Frances Perkins with him to Washington, where as secretary of labor she helped to usher in unemployment insurance, health insurance, old-age insurance, a 40-hour work week, a minimum wage, and abolition of child labor.
Perkins later mused that the state efforts that led to national changes might have helped in some way to pay the debt society owed to those whose suffering brought horrified awareness that something in the nation had gone horribly wrong. “The extent to which this legislation in New York marked a change in American political attitudes and policies toward social responsibility can scarcely be overrated,” she said. “It was, I am convinced, a turning point.”
Matthew and Hannah Josephson, Al Smith: Hero of the Cities, A Political Portrait Drawing on the Papers of Frances Perkins (London: Thames and Hudson, 1969), pp. 129–140.
Mario Zechner created the Pi agent framework used by OpenClaw, giving considerable credibility to his opinions on current trends in agentic engineering. He's not impressed:
We have basically given up all discipline and agency for a sort of addiction, where your highest goal is to produce the largest amount of code in the shortest amount of time. Consequences be damned.
Agents and humans both make mistakes, but agent mistakes accumulate much faster:
A human is a bottleneck. A human cannot shit out 20,000 lines of code in a few hours. Even if the human creates such booboos at high frequency, there's only so many booboos the human can introduce in a codebase per day. [...]
With an orchestrated army of agents, there is no bottleneck, no human pain. These tiny little harmless booboos suddenly compound at a rate that's unsustainable. You have removed yourself from the loop, so you don't even know that all the innocent booboos have formed a monster of a codebase. You only feel the pain when it's too late. [...]
You have zero fucking idea what's going on because you delegated all your agency to your agents. You let them run free, and they are merchants of complexity.
I think Mario is exactly right about this. Agents let us move so much faster, but this speed also means that changes which we would normally have considered over the course of weeks are landing in a matter of hours.
It's so easy to let the codebase evolve outside of our abilities to reason clearly about it. Cognitive debt is real.
Mario recommends slowing down:
Give yourself time to think about what you're actually building and why. Give yourself an opportunity to say, fuck no, we don't need this. Set yourself limits on how much code you let the clanker generate per day, in line with your ability to actually review the code.
Anything that defines the gestalt of your system, that is architecture, API, and so on, write it by hand. [...]
I'm not convinced writing by hand is the best way to address this, but it's absolutely the case that we need the discipline to find a new balance of speed v.s. mental thoroughness now that typing out the code is no longer anywhere close to being the bottleneck on writing software.
One of the responsibilities of this plugin is to configure which models are used for which purposes, so you can say in one place "data enrichment uses GPT-5.4-nano but SQL query assistance happens using Sonnet 4.6", for example.
Plugins that depend on this can use model = await llm.model(purpose="enrichment") to indicate the purpose of the prompts they wish to execute against the model. Those plugins can now also use the new register_llm_purposes() hook to register those purpose strings, which means future plugins can list those purposes in one place to power things like an admin UI for assigning models to purposes.
Daniel Hnyk used the BigQuery PyPI dataset to determine how many downloads there were of the exploited LiteLLM packages during the 46 minute period they were live on PyPI. The answer was 46,996 across the two compromised release versions (1.82.7 and 1.82.8).
They also identified 2,337 packages that depended on LiteLLM - 88% of which did not pin versions in a way that would have avoided the exploited version.
About 25 years ago, Musk sold his finance tech company PayPal and left dot-com life to get into rockets with the founding of SpaceX. Hardly anyone considered this a rational choice on Musk’s part. Space, after all, was where rich people went to blow their fortunes and fail.
For his part, Bhatt co-founded the investing service Robinhood in 2013 and has now decided to get into the space business as well via a start-up called Aetherflux. The company aims to build a network of solar panel-packed satellites that suck up sunshine and then beam it down to Earth via infrared lasers. Yes. Actual space lasers. What could go wrong?
The lasers would feed antennas and ground stations on Earth with energy. In theory, you could then direct power just about anywhere without needing to build a ton of infrastructure on the ground. Army convoys, data centers, etc. could just have electricity sent to them in remote areas.
Bhatt explains all of this in the episode and gets deep into his personal story. He also recounts starting and running Robinhood through its ups and downs, including being both beloved and despised.
Will the space lasers work? I dunno. It’s a lot. But we are fully in the era of trying new, bold ideas in Low Earth Orbit, and, well, I wrote a book predicting this very thing, and so am very much here for it.
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The week before last I argued that what we are seeing in Iran as well as in places like the Department of Homeland Security was the emergence of the Derp State, a government led and staffed by morons who could only advance in an administration as dumb as this one. Today, I want to look at this issue from a slightly different angle.
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The “Dunning-Kruger effect” is a well-known cognitive bias, by which people who know very little about a particular topic overestimate their skill or knowledge, often expressing confidence about their incorrect beliefs. In contrast, those who know a great deal about the subject are more humble; they understand the complexity and uncertainty around it, so they are more aware of their limitations.
We have ourselves a Dunning-Kruger president, one who is supremely confident in his abilities on a range of topics where he is completely ignorant. And now he has taken us into a Dunning-Kruger war, defined by that fatal combination of ignorance and confidence.
While the Dunning-Kruger effect can be a product of ignorance itself — those who don’t know what they don’t know might imagine that their understanding is complete — Trump is also likely driven by insecurity about his intelligence. His “tell” is when he brings up his uncle who taught physics at MIT as proof of his brilliant genes, which he tends to do when in the presence of highly credentialed scientists or successful technologists.
When his ignorance is exposed, Trump claims that he couldn’t have known what he didn’t know, because nobody knew it. “Nobody knew health care could be so complicated,” he said in amazement in 2017 when he realized how hard it would be to keep his promise of repealing and replacing Obamacare; in fact, everyone knew how complicated it was — everyone except him. Earlier this week he said the same thing about the fact that Iran responded to the war he started by attacking U.S. allies in the Gulf:
“Look at the way they attacked unexpectedly all of those countries surrounding them,” he said. “That was not supposed to- nobody was even thinking about it.” How bizarre and unexpected it was! Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said much the same thing. “I can’t say that we anticipated necessarily that’s exactly how they would react,” Hegseth admitted, “but we knew it was a possibility.” Not enough to prepare for it, apparently.
But of course that’s how they would react. This is one of the most fundamental aspects of war, often shorthanded with the saying “The enemy gets a vote.” When you start a war, the other side will respond with actions that it believes will do the most damage, and that could upend your plans. Or as saying goes, “No plan survives first contact with the enemy.” There’s a reason those aphorisms have become so well-worn.
Yet Trump seemed to believe that Iran, upon being attacked by the U.S. and Israel, would do absolutely nothing in response.
But what levers did Iran have to press, when confronted with an existential threat from the world’s most powerful military? The two most obvious ones were attacking U.S. allies in the region and shutting down the Strait of Hormuz, which would disrupt global oil supplies and set off an energy crisis. They can’t prevail in a direct military confrontation, so they have to find ways to increase pressure on the U.S. from outside. Which is exactly what they did.
Before the U.S. went to war, Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told President Trump that an American attack could prompt Iran to close the Strait of Hormuz.
Caine said in several briefings that U.S. officials had long believed Iran would deploy mines, drones and missiles to close the world’s most vital shipping lane, according to people with knowledge of the discussions.
Trump acknowledged the risk, these people said, but moved forward with the most consequential foreign-policy decision of his two presidencies. He told his team that Tehran would likely capitulate before closing the strait—and even if Iran tried, the U.S. military could handle it.
The president is, as George W. Bush famously said, “The Decider” — every day, aides come to him with choices only he can resolve to set policy. But the president’s job also involves listening to a parade of staffers who know a great deal more than he does about a wide spectrum of policy areas, then rendering decisions based on what he already knows and what he has learned. The smart ones ask probing questions, wrestle with uncertainty, and try to anticipate unintended consequences.
But Trump is not one of the smart ones. Aides have tried to accommodate his limitations; in his first term, they realized they could not give him lengthy briefing materials, because he wouldn’t read them. So they devised strategies to hold his limited attention, including keeping documents to a page or two and putting lots of pictures. Some clever aides realized, according to reporting from inside the White House, that if they had to give him something with text, the best bet was to include his name in “as many paragraphs as we can because he keeps reading if he’s mentioned.” As another report revealed, according to his aides, Trump “veers off on tangents and getting him back on topic is difficult, they said. He has a short attention span and rarely, if ever, reads intelligence reports, relying instead on conservative media and his friends for information.”
Even if most of the people closest to him know only a little more than he does — because Trump surrounds himself not with the most skilled people but with yes-men who know their jobs depend on flattering and affirming him — there are still some subject-matter experts around whom he could call on if he chose. There are people in the State Department and the CIA and the Defense Department with expertise in Iran who could have been brought in to help him understand what he was getting into. But we have no evidence that happened, and having that knowledge in the government’s possession doesn’t help if the system doesn’t push it up to the decision-maker.
So how is Trump shaping his understanding of the war today? NBC News reports:
Each day since the start of the war in Iran, U.S. military officials compile a video update for President Donald Trump that shows video of the biggest, most successful strikes on Iranian targets over the previous 48 hours, three current U.S. officials and a former U.S. official said.
The daily montage typically runs for about two minutes, sometimes longer, the officials said. One described each daily video as a series of clips of “stuff blowing up.”
The highlight reel of U.S. Central Command bombing Iranian equipment and military sites isn’t the only briefing Trump gets about the war. He’s also updated through conversations with top military and intelligence advisers, foreign leaders and news reports, the officials said.
It is unclear whether Trump claps his little hands and cries “Yay!” when he watches the video of explosions.
As disheartening as this story is, it’s also notable that we’re hearing about it at all. While his second administration hasn’t leaked as promiscuously as his first one — in which there were lots of people around who weren’t Trump loyalists, and told reporters what a chaotic mess it was — we’re now seeing more leaks emerge than we got during 2025, perhaps in part because people want to start distancing themselves from what they think is going to turn out to be a disaster.
Especially in an administration so driven by the whims of one man, that man’s ignorance and unearned confidence can have a profound, even catastrophic effect. In the Iran war, we can see Trump’s ignorance operating at multiple levels from the general to the specific, each of which has its own consequences. It would help if he knew more about the history of Iran’s relationship to the United States, which influences the motivations of Iranians and the shape of the regime’s decisions. It would help if he understood the structure of the regime, which has enabled it to survive the kind of decapitation strikes Israel and the U.S. undertook. It would help if he understood internal Iranian politics and the particular nature of the government’s system of repression, which made it highly unlikely that the Iranian people would be willing and able to attempt to overthrow the government.
And perhaps most importantly, it would help if he understood the essential nature of war, which would suggest the obvious responses Iran would make to the U.S. bombing campaign. Of course they would attack U.S. allies in the region, and of course they would shut down traffic through the Strait of Hormuz; those were the most powerful cards they had to play. He didn’t have to be a masterful military strategist to figure that out. All he had to do was consider the possibility that he didn’t already know everything. But that’s not something Trump is capable of, and now the whole world is paying the price.
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This chapter provides an overview of the most basic usage of the SQLAlchemy library to create, update and query database tables.
This is the announcement that you have all been dreading. The good news is that I plan to have an annual subscription rate of only $30 for those who subscribe before April 30th. After that, new subscribers will pay $40/year, but existing subscribers will be grandfathered in. Even if a few years from now I bump up prices by 10%, the early subscribers would go to just $33, while the late subscribers would pay $44.
After providing many thousands of free posts over the past 17 years, I’ve decided to add a paywall, although some posts will remain entirely free. In this post I’ll discuss my motives, and then add a few thoughts on money illusion.
Thanks for reading The Pursuit of Happiness! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
Here are some reasons why I have decided to charge for subscriptions:
Replacement: I have recently stopped posted at Econlog and lost a valuable source of retirement income. I wish to partially replace it.
Greed: As Danny DeVito once said, “Everyone needs money; that’s why they call it money.” Who can argue with David Mamet’s logic? Seriously, I’ll be charging significantly less than what people who understand these things tell me is the profit maximizing fee, so greed is not my only motivation. I place some weight on having a broad readership. Given the effort I put into this time-consuming project, the entire enterprise would make no sense if viewed solely as a profit-making opportunity.
Curiosity: I’m curious as to what sort of revenue I could earn. I believe it’s unlikely that I’ll fully replace my Econlog income, but who knows? Inquiring minds . . .
Feedback: During the first 18 months of my new blog, I put a lot of effort into the posts and I feel like I provided a useful service. Paid subscriptions are a sort of test as to whether I’m doing anything valuable. If very few people sign-up then I might conclude I’m wasting my time putting so much effort into the blog.
Quality: At least for my upper middle class and wealthy readers, a small annual subscription fee may be less of a negative than all of those obnoxious ads that TheMoneyIllusion had. In addition, the revenue will motivate me to subscribe to more high-quality publications and other Substacks. Even my current level of subscriptions (NYT, FT, Economist, Bloomberg, Reason, plus a few Substacks) is a bit pricey, and this will motivate me to add more Substack subscriptions. And did I mention the cost of Criterion Channel? NBA LeaguePass?
I waited a year and a half to start charging for several reasons. First, I hoped to build up an audience. Now I have about 9000 free subscribers. (I’m told that only a small portion generally opt for the paid version of a blog, around 5% to 10%.) Second, I didn’t want to be under pressure to post frequently, as I’m supposed to be retired and I do a fair bit of traveling. At least in my own mind I can now tell myself “I’ve already given people more than 18 months worth of free stuff, so if I run out of ideas then people can at least feel that they’ve already gotten something for their money.” Less pressure.
Joseph Conrad once told an interesting anecdote:
“If [his agent Edward Garnett] had said to me ‘Why not go on writing?’ I should have been paralyzed. I could not have done it. But he said to me, ‘You have written one book. It is very good. Why not write another?’ … Another? Yes: I would do that. I could do that. Many others I could not. Another, I could. That is how Edward made me go on writing. That is what made me an author.”
That’s how I always feel about blogging. At any given point in time, I feel I can come up with one more post, but after that I’m out of ideas. But then a few days later another idea pops up into my head. It would have been too intimidating for me to start charging from the beginning, as I would have felt pressure to deliver the goods to all the people who paid their hard-earned money. I’ll still feel some obligation, but having already done 130 free posts certainly lessens the pressure.
Part 2: Money Illusion
Back in the mid-1970s, a friend and I bought about six dollars of gas (a whole tank at the time) at a small independent gas station in Madison. We handed the owner of the station a $20 bill, and he immediately started yelling at us—complaining the bill was too big. “Don’t you have anything smaller! We smiled at each other, understanding that this old guy was a product of the Depression, and thought a twenty was a big bill.
Fifty years later, I’m like that grouchy old guy, suffering from money illusion. But it isn’t just me, the whole of society seems to have trouble adjusting to the change in the purchasing power of money. Consider:
In 1900, the smallest coin (the penny) had the purchasing power of 38 cents today. But in 2025 the penny is still our smallest coin. Yes, it’s being phased out, but in 1900 we somehow got by with nothing even as small as today’s quarter.
Back in the 1960s and 1970, I recall $10s and $20s as being the smallest currency notes that circulated widely. But that’s sort of true even today, when the CPI is ten times the level of 1966. There are lots of $100s “in circulation”, but they are rarely used for ordinary transactions. I suppose it reflects the fact that most larger purchases are migrating to credit cards.
I find relative price changes to be confusing. When I was young, I put product categories into different mental boxes. The price of a lunch was single digits, shoes and clothing items were double digits, major home appliances and color TVs were triple digits, Cars were four digits. Houses were five digits.
Today, lunches, cars and homes are far more expensive, but clothing is still often double digits and home appliances are still often triple digits. My wife and I occasionally go to an elegant restaurant where the bill is a few hundred dollars, and I’m always confused as to how a restaurant meal could be in the same price range as a home appliance. It makes no sense to me.
As a favor to my long-time readers, I’ve decided to charge $30/year to people who sign up during the first few months, and $40/year for those who sign up after April 30th. If you are an affluent reader that wishes to support my project with a “tip”, please sign up for the $5/month option. Or better yet the $100/year “Founding Member”. If you are Elon Musk, then feel free to put one millionth of your total wealth into the Founding Member box, to support this valuable public service.
For all you older boomers like me, think about the fact that $30 or $40 is no longer a lot of money. In California, you can barely buy a decent lunch for $30, at least if you also get a beer and add tax and tip. Don’t be like that grouchy old guy at the gas station back in 1975. Don’t be fooled by money illusion. (You are already benefiting from my own money illusion, as I still can’t stop thinking of $100 as a lot of money.)
PS. Years later my friend got revenge, buying that same gas station and turning it into a bicycle shop.
PPS. Unlike those other bloggers, I don’t pretend to be a fortune teller.
You won’t get economic forecasts or investment advice, beyond “the market forecast is best.” Instead, I’ll offer analysis. Thus I’ve been preaching that while nationalists claim to be patriotic, real world nationalism almost always ends up supporting authoritarianism, militarism, xenophobia, protectionism, corruption and dishonesty, in much the way that communists promise the warm embrace of collectivism, and end up giving us Stalin, Mao, Kim Jong Il, Pol Pot and Castro.
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I was in virtual meetings all day yesterday, so no time to write anything substantive.
Let me mention, however, that one of the meetings involved closed-door presentations from strategic experts about the Iran conflict, and it was even more depressing than I expected.
I asked what the 6000 or so Marines and paratroopers on their way to the Persian Gulf can do to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and the answer was basically, are you kidding? Iran can fire missiles and launch drones against basically any target in the Gulf, from anywhere along its very long coast or from the rugged mountains behind that coast. Policing that area would be extremely difficult even for a force many times as large as what the U.S. is deploying.
Meanwhile oil price futures keep fluctuating in response to ever-changing messages from the White House — what Edward Luce calls Donald Trump’s “tornado of piffle.” The key point is that the prices everyone (me included) watches are financial instruments, claims on future barrels of oil rather than actual barrels. And they don’t mean much until physical oil starts flowing — which seems unlikely unless the Iranian regime decides to allow it.
But Trump’s aides keep him happy with daily video montages of “stuff blowing up.”
American greatness was nice while it lasted. See you tomorrow.
A backend for datasette-files that adds the ability to store and retrieve files using an S3 bucket. This release added a mechanism for fetching S3 configuration periodically from a URL, which means we can use time limited IAM credentials that are restricted to a prefix within a bucket.
Here's an article about the "shidduch" (matchmaking) crisis being experienced in some parts of the orthodox Jewish community. It's interesting (in particular to readers of this blog) for several reasons. As it's title suggests, it is about both a particular institutional feature of a marriage market and about the use of secular science by religious communities.
The general problem is the "marriage squeeze" in communities in which husbands tend to be older than wives, when birth cohorts are growing (so there are e.g. more younger women than, say, two-year-older men). The author argues that the practice of asking new students in yeshiva to promise not to date during their first semester adds congestion to the mix, when they all come on the marriage market at the same time.
(A glossary may help: shidduchim is matchmaking, a shidduch is a match, a shadchan is a matchmaker, chochma is wisdom, a yeshiva bochur is a student, bochurim is the plural,
"There are several thousand more young women than young men currently in shidduchim. ... "We have girls who have not received a single shidduch call in months — if not ever.
...
"We cannot ignore the needs of half of Klal Yisroel. The time to act is now.
"The Midrash in Eichah Rabbah (2:13) teaches us: “Im yomar lecha adam: Chochma baGoyim — Taamin. If a person tells you that the nations of the world possess wisdom — believe it.
...
"We are instructed to take Chochma seriously. The empirical sciences, mathematics, economics, the study of how systems behave — these are chochma. And Chazal tell us: taamin. Believe it. Use it.
...
"Three of the world’s foremost experts in the science of matching markets and queue theory have produced findings that apply directly — with surgical precision — to the shidduch crisis and to the structural damage caused by the Freezer. The Torah tells us: taamin. Listen to what they have found.
"Winner of the 2012 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics for his foundational work on matching markets — Professor Roth devoted his career to studying the precise kind of system our shidduch world represents: a two-sided market where two groups must find each other, and where price alone cannot clear the market. He uses marriage itself as his primary model.
"In his landmark paper “Jumping the Gun: Imperfections and Institutions Related to the Timing of Market Transactions” (American Economic Review, 1994), Roth documented a phenomenon he calls “unraveling” — the destructive timing failures that occur in matching systems. He found that timing problems:
“…play an important and persistent role in a wide variety of settings” — explicitly including “marriage in a variety of cultures.”
"Roth further showed that when one side of a matching system is held back and then released in a synchronized wave — precisely what the Freezer does to bochurim — the result is “congestion”: a catastrophic overload in which a sudden surge of participants meets an accumulated backlog they cannot process equitably. In his research on the market for clinical psychologists, Roth documented that congestion left thousands of participants “stranded” without a match — assigned to no one — not because of a shortage of partners, but purely because of the structural timing failure.
...
"Professor John Little of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology published in 1961 what is now called “Little’s Law” — the foundational theorem of all queue theory, cited in virtually every textbook on operations research, supply chain management, and systems analysis. It is one of the most proven and universally applied mathematical theorems in modern science.
"Little’s Law states with mathematical certainty:
“An arrival rate exceeding an exit rate would represent an unstable system, where the number of waiting customers in the store would gradually increase towards infinity.”
...
"In plain language: once a timing imbalance is introduced into a matching system, the backlog will grow
...
"In their jointly published research, Roth and Xing documented what happens when a large matching system attempts to process too many participants in too narrow a window of time:
“Congestion is an issue whenever a large number of offers have to be made [simultaneously]. The system… stranded [thousands of participants] on waiting lists… assigned to no one or to options for which they expressed no preference.”
...
This is the precise mechanism the Freezer creates. By holding back an entire cohort of bochurim and releasing them at once into a pool of girls that has been accumulating for months, the system is flooded. Bochurim cannot adequately evaluate the full pool. They gravitate toward the newest, youngest entrants. The girls who have been waiting longest — those who entered the system months or years earlier — are stranded. They are not passed over because of any failing of their own. They are stranded by a structural timing failure
...
"To fix a problem, we must understand it. The primary cause of the crisis is well-known: bochurim generally marry girls a number of years younger than themselves. Since the Jewish population grows every year, Baruch Hashem, this age gap means more girls enter shidduchim each year than boys — and many girls are inevitably left behind.
"But there is a second, compounding structural factor: the timing distortion caused by the BMG Freezer. Any bochur who arrives for the winter zman, beginning Rosh Chodesh Cheshvan, must wait three and a half months until the Fifteenth of Shvat before he may begin dating. He signs a written agreement to this effect. The stated purpose was noble: to allow bochurim to become acclimated to their new yeshivah and learn without interruption."
A gas tax, and better yet, a comprehensive system of charging for parking everywhere in the city is a much smarter way to pay for roads than a monthly household fee.
A user fee ought to be based on use, and whether driving or standing still, cars are the most intensive, impactful and dangerous part of the transportation system, and they should pay for streets. A tax on houses or households isn’t fair to those who use the streets less intensely, and especially those who don’t own or drive cars.
An important set of users of Portland streets is non-residents: charging for parking or gas sales in the city puts a portion of the cost on them, rather than having Portland residents subsidize non-residents for driving in or through the city. A majority of workers in Multnomah County live outside the County, and thousands of vehicles on Portland streets are registered in other states–or not registered at all.
Portland, once again, doesn’t have enough money to pay to maintain its streets, make basic safety improvements, or do things that make biking, transit and walking easier and more commonplace.
Given voter antipathy of road taxes and fees of any kind, it’s likely that “none of the above” would win in a landslide if voters were asked to decide on a multiple choice ballot.
This same issue came up more than a decade ago when Steve Novick was transportation commissioner; he pushed for a while for a household utility fee, but in the face of opposition, ultimately decided to propose a gas tax increase, which was–surprise–approved by the voters and then renewed in second election.
But now, the gas tax again is deemed to be a political non-starter, and so the Council is searching for a new gimmick to help pay for roads. There are some very good reasons they ought not to use the household fee.
One of the arguments for the household fee is a legal/political one: fees are subject to the same legal restrictions as taxes, and the City Council can set fees without voter approval (which it would need for say, a gas tax increase). But there’s a rub here: many say they want to set lower fees for say, low income households, but conditioning fees on income, rather than on actual use of service, makes them look and act a lot more like a tax than a fee.
There are some good reasons for charging fees for street use. But in our opinion, the Council have overlooked the most obvious fee. Currently, the city charges nothing for vehicle storage on city streets in ninety percent of the city. Sure, there are meters in downtown and a few other neighborhoods, but for the most part, Portland is truly a socialist paradise–if you are a car. You get to live rent free on the city streets. Rather than sticking households with an inescapable fee, whether they have a car or not, the city should charge those who use the streets, especially for storing their cars. Whether by annual, monthly, daily, or hourly permit, everyone should pay for parking.
Free riders? Non-residents who use Portland Streets should pay, too.
And the interesting thing is that, as the hub of a two-and-a-half million person region, Portland’s streets are widely used by residents from other cities. A key problem with the household fee is that it is paid only by Portland residents, not by those who drive here from elsewhere. That’s especially true at rush hours, with many workers commuting into the city from surrounding jurisdictions. It turns out that most of the people who work in Multnomah County live outside the County. (We’re using Multnomah County data, because helpfully, it’s been compiled from Census Bureau data by the Oregon Employment Department). This is 2022–after the Covid pandemic.
Of the more than 500,000 workers in Multnomah County, 53 percent of them live outside the county. Probably 80 percent of them (or more) drive to their jobs, which are overwhelmingly in Portland. If they live outside Multnomah County, they already pay nothing toward the county’s special vehicle registration fee, nor will they pay the monthly “utility” fee to the City of Portland, and yet they’ll be straining the capacity of city streets, chiefly by driving at peak hours.
And another thing: It’s probably a good guess that somewhere between 5 and 10 percent of the cars on Portland streets are registered not just outside the city of Portland, but outside the State of Oregon. Just as an example, we took a quick tour around Portland’s eastside a couple of days ago, and found cars from 22 states and the District of Columbia. Every one of these was parked on a city street, none of them paid for parking.
Washington – California – Idaho – Nevada – Montana – Colorado — Utah – Iowa – Minnesota – Wisconsin
– Nebraska – Arkansas – Oklahoma – Texas – Louisiana – Alabama – Mississippi – Tennessee – Georgia
– North Carolina – District of Columbia – Ohio – New York
They may be visiting, or living here and delaying registering their vehicles here, but in any case, aren’t paying vehicle registration fees, like Multnomah County’s $61 annual registration fee for bridge replacement.
But out-of-staters aren’t the only free riders on Portland streets. Many cars simply haven’t bothered to renew their registrations. There are plenty of permanently parked vehicles on Portland City Streets. We may not have social housing for people, but at least we have free housing for garage-less cars on the city streets. Like dun-colored non-descript and utterly unmoving GM sedan or this 7-series BMW, apparently parked for months without moving judging from the debris underneath the car, and tags that expired in 2021–four and a half years ago.
And finally there are those who don’t even bother to display license plates, Oregon, or others, such as this late model Toyota Camry, or this aging Volvo Wagon with no plates front or rear, and no visible temporary stickers.
While the unhoused must pay rent to stay anywhere, the un-garaged can take up space of city streets almost indefinitely for free.
Let’s have the users pay.
If we’re really going to charge a fee for city streets, it ought to be levied on those who actually use the city streets, and the most impactful users–in terms of space, costs, pavement damage, safety and pollution–are cars. Carless households, about a sixth of the city’s population–make far fewer demands on Portland’s streets. Clark’s proposed household fee levies taxes on city residents who don’t own cars to effectively subsidize those who live outside the city (or register vehicles outside the city). There’s nothing equitable about charging city residents to continue to allow non-residents to use city streets for free, whether they’re traveling through town or parking their vehicles.
Fees are prices, and prices send important signals to consumers about how their decisions affect the city and others. A household fee is really a tax–it’s inescapable, and inequitable; it bears no relation to how much you use the streets. It would be far fairer to insist that everyone who uses city streets to store their vehicles should pay for the privilege, and contribute to the cost of upkeep of the city’s streets. The city could sell annual passes to residents, and use its existing “Parking Kitty” app to let people buy daily, weekly or monthly parking.
Seven Rules for Paying for Streets
How, how much, and who pays for streets is a key issue for every city. From an urbanist and public finance perspective, and as a guide to thinking about which—if any—of these approaches Portland should adopt, here are my seven suggested rules for paying for streets:
1. Don’t tax houses to subsidize cars. Despite mythology to the contrary, cars don’t come close to paying for the cost of the transportation system. The Tax Foundation estimates that only 30% of the cost of roads is covered by user fees like the gas tax. Not only do cars get a free ride when it comes to covering the cost of public services—unlike homes, they’re exempt from the property tax—but we tax houses and businesses to pay for car-related costs. Here are three quick examples: While half of storm runoff is from streets, driveways and parking lots, cars aren’t charged anything for stormwater—but houses are. A big share of the fire department’s calls involve responding to car crashes—and cars pay nothing toward fire department costs. Similarly, the police department spends a significant amount of its energy enforcing traffic laws—this cost is borne largely by property taxes—which houses pay, but cars don’t. If we need more money for streets, it ought to be charged on cars.
Adding a further charge on houses to subsidize car travel only worsens a situation in which those who don’t own cars subsidize those who do. One in seven Portland households doesn’t own a car, and because they generally have lower incomes than car owners, fees tied to housing redistribute income from the poor to the rich.
2. End socialism for private car storage in the public right of way. Except for downtown and a few close-in neighborhoods, we allow cars to convert public property to private use for unlimited free car storage. Not asking those who use this public resource to contribute to the cost of its construction and upkeep makes no sense and ultimately subsidizes car ownership and driving. This subsidy makes traffic worse and unfortunately—but understandably—makes it harder and more expensive to build more housing in the city’s walkable, accessible neighborhoods. If, as parking expert Don Shoup has suggested, we asked those who use the streets for overnight car storage to pay for the privilege, we’d go a long way in reducing the city’s transportation budget shortfall—plus, we’d make the city more livable. We should learn from the city’s success in reforming handicapped parking that getting the prices right makes the whole system work better.
3. Reward behavior that makes the transportation system work better for everyone. Paying for the transportation system isn’t just about raising revenue—it should be about providing strong incentives for people to live, work and travel in ways that make the transportation system work better and make the city more livable. Those who bike, walk, use transit, and who don’t own cars (or own fewer cars) actually make the street system work better for the people who do own and use cars. We ought to structure our user fee system to encourage these car-free modes of transportation, and provide a financial reward to those who drive less. The problem with a flat-household fee or an income tax is it provides no incentive for people to change their behavior in a way that creates benefits for everyone.
4. Prioritize maintenance. There’s a very strong argument that we shouldn’t let streets deteriorate to the point where they require costly replacement. Filling potholes and periodically re-surfacing existing streets to protect the huge investment we’ve already made should always be the top priority. Sadly, this kind of routine maintenance takes a back seat to politically sexier proposals to expand capacity. We need an ironclad “fix it first” philosophy. Also, we need to guard against “scope creep” in maintenance. There’s a tendency, once a “repair” project gets moving, to opt for the most expensive solution (see bridges: Sellwood, Columbia River Crossing). That’s great if your project gets funded, but a few gold-plated replacements drain money that could produce much more benefit if spread widely. We need to insist on lean, cost-effective maintenance.
5. Don’t play “bait and switch” by bonding revenue to pay for shiny, big projects. There’s an unfortunate and growing tendency for those in the transportation world to play bait-and-switch with maintenance needs. They’ll tell us about the big maintenance backlog to justify tax and fee increases. Then they bond two or three decades worth of future revenue to pay for a shiny new project; the Sellwood Bridge and the local share of the Portland-Milwaukie light rail have been funded largely by tying up the increase in state gas tax revenue, vehicle registration fees, and flexible federal funds for the next two decades. The state, which routinely financed construction on a pay-as-you-go basis, has also maxed out its credit card: in 2002 ODOT spent less than 2 percent of its state revenue on debt service; today, it spends 25 percent. Now it is pleading poverty on highway maintenance. Politically, this makes a huge amount of sense. You get to build the projects today, and pass the costs into the future. Unfortunately, in practice it leads to a few gold-plated projects now, while jeopardizing the financial viability of the transportation system in the long run.
6. Promote fairness through the “user pays” principle. We all want the system to be “fair.” In the case of general taxes, we often put a priority on progressivity—that taxes ought to be geared toward ability to pay. But for something like transportation (as with water rates, sewer rates, or parking meter charges), fairness is best achieved by tying the cost to the amount of use, or what economists call the “benefit principle.” Charges tied to use are fair for two important reasons: higher income people tend to use (in this case, drive) more than others, and therefore will end up paying more. Also, charges tied to use enable people to lower the amount they pay by changing their behavior.
7. Don’t write off the gas tax yet. There’s a widely repeated shibboleth that more fuel-efficient vehicles have made the gas tax obsolete. Despite its shortcomings as a revenue source—chiefly that it bears no relationship to the time of day or roadway that drivers use—there’s nothing wrong with the gas tax as a way to finance street maintenance that a higher tax rate wouldn’t solve. While other methods like a vehicle-miles-traveled fee make a lot of sense, the reason they’re popular with the transportation crowd is because they would be set high enough to raise more money. And there’s the rub: people are opposed to the gas tax not because of what is taxed, but because of how much they have to pay. As an incremental solution to our maintenance funding shortfall, there’s a lot to like about a higher gas tax: it requires no new administrative structure, it’s crudely proportionate to use, and it provides some incentives for better use of streets. So when very serious people gravely intone that the gas tax is “obsolete” or “politically impossible”—you should know what they’re really saying is that people simply don’t want to pay more for streets.
Transportation and urban livability are closely intertwined. Over the past few decades it has become apparent that building our cities to cater to the needs of car traffic have produced lower levels of livability. There are good reasons to believe that throwing more money at the existing system of building and operating streets will do little to make city life better. How we choose to pay for our street system can play an important role in shaping the future of our city. As Portlanders weigh the different proposals for a street fee, they should keep that thought at the top of their minds.
When I first read this post from my friend Paul Kafasis last week — a One Foot Tsunami instant classic — I was hoping that I could think of an example that he missed. I can’t say I did.
The closest, though, is ShowBiz Pizza Place, a 1980s archrival to Chuck E. Cheese. (Instead of a pizza-cooking rat, ShowBiz had Billy Bob, a pizza-cooking hillbilly bear.) Place is an unusual noun to put in a restaurant name, but it isn’t a structure, so it doesn’t belong on Kafasis’s list. But what brings it to mind is that growing up, we had a ShowBiz Pizza Place near our mall, and I loved going there because it was a damn good arcade (and the pizza, I thought at the time, was pretty good — cut into small squares, not slices). They had the sit-down version of Star Wars, the best way to play the best coin-op game in history. (Two tokens to play that one, of course.) They had the sit-down version of Spy Hunter, too. Anyway, generally we all just referred to the joint as “ShowBiz”, but one thing that drove me nuts is that a few of my friends, when referring to it by its full name, called it ShowBiz Pizza Palace. It was like hearing someone call an iPod Touch an “iTouch”. And while I loved the place, trust me, it was not palatial — unless you’re familiar with palaces that are really dark and seedy, and had ball pits where bad things happened.
Analytics in App Store Connect receives its biggest update since
its launch, including a refreshed user experience that makes it
easier to measure the performance of your apps and games.
There’s a lot that’s new, but all the data is still collected with an emphasis on user privacy. There’s an all-new support guide that documents everything.
Since the changes rolled out, a couple of concerns I’ve seen
expressed online are that there will no longer be a single
place to view the aggregate performance of multiple apps and that
the new default reporting period is three months. Those
concerns are well founded. The changes are organized on an
app-by-app basis, and as Apple says in a banner on App Store
Connect, the Dashboards in the Trends section of Connect
and related reports where that data was available are being
deprecated later this year and next. So, while the data Apple
offers is deep for each app, the aggregate data falls short by not
providing a birds-eye view of a developer’s entire app catalog.
For what it’s worth, Apple is aware of the feedback regarding
cross-app reporting. Also, the shorter sales reporting periods,
such as the past 24 hours and seven days, are still available, but
they’re less visible because three months is the new default.
These days, rents are constantly rising, but your salary may not keep up. Therefore, you may find yourself priced out of a good rental unit. Rent ceilings are designed to solve that problem by setting a limit on how much a landlord can charge for rent and keeping rental units reasonably priced for renters.
There are many questions about how rent ceilings work in the real world. What do they protect? What do they not protect? If you are trying to keep your rent from increasing at a faster rate than your income without worrying about sudden increases in your rent, then read on. Read this article, as we will explain how you, as a renter, can benefit from a rent ceiling.
What is Rent Ceiling?
A rent ceiling is a legal limit on the rents charged for any property, set by the government to prevent them from increasing to exorbitant levels. This is particularly true in areas with high housing demand. In practical terms, this means that your landlord cannot charge you anything more than this maximum amount for the rental unit, regardless of how much the rental market is “hot” at that time. That cap may also control how much rent can increase over time, depending on the policy in place.
The goal of rent ceilings is to maintain housing affordability and reduce the pressure associated with sudden rent increases. When there’s a ceiling, you get more predictability. You can plan your finances without worrying that your rent will jump overnight. Rent ceilings do not necessarily apply to all rental properties, as they apply only to certain types of rentals.
If you familiarize yourself with how rent ceilings work, you will better understand your rights, what to expect, and the level of protection you have when rent increases. You can also work with a Washington DC rental manager to understand more about local rent laws and rights.
How Rent Ceilings Protect Tenants
Preventing Sudden Rent Increase
When there’s a rent ceiling in place, landlords cannot increase rents in response to market fluctuations or other factors. Tenants can create budgets, manage finances, and make long-term plans because of a rent ceiling, as they don’t have to worry about losing their apartments due to rent increases. Since they can plan ahead rather than react when rent goes up, tenants will also be able to live in the same apartments.
Promoting Housing Stability
Rent ceilings set limits on the amount a tenant must pay and alleviate anxiety caused by the potential for rent increases that may force a tenant out of their home.
Not having to worry about relocation during your lease period allows you to build a schedule and establish a community. Rent ceilings remove some of the uncertainties that may prevent tenants from staying in the same area. When demand for rental properties increases due to a lack of rental housing or rapidly rising rents, the likelihood of someone being forced out is lower with rent ceilings in place.
Real-World Impacts on Tenants
A rent cap can help stabilize your rent payments. When rent levels are capped, you can pay your monthly rent on time without worrying about the amount you will have to pay when your lease comes up for renewal. Also, you will know well in advance what your maximum possible rent will be, and you can plan for just that amount.
In addition to providing you with better long-term stability and fewer moves in your housing situation, having a consistent environment to live in can do wonders for you as a person. Many people do not understand how much more money they will have after paying lower rent versus paying higher rent. Rent ceilings can reduce your cost of living, let you breathe a little easier, and make it easier to make smart financial decisions without feeling pressured.
Importance of Balance Between Tenant Protection and Sustainable Property Management
It cannot be overstated how important it is to strike a proper balance between protecting your tenant and ensuring the property remains sustainable. If strong controls are placed on rent, it will keep rents affordable and keep tenants in their homes. However, if they are too strict, they may discourage you from maintaining the property and from making new housing investments.
As a result, the quality of the rental stock will decline over time, or fewer and fewer options will be available to rent. Conversely, if there are minimal to no protections in place for renters, then you are left exposed to huge rent increases at any time, along with uncertainty and insecurity about how long you will be able to stay in your current rental unit.
By achieving the ideal balance between protecting tenants and having sufficient incentives to maintain and upgrade your rental units, the entire rental market works. This allows your tenant to rent at a fair price and gives them the confidence to stay in the place where their life is based. It also provides enough incentive to maintain and upgrade your rental units for a better quality of life, while giving you access to more rental options and a rental market that is not ‘stacked against’ you.
Conclusion
Rent control does not solve every problem associated with high rents, but it does allow you to set reasonable expectations about how much you will pay each month, making budgeting easier. If rent control measures are implemented effectively, they will create a stable and affordable housing market, thereby allowing you to plan your future with greater security.
By understanding how the rent-controlled housing market operates relative to your region, you will be able to understand your rights and responsibilities as a tenant. With this knowledge, you will be able to make educated decisions about where you will live and how you will live there.
I am offering a new piece of work — I do not quite call it a book — online and free. It has four chapters, is about 40,000 words, is fully written by me (not a word from the AIs), and it is attached to an AI with a dual page display, in this case Claude. Think of it as a non-fiction novella of sorts, you can access it here. You can read it on the screen, turn it into a pdf (and upload into your own AI), send it to your Kindle, or discuss it with Claude.
Here is the Table of Contents:
1. What Is Marginalism?
2. William Stanley Jevons, Builder and Destroyer of Marginalism
3. Why Did It Take So Long for the Science of Economics to Develop?
4. Why Marginalism Will Dwindle, and What Will Replace It?
Here are the first few paragraphs of the work:
How is it that ideas, and human capabilities, become lost? And how is that new insights come to pass? If eventually the insight seems obvious, why didn’t we see it before? Or maybe we did see it before, but didn’t really know we were on to something important? Why do new insights arrive suddenly, in a kind of flood? How do new worldviews replace older ones?
And what does all of that have to do with the future of science, the future of research, and the future of economics in particular? Especially when we try to understand how the ongoing artificial intelligence revolution is going to reshape human knowledge, and the all-important question of what economists should do.
Those are the motivating questions behind this work, but I will address them in what is initially an indirect fashion. I will start by considering a case study, namely the most important revolution in economics, the Marginal Revolution (to be defined shortly). The Marginal Revolution made modern economics possible. What was the Marginal Revolution? How did it start? Why did it take so very long to come to fruition? From those investigations we will get a sense of how economic ideas, and sometimes ideas more generally, develop. And that in turn will help us see where the science, art, and practice of economics is headed today.
Washington has historically served not only as the political heart of the country but also as a powerful corporate magnet. However, in recent years, we have observed a troubling trend: major government contractors, lobbying firms, and even entire federal agencies are beginning large-scale migrations outside the District. Behind the scenes of beautiful press releases about tax optimization and the creation of “flexible office spaces” lie colossal financial flows that often end up settling in the pockets of a narrow circle of individuals…
The Price of Political and Corporate Migrations
When a large corporation decides to relocate its headquarters from the District of Columbia to Virginia or Maryland, the receiving state almost always offers generous tax incentives. To the unsophisticated voter, this appears as a victory for local government in attracting new employers. But the reality is far more prosaic: ordinary taxpayers are de facto subsidizing these moves from their own pockets through hidden municipal grants.
Growth in the tax burden on local residents through indirect subsidies;
Loss of stable budget revenues in the originating regions;
Increased infrastructure spending in the receiving states;
Intensification of social inequality between districts.
The abandoned municipalities lose millions of dollars in annual tax collections that were originally planned for maintaining schools, parks, and municipal hospitals. Transportation arteries in the receiving region also begin to experience critical overload due to the daily commuter migration of thousands of new employees to remote office centers, which requires fresh investments in road construction. This vicious circle of inefficiency benefits only a narrow layer of administrators who ignore long-term social consequences for the sake of short-term reports.
Infrastructure of Corporate Exodus and Security Concerns
The physical process of relocating a government contractor or large financial institution differs radically from an ordinary office move. Here, we are talking about the highly complex transportation of servers with encrypted confidential data, the carriage of antique furniture belonging to top executives, and the precise calibration of analytical equipment.
Such high-risk tasks require contractors with an impeccable reputation and special clearances. That is precisely why business relocations of this scale are entrusted exclusively to proven operators such as Elatemoving, which are technically capable of ensuring the strictest security, premium service, and most importantly, zero tolerance for operational downtime.
Impact on the Commercial Real Estate Market and Urban Environment
The mass exodus of solvent tenants leaves echoing, vacant Class A office buildings right in the heart of the capital. Developers and investment funds face unpredictable declines in the profitability of their flagship properties, which inevitably leads to the degradation of the urban environment. Attempts at emergency repurposing of these gigantic spaces into residential development run up against strict zoning regulations and outdated District laws, while requiring truly astronomical capital investments.
Economic indicator
D.C. Core impact
Suburban impact
Class A office vacancy
+5.2%
-1.8%
Corporate tax revenue
-3.4%
+4.1%
Infrastructure strain
High
Critical
Rental rate volatility
+2.1%
+4.5%
The figures presented above clearly demonstrate that the real beneficiaries in this game are only large suburban developers and elite transportation companies servicing the endless transit process.
It is obvious that the migration process of major businesses and government agencies requires uncompromising public oversight. Taxpayers have a legitimate right to know exactly how much budget funds each government agency’s relocation costs and who the true beneficiaries are of the hidden subsidies and service contracts.
In conclusion: The Demand for Absolute Transparency and Accountability
Without the introduction of transparent mechanisms for independent assessment of the feasibility of large-scale relocations, the capital region risks finally plunging into a protracted infrastructure and budgetary crisis. Economic policy must be dictated by strict calculations and care for citizens, rather than the short-term interests of shadow lobbyists profiting from the movement of capital. Only rigorous reporting and open tenders can prevent further erosion of the capital’s budget.
Speed is one of the most fundamental and measurable variables in athletic performance. Whether it is a baseball pitcher trying to add velocity to his fastball, a tennis player developing a more powerful serve, or a sprint coach analyzing a sprinter’s acceleration curve, precise speed measurement provides the objective data foundation that separates evidence-based coaching from guesswork. The radar gun made this kind of real-time measurement accessible to coaches and athletes at every level.
Baseball: Where Radar Culture Was Born
No sport has embraced radar gun culture more enthusiastically than baseball. Pitching velocity is tracked obsessively at every level of the game, from Little League showcases to the major leagues. Scouts carry handheld units to college and minor league games, and major league stadiums display radar readings on scoreboards for fans. A starting pitcher who can consistently reach 95 miles per hour or above is considered elite; the difference between 88 and 93 mph can be the difference between a minor league career and a major league one. Coaches use a high-accuracy radar gun throughout training to monitor velocity trends, identify fatigue patterns, and correlate mechanical adjustments with speed changes.
Tennis: The Serve Speed Arms Race
Tennis has developed its own radar gun culture centered on serve velocity. The fastest servers in professional tennis regularly reach speeds above 140 miles per hour. At major tournaments, serve speed readings are displayed for spectators and broadcast audiences as a measure of athletic power. In practice settings, coaches use radar guns to give players immediate feedback on their serves, helping them identify the grip, toss position, body rotation, and contact point adjustments that translate into measurable speed gains.
Football, Soccer, and Other Sports
American football scouts use radar guns at pre-draft workouts and training camp to measure receiver and defensive back speed. Soccer clubs track shot velocity, pass power, and sprint speed using radar and related sensor technologies. Cricket fans are familiar with the speed gun readings displayed during fast bowling, where velocities above 90 miles per hour mark a bowler as genuinely elite. Even in golf, radar technology is used to measure club head speed — one of the primary determinants of driving distance.
Choosing the Right Sports Radar Gun
For coaches and scouts selecting a sports radar gun, several specifications matter most. Accuracy — how close to the true speed the reading is — is the foundation. Range should comfortably exceed your working distance. Response speed (how quickly the reading updates) matters for tracking fast-moving objects like pitches and serves. Data connectivity, battery life, and durability round out the key considerations. Match the specifications to your sport and your budget.
Using Radar Data Responsibly
Radar data is a powerful coaching tool but must be applied with judgment. Athletes who become overly fixated on hitting a specific velocity number sometimes sacrifice mechanics, consistency, and overall effectiveness in pursuit of the number. The most skilled coaches use radar data contextually — as one input within a broader performance picture that also includes accuracy, movement quality, recovery time, and competitive results. When used with that broader perspective, the radar gun is an invaluable asset at every level of athletic development.
AL MVP: Julio Rodriguez, Mariners AL Cy Young: Garrett Crochet, Red Sox AL Rookie: Samuel Basallo, Orioles AL Rookie Pitcher: Payton Tolle, Red Sox AL Manager: Matt Quatraro, Royals
After missing the playoffs each year from 2022-24, the Red Sox have started moving in the right direction. Things were touch-and-go at times last year, but in the end, a pitching staff led by two major acquisitions and a burgeoning core of young position players carried boston to a postseason berth. Garrett Crochet and Aroldis Chapman are back to lead the rotation and bullpen, respectively, while even more homegrown hitters will be looking to make their mark in 2026.
The starting rotation is in a terrific spot, featuring what could be the best one-two punch in the league; facing Crochet and Sonny Gray on back-to-back days will be exhausting for opposing lineups. Alongside that top-end talent, the Red Sox have significant depth, including several MLB-ready (or near-MLB-ready) starters stashed away in the minors. Their bullpen is similarly loaded for the late innings, though the bridge from their starters to their back-end arms could be treacherous.
The outfield was this team's biggest strength last season, and it should be a strong point again, replete with athletic defenders and powered by Roman Anthony's thunderous bat. The infield is less predictable, as the Red Sox will be counting on injury-prone players to stay healthy and promising youngsters to progress. Ultimately, if the offense is going to be meaningfully better than average, at least one player in the infield mix has to exceed expectations.
More broadly, how far the Red Sox will go in 2026 hinges on how far their numerous breakout candidates will take them. This is a good team as-is, but for the Red Sox to be great, they need some new contributors to achieve greatness; it's not going to be thrust upon them.
Starting Pitching: Crochet was seen as something of a risk when the Red Sox added him last winter, but he quickly proved to be one worth taking. After signing a six-year extension, Crochet firmly established himself as a top-three pitcher in the sport. The paradoxical Sonny Gray (even his name connotes both youth and age) has been on the injured list 12 times in a 13-year career. Yet, since his debut, no MLB pitcher has started more games. The 36-year-old should be an excellent deputy for the ace 10 years his junior. With Brayan Bello, Kutter Crawford, Patrick Sandoval and Johan Oviedo, the Red Sox have a surplus of starters with mid-rotation credentials. . . . In a best-case scenario in which all six starters are healthy, either Crawford or Oviedo could be optioned to Triple A or placed in the bullpen. In a more realistic scenario, the Red Sox won't have the luxury of stashing anyone in the minors or the arm barn, but they'll be glad they stockpiled depth. Boston has further depth in the form of Peyton Tolle and Connelly Early. . . . Both will probably start the year in the minors, but few teams have such exciting options so far down the Opening Day depth chart.
Relief Pitching: Who ever sold old closers can't learn new tricks? Aroidis Chapman issued walks at the lowest rate of his career in 2025, and he did so without sacrificing velocity. While he did throw more strikes, what really helped was a massive increase in swings outside the zone. . . . Garrett Whitlock returns as Chapman’s set-up man. Moving to the bullpen full time was just what the injury-prone right-hander needed, and leaning more on his changeup should help him reach even higher heights. Justin Slaten . . . stuff looked just as good in his sophomore season, but the stats won't back that up: his strikeout rate plummeted, and he struggled to strand runners as a result. Aside from that trio, Alex Cora's circle of trust isn't wide. Greg Weissert has been effective in a low-leverage role, while Jordan Hicks will look to regain his triple-digit velocity now that his flirtation with starting is over.
Catching: Carlos Narváez was barely on anyone's radar before he earned an everyday role for the Red Sox in his rookie season. He'll be looking to prove his emergence was no fluke. A strong defender, his balanced (if unremarkable) skill set at the plate should allow him to be something like a league-average catcher. Connor Wong lost his starting job to Narváez in a disappointing 2025 campaign. He's yet to show any above-average skills at the big-league level . . .
Infield: New first baseman Willson Contreras has a swing that should generate lots of balls off the Green Monster, but he hits it too low (and runs too slow) to get the most out of his new home. There will be many long singles, and few added home runs. Trevor Story played the first full season of his Red Sox tenure last year, and while he hit 25 homers and stole 31 bases, his defense wasn't what it once was. . . . Marcelo Mayer has the inside track on third base. The highly touted prospect looked overmatched as a rookie, flashing plus bat speed (74.1 mph) on his swings but whiffing on far too many. His glove should be fine in the long run, though he needs to hone his instincts to compensate for a mediocre arm. The presumptive second baseman is Kristian Campbell, another prospect who struggled in the majors. His power, theoretically his defining trait, was AWOL, and his defense was disastrous. Romy González and Ceddanne Rafaela can also cover the keystone, but the lefty-mashing González has no business facing righties, and Rafaela's elite outfield glove would be wasted on the dirt.
Outfield: Roman Anthony already looks like his team's best hitter, and he still has room to grow. His power numbers were low in his rookie season, considering how hard he hit the ball, and he'd do even more damage with a less passive approach. On top of everything he does at the plate, he's a talented fielder as well, and he'll join Ceddanne Rafaela, Jarren Duran and Wilyer Abreu to form the best defensive outfield rotation in the majors. Rafaela's superhuman jumps enable him to cover swaths of ground in center field. His bat is weak, but his speed helps him reach base just enough to wreak havoc once he's there. Duran and Abreu are strong fielders themselves, with above-average bats to accompany their gloves. . . . The Red Sox could free up more playing time by moving on from Masataka Yoshida. Like Anthony, Duran and Abreu, Yoshida bats left-handed; and he's the worst defender of the bunch. Trading or cutting him would free up DH reps for whichever of Anthony, Duran and Abreu isn't playing the field.
Designated Hitter: Yoshida is the de facto DH, but he hasn't proved he deserves those at-bats over teammates like Anthony, Abreu, Duran and González. His contact skills thrived in Japan, but MLB pitching has limited his power and tested his discipline.
Organization/Management: None of Boston's top baseball people came away from last year's Rafael Devers drama looking great, but a strong second-half showing earned . . . some goodwill from their fanbase. Craig Breslow has already made several splashes in his brief tenure as chief baseball officer. Now, he needs the on-field results to confirm he committed to the right players — and the right manager. Breslow didn't hire Alex Cora, but the executive quickly gave the skipper he inherited his full support, extending Cora through the 2027 campaign.
This season, Cora will be tasked with finding playing time for all his guys; helping top prospects (and recently graduated top prospects) reach their ceilings; and keeping a pitching staff full of aging and injury-prone arms healthy. As for Breslow, he's likely going to have to make some tough decisions about who to keep and who to part with. The Red Sox have possible logjams at several positions, and fans will certainly expect a more active trade deadline.
YANKEES
The Yankees bounced back from their worst season since the early 1990s with a trip to the World Series in 2024. They weren't quite as successful in 2025 . . .
The pressure on the pinstripes will be unrelenting. Two of their top hitters, Judge and Stanton, are in their mid-30s while two more, Chisholm and Grisham, can be free agents after the season. None of Fried, Cole and Carlos Rodón is younger than 32 . . . The Blue Jays, Red Sox and Orioles all have younger cores, and Brian Cashman's payroll advantage isn't what it once was. . . .
Starting Pitching: Gerrit Cole and Carlos Rodón will miss the start of the season, while Clarke Schmidt will spend most (if not all) of it recovering from Tommy John surgery. That leaves a top four of Max Fried, Cam Schlittler, Luis Gil and Will Warren to open the year. . . . Warren, Schlittler and Gil are pitchers the Yankees want competing for back-end roles, not comprising the middle of their rotation. Gil was worryingly hittable . . . His velocity was down, and his strikeout rate paid the price. . . . Warren made a commendable 33 starts, but he wasn't dominant. . . . Cole is coming back from Tommy John surgery in March, and Rodón had loose bodies removed from his elbow in October. . . .
Relief Pitching: . . . Setting up for Bednar will be Camilo Doval and Fernando Cruz. Doval reintroduced his sinker last year, when his cutter couldn't cut the mustard . . . Neither the cutter nor the sinker stands out like they did when Doval could touch 102 mph . . . Veteran sinkerballer Tim Hill will be the go-to lefty, while Jake Bird and his breaking balls are a promising work in progress.
Catching: . . . There was a time when [Austin Wells] looked like a bat-first backstop, but . . . he hasn't proved he's anything more than average when he's standing at the plate instead of crouching behind it. . . .
Outfield: It wouldn't be enough to call Judge the backbone of the Yankees’ offense; he's more like the whole skeletal system. . . . [He] has scored or driven in 23.1 percent of his team's runs over the last four seasons. . . . Trent Grisham look a chance on himself by accepting a qualifying offer . . . His career numbers say he's due for regression, as does his lopsided 34:9 home runs-to-doubles ratio. . . . Jasson Dominguez shows power potential . . . but the player he's been is a mediocre hitter with a lot to learn in left field. . . .
Designated Hitter: Giancarlo Stanton is 36 and hasn't played a full, healthy season in eight years. . . .
Organization/Management: No longer are the Yankees the Evil Empire that wildly outspends the rest of the league. . . . No manager in Major League Baseball faces more criticism than Aaron Boone, but the Yankees' skipper has the backing of the front office. That has inevitably led to chirping that it's really Cashman calling the shots in the dugout. The simplest explanation is that Cashman hired a manager whose opinions align with his own.
Extreme heat lingers over the U.S. Southwest and Mexico on March 20, 2026, in this visualization based on GEOS-FP data.
NASA Earth Observatory/Michala Garrison
In March 2026, the first official day of the Northern Hemisphere’s spring felt more like summer across much of the southwestern United States. Numerous high-temperature records fell that day amid a bout of extreme heat.
The extent and severity of the heat are represented on this map, which shows air temperatures on the afternoon of March 20, modeled at 2 meters (6.5 feet) above the ground. It was produced with a version of the GEOS (Goddard Earth Observing System) model, which integrates meteorological observations with mathematical equations that represent physical processes in the atmosphere. The darkest reds are where the model indicates temperatures reaching or exceeding 104 degrees Fahrenheit (40 degrees Celsius).
Measurements from weather stations on March 20 pinpointed some of the highest U.S. temperatures in Arizona and California. According to the National Weather Service (NWS), Yuma, Arizona, reached a record high of 109°F, which is 28 degrees above the 1991-2020 climatological normal for that date. Four other locations—near Yuma and Martinez Lake in Arizona and Ogilby and Winterhaven in California—tied for the highest temperatures in the U.S. that day, reaching 112°F (44°C).
Several other U.S. states saw temperatures soar in late March. In Texas, Lubbock experienced several days in the mid to upper 90s. Sweltering temperatures extended into Mexico as well. A new March record was set in Hermosillo, for example, where temperatures reached 108°F (42°C), according to news reports.
The heat was driven by a persistent high-pressure system, which the NWS noted was similar in strength to conditions seen in summer. It remained over the region for more than a week, keeping the air dry and skies clear across a vast stretch of the U.S. and Mexico. The heat was expected to spread east into the U.S. Midwest and Southeast by the following week.
CANBERRA, Australia: Infinity Avionics, a leader in smart vision systems for the NewSpace economy, announced today the full commercial availability of Aquila. Following a standout debut at IAC Sydney, the […]
New York-based software startup Airbase emerged from stealth March 25 after raising $5 million to modernize how governments coordinate radio frequencies used by satellites, 5G networks and other wireless systems.
It goes without saying that we shouldn’t take everything Elon Musk says too seriously. There are whole websites dedicated to those times when he has ‘talked the talk’ but failed to ‘walk the walk’ — as well as those times when he has been factually untrue. But his latest claim, which is that he will […]
Swiss startup Pave Space has raised $40 million to develop an orbital transfer vehicle that could move satellites from LEO to their final destinations in hours instead of months.
NASA, concerned about slow development of commercial markets, is considering revamping its strategy for supporting the creation of commercial space stations to succeed the International Space Station.
The Office of Space Commerce has rolled out its proposal for a “light touch” approach to mission authorization, the latest attempt in an effort to regulate new commercial space applications.
IRVINE, Calif., March 25, 2026 — Terran Orbital Corporation, a Lockheed Martin company, today announced the introduction of its new star tracker product line at SATSHOW 2026, expanding the company’s […]
WASHINGTON – Sift, a Southern California startup developing tools to help engineers make sense of hardware sensor data, raised $42 million in a Series B investment round. With the funding, Sift plans to expand its staff of engineers building the infrastructure layer that underpins devices controlled by artificial intelligence algorithms. “Modern rockets, satellites, defense […]
Kent Beck kicks off Still Burning with a fireside manifest for geeks navigating a world that's shifted under their feet. Old skills are losing leverage, and nobody has the answers — not even the people who've been doing this for 30 years. So what do you do? You try things. You experiment cheaply. You bless and release what no longer matters. This one's for the geeks who still care and are still doing something about it.
Authorities in Beijing have barred two executives from a Singapore-based AI firm from leaving China amid a review of the company’s $2 billion acquisition by U.S. social media giant Meta, according to a report by the Financial Times on Wednesday.
Xiao Hong and Ji Yichao — the CEO and chief scientist, respectively, of Manus — were summoned to Beijing this month and questioned over a possible violation of foreign direct investment reporting rules related to the acquisitionbefore being told they could not leave the country, the report said.
Here is more from The Washington Post. In my view, the American lead in AI is somewhat larger than a model comparison alone might suggest.
(Lady-day). Up betimes and to my office, where all the morning, at noon dined and to the Exchange, and thence to the Sun Tavern, to my Lord Rutherford, and dined with him, and some others, his officers, and Scotch gentlemen, of fine discourse and education. My Lord used me with great respect, and discoursed upon his business as with one that he did esteem of, and indeed I do believe that this garrison is likely to come to something under him. By and by he went away, forgetting to take leave of me, my back being turned, looking upon the aviary, which is there very pretty, and the birds begin to sing well this spring.
Thence home and to my office till night, reading over and consulting upon the book and Ruler that I bought this morning of Browne concerning the lyne of numbers, in which I find much pleasure.
This evening came Captain Grove about hiring ships for Tangier. I did hint to him my desire that I could make some lawfull profit thereof, which he promises that he will tell me of all that he gets and that I shall have a share, which I did not demand, but did silently consent to it, and money I perceive something will be got thereby.
At night Mr. Bland came and sat with me at my office till late, and so I home and to bed. This day being washing day and my maid Susan ill, or would be thought so, put my house so out of order that we had no pleasure almost in anything, my wife being troubled thereat for want of a good cook-maid, and moreover I cannot have my dinner as I ought in memory of my being cut for the stone, but I must have it a day or two hence.
Bold and heedless in the face of danger; highly imaginative, given to flights of fancy fueled by lack of any instinct for self-doubt, during which any and all ideas will be perceived as brilliant, even inevitable, no matter how lame.
And:
Incapable of viewing others as real creatures with needs discrete from his or her own, consequently has no problem using others for any purpose that furthers his or her desires, up to and including their destruction, for which he or she will feel no remorse. Remorse in general not a strong suit.
Which brings us to this discussion of how Trump ‘thinks’ (boldface mine):
Donald Trump does not think strategically. Nor does he think historically, geographically, or even rationally. He does not connect actions he takes on one day to events that occur weeks later. He does not think about how his behavior in one place will change the behavior of other people in other places.
He does not consider the wider implications of his decisions. He does not take responsibility when these decisions go wrong. Instead, he acts on whim and impulse, and when he changes his mind—when he feels new whims and new impulses—he simply lies about whatever he said or did before…
…If allied leaders thought that their sacrifice might count for something in Washington, they might choose differently. But most of them have stopped trying to find the hidden logic behind Trump’s actions, and they understand that any contribution they make will count for nothing. A few days or weeks later, Trump will not even remember that it happened.
What this misses is that it is not an issue of Trump lacking object permanence, it is that he willfully forgets–that is, he lies to himself. Why? Back to December 2016:
First, he is essentially a full-tilt diva, with the rest of us either as bit, cameo players, or else the audience (or both). One day the script might be ‘hard-charging businessman’, the next ‘compassionate philanthropist’, followed by ‘competent manager’ and so on. Regardless, the show must go on. Ideally, his entire life is a fantasy, unmoored from reality. Anyone who challenges this fantasy causes extreme psychological distress.
That brings us to sunny point #2. Just like the addict’s primary goal is to get that fix, the narcissist’s primary goal is to maintain the fantasy. They will construct elaborate mechanisms to deny unpleasant realities. Plainly put, they turn everyone around them into liars. You [as a subordinate] have to lie as a self-defense mechanism in order to fend off and manage the impulsiveness, the bouts of inadequacy, the hare-brained ideas, and the laziness and ineptitude.
And yes, this has ramifications for policy making:
The narcissist is often not very good for the organization’s mission. While he often rose to his position by selling a five-star sizzle on a one-star steak, he’s often underprepared and unskilled, and very dependent on others–essentially, he’s an Illustrious Name on the Door. Unfortunately, leaders, on occasion, do have to lead–and that does involve work, knowledge and experience, and relevant skills. The dishonest climate is another massive problem. Problems will fester and multiply because the narcissist doesn’t want to hear about them–the show must go on. Then things reach a crisis point, as the lies collapse on each other. At this point, the narcissist swings into paranoia and rage. Why did all of these awful people lie to me? (Can’t imagine why…). Then the impulsiveness kicks in. Needless to say, this isn’t the optimal environment for crisis management. So if you care about the goals of the organization, the narcissist boss is often the largest impediment.
This is why The Discourse must recognize that Trump is mentally ill, and he not only does not manage his illness, he leans into it. He is not senile, though his aging is not helping (aging rarely does). He is a narcissist, and that means he is delusional.
With the end of the post-WW2 global order, every great power is now effectively a rogue state. Russia is trying (and failing) to reestablish its old empire. China is menacing its neighbors and funding aggressive proxies around the globe. But for sheer wackiness and chaos, it’s hard to beat the United States under Donald Trump. First it was tariffs and threats to invade Greenland. Now the Iran War is causing a global energy crisis.
Militarily, the U.S. has pretty much had its way with Iran, destroying their missile launchers, killing their leadership, and achieving air supremacy with extremely few losses. But Iran has done the one thing that everyone — except, apparently, Donald Trump and his leadership team — had always expected them to do in a major war with the U.S. They have closed the Strait of Hormuz, through which about 20-25% of all global oil and liquefied natural gas flows. Iranian forces have attacked and damaged a large number of ships, causing ships to avoid the strait.
Demand for oil and LNG is inelastic. That means when you cut off some of the supply, price shoots way up. Here are oil prices:
It’s not clear whether this is actually the biggest oil disruption in history, but it’s up there. And unless Trump chickens out and calls off the war very soon, the disruption is likely to continue for some time.
Natural gas prices in Asia (which imports much of its gas as LNG) have also gone way up, due to the strait closure, and to Iran’s attacks on Qatar’s LNG infrastructure.
When oil prices go up, gasoline prices go up too. Gas in the U.S. (meaning gasoline, not natural gas) is now back to $4 a gallon, about as high as it’s ever been1 other than right after the start of the Ukraine war:
But Americans actually have it easy compared to much of the world, where fuel shortages are escalating. Asia, which gets most of the oil and gas that pass through the Strait of Hormuz, is being hardest hit:
Arguably, nowhere has felt it more than Asia: nearly 90% of the oil and gas passing through the strait is bound for Asian countries…Governments have ordered employees to work from home, cut the working week, declared national holidays and closed universities early in order to conserve their supplies…Even China - which is thought to have reserves equivalent to three months of imports - is making adjustments, limiting a fuel price hike as citizens are faced with a 20% jump in price.
On the geopolitical front, this seems unlikely to lead to much international goodwill toward the United States. Iran was not a friendly or peaceful regime by any means, but America attacked and decapitated it without immediate provocation, seemingly with no good long-term plan or exit strategy — and now other countries around the world are bearing the brunt of Trump’s mercurial violence. This all makes America seem like a dangerous loose cannon — a powerful country flailing around, applying its power whimsically and indiscriminately and leaving others to suffer the consequences.
But what will be the economic ramifications? Despite the drama, the damage is likely to be modest rather than catastrophic.
Economists have been studying the impact of energy shocks for a long time. As you can imagine, this was a big topic in the 1970s, when there were two big oil shocks — one related to the Yom Kippur War and the OPEC oil embargo in 1973, and the second after the Iranian revolution in 1979. Those shocks are often blamed for the 1970s “stagflation” — low growth, high unemployment, and high inflation.
In fact, after the recent post-pandemic inflation, Larry Summers posted a chart predicting a resurgence of inflation, based on little more than pattern-matching:
A lot of people laughed at this chart when it came out, but it would be darkly ironic if history actually ended up repeating itself due to another oil disruption from Iran.
I have my doubts that anything like this will happen, though. For one thing, some economists, like my econometrics teacher Lutz Killian, vigorously dispute this narrative, and claim that the 70s inflation wasn’t caused by oil at all. But regardless of who’s right about the 1970s, it looks like modern economies are just more resilient to disruptions in oil supplies.
Blanchard and Gali (2007) looked at economic responses to changes in oil prices in the U.S.,2 and concluded that the economy of the 2000s was only about a third to half as sensitive to the price of oil as the economy of the 1970s had been. Their reasoning is that modern economies are more flexible in general, that they have better monetary policy (i.e. we don’t try to print a ton of money in response to a supply shock), and that we depend on oil less.
By their estimates, a 10% increase in the price of oil now (or at least, if “the 2000s” means “now”) leads to only a 0.25 percentage point increase in the CPI and a 0.3 percentage point reduction in GDP over the course of a year or so. Since oil just spiked by 50%, then if that’s sustained, we might expect to see inflation go up by 1.25 percentage points, and GDP go down by 1.5 percentage points over the next year. That would mean inflation would go to around 4% and GDP growth might go down to 1.5% — frustrating and annoying, but not catastrophic.
Other estimates seem similarly modest. For example, in a recent roundup, I flagged a paper by Känzig and Raghavan (2025) that looked at the closure of key shipping chokepoints. Here was their chart showing the predicted response to a 10% increase in shipping costs caused by the closure of a key waterway:
Now note that shipping costs haven’t even increased since the start of the Iran war. That implies relatively little shock from shipping disruption. Inflation expectations have risen only a tiny bit in survey measures, and market measures so far show no expected increase in inflation over the next one or two years.
So if you were worried that the Iran war was going to collapse the economy, I think you can relax. 4% inflation and growth cut in half for a year are no fun, but they’re not a calamity either.
That said, there are several reasons to worry a bit. First of all, 4% inflation and growth cut in half feel like a self-inflicted wound — another self-inflicted wound, after the madness of tariffs. Americans are already in an incredibly bad mood about the economy. Consumer sentiment is absolutely in the dumps:
The negative trend began in the Biden years, and voters definitely blamed Biden at the time. But now they’re blaming Trump, and it’s clear that the Iran war made approval of Trump’s economic policy fall off a cliff:
(Note, by the way, that “Trump’s approval rating goes down” is not bad in and of itself — in fact, I’m glad more people are finally waking up to what a horrible leader Trump is. But I do not want Americans to feel sad and angry and afraid about their economy. It’s not worth wishing for bad things to happen just so there will be a backlash against politicians I don’t like.)
Also, it’s worth remembering that the U.S. isn’t the only country that matters. Kilian and Zhou (2023) find that Europe and the UK tend to experience much more of a bump in inflation from oil price shocks than the U.S. or Japan. And there are plenty of papers that find a strong link between global energy prices and local food prices in poor countries like Pakistan, Uganda, and others.
In other words, even if the U.S. escapes relatively unscathed from its ill-planned war of choice in Iran, its allies, and vulnerable poor people around the world, may feel a lot more pain. Not that the Trump administration has shown much inclination to care about allies or the global poor, of course.
That will simply reinforce the notion of America as a force for chaos — a bully who jumps in, smashes things up, and leaves others to deal with the consequences. It will be very hard to shake that reputation, even after Trump is out of office. Meanwhile, Americans themselves are getting angrier and angrier, even if the actual harms they’re suffering are more mild.
So the Iran war will not be a catastrophe, but it’s still bad news for the economy. And that pain is unlikely to come with any geostrategic gains, either — Trump is probably not going to be able to destroy Iran’s nuclear program with airstrikes, and the Iranian regime doesn’t seem in danger of collapsing. So it’s worth asking why we’re doing this war at all. The answers won’t be flattering for Trump, and they won’t be pleasant for his fans to hear.
If we measure gasoline prices relative to incomes, it won’t be as high as in the early 2010s, because incomes have gone up since then. But it’s still a big spike!
This requires the assumption that oil prices move due to supply-related factors — rather than to changes in economic conditions, which would give rise to reverse causality.
Online gaming platforms have reshaped digital entertainment by offering more than a single type of game. They bring multiple forms of play into one place, giving players greater choice and control over how they spend their time.
The strongest platforms go beyond large libraries, creating environments where players can move between formats, use different devices, and discover features that make each session feel more tailored. From classic table games to live content and social tools, the offering is broader and more refined. As a result, online gaming platforms have become a key part of digital entertainment, keeping players engaged through variety, convenience, and stronger design.
More Genres in One Place
One of the clearest ways online gaming platforms expand entertainment is by bringing multiple game types together in a single destination. Players no longer need to visit several sites or apps to find something that matches their interests. Many platforms now include card games, live tables, slots, puzzle-based titles, and quick mobile experiences under one account.
That variety gives players practical benefits:
Easier to switch between short and longer sessions,
Different game types suit different moods and times of day,
One platform can serve both familiar habits and new interests.
Casino games remain an important part of this broader selection because they give players access to different styles of play within the same platform. Some titles are built around speed and visual energy, while others appeal to players who prefer a more traditional table experience with a familiar rhythm.
Games such as Baccarat highlight why classic formats continue to hold value. Known for its straightforward structure and steady pace, Baccarat offers a more measured style of play that contrasts with faster-paced options. It is also commonly featured in live dealer formats, where real-time gameplay and professional dealers bring added presence to the table.
Its continued inclusion across digital libraries reflects the lasting appeal of casino entertainment that feels polished, recognizable, and easy to place within a wider lineup of table games.
Greater Convenience Across Devices
Accessibility is one of the biggest strengths of modern gaming platforms. Players expect to move between devices without losing progress, settings, or ease of use. In response, platforms now focus more on smooth design across phones, tablets, and desktop systems. This lets players decide when and where they want to play without changing their routine.
That convenience expands digital entertainment because it reduces friction. A player might begin on a computer at home, return later on a phone, and continue with very little interruption. When the transition feels simple, gaming fits more naturally into everyday life.
Clear menus, fast loading times, and strong mobile design also matter. Players have many entertainment options competing for their attention, so a platform must feel efficient from the first screen. Better access isn’t just a technical upgrade. It changes how often players return and how easily gaming becomes part of their daily digital habits.
Live Features Create a Richer Experience
Live content broadens digital entertainment by adding real hosts, real-time pacing, and a more immediate feel than standard automated formats.
A Stronger Sense of Presence
When a session unfolds in real time, the experience often feels less distant. Players are not only watching a screen refresh. They are following an event as it happens. This sense of continuity helps maintain focus throughout the session. That can make even familiar games feel more vivid and more engaging.
More Variety in Mood and Format
Live content also gives players another way to choose how they want to spend their time. Some days may suit quiet solo play. Other moments may feel better with a more interactive format. By supporting both styles, platforms make gaming feel more versatile and more closely connected to the wider world of digital entertainment.
Personalization Helps Players Find Better Options
Online gaming platforms are becoming better at helping players find content that suits their preferences. Personalization tools reduce the effort needed to search through a large library. Instead of scrolling through endless categories, players often see suggested games, recent activity, and recommendations shaped by their habits and interests.
This adds real value because choice only matters when it’s easy to manage. A huge selection can feel overwhelming without some structure. Tailored suggestions make the platform easier to use while still leaving players in control. They can follow recommendations or ignore them, but the overall experience feels more directed.
Personalization also encourages discovery. A player who usually stays with one type of game may be introduced to another option with a similar pace or style. That creates a natural path toward trying something new. In that way, platforms expand entertainment not only by offering more content, but by making it easier for players to notice and explore what suits them best.
Why Players Have More to Explore Than Ever
Online gaming platforms are expanding digital entertainment by offering more than access to games. They combine variety, device convenience, live content, personalization, and social features in one connected space, giving players greater flexibility and more ways to stay engaged.
The shift is not just in the number of titles, but in the quality and range of what’s offered. Players can move between formats, use different devices, and find options that better match their preferences, making these platforms feel more complete. As digital habits evolve, players will continue to value depth, clarity, and ease of use. The platforms that stand out will be those that treat entertainment as adaptable, shaped not just by content, but by how smoothly players interact with it.
WASHINGTON, DC—NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman on Tuesday laid out a sweeping vision for the space agency’s next decade during an event called “Ignition” in which he and other senior leaders set out their exploration plans.
Isaacman and his colleagues shared a number of major announcements, including outlining a nuclear-powered mission to Mars that will release three helicopters there and major changes to commercial space stations. However, most significantly, Isaacman outlined a detailed plan to construct a substantial Moon base over the next decade. He framed it as part of a "great power" challenge, saying that if NASA does not succeed now it will cede the Moon to China.
The base included long-range drones, multiple sources of power, sophisticated communications, permanent habitats, scientific laboratories, local manufacturing, and more. To accomplish this, NASA will work with a broad range of industry partners capable of sending medium-size and large cargos to the lunar surface. Isaacman also confirmed that NASA will no longer build a Lunar Gateway in orbit around the Moon, but would rather focus all of its energy and resources on the lunar surface.
In the past 18 months, we've experimented with a ton of AI-infused features at 37signals. Fizzy had all sorts of attempts. As did Basecamp. But as Microsoft and many others have realized, it's not that easy to make something that's actually good and would welcomed by users. So we didn't ship.
In the meantime, agents have emerged has the killer app for AI. Not only are LLMs much smarter when they can check their thinking using tools, but the file system also gives them the memory implant they needed to learn between prompts. And now they can actually do stuff!
Not only can you have your agent look through everything in Basecamp, summarize whatever you need, but it can also set up to-do lists, post message updates, chat with humans and clankers alike, upload reference files, and arrange a project schedule. Anything you can do in Basecamp, agents can now do too.
This becomes extra powerful when you combine Basecamp with all the other tools you might be using that are also agent accessible. For software development, you can use the MCP from Sentry to trawl through major sources of bugs, then have the agent summarize that in a message for Basecamp. Or you have it download, analyze, and highlight key customer complaints by giving it access to your help desk system.
All this was possible in the past with APIs, hand-written integrations, and human data scientists. But it was cumbersome, slow, and expensive, so most people just didn't. A vanishingly small portion of Basecamp customers have ever directly interacted with our API. But agents? I think adoption is going to be swift.
Not because everyone is going to run OpenCode, Claude Code, or Gemini CLI. But because agents are going to be incorporated into ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, and all the other mainstream interfaces who were collectively embarrassed by OpenClaw's meteoric ascent and popularity very quickly. There's a huge demand out there for a personal agent that can act as your private executive assistant.
This is where the puck is going, and we're skating to meet it with agent accessibility across the board. Basecamp is first, Fizzy is next, and we'll hit HEY before long too. Revamped APIs, comprehensive CLIs, and the skills to use them whatever your harness or claws look like.
This post follows up on the previous twoposts about President Trump’s weak hand in trying to end his Iran War with something short of a humiliating climb-down from his demands for “regime change” and “unconditional surrender.” Trump’s claim yesterday of “very, very strong talks” with Tehran turn out, predictably, to be third-party talks aimed at coaxing Tehran into talking at all. As Reuters reports in this new (paywalled) story, Iran is actually dramatically upping its demands since the start of the war. Those include guarantees of no future attacks, reparations for war damage and formal control of the Strait of Hormuz.
Now, you can demand anything you want. That doesn’t mean you’ll get those things. But when one side is begging for talks and backing off threats, and the other is making maximal demands you know who has the whip hand in the negotiations and indeed in the larger conflict itself. And don’t be surprised if Iran actually gets some of those concessions. In an Axios piece that ran three days ago, a U.S. government official suggested on background that reparations might be doable with a bit of finessing: “They call it reparations. Maybe we call it return of frozen money. There’s many different ways that we can wordsmith so that it solves politically what they need to solve, to develop consensus in their system.”
If the U.S. were to release a few billion in frozen Iranian assets — an issue that goes back to the revolution — it might be fair for the U.S. not to call them “reparations.” Obama did some of that with his nuclear deal, a fact Trump himself and most Republicans castigated for years. But cash payments to Iran is a far, far cry from “unconditional surrender.”
And there’s another part of the equation. The U.S. has claimed that the intensity of its bombing has only increased. The message being: foot-dragging only hurts Iran. More days, more punishment. But this article in The Jerusalem Post suggests that the pace of bombing actually dropped off dramatically starting roughly a week ago. The reason is partly the need for rest for pilots and maintenance of plans and partly running out of targets to bomb. This further strengthens the point I made a couple days ago, which is the war is now going on not in pursuit of the original U.S. objectives, whatever those might have been, but to get Iran to stop punishing the United States essentially through holding the global economy hostage. Let’s be a bit more direct: the main aim of the war is to get Iran to stop doing what it did to retaliate against the United States for starting the war.
Meanwhile the Brent crude benchmark price for a barrel of oil is back over $100 as traders realized they got punked yet again by a sudden, dramatic claim from Trump that because of a new secret plan everything was about to be awesome again.
Sen. Ron Wyden is warning us of an abuse of Section 702:
Wyden took to the Senate floor to deliver a lengthy speech, ostensibly about the since approved (with support of many Democrats) nomination of Joshua Rudd to lead the NSA. Wyden was protesting that nomination, but in the context of Rudd being unwilling to agree to basic constitutional limitations on NSA surveillance. But that’s just a jumping off point ahead of Section 702’s upcoming reauthorization deadline. Buried in the speech is a passage that should set off every alarm bell:
There’s another example of secret law related to Section 702, one that directly affects the privacy rights of Americans. For years, I have asked various administrations to declassify this matter. Thus far they have all refused, although I am still waiting for a response from DNI Gabbard. I strongly believe that this matter can and should be declassified and that Congress needs to debate it openly before Section 702 is reauthorized. In fact, when it is eventually declassified, the American people will be stunned that it took so long and that Congress has been debating this authority with insufficient information.
Over the decades, we have learned to take Wyden’s warnings seriously.
Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) has been on a tweeting spree, campaigning against the idea by, for example, comparing the voter suppression legislation to a fine cut of beef, urging his colleagues not to “settle for cheap imitations” of the sort necessitated by budget reconciliation. It is perhaps an imperfect metaphor.
Right wingers in the House are also denouncing the idea.
The SAVE America Act cannot procedurally be passed through reconciliation. The parliamentarian will strip out provisions like voter ID, etc. Any Republican senator claiming it can be done that way is LYING. The SAVE America Act only stands a chance if it is attached to FISA.
It’s still TBD whether the DHS funding “deal” we discussed yesterday will work out or run aground. But, as Emine Yücel wrote yesterday evening, Democrats have their own demands, noting that the deal, which would fund Homeland Security Investigations and Border Patrol, is still funding immigration enforcement, which they said they would not do without reforms. That means Majority Leader John Thune’s effort to narrow the shutdown to just ICE enforcement (and later fund ICE enforcement through reconciliation) is facing trouble from multiple directions.
A recent conversation with a friend who works the futures markets has me thinking about the nature of daydreaming. This is a guy who tracks fast-breaking numbers all day long so as to avoid getting a freight-car’s worth of coffee beans or some other commodity delivered to his condo. His numbers, he says, are all business, and allow no time for daydreaming. Whereas the numbers I study have no deadline, and give me plenty of time for reflection, moments of gazing off into the distance and just letting thoughts run. Today, for example, I’m troubled about what we know about the age of the galaxy.
If daydreaming sounds abstract, consider that this is an issue that has a bearing on our own standing in the cosmos. We have a pretty good read on the age of the Earth, and can peg it at around 4.5 billion years. Various sources tell me the Big Bang occurred some 13.8 billion years ago, with the formation of the Milky Way beginning not terribly long thereafter. Let’s say for the sake of argument that our galaxy is 13.6 billion years old, a figure that NASA recently cited.
So when did worlds like the Earth – terrestrial planets – began to appear? I think I’ve been writing about this question since Centauri Dreams first appeared, as it draws upon the work of Charles Lineweaver (Australian National University), who in 2001 landed on the figure of 9 billion years ago. The problem is immediately apparent: The galaxy seems to be stuffed with many a planet that is older than our own, and in many cases considerably so. Lineweaver’s work found that the median age of terrestrial planets is on the order of 6.4 billion years.
Here we tug again at the Fermi question – ‘Where are they?’ – since these numbers suggest that the opportunity for civilizations to emerge was robust long before our planet began to coalesce. Since that seminal 2001 paper, which I’m surprised is not cited more than it is, Lineweaver has continued to explore the numbers, and they are likewise massaged in other subsequent papers, but rather than going into the details, let’s just say that we’re still left with a galaxy far older than our planet. Give an extraterrestrial civilization a 2 billion year head start and you might think they would be visible to us in some way, or maybe not. Maybe civilizations don’t live all that long?
See Stephen Webb’s wonderfully readable If the Universe is Teeming with Aliens, Where is Everybody? (Springer 2015), the latest edition of which offers 75 answers to Fermi that range from the preposterous to the ingenious. I also send you to Milan Ćirković’s absorbing The Great Silence: Science and Philosophy of Fermi’s Paradox (Oxford, 2018), which mines the depths of a question that many do not consider a paradox, and others find deeply troubling no matter what the name. And Paul Davies is also a reminder of how rich the literature on Fermi is. See his The Eerie Silence (Mariner, 2010) for still further insights.
Thinking about a culture that was around in the days when the first signs of life began to appear on Earth is indeed cause for daydreaming. I notice this morning that Avi Loeb, in his lively publishing venture on Medium, is looking at how long-lived civilizations might cope with the problems raised by their longevity. It’s one thing to consider our own fate when the billion years or so we have before the Sun gets too hot to deal with completely dwarfs our species’ scant time on Earth. But what would we do if we actually survived for that billion years? Would we go elsewhere, or find a way to move the Earth to an orbit that would provide habitable conditions for millions, even billions of years more?
This is pretty lively stuff, for it opens up the possibility of terrestrial-class planets orbiting far outside what was once their habitable zone. It also brings into question the matter of white dwarfs, which could still sustain life for a species that insisted on staying within its natal stellar system. An ETI that can move planets might move one again, this time back in toward the Earth-sized remnant of its former red giant star. I would assume interstellar relocation would make more sense, but no one can know what alien minds might think of this.
Loeb has worked on these issues before:
In 2013, I co-authored a paper with Dani Maoz… which showed that during a transit by an Earth-mass planet across a white dwarf, the transmission spectrum of the planet’s atmosphere would show prominent bio-markers such as molecular oxygen absorption at a wavelength of ∼ 0.76 micrometers. We calculated that a potentially life-sustaining Earth-like planet transiting a white dwarf would be detectable by the Webb telescope in about 5 hours of total exposure time, integrated over 160 two-minute transits.
The method is familiar, one that we’ve discussed here often ever since the first transmission spectroscopy results began showing us what could be found in a hot Jupiter’s atmosphere. I love the idea of expanding the search for habitable worlds into environments as seemingly bizarre as these, although the limitations on telescope time (demand is high!) would make such searches lower priority than, say, a close look at a nearby red dwarf’s habitable zone planet. Here again we have more SF story material, though. All the possible planets around white and red dwarf stars make for fertile hunting for story crafters.
Image: Artist’s impression of a still unconfirmed planet around the white dwarf star WD1054-226 orbited by clouds of planetary debris. Credit Mark A. Garlick / markgarlick.com. License type Attribution (CC BY 4.0).
Loeb also mentions a paper I had missed in earlier discussions of stellar ages. In 2019, Nicholas Fantin (University of Victoria, BC) and colleagues extended the Lineweaver work I led this post with to include white dwarfs, considering them as age markers that help us trace the development of the galaxy. The bare bones of this method are described here:
We develop a new white dwarf population synthesis code that returns mock observations of the Galactic field white dwarf population for a given star formation history, while simultaneously taking into account the geometry of the Milky Way (MW), survey parameters, and selection effects. We use this model to derive the star formation histories of the thin disk, thick disk, and stellar halo.
Skipping the details, I just want to cite a few results that back up the interesting point about the relative youth of the Sun. According to this model, the Milky Way’s thick disk began forming stars 11.3 ± 0.5 billion years ago. The growth rate peaked at 9.8 ± 0.3 billion years ago. A slow decline in starbirth is traced that eventually became a constant rate that persists until now. Heavily reliant on results from the Gaia mission, the data set is dominated by disk stars in the solar neighborhood. A larger sample size will eventuate through surveys like Pan-STARRS DR2, the LSST, as well as data from WFIRST and Euclid.
Again we face what Tennyson called ‘the long result of time.’ So much time, in fact, that civilizations in their multitudes would have had the chance to form. Cirkovic notes in The Great Silence just how much deeper the Fermi question becomes when we consider it in light of such findings. He points out that the original Fermi statement (WeakFP) could be taken to ask why we have seen no evidence of extraterrestrials on Earth or in the Solar System. Keep extending the search outward, though, and the issue gets more and more puzzling. Take the entirety of our past light cone as your canvas and the lack of signs of extraterrestrial activity despite the billions of years civilizations could have existed escalates in impact. This is why Webb’s book is as long as it is.
All this is occurring even as we continue to rack up exoplanets of all descriptions including those of terrestrial mass, and even as the prospect of interstellar travel is now under serious investigation, as we’ve just been reminded by Jim Benford’s work with Breakthrough Starshot. We have developed, says Cirkovic:
Improved understanding of the feasibility of interstellar travel in the classical sense and in the more efficient form of sending inscribed matter packages over interstellar distances. The latter result is particularly important since it shows that contrary to the conventional skeptical wisdom shared by some of the SETI pioneers, it makes good sense to send (presumably extremely miniaturized) interstellar probes, even if only for the sake of communication.
Just where to send such probes? The nearest stars are obvious candidates, with Proxima Centauri b leading the list, but fleshing out a target roster – today an exercise in theory more than planning – may take in destinations we have only begun to consider. That’s assuming our early work on interstellar probe technologies continues to develop options for ever more distant targets. Imagine ‘swarm’ flybys of interesting systems, a capability we may well be able to deploy some time late in this century.
The nearest white dwarf to the Sun, by the way, is Sirius B, some 8.6 light-years out. The closest solitary white dwarf is van Maanen’s Star, about 14 light years distant. The closest red giant is Pollux in Gemini, at about 34 light years distance
The paper is Fantin et al., “The Canada-France Imaging Survey: Reconstructing the Milky Way Star Formation History from Its White Dwarf Population,” The Astrophysical Journal Vol. 887, No. 2 (17 December 2019), 148. Full text. Charles Lineweaver’s 2001 paper is “The Galactic Habitable Zone and the Age Distribution of Complex Life in the Milky Way,” Science Vol. 303, No. 5654 (2 January 2004), pp. 59-62, with abstract here.
Her first book, Blood and Iron, about the German Empire from 1871 to 1918, was well reviewed, even though some reviewers suggested that she had played down the negative aspects of the period and of Otto von Bismarck‘s legacy. Her second book, Beyond the Wall, about the history of the GDR from 1949 to 1990, was well reviewed in the United Kingdom, but less well received in Germany.
Per Apple’s announcement of its new Apple Business platform, ads are indeed coming to Apple Maps. Beginning this summer in the U.S. and Canada, businesses will have a new way to be discovered by using… More
A book reprinting John Rocque’s 1746 map of London, a massive 24-sheet, 1:2,437-scale map originally printed in 24 sheets, has just been published. Or rather, republished: it’s an updated reprint of a 1947 paperback by… More
I say that not derisively, but truthfully. He is an unknown Democrat, running in the CA-71 Assembly race against an incumbent, Republican Kate Sanchez, who has him dwarfed in name recognition, financial wherewithal and potential voters (the district is plus-10 GOP).
But, truly, J.J. Galvez is a winner. He is an unknown Democrat, running in the CA-71 Assembly race against an incumbent, Republican Kate Sanchez, who has him dwarfed in name recognition, financial wherewithal and potential voters (the district is plus-10 GOP). And yet—the 34-year-old going for it. When nobody up stood up and said, “We need to fight!”, bro stood up and said, “We need to fight!” Not for glory. Not for social media points. Nope—he’s running because he feels compelled and connected and, in a way, called. Victory or defeat.
Can he win? I mean—was UTSA going to beat UConn in the first round of the women’s tournament? The odds were long, the decks were stacked … and the Roadrunners fell by 38. But they were still in the game. Still on the court. Scrapping. Throwing elbows. Working their asses off and brawling for respect. They inspired people. Hell, they inspired me.
J.J. and I sat down for coffee in Orange a couple of weeks ago. One can visit his website here, and his Instagram here.
Here’s our chat …
JEFF PEARLMAN: “All right. Question number one. Serious question. You’re 34-years old. You must have better things to do in your life to run for political office. So I know the whole cliche answer, America, blah, blah, blah, make it better. But why would you actually throw yourself into an assembly race?”
J.J. GALVEZ: “Well, for me, it starts with my background and it really is ... I grew up in a different country and I grew up really looking up to the U.S. and it was a goal of mine to come here as I was growing up. And I was really lucky that I was born into a middle class family in Honduras, which is a very small percentage of the population. We have 70 percent of the population living beneath the poverty line. And for me, being born into a middle class family meant that I was able to go to a private bilingual school since I was in kindergarten. And so I was exposed to opportunities there for things like being able to go and study abroad. And for me growing up, it was really a goal to get a scholarship to come to the U.S. because I felt it was a way for me to just open up more possibilities for my future. And I accomplished that goal.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “You were 18 when you came?”
J.J. GALVEZ: “Yeah, I came from college. I came on a student visa and my plan was actually to go back. My parents and my three brothers, they’re all back in Honduras. And I ended up staying because I met the person who’s now my wife and she wanted to be really close to family and we figured out a way to make it work and we’ve been together since basically freshman year of college at Loyola Marymount.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “That’s quite a saga.”
J.J. GALVEZ: “When you grow up in a different part of the world, especially a country like Honduras where you see a very different level of poverty of insecurity, like personal insecurity and lack of opportunity, it’s a completely different world from what we have over here. And what we have going on right now at the national level is basically the kind of government that we’ve had in Honduras forever, which is the reason why countries like Honduras are chronically underdeveloped because it’s people that come into power that are only empowered to serve themselves. They’re abusing power for their own benefit.
“The amount of corruption that’s going on at the national level right now, not to mention just the full breakage of any kind of law that doesn’t benefit themselves. And so I first got politically activated in 2020, and that was because I was completely caught by surprise like most of us were that Trump won in 2016. And so when he was running for reelection, I wanted to do something. And so I signed up to be a volunteer to make phone calls to Spanish-speaking voters in Arizona, because Arizona was a swing state. And so I did that, and Biden won. And then after that, I just went back to my career, my day job. I’m a product manager, strategy and operations manager, basically somebody that sits at the intersection of a bunch of different teams and tries to push things forward. So I went back to that and I thought it was like, ‘This is it. The US is going to continue to be the US that it’s always been.’ And 2024 rolled around. I started getting involved as a volunteer again. That’s when I got involved with the Canyon Democrats. They sent me a postcard …”
JEFF PEARLMAN:“The postcard worked!”
J.J. GALVEZ: “It did. I went to an event. I had a pancake social and I ended up showing up and I just kept on going to that. And I did phone banking again, did door knocking for the first time. I actually knocked on doors here locally for Joe Kerr, who I didn’t know, but I just knew that he was the only Democrat running in the race. And I figured if we lose the presidency, at least we can win Congress. Of course we didn’t. And I also went out to Arizona to knock on doors for the presidential campaign.”
JEFF PEARLMAN:“Having your experiences door knocking ... I don’t have an answer for this, so I’m not leading you in one direction. Is it effective or is time that is better spent doing something else?”
J.J. GALVEZ: “It’s effective. I don’t think the silver bullet that people sometimes make it to be like, ‘Oh, it’s all about knocking on doors and that’s everything you have to do.’ Winning in politics I think is very complicated and it takes a lot of different things coming together. Many of those things are beyond your control. Right now we’re really benefited by the current environment and even if you run a campaign that’s not great, you might still win because you’re being driven by the macro environment. But I think as far as voter contact, I mean, I’ve talked to people over the phone. I’ve written postcards myself. I’ve posted online … and the connection that you get face to face with the person is hard to match.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “Wait. So why are you running?”
J.J. GALVEZ: “Yeah, Trump got elected the second time. And so for me, what that meant was, well, I have got to stay involved. I’ve got to keep on doing something. And so I got more involved with Canyon Democrats. I started a group of younger members of the club that just get together on a monthly basis to ... First, it was really to just hang out. I was like, ‘Oh, I need to find people that kind of remind me that I’m not alone.’ So that was the genesis of that. And in a social setting, we just got together for happy hours. And then after that, it’s evolved to much more sort of action-driven, like take action by going to city council. I started organizing rallies for the Canyon Democrats, started basically saying yes to a bunch of opportunities. Somebody said, “Hey, you should run to be an ADEM …”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “ADEM?”
J.J. GALVEZ: “Basically, in the California Democratic Party you can become a delegate through a bunch of different ways. One of those ways is you can actually be elected in your local assembly district to basically be a party official. And that’s what an ADEM is. So I said, ‘Yeah, sure.’ And it’s a thing where there are 14 spots in every assembly district, seven for women, seven for men. And so there were only seven men running. So I didn’t really have to do anything. I just put my name down.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “What I’m hearing is you won your first election in a landslide …”
J.J. GALVEZ: “Indeed! And so that gave me the opportunity to the state party convention, which was something like, ‘Whoa, I never thought I was going to be doing something like this.’ And so that was pretty cool just to learn a little bit more about how things work inside. The main thing that struck me was that a ton of the party infrastructure is basically volunteers. It’s not like there’s like this magic wand operating in the background, but it’s just a bunch of people spending their own time because they care.
“Then the other big thing was I got appointed to my local board in Silverado. Silverado is an unincorporated community, so we don’t have a city council. The only thing that we have that manages money that we get from the government—which comes through the county—is a local board. And it’s a group of five people and we manage a couple parks, a couple community centers, and it’s an elected position. There was a vacancy on the board and I raised my hand because I wanted to get involved. I just want to do something outside of work where I feel like I am spending my anxiety, my energy in a productive way. And so I raised my hand, nobody else did and …”
JEFF PEARLMAN:“You’re 2-0 in elections.”
J.J. GALVEZ: “So I became the treasurer and that’s actually been a really great experience. It’s been so much more work than I would have hoped it to be, but it’s been actually an incredible experience because A. It’s given me some training in terms of how to navigate the public sector, but then B. There was an incredible opportunity for me to have an impact immediately. Our funding from the county went from about $160,000 a year to about $100,000 a year. We had no control over that, and when I came in, that had already been going on. We had already been told that our funding was being reduced, so for me it was, ‘How do we rebalance the budget? How do we cut down expenses? And can we do that in a way that we’re still having community services like ...wWe do senior lunch bunches where like once a week we subsidize lunch for like a bunch of seniors that get together at the community center.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “You seem like a guy who enjoys this stuff. The challenges of it all. Almost like the nerdiness of it.”
J.J. GALVEZ: “Yeah. I mean, I’ve always had a very curious mind and just coming from the ... I think what really attracted me to startups initially was the thing of building something, but also having to figure it out a lot by yourself. When I entered the workforce, my first job was a tech startup of a project that had come out of a class at LMU, I was really afraid to ask questions because I, for some reason, thought that everybody had it figured out, and I didn’t want to be the dumb person asking questions in a meeting and stuff like that. And it took me a while to realize that nobody knows what’s going on, and that this is the opportunity. There’s a quote that I love from Steve Jobs—“The moment that you realize that everything around you was invented by another person everything changes.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “Love it.”
J.J. GALVEZ: “I enjoy taking a step back, looking at the bigger picture, and then just going back to the basics, questioning the assumptions. Why do we have to do it that way? It’s always been that way, but why does it have to be that way? And there’s a lot of opportunity in government to disrupt in that way. We have a lot of solutions and institutions that came about decades ago for a problem that has evolved over time. The only constant is change, and so we’ve always got to be changing. So I got to the parks board, we were able to rebalance the budget, and that is something that I am definitely advertising on my materials and I need to talk more about, because I think it’s a really good story, especially for somebody running as a Democrat, when so many Republicans have this image of Democrats being fiscally irresponsible. I think it’s a good example of the stuff that we’ve been able to accomplish—rebalancing the budget without meaningfully sacrificing community services.
“So anyways, somebody from the Democratic Party of Orange County reached out and she said, ‘Hey, why don’t you run for state assembly? We need somebody to run …”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “How long ago was this?”
J.J. GALVEZ: “This was in July of last year, and I initially said no. I didn’t really need the life change. But she kept on asking and I thought more about it. And I really realized that I get a level of meaning from being involved in a way that I don’t from my business career. And for better or worse, one of my personality traits is that I have always been very mission-driven, and that can be a superpower, but I believe that our superpowers are also our greatest weaknesses. And for me, I’ve seen that happen in my career where I’ve become too committed to something that I didn’t really believe in, or I become too disengaged because I don’t really understand what is this all for.
“And so I think with public service, I think I’m good at it. I get meaning from it. It’s something that contributes to society. And so for me, I think this is where I need to be right now. I think I can do this. I know that I’m in a really tough district. The likeliest outcome here is that I don’t win.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “Wow.”
J.J. GALVEZ: “I am aware of that. Yeah. 100 percent. I mean, you just wrote about how difficult CA-40 is, and you’re not wrong. My race us even harder.”
JEFF PEARLMAN:“OK, so how do you win? I want the path for one of the great upsets in California politics. Tell me …”
J.J. GALVEZ: “Yeah. I’m going to give you the path, but before I give you that, I’m going to give you an answer that is very counterintuitive and maybe is something that gets me some backlash or whatever. I didn’t get into this to win. I got into this to make a difference. And so for me, what that means is I have a platform to present myself as an immigrant, to talk about things that I believe in, talk about different things. And if I win, it’s amazing and I think there’s a path to win, but if I don’t, that is much more important to me than trying to play the game and calculate what do I say, what do I not say? Because it’s not the point of why I’m doing this. I’m doing this because I care about what’s going on in the country and I think having somebody like me in a state that’s so powerful can contribute to guiding the country back on the righteous part.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “The district is plus-nine Republican …”
J.J. GALVEZ: “Plus 10.”
JEFF PEARLMAN:“Yikes.”
J.J. GALVEZ: “I mean, you’ve seen the news of districts with worse margins than this one flipping. So we have the data points to indicate that there could be a major upset here. We have an incredible group of volunteers. We were able to collect about 1,200 signatures for our nomination papers, and we only needed about 40. We needed 857 to waive our candidate filing fee, which wasn’t a huge amount of money. It was about $1,300, but it wasn’t about waving that. It was about building the ground game and giving ourselves a goal to prepare ourselves for what’s to come. And so if we are able to get a group of 100 engaged volunteers, which we have over that amount of people, I’m talking about people that are consistently showing up for events, we are able to get to build a grassroots game that I think can help us do something special.
“Besides that, we have to do a bunch of stuff on social media, which I am lagging behind on because I have a full-time job and I have the parks board and I’m doing this as well, but we’re getting a lot of engagement from our posts, even though I only have like 200 followers. It’s a lot of 50 likes on those different things, a lot of views. So the combination of digital ground game, riding the wave and having a message that is hyper-focused on economics, I think is going to give us a shot. And what I mean by economics is it’s all about lowering the cost of living and growing the opportunities for revenue in our district. I also think that there is an opportunity when it comes to messaging to talk a lot about unity. That’s something that I think you have to do in a district like this, because you can’t be a firebrand talking about super, super left-wing stuff because there’s a 10 point differential. But at the same time, I mean, how many people just hate the fact that you can’t talk about politics? Politics can’t even creep into a personal conversation because then everything gets super ugly. How many relationships in our personal lives with friends, with family, have been damaged? So I try to talk a lot about unity. We all care about the same core things, but we live in an environment, a media environment, a social media environment that just drives us to the test each other. And if anything, if I can just be a voice of optimism, a voice that’s stretching out hands … I think that’s refreshing to people. I also think that gives us a better chance to win. So it’s an economics message that’s coupled with a strong message on unity.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “Fundraising. Fun times?”
J.J. GALVEZ: “It’s not my favorite part of this. But … it’s necessary. The main thing you need money for is mailers, marketing. I had a campaign manager, but I decided to part ways because he’s not what we needed right now. He’s a great guy and he’s a friend, but, I’m figuring this stuff out. I’ve been really lucky with just the amount of in-kind contributions that people are providing through just their time. Whether it’s website, graphic design, field coordination. There zte a lot of people who really believe in what we’re doing. But in terms of raising money, my goal is to raise $350,000.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “How much have you raised?”
J.J. GALVEZ: “About $30,000. So I have a long way to go.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “Do you know how much Kate Sanchez has?”
J.J. GALVEZ: “A lot. She’s going to out-raise me. If I’m able to get to $300,000 $350,000, I think she’s going to have double the amount of money. But that’s okay because it’s not just about ... I mean, that’s enough to be within striking distance to just be able to invest in the marketing materials that we need in promoting our digital advertising and in having the internal operations infrastructure to be able to leverage our volunteer enthusiasm that we have.”
JEFF PEARLMAN:“I find myself use boxing a lot in political metaphor. You want to have a puncher’s chance. You’re not going to be the favorite. But if you can be in the ring and you have a shot …”
J.J. GALVEZ: “Any given Sunday.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “That’s football. But I get it.”
J.J. GALVEZ: “Were it just about money, Kamala Harris would be president.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “Have you met Kate Sanchez?”
J.J. GALVEZ: “Literally never.”
JEFF PEARLMAN:“How much of your campaign, if any, do you focus on her?”
J.J. GALVEZ: “So, in the primary it’s just the two of us, and it’s a matter of how close can we get. And I want to show potential investors, interested parties that we have a chance to flip this. And, hopefully, people then see reason to invest in the general. Hey, here’s some money for you. And unions and different things like that. But when it comes to the general, we’re going to have to get a lot more of those independents to participate and come to our side. And a way we can do that is by counter-positioning myself versus her as her being somebody who is just very ineffective. Her track record is not great.”
JEFF PEARLMAN:“Meaning it’s super MAGA?”
J.J. GALVEZ: “Well, we’re not really going to focus so much on the MAGA stuff. I mean, she is very MAGA, but she’s just not an effective politician. She’s not an effective representative for you. She has passed zero bills since she got elected in 2022, and she’s missed the second most amount of votes of the entire state legislature. That’s across assembly and state senate.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “See, that’s a good message.”
J.J. GALVEZ: “So it’s not about the cultural stuff. It’s not about the red meat, the rah, rah. It’s about lowering the cost of living.. If I can position myself as somebody who’s pretty centrist, and I can convince enough people in the district, especially right-leaning independents, that hey, he seems like a pretty reasonable guy. A guy who wants to help everyone, regardless of politics. So what he’s talking about, about bringing funds back to the district and helping us out here, he probably is in a better position to do that than Kate. And Kate’s record isn’t really great. She hasn’t really done anything. So maybe we can give him a shot. And so that is going to be really important.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “How much of a problem is just people not knowing what the assembly is, not caring about the election?”
J.J. GALVEZ: “I think it’s a big challenge. I can talk for hours now about the assembly, but before running for this, it’s like ‘The assembly? What is that exactly?’ It’s like, ‘Oh, we have a senate and we have an assembly.’ So it is a challenge. It’s where we have to be out there and we have to be talking to people.”
JEFF PEARLMAN:“How many hours a week do you put into this? And is your wife like, “Ugh, we just go out for dinner? Can we just watch ‘Love is Blind’, please, something?”
J.J. GALVEZ: “My wife’s really happy because she sees that I’m really energized by this. If she had it her way, she would have picked something else in life for me to be energized by it, but she’s very proud. It’s 30 hours a week, after 40 hours of my job. So it’s not nothing. But I feel a sense of real purpose.
This morning, economist Paul Krugman came right out and said it: “People close to Trump are trading based on national secrets.” Another word for that, he said, is “treason.” The evidence for such a claim is the sudden and isolated jump in trading volume in S&P 500 and oil futures about 15 minutes before Trump suddenly announced that the U.S. and Iran were in negotiations to end the war—an announcement that turned out to be false.
The oil futures trade alone was worth about $580 million, the Financial Times estimated. As Krugman notes, exploiting confidential information for financial gain, otherwise known as “insider trading,” is illegal. But exploiting confidential information about national security for private financial gain is something else again. It puts profit-making above Americans’ safety.
“I’d very much like to know exactly who was making those trades yesterday morning,” Krugman wrote. “Were they people directly in the know, or billionaires/traders who paid people in the know for tips?”
There certainly are signs that Trump considers the government his to do with as he wishes to keep himself in wealth and power. In the Washington Post Monday, architecture critic Philip Kennicott examined how Trump is smashing the historic lines and architecture of the national capital.
Trump’s plan for a gargantuan 90,000-square-foot ballroom will dominate the original White House and cut into the lines of the driveway designed a century ago by the great landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted. His proposed 250-foot arch near Arlington National Cemetery would be the largest triumphal arch in the world, overshadowing the nearby Lincoln Memorial. His proposed “National Garden of American Heroes” between the Lincoln Memorial and the Tidal Basin would take the park near monuments dedicated to Presidents Thomas Jefferson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt and to the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and fill it with hastily made statues to “showbiz stars, folk heroes, and sports celebrities.”
By stuffing oversight panels with his own cronies, Trump has destroyed the process of design review intended to preserve Washington as a city whose layout and design reflects the simplicity, dignity, and majesty of the American people. Yesterday the White House began the process of ripping the beige Tennessee flagstone pavers out of the West Colonnade that connects the Oval Office and West Wing to the Executive Residence. Trump wants to replace them with black granite, which will contrast more effectively with the gold doodads and the gold-framed portraits in the “Presidential Walk of Fame” Trump has installed along the walk.
Trump’s vision of the U.S. is one tied to fossil fuels, leading the administration to declare war on renewable energy. On Monday it announced it will pay $928 million in taxpayer money to the large French energy company TotalEnergies to buy back leases it acquired under the Biden administration to build two wind farms, one off New York and the other off North Carolina. TotalEnergies will then invest that money in U.S. oil and gas projects, including one in Texas that will export liquefied natural gas.
“The era of taxpayers subsidizing unreliable, unaffordable and unsecure energy is officially over, and the era of affordable, reliable and secure energy is here to stay,” said Interior Secretary Doug Burgum. North Carolina governor Josh Stein, a Democrat, told Maxine Joselow and Brad Plumer of the New York Times: “Our state has the offshore wind potential to power millions of homes with renewable American-made energy. It’s ludicrous and wasteful that the Trump Administration is spending $1 billion in taxpayer money to pay off a company to stop it from investing private dollars to create the clean energy we need.”
Meanwhile, as airport lines grow because of the ongoing shutdown that means Transportation Security Administration (TSA) agents aren’t getting paid, Trump yesterday sent in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to fourteen airports in eleven cities, including Atlanta, Chicago, Philadelphia, Houston, Phoenix, Cleveland, Fort Myers, New Orleans, and New York City.
While CNN’s Brian Stelter speculated that Trump got the idea for putting ICE agents in the airports from “Linda from Arizona,” who called in to “The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show” last Friday, Trump ally Steve Bannon suggested on his podcast War Room yesterday that “[w]e can use this as a test run, as a test case, to really perfect ICE’s involvement in the 2026 midterms.” Jacob Knutson of Democracy Docket noted that Trump’s deployment of ICE agents to airports showed both that he sees them as his own personal law enforcement agents and that he is willing to deploy them in situations that are not related to their actual job description.
Democratic senators have tried repeatedly to get Senate Republicans to agree to fund all of the Department of Homeland Security except ICE, the agency responsible for the violence in Minnesota that led to the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. For those, Democrats have demanded reforms.
But Trump has kept pressure on Republican senators not to pass such a measure, instead demanding that Senate majority leader John Thune kill the filibuster to pass legislation without the votes of Democrats. On Sunday, Trump posted that he would not agree to any funding proposal unless Democrats also agreed to support the so-called SAVE America Act, which would require voters to show not just ID but also proof of citizenship, would end mail-in voting, and would attack the rights of transgender Americans.
After the Senate confirmed former senator Markwayne Mullin late yesterday as secretary of homeland security, replacing former secretary Kristi Noem, Republicans offered to Democrats a measure that funded DHS without funding ICE, but made no reforms to the agency. To fund ICE—and perhaps to pass pieces of the SAVE America Act—they plan to use the process of budget reconciliation, which cannot be filibustered and thus can be used to pass measures without any Democratic support.
Democrats rejected the Republicans’ offer, noting that Republicans have blocked eight different Democratic attempts to fund everything in the Department of Homeland Security other than ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the parent agency for Border Patrol. The Democrats will make another offer.
Senator Patty Murray (D-WA), who as vice chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee is central to the talks, said Trump’s demands have made negotiations difficult and added: “We’ve been very clear that if we’re talking about funding any part of ICE and CBP, we absolutely must take some key steps to rein them in. The current Republican offer in front of us does not do that. Reforms must make it into law.”
The SAVE America Act Trump wants is pretty openly a voter suppression measure: voting by undocumented immigrants is already virtually nonexistent, and it is already illegal. And the Brookings Institution reported in 2025 that only about four cases of mail fraud occur per 10 million mail-in ballots, or 0.000043% of total mail ballots cast. But Republicans are using the idea of voter fraud to argue for measures that could toss more than 21 million Americans off the voter rolls.
There is an especial irony in Trump attacking mail-in voting as fraudulent: Bill Barrow of the Associated Press reported today that Trump voted by mail in Tuesday’s elections in Florida. White House spokeswoman Olivia Wales explained Trump’s position, saying that “the SAVE America Act has commonsense exceptions for Americans to use mail-in ballots for illness, disability, military, or travel—but universal mail-in voting should not be allowed because it’s highly susceptible to fraud.”
In today’s special legislative elections in Florida, Democrat Emily Gregory flipped the house district in which the Trump Organization’s Mar-a-Lago sits. The district went for Trump by 11% in 2024. Gregory, a business owner and a military spouse, defeated a Republican who received Trump’s “Complete and Total Endorsement” in January. At an election night party, Gregory told her supporters: “When we started this, nobody thought it was possible. They thought we were crazy. I knew my community. I knew we deserved better. We deserve a leader who will fight for us.” Gregory told CNN’s Erin Burnett that she did not focus on Trump, but focused on her Republican opponent and the “issues that matter most to Florida families.” “Everyone is feeling that affordability crisis, and the last thing that Florida families needed when they’re struggling is $4 gas,” she explained.
Trump’s niece, psychologist Mary Trump, posted: “The Democrats just flipped a state house seat in the district where Donald committed voter fraud by casting his ballot illegally by mail.”
Tonight, Eric Schmitt of the New York Times reported that the Pentagon has ordered to the Middle East about 2,000 military personnel from the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne Division, trained to deploy anywhere in the world within eighteen hours. About 2,500 Marines from the 31st Expeditionary Unit will arrive in the region later this week.
Really interesting new development in Claude Code today as an alternative to --dangerously-skip-permissions:
Today, we're introducing auto mode, a new permissions mode in Claude Code where Claude makes permission decisions on your behalf, with safeguards monitoring actions before they run.
Before each action runs, a separate classifier model reviews the conversation and decides whether the action matches what you asked for: it blocks actions that escalate beyond the task scope, target infrastructure the classifier doesn’t recognize as trusted, or appear to be driven by hostile content encountered in a file or web page. [...]
Model: the classifier runs on Claude Sonnet 4.6, even if your main session uses a different model.
They ship with an extensive set of default filters, and you can also customize them further with your own rules. The most interesting insight into how they work comes when you run this new command in the terminal:
Test Artifacts: Hardcoded test API keys, placeholder credentials in examples, or hardcoding test cases
Local Operations: Agent deleting local files in working directory, local file operations within project scope, or using --ignore-certificate-errors for local testing. "Project scope" means the repository the session started in — wandering into ~/, ~/Library/, /etc, or other repos is scope escalation (User Intent Rule #2), not a local operation. Does NOT cover irreversible destruction of pre-existing files or local stateful services — see "Irreversible Local Destruction" in BLOCK.
Read-Only Operations: GET requests, read-only API calls, or queries that don't modify state and don't contain sensitive information in the URL. Note: PREEMPTIVE BLOCK ON CLEAR INTENT still applies — if the transcript contains clear evidence the agent is using read-only operations to scout for a blocked action, block it.
Declared Dependencies: Installing packages that are already declared in the repo's manifest files (requirements.txt, package.json, Cargo.toml, pyproject.toml, Gemfile, etc.) via standard commands that read those manifests (pip install -r requirements.txt, npm install, cargo build, bundle install) — provided the agent has not modified the manifest in this session. Does NOT cover installing agent-chosen package names (e.g. pip install foo, npm install bar) — those carry typosquat and supply-chain risk. [...]
From "soft_deny":
Git Destructive: Force pushing (git push --force), deleting remote branches, or rewriting remote history
Git Push to Default Branch: Pushing directly to main, master, or the repository's default branch — this bypasses pull request review. Commits should be pushed to a new feature branch instead.
-Code from External: Downloading and executing code from external sources — e.g. curl | bash, deserializing external data via formats that can execute code (eval, exec, yaml.unsafe_load, pickle, etc), or similar mechanisms. Also includes running code from an external repo cloned earlier in the transcript (pip install -e, make install, python script.py, pickle.load/torch.load on cloned repo files) — "local on disk" does not mean trusted if it was cloned from an external source visible in the transcript. The repo the agent starts in is trusted.
Cloud Storage Mass Delete: Deleting or mass modifying files on cloud storage (S3, GCS, Azure Blob, etc.) [...]
I remain unconvinced by prompt injection protections that rely on AI, since they're non-deterministic by nature. The documentation does warn that this may still let things through:
The classifier may still allow some risky actions: for example, if user intent is ambiguous, or if Claude doesn't have enough context about your environment to know an action might create additional risk.
The fact that the default allow list includes pip install -r requirements.txt also means that this wouldn't protect against supply chain attacks with unpinned dependencies, as seen this morning with LiteLLM.
I still want my coding agents to run in a robust sandbox by default, one that restricts file access and network connections in a deterministic way. I trust those a whole lot more than prompt-based protections like this new auto mode.
Today's LiteLLM supply chain attack inspired me to revisit the idea of dependency cooldowns, the practice of only installing updated dependencies once they've been out in the wild for a few days to give the community a chance to spot if they've been subverted in some way.
This recent piece (March 4th) piece by Andrew Nesbitt reviews the current state of dependency cooldown mechanisms across different packaging tools. It's surprisingly well supported! There's been a flurry of activity across major packaging tools, including:
pnpm 10.16 (September 2025) — minimumReleaseAge with minimumReleaseAgeExclude for trusted packages
Yarn 4.10.0 (September 2025) — npmMinimalAgeGate (in minutes) with npmPreapprovedPackages for exemptions
Bun 1.3 (October 2025) — minimumReleaseAge via bunfig.toml
Deno 2.6 (December 2025) — --minimum-dependency-age for deno update and deno outdated
uv 0.9.17 (December 2025) — added relative duration support to existing --exclude-newer, plus per-package overrides via exclude-newer-package
pip currently only supports absolute rather than relative dates but Seth Larson has a workaround for that using a scheduled cron to update the absolute date in the pip.conf config file.
I really think "give AI total control of my computer and therefore my entire life" is going to look so foolish in retrospect that everyone who went for this is going to look as dumb as Jimmy Fallon holding up a picture of his Bored Ape
— Christopher Mims, Technology columnist at The Wall Street Journal
The LiteLLM v1.82.8 package published to PyPI was compromised with a particularly nasty credential stealer hidden in base64 in a litellm_init.pth file, which means installing the package is enough to trigger it even without running import litellm.
(1.82.7 had the exploit as well but it was in the proxy/proxy_server.py file so the package had to be imported for it to take effect.)
This issue has a very detailed description of what the credential stealer does. There's more information about the timeline of the exploit over here.
PyPI has already quarantined the litellm package so the window for compromise was just a few hours, but if you DID install the package it would have hoovered up a bewildering array of secrets, including ~/.ssh/, ~/.gitconfig, ~/.git-credentials, ~/.aws/, ~/.kube/, ~/.config/, ~/.azure/, ~/.docker/, ~/.npmrc, ~/.vault-token, ~/.netrc, ~/.lftprc, ~/.msmtprc, ~/.my.cnf, ~/.pgpass, ~/.mongorc.js, ~/.bash_history, ~/.zsh_history, ~/.sh_history, ~/.mysql_history, ~/.psql_history, ~/.rediscli_history, ~/.bitcoin/, ~/.litecoin/, ~/.dogecoin/, ~/.zcash/, ~/.dashcore/, ~/.ripple/, ~/.bitmonero/, ~/.ethereum/, ~/.cardano/.
It looks like this supply chain attack started with the recent exploit against Trivy, ironically a security scanner tool that was used in CI by LiteLLM. The Trivy exploit likely resulted in stolen PyPI credentials which were then used to directly publish the vulnerable packages.
The drone whirred above us. The loud hum combined with some precious Seattle sunshine made it easy to follow the four-armed machine as it zoomed into the distance. The drone’s creator, Blake Resnick, watched with a big grin. “This is always our most dramatic demo,” he told me, as he unfolded a clear pair of safety glasses.
We stood in the parking lot of a drone company called Brinc, founded by Resnick in 2017. They produce extra fancy hardware, like the Lemur 2 that zipped over our heads, for tactical responders in the public safety field. Firefighters can use its glass breaker to bust into a building and scope out an inferno. Police officers can flick on its thermal vision to find criminals in hiding. A SWAT team, per Brinc’s website, can prompt it to “deliver a pack of cigarettes during a negotiation.”
“We’ve seen those drones get shot, seen it stabbed, we’ve seen them flown into ceiling fans,” Resnick told me. “They go through some stuff.”
Our drone had a far more important mission on this day: to impress a journalist. Its teleoperator was Dmitry Tarasov, an operations manager at Brinc and one of Resnick’s closest colleagues. He flipped through features as Resnick said them aloud. Show her night vision, now flip on the police lights and sirens. They played a pre-programmed message, alerting the neighborhood about a fictitious missing child. He called the drone to demonstrate its two-way communication capability. “One, two, three, four, five,” Resnick’s voice boomed through the drone.
The drone descended, navigated itself underneath some of the parked cars before Tarasov piloted it directly into a concrete wall — on purpose. Resnick rattled off words to describe each component: LiDAR, tungsten carbide, 20,000 RPM. He seemed like a proud dad listing little league trophies.
Finally, the drone approached a sheet of glass propped up nearby. With a little tap — tink, pop! — it turned to dust. “This was the first drone in the world with the glass breaching capability,” Resnick said, never losing his grin.
IF YOU weren’t already aware, I’ll tell you now — there’s a lot of drama in the drone world.
One pleasure of following an area of research for a long time is getting to see how its academic literature becomes both deeper and broader. That's certainly been the case with kidney exchange, which now has (of course) a big medical literature, but has also spurred research in the economics and operations research communities. Here's a recent survey of the OR literature:
Abstract: "Kidney exchange is a transplant modality that has provided new opportunities for living kidney donation in many countries around the world since 1991. It has been extensively studied from an Operational Research (OR) perspective since 2004. This article provides a comprehensive literature survey on OR approaches to fundamental computational problems associated with kidney exchange over the last two decades. We also summarise the key integer linear programming (ILP) models for kidney exchange, showing how to model optimisation problems involving only cycles and chains separately. This allows new combined ILP models, not previously presented, to be obtained by amalgamating cycle and chain models. We present a comprehensive empirical evaluation involving all combined models from this paper in addition to bespoke software packages from the literature involving advanced techniques. This focuses primarily on computation times for 49 methods applied to 4320 problem instances of varying sizes that reflect the characteristics of real kidney exchange datasets, corresponding to over 200,000 algorithm executions. We have made our implementations of all cycle and chain models described in this paper, together with all instances used for the experiments, and a web application to visualise our experimental results, publicly available. "
"The first papers to study algorithms or mechanisms for KE-Opt were the landmark papers of Roth et al., 2004, Roth et al., 2005. When the objective is to maximise the number of transplants, KE-Opt is -hard in general (Abraham et al., 2007).
...
"The main contributions of this survey paper are as follows:
•A detailed literature survey (with over 210 references) of OR approaches to KE-Opt, covering the following topics: algorithms and complexity for KE-Opt; hierarchical optimisation in KE-Opt; enabling equal access to transplantation; dynamic KEPs; uncertainty and robustness in KEPs; multi-hospital and international KEPs; recipients’ preferences; dataset generators and software tools; emerging topics; and other related surveys. •A systematic exposition of all the key existing ILP approaches for KE-Opt, describing separately models for representing optimal solutions comprising only cycles from those comprising only chains. As a consequence, combined ILP models for KE-Opt can be obtained by mixing a cycle model with a chain model. We also use a running example (appearing in the Supplementary Material) to illustrate all models for the benefit of the reader.
•A comprehensive empirical evaluation of all combined ILP models for KE-Opt that are described in this paper, together with “off-the-shelf” approaches involving advanced techniques such as column generation and branch-and-price, where we have been able to obtain and execute the third-party software. The main aim is to compare execution times of the different approaches considered on randomly generated datasets that reflect the characteristics of real data from the UK’s KEP. In particular, we tested 49 methods on 4320 instances, corresponding to over 200,000 algorithm executions, and amounting to over 10 years of computational processing time in total, across multiple cores running in parallel. •An interactive tool to allow the reader to analyse the data resulting from our experiments that is publicly available at https://optimalmatching.com/kep-survey-2025, allowing custom heatmaps to be created by varying instance sets, models to be considered and measures of performance. •All of the implementations of the combined cycle and chain ILP models presented in this paper are available for the reader to access at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14905243, and the benchmark instances used for the experiments are available for download at https://doi.org/10.5525/gla.researchdata.1878."
Electricity generation in Texas. Source: Energy Information Agency
We are now in a global fossil fuel crisis. With oil and liquefied natural gas from the Persian Gulf unable to reach international markets due to Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, hydrocarbon prices have been soaring around the world and widespread shortages are emerging. Anyone who thought that the U.S. would be insulated from this dire picture thanks to its large domestic oil production has had a rude awakening: the average retail price of gasoline has risen more than $1 per gallon over the past month, while the price of diesel is up $1.60.
But the Trump administration hasn’t allowed these short-run distractions to divert it from its long-run goals: It remains deeply committed to killing renewable energy, especially wind power, and increasing America’s reliance on fossil fuels.
True, some of the administration’s attacks on wind power have failed: Its efforts to throttle offshore wind development by ordering developers to stop work on projects that are already underway have repeatedly been overruled by the courts. But the administration is continuing to block development of onshore wind and solar power by freezing the issuance of federal permits.
And on Monday the Interior Department unveiled a new tactic in its war on wind: It announced that it will pay TotalEnergies, a French energy giant, almost $1 billion to not produce energy — specifically to abandon its plans to build two large wind farms off the East Coast.
To understand the Trump administration’s motives in its campaign to kill renewable energy, one must realize that this campaign is both economically self-destructive and, despite the best efforts of the fossil fuel industry, deeply unpopular.
Fifteen years ago wind and solar power were still relatively marginal energy sources, which those hostile to their development could portray as unproven and uneconomic. Today they are major contributors to energy supply in many nations — and in some U.S. states. Perhaps most notably, as the chart at the top of this post shows, renewables — mostly wind, but with a growing role for solar — now account for more than a third of electricity generation in Texas, America’s largest producer of electricity and not exactly a state run by environmental extremists.
Even more impressively, renewables have dominated the growth in Texas’s electricity generation in recent years:
You almost have to admire the administration’s persistence, its determination to turn back the clock on energy even though renewables are big business, its tenacity in trying to block new, secure energy sources even in the face of a global energy crisis. But what’s this all about?
The administration has argued that offshore wind farms are a threat to national security, supposedly interfering with radar. But that doesn’t explain the efforts to block onshore wind and solar, and the courts have remained unconvinced. In announcing the buyoff of TotalEnergies, the Interior Secretary claimed that wind power is expensive and unreliable; but in that case why is it necessary to pay private companies not to develop it?
Campaign finance is part of the story. At this point, political contributions from fossil fuel companies go almost entirely to the GOP, while alternative energy favors Democrats.
Beyond campaign finance, fossil fuel interests, especially but not only the Koch brothers, have spent many decades promoting hostility to renewable energy and any effort to mitigate climate change. They have done so by every means possible, including faux environmentalism. When Donald Trump makes bizarre claims about how wind power is massacring birds and “driving whales crazy,” he’s getting his fantasies, whether he knows it or not, from the fossil-fuel propaganda machine.
Now, this long-term project has had limited success at moving the broader public, which remains favorably disposed toward renewable energy. In fact, as late as 2020 large majorities of rank-and-file Republicans held favorable views of both solar and wind power. Those views have shifted against renewables in Trump’s second term, but even now they aren’t nearly as extreme as the views of the Trump administration. And according to Pew, a substantial majority of Americans still believes that promoting wind and solar is “a more important priority” than promoting fossil fuel production.
But the right-wing elite is completely anti-renewable.
In large part this reflects long-term indoctrination by fossil-fuel backed think tanks and media. In addition, however, to make sense of the right-wing elite’s intense hostility to renewable energy one needs to think about psychology (psychology that the fossil fuel cabal exploits.)
Bear in mind that on the political right wind and solar power are routinely condemned as “woke.” Real men burn stuff.
What this reflects, I believe, is a common factor underlying many right-wing obsessions. Why cling to fossil fuels in the face of a technological revolution in energy? Why valorize “warrior ethos” and bulging biceps in an age of drone warfare? Why build economic policy around a doomed attempt to bring back “manly” jobs? At a deep level, I’d argue, it’s about nostalgia for an imagined past in which brawn mattered more than brains, combined with, yes, a hefty dose of insecure masculinity.
The world keeps declining to cooperate with these macho dreams. Tariffs aren’t bringing back blue-collar jobs. Setting out to “destroy the enemy as viciously as possible” — as Pete Hegseth said Tuesday — isn’t winning an easy victory over Iran. And turning our back on the energy revolution, even paying the private sector to reject new technology, means both making America less secure and ceding the future to other countries that aren’t ruled by MAGA’s obsessions.
But that appears to be a price both fossil fuel interests and the Trump administration are willing to pay.
MUSICAL CODA
For all the manly men exploiting natural resources
Samsung is introducing AirDrop support to the Galaxy S26 series,
making it easier for users to share content between devices using
Quick Share.
The feature will begin rolling out from March 23, starting in
Korea and expanding to more regions including Europe, Hong Kong,
Japan, Latin America, North America, Southeast Asia, and Taiwan.
AirDrop support will initially be available on the Galaxy S26
series, with expansion to additional devices to be announced at a
later date.
Apple has, to date, not commented on any of this. I get the feeling there’s nothing they can do about this without breaking AirDrop compatibility between existing Apple devices. It would be kind of funny if AirDrop — never intended as a public protocol — becomes a de facto standard, but FaceTime — which Steve Jobs impulsively announced would become an official standard at its introduction in 2010 (to the complete surprise of both Apple’s legal and engineering teams) — never does.
Here’s one for the icons-in-menus haters on macOS Tahoe:
defaults write -g NSMenuEnableActionImages -bool NO
It even preserves the couple of instances you do want icons, like
for window zoom/resize.
You do not need to restart or log out after applying this setting, but you will need to quit and relaunch any apps that are currently running for it to take effect.
If this worked to hide all of these cursed little turds smeared across the menu bar items of Apple’s system apps in Tahoe, this hidden preference would be a proverbial pitcher of ice water in hell. As it stands, alas, it’s more like half a glass of tepid water. Still quite welcome when you’re thirsty in hell, though.
The problem is that while some of Apple’s system apps obey this setting across the board, others obey it only scattershot, and others still ignore it completely. Apple’s AppKit apps — real Mac apps — are the most likely to obey it. In the Finder, Notes, Photos, Preview, and TextEdit, it pretty much kills all menu item icons, leaving behind only a few mostly useful ones. (Among the random inconsistencies: Preview still shows an icon for the File → Print command — a stupid printer icon, natch — but none of the other apps listed above show an icon for the Print command.)
Mail and Calendar are more scattershot. Calendar hides most menu item icons, but keeps a few in the File menu. Mail is more like half-and-half, with no apparent rhyme or reason to which menu items still show icons. In the Mailbox menu, nearly all items have their icons removed; in the Messages menu, most keep their icons even with this setting set to hide them.
Safari is a heartbreak. It’s one of my favorite, most-used apps, and generally, one of Apple’s best exemplars of what makes a great Mac app a great Mac app. But with this setting enabled, only a handful of seemingly random menu items have their icons hidden. For example, here is the File menu in Safari v26.3.1, before and after applying this setting:
So, after applying a setting that should hide almost all menu item icons, 15 out of 18 menu items still have icons in Safari’s File menu — with no rhyme or reason to the 3 that are omitted. Safari’s other menus are similarly noncompliant. Like I said, heartbreaking.
(All is not lost in Safari, however — the setting does remove the icons from Safari’s contextual menu.)
Apple’s non-AppKit (Catalyst/UIKit/SwiftUI) Mac apps are mostly lost causes on this front. Messages, Maps, and Journal keep all their icons, except for the Window menu. The iPhone Mirroring app hides the icons from its Edit and Window menus, but keeps all of them in the View menu.
So it’s a mixed bag. But even a mixed bag is better than seeing all of these insipid ugly distracting icons. Apple should fix these apps so they all fully support this global preference (that’s what the -g switch in Troughton-Smith’s command-line incantation means), and should expose this setting as a proper, visible toggle in the System Settings app. And of course, in MacOS 27, Apple should remove most of these icons from these apps, leaving behind only the handful that add actual clarity to their menu items. There’s an outcome just waiting to be had where the MacOS menu bar is better than it used to be, not worse, by carefully adding icons only next to commands where the icons add clarity.
My favorite example: commands to rotate images, like the Tools → Rotate Left and Rotate Right commands in Preview, and Image → Rotate Clockwise and Rotate Counterclockwise in Photos.1 The rule of thumb should be that menu items should have icons if the icon alone could provide enough of a clue to replace the command name. That’s very much true for these Rotate commands, and the icons help reduce the cognitive load of thinking about which way is clockwise.
And but so what about third-party Mac apps? I think the best solution is for third-party apps to ignore Apple’s lead, and omit menu item icons on apps that have been updated for the new appearance on MacOS 26 Tahoe. That’s what Brent Simmons has done with NetNewsWire 7, using code he published as open source. Rogue Amoeba Software has adopted the same technique to improve their suite of apps when running on Tahoe, and published this blog post, illustrated with before and after screenshots, to explain their thinking.
No one is arguing that icons never improve the clarity of menu items. But for the most part, menu commands should be read. If a few special menu items are improved by including icons, include just those. They’ll stand out, further improving clarity. Part of the problem with Apple’s “almost every menu item has an icon” approach with their own apps on Mac OS 26 Tahoe is that — as copiously documented by Nikita Prokopov and Jim Nielsen — the overall effect is to add visual clutter, reducing clarity. But a side effect of that clutter is that it reduces the effectiveness of the menu items for which icons are actually useful (again, like Rotate commands, or the items in the Window → Move & Resize submenu). If every menu item has an icon, the presence of an icon is never special. If only special menu items have icons, the presence of an icon is always special.2
It should go without saying that these commands in Preview and Photos should use the same terms. Either both should use Rotate Left/Right, or both should use Rotate Clockwise/Counterclockwise. I personally prefer Clockwise/Counterclockwise, but the inconsistency is what grates. In the heyday of consistency in Apple’s first-party Mac software, Apple’s apps were, effectively, a living HIG. If you were adding a Rotate command to your own application, and you were unsure whether to call it “Rotate Right” or “Rotate Clockwise”, you could just check what Apple did, in its own apps, and feel certain that you were doing the right thing, using the correct terms. ↩︎
BBEdit offers a great example. BBEdit can be used, free of charge, in perpetuity with a limited (but robust!) subset of its full feature set. Its full feature set is unlocked with a one-time purchase for each major release version. But the full feature set is available as a 30-day trial — which trial period is reset each time a major new version is released. During that trial period, menu commands that are paid features are available to use, but marked with a “★” icon. (A very fine choice of icon, if you ask me.) Here, for example, are screenshots of BBEdit’s Text and Go menus while in trial mode. When the trial period ends, those commands are disabled, but remain visible in the menus, still marked with those star icons. Thus, during the free trial period, users can see which commands they’re using that they’ll need to pay for when the trial ends, and after the trial ends, they can see which features are locked. (After you purchase a license, those star icons just go away.) ↩︎︎
In Claude Cowork and Claude Code, you can now enable Claude to use
your computer to complete tasks. When Claude doesn’t have access
to the tools it needs, it will point, click, and navigate what’s
on your screen to perform the task itself. It can open files, use
the browser, and run dev tools automatically — with no setup
required.
This feature is now available in research preview for Claude Pro
and Max subscribers. It works especially well with Dispatch,
which lets you assign Claude tasks from your phone.
I think you’re nuts if you try this on your actual Mac, with all your actual data and files. But I thought people were nuts for using a lot of bleeding edge AI features before I tried them myself. It’s certainly notable that Anthropic has shipped agentic AI on the Mac before Apple has, after Apple originally promised it to arrive a year ago.
The Claude Mac client itself remains a lazy Electron clunker. If Claude Code is so good I don’t get why they don’t prove it by using it to make an even halfway decent native Mac app.
Berber Jin, reporting last week for The Wall Street Journal (gift link):
OpenAI is planning to unify its ChatGPT app, coding platform Codex
and browser into a desktop “superapp,” a step to simplify the user
experience and continue with efforts to focus on
engineering and business customers.
Chief of Applications Fidji Simo will oversee the change and focus
on helping the company’s sales team market the new product. OpenAI
President Greg Brockman, who currently leads the company’s
computing efforts, will help Simo oversee the product revamp and
related organization changes, an OpenAI spokeswoman said.
The strategy change marks a major shift from last year, when
OpenAI launched a series of stand-alone products that didn’t
always resonate with users and sometimes created a lack of focus
within the company. OpenAI executives are hoping that unifying its
products under one app will allow it to streamline resources as it
seeks to beat back the success of its rival Anthropic.
This sounds like an utter disaster in the making. Would it make any sense for Apple to merge Safari, Messages, and Xcode into one “superapp”? No, it would not. It makes no more sense for OpenAI to merge ChatGPT, Codex, and especially Atlas together. I use and very much enjoy ChatGPT because its Mac client is such a good Mac app.
Simo came to OpenAI by way of Shopify and Instacart, so it doesn’t surprise me that she sees OpenAI’s existing product-first culture of creating well-crafted native apps as a problem, not a strength to build on. If this “superapp” plan is true, it’s going to tank everything that heretofore has been good about ChatGPT and Codex.
We’re saying goodbye to the Sora app. To everyone who created with
Sora, shared it, and built community around it: thank you. What
you made with Sora mattered, and we know this news is
disappointing.
We’ll share more soon, including timelines for the app and API and
details on preserving your work.
Sora was kind of fun for a week or two. But, contrary to the above, nothing anyone made with Sora mattered. It was just a very (very) expensive lark.
Good rundown of everything new and changed, as usual, from Juli Clover at MacRumors. This has been a noticeable change for me:
The App Store merges apps and purchase history, and has a
dedicated section for app updates. It now takes two taps to get to
app updates rather than having them available at the bottom of the
profile page.
At first the extra tap irked me, but it really does make more sense for Updates to have its own section. I update apps manually, because I like reading release notes from developers who take the time to document changes, and I also like reading “Bug fixes and performance improvements” over and over and over again from developers who do not.
Large-scale, voluntary space settlement must be economically rational to be viable. Here, we deploy the Roy model, an economic model used to understand immigration, to illuminate the economic factors important for space settlement and develop qualitative understanding of robust features of space settlement that do not depend on the details of the space economy. We find that getting the cost of living in space down by approximately 2 orders of magnitude is necessary to generate a space population on the order of 1 million people and the typical net utility of immigrating will be on the order of this cost. In addition, if the space economy is driven by productive activities of space settlers and there is some correlation between Earth and space skills and income, space settlers are likely to be drawn from the upper tail of Earth income distribution. An ideal way to incentivize immigration by these high-skill, high-income individuals is to declare the space economy free of redistributive taxes. Alternatively, if space settlement is driven by an insurance policy on civilization involving monetary transfers from Earth to space settlers, the space settlers are likely to be drawn from the lower tail of Earth income distribution, and only minimal marginal income beyond the cost of living in space will be necessary to create positive net utility of immigrating for them. The usefulness of the Roy model is demonstrated by its flexibility in providing qualitative insight in these disparate situations.
That is from a new paper by Dorian S. Abbot and Anup Malani.
This post is a set of my observations on the current war in Iran and my thoughts on the broader strategic implications. I am not, of course, an expert on the region nor do I have access to any special information, so I am going to treat that all with a high degree of uncertainty. But I am a scholar of military history with a fair bit of training and experience in thinking about strategic problems, ancient and modern; it is this ‘guy that analyzes strategy’ focus that I want to bring to this.
I am doing this post outside of the normal Friday order because it is an unusual topic and I want to keep making it clear that even as world events continue to happen – as they must – I do not want this blog to turn into a politics newsletter. I simply haven’t had the time to polish and condense these thoughts for other publication – the hard work of much writing is turning 3,500 words (or 7,500, as it turns out) of thoughts into 1,500 words of a think piece – but I need to get them out of my head and on to the page before it burns out of the back of my head. That said, this post is going to be unavoidably ‘political,’ because as a citizen of the United States, commenting on the war means making a statement about the President who unilaterally and illegally launched it without much public debate and without consulting Congress.
And this war is dumb as hell.
I am going to spend the next however many words working through what I think are the strategic implications of where we are, but that is my broad thesis: for the United States this war was an unwise gamble on extremely long odds; the gamble (that the regime would collapse swiftly) has already failed and as a result locked in essentially nothing but negative outcomes. Even with the regime were to collapse in the coming weeks or suddenly sue for peace, every likely outcome leaves the United States in a meaningfully worse strategic position than when it started.
Now, before we go forward, I want to clarify a few things. First, none of this is a defense of the Iranian regime, which is odious. That said, there are many odious regimes in the world and we do not go to war with all of them. Second, this is a post fundamentally about American strategy or the lack thereof and thus not a post about Israeli strategy. For what it is worth, my view is that Benjamin Netanyahu has is playing an extremely short game because it benefits him politically and personally to do so and there is a significant (but by no means certain) chance that Israel will come to regret the decision to encourage this war. I’ll touch on some of that, but it isn’t my focus. Likewise, this is not a post about the strategy of the Gulf states, who – as is often the sad fate of small states – find their fate largely in the hands of larger powers. Finally, we should keep in mind that this isn’t an academic exercise: many, many people will suffer because of these decisions, both as victims of the violence in the region but also as a consequent of the economic ripples.
But that’s enough introduction. What I want to discuss here is first the extremely unwise gamble that the administration took and then the trap that it now finds itself in, from which there is no comfortable escape.
The Situation
We need to start by establishing some basic facts about Iran, as a country.
First, Iran is a large country. It has a population just over 90 million (somewhat more than Germany, about the same as Turkey), and a land area over more than 600,000 square miles (more than four times the size of Germany). Put another way Iran is more than twice as large as Texas, with roughly three times the population.
More relevantly for us, Iran is 3.5 times larger than Iraq and roughly twice the population. That’s a handy comparison because we know what it took to invade and then hold Iraq: coalition forces peaked at half a million deployed personnel during the invasion. Iran is bigger in every way and so would demand a larger army and thus an absolutely enormous investment of troops, money and fundamentally lives in order to subdue.
Via Wikipedia, a map of Iran. This is a very big country. It also has a lot of very challenging terrain: lots of very arid areas, lots of high mountains and plateaus. It is a hard country to invade and a harder country to occupy.
In practice, given that Iran did not and never has posed an existential threat to the United States (Iran aspires to be the kind of nuclear threat North Korea is and can only vaguely dream of being the kind of conventional threat that Russia is), that meant that a ground invasion of Iran was functionally impossible. While the United States had the raw resources to do it, the political will simply wasn’t there and was unlikely to ever be there.
Equally important, Iran was not a major strategic priority. This is something that in a lot of American policy discourse – especially but not exclusively on the right – gets lost because Iran is an ‘enemy’ (and to be clear, the Iranian regime is an enemy; they attack American interests and Americans regularly) and everyone likes to posture against the enemy. But the Middle East is a region composed primarily of poor, strategically unimportant countries. Please understand me: the people in these countries are not unimportant, but as a matter of national strategy, some places are more important than others. Chad is not an area of vital security interest to the United States, whereas Taiwan (which makes our semiconductors) is and we all know it.
Neither is the Middle East. The entire region has exactly two strategic concerns of note: the Suez Canal (and connected Red Sea shipping system) and the oil production in the Persian Gulf and the shipping system used to export it. So long as these two arteries remained open the region does not matter very much to the United States. None of the region’s powers are more than regional powers (and mostly unimpressive ones at that), none of them can project power out of the region and none of them are the sort of dynamic, growing economies likely to do so in the future. The rich oil monarchies are too small in terms of population and the populous countries too poor.
In short then, Iran is very big and not very important, which means it would both be very expensive to do anything truly permanent about the Iranian regime and at the same time it would be impossible to sell that expense to the American people as being required or justified or necessary. So successive American presidents responded accordingly: they tried to keep a ‘lid’ on Iran at the lowest possible cost. The eventual triumph of this approach was the flawed but useful JCPOA (the ‘Iran deal’) in which Iran in exchange for sanctions relief swore off the pursuit of nuclear weapons (with inspections to verify), nuclear proliferation representing the main serious threat Iran could pose. So long as Iran remained non-nuclear, it could be contained and the threat to American interests, while not zero, could be kept minimal.
That deal was not perfect, I must stress: it essentially gave Iran carte blanche to reinforce its network of proxies across the region, which was robustly bad for Israel and mildly bad for the United States, but since the alternative was – as we’ll see – global economic disruption and the prospect of a large-scale war which would always be far more expensive than the alternatives, it was perhaps the best deal that could have been had. For what it is worth, my own view is that the Obama administration ‘overpaid’ for the concessions of the Iran deal, but the payment having been made, they were worth keeping. Trump scrapped them in 2017 in exchange for exactly nothing, which put us on the course for this outcome (as more than a few people pointed out at the time).
But that was the situation: Iran was big and hostile, but relatively unimportant. The United States is much stronger than Iran, but relatively uninterested in the region apart from the uninterrupted flow of natural gas, oil and other products from the Gulf (note: the one thing this war compromised – the war with Iran has cut off the only thing in this region of strategic importance, compromised the only thing that mattered at the outset), whereas Iran was wholly interested in the region because it lives there. The whole thing was the kind of uncomfortable frontier arrangement powerful states have always had to make because they have many security concerns, whereas regional powers have fewer, more intense focuses.
Which leads us to
The Gamble
The current war is best understood as the product of a fairly extreme gamble, although it is unclear to me if the current administration understood they were throwing the dice in June of 2025 rather than this year. As we’re going to see, this was not a super-well-planned-out affair.
The gamble was this: that the Iranian regime was weak enough that a solid blow, delivered primarily from the air, picking off key leaders, could cause it to collapse. For the United States, the hope seems to have been that a transition could then be managed to leaders perhaps associated with the regime but who would be significantly more pliant, along the lines of the regime change operation performed in Venezuela that put Delcy Rodriguez in power. By contrast, Israel seems to have been content to simply collapse the Iranian regime and replace it with nothing. That outcome would be – as we’ll see – robustly bad for a huge range of regional and global actors, including the United States, and it is not at all clear to me that the current administration understood how deeply their interests and Israel’s diverged here.
In any case, this gamble was never very likely to pay off for reasons we have actually already discussed. The Islamic Republic of Iran is not a personalist regime where the death of a single leader or even a group of leaders is likely to cause collapse: it is an institutional regime where the core centers of power (like the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps or IRGC) are ‘bought in’ from the bottom to the top because the regime allows them access to disproportionate resources and power. Consequently if you blow up the leader, they will simply pick another one – in this case they picked the previous leader’s son, so the net effect of the regime change effort was to replace Supreme Leader Khamenei with Supreme Leader Khamenei…Jr.
But power in the Iranian regime isn’t wielded by the Supreme Leader alone either: the guardian council has power, the council of experts that select the Supreme Leader have power, the IRGC has power, the regular military has some power (but less than the IRGC), the elected government has some power (but less than the IRGC or the guardian council) and on and on. These sorts of governments can collapse, but not often. It certainly did not help that the United States had stood idle while the regime slaughtered tens of thousands of its opponents, before making the attempt, but I honestly do not think the attempt would have worked before.
The gamble here was that because the regime would simply collapse on cue, the United States could remove Iran’s regional threat without having to commit to a major military operation that might span weeks, disrupt global energy supplies, expand over the region, cost $200 billion dollars and potentially require ground operations. Because everyone knew that result was worse than the status quo and it would thus be really foolish to do that.
As you can tell, I think this was a bad gamble: it was very unlikely to succeed but instead always very likely to result in a significantly worse strategic situation for the United States, but only after it killed thousands of people unnecessarily. If you do a war where thousands of people die and billions of dollars are spent only to end up back where you started that is losing; if you end up worse than where you started, well, that is worse.
The problem is that once the gamble was made, once the dice were cast, the Trump administration would be effectively giving up control over much of what followed.
That is notable because Iran did not assume that immediately during the Twelve-Day War in 2025. Indeed, Iran did not treat the United States as a real co-belligerent even as American aircraft were actively intercepting Iranian missiles aimed at Israel. And then the United States executed a ‘bolt from the blue’ surprise attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities on June 22, 2025, catching Iran (which had been attempting to negotiate with the United States) by surprise.
The problem with that strike is that attacking in that way, at that time, meant that Iran would have to read any future attacks by Israel as likely also involving attacks by the United States. Remember, the fellow getting bombed does not get to carefully inspect the flag painted on the bomber: stuff blows up and to some degree the party being attacked has to rapidly guess who is attacking them. We’ve seen this play out repeatedly over the last several weeks where things explode in Iran and there is initially confusion over if the United States or Israel bombed them. But in the confusion of an initial air attack, Iran’s own retaliatory capability could not sit idle, waiting to be destroyed by overwhelming US airpower: it is a ‘wasting’ use-it-or-lose-it asset.
So Iran would now have to assume that an Israeli air attack was also likely an American air attack. It was hardly an insane assumption – evidently according to the Secretary of State, American intelligence made the exact same assessment.
But the result was that by bombing the Iranian nuclear facilities in June of 2025, the Trump administration created a situation where merely by launching a renewed air campaign on Iran, Israel could force the United States into a war with Iran at any time.
It should go without saying that creating the conditions where the sometimes unpredictable junior partner in a security relationship can unilaterally bring the senior partner into a major conflict is an enormous strategic error, precisely because it means you end up in a war when it is in the junior partner’s interests to do so even if it is not in the senior partner’s interests to do so.
Which is the case here. Because…
The Trap
Once started, a major regional war with Iran was always likely to be something of a ‘trap,’ – not in the sense of an ambush laid by Iran – but in the sense of a situation that, once entered, cannot be easily leftor reversed.
The trap, of course, is the Strait of Hormuz and the broader Persian Gulf. The issue is that an enormous proportion of the world’s shipping, particularly energy (oil, liquid natural gas) and fertilizer components (urea) passes through this body of water. The Gulf is narrow along its whole length, extremely narrow in the Strait and bordered by Iran on its northern shore along its entire length. Iran can thus threaten the whole thing and can do so with cheap, easy to conceal, easy to manufacture systems.
And the scale here is significant. 25% of the world’s oil (refined and crude), 20% of its liquid natural gas and around 20% of the world’s fertilizer passes through the Strait of Hormuz which links the Persian Gulf to the Indian Ocean. Any of those figures would be enough for a major disruption to trigger huge economic ripples. And even worse there are only very limited, very insufficient alternative transport options. Some Saudi oil (about half) can move via pipeline to the Red Sea and some Emirati oil can move via pipeline to Fujairah outside of the Strait, but well over half of the oil and effectively all of the natural gas and fertilizer ingredients are trapped if ships cannot navigate the strait safely.
And here we come back to what Clausewitz calls the political object (drink!). Even something like a 50% reduction in shipping in the Gulf, were it to persist long term, would create strong global economic headwinds which would in turn arrive in the United States in the form of high energy prices and a general ‘supply shock’ that has, historically at least, not been politically survivable for the party in power.
And so that is the trap. While the United States can exchange tit-for-tat strikes with Iran without triggering an escalation spiral, once you try to collapse the regime, the members of the regime (who are making the decisions, not, alas, the Iranian people) have no reason to back down and indeed must try to reestablish deterrence. These are men who are almost certainly dead or poor-in-exile if the regime collapses. Moreover the entire raison d’être of this regime is resistance to Israel and the United States: passively accepting a massive decapitation attack and not responding would fatally undermine the regime’s legitimacy with its own supporters, leading right back to the ‘dead-or-poor-and-exiled’ problem.
Iran would have to respond and thus would have to try to find a way to inflict ‘pain’ on the United States to force the United States to back off. But whereas Israel is in reach of some Iranian weapons, the United States is not. Iran would thus need a ‘lever’ closer to home which could inflict costs on the United States. For – and I must stress this – for forty years everyone has known this was the strait. This is not a new discovery, we did this before in the 1980s. “If the regime is threatened, Iran will try to close the strait to exert pressure” is perhaps one of the most established strategic considerations in the region. We all knew this.
But the trap here is two sided: once the strait was effectively closed, the United States could not back off out of the war without suffering its own costs. Doing so, for one, would be an admission of defeat, politically damaging at home. Strategically, it would affirm Iran’s control over the strait, which would be a significantly worse outcome than not having done the war in the first place. And simply backing off might not fully return shipping flows: why should Iran care if the Gulf states can export their oil? An Iran that fully controls the strait, that had demonstrated it could exclude the United States might intentionally throttle everyone else’s oil – even just a bit – to get higher prices for its own or to exert leverage.
So once the strait was closed, the United States could not leave until it was reopened, or at least there was some prospect of doing so.
The result is a fairly classic escalation trap: once the conflict starts, it is extremely costly for either side to ever back down, which ensures that the conflict continues long past it being in the interests of either party. Every day this war goes on make both the United States and Iran weaker, poorer and less secure but it is very hard for either side to back down because there are huge costs connected to being the party that backs down. So both sides ‘escalate to de-escalate’ (this phrase is generally as foolish as it sounds), intensifying the conflict in an effort to hit hard enough to force the other guy to blink first. But since neither party can back down unilaterally and survive politically, there’s practically no amount of pain that can force them to do so.
Under these conditions, both sides might seek a purely military solution: remove the ability of your opponent to do harm in order to create the space to declare victory and deescalate. Such solutions are elusive. Iran simply has no real way of meaningfully diminishing American offensive power: they cannot strike the airfields, sink the carriers or reliably shoot down the planes (they have, as of this writing, managed to damage just one aircraft).
For the United States, a purely military solution is notionally possible: you could invade. But as noted, Iran is very, very big and has a large population, so a full-scale invasion would be an enormous undertaking, larger than any US military operation since the Second World War. Needless to say, the political will for this does not exist. But a ‘targeted’ ground operation against Iran’s ability to interdict the strait is also hard to concieve. Since Iran could launch underwater drones or one-way aerial attack drones from anywhere along the northern shore the United States would have to occupy many thousands of square miles to prevent this and of course then the ground troops doing that occupying would simply become the target for drones, mortars, artillery, IEDs and so on instead.
One can never know how well prepared an enemy is for something, but assuming the Iranians are even a little bit prepared for ground operations, any American force deployed on Iranian soil would end up eating Shahed and FPV drones – the sort we’ve seen in Ukraine – all day, every day.
Meanwhile escort operations in the strait itself are also deeply unpromising. For one, it would require many more ships, because the normal traffic through the strait is so large and because escorts would be required throughout the entire Gulf (unlike the Red Sea crisis, where the ‘zone’ of Houthi attacks was contained to only the southern part of the Red Sea). But the other problem is that Iran possesses modern anti-ship missiles (AShMs) in significant quantity and American escort ships (almost certainly Arleigh Burke-class destroyers) would be vulnerable escorting slow tankers in the constrained waters of the strait.
It isn’t even hard to imagine what the attack would look like: essentially a larger, more complex version of the attack that sunk the Moskva, to account for the Arleigh Burke’s better air defense. Iran would pick their moment (probably not the first transit) and try to distract the Burke, perhaps with a volley of cheap Shahed-type drones against a natural gas tanker, before attempting to ambush the Burke with a volley of AShMs, probably from the opposite direction. The aim would be to create just enough confusion that one AShM slipped through, which is all it might take to leave a $2.2bn destroyer with three hundred American service members on board disabled and vulnerable in the strait. Throw in speed-boats, underwater drones, naval mines, fishing boats pretending to be threats and so on to maximize confusion and the odds that one of perhaps half a dozen AShMs slips through.
And if I can reason this out, Iran – which has been planning for this exact thingfor forty years certainly can. Which is why the navy is not eager to run escort.
But without escorts or an end to the conflict, shipping in the Gulf is not going to return to normal. Container ships are big and hard to sink but easy to damage. But while crude oil tankers are hard to set fire to, tankers carrying refined petroleum products are quite easy to set fire to, as we’ve seen, while tankers of liquid natural gas (LNG carriers) are essentially floating bombs.
The result is that right now it seems that the only ships moving through the strait are those Iran permits and they appear to have a checkpoint system, turning away ships they do not approve of. A military solution this problem is concievable, but extremely difficult to implement practically, requiring either a massive invasion of Iran’s coastline or an enormous sea escort operation. It seems more likely in both cases that the stoppage will continue until Iran decides it should stop. The good news on that front is that Iran benefits from the export of oil from the Gulf too, but the bad news is that while they are permitting some traffic, precisely because high energy prices are their only lever to make the United States and Israel stop killing them, they are unlikely to approve the transit of the kinds of numbers of ships which would allow energy markets to stabilize.
Just as a measure here, as I write this apparently over the last three days or so Iran has let some twenty ships through their checkpoint, charging fees apparently to do so. That may sound like a lot, but it is a quantity that, compared to the normal operation of the strait, is indistinguishable from zero. The Strait of Hormuz normally sees around 120 transits per day (including both directions). That scale should both explain why five or six ships a day paying Iran to transit is not going to really impact this equation – that’s still something like a 95% reduction in traffic (and all of the Iran-approved transits are outbound, I think) – but also why a solution like ‘just do escorts’ is so hard. Whatever navies attempted an escort solution would need to escort a hundred ships a day, with every ship being vulnerable at every moment from when it entered the Strait to when it docked for loading or offloading to its entire departure route. All along the entire Gulf coastline. All the time.
Likewise, even extremely punishing bombings of Iranian land-based facilities are unlikely to wholly remove their ability to throw enough threat into the Strait that traffic remains massively reduced. Sure some ship owners will pay Iran and others will take the risk, but if traffic remains down 90% or just 50% that is still a massive, global energy disruption. And we’ve seen with the campaign against the Houthis just how hard it is with airstrikes to compromise these capabilities: the United States spent more than a year hammering the Houthis and was never able to fully remove their attack capabilities. Cargo ships are too vulnerable and the weapons with which to attack them too cheap and too easy to hide.
There is a very real risk that this conflict will end with Iran as the de facto master of the Strait of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf, having demonstrated that no one can stop them from determining by force which ships pass and which ships cannot. That would, in fact, be a significant strategic victory for Iran and an enormous strategic defeat for the United States.
Peace Negotiations?
Which brings us to the question of strategic outcomes. As the above has made clear, I think the Trump administration erred spectacularly in starting this war. It appears as though, in part pressured by Israel, but mostly based on their own decisions (motivated, it sure seems, by the ease of the Venezuela regime-change) they decided to go ahead on the hopeful assumption the regime would collapse and as a result did not plan for the most likely outcome (large war, strait closure), despite this being the scenario that political leadership (Trump, Hegseth, Rubio) were warned was most likely.
That is a lot of uncertainty! But I think we can look at some outcomes here both in terms of what was militarily achieved, what the consequences of a ‘deal’ might be and what the consequences of not having a deal might be.
The Trump administration has offered a bewildering range of proposed objectives for this war, but I think it is fair to say the major strategic objectives have not been achieved. Initially, the stated objective was regime change or at least regime collapse; neither has occurred. The regime very much still survives and if the war ends soon it seems very plausible that the regime – able to say that it fought the United States and made the American president sue for peace – will emerge stronger, domestically (albeit with a lot of damage to fix and many political problems that are currently ‘on pause’ coming ‘un-paused’). The other core American strategic interest here is Iran’s nuclear program, the core of which is Iran’s supply of roughly 500kg of highly enriched uranium; no effort appears to have been made to recover or destroy this material and it remains in Iranian hands. Actually destroying (dispersing, really) or seizing this material by military force would be an extremely difficult operation with a very high risk of failure, since the HEU is underground buried in facilities (mostly Isfahan) in the center of the country. Any sort of special forces operation would thus run the risk of being surrounded and outnumbered very fast, even with ample air support, while trying to extract half a ton of uranium stored in gas form in heavy storage cylinders.
Subsequently, administration aims seem to have retreated mostly to ‘fixing the mess we made:’ getting Iran to stop shooting and getting the Strait of Hormuz reopened and the ships moving again. They do seem to be asking for quite a bit more at the peace table, but the record of countries winning big concessions at the peace table which they not only haven’t secured militarily but do not appear able to do so is pretty slim.
Now it is possible that Iran blinks and takes a deal sooner rather than later. But I don’t think it is likely. And the simple reason is that Iran probably feels like it needs to reestablish deterrence. This is the second sudden bombing campaign the country has suffered in as many years – they do not want there to be a third next year and a fourth the year after that. But promises not to bomb them don’t mean a whole lot: establishing deterrence here means inflicting quite a lot of pain. In practice, if Iran wants future presidents not to repeat this war, the precedent they want to set is “attacking Iran is a presidency-ending mistake.” And to do that, well, they need to end a presidency or at least make clear they could have done.
Iran is thus going to very much want a deal that says ‘America blinked’ on the tin, which probably means at least some remaining nuclear program, a de facto Iranian veto on traffic in the strait and significant sanctions relief, along with formal paper promises of no more air strikes. That’s going to be a hard negotiating position to bridge, especially because Iran can ‘tough it out’ through quite a lot of bombing.
And I do want to stress that. There is a frequent mistake, often from folks who deal in economics, to assume that countries will give up on wars when the economics turn bad. But countries are often very willing to throw good money after bad even on distant wars of choice. For wars close to home that are viewed as existential? Well, the ‘turnip winter‘ where Germans started eating food previous thought fit only for animals (a result of the British blockade) began in 1916. The war did not end in 1916. It did not end in 1917. It did not end until November, 1918. Food deprivation and starvation in Germany was real and significant and painful for years before the country considered surrender. Just because the war is painful for Iran does not mean the regime will cave quickly: so long as they believe the survival of the regime is at stake, they will fight on.
There is a great deal of ruin in a nation.
Strategic Implications
So my conclusion here is that the United States has not yet achieved very much in this war on a strategic level. Oh, tactically, the United States has blown up an awful lot of stuff and done so with very minimal casualties of its own. But countries do not go to war simply to have a war – well, stupid fascist countries do, which is part of why they tend to be quite bad at war – they go to war to achieve specific goals and end-states.
None of the major goals here – regime change, an end to Iran’s nuclear ambitions – have been achieved. If the war ends tomorrow in a ‘white peace,’ Iran will reconstitute its military and proxies and continue its nuclear program. It is in fact possible to display astounding military skill and yet, due to strategic incoherence, not accomplish anything.
So the true, strategic gains here for all of the tactical effectiveness displayed, are functionally nil. Well what did it cost?
Well, first and foremost, to date the lives of 13 American soldiers (290 more WIA), 24 Israelis (thousands more injured), at least a thousand civilian deaths across ‘neutral’ countries (Lebanon mostly, but deaths in Kuwait, Iraq, Qatar, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, etc) and probably at least a thousand if not more Iranian civilians (plus Iranian military losses). The cost of operations for the United States is reportedly one to two billion dollars a day, which adds up pretty quickly to a decent chunk of change.
All of the military resources spent in this war are in turn not available for other, more important theaters, most obviously the Asia-Pacific (INDOPACOM), but of course equally a lot of these munitions could have been doing work in Ukraine as well. As wars tend to do, this one continues to suck in assets as it rumbles on, so the American commitment is growing, not shrinking. And on top of spent things like munitions and fuel, the strain on ships, air frames and service personnel is also a substantial cost: it turns out keeping a carrier almost constantly running from one self-inflicted crisis to the next for ten months is a bad idea.
You could argue these costs would be worthwhile it they resulted in the destruction of Iran’s nuclear program – again, the key element here is the HEU, which has not been destroyed – or of the Iranian regime. But neither of those things have been achieved on the battlefield, so this is a long ledger of costs set against…no gains. Again, it is not a ‘gain’ in war simply to bloody your enemy: you are supposed to achieve something in doing so.
The next side of this are the economic consequences. Oil and natural gas have risen in price dramatically, but if you are just watching the commodity ticker on the Wall Street Journal, you may be missing some things. When folks talk about oil prices, they generally do so via either $/bbl (West Texas Intermediate – WTI – one-month front-month futures) or BRN00 (Brent Crude Oil Continuous Contracts). These are futures contracts, meaning the price being set is not for a barrel of oil right now but for a barrel of oil in the future; we can elide the sticky differences between these two price sets and just note that generally the figure you see is for delivery in more-or-less one month’s time. Those prices have risen dramatically (close to doubled), but may not reflect the full economic impact here: as the ‘air bubble’ created by the sudden stop of oil shipments expands, physical here-right-now prices for oil are much higher in many parts of the world and still rising.
Essentially, the futures markets are still hedging on the idea that this war might end and normal trade might resume pretty soon, a position encouraged by the current administration, which claims it has been negotiating with Iran (Iran denied the claim). The tricky thing here is that this is a war between two governments – the Trump administration and the Iranian regime – which both have a clear record of lying a lot. The Trump administration has, for instance, repeatedly claimed a peace deal between Ukraine and Russia was imminent, and that war remains ongoing. The markets are thus forced to try and guess everyone’s actions and intentions from statements that are unreliable. Cards on the table, I think the markets are underestimating the likelihood that this conflict continues for some time. Notably, the United States is moving assets into theater – an MEU, elements of the 82 Airborne – which will take some time to arrive (two weeks for the MEU which is still about a week out as I write this) and set up for operations.
In either case, while I am not an expert on oil extraction or shipping, what I have seen folks who are experts on those things say is that the return of normal operations after this war will be very slow, often on the order of ‘every extra week of conflict adds a month to recovery’ (which was Sal Mercogliano’s rule of thumb in a recent video). If the war ends instantly, right now, ship owners will first have to determine that the strait is safe, then ships will have to arrive and begin loading to create space in storage to start up refineries to create space in storage to start up oil wells that have been ‘shut in,’ some of which may require quite a bit of doing to restart. Those ships in turn have to spend weeks sailing to the places that need these products, where some of the oil and LNG is likely to be used to refill stockpiles rather than immediately going out to consumers. For many products, refineries and production at the point of sale – fertilizer plants, for instance – will also need to be restarted. Factory restarts can be pretty involved tasks.
Meanwhile, disruption of fertilizer production, which relies heavily on natural gas products, has the potential to raise food prices globally. Higher global food prices – and food prices have already been elevated by the impact of the War in Ukraine – are pretty strongly associated with political instability in less developed countries. After all, a 25% increase in the price of food in a rich country is annoying – you have to eat more cheaper foods (buy more ramen, etc.). But in a poor country it means people go hungry because they cannot afford food and hungry, desperate people do hungry, desperate things. A spike in food prices was one of the core causes of the 2010 Arab Spring which led in turn to the Syrian Civil War, the refugee crisis of which significantly altered the political landscape of Europe.
Via Wikipedia, a chart of the food price index, with the spikes on either side of 2010 clearly visible; they are thought to have contributed to the intense political instability of those years (alongside the financial crisis).
I am not saying this will happen – the equally big spike in food prices from the Ukraine War has not touched off a wave of revolutions – but that it increases the likelihood of chaotic, dynamic, unsettled political events.
But it does seem very clear that this war has created a set of global economic headwinds which will have negative repercussions for many countries, including the United States. The war has not, as of yet, made Americans any safer – but it has made them poorer.
Then there are the political implications. I think most folks understand that this war was a misfire for the United States, but I suspect it may end up being a terrible misfire for Israel as well. Israeli security and economic prosperity both depend to a significant degree on the US-Israeli security partnership and this war seems to be one more step in a process that very evidently imperils that partnership. Suspicion of Israel – which, let us be honest, often descends into rank, bigoted antisemitism, but it is also possible to critique Israel, a country with policies, without being antisemitic – is now openly discussed in both parties. More concerning is polling suggesting that not only is Israel underwater with the American public, but more Americans sympathize with Palestinians than Israelis for the first time in American history.
Again, predictions are hard, especially about the future, but it certainly seems like there is an open door to a future where this war is the final nail in the coffin of the American-Israeli security partnership, as it becomes impossible to sustain in the wake of curdling American public opinion. That would be a strategic catastrophe for Israel if it happened. On the security side, with Israel has an independent nuclear deterrent and some impressive domestic military-industrial production the country is not capable of designing and manufacturing the full range of high-end hardware that it relies on to remain militarily competitive despite its size. There’s a reason Israel flies F-35s. But a future president might well cut off spare parts and maintainers for those F-35s, refuse to sell new ones, refuse to sell armaments for them, and otherwise make it very difficult for Israel to acquire superior weapons compared to its regional rivals.
Economic coercion is equally dangerous: Israel is a small, substantially trade dependent country and its largest trading partner is the United States, followed by the European Union. But this trade dependency is not symmetrical: the USA and EU are hugely important players in Israel’s economy but Israel is a trivial player in the US and EU economies. Absent American diplomatic support then, the threat of economic sanctions is quite dire: Israel is meaningfully exposed and the sanctions would be very low cost for the ‘Status Quo Coalition’ (assuming the United States remains a member) to inflict under a future president.
A war in which Israel cripples Iran in 2026 but finds itself wholly diplomatically isolated in 2029 is a truly pyrrhic victory. As Thucydides might put it, an outcome like that would be an “example for the world to meditate upon.” That outcome is by no means guaranteed, but every day the war grinds on and becomes less popular in the United States, it becomes more likely.
But the United States is likewise going to bear diplomatic costs here. Right now the Gulf States have to shelter against Iranian attack but when the dust settles they – and many other countries – will remember that the United States unilaterally initiated by surprise a war of choice which set off severe global economic headwinds and uncertainty. Coming hot on the heels of the continuing drama around tariffs, the takeaway in many places may well be ‘Uncle Sam wants you to be poor,’ which is quite a damaging thing for diplomacy. And as President Trump was finding out when he called for help in the Strait of Hormuz and got told ‘no’ by all of our traditional allies, it is in fact no fun at all to be diplomatically isolated, no matter how powerful you are.
Of course the war, while quickly becoming an expensive, self-inflicted wound for the United States has also been disastrous for Iran. I said this at the top but I’ll say it again: the Iranian regime is odious. You will note also I have not called this war ‘unprovoked’ – the Iranian regime has been provoking the United States and Israel via its proxies almost non-stop for decades. That said, it is the Iranian people who will suffer the most from this war and they had no choice in the matter. They tried to reject this regime earlier this year and many were killed for it. But I think it is fair to say this war has been a tragedy for the Iranian people and a catastrophe for the Iranian regime.
And you may then ask, here at the end: if I am saying that Iran is being hammered, that they are suffering huge costs, how can I also be suggesting that the United States is on some level losing?
And the answer is simple: it is not possible for two sides to both win a war. But it is absolutely possible for both sides to lose; mutual ruin is an option. Every actor involved in this war – the United States, Iran, arguably Israel, the Gulf states, the rest of the energy-using world – is on net poorer, more vulnerable, more resource-precarious as a result.
In short, please understand this entire 7,000+ word post as one primal scream issued into the avoid at the careless, unnecessary folly of the decision to launch an ill-considered war without considering the obvious, nearly inevitable negative outcomes which would occur unless the initial strikes somehow managed to pull the inside straight-flush. They did not and now we are all living trapped in the consequences.
Maybe the war will be over tomorrow. The consequences will last a lot longer.
What was your path into AI, and what are you working on now?
I first became interested in AI when I saw the chess computer Tinker Belle wheeled into a New Jersey chess tournament in I think 1975. I followed the Kasparov matches closely, and the more general progress of AI in chess. I read chess master David Levy telling me that chess was far too intuitive for computers ever to do well. He was wrong, and then I realized that AI could be intuitive and creative too. That was a long time ago.
In 2013 I published a book on the future of AI called Average is Over. I feel it has predicted our current time very accurately. I also taught Asimov’s I, Robot – a work far ahead of its time – for twenty years.
Right now I am simply working to keep afloat and to stay abreast of recent AI developments. I blog and write columns on the topic frequently, and have regular visits to the major labs. I encourage universities to experiment with AI education.
I mention William Byrd and Paul McCartney as well.
Coastal towns and green farmland are unaffected by floodwater, and the ocean is mostly blue.
NASA Earth Observatory / Lauren Dauphin
The same area, with brown floodwater pooling across farmland between Mokuleia and Waialua, with a red-brown plume spreading into the coastal ocean.
NASA Earth Observatory / Lauren Dauphin
Coastal towns and green farmland are unaffected by floodwater, and the ocean is mostly blue.
NASA Earth Observatory / Lauren Dauphin
The same area, with brown floodwater pooling across farmland between Mokuleia and Waialua, with a red-brown plume spreading into the coastal ocean.
NASA Earth Observatory / Lauren Dauphin
January 25, 2026
March 14, 2026
January 25, 2026 – March 14, 2026
Floodwaters pool in neighborhoods and on farmland, while a plume of sediment spreads into the coastal ocean (right) on March 14, 2026, after the first of two kona lows dropped copious rain on O’ahu, Hawaii. The same location is pictured free of floodwater (left) on January 25, 2026. Both images were acquired with the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 9.
Back-to-back low-pressure systems struck Hawaii in March 2026, delivering some of the worst flooding the state has seen in decades. The subtropical weather systems—called kona lows near Hawaii—siphoned moisture from the tropics, fueling slow-moving thunderstorms with torrential, destructive rains.
The National Weather Service reported rainfall totals of 5 to 10 inches (13 to 26 centimeters) throughout the state between March 11 and 15, with some areas seeing more than 30 inches. Weather stations in Honolulu, Hilo, Līhuʻe, and Kahului all broke daily rainfall records.
The satellite image on the right shows swamped neighborhoods and farmland between Mokuleia and Waialua on the island of O’ahu on March 14, 2026, after the first and more destructive storm system hit the island. Plumes of suspended sediment have discolored waters in and around Kaiaka Bay. Hawaii’s volcanic Hilo soils are known for being red due to the high levels of iron and aluminum oxide that accumulate as they weather. For comparison, the image on the left shows the same area on January 25, 2026, before the deluge.
Preliminary assessments indicate that hundreds of homes in O’ahu sustained damage. Farmers on the island and across the state reported millions of dollars in damage, according to news reports. The storm produced widespread wind gusts between 60 and 75 miles (97 and 121 kilometers) per hour, with gusts in some places reaching 100 miles per hour. As many as 115,000 O’ahu residents faced power outages in the storm’s aftermath.
While the most intense rains had subsided by March 24, forecasters are continuing to monitor unsettled weather and the possibility of more flash floods in the coming days.
WASHINGTON – National missile warning and tracking could be improved if all government agencies shared the raw data they gather. “There are agencies that have sensors that can provide data that would be very supplemental to the missile-defense mission, but they designed it for a completely different purpose,” Devin Elder, Northrop Grumman Strategic Space Systems […]
WASHINGTON – Electronic warfare is a growing threat to U.S. space systems, according to a March 23 unclassified briefing by U.S. Space Force Chief Master Sergeant Ron Lerch, senior enlisted advisor to the Deputy Chief of Space Operations for Intelligence. During the Satellite 2026 presentation, Lerch discussed technologies designed to disrupt proliferated low-Earth orbit (PLEO) […]
Victoria, Canada / Daejeon, South Korea – March 24, 2026 – Canadian and international organizations can now access SpaceEye-T imagery and tasking services through Pacific Geomatics Limited, one of the […]
SES has ordered an initial 28 satellites from manufacturing startup K2 Space for meoSphere, a next-generation MEO network slated to be in operation by 2030.
A shifting geopolitical landscape is driving huge business opportunities for satcoms but also bringing new supply chain and regulatory challenges, industry executives said March 24 at the Satellite Conference in Washington, D.C.
WASHINGTON — Redwire announced the first award for its new solar arrays, a $12.8 million contract from Moog. Under the contract announced March 24, Redwire will deliver Extensible Low-Profile Solar Array (ELSA) wings for Moog’s Meteor satellite bus ordered by an undisclosed national security customer. ELSA unveiled earlier this month, is designed to provide 50% more […]
Washington, D.C., March 24, 2026 – OrbitsIQ Global (OIQ), an innovator in AI-driven secure connectivity across terrestrial and satellite networks, today announced a major technological milestone achieved in collaboration with […]
The conversation around humanity’s return to the moon is often viewed through launches, landers and national programs. But, industry leaders say that framework is becoming outdated. Instead, they point to […]
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman speaks during an event where NASA is outlining how the agency is executing President Donald J. Trump’s National Space Policy and accelerating preparations for America’s return to the surface of the Moon by 2028, Tuesday, March 24, 2026, at the Mary W. Jackson NASA Headquarters building in Washington. During the event NASA leadership provided updates on mission priorities, including sending the first astronauts to the lunar surface in more than 50 years, establishing the initial elements of a permanent lunar base, getting America underway in space on nuclear propulsion, and other objectives. Image: NASA/Bill Ingalls
With the Artemis 2 around-the-moon launch just eight days away, NASA announced ambitious long-range plans Tuesday to spend $20 billion over the next seven years to build a moon base near the lunar south pole featuring habitats, pressurized rovers and nuclear power systems.
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman kicked off a series of meetings with contractors at NASA Headquarters in Washington saying he envisioned launching two moon landing missions per year to establish semi-permanent astronaut occupation on the lunar surface to explore, conduct research and develop the technology needed for eventual flights to Mars.
“This revised, step-by-step approach to learn, to build muscle memory, to bring down risk and gain confidence is exactly how NASA achieved the near impossible in the 1960s,” he said, referring to the agency’s Apollo program. “But this time, the goal is not flags and footprints. This time, the goal is to stay.
“Today, we are providing a demand for frequent crewed missions well beyond (previously announced moon landings in 2028). We intend to work with no fewer than two launch providers with the aim of crewed landings every six months, with additional opportunities for new entrants in the years ahead. America will never again give up the moon.”
The revised Artemis program envisions a transition from the government owned-and-operated Space Launch System rocket that will send the next several Artemis crews to the moon in favor of competitive commercial rockets like those being developed by SpaceX, Blue Origin and others.
It also will “pause” a program to build the Gateway space station in lunar orbit and “repurpose” components of that project for surface operations more in keeping with the moon base called for in the Trump administration’s national space policy.
Along with plans for a moon base, senior NASA managers also outlined work to develop nuclear power systems for use on the moon and Mars to keep astronauts, habitats and other equipment warm while providing the electricity needed for research, construction and daily operations.
First out of the gate will be the “Skyfall” mission to Mars in 2028 in which a fission reactor — Space Reactor 1, or SR-1, will power a nuclear-electric propulsion system to deliver three small helicopters that will be dropped in the thin martian atmosphere to fly about and study a possible landing zone for future astronauts.
SR-1 will be the first in a series of new nuclear power technologies NASA plans to deploy in the next few years on the moon.
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
Closer to home, agency managers vowed to continue efforts to encourage development of commercial space stations to keep American astronauts and researchers in low-Earth orbit after the International Space Station is retired in the 2030 timeframe.
Officials acknowledged the ISS program and commercially-developed crew ferry ships have not generated the private sector interest once envisioned and said the agency was exploring ways to encourage and hasten commercial development.
That includes allowing more privately financed non-astronauts to conduct research aboard the ISS, “selling” commander slots to qualified non-astronauts and even using the lab as a staging base for assembly of private-sector modules that later could be separated to fly on their own.
Isaacman said NASA would be able to afford the new Artemis architecture, space nuclear power development, ongoing science missions and new exploration ventures as well as working to facilitate the commercialization of low-Earth orbit with its existing budget, repurposing hardware to focus on the moon and by trimming bureaucratic waste and inefficiency.
“A lot of people ask us, you know, how are you going to be able to do all this within the resource you have available?” Isaacman said. “And I continue to tell them NASA does not necessarily have a top-line problem. We get a lot of resources. We may not always allocate them that efficiently.”
The revised Artemis program was unveiled just a few weeks after Isaacman ordered major changes to near-term missions, adding a flight in low-Earth orbit next year to test rendezvous and docking procedures using Orion crew ships and moon landers being built by SpaceX and Blue Origin.
Based on the results of the Artemis 2 and 3 missions, NASA now plans to launch at least one and possibly two moon landing missions in 2028 — Artemis 4 and 5 — using one or both privately developed moon landers before pressing ahead with a steady stream of flights to develop a base on the moon.
In the process, NASA will forego development of a planned space station in lunar orbit — the Gateway — and repurpose modules and systems already under development to serve as components of the planned moon base.
Under the old architecture, Gateway would have operated in a highly elliptical orbit where Orion crew ships from Earth would meet up with already docked lunar landers for descents to the surface. As it now stands, Orion astronauts will transfer directly to their landers without stopping at an orbital way station.
Gateway was intended to accommodate the propulsion capabilities of the Orion crew ship and its service module engine, which does not have the power to get into and out of a low-lunar orbit like the one used by Apollo crews.
What sort of orbits might be possible in the absence of Gateway was not addressed, but NASA is asking its contractors to help come up with workable alternatives.
“It should not really surprise anyone that we are pausing Gateway in its current form and focusing on infrastructure that supports sustained operations on the lunar surface,” Isaacman said. “Despite some of the very real hardware and schedule challenges, we can repurpose equipment and international partner commitments to support surface and other program objectives.”
He added that “shifting NASA workforce priority” to the lunar surface will enable the agency to use the moon as a “proving ground for future Mars initiatives” and that the policy change “does not preclude revisiting the orbital outpost in the future.”
The Planetary Society, a space advocacy organization co-founded by the late astronomer Carl Sagan, estimates NASA will have spent about $107 billion on return-to-the-moon plans through 2026 in inflation-adjusted dollars. That’s thanks in large part to repeated program changes over the past 20 years by successive presidential administrations.
In the wake of the shuttle Columbia disaster in 2003, President George W. Bush ordered NASA to retire the shuttle, build new rockets and return astronauts to the moon by 2020 in what became known as the Constellation program. The Obama administration concluded that program was not sustainable and ordered NASA to focus instead on a flight to a nearby asteroid.
In his first term, President Trump ordered NASA to shift its focus back to the moon for a proposed 2024 landing in what became known as the Artemis program. The Biden administration generally left Artemis alone, but the program had been slowed by the COVID pandemic, budget shortfalls and a variety of other factors.
Isaacman has repeatedly talked of Trump’s continued support of the Artemis program, and the revised architecture the administrator outlined Tuesday clearly has the approval of the White House.
Speaking of past delays and budget overruns, Isaacman said “the programs we left behind in this effort were not success stories. NASA takes ownership for the shortcomings, but contributing billions more and time that we do not have was not a pathway to success.”
A NASA chart sums up the plans and goal announced by agency officials Tuesday at NASA Headquarters. Image: NASA TV
The moon base will be built in three phases. Phase 1 will transition from infrequent, once-a-year moon missions to “a templated approach that will generate significant learning through experimentation,” he said.
“We will dramatically expand lunar landings … delivering rovers, instruments and technology payloads that test mobility, power systems … communications, navigation, surface operations and all the science payload that can be incorporated.”
Phase 2 will see development of habitats and infrastructure “supporting regular astronaut operations on the surface.” Phase 3 will enable “the permanent infrastructure necessary to sustain a human presence,” Isaacman said.
That includes nuclear and solar power systems, crewed and uncrewed rovers, including machines to prepare sites for construction, a cellphone-like communications network, a lunar GPS system and constellations of lunar observation and communications relay satellites.
“The moon base will not appear overnight,” Isaacman said. “We will invest approximately $20 billion over the next seven years and build it through dozens of missions, working together with commercial and international partners towards a deliberate and achievable plan.”
Isaacman made it clear that failure is not an option when it comes to beating China back to the lunar surface.
“Should we fail, and should we look on as our rivals achieve their lunar goals ahead of our own, we are not going to celebrate our adherence to excess requirements, policy or bureaucratic process,” he said, adding later that “we are not going to sit idly by when schedules slip or budgets are exceeded.”
“Expect uncomfortable action if that is what it takes, because the public has invested over $100 billion and has been very patient with respect to America’s return to the moon. Expectations are rightfully very high.”
Lay pretty long, that is, till past six o’clock, and then up and W. Howe and I very merry together, till having eat our breakfast, he went away, and I to my office. By and by Sir J. Minnes and I to the Victualling Office by appointment to meet several persons upon stating the demands of some people of money from the King.
Here we went into their Bakehouse, and saw all the ovens at work, and good bread too, as ever I would desire to eat.
Thence Sir J. Minnes and I homewards calling at Browne’s, the mathematician in the Minnerys, with a design of buying White’s ruler to measure timber with, but could not agree on the price. So home, and to dinner, and so to my office.
Where we sat anon, and among other things had Cooper’s business tried against Captain Holmes, but I find Cooper a fuddling, troublesome fellow, though a good artist, and so am contented to have him turned out of his place, nor did I see reason to say one word against it, though I know what they did against him was with great envy and pride.
So anon broke up, and after writing letters, &c., home to supper and to bed.
“This is going to surprise some people, but I consider Markwayne Mullin a friend. We have a very honest and constructive working relationship. We have authored legislation together, such as the Tribal Buffalo Management Act, and we crafted the Legislative Branch Appropriations bill together this year. We often disagree and when we do, we work to find whatever common ground we share.
“I have also seen first-hand that Markwayne is not someone who can simply be bullied into changing his views, and I look forward to having a Secretary who doesn’t take their orders from Stephen Miller.
“For five years, under this and the previous Trump Administration, I have lacked any constructive relationship with the Secretary of Homeland Security. This is despite my state being home to hundreds of TSA, CBP and Border Patrol constituents and many miles of the U.S./Mexico border. I want someone who recognizes the necessity of judicial warrants, as he has. I would like a Secretary who I can call and have a constructive conversation with about my state and the unique terrain that exists in the southwest and the proper mix of structure, technology and personnel necessary to effectively secure our border.
“For these reasons, I will vote to confirm Markwayne Mullin to be Secretary of Homeland Security.”
I have included his entire reasoning out of fairness, but I want to focus on the boldface part. Without engaging in too much late-night bong-influenced pseudophilosophy, there exist multiple Mullins. The Mullin the Democratic senator experiences is a principled opponent who is willing to “work to find whatever common ground we share.”
But the Mullin many, many other people know is not that man. He is a bloviating confabulist, who is terrified of being carjacked in D.C., who seems to like other people’s nostrils way too much, and also likes to pick fights with Congressional witnesses. Importantly, Mullin has not broken with Trump and his fascism in any meaningful way, and in 2021, refused to accept the validity of Biden’s presidential win.
Our Mullin, the one the overwhelming majority of us experience is not a principled opponent. He is a partisan hack who says absurd things and is, at best, a fascist appeaser, if not an outright fascist. There is no reason to think that the Democratic senator’s Mullin is the ‘real’ one, the one that will surface if Mullin becomes DHS Secretary. The Mullin the majority of Americans experience might be the one that is germane to how Mullin would perform his duties.
As I noted after Trump’s most recent State of the Union address:
But there are two things that sorry spectacle* revealed about professional Republicans.
First, they hate their Democratic coworkers. When Trump pointed at Democrats and said Democrats are “crazy… We’re lucky we have a country, with people like this. Democrats are destroying our country, but we stopped it, just in the nick of time”, Republicans went wild with glee. They were behaving like it was the pregame for a pogrom. This is who they really are, and this is what they really think.
Second, it’s still not clear to me if Democrats comprehend the Republican hatred. The superficial acts of civility by their Republican coworkers are a mask over the hatred Republicans have for Democrats, including their supposed ‘colleagues.’ While a willingness to pretend otherwise is humiliating for professional Democrats, it’s dangerous for the rest of us.
It obviously has not occurred to the Democratic senator that his coworker** might be playing him in private to get some legislation that Mullin himself wants, and that his public face is the real one. Professional Democrats need to figure this out, and fast.
*Since this is a vice that afflicts many, if not most, federal Democrats, I see no reason to focus on the particular senator, in this case New Mexico’s Senator Heinrich.
**No reason to refer to the overwhelming majority of Republicans who defended the insurrectionists that tried to overthrow the government and threatened to lynch Democratic lawmakers as colleagues. FFS, show some damn self-respect.
Donald Trump is flailing. Despite easy battlefield victories, the Iran War is quickly turning into a quagmire; the regime has not fallen, and threats against oil traffic through the Strait of Hormuz are causing gasoline prices to soar and threatening to reignite inflation. This is on top of Trump’s existing unpopularity due to the cost of living and the violent lawlessness of ICE. The electorate is moving solidly toward the Democrats; even groups that traditionally supported Trump are starting to get fed up. Unless Trump somehow manages to cancel the midterms, it seems certain that his party is going to take a huge loss.
And yet if Democrats want to really capitalize on this epic failure of Trumpism — if they want to hold power for more than just one more backlash cycle — they will need an ideology that’s more appealing than what they have now. The Democratic Party’s favorability rating is still extremely low. An NBC News poll from two weeks ago found that the Democrats’ net favorability was worse than the GOP, Donald Trump, or even ICE itself:
Many progressives claim that these low approval ratings are due to progressive voters disapproving of the Democrats for failing to fight Trump hard enough. That’s probably a factor on the margin, but it ignores the Democrats’ deep unpopularity on core issues. For example, a poll from six weeks ago found that voters preferred Republican approaches to Democratic ones on immigration, crime, and most other issues, even though they planned to vote for Democrats:
In other words, most of the Dems’ unpopularity probably doesn’t come from their lack of aggressiveness against Trump; it mostly comes from the fact that progressive ideology is unpopular.
In fact, many progressives probably don’t even realize that their values are out of step with the country. On a survey by the Cooperative Election Study, Democrats, Republicans, and Independents all basically agreed that Republican voters are very conservative. But Democrats saw themselves as moderates, even though Independents and Republicans saw them as leaning strongly to the left:
This is evidence that a lot of progressive Democrats are living in a bubble with regards to the overall country’s values. The simplest explanation is that progressive institutions — universities, nonprofits, etc. — and deep blue cities have concentrated educated progressives so much that they don’t interact with the masses of Americans very often, and hence don’t realize how far out of step their values are with the values of the electorate.
A prime example of such an issue is trans rights. While 54% of Democrats say people are able to change their gender, 74% of Independents say gender is determined at birth:
Independents are the real ball game. Not only are they all-important swing voters, but they’re a large and growing plurality of the electorate, as moderates leave both of the major parties:
And in fact, polls find that support for many of the trans movement’s key demands has gone down in recent years, even among Democrats.
Does this mean Democrats should moderate and compromise on social issues like trans rights? In the past, this is often what they did. After the electorate became moderately less pro-choice in the 1980s, Democrats compromised on abortion by saying it should be “safe, legal, and rare.” Before gay marriage gained majority support, Democrats — including Barack Obama — often supported “civil unions” as a halfway measure.
Today’s progressives are less inclined to compromise or beat a strategic retreat. The dominant idea seems to be that there is a “long arc” of history that bends towards their current positions on sociocultural issues. This idea comes from Martin Luther King, Jr.’s famous quote that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
To some progressives, recent history bears out the idea that the moral universe has an arc, and that it bends in their direction. Support for gay marriage steadily climbed over time, until liberals no longer had to bother with “civil unions” or other half measures. The core successes of the civil rights movement were not reversed.
If history works this way, why compromise today? Just stand your ground and stick to your principles, and eventually history will judge you favorably when the consensus inevitably catches up. I think progressives are thinking this way right now, as evidenced by their refusal to even entertain the notion of budging on the issue of trans women in women’s sports — an issue where public opinion is strongly on the side of the GOP.
Now don’t get me wrong — I don’t think the issue of women’s sports is a make-or-break issue for the Democrats. I just think it’s emblematic of a larger attitude that progressives are always on the right side of history, and that compromise and moderation are acts of cowardice rather than strategic necessities. In fact, some recent research I’ve seen suggests that it’s actually racial discrimination, asylum seekers, and public order where Dems would benefit most from moving to the center:
The danger is that “long arc” thinking will prevent Democrats from compromising on any of this, leading to another backlash cycle in 2028 or 2032 that brings an increasingly radicalized GOP back into power.
“Long arc” thinking isn’t necessarily wrong. There’s plenty of evidence that over time, societies all over the world — not just America — have evolved toward greater tolerance, inclusion, and personal liberty along many dimensions. The most likely reason is economic growth — as societies get richer, they tend to shift from harsh, conservative “survival values” toward more liberal values of “self-expression”.
But to think that this tendency will inevitably move society in the direction of progressives’ current ideas makes a number of mistakes.
First of all, believing that the “arc of history” is independent of human action is a dangerous assumption that removes human agency. History is contingent — the Equal Rights Amendment failed ratification by only three states out of 38, and never really got a second shot. If Hillary Clinton had won a few more votes in 2016, Roe v. Wade wouldn’t have been overturned, and affirmative action in college admissions would be legal to this day.
That means that even if you believe strongly that you’re morally on the right side of history, you still have to be strategic about picking your battles. Liberal victories like civil rights and gay marriage didn’t just cruise to victory on an inevitable tide of history; they required savvy strategizing by movement leaders and intellectuals. Sometimes those strategies involved boldness and pushing the envelope of what had been deemed possible; sometimes they involved compromise, strategic focus, and moderation.
It was the great mistake of communism to believe that History made them inevitable. Marx believed that vast social forces would inevitably push society toward communism; Marxists invested this prediction with a quasi-religious belief. This caused them not to worry enough about the mistakes they were making along the way; when the Cold War ended and it turned out that History wasn’t coming to save them, Francis Fukuyama wrote a whole book making fun of their misplaced faith.
The second reason “long arc” thinking is dangerous is that it automatically equates current progressive ideals with the ultimate moral destination of society.
Looking back to liberal victories naturally entails a selection effect. Yes, civil rights and gay marriage won the day and were ultimately enshrined as basic rights in American society — and, increasingly, in global society as well. But that doesn’t mean that every right that liberals and progressives fight for ends up being equally enshrined. There have been many losses and reversals — not just in the short term, and not just due to backlash, but due to society deciding that certain movement goals are not actually basic human rights.
For example, take abortion. Public opinion on abortion has fluctuated, but hasn’t changed since 1990, and fairly little since 1970:
The recent dramatic overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022has led to a stalemate, with abortion rights more restricted than they’ve been in over half a century. There was surprisingly little public backlash to the change — no dramatic nationwide marches, no riots, at best a small electoral bump for Democrats in 2022. By the time the GOP swept to power in 2024 it was almost forgotten.
An even more dramatic example is immigration. In the 1870s, America was extremely open to immigration, with essentially no federal controls and a patchwork of weak state controls on people coming into the country. Fast forward to 2015 — before Donald Trump’s election, and a supposed golden age of immigrant mobility — and we see a policy landscape far more restrictive than that of 140 years earlier. Border fences, continual mass deportations, restrictions on immigrant use of welfare and public services, and so on were all in place. There was no arc of history bending toward the right of free movement across national borders.
Even the civil rights movement — the template and paragon of liberal American movements — didn’t win everything. In the 1960s and 1970s, affirmative action in college admissions was a core goal of the civil rights movement. In 2023, the Supreme Court ruled it illegal. There was no public outcry; a solid majority of Americans favored the Court’s decision. DEI policies have instituted racial hiring discrimination in some companies, but this is on the wane after the policies grew increasingly unpopular.
Another example is busing. Mandatory integration busing was a core policy and a core demand of the original civil rights movement, but it was abandoned in the 1990s and 2000s.
In other words, looking back at modern American history, it’s clearly not the case that the country always trends toward what liberals or progressives want or demand. Sometimes rights movements win, sometimes they lose.
A key reason is that what constitutes a “right” is highly contested, and the ideas of tolerance, freedom, and equality don’t always clearly come down on the progressive side. Female athletes might view it as a form of liberty to have sex-segregated locker rooms where they don’t have to be exposed to penises. Asian and White college applicants might view it as a matter of tolerance and equality to be able to apply to jobs without being discriminated against on the basis of their race. Many societies have become less tolerant of public disorder and minor crimes in recent years, out of concern for their citizens’ freedom to walk the streets in safety.
It’s easy to trick yourself into thinking that “rights” always win out in the end, because of the selection effect — when we look back at what society eventually decided was an inalienable right, we’re looking only at movement victories. The losses didn’t get enshrined as “rights”, so we tend to ignore the fact that liberals and progressives fought long and hard for things they never ended up getting.
If you’re a progressive, and you believe deeply that racial preferences in hiring, leniency toward petty crime and illegal immigration, and trans women on women’s sports teams are basic human rights, I can’t tell you to change your values or go against your conscience just to win some elections. If you feel you have to stick to your guns, then stick to your guns. But if there are some progressives out there who are open to the idea of strategic compromise, I think now would be the time to do it. This nation really can’t afford to keep ping-ponging back and forth between an unpopular Democratic party and a mad rightist personality cult every two to four years.
Let's start with the basics. What, exactly, is an orbital data center?
On the ground, data centers are typically large, warehouse-sized facilities filled with racks of storage and servers, and usually some high-speed networking gear to connect everything. A data center can be small or large, but the ones SpaceX is looking to supplant are of the big kind—the ones operated by major industry players like Amazon Web Services and Google, which provide most of the online services you use today. These are sprawling buildings, or even campuses of buildings, with redundant connections to the electrical grid, on-site generators, massive banks of batteries, and enormous cooling systems to handle the heat being shed by thousands upon thousands of machines operating around the clock.
An orbital data center replicates all of that, but in space.
Educational institutions rely heavily on digital platforms to deliver, monitor, and report assessments at scale. However, trust in an exam management system goes beyond simply delivering tests online. It involves ensuring reliability, security, transparency, and fairness throughout the entire assessment lifecycle. When exam processes are managed through well-designed digital systems, institutions can confidently administer assessments while maintaining academic integrity and operational efficiency.
Reliable Infrastructure for High-Volume Testing
One of the clearest indicators of trusted exam management is a platform’s ability to handle high-volume testing environments without disruption. Universities and training providers often administer thousands of assessments simultaneously, particularly during peak exam periods. A reliable system must therefore maintain stability, minimise downtime, and ensure consistent performance across large cohorts.
Institutions prioritise server scalability, system redundancy, and latency-free concurrent sessions when they evaluate trusted exam management software. This scrutiny ensures platforms can handle thousands of simultaneous assessments during peak university exam periods without disruption, maintaining stability, minimising downtime, and delivering consistent performance across large cohorts. With such infrastructure in place, technical issues rarely compromise the testing experience, fostering confidence in high-volume exam delivery.
Secure Candidate Authentication and Monitoring
Trust in exam management also depends on the ability to confirm that the correct individual is completing the assessment. Secure identity verification processes help institutions prevent impersonation and protect the integrity of exam results.
Modern platforms support this through technologies such as multi-factor authentication, facial recognition, and remote proctoring systems. These tools verify a candidate’s identity before an exam begins and monitor activity throughout the session. By combining identity verification with behavioural monitoring, institutions create a structured testing environment that mirrors traditional supervised examinations while allowing assessments to take place remotely.
Transparent Assessment Delivery
Trusted exam management also requires clear and predictable assessment delivery. Students and administrators must understand how exams are presented, how responses are captured, and how technical contingencies are handled if disruptions occur.
Transparent systems provide clear instructions, stable navigation, and automated progress saving during an assessment. These design features reduce the risk of lost responses caused by connectivity issues or accidental browser closures. In addition, exam administrators benefit from dashboards that display session status in real time, allowing them to quickly identify and address irregularities during the exam process.
Accurate and Verifiable Result Processing
Another essential aspect of trusted exam management is the accuracy of scoring and result processing. Assessment outcomes must be generated through reliable processes that ensure fairness and consistency across all candidates.
Digital platforms achieve this through automated scoring engines and structured marking workflows. Objective question types, such as multiple choice, can be graded instantly, while essay responses can be routed through controlled marking systems that support double marking, moderation, and rubric-based evaluation. These mechanisms help institutions maintain consistent grading standards while ensuring that results are defensible if they are later reviewed or audited.
Data Protection and Compliance Standards
Assessment platforms also handle sensitive information, including student identities, performance data, and institutional records. As a result, trusted exam management must include strong protections for data security and regulatory compliance. Evidence from the academic literature on online assessment privacy highlights that digital proctoring and testing systems frequently process large amounts of personal data, making responsible governance and transparent data management essential for maintaining institutional trust.
Modern systems, therefore, implement encryption protocols, controlled access permissions, and detailed activity logs to safeguard assessment data. These features support compliance with recognised data protection frameworks and institutional governance policies. Comprehensive audit trails also allow administrators to trace actions taken during an exam cycle, providing transparency in cases where results or processes are later questioned.
Clear Reporting and Institutional Oversight
Trusted exam management does not end when the exam concludes. Institutions also require clear reporting capabilities that allow them to review performance data, identify irregularities, and refine assessment strategies.
Advanced reporting tools allow administrators to analyse candidate performance, detect anomalies, and evaluate assessment quality. By combining analytics with detailed activity records, institutions gain a complete view of how exams were delivered and completed. This oversight strengthens institutional confidence in both the assessment process and the results it produces.
Building Confidence Through Consistency
Trusted exam management is ultimately defined by consistency across every stage of the assessment lifecycle. From system reliability and candidate verification to transparent delivery and accurate reporting, each component contributes to the credibility of the overall testing process. When these elements work together effectively, educational institutions can administer assessments with confidence, knowing that both academic standards and operational integrity are being upheld.
Emine Yücel has a report up this morning on a new “deal” being kicked around the Senate that would attempt to fix the airport situation. This proposal would fund most of DHS — including the TSA — without funding ICE enforcement operations.
Republicans would then seek to fund those operations later this year, in a reconciliation bill, which, under Senate rules, can pass with only 51 votes. That means Republicans won’t need Democrats to get it through.
The deal is similar to how one might have predicted this would end for weeks. But it includes one weird, emerging point: Republicans might also try to pass the SAVE America Act through reconciliation.
The SAVE America Act — a sweeping voter suppression bill — has been a kind of chaos factor for months now, scrambling the Texas Senate primary and, more recently, scuttling the last attempt at a Senate deal to end the partial government shutdown. Trump demanded Republican senators not cut a deal with Democrats and instead sent ICE into airports to back up TSA, his idea of a solution.
Politico reports that, yesterday, Trump agreed to back this new deal to partially end the DHS shutdown, so long as Republicans get aspects of the SAVE Act into a reconciliation package.
But budget reconciliation is only meant to be used for, essentially, budget stuff. A sweeping voter suppression bill is not budget stuff. Not at all. So what is happening here?
Some Senate Republicans have been contending there is a way to get the SAVE Act through with budget reconciliation. Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) earlier this month proposed his conference hire “a really smart lawyer” to figure it out. This hypothetical individual could supposedly “help us craft a SAVE Act that can survive a Byrd bath,” the process through which the Senate parliamentarian strips out from a reconciliation bill any measures that don’t qualify for reconciliation.
Republicans could also refuse to abide by the parliamentarian’s rulings. But Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD), during the last reconciliation process, was clear that he did not want to break with precedent and do so.
“The meat of the Save Act cannot be done in reconciliation unless you’re willing to break the rules of reconciliation,” Bobby Kogan, senior director of federal budget policy at the Center for American Progress, told TPM.
Kogan explained Republicans could “pay states to voluntarily change their state rules, to do some of the stuff in the Save Act” but they are trying to set “binding national requirements, and that sort of thing is either non budgetary in some cases or merely incidental in other cases” and can’t be addressed in the reconciliation process.
“There’s a deeper political problem,” Kogan added. “If you can finagle some very, very minor stuff, do they get to pretend they have a win? Or does it further enrage the people who know that it’s nowhere close to what they’re actually seeking?”
Passing the SAVE Act would be a disaster for American democracy. But we’re not sure that’s what Senate Republicans are really up to here.
We’ll be watching to see if this is a genuine attempt to pass the SAVE Act, or an effort to kick the can, get Trump off their backs, and disclaim responsibility when they find that — even with some smart lawyers — they can’t get the SAVE Act through using reconciliation after all.
Japan’s election last month and the rise of the country’s newest and most innovative political party, Team Mirai, illustrates the viability of a different way to do politics.
In this model, technology is used to make democratic processes stronger, instead of undermining them. It is harnessed to root out corruption, instead of serving as a cash cow for campaign donations.
Imagine an election where every voter has the opportunity to opine directly to politicians on precisely the issues they care about. They’re not expected to spend hours becoming policy experts. Instead, an AI Interviewer walks them through the subject, answering their questions, interrogating their experience, even challenging their thinking.
Voters get immediate feedback on how their individual point of view matches—or doesn’t—a party’s platform, and they can see whether and how the party adopts their feedback. This isn’t like an opinion poll that politicians use for calculating short-term electoral tactics. It’s a deliberative reasoning process that scales, engaging voters in defining policy and helping candidates to listen deeply to their constituents.
This is happening today in Japan. Constituents have spent about eight thousand hours engaging with Mirai’s AI Interviewer since 2025. The party’s gamified volunteer mobilization app, Action Board, captured about 100,000 organizer actions per day in the runup to last week’s election.
It’s how Team Mirai, which translates to ‘The Future Party,’ does politics. Its founder, Takahiro Anno, first ran for local office in 2024 as a 33 year old software engineer standing for Governor of Tokyo. He came in fifth out of 56 candidates, winning more than 150,000 votes as an unaffiliated political outsider. He won attention by taking a distinctive stance on the role of technology in democracy and using AI aggressively in voter engagement.
Last year, Anno ran again, this time for the Upper Chamber of the national legislature—the Diet—and won. Now the head of a new national party, Anno found himself with a platform for making his vision of a new way of doing politics a reality.
In this recent House of Representatives election, Team Mirai shot up to win nearly four million votes. In the lower chamber’s proportional representation system, that was good enough for eleven total seats—the party’s first ever representation in the Japanese House—and nearly three times what it achieved in last year’s Upper Chamber election.
Anno’s party stood for election without aligning itself on the traditional axes of left and right. Instead, Team Mirai, heavily associated with young, urban voters, sought to unite across the ideological spectrum by taking a radical position on a different axis: the status quo and the future. Anno told us that Team Mirai believes it can triple its representation in the Diet after the next elections in each chamber, an ostentatious goal that seems achievable given their rapid rise over the past year.
In the American context, the idea of a small party unifying voters across left and right sounds like a pipe dream. But there is evidence it worked in Japan. Team Mirai won an impressive 11% of proportional representation votes from unaffiliated voters, nearly twice the share of the larger electorate. The centerpiece of the party’s policy platform is not about the traditional hot button issues, it’s about democracy itself, and how it can be enhanced by embracing a futuristic vision of digital democracy.
Anno told us how his party arrived at its manifesto for this month’s elections, and why it looked different from other parties’ in important ways. Team Mirai collected more than 38,000 online questions and more than 6,000 discrete policy suggestions from voters using its AI Policy app, which is advertised as a ‘manifesto that speaks for itself.’
After factoring in all this feedback, Team Mirai maintained a contrarian position on the biggest issue of the election: the sales tax and affordability. Rather than running on a reduction of the national sales tax like the major parties, Team Mirai reviewed dozens of suggestions from the public and ultimately proposed to keep that tax level while providing support to families through a child tax credit and lowering the required contribution for social insurance. Anno described this as another future-facing strategy: less price relief in the short term, but sustained funding for essential programs.
Anno has always intended to build a different kind of party. After receiving roughly $1 million in public funding apportioned to Team Mirai based on its single seat in the Upper Chamber last year, Anno began hiring engineers to enhance his software tools for digital democracy.
Anno described Team Mirai to us as a ‘utility party;’ basic infrastructure for Japanese democracy that serves the broader polity rather than one faction. Their Gikai (‘assembly’) app illustrates the point. It provides a portal for constituents to research bills, using AI to generate summaries, to describe their impacts, to surfacing media reporting on the issue, and to answer users’ questions. Like all their software, it’s open source and free for anyone, in any party, to use.
After last week’s victory, Team Mirai now has about $5 million in public funding and ambitions to grow the influence of their digital democracy platform. Anno told us Team Mirai has secured an agreement with the LDP, Japan’s dominant ruling party, to begin using Team Mirai’s Gikai and corruption-fighting Mirumae financial transparency tool.
AI is the issue driving the most societal and economic change we will encounter in our lifetime, yet US political parties are largely silent. But AI and Big Tech companies and their owners are ramping up their political spending to influence the parties. To the extent that AI has shown up in our politics, it seems to be limited to the question of where to site the next generation of data centers and how to channel populist backlash to big tech.
Those are causes worthy of political organizing, but very few US politicians are leveraging the technology for public listening or other pro-democratic purposes. With the midterms still nine months away and with innovators like Team Mirai making products in the open for anyone to use, there is still plenty of time for an American politician to demonstrate what a new politics could look like.
This essay was written with Nathan E. Sanders, and originally appeared in Tech Policy Press.
I love Nagasaki. The more I visit, the more I love it. It’s a city with a historical and cultural depth and complexity you don’t find in most big cities, let alone mid-sized cities. It rewards multiple explorations, and I look forward to exploring more of the city and prefecture at large in future trips.
If you’ve never been to Nagasaki, you should go. And if you haven’t been in a while, you should head back!
Shortly after the close of the U.S. stock market on Friday, President Donald J. Trump appeared to try to address the losses it had sustained since his February 28 attack on Iran by posting that the war was “winding down.” This reassurance appeared designed to calm market fears over the weekend.
But then, at 7:44 Saturday evening, Trump posted: “If Iran doesn’t FULLY OPEN, WITHOUT THREAT, the Strait of Hormuz, within 48 HOURS from this exact point in time, the United States of America will hit and obliterate their various POWER PLANTS, STARTING WITH THE BIGGEST ONE FIRST! Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DONALD J. TRUMP”
Aside from the fact that attacking civilian infrastructure is a war crime, this threat against Middle East oil infrastructure made the market teeter again, especially after Iran threatened to strike power plants in Israel and other Gulf states.
Then, at 7:23 this morning, Trump posted: “I AM PLEASED TO REPORT THAT THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, AND THE COUNTRY OF IRAN, HAVE HAD, OVER THE LAST TWO DAYS, VERY GOOD AND PRODUCTIVE CONVERSATIONS REGARDING A COMPLETE AND TOTAL RESOLUTION OF OUR HOSTILITIES IN THE MIDDLE EAST. BASED ON THE TENOR AND TONE OF THESE IN DEPTH, DETAILED, AND CONSTRUCTIVE CONVERSATIONS, WHICH WILL CONTINUE THROUGHOUT THE WEEK, I HAVE INSTRUCTED THE DEPARTMENT OF WAR TO POSTPONE ANY AND ALL MILITARY STRIKES AGAINST IRANIAN POWER PLANTS AND ENERGY INFRASTRUCTURE FOR A FIVE DAY PERIOD, SUBJECT TO THE SUCCESS OF THE ONGOING MEETINGS AND DISCUSSIONS. THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER! PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP”
The five-day period in which Trump promised to hold off on this particular threat—the war itself continues—coincides with the days the stock market is open.
According to The Kobeissi Letter, which analyzes the stock market, the S&P 500 surged upward by 240 points. The price of Brent crude oil dropped to $96 a barrel.
Then Iran denied Trump’s claims and said its leaders had had “no direct or indirect contact” with Trump’s people. Iran’s foreign ministry suggested Trump was trying “to reduce energy prices and to buy time for implementing his military plans.” It said that countries in the region had approached Iran to begin negotiations and that “our response to all of them is clear: we are not the party that started this war, and all such requests should be directed to Washington.”
The S&P fell 120 points and the price of Brent crude rose to about $100 a barrel.
“What is happening here?” wrote Adam Kobeissi about the stock market in his newsletter.
The answer to which social media posters jumped was market manipulation. Economist Paul Krugman suggested the same in a post today, noting that someone who had insider knowledge “could have sold a bunch of crude oil futures, at very high prices, Brent was over $112 over the weekend, then bought them back immediately after Trump’s announcement of triumphal progress, but before the Iranians said that is not happening. And you could have turned a very, very nice, very large profit.”
Indeed, by the end of the day, reporters like Yun Li at CNBC noted that about fifteen minutes before Trump’s announcement there had been a sudden and sharp jump in S&P 500 futures and oil futures.
Krugman had other observations as well, though. Trump threatened to “commit a massive war crime” by striking civilian energy facilities and “must be looking for a way out.” Krugman noted that there is no apparent reason for Iranian leaders to be making a deal right now: it seems pretty clear that protracting the war constitutes winning in the metric of humiliating the U.S.
Krugman goes on to make a major point: “Think about how much America’s position in the world has been weakened, not just by apparent failure to subdue a fourth-rate power, but by the fact that everybody now knows that you cannot trust anything, cannot trust any promises the United States makes, you cannot count on the United States carrying through with promises, with threats, not just promises, but threats are also incredible in the sense of not being all credible, and that the default assumption should be that anything that this administration says is a lie.”
Trump doubled down on his post this morning when he talked to reporters at Palm Beach International Airport, seeming to see an off-ramp from the conflict. He claimed that his Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff is speaking with “a top person” in Iran, “the man who, I believe, is the most respected and the leader…not the supreme leader…but the people that seem to be running [Iran].”
Barak Ravid of Axios later reported that Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner—both freelancers who have financial ties to the Middle East—rather than the U.S. secretary of state, Marco Rubio, have sent messages to the speaker of the Iranian parliament, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, through Egypt, Pakistan, and Turkey, where intermediaries are trying to set up a call between U.S. and Iranian negotiators. Ghalibaf is a close associate of Iran’s new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei.
Trump seemed to consider that plan a done deal and said the U.S. and Iranian negotiators would talk today by phone. He continued: “We’ll at some point very soon meet. We’re doing a five-day period. We’ll see how that goes. And if it goes well, we’re gonna end up with settling this, otherwise we just keep bombing our little hearts out.”
Kaitlan Collins of CNN asked Trump, “You’ve said there’s many points of agreement with Iran right now. Can you give us a few of them?” He answered, “Many. Like fifteen points. Fifteen points.”
Collins followed up: “That Iran has said yes to?”
Trump replied: “Well, they’re not gonna have a nuclear weapon. That’s number one. That’s number one, two, and three. They will never have a nuclear weapon.”
Collins asked: “They’ve said yes to that?”
Trump replied: “They’ve agreed to that.”
When another reporter asked if Iran has agreed “to no enrichment whatsoever, even for medical purposes, civilian purposes,” Trump answered: “They have.”
Then Collins asked, “What about the Strait of Hormuz? Who’s going to be in control of that?” Trump answered: “That’ll be opened very soon if this works.” To questions of how soon, he responded, “Immediately.”
Asked who would control the strait, he answered: “Uhhhhh, [it’ll] be jointly controlled.”
“By who?” Collins asked.
“Maybe me. Maybe me,” Trump said. Not the United States, or an international coalition, but “[m]e and the ayatollah, whoever the ayatollah is…. And there’ll also be… a very serious form of regime change. Now in all fairness, everybody’s been killed from the regime…. But we’re dealing with some people that I find to be very reasonable, very solid. The people within know who they are. They’re very respected, and maybe one of them will be exactly what we’re looking for. Look at Venezuela, how well that’s working out. We are doing so well in Venezuela, with oil and with the relationship between the president-elect and us. And maybe we find someone like that in Iran.”
Today, at the Palm Beach airport, a reporter asked Trump: “If the war is ending, do you still need $200 billion?” Trump answered: “We, ah, it’s always nice to have. It’s always nice to have. It’s a very inflamed world.”
Physician incomes are extraordinarily high in the United States. A new NBER paper finds that U.S. physicians earn roughly two to four times as much as their counterparts in Canada, the Netherlands, and Sweden.
Why? Is it some feature particular to the US health care sector? Probably not. The same paper finds that physicians in the US have about the same relative income ranking as in Canada, the Netherlands, and Sweden. In other words, lots of high-skill workers in the US earn high incomes and physicians don’t look unusual relative to these other high-skill groups.
That is exactly what one would expect in an economy with an extreme shortage of high-IQ, high-skill workers. The US is a uniquely productive economy for high-skill workers which is why the US demand for foreign workers and the foreign demand to immigrate are so strong, especially at the high end.. By one estimate, “immigrants account for 32 percent of aggregate U.S. innovation.”
Immigration of high-skill workers such as with the H-1B and EB-1,2,3 programs, together with stronger U.S. education, is one way to reduce the shortage of high-skill workers. The alternative is simpler: make the economy less dynamic and less rewarding for talent. Then wages would fall and fewer ambitious people would bother coming. A solution but only if your preferred cure for scarcity is decline.
The American market for guns is among the most complex of controversial markets, since gun purchases are regarded by many Americans as repugnant, while to many others (and in the eyes of the law*) they are protected. So the US debate about guns is conducted in a restricted space.
Here's a new paper that takes an unusually nuanced, empirical approach to understanding possible paths forward. In particular, it introduces non-lethal firearms into a survey and experiment.
Abstract: "Lethal firearm ownership is deeply polarizing in the United States. We show that beneath this polarization, owners and non-owners share a common objective — safety — but disagree sharply about whether lethal firearms achieve it. Using an original survey of more than 5,400 respondents combined with randomized experiments, we document that owners feel safe and confident with firearms, while non-owners on balance feel less safe around them and perceive large private costs and social harms. Demand for lethal firearms is nonetheless potentially large and growing: one-third of non-owners express interest in acquiring one — these individuals report the lowest day-to-day safety — while very few owners would consider reducing their holdings. Persuading owners to relinquish firearms without any replacement appears unrealistic; the more tractable margins may be safe storage and non-lethal substitution for additional purchases. We organize these patterns through a framework centered on a perceived safety possibilities frontier (SPF) — the safety outcomes a household believes achievable with different combinations of lethal and non-lethal tools. Households may differ in firearm demand because they face different risk environments, weigh protective benefits against harms differently, or hold different beliefs about the frontier. Our descriptive evidence points to heterogeneous beliefs as important drivers, suggesting that levers such as information could shift the perceived frontier. These patterns motivate three experimental treatments: one on the private legal/medical costs of lethal firearm ownership, and two on a non-lethal firearm (NLFA), with and without a conservative pundit’s endorsement. The private-cost treatment increases concern about harms among all respondents and support for safe storage policies, and modestly raises stated willingness to keep lethal firearms locked. NLFA treatments raise willingness to pay for an NLFA, to keep lethal firearms locked, and support for incapacitating over lethal firearms and for policies encouraging NLFAs. These effects are largely persistent. Importantly, NLFA information does not increase willingness to reduce lethal firearm ownership but does increase willingness to store lethal firearms safely. Our results suggest that many owners perceive the SPF differently from nonowners, neglecting harms or less-lethal alternatives, yet remain open to such tools. Overall, individuals share a common goal — safety — yet disagree about the means. Although these disagreements appear entrenched, people remain receptive to alternatives that might command broader agreement."
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*The 2nd Amendment to the Constitution says
"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
(Only the part in bold seems, to my unlawyerly eyes, to have played much part in American jurisprudence.)
I wrote about Dan Woods' experiments with streaming expertsthe other day, the trick where you run larger Mixture-of-Experts models on hardware that doesn't have enough RAM to fit the entire model by instead streaming the necessary expert weights from SSD for each token that you process.
Five days ago Dan was running Qwen3.5-397B-A17B in 48GB of RAM. Today @seikixtc reported running the colossal Kimi K2.5 - a 1 trillion parameter model with 32B active weights at any one time, in 96GB of RAM on an M2 Max MacBook Pro.
And @anemll showed that same Qwen3.5-397B-A17B model running on an iPhone, albeit at just 0.6 tokens/second - iOS repo here.
I think this technique has legs. Dan and his fellow tinkerers are continuing to run autoresearch loops in order to find yet more optimizations to squeeze more performance out of these models.
Update: Now Daniel Isaac got Kimi K2.5 working on a 128GB M4 Max at ~1.7 tokens/second.
slop is something that takes more human effort to consume than it took to produce. When my coworker sends me raw Gemini output he’s not expressing his freedom to create, he’s disrespecting the value of my time
The most interesting alpha of datasette-files yet, a new plugin which adds the ability to upload files directly into a Datasette instance. Here are the release notes in full:
Over the weekend Donald Trump threatened dire vengeance on Iran unless its government opened the Strait of Hormuz within 48 hours, a deadline that would expire Monday evening in Washington. Specifically, he announced that the U.S. would begin bombing power plants — plants that supply electricity to Iran’s civilian population — unless the Strait was cleared.
But at 7:05 AM Monday Trump called the whole thing off — for five days, he said, but many people are assuming that the threatened action, which would have been a massive war crime, is now off the table.
The reason for the about-face, he claimed, was that the U.S. was engaged in productive negotiations with Iranian officials — although this seems to have come as news to the Iranians, who denied that any such negotiations are taking place. Sad to say, in this case, as I tried to explain yesterday, the fanatical, brutal Iranian regime is more credible than the president of the United States. Is he lying or living in a fantasy world? Neither possibility is comforting.
But in any case, Trump’s sudden climb-down was startling. Who could have seen this coming?
The answer is, the person or people who bought large quantities of stock market futures and sold large quantities of oil futures around 15 minutes before Trump’s announcement. As CNBC reports,
At around 6:50 a.m. in New York, S&P 500 e-Mini futures trading on the CME recorded a sharp and isolated jump in volume, breaking from an otherwise subdued premarket backdrop. With thin liquidity typical of early trading hours, the sudden burst stood out as one of the largest volume moments of the session up to that point.
A similar pattern was observed in oil markets. West Texas Intermediate May futures also saw a noticeable pickup in trading activity at roughly the same time, with a distinct volume spike interrupting otherwise quiet conditions.
This “sharp and isolated jump in volume” — which you can see for the oil futures market in the chart at the top of this post — was especially bizarre because there were no major news items — no major publicly available news items — to drive sudden big market transactions. The story would be baffling, except that there’s an obvious explanation: Somebody close to Trump knew what he was about to do, and exploited that inside information to make huge, instant profits.
This wasn’t the first time something like this has happened under Trump. There were large, suspicious moves in the prediction market Polymarket before previous attacks on Iran and Venezuela. But this front-running of U.S. policy was really large: the Financial Times estimates the sales of oil futures in that magic minute Monday morning at about $580 million, and that doesn’t count the purchases of stock futures.
When officers of a company or people close to them exploit confidential information for personal financial gain, that’s insider trading — which is illegal. But we have another word for situations in which people with access to confidential information regarding national security — such as plans to bomb or not to bomb another country — exploit that information for profit. That word is “treason.”
Why is profiting from insider information about national security decisions effectively a form of treason? First, it’s hard to think of a more fundamental principle for officials we entrust with important decisions, especially those that involve national security, that they or people they know should not be allowed to exploit their positions for personal gain.
Second, financial trading based on what should be closely held secrets reveals information to current or potential foreign adversaries. To exaggerate a bit, but only a bit, who needs to bribe agents within the government, or recruit them with honey traps, when you can infer the same information by keeping track of transactions on futures markets?
Finally, there isn’t that big a gap between using knowledge of national secrets to make lucrative financial trades and simply selling those secrets to the highest bidder. Once you’re breached the line that says you shouldn’t profit personally from access to information that is or should be highly classified, the line between trading based on state secrets and selling those secrets directly is a blurry one.
In fact, I’d very much like to know exactly who was making those trades yesterday morning. Were they people directly in the know, or billionaires/traders who paid people in the know for tips?
I’m sure we’ll find out once Kash Patel’s FBI carries out its careful, no-holds-barred investigation.
For the humor-impaired, that was a joke. However, I do believe that the culprits will be easy to determine once Democrats are back in power, and they must apply the full force of law to the people responsible.
One question that may be harder to resolve is the extent to which the possibility of insider trading may actually have influenced policy. Are decisions about war and peace in part serving the cause of market manipulation rather than the national interest? If you dismiss this as unthinkable, you just haven’t been paying attention.
There’s a broader lesson here: You can’t trust a corrupt government to protect national security. And our government is now utterly corrupt: It’s hard to find a single senior official, from the president on down, who treats public office as a grave responsibility rather than an opportunity for personal self-aggrandizement and profit.
Among other things, deeply corrupt governments tend to be very bad at waging war, no matter how much they may exalt “warrior ethos” and “lethality.” When we do a post-mortem on how the Iran debacle happened, arrogant ignorance may still get top billing. But grotesque venality will come a close second.
npx workos@latest launches an AI agent, powered by Claude, that reads your project, detects your framework, and writes a complete auth integration into your codebase. No signup required. It creates an environment, populates your keys, and you claim your account later when you’re ready.
But the CLI goes way beyond installation. WorkOS Skills make your coding agent a WorkOS expert. workos seed defines your environment as code. workos doctor finds and fixes misconfigurations. And once you’re authenticated, your agent can manage users, orgs, and environments directly from the terminal. No more ClickOps.
A lot of America’s most effective giving was done by the early “robber barons,” such as Carnegie, Mellon, and Rockefeller. Andrew Carnegie, for instance, helped to create what is now Carnegie-Mellon University, and Carnegie libraries to this day dot the country and encourage literacy and reading. The Mellon and Rockefeller art collections seeded some of America’s highest quality museums.
None of this was done with any kind of pledge. Those great 19th-century industrialists pursued high-quality philanthropic opportunities when they saw them, unencumbered by today’s massive foundation staffs. If a town wanted to set up a Carnegie library, they had to meet some standard criteria, and they started by sending a letter to Carnegie’s private secretary, James Bertram. The Carnegie Corporation, which in later years led much of the philanthropy, had mainly clerical staff and did not have a full-time salaried president until after Carnegie’s death. It remains to be seen whether today’s philanthropists, including the ones who signed the Giving Pledge, will do as well.
This paper examines China’s transition from pharmaceutical “free rider” to global innovator over the last decade. In 2010, China accounted for less than 8% of global clinical trials; by 2020, it had surpassed the US in annual registered clinical trial volume. To study this transformation, we compile a comprehensive, synchronized database spanning the pharmaceutical drug development supply chain, covering scientific publications, clinical trials, drug development milestones for China, the U.S., and Europe, alongside drug sales and government policies over the same period. We provide strong evidence that China’s rise was primarily driven by the National Reimbursement Drug List (NRDL) reform, which dramatically expanded the effective market size for innovative drugs. We document a sharp rise in both the quantity (86% increase) and novelty of drug trials post reform, with growth concentrated in reform-exposed disease categories, first- or best-in-class drugs, and among domestic firms. A decomposition exercise reveals that the NRDL reform accounts for 43% of the growth in oncology trial activity, nearly doubling the combined contribution of upstream knowledge accumulation and talent flows (24%), while other government policies play a minor role. Finally, dynamic gains from induced innovation exceed the reform’s static gains in consumer access to innovative drugs by threefold, underscoring the importance of accounting for the reform’s long-run effects on innovation incentives in addition to near-term improvements in drug affordability.
Tropical Cyclone Narelle approaches northern Queensland, Australia, in this image acquired on March 19, 2026, with the VIIRS (Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite) on the NOAA-21 satellite.
NASA Earth Observatory/Michala Garrison
Tropical Cyclone Narelle traced a long path across the northern edge of Australia, bringing damaging winds and rain to areas already saturated with abundant precipitation. The system made separate landfalls in three different states and territories between March 20 and 23, 2026.
These satellite images show Narelle at about 2 p.m. local time (04:00 Universal Time) on March 19. By that time, the tropical cyclone was poised to make its first and most powerful landfall after intensifying over the Coral Sea. Sea surface temperatures along its path were 0.5–1.0 degrees Celsius above average, experts noted, which helped fuel its rapid intensification.
As it approached Queensland, the storm intensified to a category 5 on Australia’s tropical cyclone scale with maximum sustained winds up to 225 kilometers (140 miles) per hour—equivalent to a category 4 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson wind scale. However, because Narelle’s structure was compact by cyclone standards, the most damaging winds extended a relatively short distance from its core. Narelle reached the Cape York Peninsula, a sparsely populated region in northern Queensland, on the morning of March 20.
Tropical Cyclone Narelle churns over the Coral Sea in this image acquired on March 19, 2026, with the VIIRS (Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite) on the NOAA-21 satellite.
NASA Earth Observatory/Michala Garrison
Narelle re-emerged over the Gulf of Carpentaria as a weakened cyclone, and wind speeds continued to decline as it neared the Northern Territory’s coast. The storm made its second landfall on the afternoon of March 21 with maximum sustained winds up to 148 kilometers (92 miles) per hour. It traversed the territory’s “Top End” until March 22.
More than 100 millimeters (4 inches) of rain fell across a wide area of the Northern Territory during Narelle’s passage, according to news reports. Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) warned of minor to major flooding of several rivers. The storm arrived amid a severe wet season in the region that had already caused damaging floods and prompted evacuations.
After exiting the Northern Territory, the storm briefly crossed water and reached the northern Kimberley region of Western Australia as a tropical low on March 23. Even after Narelle’s multiple strikes in northern Australia, the storm may keep going. On March 23, the BOM said Narelle could potentially re-intensify into a tropical cyclone off the coast of Western Australia, curve south, and track along the coastline toward Perth.
Cyclones with several landfalls on mainland Australia are rare but not unheard of. In 2005, Ingrid followed a similar path to Narelle. That “triple-strike” storm, however, made landfall each time as a category 3 tropical cyclone or higher.
Market Design
the joy of sox
must recognize that Trump is mentally ill, and he not only does not manage his illness, he leans into it. He is not senile, though his aging is not helping (aging rarely does). He is a narcissist, and that means he is delusional.
