Since I began writing about commercial aviation, over twenty years ago, my foundational motive has been an evangelical one: encouraging people to rediscover the greatness of air travel. I’m well acquainted with the hassles and indignities of flying, and these too I’ve discussed at length. But what underlies my work is a seldom heard plea to reevaluate, and maybe even savor, the idea of getting on a plane. A newspaper once described me as “an air-travel romantic.” I can’t deny it.
“As I writer-pilot,” I said to an interviewer in 2004, “I hope to restore an appreciation for the airplane as part of the greater experience of travel.” Perhaps that’s too tall an order, but can’t we at least acknowledge the impressiveness of it? We live in an age when people can travel halfway around the world in a matter of hours, in almost absolute safety, at a cost of pennies per mile. Spend a little more to sit up front, and you relax in stupendous comfort. How is this not remarkable?
Well, remarkable as it might be, I worry it’s not enough. I’m afraid the bad simply outweighs the good, never giving people the chance to consider another perspective. They just don’t have the patience. My mission is a failed one, I suspect.
And I shouldn’t be surprised. We’ve worked pretty damn hard to make flying as tedious and infuriating as possible.
Our propensity to sabotage what could be, and should be, an enjoyable experience, seems to worsen every year. And the saddest part is, it doesn’t need to be this way. The lines don’t have to be so long. The delays don’t have to be so frequent. The security rules don’t have to be so stupid, or the noise levels so aggravating. But we make them so. Flying doesn’t have to suck, yet we insist on it.
What’s the most dreadful part? That’s subjective, I suppose, but I can offer you an opinion on what, to me, are the three worst things to happen to commercial air travel since the dawn of the Jet Age:
REGIONAL JETS
Number three on my list is the advent of the regional jet. Starting in the 1990s, advances in jet engine efficiency meant that smaller, high-speed planes could now be operated profitably. This changed the way airlines do business, farming out huge swaths of domestic capacity to contract carriers (the various “Express” and “Connection” outfits) flying what came to be called “RJs.” These planes have always been reliable, safe, and technologically sophisticated, but they’re a sub-par product compared to mainline jets, with tight cabins, limited luggage space, and minimal onboard service.
Their proliferation dragged down wages for tens of thousands of employees. RJ pilots often earned less than $20,000 annually, and working conditions at many regional carriers were dire. Things have improved significantly over the last few years, but an entire generation of workers suffered.
RJs have also been a huge contributor to delays and congestion — maybe the biggest. At the height of RJ mania in the early 2000s, these mini-jets came to account for close to 50 percent of all commercial flights in the United States. That’s half of the flights carrying maybe twenty percent of the passengers — a terribly inefficient use of airspace and runways. Thankfully these numbers are more reasonable today, but hundreds of RJs are still out there, often on segment lengths exceeding two hours.
TERMINAL RACKET
Next we have airport noise levels. This is the intangible one, but a big one nonetheless. It’s chiefly, but not exclusively, a U.S. phenomenon, and it’s gotten worse in recent years.
Beyond cellphone chatter and the occasional screeching kid, the typical airport terminal should be a relatively quiet place — no noisier than, say, a shopping mall. But we’ve managed to make it hellishly loud thanks to an infatuation with public address announcements, very few of which serve a useful purpose. It didn’t used to be this way.
The din starts in the concourse, where travelers are bombarded with music, promotional announcements, and pointless security advisories. Then, at the gate, at least a dozen mostly redundant PAs accompany the boarding process. There’s little relief on the plane, with cabin crew yapping orders as passengers stow their bags and settle in. Then comes the interminable safety demo, and yet another flurry of announcements. Your first thirty or so minutes onboard is spent being lectured to and barked at.
If even half of this clamor were helpful or informative, it could be excused. But it’s not. It’s nothing but noise, making an already stressful experience that much worse.
Corrosive as it is to travelers’ nerves, it’s also subtle. You might not realize how loud the average U.S. airport is until you experience one of the more peaceful European or Asian ones. Something feels different… and then it dawns on you: it’s quiet. Some European terminals ban public address announcements completely, and most non-U.S. carriers, too, take it a lot easier with PAs on the plane.
SECURITY THEATER
But probably the single worst thing to happen to flying is post-9/11 airport security, and all of its foibles and foolishness. In the United States our punching bag is the TSA, but really this is global.
I’m in full agreement that some type of passenger screening is necessary. The monster we created, however, is not the answer. A system that treats every last passenger who flies as a potential terrorist, and everything they carry as a potential weapon, is a ludicrous one, but that’s what we’ve got; an approach we’ve barely budged from in all the years since the attacks of 2001. The exasperating irony being that none of the checkpoint protocols in place today would have prevented the 9/11 hijackers from doing what they did.
I’ve written volumes on all the things wrong and wasteful about airport security. Here’s a good place to start. As to sifting through our bags for knives and confiscating tubes of toothpaste, consider for a minute the hundreds of thousands of tons of supplies that are trucked into airports every single day. Food, beverages, restaurant and retail supplies: all the crap for sale on the concourse. This stuff isn’t given more than cursory inspection.
Which is to be expected, because it’d be impossible to screen even one percent of it with the same level of scrutiny we devote to passengers. Dare I suggest that a team of terrorists, with someone on the inside, working at a duty free shop or in a restaurant, could easily smuggle in something deadly, then pass it along to someone getting on a plane. Such scenarios are endless. Meanwhile, TSA is micro-inspecting the toiletries of someone’s grandmother.
The whole thing is completely insane.
As I’ve always maintained, the true nuts and bolts of keeping terrorists away from planes takes place backstage, as it were, far from the airport. It’s the job of law enforcement and intelligence and international collaboration. It’s not the job of guards on the concourse. What the perfect checkpoint might look like is hard to say, but surely it’s not what we have.
Imagine a journey free of these three scourges. How different it all would feel.
There’s a bodega around the corner from my apartment where I often make small purchases, especially fruit, vegetables and bread. No, I’m not afraid to cross the street to buy bread.
While in in the check-out line, I often see some patrons, typically elderly and/or disabled, paying with EBT cards. EBT cards are the way the government delivers food aid under the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps. SNAP has become a crucial part of America’s social safety net, with more than 40 million Americans relying on those EBT cards to put food on the table.
And unless the government shutdown ends this week, which seems basically impossible, federal support for SNAP will be cut off this Saturday.
Here are four things you should know about the imminent hunger games.
This is a political decision — specifically, a Republican decision
Despite the government shutdown, the SNAP program isn’t out of money. In fact, it has $5 billion in contingency funds, intended as a reserve to be tapped in emergencies. And if the imminent cutoff of crucial food aid for 40 million people isn’t an emergency, what is? The Department of Agriculture, which runs the program, also has the ability to maintain funding for a while by shifting other funds around. But Donald Trump has — quite possibly illegally — told the department not to tap those funds.
Furthermore, the Republican majority in the Senate could maintain aid by waiving the filibuster on this issue. They have done this on other issues — for example, to roll back California’s electric vehicle standard. But for today’s Republican Party, blocking green energy is more important than keeping 40 million Americans from going hungry.
Furthermore, passing legislation to keep food aid flowing would require that Mike Johnson, the speaker, call the House back into session – something which he refuses to do. While we don’t know for sure the reason behind Johnson’s refusal, there is widespread speculation that it’s to avoid swearing in the newly elected Arizona congresswoman Adelina Grijalva, who would supply the crucial vote needed to force an overall vote on releasing the Epstein files. It sounds crazy to say that Republicans are making children go hungry to protect pedophiles, but it’s actually a reasonable interpretation of the situation.
The pain from lost food aid will, if anything, hurt Republican voters worse than Democrats
Republican strategy on the shutdown has rested on the premise that Democrats will eventually cave, based on several assumptions. First, G.O.P. strategists expected the public to blame Democrats for the impasse. Second, they thought that Democrats, who favor big government, would be anxious to resume federal spending. Lastly, I suspect that many Republicans simply assumed that SNAP beneficiaries are disproportionately Democrats.
So far, however, the shutdown impasse has developed not necessarily to the G.O.P.’s advantage. A plurality of Americans place more blame on Republicans than on Democrats. Moreover, given that Democrats have been more unified in their stance than the Republicans, it’s not at all obvious that Democrats will capitulate over the issue of reduced government spending.
What about the partisan affiliation of SNAP recipients? I’d be curious to see a survey of Republican legislators and activists on who they think the typical food aid recipient is. My bet is that they’re still under the influence of Ronald Reagan’s 1970s stereotypes, in which a “strapping young buck” buys T-bone steaks with food stamps. That is, MAGA probably views food stamps as a welfare program for urban nonwhites, including illegal immigrants.
Yet the evidence suggests that the program is most important to overwhelmingly white rural counties that strongly supported Trump. This is shown by the map at the top of this post, in which darker colors correspond to greater SNAP use.
Consider, for example, Owsley County in Kentucky. The county is 96 percent white, and last year it cast 88 percent of its votes for Trump. Also, 37 percent of residents are on SNAP.
So by refusing to maintain food aid, Republicans are hurting many of their own supporters.
The fact that Trump-supporting communities rely heavily on federal food aid raises another, even larger question: Why does the GOP want to cut food assistance generally? Apart from refusing to fund SNAP during the government shutdown, Republicans want to drastically cut back on food stamps over the long term. Indeed, savage cuts to SNAP are a key feature of the One Big Beautiful Bill passed earlier this year – cuts that were scheduled to happen after the midterm elections, not a few days from now.
Despite what Republicans believe, SNAP recipients aren’t malingerers
Why are Republicans hostile to a program that benefits tens of millions of Americans? Pay attention to right-wing rhetoric about food stamps and you’ll hear again and again assertions that SNAP beneficiaries are lazy malingerers — the “bums on welfare” who should be forced to go out and get jobs.
But that myth is punctured bya quick look at who gets SNAP. The fact is, the great majority of SNAP recipients can’t work: 40 percent are children; 18 percent are elderly; 11 percent are disabled. Furthermore, a majority of recipients who are capable of working do work. They are the working poor: their jobs just don’t pay enough, or offer sufficiently stable employment, to make ends meet without aid.
So efforts to force food stamp recipients to get jobs via work requirements or simply by cutting funding are doomed to failure. While it may be possible to push a handful of food stamp recipients into the labor force, any positive economic effects from such a push will be swamped by the negative effects of denying adequate nutrition and financial resources to children during a crucial part of their lives.
Food stamps are an investment in the future
Young children need adequate nutrition and in general need to grow up in households with adequate resources if they are to grow into healthy, productive adults.
In saying this I’m not making a vague assertion in line with liberal pieties. We have overwhelming empirical, statistical evidence that SNAP, by improving the lives of young children, is an extraordinarily effective way of investing in the future.
Where does this evidence come from? A pilot version of the modern food stamp program began in 1961, when an unemployed coal miner and his wife used food stamps to buy a can of pork and beans. The program was rolled out in earnest in 1964, as part of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. But the program didn’t immediately go into effect nationwide. Instead, it was gradually rolled out geographically over the course of a decade.
This gradual rollout provided a series of “natural experiments.” Economists can and have compared the life trajectories of Americans who, as children, benefited from food stamps with those of children with similar class and demographic characteristics whose families didn’t receive food aid.
The results are stunning. Children whose families received SNAP benefits grew up to become healthier, more productive adults than children whose families didn’t receive benefits. Spending money to help families with children is an extremely high-return investment in the nation’s future.
In fact, the evidence for large economic benefits from food stamps is far stronger than the evidence for payoffs from investment in physical infrastructure like roads, bridges and the power grid, although I favor those investments too. And the evidence that helping families with children is good for economic growth is infinitely better than the evidence for the efficacy of tax cuts for the rich, a central plank of conservative dogma — because there is no evidence that tax cuts boost growth.
Which brings us back to the impending cutoff of SNAP. It’s gratuitous: Republicans could easily avoid this cutoff if they wanted to. It’s cruel: Millions of Americans will suffer severely from the loss of food aid. And it’s destructive: Depriving children, in particular, of aid will cast a shadow on America’s economy and society for decades to come.
So of course the cutoff is going to happen. At this late date it’s hard to see how it can be avoided.
I'm at GitHub Universe this week (thanks to a free ticket from Microsoft). Yesterday I picked up my conference badge... which incorporates a full Raspberry Pi Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller with a battery, color screen, WiFi and bluetooth.
GitHub Universe has a tradition of hackable conference badges - the badge last year had an eInk display. This year's is a huge upgrade though - a color screen and WiFI connection makes this thing a genuinely useful little computer!
The only thing it's missing is a keyboard - the device instead provides five buttons total - Up, Down, A, B, C. It might be possible to get a bluetooth keyboard to work though I'll believe that when I see it - there's not a lot of space on this device for a keyboard driver.
Everything is written using MicroPython, and the device is designed to be hackable: connect it to a laptop with a USB-C cable and you can start modifying the code directly on the device.
Getting setup with the badge
Out of the box the badge will play an opening animation (implemented as a sequence of PNG image frames) and then show a home screen with six app icons.
The default apps are mostly neat Octocat-themed demos: a flappy-bird clone, a tamagotchi-style pet, a drawing app that works like an etch-a-sketch, an IR scavenger hunt for the conference venue itself (this thing has an IR sensor too!), and a gallery app showing some images.
The sixth app is a badge app. This will show your GitHub profile image and some basic stats, but will only work if you dig out a USB-C cable and make some edits to the files on the badge directly.
I did this on a Mac. I plugged a USB-C cable into the badge which caused MacOS to treat it as an attached drive volume. In that drive are several files including secrets.py. Open that up, confirm the WiFi details are correct and add your GitHub username. The file should look like this:
The badge comes with the SSID and password for the GitHub Universe WiFi network pre-populated.
That's it! Unmount the disk, hit the reboot button on the back of the badge and when it comes back up again the badge app should look something like this:
When I got mine yesterday the official repo had not yet been updated, so I had to figure this out myself.
I copied all of the code across to my laptop, added it to a Git repo and then fired up Claude Code and told it:
Investigate this code and add a detailed README
Here's the result, which was really useful for getting a start on understanding how it all worked.
Each of the six default apps lives in a apps/ folder, for example apps/sketch/ for the sketching app.
There's also a menu app which powers the home screen. That lives in apps/menu/. You can edit code in here to add new apps that you create to that screen.
I told Claude:
Add a new app to it available from the menu which shows network status and other useful debug info about the machine it is running on
This was a bit of a long-shot, but it totally worked!
The first version had an error:
I OCRd that photo (with the Apple Photos app) and pasted the message into Claude Code and it fixed the problem.
This almost worked... but the addition of a seventh icon to the 2x3 grid meant that you could select the icon but it didn't scroll into view. I had Claude fix that for me too.
The icons used on the app are 24x24 pixels. I decided it would be neat to have a web app that helps build those icons, including the ability to start by creating an icon from an emoji.
I noticed that last year's badge configuration app (which I can't find in github.com/badger/badger.github.io any more, I think they reset the history on that repo?) worked by talking to MicroPython over the Web Serial API from Chrome. Here's my archived copy of that code.
Wouldn't it be useful to have a REPL in a web UI that you could use to interact with the badge directly over USB?
I pointed Claude Code at a copy of that repo and told it:
Based on this build a new HTML with inline JavaScript page that uses WebUSB to simply test that the connection to the badge works and then list files on that device using the same mechanism
It took a bit of poking (here's the transcript) but the result is now live at tools.simonwillison.net/badge-repl. It only works in Chrome - you'll need to plug the badge in with a USB-C cable and then click "Connect to Badge".
Get hacking
If you're a GitHub Universe attendee I hope this is useful. The official badger.github.io site has plenty more details to help you get started.
There isn't yet a way to get hold of this hardware outside of GitHub Universe - I know they had some supply chain challenges just getting enough badges for the conference attendees!
It's a very neat device, built for GitHub by Pimoroni in Sheffield, UK. A version of this should become generally available in the future under the name "Pimoroni Tufty 2350".
Tyler Cowen, Free Press columnist and Holbert L. Harris Chair of Economics at George Mason University:
What do I want from a U.S. trade deal with China? Most of all, stability and predictability. America has a great deal it needs to do to “deal with China.” That might include boosting our own supplies of rare-earth elements, maintaining our lead in generative AI, and making sure that enough high-quality chips come from somewhere other than Taiwan.
Vigorous action is required on all these fronts. While we are at the wish-making stage, how about better fiscal policies for long-term sustainability, improved science funding, a more rapid and effective military procurement system, and an education system with fewer holes?
But here is the thing—none of those will be accomplished through a trade deal with China. Success or failure on those fronts will depend solely on ourselves. The purpose of a trade deal, at this point, should simply be to put U.S.-China relations back on a normal footing. We are not going to stop significant supplies of dangerous drugs from entering the United States, no matter what China does or does not agree to. We are not going to end China’s trade surplus with us, nor should we fear that trade surplus. And we are not going to end the ability of the Chinese government to have some influence over the real value of its currency, just as we have that same ability.
We could and should turn the drama down a notch. Whether that is what you will get from this episode in the reality TV season, however, remains to be seen.
At the office sitting all the morning, and then home to dinner with my wife, and after dinner she and I passing an hour or two in ridiculous talk, and then to my office, doing business there till 9 at night, and so home and to supper and to bed.
My house is now in its last dirt, I hope, the plasterer and painter now being upon winding up all my trouble, which I expect will now in a fortnight’s time, or a little more, be quite over.
A Falcon 9 stands ready for a Starlink mission at Cape Canaveral’s pad 40. File photo: Adam Bernstein/Spaceflight Now.
SpaceX is preparing for its penultimate Falcon 9 rocket launch of October, which is set to fly from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station around lunchtime on Wednesday.
The Starlink 10-37 mission will carry 29 of the company’s Starlink V2 Mini Optimized satellites into low Earth orbit.
Liftoff from Space Launch Complex 40 is scheduled for 12:16 p.m. EDT (1616 UTC). The satellites will be deployed roughly an hour into the mission.
Spaceflight Now will have live coverage beginning about an hour prior to liftoff.
The 45th Weather Squadron forecast a 95 percent chance for favorable weather during the launch window. Meteorologists said that conditions in the booster recovery area “remain a watch item, due to elevated waves off the (South) Carolina coast.”
SpaceX will launch the mission using its first stage booster with the tail number B1083. This will be its 15th flight after launching missions, like Crew-8, Polaris Dawn and Intuitive Machines Mission 2.
About 8.5 minutes after liftoff, B1083 will target a landing on the drone ship, ‘Just Read the Instructions’. If successful, this will be the 139th landing on this vessel and the 526th booster landing to date.
The Starlink 10-37 mission will be just the second time that SpaceX launches the maximum number of the V2 Mini satellites that the Falcon 9 is capable of launching while flying in a reusable booster configuration. The first time SpaceX flew at max capacity was the Starlink 6-84 mission on May 4, 2025.
An artist’s rendering of Blue Origin’s Blue Moon Mark 1 lunar lander on the surface of the Moon. Graphic: Blue Origin
Blue Origin is still several years off from its currently contracted mission to bring astronauts to the Moon’s South Pole on the Artemis 5 mission. But it has a number of spacecraft in development with at least one set to fly to the lunar surface as soon as potentially later this year.
The company is also developing plans that could expedite the Artemis 3 mission, which will be the first human landing on the Moon as part of NASA’s Artemis program.
Jacqueline Cortese, Blue Origin’s Senior Director of Civil Space, represented the company during a Tuesday panel at the American Astronautical Society’s 2025 von Braun Space Exploration Symposium. Dubbed “Artemis 3 and Beyond: Establishing a Permanent Lunar Presence,” Cortese was there to discuss Blue Origin’s plans for both astronaut and cargo flights to the Moon.
She noted that Blue Origin’s first mission to the Moon will be an uncrewed Blue Moon Mark 1 lander is going through final stacking in Florida. The 8.1-meter-tall cargo lander will help with ongoing development of their crewed lander, named Blue Moon Mk. 2, which is 15.3 meters tall.
Both are powered by Blue Origin’s BE-7 engines, which are being tested on stands in Alabama, Texas and Washington. Company CEO Dave Limp shared a 17-minute-long video of one hot fire test in Texas meant to simulate the Apogee Raise Maneuver for the Blue Moon Mk. 1 lander.
With rocket engines, boring is good. To that end, please enjoy this 1,030-second (17+ min!) BE-7 engine burn. This test represents the Apogee Raise Maneuver or ARM burn for our Blue Moon Mark 1 Lunar lander, plus margin, the longest burn required by the mission to reach the Moon.… pic.twitter.com/8bnU9fequn
“A big milestone for you to look out for online is that Mk. 1 is three modules that are being stacked as we speak: aft, forward and mid. And once it is stacked in its finished configuration, we will be barging it over to NASA Johnson Space Center Chamber A to do a full up thermal vac campaign,” Cortese said. “So when you see that on its boat, you will know that big things are happening.”
Both versions of the lander are powered by a combination of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. A key difference though is that Mk.1 can be launched to the Moon with a single launch of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket while Mk. 2 requires orbital refueling.
Cortese said the stacking work for the first Blue Moon Mk.1 lander is happening at a dedicated production plant for the spacecraft located at Port Canaveral, which is south of Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. She also noted that Blue Origin is ramping up a production line for the Blue Moon Mk. 1 landers, stating that the aft section for the second of these vehicles is currently in structural testing.
“That first Mk. 1 is intentionally not carrying 3,000 kilograms of payload because it’s a demo flight, right? It is sensored. So many instruments, so many sensors, PSI, instrumentation with NASA, etc., but that vehicle itself is intended to grow into a production line,” Cortese said.
The first of these landers will carry NASA’s SCALPSS (Stereo Cameras for Lunar-Plume Surface Studies) and LRA (Laser Retroreflective Array) payloads onboard. Cortese teased that it would launch “in the next couple of weeks,” but didn’t offer further details on the timeline.
Lights, cameras, lunar action! @NASA’s SCALPSS (Stereo Cameras for Lunar Plume-Surface Studies) was recently installed on our Blue Moon MK1 lander. It will measure how much lunar dust is stirred up during landing and capture any resulting crater formation, providing data to… pic.twitter.com/mesAgVyHg6
During the 2025 International Astronautical Congress in Australia, Pat Remias, Blue Origin’s Vice President of Space Systems Development said the company intends to recover the first stage booster flying on the upcoming EscaPADE mission for NASA (planned to launch in early November) and then reuse it for the first flight of a Blue Moon Mk. 1 lander.
Last month, NASA tapped the Blue Moon Mk. 1 as the vehicle that will deliver its VIPER (Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover) mission to the Moon’s South Pole as part of the agency’s CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) task order. This new contract is valued at $190 million and it will be the second flight of a Blue Moon Mk. 1 lander.
“We’re very excited for that one, not just as a test bed for what we’re doing on HLS (Human Landing System program), but as its future for logistics infrastructure and big permanence on the Moon,” Cortese said.
This artist’s concept shows Blue Origin’s Blue Moon Mark 1 lander and NASA’s VIPER (Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover) on the lunar surface. Graphic: Blue Origin
Returning humans to the Moon
While Blue Origin is preparing to send these cargo landers to the Moon, the far more challenging endeavor is creating a safe passage for astronauts to travel to and from the lunar surface. In May 2023, NASA awarded Blue Origin a firm-fixed price contract valued at $3.4 billion to develop a crewed lander for the Artemis 5 mission, which was scheduled for 2029 at the time.
The contract requires at least one uncrewed landing demonstration of a Blue Moon Mk.2 lander before the vehicle can host NASA’s astronauts as part of the Human Landing System (HLS) program.
For the Artemis 5 mission, Blue Origin will use the Blue Moon Mk. 2 lander, which will require the use of their Lunar Transporter for in-space cryogenic propellant transfer. Work has been underway for some time to prepare systems to store propellant at the necessary temperatures to mitigate or prevent boil off.
The first test article assembled and tested in Lunar Plant 1: our Lunar Transporter sunshield!
Designed to be one of the largest deployable shields in space, it will protect both our Transporter and Blue Moon MK2 Crew Lander from radiation while the two vehicles are… pic.twitter.com/rhyPLmypJx
“Blue Origin has been working to mature our cryo cooling capabilities over the last several years and we’re now holding, with proto-flight hardware, 90 and 20 Kelvin in lab environments and we have some big, upcoming milestones for that,” Cortese said. “We worked with NASA super hard this summer on this test campaign.”
Additionally, testing of the Blue Origin Utility Transfer Mechanism was recently done inside the TS300 thermal vacuum chamber at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. Cortese said the Lunar Transporter will using similar propellant tanks to those flown on the company’s New Glenn rocket.
Like New Glenn, the Lunar Transporter will also use seven BE-4 engines as its main propulsion system. Both the Lunar Transporter and the Blue Moon Mk. 2 are being built at the Lunar Plant 1 building at Blue Origin’s Rocket Park campus in Florida.
While these spacecraft are coming together, Cortese said Blue Origin is also working closely with NASA on the habitation area of the Blue Moon Mk. 2, which will house two astronauts during their mission down to the lunar surface and back up to the Gateway, a space station being developed by NASA and other international partners.
Blue Origin’s Lunar Performance teams tests the company’s zero-boil-off technology designed to store liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen onboard its Lunar Transporter. This will support the system that will allow in-space propellant transfer operations for the Blue Moon Mk. 2 lunar lander. Image: Blue Origin
“We’ve definitely decided to insource a lot of the ECLSS (environmental control and life support system) and environmental components,” Cortese said. “I think that supply chain is an area where we wanted to have a lot of robustness and redundancy.
“I think what we were seeing was some down range supply chain issues in the ECLSS area, so we are working to vertically integrate a number of those areas. We’ve made some great progress on that.”
Cortese added that there are some “awesome synergies” between their work for HLS and their bid for a successor to the International Space Station, which Blue Origin and its partners dubbed, Orbital Reef.
Lunar dust up
Looming over the “Artemis 3 and Beyond” panel was the fate of that mission itself. In the midst of the ongoing government shutdown — which also prevented NASA employees from participating in this week’s conference — NASA Acting Administrator Sean Duffy said he would be reopening the contract for the Artemis 3 mission due to SpaceX being behind in their HLS work.
The company founded by billionaire Elon Musk is developing a variant of its Starship rocket that will be capable of taking crew down to the surface. It was granted a $2.89 billion contract for the Artemis 3 mission in April 2021 and a separate $1.15 billion contract for an Artemis 4 landing.
SpaceX completed 11 integrated test flights of its Starship-Super Heavy rocket and is preparing to transition to the third major version of the launch vehicle. However, the company was expected to have completed its in-space propellant transfer demo by mid-2025 and that operation now not expected until sometime in early- to mid-2026 at the earliest.
Through its most recent public update, NASA set the Artemis 3 launch for mid-2027, but many expect that this date won’t bear out.
An artist’s rendering of the Human Landing System version of Starship docking with NASA’s Orion spacecraft in lunar orbit. Graphic: SpaceX
“SpaceX had the contract for Artemis 3. By the way, I love SpaceX. They’re an amazing company. The problem is they’re behind. They pushed their timelines out and we’re in a race against China,” Duffy said in an Oct. 20 appearance on CNBC’s Squawk Box show.
“The President and I want to get to the Moon in this President’s term. So, I’m going to open up the contract. I’m going to let other space companies compete with SpaceX, like Blue Origin,” Duffy added. “And whatever one can get us there first, to the Moon, we’re gonna take. And if SpaceX is behind and Blue Origin can do it before them, good on Blue Origin.”
This led to Musk berating Duffy on X, formerly Twitter, with allegations about Duffy’s perceived competence to run NASA while simultaneously serving as the Secretary of Transportation.
Asked during the panel what work it was doing to capitalize on this new opportunity, Cortese played it close to the vest.
“Since it’s definitely a competitive environment, I probably won’t say too much about it, but we did just kick off that work with NASA. We’re super excited about it. We have a lot of ideas,” Cortese said.
“I will say it this way. Especially with Mk. 1 and some of our preceding work we’re doing, we have what we think are some good ideas about maybe a more incremental approach that could be taken advantage of for an acceleration-type scenario, which is ultimately still on that end path to sustainability, but is perhaps more incremental in near term.”
Aarti Matthews, Director of Starship Crew and Cargo Programs at SpaceX, was on the agenda as one of the participants of Tuesday’s panel, but wasn’t present to represent the company.
The FCC voted Oct. 28 to propose creating a modular “licensing assembly line” that would overhaul its satellite application process to accelerate reviews and cut red tape.
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Slingshot Aerospace is in talks with other countries to create or expand space-tracking capabilities after selling optical sensors to the U.K., marking the California-based company’s first deal for the hardware behind its monitoring software.
As Europe prepares its next generation of Earth-Observation (EO) missions, a less visible but equally strategic challenge unfolds on the ground — how to manage the growing complexity of satellite […]
Over the weekend, I came across an article in which the president of Google, who has no medical or biology training, claimed that AI will cure cancer in our lifetime. Leaving aside the silliness of describing any complex machine learning algorithm as ‘AI’, what is so frustrating is so many mRNA-based* phase II trials for both cancer and infectious diseases could be funded with a fraction of the money spent on spicy machine learning.
For context, a typical phase II trial costs around $15 million. Leaving the billions of dollars lit on fire for ‘AI’, remember when Facebook was spending $50 million per day to build legless avatars? (they apparently now have legs!).
I would argue the two greatest technological advances** in the last decade are the constant engineering improvements leading to ever cheaper renewable energy and the development of mRNA vaccines, the latter which so far have saved the lives of at least one million Americans, probably more. Instead, we’re burning many, many billions of dollars of capital on a giant mediocrity machine, which seems to be creating more problems than it solves (or ‘solves’).
I will now go outside and yell at clouds.
*Regarding infectious disease, investigating nasal delivery and adjuvants, along with new targets (and various combination thereof), also seems very promising. Meanwhile there are some promising leads for diseases other than cancer too.
**One problem with the term ‘tech’ is that it typically limits the entire discussion to ‘writing code’–which is important–and ignores any kind of physical technology.
For more than a year, we’ve heard scattered complaints: problems
with Nisus Software’s website, particularly the user discussion
forum; slow or absent responses to support requests; assorted
bugs; and other issues. But earlier this week, on 22 October 2025,
the reports changed to: “Did you know the Nisus website is
completely down, and that Nisus Writer is no longer in the Mac App
Store? Does this mean Nisus is out of business?”
On the one hand: The site is back online as I write this. The
app still works. I’m writing the first draft of this article in
Nisus Writer Pro on a Mac running macOS 26 Tahoe, and it’s fine.
You can still download it and buy a license. At least one person
is actively involved in the company, to some extent. It’s
(mostly) alive!
On the other hand: All available evidence suggests that
development and support for Nisus Writer have ceased, and barring
some new information, its future is doubtful. It’s (mostly) dead!
I’m going to tell you what I know. (Well, most of what I know.)
I’m also going to speculate a bit, because despite my best
efforts, I have been unable to obtain verifiable information about
certain topics, though I have a pretty good idea of what’s likely
the case.
Seems like an ignominious demise for a once-great app. Nisus Writer has been an acclaimed Mac-only (and Mac-assed) word processor since 1989. I never got into it, but I could always see the appeal. Nisus had a macro language for automation and regex-style advanced search and replace. But when I wanted features like those, I wanted them in a plain text editor, not a word processor, so I got into BBEdit.
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I’ve made versions of this argument here in the Editors’ Blog and on the podcast many times. But it’s critical and so beyond dispute I wanted to state it here as clearly as possible. There is no future for civic democracy in this country without reforming the Supreme Court. Putting that more specifically, the only way to recover from Donald Trump’s rapid lunge into an authoritarian American future is a future point at which Democrats regain control of the federal government — a trifecta — and institute a series of laws which cut off the channels Trump has exploited to get us to this point. That doesn’t solve the problem of Trumpism. The core issue is that very large minority of Americans who support his style of autocratic government. But that cuts off many various paths Trump has used to build a presidential autocracy under the thin cover of law. You need, among other things, but as one of the simplest and least controversial things, a federal law to place strict limits on partisan and racial gerrymandering. It’s only one example out of many. I note it because it came up today when Kate and I recorded this week’s podcast. But even this comparatively uncontroversial federal statute would certainly be overturned by the Republican justices.
The simple truth is that none of these sorts of laws would survive the scrutiny of the current Republican court majority as soon as there is another Republican president. Most would be overruled much sooner because they would, like an anti-gerrymandering law, place limits on Republican states. You cannot consider the last three to four years and doubt any of this. And what follows from that is that no plan to recover from or even seriously battle with Trumpism can be in any way capable of succeeding unless reforming the Supreme Court is the first order of business. The dire corruption of the Republican majority governs everything.
From my perch as a rabbi’s kid, a decently religious Jew, not an anti-Zionist, and someone who spends many hours a week (a day?) occupied by these issues of Jewish community politics, I want to say: “What the fuck are we talking about” is exactly right.
I would add two things. First:
It is also profoundly silly for all these rabbis to argue that this one candidate is the person, the thing that will unleash these forces. In the New Yorker’s big profile of Mamdani it’s reported that – as he was mapping his run – he and his advisors debated how much to lean into his real views and background on Israel-Palestine. And they looked at the trajectory of the party post-10/7 and the way young people had revolted against Biden and Harris, and decided that his real views would actually be an asset in this primary. And they were right.
They were right because of Israel’s catastrophic political miscalculations which led to losing a generation of young people in America, and they were right because of Joe Biden’s fecklessness in being unable to rein in the excesses of the response in Gaza, and yes, because of neural grooves toward antisemitism across society. But this is where this whole things breaks down for me, or at least where I get tripped up. The whole debate – Rabbis Cosgrove, Hirsch, the letter – it’s all being framed as if Mamdani’s election will be the domino that sets off all these forces. But it’s the opposite. He is riding the wave that has already begun.
The idea that the election of this guy is the thing that will unleash these forces to me indicates that these rabbis don’t quite understand what is actually going on, or how young people form their opinions, or maybe how people outside of their very cloistered Hasbara bubble form their opinions. That’s not to say that Mamdani won’t give a face and name and shape to some of this stuff. He will! But it’s already here. And honestly, he seems so much more open to engagement and evolution and existing in a messy coalition than some of the other ideologues on Capitol Hill and elsewhere.
And secondly:
The other deeply disturbing thing the letters and “sermons” miss is that it is just entirely unrealistic, and in my view unreasonable, to expect the world’s position on Israel to remain unchanged after two years of horrific war crimes in Gaza – the utter annihilation of an entire civilization, of whole bloodlines, of children, etc. I am deeply skeptical of rabbis who get up on the bima and chalk that up to “Israel is flawed as any country/of course we don’t like Bibi” and then lambaste anyone who actually uses strong language to call out these absolute desecration of God’s name. If you can’t re-examine your relationship with Israel, and even re-tool it, after these two years, why should I listen to your moralizing about antisemitism?
Instead of continuing this long path of reflexive fear responses – where we allow ourselves to be totally paralyzed into a state of rage and fight response at any inkling of change on the Israel question – I think we need a real spiritual renewal as a Jewish people. How did we get here? For what do we bear communal responsibility? How can we break the cycle of these toxic dynamics? How can we create a political horizon to prevent this all from happening again (god forbid) in five or ten years? We should try to live in honest, uncomfortable complexity even when it’s easier to simplify all politics to “he’s an antisemite.” So yes, what the fuck are we talking about? Please. We owe ourselves as a people more than that.
Publishing two very different responses, first from TPM Reader JS …
I bet you’re not surprised that I disagree about this. The #1 threat faced by Jews right now in the US is stochastic terrorism from both the left and right and Islamic terrorists, whether it’s more like the Tree of Life shooting (right wing), the attack on the Boulder group (left wing) or the very recent shooting in Manchester (Islamic), or, in my community an actual bomb attempt on local synagogues (right wing). This is the heart attack; fascism—or whatever you want to call what Trump is doing—is like cancer. At this point, just living until the cancer kills you is lucky. It doesn’t mean you don’t try to cure the cancer, but first things first.
If you don’t think spreading the genocide libel and talking about how Israel is the cause of all the world’s woes as Mamdani has obsessively done throught his entire life is the cause of this stochastic violence, then I guess we just fundamentally disagree. But I think you understand this because you’ve written about it in other contexts, such as political violence being fomented by the things Trump, for example says.
Finally, Mamdani isn’t “antisemitic.” OK, great. He has Jewish friends and campaign beards. So by the standard no one accepts with respect to any other group he’s not antisemitic. But the genocide libel is based on a series of inferences that depend on antisemitic premises. If we are going to pretend to be so subtle as to fish out the difference between what is and what is not antisemitic, we can be subtle enough to examine how this accusation is based on a bunch of out of context quotes from Israeli leaers and only if you believe in sinsister conspiracy theories about the Jews does any of this even make sense. Remember, these accuations started before any Israeli retaliation, and, indeed have been ongoing since before October 7th.
So I dunno man, if you need to harbor a bunch of nasty beliefs about Jews (the non-“good ones”) to form your conclusions that lead you to go out in the world and talk about it for years on end, I have a hard time thinking that’s not a Jew hater and it’s still a threat to Jews just as Trump telling Proud Boys to stand by is. And all of this is absolutely relevant to a city with a huge Jewish population.
The antisemitism is also present in the second-order look at this. No other group would have to explain any of this. If Mamdani had a problem with Puerto Ricans and said Puerto Rico is a colonial enterprise that should be given back to the Native Americans, I don’t believe for a minute that the Latino community in New York would have to explain to liberals why this was not something they needed to hear in a time of escalating anti-Latino violence.
Mamdani is exactly the kind of person Democrats want these days. And they’re going to get him. Good and hard. Then I guess we can worry about the incipient fascism of the Rubio or Vance regime.
Does any of this make sense? If you follow equities markets you’d think we’re on the brink of a period of historic or at least very robust growth. And yet at the same time the global economy is in a period of growing dislocation and uncertainty creating what can only be called a high-fear, high-risk economic climate. It’s hard to see how these two things can both be true.
Today we’re introducing ChatGPT Atlas, a new web browser built
with ChatGPT at its core.
AI gives us a rare moment to rethink what it means to use the web.
Last year, we added search in ChatGPT so you could instantly find
timely information from across the internet — and it quickly
became one of our most-used features. But your browser is where
all of your work, tools, and context come together. A browser
built with ChatGPT takes us closer to a true super-assistant that
understands your world and helps you achieve your goals.
“We wanted to make sure that Atlas didn’t feel like your old
browser, just with a chat button that was bolted on. But instead,
we made ChatGPT the beating heart of Atlas.”
After giving it a try over the last week, to me Atlas feels like … Chrome with a chat button bolted on. I do not see the appeal, at all, despite being a daily user of ChatGPT. Atlas offers nothing to me that’s better than using Safari as a standalone browser and ChatGPT’s excellent native Mac app as a standalone AI chatbot. But, for me, my browser is not “where all of [my] work, tools, and context come together”. I use an email app for email, a notes app for notes, a text editor and blog editor for writing and programming, a photos app for my photo library, a native feed reader app for feed reading, etc. My web browser is for browsing pages on the web. Perhaps this sort of browser/chat hybrid appeals better to people who live the majority of their desktop-computing lives in browser tabs.
The main interface isn’t a combo search/location field, but rather a chat/location field. Instead of getting search results for a query, you get a chat response. If I wanted this I’d just ask my prompt in ChatGPT. Oftentimes — usually, even — I really do want a list of search results, and I want them fast. ChatGPT responses in Atlas are not a list of web pages, and are — compared to Google Search or my preferred search engine, Kagi — very slow. ChatGPT is many things but a good search engine replacement it is not. But that seems to be the entire premise of Atlas.
Atlas offers an agent mode where it actually surfs the web for you. One of the demos from their launch video involved getting a list of ingredients from a recipe on a web page, and then allowing Atlas to buy all those ingredients for you. That seems crazy to me. Do not want.
Atlas is a Chromium browser, supports Chrome extensions, and but currently is only available for the Mac. It’s not particularly Mac-like though, as Michael Tsai notes:
Alas, it doesn’t support AppleScript and has System Settings–style
preferences.
System Settings-style preferences are certainly better than Chrome-style “settings in a web page tab”, though. Also, in my testing, Atlas doesn’t make good use of Apple Passwords for autofill.
ChatGPT is running a promotion that offers users increased rate limits if they make — and keep — Atlas their default web browser. I’ve never before seen a web browser offer any sort of incentive like this for making it your default. This promotion strikes me as simultaneously clever and icky.
I continue to find this entire category of browser agentsdeeply confusing.
The security and privacy risks involved here still feel
insurmountably high to me — I certainly won’t be trusting any of
these products until a bunch of security researchers have given
them a very thorough beating. [...]
I also find these products pretty unexciting to use. I tried out
agent mode and it was like watching a first-time computer user
painstakingly learn to use a mouse for the first time. I have yet
to find my own use-cases for when this kind of interaction feels
useful to me, though I’m not ruling that out.
In the demo for Atlas, the OpenAI team shows a user trying to find
a Google Doc from their browser history. A normal user would type
keywords like “atlas design” and see their browser show a list of
recent pages. They would recognize the phrase “Google Docs” or the
icon, and click on it to get back to where they were.
But in the OpenAI demo, the team member types out:
search web history for a doc about atlas core design
This is worse in every conceivable way. It’s slower, more prone
to error, and redundant. But it also highlights one of the biggest
invisible problems: you’re switching “modes”. Normally, an LLM’s
default mode is to create plausible extrapolations based on its
training data. Basically, it’s supposed to make things up. But
this demo has to explicitly walk you through “now it’s time to go
search my browser history” because it’s coercing the AI to look
through local content.
Chat is a great interface for, well, chatting. People love texting. And it turns out that chat conversations are a very good user interface for interacting with LLMs. We humans enjoy texting with other humans, and we enjoy texting with LLMs. But typed-out text commands are not a good user interface at all for browsing the web. We had an entirely text-based Internet before the World Wide Web, and the point-and-click visual metaphor of the Web won out.
Dash, later on:
It’s no coincidence that hundreds of people who work at OpenAI,
including many of the most powerful executives, are alumni of
Facebook/Meta, especially during the era of many of that
company’s most egregious abuses of people’s privacy. In the
marketing materials and demonstrations of Atlas, OpenAI’s team
describes the browser as being able to be your “agent”,
performing tasks on your behalf.
But in reality, you are the agent for ChatGPT.
During setup, Atlas pushes very aggressively for you to turn on
“memories” (where it tracks and stores everything you do and uses
it to train an AI model about you) and to enable “Ask ChatGPT” on
any website, where it’s following along with you as you browse the
web. By keeping the ChatGPT sidebar open while you browse, and
giving it permission to look over your shoulder, OpenAI can
suddenly access all kinds of things on the internet that they
could never get to on their own.
This jibes with my impression after giving Atlas a try. The point of it doesn’t seem to be to provide a better web browser for me to use, but rather, to provide ChatGPT with the personal context of my digital life that it otherwise couldn’t get.
That last point raises the question of just how stable we should consider the Apple-OpenAI partnership for ChatGPT-backed Apple Intelligence features. Apple’s goal for a “more personalized Siri” — the whole thing Apple promised at WWDC 2024 but had to postpone for a full year early this year — is for the ecosystem of native apps on Apple platforms, particularly iOS and MacOS, to serve as the personal knowledge context for personalized AI features through App Intents. That’s the basis for the “When is my mom’s flight arriving?” type of interaction that Apple has promised, but still has not delivered. The premise of Atlas (and its brethren AI-integrated browsers like The Browser Company’s Dia and Perplexity’s Comet) is that you should live your entire desktop computing life inside your browser, which in turn will give the AI agent that is integrated with your browser the contextual knowledge for your entire life.
OpenAI’s ambitions are clearly at odds with Apple’s.
OpenAI’s advantage here is that ChatGPT is the most popular LLM chatbot in the world, by far. Apple doesn’t even have an LLM chatbot of its own, let alone a good or popular one. But Apple’s advantage is a big one: most people don’t live their digital lives on desktop computers, where it’s an option to do most things in a web browser. Most people’s primary computing devices are their phones — and even for people whose primary devices are desktop computers, their phones are much-used satellite devices. And on both iOS and Android alike, people live their mobile digital lives through native apps, not websites.
Goodger is a titanic figure in the web browser world, having helped create Mozilla Firefox in the early 2000s, and then joining Google in 2005 to help create Chrome. I noted last year that Goodger leaving Google for OpenAI was a pretty clear sign that OpenAI was creating its own web browser. ↩︎
Another update ... a few key points:
1) There is a clear seasonal pattern for house prices.
2) The surge in distressed sales during the housing bust distorted the seasonal pattern. This was because distressed sales (at lower price points) happened at a steady rate all year, while regular sales followed the normal seasonal pattern. This made for larger swings in the seasonal factor during the housing bust.
3) The seasonal swings have increased recently without a surge in distressed sales.
Click on graph for larger image.
This graph shows the month-to-month change in the NSA Case-Shiller National index since 1987 (through August 2025). The seasonal pattern was smaller back in the '90s and early '00s and increased once the bubble burst.
The seasonal swings declined following the bust, however the pandemic price surge changed the month-over-month pattern.
The peak MoM increase in NSA prices this year was the smallest since 2008!
The second graph shows the seasonal factors for the Case-Shiller National index since 1987. The factors started to change near the peak of the bubble, and really increased during the bust since normal sales followed the regular seasonal pattern - and distressed sales happened all year.
The swings in the seasonal factors were decreasing following the bust but have increased again recently - this time without a surge in distressed sales.
S&P/Case-Shiller released the monthly Home Price Indices for August (”August” is a 3-month average of June, July and August closing prices). June closing prices include some contracts signed in April, so there is a significant lag to this data. Here is a graph of the month-over-month (MoM) change in the Case-Shiller National Index Seasonally Adjusted (SA).
The MoM decrease in the seasonally adjusted (SA) Case-Shiller National Index was at 0.21% (a +2.5% annual rate). This followed five consecutive MoM decreases in the seasonally adjusted index.
On a seasonally adjusted basis, prices increased month-to-month in 11 of the 20 Case-Shiller cities. San Francisco has fallen 8.2% from the recent peak, Phoenix is down 5.7% from the peak, Tampa down 4.2% and Miami down 3.6%.
Astrobotic staff examine a propulsion tank sitting in front of Griffin-1’s structure. Image: Astrobotic
Astrobotic is now eyeing the summer of 2026 for the launch of its second mission with the goal of landing on the surface of the Moon.
On Friday, the company based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, said it was targeting a launch window in July 2026 for the flight of its medium-sized class Griffin lander, notably larger compared to the Peregrine lander flown in January 2024.
Both missions are part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, which is designed to get the agency’s science instruments and technology demonstrations to the surface of the Moon. These missions are meant to help further the understanding of the Moon as NASA and its international partners prepare for human exploration through the Artemis program.
An artist’s rendering of Astrobotic’s Griffin Mission One lander alongside Venturi Astrolab’s FLIP (FLEX Lunar Innovation Platform) rover. Graphic: Astrobotic
Astrobotic also laid out multiple milestones it accomplished on the road to launch, including the completion of acceptance testing for its avionics flight hardware and performing “a fully closed-loop simulation of the descent and landing sequence.”
Having completed acceptance testing on its shoebox-sized BEACON (Benchmark for Engineering and Autonomous Capabilities in Operations and Navigation) rover back in July, Astrobotic said its now using a high-fidelity replica of the rover, called Flatsat, to perform joint mission development training with partner, Canada-based Mission Control.
The mission will launch onboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Mission Control team members test BEACON. Image: Mission Control
Multiple delays
The timing of the launch of Griffin-1 was partially driven by the readiness and flight of Astrobotic’s Peregrine lander, which was originally scheduled to launch in 2021 onboard United Launch Alliance’s inaugural Vulcan rocket. That launch was delayed due in large part to delays stemming from the development and readiness of Blue Origin’s BE-4 engines that power the Vulcan rocket.
The Griffin-1 mission was also designed to transport NASAS’s VIPER (Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover) mission to the lunar south pole. In June 2020, NASA awarded Astrobotic a $199.5 million contract to deliver its rover to the Moon in 2023.
In a May 2021 press release, NASA said that the contract for Astrobotic had increased in value to $226.5 million. This was due to some additional requirements on the rover that altered its mass.
All appeared to be progressing well in April 2022, which is when NASA’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) published a report stating that the spacecraft’s four science instruments were on schedule and that Astrobotic officials said development of the Griffin lander “remains on track to meet the current launch timetable” of November 2023.
Artist’s concept of Astrobotic’s Griffin lander with NASA’s VIPER rover. Credit: Astrobotic
However, in July 2022, NASA announced a delay of the mission to November 2024 because of a new mandate “for additional ground testing of the company’s Griffin lunar lander.” That bumped the mission cost up again, this time to $320.4 million.
An internal review at NASA resulted in the July 2024 announcement that it was suspending further development of VIPER, stating that continuing further “would result in an increased cost that threatens cancellation or disruption to other CLPS missions.”
The agency stated that the time that Astrobotic would continue on with the Griffin-1 mission, but allowed it to pursue other payloads. The mission was determined to launch no earlier than fall 2025.
Fast forward to February 2025, Venturi Astrolab’s FLEX Lunar Innovation Platform (FLEX) rover was brought onboard as the new primary payload for the Griffin-1 mission.
Technicians work on Astrolab’s FLIP lunar rover at the company’s Hawthorne, Calif., facility. The rover, designed to deliver payloads to the Moon, is being assembled in preparation for launch on Astrobotic’s Griffin-1 mission. Image: Astrolab
“Astrobotic received worldwide interest from dozens of organizations eager to fly aboard Griffin-1, and we conducted a rigorous selection process to identify the mission partner that aligned best with our timeline and Griffin’s capabilities,” said John Thornton, Astrobotic’s founder and CEO, in February. “Astrolab shares our vision of making lunar science, exploration, and commercial activity both accessible and transformative.”
As of Friday’s update, Astrobotic said FLIP “is undergoing developmental thermal vacuum testing, and core rover systems are integrated.” It added that in the coming months, Astrolab “will complete payload integration and vehicle-level protoqualification testing.”
Meanwhile the integration of Griffin’s core structure is nearly complete with things like attitude control thrusters, solar panels, ramps and pressurant tanks completing fit checks.
Astrobots fit-check a pressurant tank with Griffin-1’s primary structure. Image: Astrobotic
For the second time this postseason, baseball fans – and more casual postseason observers who do not obsess over the game from the moment the gates of spring training camps are unlocked in mid-February – have been treated to an extraordinary, unforgettable game that simply would not have occurred if the most radical of the rule changes imposed on the game by Commissioner Rob Manfred's tenure had been used, as it is during the regular season.
The extra-inning runner that is used during the regular season is not used during the postseason. It would appear that even Manfred understands, on some level, that he shouldn't shit on the most important games of the season by insisting upon his most infamous gimmick of a rule change. I don't believe in prayer, but I pray this obscene rule is erased as soon as Manfred's current tenure ends in 2029, and the basic foundation of the game, which had done quite well for 150 years, is restored.
The Los Angeles Dodgers and Toronto Blue Jays battled through eighteen innings on Monday night in the third game of the 2025 World Series, leaving fans of both teams utterly exhausted, as though they had run a marathon. For six hours and 39 minutes, the two teams battled in what truly deserved to be called a heavyweight bout before Dodgers first baseman Freddie Freeman hit a game-winning home run in the bottom of the 18th round inning. Los Angeles leads 2-game-to-1 in the World Series. (Earlier this month, the Seattle Mariners beat the Detroit Tigers 3-2 in 15 innings to win the American League Division Series.
This game is tied for the longest World Series game by innings with Game 3 of the 2018 World Series between the Dodgers and Boston Red Sox, a game won 3-2 by the Dodgers on Max Muncy's walkoff home run after seven hours and 20 minutes. (A couple of years ago, looking at the online box score and seeing 7:20 as the time of game, my first thought was that it must be a typo. Nope. The game ended for me at 3:30 a.m. in the Eastern time zone. I ended up not posting all that much about the game because I needed to get a bit of sleep before later that day. I went to bed around 4:15, got four hours of sleep, and worked my noon-to-midnight shift at a Toronto law firm. (My favourite factoid from that game: It lasted 15 minutes longer than the entire 1939 World Series, when the Yankees swept the Reds in a combined 7:05 (1:33, 1:27, 2:01, 2:04).)
That 2018 game featured 561 pitches. This "instant classic" had 609 pitches (48 more than in any other postseason game since at least 2000), which were disbursed over 153 plate appearances against a total of 19 pitchers (which is a record for a postseason game). The 37 combined runners left on base also set a postseason game record.
In a best-of-seven postseason series that is tied 1-1, the Game 3 winner has gone on to win the series 70 of 101 times (69.3%). Teams breaking a 1-1 tie with a home win in Game 3 in the current 2-3-2 format that have gone on to win the series 29 of 48 times (60.4%).
The best place to begin is probably with Shohei Ohtani. The man set several World Series records in this game because of course he did. If a game with Ohtani in it goes 18 innings, he's probably going to break a few all-time records. It would be surprising if he did not. Ohtani batted nine times and he reached base a record NINE TIMES. He went 4-for-4, with two doubles, two home runs, five walks (four intentional), three runs scored, and three RBI. The four BBIs was a new record. Then he went nine innings (as LA's DH), more than three hours, without facing a single pitch. He did not swing at a pitch after the seventh inning. He now shares the World Series record of four extra-base hits in a game with Chicago White Sox second baseman Frank Isbell, who hit four doubles in Game 5 of the 1906 World Series. . . . Ohtani will be the starting pitcher for the Dodgers in Game 4.
Ohtani At The Bat
1st inning: Double to right 3rd inning: Home run to right (increased LA lead to 2-0) 5th inning: Double to left-center, RBI cut Toronto's lead to 4-3 (he scored tying run) 7th inning: Home run to deep left-center (401 feet, first pitch, tied game 5-5) 9th inning: Intentional walk, thrown out trying to steal second 11th inning: Intentional walk 13th inning: Intentional walk 15th inning: Intentional walk 17th inning: Walk (four pitches)
[Some Ohtani factoids at end of post.]
Both teams seemed allergic to clean innings all night long. Of the 35 complete half-innings, only 10 were comprised of three straight outs. Once the game went into extras, I spent the top half of seemingly every inning anxiously watching the Dodgers' pitchers get in and out of trouble, before relaxing during the bottom half, happy to accept whatever the LA batters did or didn't do. . . . I was really hoping the game would last into a record 19th inning . . . and beyond. (I have this entire week off. I have nowhere to go, nothing to do.)
The Dodgers took a 2-0 lead on solo homers from Teoscar Hernández leading off the second and Ohtani with one out in the third. That inning ended with Freeman being thrown out at the plate by Blue Jays right fielder Addison Barger, who fielded a single from Will Smith and threw a perfect strike to Alejandro Kirk on the fly. Kirk was in perfect position to catch the ball and block the runner from the plate and tag Freeman out.
Toronto was retired in order in the first and third inning, while stranding runners at the corners in the second. Mark Wegner, the home plate umpire, screwed the Blue Jays in the second. With Bo Bichette on first, Daulton Varsho walked on a high 3-1 pitch. But Wegner fucked up twice: he called the pitch a strike and he waited so long before annoucing the blown call that a confused Bichette was picked off first base. Varsho ended up walking and Kirk singled, so Wegner's blown call and unprofessional delay likely stole at least one run from the Blue Jays.
Toronto broke through against Tyler Glasnow (4.2-5-4-3-5, 85) in the fourth. Vladimir Guerrero drew a full-count walk and Bichette reached on an error. After Varsho poped to left, Kirk crushed a first-pitch curve to left-center for a three-run dong. The Jays made it 4-2 with singles by Barger and Ernie Clement and a sac fly from Andrés Giménez.
The Dodgers tied things in the fifth off Max Scherzer (4.1-5-3-1-3, 79), pitching in the World Series for his fourth team (2012 Tigers, 2019 Nationals, 2023 Texas). Kiké Hernández grounded a single into to center. With one out, Mason Fluharty came in and gave up a run-scoring double to Ohtani (who had fanned three times in three previous at-bats against him). With two outs, Freeman lined a single down the right field line, scoring Ohtani with the tying run.
The two teams each scored in the seventh. George Springer led off the top half and hurt himself when he fouled the first pitch off. He left the game and Ty France took over the at-bat, striking out. Nathan Lukes grounded back to the pitcher for the second out. Blake Treinen relieved Justin Wrobleski, and gave up a single to Guerrero. Bichette fouled off four pitches before singling down the right field line. The ball got tangled up with a sound guy and Guerrero scored all the way from first. The throw from right field was to the first base side of the dish and Smith could not get back for a tag before the run scored.
Seranthony ("Sir Anthony") Domínguez began the bottom of the seventh by retiring Andy Pages on a fly to right. Ohtani was next and Toronto's decision during a mound meeting was between simply sending him to first base or going right after him. (The idea of nibbling and trying to get him to chase was dismissed as pointless.) They decided to pitch to him, but Domínguez's first offering was a grooved fastball at 98. He might as well have placed the ball on a tee. Ohtani took a swing that appeared so easy and controlled and relaxed, it was a small shock that the ball travelled 401 feet to deep left-center. Ohtani's second home run of the night re-tied the game at 5-5. With two outs, Domínguez walked Freeman and Smith and had a 3-1 count on Max Muncy, but got Muncy to ground out.
And 5-5 was how the score remained for the next ten innings. Toronto put runners on first and third, thanks to a Betts error and a single from Giménez off Jack Dreyer. Roki Sasaki took over and got two ground outs to escape the jam, the third out coming when he leapt skyward to spear Lukes' high chopper over the mound. Sasaki seemed sharp as he got the first batter in the ninth, but then couldn't find the plate. He walked Isiah Kiner-Falefa (who had pinch-run for Bichette two innings earlier) on five pitches. Varsho lined a full-count pitch towards right field. Freeman leapt and the ball deflected off his glove. Tommy Edman chased the ball into the outfield and then fired a throw to third base to get IKF, who had ill-formed ideas of getting to third. That was the second out and Sasaki walked Kirk before getting a force at second. The Blue Jays left two men on base in each of the seventh, eighth, and ninth innings, going 1-for-9 with RATS.
In the bottom of the ninth, Ohtani was walked intentionally with one out. He was also thrown out trying to steal before Betts fouled to right. It was the first of four consecutive intentional walks to Ohtani. The next time he actrually stood in the box and saw some pitches was when he walked on four straight ball sin the seventeeth inning.
Emmet Sheehan faced the Jays batters in the tenth. (Sportsnet analyist Buck Martinez informed the international audience: "This is a big game for both teams." I suppose there might have been a few seals on Baffin Island who were unsure about the stakes.) Sheehan needed only six pitches to get two outs before giving up a single to France and a double to Lukes. The Baltimore dong was lined to to right, but the Dodgers gunned down pinch-runner David Schneider at the plate 9-4-2. Edman, the cut-off man, took Teoscar Hernández's throw, and made a perfect relay throw to the plate. It was in plenty of time and as Will Smith gloved the ball, he turned to block the runner and protect the plate. The Blue Jays challenged both the umpire's out call and his ruling that Smith didn't block the plate before he had possession of the ball. They lost on both counts.
Bottom of the 10th: Blue Jays reliever Jeff Hoffman hit Smith with a pitch with one down. After Muncy struck out looking, Teoscar Hernández smacked an 0-2 pitch into left for a hit. Hoffman got Edman to foul out to Gerrero on his 33rd (and final) pitch of the night.
Top of the 11th: Sheehan avoids any drama, retiring Toronto's 3-4-5 hitters in order. Guerrero F8, Kiner-Falefa 1-3, Varsho K.
Bottom of the 11th: "Let's Go" Braydon Fisher, a rookie who had given up five runs in 5.2 postseason innings, is the seventh pitcher for Toronto. He strikes out Kiké Hernández on a diving curve and Clement catches Pages' line drive at third. Ohtani is put on first base and Mookie Betts singles to left. Ohtani appears to jog gingerly into second base. Roberts and a translator come out to chat, but everything seems fine. Freeman pops to left.
Top of the 12th: My scorecards have room for 12 innings, but the many pitchers on both sides (as well as several scrawled notes) have left little room at the bottom of the page, so I start a second scorecard. This is a scary fuckin inning. Facing Fisher, Kirk walks on five pitches (none of the four balls were close) and Tyler Heineman pinch-runs. The Blue Jays now have no position players on the bench. Myles Straw twice tries to bunt before lining to first. Clayton Kershaw is warming up for the Dodgers! Clement falls behind 0-2 and grounds the ball up the middle. Edman moves to his right, backhands the ball and fires to first. It's the second out, on a very close play. LA manager Dave Roberts has Giménez walked intentionally, putting runners at first and second. The move mystifies both Sportsnet announcers. Ron Shulman announces the move in a WTF voice and all Martinez can say is "very interesting" with a certain amount of wonder in his voice. Fisher has a 2-2 count on Schneider but misses with ball 3 – a pivitol pitch, because now the runners will be off with the pitch. Schneider hits a slow grounder towards third. Heineman is running to third and Muncy has his foot on the bag, forced to wait for the ball to get to him. Getting to third does not seem to be an urgent concern for Heineman, but he does make it to the safely base (without sliding). The bases are loaded and here comes Kershaw, who has announced he will retire after the World Series. He battles Lukes to a full count (bcbcb). His next three pitches are all a bit out of the strike zone, and would presumably be called ball 4 and force in a run, but Lukes offers at all of them, fouling the first two off before grounding out to second. Inning over, three left on base.
Bottom of the 12th: The Dodgers are retired in order. Fisher strikes out Smith and Eric Lauer, a lefty who made 15 starts during the season, gets two infield popups.
Top of the 13th: Edgardo Henriquez, a 23-year-old righty, takes over for the Dodgers, and alternates fastballs at 101/102 with sliders at 83/84. He hits Varsho in the back leg with a 102-mph fastball with two outs. Heineman, in his first postseason trip to the plate, flies to center.
Bottom of the 13th: Edman extends his arms and drives an outside 0-1 pitch to right-center. Centerfielder Varsho was shaded towards left, and has a long run to get the ball. It's a double. Pinch-hitter Miguel Rojas bunts the potential winning run to third. Alex Call, another pinch-hitter (for Pages, who is 4-for-48 (.083) in this postseason), gets ahead 2-0 but pops to shortstop. Toronto manager John Schneider intentionally walks Ohtani (who reaches base for the seventh time, a new WS record). He also intentionally walks Betts, setting up an inning-ending force at every base, but also affording his pitcher absolutely no room for error. Freeman takes a ball before launching a fly to deep center. Varsho drifts back to the track and makes the catch. Schneider is a badass. (Buck Martinez: "This is a baseball game, folks.")
Top of the 14th: It's the bottom of the Jays lineup and Henriquez sets them down with a minimum of fuss: F8, 5-3, K.
Bottom of the 14th: Smith leads off and belts Lauer's eighth pitch to deep left-center, sending Straw to the wall for a very long (and for Dodgers fans, heart-stopping) out. Lauer is throwing a lot of pitches (and/or the Dodgers are making him work). After an eight-pitch F7, Lauer walks Muncy (seven pitches) and gives up a single to Teoscar Hernández (eight pitches). LA is again threatening to end the game, but Lauer suddenly needs only four pitches to get the final two outs: Edman pops to second (infield fly rule) and Rojas grounds to third.
Top of the 15th: Toronto's bats have cooled significantly since the twelfth. The last reliever in the Dodgers' pen, Will Klein, showcases a disgusting red beard that has obviously repelled all attempts at grooming. Perhaps it is a weapon to distract opposing hitters. Guerrero singles with two outs but is left at first when Kiner-Falefa strikes out looking.
Bottom of the 15th: GDGD says Brendon Little is now pitching for Toronto, but it's actually still Lauer (for the next two innings, in fact). Back at Skydome, it's 1:48 a.m. and a lot of fans are still watching the game on Skydome's huge board (which is extremely huge and high defintion). The team's admission charge of $15 seems greedy – why not free or a token $5 and make your $$ on food and drink?, but the remaining fans are getting their money's worth. Call grounds to second, Ohtani is walked intentionally, Betts flies to right, and Freeman lines out to deep left-center, as Varsho makes a nice running catch at the wall.
Top of the 16th: The Bue Jays go 1-2-3. It's quite boring, for a change: 4-3, P1, K. Guerrero eats an apple.
Bottom of the 16th: The Dodgers go 1-2-3. K, K, F8 to the track in right-center. Things have calmed down and I envision both teams settling into a groove of making outs for many innings.
Top of the 17th: Another clean inning for Klein. F8, K, L1. He's retired seven in a row! Sportsnet says that Fox's Tom Verducci is reporting that Dave Roberts will have a position player on the mound if the game goes into the 18th. Shulman and Martinez are skeptical. Why wouldn't Roberts have someone like Blake Snell (G1 starter) go for an inning or two instead?
Bottom of the 17th: Lauer is done after 4.2 innings (4.2-2-0-4-2, 68), having thrown the second-most pitches of any Jays pitcher (after Scherzer). Little is in and he strikes out Edman and gets Rojas on a grounder to short. Call singles to left-center and Toronto is more or less forced to pitch to Ohtani, hoping to maybe get him out rather than put the wnning run at second for Betts. But Little misses with four straight and Ohtani gets franked anyway. (Ohtani saw one strike after the fifth inning tonight, his HR in the seventh (which was also his last swing oif the game.) Betts, who has barely been an afterthought in this game, sees eight pitches and fouls to first. (He's 2-for-15 in the WS.)
Top of the 18th: No position player. It's Klein for his fourth inning (4-1-0-2-5, 72). Though, with one out, Yoshinobu Yamamoto (who threw a complete game in G2!) is warming up in the Dodgers bullpen. Guerrero walks, but is forced at second. Varsho also walks and the runners take second and third on a wild pitch before Heineman strikes out.
Bottom of the 18th: Freeman hammers a 3-2 sinker – the 609th pitch of the game – that is left out over the plate. This time, Varsho runs to the wall can do nothing. Little grabs his cap and walks off the field as the Dodgers celebrate.
The two longest World Series games by innings were both won at Dodger Stadium on solo home runs (hit on full counts) by the first batter in the home half of the 18th inning:
2018 WS Game 3 (October 26): Max Muncy led off the bottom of the 18th inning and homered on a full-count pitch (bbbcff) to left-center.
2025 WS Game 3 (October 27): Freddie Freeman led off the bottom of the 18th inning and homered on a full-count pitch (fbbbc) to center.
Four Dodgers played in both games: Max Muncy, Enrique Hernandez, Clayton Kershaw, and Mookie Betts (who was with the Red Sox).
Ohtani set a new postseason record by reaching base nine times in a game. The previous record was six times, held by Stan Hack (1945 WS 6), Kenny Lofton (1995 WS 3), and Kerry Carpenter (2025 ALDS 5).
Ohtani is one of four players to reach base nine times in any game (regular season or postseason) and the first to do so in the last 83 years. The other three: Max Carey (July 7, 1922), Johnny Burnett (July 10, 1932), and Stan Hack (August 9, 1942).
Ohtani is the first player in MLB history with 4+ hits and 5+ walks in a game (regular season or postseason)
Ohtani is the first player to be intentionally walked more than once with the bases empty in a postseason game (since BBI became official in 1955). He had three tonight. Albert Pujols had one in 2011 World Series 5.
Ohtani is the first player to be intentionally walked four times in a postseason game. Only six players have had 4+ BBI in a regular season game, since 1955: Roger Maris (1962), Garry Templeton (1985), Andre Dawson (1990), Manny Ramirez (2001), Barry Bonds (2004, 4 games), James Wood (2025).
Ohtani has nowbeen walked eight times in this postseason, tying Pujols (2011) for the second-most BBis. Barry Bonds received 13 BBI in 2002.
Ohtani and Babe Ruth are the only players with postseasn careers with multiple pitching starts and more than two home runs. Ruth (15 HR, 3 GS), Ohtani (11 HR, 2 GS).
Ohtani is the only player in postseason history with at least one pitching start and multiple home runs in a single postseason.
Ohtani has hit eight home runs in the 2025 postseason, tied for the most in a single postseason in Dodgers history, with Corey Seager (8 in 2020). In MLB history, only Randy Arozarena has hit more (10 in 2020).
Ohtani is the first player with multiple games with 12+ total bases in a single postseason. The only other player with two such games in a postseason career is Babe Ruth.
Ohtani is the first player with three multi-homer games in a single postseason.
Ohtani's last two games at Dodger Stadium: October 17, 2025 (NLCS G4): 12 total bases (3 HR) October 27, 2025 (World Series G3): 12 total bases (2 HR, 2 2B) No other MLB player in the modern era (since 1900) has had 12+ total bases in two consecutive home games in the regular season or postseason.
HMHS Britannic under construction at Harland and Wolff, circa 1914. Via Wikipedia.
From roughly the end of the US Civil War until the late 1950s, the United Kingdom was one of the biggest shipbuilders in the world. By the 1890s, UK shipbuilders were delivering 80% of worldwide shipping tonnage, and though the country only briefly maintained this market-dominating level of output— on the eve of World War I, its share of the market had fallen to 60% — it nonetheless remained one of the world’s largest shipbuilders for the next several decades.
Following the end of WWII, UK shipbuilding appeared ascendant. The shipbuilding industries of most other countries had been devastated by the war (or were, like Japan, prevented from building new ships), and in the immediate years after the war the UK built more ship tonnage than the rest of the world combined.
But this success was short-lived. The UK ultimately proved unable to respond to competitors who entered the market with new, large shipyards which employed novel methods of shipbuilding developed by the US during WWII. The UK fell from producing 57% of world tonnage in 1947 to just 17% a decade later. By the 1970s their output was below 5% of world total, and by the 1990s it was less than 1%. In 2023, the UK produced no commercial ships at all.
Ultimately, UK shipbuilding was undone by the very thing that had made it successful: it developed a production system that heavily leveraged skilled labor, and minimized the need for expensive infrastructure or management overheads. For a time, this system had allowed UK shipbuilders to produce ships more cheaply and efficiently than almost anywhere else. But as the nature of the shipping market, and of ships themselves, changed, the UK proved unable to change its industry in response, and it steadily lost ground to international competitors.
The rise of UK shipbuilding
For much of recent history, the Netherlands boasted the largest and most successful shipbuilding industry. Between 1500 and 1670, Dutch shipping had grown by a factor of 10, and by the end of the 17th century the Dutch merchant fleet, made up of mostly Dutch-made ships, was larger than the commercial fleets of England, France, Spain, Portugal, and what is now Germany combined. Dutch shipbuilding was “technologically the most advanced in Europe,” and Dutch shipbuilders could build ships 40-50% cheaper than English ones.
Over the course of the 18th century, however, the Dutch advantage was gradually eroded by “a failure to keep pace with advances in European sailing ship design and an inherent conservatism within the industry.” But while it briefly looked like the UK would come to dominate shipbuilding in the early 19th century, the mantle instead passed to the United States. By the middle of the 19th century, thanks in part to the easy availability of ship-quality lumber, the US could build wooden ships for 20 to 25% less than in the UK, and “the very existence of the British industry was under threat”.
But as wooden sailing ships gave way to iron and steel steamships over the course of the 19th century, the UK reclaimed its advantage. By the 1850s, the UK was building iron ships more cheaply than wood ships, and while it took decades for iron, steel and steam to displace wood and sail — sail remained a better option than steam for very long voyages until the 1880s — Britain’s access to cheap coal, cheap iron (and later cheap steel), and cheap skilled labor (compared to the US) allowed it to dominate the transformed shipbuilding industry. By 1900, UK shipbuilding productivity was substantially higher than in the US, and even further ahead of other countries. The UK had become the “shipyard of the world” on the back of its inexpensive production.
Structure of UK shipbuilding
The structure of the UK’s shipbuilding industry reflected the conditions it operated under. Building iron and steel ships obviously required machinery and infrastructure — machine tools, cranes, slipways (sloped areas of ground the ship would slide down upon completion) — but wherever possible, British yards still eschewed expensive machinery or infrastructure in favor of skilled labor. British yards in the late 19th and early 20th century have been described as “under-equipped in relation to those of her competitors”: for instance, while the most advanced foreign yards had large, mechanically operated cranes that could be moved from berth to berth, most British yards “retained their fixed cranes, manually operated derricks, and push-carts on rails”. Because of the notoriously cyclical shipbuilding industry, which often had “seven fat years followed by seven lean years”, using labor-intensive production methods let shipbuilders easily scale up and down their operations depending on demand: workers could be hired when they were needed, and quickly fired when weren’t. A capital intensive production operation, by contrast, couldn’t easily reduce its overheads during a downturn: one extremely large, modern, and expensive British shipyard at Dalmuir was forced to close in 1929 due to difficulty servicing its overheads when demand for new ships fell.
British shipbuilders’ production operations were in large part oriented to meet the needs of British shipowners, who made up the majority of their customers. Shipyards (and their owners) developed close relationships with shipowners, who would purchase from the same yards repeatedly; as a result, shipyards did little in the way of marketing their services. Ships in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were “expensive, custom-made commodities built in close consultation with the owner”. Frequent changes during the building process by the owner were common, and standardization was limited to non-existent. With limited ability to take advantage of economies of scale, shipyards were small and numerous, and while yards tended to specialize in certain types of ships, labor-intensive production methods made it comparatively easy for yards to adapt to producing different types of ships depending on the market.
In addition to minimizing infrastructure overheads, British shipyards had low management overheads; much of the work was performed by skilled labor organized into “squads,” groups of tradesmen which could organize work without needing much in the way of specific instructions. As a result, British shipyards employed comparatively few supervisors, and did little in the way of production planning.
Because shipyard workers had little in the way of job security, the British shipbuilding industry became strongly unionized. Iron shipbuilding was done by a group of 15 different unions — riveters, boilermakers, plumbers, and so on — and there were very strict rules about which unions were allowed to do which tasks. This arrangement had its advantages — unions oversaw much of the training and apprenticeship of new workers, and allowed the work to be done with comparatively little management overhead. But it also had drawbacks: the union’s (rational) lack of trust in the shipbuilders, who they correctly viewed as considering their workers disposable, resulted in fierce opposition to changes in the nature of ship production, and made introducing method improvements fraught.
Cracks begin to appear
The first cracks in British shipbuilding hegemony began to appear afterWorld War I. Immediately following the war, the world saw a huge increase in demand for ships: in 1919, worldwide ship production was 7.1 million gross tons, up more than double the pre-war peak of 3.3 million tons in 1913. Initially much of this output was American (thanks to the continuation of the wartime shipbuilding program past the end of the war), but as this program ended the UK was once again dominant: by 1924 the UK was producing 60% of the world’s ship tonnage.
But the competitive landscape of the shipbuilding industry was changing. Worldwide shipyard capacity after the war was roughly double what it had been before it. Other countries were eager to give support to their local shipbuilding industries, and foreign shipyards were catching up to British levels of productivity.
Ships and the methods for producing them were also changing. New shipyard layouts and new production techniques such as welding were being experimented with, and new types of ships such as diesel-powered ships and tankers — kinds of ships British shipowners and shipbuilders seemed less interested in building — were increasingly in demand. When the booming shipbuilding market entered a downturn in the 1920s — worldwide ship output dropped from over 7 million gross tons in 1919 to 2.2 million in 1924 — the competitive pressure on British shipbuilders began to mount. In 1925 the British shipbuilding community was shocked when Furness Withy, a British shipping company, ordered several ships from Germany, citing lower costs and faster delivery times. The news was surprising enough that a British shipbuilding trade association called an emergency conference on the problem of foreign competition:
The employers reviewed the history of foreign competition and conceded that whilst before the war foreign competition had presented a threat, ‘the margin of difference then was sufficiently limited’ to prevent a successful challenge to our premier position and certainly such a catastrophe as an important British order going abroad’. The margin of difference, however, now favoured continental builders and there was every prospect of more British orders going abroad and fewer foreign orders coming to the UK.
What’s more, the postwar boom in shipbuilding had created a huge glut in ships and shipbuilding capacity. In the early 1920s British shipbuilding had a third more capacity than it did before the war, only to be faced with demand less than half of what it was in 1914. By 1933, worldwide seaborne trade was down 6% from 1913, but the tonnage of merchant ship capacity was up by 49%, greatly reducing demand for new ships.
British shipbuilding was further hamstrung by the Washington Naval Treaty, which was signed in 1922 and then extended by the London Naval Treaty in 1930. The treaty, signed by the UK, the US, France, Italy and Japan, attempted to prevent a naval arms race by limiting naval vessel construction for each signatory. What had been a robust British program of naval expansion was suddenly halted. Following the treaty, British naval shipbuilding fell by over 90%.
The lack of shipbuilding, increased pressure from foreign competition, and the global decline in new ship orders wreaked havoc on the British shipbuilding industry in the 1920s and 30s, to the benefit of its competitors. The UK’s fraction of worldwide ship tonnage produced declined from 60% in 1924 to 50% by the end of the 1920s, to less than 40% by the mid-1930s. Over the same period, Germany, Sweden, and Japan’s combined share rose from 12% to 36%. Numerous British shipbuilding firms ceased operations, and shipbuilding unemployment rose from 5.5% in 1920 to over 40% in 1929. In the first 9 months of 1930, only one in five of British shipbuilders received any orders at all.
To help address the problem of excess shipyard capacity, British shipbuilders banded together to form the National Shipbuilders Security (NSS) company, which was funded to “assist the shipbuilding industry by the purchase of redundant and/or obsolete shipyards and dismantling and disposal of their contents.”. By 1938, over 216 ship berths had been demolished. The NSS also made efforts to try to improve productivity and improve the competitive position of British shipyards compared to foreign yards, though it’s not clear if this had much impact: by 1938, foreign orderbooks appeared far fuller than British ones, and the industry was palpably worried about the threat of foreign competition. It wasn’t until the Royal Navy began a period of rearmament in the late 1930s in anticipation of war that fortunes began to improve for the UK shipbuilders.
Post WWII
Following the end of WWII, fortunes initially looked bright for the British shipbuilding industry. German and European shipbuilding capacity had been devastated by the war, the US was dismantling its enormous wartime shipbuilding machine, and Japan was forced to cease ship production. In the immediate years following the war, the UK was once again producing more ship tonnage than the rest of the world combined.
But the issues of foreign competition that had increasingly threatened the UK’s dominance prior to WW2 had only retreated temporarily. What’s more, during the war, developments had taken place that would threaten the skilled labor-intensive production model that British shipbuilders relied on. To win the Battle of the Atlantic and overcome destruction to their fleet caused by German U-boats, the US had used welded, prefabricated construction to rapidly build enormous numbers of simple cargo ships: Liberty ships, Victory ships, and T-2 Tankers. In the 1950s, those methods of ship construction were brought to Japan, where they continued to be refined.
British shipbuilders could have taken advantage of these methods as well. They had seen firsthand the huge number of Liberty ships American shipyards were producing (the Liberty ship was, after all, originally a British design), and had made use of welded, prefabricated construction themselves to build vessels during wartime. But British shipbuilders perceived adopting these radically different production methods as risky. It would require enormous capital expenditure, and British shipbuilders had only survived the brutal 1930s thanks to their comparatively light overheads and labor-intensive methods. Dramatic changes to production methods would also require changes to the very strict demarcation system of its unionized labor force, which the unions, naturally distrustful of shipyard operators, were sure to resist. And while the US had successfully built thousands of ships very rapidly during the war, it had come at a cost: the US cargo ships, using modern methods, were more expensive to build than similar British ships. Though some British shipbuilders recognized the potential of welding and prefabrication, they weren’t clearly worth reorganizing the entire industry around.
Steel plate fabrication at British shipbuilder Stephen of Linthouse in 1950. Johnman and Murphy note that this scene “could just as well have been 1900.” Via Johnman and Murphy 2002.
And beyond their rational reluctance, British shipbuilders were simply not predisposed towards adopting radical innovations. Many of them (along with many British shipowners) were suspicious of welding, partly due to natural conservatism and partly due to several high-profile failures where welded ships cracked in two. (As late as 1954, British shipbuilders noted that “owners do not want a welded box, they expect plenty of riveting.”) British shipbuilders similarly proved somewhat reluctant to enter the world of tanker and diesel-powered ship construction, which were becoming an increasingly large fraction of ship construction. They also seemed to always have an excuse for not making large, new capital investments: when the yards were busy, such investments were disruptive and made it difficult to get on with the business of building ships, and when they weren’t, there was no funding available to do so. Shipbuilders were often small, family-run businesses, sometimes by descendants of the original founders, and they were generally happy to simply carry on business as they always had. And broader ownership did not foster innovation either, with firms distributing their profits as dividends rather than reinvesting them in the business, driving the stock prices of shipbuilders up more than any other manufacturing industry.
Moreover, British shipyards tended to be cramped, with little room for expansion, and British shipbuilders were fearful that any postwar boom in shipbuilding would (once again) be followed by a bust, requiring retrenchment and making investment in expanding facilities unwise. (One British shipbuilder predicted that “it will be a case of last in, first out, and that Britain’s policy of modernising her shipyards without any great expansion of their capacity will pay dividends in her future competition.”)
Thus, even as the world shipbuilding market boomed in the 1950s, UK shipbuilding output stayed roughly constant. Between 1947 and 1957, UK ship output rose by 18%, while worldwide output comparatively rose by over 300%. Countries like Germany, Sweden, and Japan picked up the slack. The UK lost its position as the world’s biggest shipbuilder by tonnage to Japan in 1956. By the end of the 1950s, Germany and Sweden had passed the UK in ship tonnage built for export and by the end of the 1960s they were outproducing the UK in overall ship tonnage. Between 1950 and 1975, one of the largest shipbuilding booms in history, the UK was the only major shipbuilding country to not increase its output at all.
As other countries expanded their output, adopted modern production methods, and built new, efficient shipyards, British shipbuilders found themselves increasingly uncompetitive. Their costs were higher than those of foreign shipbuilders, and their delivery times were longer. Shipbuilding had traditionally been done on a “cost plus” basis, where owners were charged some percentage above costs incurred when building the ship, but owners were increasingly requiring fixed price bidding. British shipbuilders, with their comparative lack of production planning and managerial control, struggled to adapt to the new reality. British shipowners, traditionally the primary customer of British shipyards, were increasingly buying their ships abroad, citing the UK’s high costs and long delivery times.
Attempts to remedy the situation
Investigations into potential problems in the shipbuilding industry started shortly into the post-war era. In 1948, following a British shipowner cancelling several orders with British yards due to “costs and delivery times,” the government stepped in to conduct analyses of the shipbuilding industry. One, produced by the Labour Party’s research arm, argued that “that new methods of construction, utilising welding and prefabrication, required a complete reconstruction of the yards, and that this could be best achieved via Government finance and assistance…It seems inevitable that a prosperous shipbuilding industry will require heavy expenditure and it is very doubtful whether the industry is willing and or able to undertake this.” The other, produced by the Shipbuilding Costs Committee (staffed largely by industry leaders), was a “’a very non-controversial report,’ which provided ‘no useful recommendations on which action could be taken.’” In light of the industry’s full postwar order books, the government opted not to take any action.
In the mid-1950s, the government examined the practices of British naval shipbuilding, and concluded that “there was a need for a wholesale modernisation of the shipyards in terms of layouts, plant and equipment particularly to increase the use of prefabrication.”
The return on capital employed and investment rates were criticised as poor and British costs were felt to be comparatively high in international terms. Restrictive practices were noted, but more worryingly there was a shortage of skilled labour in the industry, which was responsible for the British single-shift system, with consequently expensive overtime, compared with the double-shift system which was normal on the Continent and in Japan.
A 1957 report from the Working Party on the Transport of Oil From the Middle East similarly noted that the industry had been “sluggish in responding to the opportunities from expansion” and criticized its lack of investment (though it did note that some shipyards had begun some degree of modernization).
As the booming shipbuilding market turned at the end of the 1950s, these investigations grew more frequent and more worried. A 1959 Treasury report concluded the industry “is not competitive. It has not modernised its production methods and organisation so quickly or so thoroughly as its competitors. Its labour relations are poor, and its management, while improving, is not as good as it might be.” It was further “pessimistic over delivery dates and prices and concluded that the prospects of the industry becoming competitive could not be rated very high.”
This report was followed in 1960 by a Department of Scientific and Industrial Research report on the shipbuilding industry, which declared that the industry’s R&D efforts had been “woeful”:
…production control in the industry was primitive, the total effort devoted to research and development was insufficient, and almost no organised research had been applied to production and management problems with a view to improving the productivity of capital and labour and reducing costs.1
That same year, the head of the UK’s Shipbuilding Advisory Committee staged a high-profile resignation, stating that the excuses of the industry to avoid investigating its problems were “so frustrating that to continue serving the industry as chairman would be fruitless.” In response to the resignation, in 1961, the Advisory Committee released a report on the shipbuilding industry. However, other than arguing that credit facilities (lending to shipowners to make purchasing ships easier) should be expanded, the report gave few strong recommendations.
The Shipbuilding Advisory Committee report was followed by another government-commissioned report on why British shipowners were buying from foreign yards; the report concluded that the major reasons were “price; price and delivery date; price and credit facilities; guaranteed delivery dates; and the reluctance of British builders to install foreign-built engines.”
As the industry continued to struggle in the 1960s, the reports piled up even higher. A 1962 report on productivity commissioned by the British Ship Research Association noted “the underdeveloped nature of managerial hierarchies in the industry as a serious weakness and recommended a more systematic approach to production control”. A report by the British Ship Exports Association on the Norwegian market (traditionally one of Britain’s strongest ship export markets) noted that “Norwegian customers... have voiced a series of complaints, the principal of which. .. is that in addition to regarding us as unreliable over delivery, many are now saying that we cannot be trusted to honour contracts.” The author of the report noted that:
…every reported speech by a British shipbuilder in the Norwegian press usually comprised a list of excuses for poor performance, ranging from official and unofficial stoppages, shortages of labour, failings on the part of subcontractors, modernisation schemes not producing the anticipated results, to recently completed contracts having entailed substantial losses. The impression thus gained by the Norwegians, according to Holt, was of an industry where the shipbuilders had no control or responsibility over problems, and worse, had no ideas as to how to address the problems. (since 1918 147).
Accordingly, the UK’s share of Norwegian shipbuilding, its largest export market, fell from 48% in 1951 to 2.8% in 1965.
As reports documenting the UK’s shipbuilding troubles accumulated, things continued to look worse and worse for the shipbuilders. The market for ocean liners, once a major source of demand for British shipbuilders, was being threatened by the rise of commercial air travel. Transatlantic travel by air surpassed transatlantic ocean travel in 1957, and the ascendance of commercial jetliners further eroded the market. By 1969, passengers crossing the Atlantic by plane outnumbered maritime passengers 24 to 1. And the explosion of global trade in the 1950s and 60s was met not just with more ships, but with larger ships (such as Very Large Crude Carriers for transporting oil) which were cheaper to build and operate. The simple Liberty ship built in huge numbers by the US during the war was about 10,000 tons deadweight, but by the end of the 1950s Japan was building ships in excess of 100,000 tons deadweight.
Likewise, by the end of the 1960s Japanese shipyards were building drydocks with 400,000 tons capacity. By comparison, British shipyards, which had been built in an era of much smaller ships, had trouble accommodating these huge ships, in part due to lack of space for expansion. (Some space-constrained British yards attempted to get around their space constraints by building large ships in two halves, which were then stitched together in the water.) And as ships got larger, prefabricated construction methods got more advanced, utilizing massive gantry cranes to assemble ships out of huge pre-built blocks. Advances in prefabrication continued to drive down costs in the shipyards that implemented them. Between 1958 and 1964, the labor hours required to build a given amount of tonnage in a Japanese shipyard fell by 60%, and the amount of steel fell by 36%. Over the same period the UK’s share of global shipbuilding fell from 15% to 8%.
Average size and speed of tankers, via Harrison 1990.
Throughout this period, major advances in ship technology were increasingly happened outside the UK. A history of UK shipbuilding noted that 13 of 15 major ship innovations introduced between 1800 and 1950 were first widely adopted in Britain. But of 14 major innovations introduced between 1950 and 1980, only three were first widely adopted in Britain.
Neither the government nor the British shipbuilding industry seemed willing to take bold steps to try to improve its fortunes. The Board of Trade stated in 1960 that there was little point to government intervention “until the prospects of the industry are very patently bad”. Despite the numerous government reports pointing out the various industry deficiencies, by 1963 the only government action that had been taken was the aforementioned expansion of credit facilities to shipowners. British shipbuilders remained convinced that a decline in the market was just around the corner and that the expensive shipyards of their competitors would become millstones. And despite the shipbuilding market shifting towards larger, more standardized ships sold at fixed prices, UK builders tried to stick with their tried-and-true strategy of ships tailor-built to the needs of British shipowners. But as British shipowners, who themselves made up an increasingly small fraction of global shipping (the UK’s share of global shipping tonnage fell from 45% in 1900 to 16% in 1960), increasingly took their business to foreign shipyards, British shipbuilders found that “the protective skin that tradition and convention gave to the home market has been split beyond repair”. By 1962, the bankruptcy of many UK shipbuilders had finally become “an alarming reality rather than an impending possibility”.
It wasn’t until after the 1964 elections, with a new Labour government, that more serious actions to rescue the shipbuilding industry began to be taken (possibly because the “vast majority of shipbuilding yards lay within Labour parliamentary seats”). In early 1965, a British group led by the Minister of Trade visited several Japanese shipyards, which were found to have lower costs, shorter delivery times, and higher productivity than British yards. Following this visit, the government instigated yet another investigation into the British shipbuilding industry. The resulting report (known as the Geddes report, after Reay Geddes, the head of the committee that produced it), enumerated a long list of problems of UK shipbuilders, including high costs (20% more than competitors on average), long delivery times, late deliveries, out of date infrastructure, poor labor relations, and poor management. Moreover, even at prices 20% higher than their competitors, British shipyards struggled to be profitable, with the report noting that “many of the orders now in hand will not be remunerative to cover costs”.
British shipyards’ traditional production methods, which demanded little in the way of management, meant that yards had few supervisors. The supervisors they did have had often worked their way up from the shop floor and had never received any business or management training. As a result, production planning and estimates of labor required were poor. While this may have been acceptable when vessels were custom-produced on a cost-plus basis, it made yards ill-equipped for a market where fixed-cost pricing was the norm. A history of British shipbuilding noted that “in an increasingly competitive industry British shipyards did not successfully perform the financial management tasks—marketing, budgeting and procurement--necessary to build vessels profitably.”
The Geddes report also noted that labor relations were abysmal, and strict adherence to labor demarcation rules (which themselves varied extensively from yard to yard) greatly hampered productivity. The labor demarcation problem was so severe that in some yards it literally took three different workers to change a lightbulb:
…a laborer (member of the Transport and General Workers Union) [to] carry the ladder to site, a rigger (member of the Amalgamated Society of Boilermakers, Shipwrights, Blacksmiths and Structural Workers Union) [to] erect it and place it in the proper position, and an electrician (member of the Electrical Trades Union) [to] actually remove the old bulb and screw in the new one. Production was often halted while waiting for a member of the appropriate union to arrive to perform the job reserved by agreement for them. (sunset 96)
The Geddes committee further argued that none of these issues could be fixed at the scale contemporary shipbuilders were operating at, and that a prerequisite for rescuing the industry was grouping existing shipbuilders together to give them the scale needed to be internationally competitive. The report recommended consolidation, and for a comparatively small amount of government financing (37.5 million pounds in grants and loans, and another 30 million in credit guarantees) to be awarded over the next four years to shipbuilders that consolidated and met a strict set of performance targets.
The post-Geddes industry
In 1967, the Shipbuilding Inquiry Act implementing the Geddes Report’s recommendations, was passed, and over the next several years, 27 major British shipbuilders were consolidated into 12 groups (though some of these “groups” were groups of just one). As shipyards consolidated, government financing began to flow: between 1967 and 1972 almost 160 million pounds (much more than had been recommended by the Geddes Report) were provided by the government to various shipbuilders, and the shipping board made recommendations for over a billion pounds worth of bank loan guarantees for British shipowners purchasing in British yards.
None of this helped stem the decline. By 1971, the government-backed British shipyards had achieved “no gains in competitiveness, no improvement in turnover, falling profitability and cash resources [that were] becoming rapidly inadequate.” Late deliveries continued to dog the shipbuilders: from 1967 to 1971 nearly 40% of British ships were 1 month late, and nearly 10% were six months late. With fixed-cost contracts, stiff penalties for late deliveries, and rapid inflation (over 20% from 1967 to 1971), late deliveries drastically eroded profitability, and much of the government funding actually went to writing off shipbuilders’ losses. Between 1967 and 1972 three major shipbuilders — Upper Clyde Shipbuilders (a post-Geddes amalgamation of several smaller builders), Cammell Laird, and Harland and Wolff (the company that built the Titanic, once the largest shipbuilder in the world) — were rescued from bankruptcy and became owned “wholly or in part by the British government”. In the early 1970s, the shipbuilding industry performed “even below the Geddes ‘worst case scenario”.
The industry’s failure to improve seems to be partly due to a lack of urgency on the shipbuilders part. A combination of factors (British pound devaluation, unexpectedly high enthusiasm for the credit offerings for British shipowners, the Suez canal closing) created enough demand for British ships in the late 1960s that the orderbooks swelled. While these orders were a small fraction of worldwide orders, the rise in demand was sufficient to dampen the urgency for reforming shipbuilding practices. In 1972, yet another report on the British shipbuilding industry (this one produced by Booz-Allen Hamilton), was released. It found that nearly every problem listed in the Geddes report had gotten worse:
This review of the U.K. shipbuilding industry is pessimistic about the general background situation, and critical of the industry in many areas. U.K. yards generally are under-capitalized and poorly managed; the industry has a poor reputation amongst its customers, particularly for delivery and labour relations; overseas competition has moved more rapidly to modernize and re-equip its facilities and is now better placed to face the forecast surplus of capacity which will exist for the remainder of the 1970’s
Even companies that had invested in the infrastructure they needed to compete in the modern shipbuilding world found themselves struggling. Harland and Wolff, for instance, had been “reconfigured in the 1960s to build tankers of up to 1 million deadweight tons”:
…it should have thrived during the 1967-73 large tanker boom. Instead, due to the typical British shipbuilding problems of high costs, low productivity, poor labor relations, and late delivery, it lost money even with a full order book.
The problem of money-losing contracts became so severe that some British shipbuilders found themselves paying owners to cancel contracts they were unable to build profitably.
With seemingly no way of returning the industry to commercial profitability, and already operating struggling shipbuilders directly, the government moved to full nationalization. In 1974, a Labour government was elected with promises to nationalize the industry, which eventually took place in 1977. The Aircraft and Shipbuilding Industries Act of 1977 created a new company, British Shipbuilders, encompassing 97% of Britain’s commercial shipbuilding capacity.2
But even nationalization did nothing to rescue the industry. After peaking in 1975, the worldwide shipbuilding market collapsed in the wake of the 1973 energy crisis. The shipbuilding industries in countries like Japan became desperate for new orders, and recent, subsidized entrants like South Korea, Taiwan and Brazil were hungry as well. In the face of such fierce competition, the new British Shipbuilders company wilted. Despite taking virtually any order that it could get, even at loss-making prices, the UK’s shipbuilding industry continued its inexorable decline. Between 1975 and 1985, the UK’s shipbuilding output declined by nearly 90%, and its share of the world market fell from 3.6% to less than 1%. British Shipbuilders began re-privatization in 1983 with the passage of the British Shipbuilders Act, and over the next several years most of those newly privatized yards would close. In 2024, the UK produced just 0.01% of the commercial ship tonnage built worldwide that year. In 2022 and 2023, the percentage was 0.
Conclusion
In his book on the decline of the British shipbuilding industry, Edward Lorenz argues that while British shipbuilders precipitated their own decline, their decisions were essentially rational, the product of the constraints that they were operating under at the time. A production system based heavily on leveraging skilled, union-trained labor, minimizing the need for expensive infrastructure or equipment and with a minimum of management overheads helped keep British costs low; the labor force could be scaled up and down depending on demand, and workers could easily move from yard to yard as the work required. This production system worked reasonably well for decades, and only truly began to unravel after WWII, when the shipbuilding market transformed technologically and transactionally, and began demanding much larger vessels, made from welded, block-construction, sold under fixed price contracts.
While British shipbuilders could have responded by enthusiastically embracing the new methods, they had learned from a lifetime of doing business in a wildly fluctuating market that investments in expensive new shipbuilding infrastructure or high-overhead production methods were risky. Their strategy of rapidly scaling their labor force depending on day-to-day needs had bred a deep distrust between management and labor, and created a strict demarcation system that was difficult to dislodge. Decades of urban development in port cities had made physical expansion of shipyards difficult. Uncertainty about whether transformation was truly needed, and the certainty of costly disruptions should they try, resulted in British shipbuilders sticking with their existing production methods as the rest of the world passed them by.
Moreover, globally the economic pressure to shift shipbuilding towards locations with lower labor costs was immense. Sweden modernized its operations far more effectively than the UK, and was one of the most efficient, capable shipbuilding countries in the world in the post-war era, but this didn’t stop the Swedish shipbuilding industry from being hollowed out in the face of competition from Asian producers. Similarly, Japan’s skill in shipbuilding hasn’t stopped it from losing ground to China in recent years.
There’s a telling bit in a book about the nationalized British Shipbuilders company called “Crossing the Bar”. At an international shipbuilders conference in London in 1983, a UK shipbuilder asked a Korean delegate why they were keeping their prices so low. The delegate responded that they weren’t worried about UK or European competition, or even Japanese competition: they were worried about China. Several decades on, Korea is now losing ground in the shipbuilding market to China too. So, it’s not clear if a much more vigorous British shipbuilding industry would have been all that much more successful in resisting its ultimate decline.
Nevertheless, the lack of motivation (rational or otherwise) of British shipbuilders to modernize their operations certainly did not help. Perhaps they would have ultimately lost out to low-cost Korean and Japanese builders anyway, but had they shared Japan’s “burning zeal” to make their industry competitive, they might have kept the wind in their sails longer.
Harland and Wolff, despite then being owned by the British government, was left as an independent entity due to political concerns regarding Northern Ireland.
• The S&P Cotality Case-Shiller U.S. National Home Price NSA Index posted a 1.5% annual gain
for August, down from a 1.6% rise in the previous month.
• Housing wealth eroded in real terms for the fourth consecutive month, with the 1.5% national
gain falling well short of 3% inflation.
• Nineteen of 20 metros declined month-to-month in August, with only Chicago posting a gain,
signaling broad weakness beyond typical seasonal patterns.
The S&P Cotality Case-Shiller U.S. National Home Price NSA Index, covering all nine U.S. census
divisions, reported a 1.5% annual gain for August, down from a 1.6% rise in the previous month. The
10-City Composite showed an annual increase of 2.1%, down from a 2.3% increase in the previous
month. The 20-City Composite posted a year-over-year increase of 1.6%, down from a 1.8% increase
in the previous month.
New York again reported the highest annual gain among the 20 cities with a 6.1% increase in August,
followed by Chicago and Cleveland with annual increases of 5.9% and 4.7%, respectively. Tampa
posted the lowest return, falling 3.3%. ...
The pre-seasonally adjusted U.S. National, 10-City Composite, and 20-City Composite Indices
continued to report negative month-over-month change in August, posting -0.3% for U.S. national index
and -0.6% for both 10-City and 20-City Composite indices.
After seasonal adjustment, all three indices posted a month-over-month increase of 0.2%.
...
"August's data shows U.S. home prices continuing to slow, with the National Index up just 1.5% year-
over-year," said Nicholas Godec, CFA, CAIA, CIPM, Head of Fixed Income Tradables & Commodities
at S&P Dow Jones Indices. "This marks the weakest annual gain in over two years and falls well below
the 3% inflation rate. For the fourth straight month, home values have lost ground to inflation, meaning
homeowners are seeing their real wealth decline even as nominal prices inch higher.
"The National Index rose 1.5% over the past year, with most of that gain coming in the recent six
months (up 1.5%) while the prior six months were essentially flat. The 20-City Composite gained 1.6%
annually and the 10-City rose 2.1%, both continuing their deceleration from earlier in the year. emphasis added
Click on graph for larger image.
The first graph shows the nominal seasonally adjusted Composite 10, Composite 20 and National indices (the Composite 20 was started in January 2000).
The Composite 10 index was up 0.2% in August (SA). The Composite 20 index was up 0.2% (SA) in August.
The National index was up 0.2% (SA) in August.
The second graph shows the year-over-year change in all three indices.
The Composite 10 NSA was up 2.1% year-over-year. The Composite 20 NSA was up 1.6% year-over-year.
The National index NSA was up 1.5% year-over-year.
Annual price changes were below expectations. I'll have more later.
I assume I don’t have to explain last week’s Louvre jewel heist. I love a good caper, and have (like many others) eagerly followed the details. An electric ladder to a second-floor window, an angle grinder to get into the room and the display cases, security guards there more to protect patrons than valuables—seven minutes, in and out.
The Louvre, it turns out—at least certain nooks of the ancient former palace—is something like an anopticon: a place where no one is observed. The world now knows what the four thieves (two burglars and two accomplices) realized as recently as last week: The museum’s Apollo Gallery, which housed the stolen items, was monitored by a single outdoor camera angled away from its only exterior point of entry, a balcony. In other words, a free-roaming Roomba could have provided the world’s most famous museum with more information about the interior of this space. There is no surveillance footage of the break-in.
Professional jewelry thieves were not impressed with the four. Here’s Larry Lawton:
“I robbed 25, 30 jewelry stores—20 million, 18 million, something like that,” Mr. Lawton said. “Did you know that I never dropped a ring or an earring, no less, a crown worth 20 million?”
He thinks that they had a compatriot on the inside.
Museums, especially smaller ones, are good targets for theft because they rarely secure what they hold to its true value. They can’t; it would be prohibitively expensive. This makes them an attractive target.
We might find out soon. It looks like some people have been arrested
Not being out of the country—out of the EU—by now was sloppy. Leaving DNA evidence was sloppy. I can hope the criminals were sloppy enough not to have disassembled the jewelry by now, but I doubt it. They were probably taken apart within hours of the theft.
The whole thing is sad, really. Unlike stolen paintings, those jewels have no value in their original form. They need to be taken apart and sold in pieces. But then their value drops considerably—so the end result is that most of the worth of those items disappears. It would have been much better to pay the thieves not to rob the Louvre.
As I mentioned in yesterday's post, I'm working on the galleys of my forthcoming book, Moral Economics. This has reminded me of the long journey to a book title.
For one thing, the British title isn't exactly the same as the American title--they have different subtitles. British readers will have to open the book to discover that prostitution and organ sales are among the topics covered, while American readers can see this on the cover.
My original, working title was "Controversial Markets and Repugnant Transactions," based in part on my 2007 article "Repugnance as a Constraint on Markets". But I soon realized that when non-economists heard me mention that a transaction was repugnant, they thought I meant that I didn't like it and that they shouldn't either, when what I did mean was merely that some people object to it, often on moral grounds.
So for a while my working title became "Controversial Markets and Morally Contested Transactions."
That's descriptive, but clunky. So I didn't resist too much when my publisher suggested "Moral Economics," although I worried that was too cryptic, so a sub-title would be needed.
And all of this is stored in a folder with the title "Yuck" that I opened on my hard drive when I first started to think about writing a book on repugnant transactions.
Good Wall Street Journalarticle on criminal gangs that scam people out of their credit card information:
Your highway toll payment is now past due, one text warns. You have U.S. Postal Service fees to pay, another threatens. You owe the New York City Department of Finance for unpaid traffic violations.
The texts are ploys to get unsuspecting victims to fork over their credit-card details. The gangs behind the scams take advantage of this information to buy iPhones, gift cards, clothing and cosmetics.
Criminal organizations operating out of China, which investigators blame for the toll and postage messages, have used them to make more than $1 billion over the last three years, according to the Department of Homeland Security.
[…]
Making the fraud possible: an ingenious trick allowing criminals to install stolen card numbers in Google and Apple Wallets in Asia, then share the cards with the people in the U.S. making purchases half a world away.
A House of Dynamite (Netflix) is an expertly crafted political thriller about living 18 minutes from nuclear annihilation. Directed by Kathryn Bigelow, it shares thematic DNA with two of her previous films, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty. (Bigelow also directed the cult classic Point Break and the underrated Strange Days).The film tightens the tension in the first 18 minutes, releases it just enough to breathe, then resets and winds you up again—and then again. There is no climax. That frustrates some viewers, but the ending makes the point: the film is fiction but we are the ones living in a house of dynamite. Nuclear war is underrated as a problem–see previous MR posts. The film is technically and politically well researched, which is one reason the Pentagon is trying to pushback on some figures. If HOD is to be charged with a lack of realism, it’s in the competency of the within 18-minute response (although there are some excellent phone scenes.)
Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere isn’t a conventional rock biopic. It focuses on the making of Nebraska, Springsteen’s bleakest and most intimate album—a solo acoustic recorded at his home in New Jersey on a cassette. Nebraska’s songs portray not the merely unlucky, but the damned: people who drag others down with them.
I saw her standing on her front lawn
Just a-twirling her baton
Me and her went for a ride, sir
And ten innocent people died
…I can’t say that I’m sorry
For the things that we done
At least for a little while, sir
Me and her, we had us some fun
Springsteen was depressed at the time. The film has three love stories, the first and least important is between Springsteen and his then girlfriend. The second is Springsteen’s relationship with his troubled father. The third is with his manager, Jon Landau. We should all be so lucky to have someone who loves us as much as Landau loved Springsteen.
Jeremy Allen White, as Springsteen, gives a strong performance; in some shots he looks uncannily like him. He sings most of the songs himself and excels on the Nebraska material, though he can’t match Springsteen’s power and electricity on the brief E Street Band sequences. Jeremy Strong is excellent as Landau.
I liked Deliver Me from Nowhere, but it doesn’t demand a big screen, you can watch at home.
It’s not a movie, but for my money Wings for Wheels: The Making of “Born to Run”, included with the 30th-anniversary edition of BTR, remains the definitive portrait of Springsteen at work. It shows Springsteen driving the E Street Band through take after take, unrelenting and exhausting, in pursuit of the sound in his head—a great study in creative obsession. Pairs well with the very different process documented in Peter Jackson’s Get Back.
Viabundus is an online map of medieval Europe. Viabundus is a freely accessible online street map of late medieval and early modern northern Europe (1350-1650). Originally conceived as the digitisation of Friedrich Bruns and Hugo… More
I sent a shorter version of this newsletter as the last issue of the (the entire walk is) Between Two Mountains pop-up newsletter. This version is quite expanded. The archives of the B2M pop-up are available to SPECIAL PROJECTS members on the members’ site. And if you’d like to follow along in my digital footsteps, the GPX file of the walk is here.
Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) are the gold standard for evaluating the effects of interventions because they rely on simple assumptions. Their validity also depends on an implicit assumption: that the research process itself—including how participants are assigned—does not affect outcomes. In this paper, I challenge this assumption by showing that outcomes can depend on the subject’s knowledge of the study, their treatment status, and the assignment mechanism. I design a field experiment in India around a soil testing program that exogenously varies how participants are informed of their assignment. Villages are randomized into two main arms: one where treatment status is determined by a public lottery, and another by a private computerized process. My design temporally separates assignment from treatment delivery, allowing me to isolate the causal effect of the assignment process itself. I find that estimated treatment effects differ across assignment methods and that these effects emerge even before the treatment is delivered. The effects are not uniform: the control group responds more strongly to the assignment method than the treated group. These findings suggest that the choice of assignment procedure is consequential and that failing to account for it can threaten the interpretation and generalizability of standard RCT treatment effect estimates.
The Python Software Foundation was recently "recommended for funding" (NSF terminology) for a $1.5m grant from the US government National Science Foundation to help improve the security of the Python software ecosystem, after an grant application process lead by Seth Larson and Loren Crary.
The PSF's annual budget is less than $6m so this is a meaningful amount of money for the organization!
We were forced to withdraw our application and turn down the funding, thanks to new language that was added to the agreement requiring us to affirm that we "do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws."
Our legal advisors confirmed that this would not just apply to security work covered by the grant - this would apply to all of the PSF's activities.
This was not an option for us. Here's the mission of the PSF:
The mission of the Python Software Foundation is to promote, protect, and advance the Python programming language, and to support and facilitate the growth of a diverse and international community of Python programmers.
If we accepted and spent the money despite this term, there was a very real risk that the money could be clawed back later. That represents an existential risk for the foundation since we would have already spent the money!
I was one of the board members who voted to reject this funding - a unanimous but tough decision. I’m proud to serve on a board that can make difficult decisions like this.
The Cross Section is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
It was just a few months ago that Elon Musk could have reasonably been described as the most influential person in America, not just the main character on Twitter but a human daisy cutter slashing his way through the federal government. If you haven’t been paying attention to tech news, you might have missed the fact that Musk seems to be facing some rather hard times, even as he continues to insist that everything is going great and he will ascend to even greater heights before you know it.
Here’s what’s going on with him lately:
Musk is engaged in an ongoing feud with acting NASA administrator Sean Duffy over delays in SpaceX’s work for future NASA missions, which naturally Musk has made as personal and angry as possible.
Tesla’s profits dropped 37% in the third quarter of the year despite a bump in vehicle sales as consumers rushed to beat the expiration of EV tax credits.
In response to the end of the credits, Tesla unveiled slightly cheaper and slightly crappier versions of its Model Y and Model 3. Other than the spectacular failure of the Cybertruck, it hasn’t released a new model in years, which doesn’t exactly position it as a company on the bleeding edge of innovation.
Tesla’s robotaxi rollout in Austin has been underwhelming; only about 30 of the taxis are in operation, and they still have drivers in the front seat for safety. Musk says that by year’s end they will be fully autonomous, but his predictions have a way of not coming true. In any case, Tesla is way behind Waymo in this sector, suggesting that the robotaxi project will never amount to anything like what Musk has said it would.
Tesla recently rolled out “Mad Max” mode in its self-driving features, which will engage in rapid acceleration and swerving between lanes. Sounds like a great idea that couldn’t possibly have any negative consequences! Naturally, safety regulators are concerned.
Musk is trying to get Tesla shareholders to approve what would be a $1 trillion pay package, though it is highly unlikely that it will ever amount to that much, since it depends on outlandish production and sales targets.
There are still plenty of Musk fanboys out there, convinced that he is a genius of historic proportions who can do anything he sets his mind to. On the other hand, there are people who have seen his X feed and know that while he has some considerable talents, he’s also an insecure, erratic, hateful, bigoted, juvenile little man-baby who isn’t nearly as smart as he thinks he is, especially when he ventures outside his areas of actual expertise. Which is exactly what we saw when he rampaged through the government, saved almost no money for all the damage he did, and then ran away from the wreckage he had created.
Yet the meme stock keeps memeing
Back in March I wrote a post about the DOGE-driven backlash against Tesla and argued that it is basically a meme stock. To illustrate, I made a chart comparing Tesla’s price/earnings ratio to that of its peers in both the auto and tech industries. The P/E ratio compares a company’s stock price to the amount of money it’s actually making; while it isn’t a perfect measure of whether a stock is overvalued, it can be quite suggestive. If a company has a huge P/E ratio, it can mean that while it isn’t making much money now, investors foresee that it will eventually become hugely profitable. Or it can mean that the stock is just overhyped. But Tesla does make money; it’s not like it’s a brand-new company with an untested product that might just go big if everything works out. For its P/E ratio to be justified, it would have to mean that in the future its profits will rise exponentially.
But now it’s even more dramatic:
I couldn’t really make the second graph to the same scale because it would have gotten too big, but Tesla’s P/E ratio has almost tripled. Sure, it goes up and down on a day-to-day basis, but it remains clearer than ever that Tesla is a meme stock. Its price – and therefore Musk’s wealth – is based not on real value but on hype, and investors’ faith in Musk to produce spectacular future profits.
But how is Tesla going to do that? It’s hard to know where the EV market will be in 10 years, but it’s almost impossible to believe that Tesla will ever regain the dominant position it once had. There are simply too many high-quality competitors, both in the U.S. and abroad, and the company seems to have pretty much stopped innovating.
But Musk has the answer: robots! Specifically, Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robot, which is still essentially in the experimental stage. Despite the fact that there are a thousand robot companies out there, Musk talks as though before long just about everyone on Earth will have an Optimus and there will be no meaningful competition, at which point Tesla will be making trillions of dollars and all humanity’s problems will be solved. I am not exaggerating:
He’s said that Optimus will upend the job market and free humanity from the drudgery of work. (“Working will be optional, like growing your own vegetables, instead of buying them from the store,” he posted this week.) Elsewhere on the investor call Wednesday, he said that Tesla’s robots would “actually create a world where there is no poverty, where everyone has access to the finest medical care.”
Optimus, he added, “will be an incredible surgeon, and imagine if everyone had access to an incredible surgeon.” For Tesla, Optimus will be “an infinite money glitch,” Musk said, arguing that everyone will want a humanoid robot who can do their work for them.
There’s a glitch alright, but it appears to be located in Elon Musk’s brain. Even in an industry that runs on absurd predictions of the glorious future to come, this is positively deranged.
Perhaps Musk will mount a dramatic comeback and surprise us all. Perhaps his AI company, xAI, will emerge as the dominant force in that sector (assuming there’s a universal demand for a chatbot that is being shaped according to Musk’s anti-woke ideology and at one point started calling itself MechaHitler). And he is still the richest man in the world (current estimated net worth: $428 billion), thought is mostly based on the insane price of Tesla shares. Nevertheless, it isn’t hard to imagine that Musk has begun what could be a dramatic fall.
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Hurricane Melissa will make landfall in southern Jamaica less than 24 hours from now, and it is likely to be the most catastrophic storm in the Caribbean island’s history.
As it crawled across the northern Caribbean Sea on Monday morning, Melissa officially became a Category 5 hurricane with 160 mph winds, according to the National Hurricane Center.
The hurricane will likely fluctuate in intensity over the next day or so, perhaps undergoing an eyewall replacement cycle. But the background conditions, including very warm Caribbean waters and low wind shear, will support a very powerful hurricane and the potential for further strengthening.
In 1964, the Beatles were the most popular music act in the world—but who knew how long it would last? Mop-top boy bands from Liverpool might just be a passing fad, like hula hoops and lava lamps.
So the band got rejected by producer Nat Cohen when they approached him about financing a Beatles movie. He was unimpressed, and moved on to other projects (including Percy —a film about a penis transplant).
As the Romans said, there is no accounting for taste. But United Artists saved the day, agreeing to make a low-budget Beatles movie—although they did it mostly to get rights to a soundtrack album.
“What we lose on the film we’ll get back on this disc,” admitted a United Artists exec. And they planned to make this movie fast and cheap.
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The budget was just £200,000, and the filming only took seven weeks. The goal was to exploit the Beatles’ popularity while it lasted. So everything was rushed—John Lennon wrote the title song in one (hard day’s) night, and the band recorded it in just three hours (although musicologists still argue over the opening chord).
But the studio met their deadlines, starting production in March 1964 and somehow getting the movie into theaters in early July.
The response was unprecedented—so many cinemas wanted A Hard Day’s Night, that 1,600 prints were in circulation at the same time. The film generated $14 million in its initial release.
Beatles fans loved it—of course they did. But so did critics. In the Village Voice poll that year, A Hard Day’s Night finished second, only falling behind Dr. Strangelove. Time magazine later picked it as one of the 100 best films ever made.
Somehow, against all odds, these four young musicians, lacking any film experience, had managed to make one of the greatest comedies of all time.
Some critics even compared the Beatles to the Marx Brothers—one of the finest comedy ensembles in cinema history. It’s actually quite an apt comparison.
John Lennon’s demeanor and verbal humor definitely reminds me of Groucho Marx. And Ringo is a court jester in the style of Harpo Marx. Paul and George both show a knack for deadpan humor. You can call it a cross between Chico and Zeppo Marx.
You can’t deny it—in aggregate, they are a stunningly good comedy team. And they were all amateurs.
When they turned Elvis into a film star, they cast him as a romantic lead in a war movie. When Frank Sinatra finally established himself as a legit movie star, it was in another war movie. In many other films of that era, musicians had almost no acting responsibilities in the their movie appearances—they just got a few minutes on screen to perform a song.
But the Beatles aimed much higher—even on their tight budget and production deadline. They not only went for laughs, but did so in their own mordant postmodern way. At some moments, you might be fooled into thinking that Beckett or Ionesco had written some of their lines.
So give director Richard Lester and screenwriter Alun Owen credit for seeing comedic potential in these four musicians. But you also need to give the Beatles credit—because they chose Lester and Owen.
Lester had deep roots in comedy and music. He had worked with Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan on three TV series in the 1950s. But John Lennon had been especially impressed by Lester’s The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film, an Oscar-nominated short movie that the director had made for just seventy pounds—filming it over the course of two Sundays in 1959.
It’s a shame that Lester only had the chance to make two Beatles movies—A Hard Day’s Night (1964) and the followup Help! (1965). The band had too many other opportunities and commitments. And filmmaking was tough—especially the more tightly scripted Help!
John Lennon later recalled:
I realize, looking back, how advanced it was. It was a precursor to the Batman “Pow! Wow!” on TV – that kind of stuff. But [Lester] never explained it to us. Partly, maybe, because we hadn’t spent a lot of time together between A Hard Day’s Night and Help!, and partly because we were smoking marijuana for breakfast during that period. Nobody could communicate with us.
But even if the Beatles walked away from this opportunity, others rushed in to take their place. In 1966, The Monkees TV series followed an almost identical formula—mixing Beatles-esque pop with madcap humor. The Batman series from that same year was even more popular, turning the classic superhero story into campy and surreal comedy, where even fight scenes were played for laughs.
But the most lasting impact of the Lester/Beatles collaboration can be seen in the later rise of the music video as a quasi-narrative way for launching pop songs. In the early 1960s, filmed musical performances were on TV every night, but nobody was doing it like Richard Lester and his four young collaborators.
There are so many lovely touches in these films. I especially like the Beatles’ apartment in Help!—which is like a cross between an out-of-control mancave and Pee-wee’s Playhouse. Or the scene in the Indian restaurant where the house band plays a Hindustani version of “A Hard Day’s Night” in the background. And, of course, the recurring chase scenes, which capture a sweet slapstick craziness.
The screaming female fans who constantly chase the lads from Liverpool is straight out of Buster Keaton’s Seven Chances from 1925. But when the Beatles aren’t running away from ladies, they are pursued by police or sacrificial cults. Sometimes it seems like half of the running time of these films is actual running.
The Beatles were a natural at all this. So even if they stopped making comedy films with Lester, they never abandoned comedy. Lester did manage to convince John Lennon to join the cast of How I Won the War (1967), where a Beatle (finally!) plays a soldier, but radiating lots of dark humor in a Catch 22 kind of way.
But this would be Lennon’s only appearance in a non-musical film. In the future, he would save his Groucho Marx-style ironic quips for TV interviews and song lyrics.
Ringo, a natural comedian, had the most ambitious career in films, even while still a member of the Beatles. He appears in Candy (1968) and The Magic Christian (1969)—both based on campy Terry Southern novels. The latter was filmed in the same studio where the Let It Be project started—and almost at the same moment.
He occasionally got drawn back into film projects (perhaps most notably as narrator for Thomas the Tank Engine). But he never really took the plunge into a full blown movie career, and I’m left disappointed that he didn’t do more on screen.
The Beatles, as an ensemble, also leave me wanting more from their comedic talents. But, to their credit, they still retained their sense of humor, even after ending their partnership with Lester. It shows up in their animated feature Yellow Submarine (1968), their TV film Magical Mystery Tour (1967), and even in the film footage for Let It Be, from the very end of their collaborative career.
When almost eight hours of that material finally got released in 2021 as The Beatles: Get Back, the public could see how playful and comic these musicians were right before their breakup. They spend hours clowning around, making faces, doing parodies, and goofing off.
Sometimes this showed up in their songs. But a lot of it happened in-between takes and during rehearsals. I can’t help concluding that each of these four music superstars had an alter ego comedian inside just waiting for a chance to come out.
In a final epilogue, George Harrison struck up a friendship with comedian Eric Idle, who convinced the former Beatle to finance the Monty Python film Life of Brian, after EMI backed out. Harrison wrote a check for three million pounds—allegedly because he wanted to see the movie. John Cleese later joked that Harrison purchased the most expensive movie ticket of all time.
But it proved to be a shrewd investment. The film made $20 million at the box office. But Harrison also got a cameo appearance.
Those few seconds in front of the camera are almost a symbolic statement of the Beatles’ elusive relationship with the comedy world. Those lads had such talent—and not just as musicians. And for a while it seemed like they would be joking with us forever.
But it was gone in a flash, a historic movie career squeezed into just a few hectic months. You can see both A Hard Day’s Night and Help! in three hours. If you haven’t done so, find a way to do it. It’s time well spent from your hard day (or night).
Too much personal stuff going on for a full post today, and also suffering from absurdity overload. Hard to top this:
But I thought I’d take a few minutes to weigh in on one piece of the absurdity: Donald Trump’s hysterical reaction to an ad run by the Canadian province of Ontario that featured audio of Ronald Reagan denouncing tariffs and extolling free trade.
I suspect that the ad especially enraged Trump because it featured Reagan, still the Republican lodestar, making a serious, reasoned case for why tariffs are generally bad for the country. In the ad, Reagan sounded presidential and trustworthy, a sure reminder of how far the Republican party has sunk while in the grip of a grandiose, snarling, whining toddler.
So Trump claimed that the ad was “FAKE” and that Reagan “LOVED tariffs.” Actually, the ad accurately conveyed the sense of Reagan’s remarks — and no, Reagan didn’t love tariffs.
It’s straightforward to go through the historical record to discover Reagan’s actual position on trade. As the Financial Times puts it, Reagan “was a devout champion of open trade who used tariffs sparingly and reluctantly.”
I can also attest personally to the reality of Reagan’s tariff policies because I served a year in the Reagan administration, as a sub-political, technocratic staffer working on international policy at the Council of Economic Advisers:
Reagan did, in fact, repeatedly emphasize the virtues of free trade. Like all modern presidents, he nonetheless imposed some tariffs for political reasons. But Reagan always stayed within the boundaries of the law, using his right to impose discretionary tariffs as pressure release valves rather than abusing his authority to make tariff policy an instrument of his personal whims.
Now, Reagan did many things that, I believe, harmed America. Indeed, I would argue that his tax cuts, deregulation and anti-union policies, as well as his exploitation of racial tensions, were critical in laying the foundation for the plutocracy that is now destroying our democracy. But one thing that was clear to me while working within the Reagan administration was that Reagan and his people — totally unlike Trump — took their promises to other countries seriously. If a proposed policy was in clear violation of our international agreements, it was simply out of bounds.
By contrast, as far as I can tell everything that Trump has done on tariffs involves breaking solemn, supposedly binding past pledges to other nations and expecting those countries to meekly go along.
I never met Reagan. But I was close enough to witness how the tariff policy sausage was made during his administration, and it was nothing like the lawless chaos that rules under Trump.
Claude doesn't make me much faster on the work that I am an expert on. Maybe 15-20% depending on the day.
It's the work that I don't know how to do and would have to research. Or the grunge work I don't even want to do. On this it is hard to even put a number on. Many of the projects I do with Claude day to day I just wouldn't have done at all pre-Claude.
And in this system, where is the dominant American sphere of influence likely to be? North America and Latin America. These regions are removed from the rest of the world by large oceans; they share time zones; and there are plenty of Latin Americans in the United States, creating linguistic, personal, and business ties. America’s connections with Canada are even more obvious. China may buy lots of commodities from Latin American countries, but it is unlikely ever to have comparably close connections, if only for reasons of language, distance, and culture.
And this:
Let’s start with Argentina. Milei is trying to bring freer markets and fiscal responsibility to Argentina. If he succeeds, many in the region will copy his formulas. But if he fails, free markets might end up discredited. So, in the Trumpian view, it is very important to throw him a lifeline. Trump sees the United States’ $20 billion economic support package to Argentina not just as a “bailout,” but as an attempt to shape the entire ideological direction of South America.
Mortgage rates fell to the lowest levels in a month last Tuesday and barely budged through the rest of the week. Now, at the start of the new week, the average lender is perfectly unchanged from last Friday. This means there are only a small handful of days with meaningfully lower rates going all the way back to late 2022.
As the government shutdown continues, the bond market (which dictates rates) continues missing out on the bulk of relevant economic reports that normally help guide momentum throughout the month. [30 year fixed 6.19%] emphasis added
Tuesday (RED will not be released due to government shutdown):
• At 9:00 AM ET, S&P/Case-Shiller House Price Index for August. The consensus is for the National index to be up 1.9% year-over-year.
• Also at 9:00 AM, FHFA House Price Index for August. This was originally a GSE only repeat sales, however there is also an expanded index.
• At 10:00 AM, The Q3 Housing Vacancies and Homeownership report from the Census Bureau.
• Also at 10:00 AM, Richmond Fed Survey of Manufacturing Activity for October. This is the last regional Fed survey for October.
Up, and after giving order to the plasterer now to set upon the finishing of my house, then by water to wait upon the Duke, and walking in the matted Gallery, by and by comes Mr. Coventry and Sir John Minnes, and then to the Duke, and after he was ready, to his closet, where I did give him my usual account of matters, and afterwards, upon Sir J. Minnes’ desire to have one to assist him in his employment, Sir W. Pen is appointed to be his, and Mr. Pett to be the Surveyor’s assistant. Mr. Coventry did desire to be excused, and so I hope (at least it is my present opinion) to have none joined with me, but only Mr. Coventry do desire that I would find work for one of his clerks, which I did not deny, but however I will think of it, whether without prejudice to mine I can do it.
Thence to my Lord Sandwich, who now-a-days calls me into his chamber, and alone did discourse with me about the jealousy that the Court have of people’s rising; wherein he do much dislike my Lord Monk’s being so eager against a company of poor wretches, dragging them up and down the street; but would have him rather to take some of the greatest ringleaders of them, and punish them; whereas this do but tell the world the King’s fears and doubts. For Dunkirk; he wonders any wise people should be so troubled thereat, and scorns all their talk against it, for that he says it was not Dunkirk, but the other places, that did and would annoy us, though we had that, as much as if we had it not. He also took notice of the new Ministers of State, Sir H. Bennet and Sir Charles Barkeley, their bringing in, and the high game that my Lady Castlemaine plays at Court (which I took occasion to mention as that that the people do take great notice of), all which he confessed. Afterwards he told me of poor Mr. Spong, that being with other people examined before the King and Council (they being laid up as suspected persons; and it seems Spong is so far thought guilty as that they intend to pitch upon him to put to the wracke or some other torture), he do take knowledge of my Lord Sandwich, and said that he was well known to Mr. Pepys. But my Lord knows, and I told him, that it was only in matter of musique and pipes, but that I thought him to be a very innocent fellow; and indeed I am very sorry for him. After my Lord and I had done in private, we went out, and with Captain Cuttance and Bunn did look over their draught of a bridge for Tangier, which will be brought by my desire to our office by them to-morrow.
Thence to Westminster Hall, and there walked long with Mr. Creed, and then to the great half-a-crown ordinary, at the King’s Head, near Charing Cross, where we had a most excellent neat dinner and very high company, and in a noble manner.
He told me what great faction there is at Court; and above all, what is whispered, that young Crofts is lawful son to the King, the King being married to his mother. How true this is, God knows; but I believe the Duke of York will not be fooled in this of three crowns.
Thence to White Hall, and walked long in the galleries till (as they are commanded to all strange persons), one come to tell us, we not being known, and being observed to walk there four or five hours (which was not true, unless they count my walking there in the morning), he was commanded to ask who we were; which being told, he excused his question, and was satisfied. These things speak great fear and jealousys. Here we staid some time, thinking to stay out the play before the King to-night, but it being “The Villaine,” and my wife not being there, I had no mind.
So walk to the Exchange, and there took many turns with him; among other things, observing one very pretty Exchange lass, with her face full of black patches, which was a strange sight. So bid him good-night and away by coach to Mr. Moore, with whom I staid an hour, and found him pretty well and intends to go abroad tomorrow, and so it raining hard by coach home, and having visited both SirWilliams, who are both sick, but like to be well again, I to my office, and there did some business, and so home and to bed.
At Sir W. Batten’s I met with Mr. Mills, who tells me that he could get nothing out of the maid hard by (that did poyson herself) before she died, but that she did it because she did not like herself, nor had not liked herself, nor anything she did a great while. It seems she was well-favoured enough, but crooked, and this was all she could be got to say, which is very strange.
Australian company HEO has imaged and modeled a mystery Chinese satellite prior to its reentry into Earth’s atmosphere, revealing previously unknown details about the spacecraft.
The defense and intelligence community is entering a new era of autonomy, one defined by AI-driven workflows that are reshaping how we handle geospatial intelligence (GEOINT). Agents are beginning to […]
SAN FRANCISCO — Voyager Technologies announced the acquisition Oct. 27 of propulsion-system developer ExoTerra Resource. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. “We’re amplifying our collective mission capability with ExoTerra, accelerating delivery across defense and commercial markets,” Dylan Taylor, Voyager chairman and CEO, said in a statement. “As freedom of maneuver becomes central to space […]
Networking specialist MTN has launched a service that enables SpaceX’s Starlink LEO satellites to operate as part of a privately secured communications system, giving businesses a way to link remote sites without using the public internet.
When America embarked on the journey to build the Arsenal of Democracy in World War II, President Roosevelt had a simple instruction: “speed, speed, speed.” His emphasis on speed spurred on the production of lethal, mass-producible American warplanes that enabled the United States to win WWII. Some 80 years later, the urgency for speed is […]
Iridium Communications plans to release a tiny chip next year to protect devices relying on navigation satellites from jamming and spoofing, reinforcing one of the L-band operator’s core strengths as SpaceX’s Starlink encroaches on other parts of its business.
Mark Gurman, in his weekly paywalled Power On column for Bloomberg:
I reported a few years ago that Apple was working to bring
more advertising to iOS. Well, now that effort is gaining traction — with a plan to start the ads as early as next year. The company
is focusing on Apple Maps, which will allow restaurants and other
businesses to pay to have their details featured more prominently
within the app’s searches.
The concept is quite similar to Search Ads inside of the App
Store, where developers can pay for their software to appear in a
promoted slot based on user queries. I’m told the Maps version
will have a better interface than what Google and other companies
offer inside of mapping services. The Apple approach also will
leverage AI to ensure that results are relevant and useful.
The big risk Apple faces here is a potential consumer backlash.
I don’t love the ads in the App Store, but I don’t hate them. They’re restrained, and clearly labeled. I do, however, despise the ads in Apple News. They’re low-quality, distracting, highly repetitive, and appear far too frequently within articles.
At no point did it supplant iMovie for iOS as the fun, easy-breezy
video editor, which is also in a similarly stagnant state. The
only updates iMovie has received in the past year were onboarding
screens for permissions settings.
Why is it that Apple can make what is widely regarded as the best
video recording experience on any smartphone, but it can’t make a
good video editor for a smartphone? Is it partly because these
apps don’t have direct payments, so they can only ever be demos
for hardware and services that do earn money?
Rosensteel is concerned about the radio silence from Apple regarding Pixelmator and Photomator, the apps (and team) that Apple acquired a year ago:
Of course, Apple may be assembling its own mirror of the Adobe
Creative Cloud suite so that it can charge one bundle price for
access to a suite of pro apps, and maybe that’s why pricing for
everything is frozen in place, and the iPad Pro apps aren’t in
step with the Mac ones.
That’s what I hope: that Apple is somewhere near the cusp of announcing some sort of “pro apps” subscription.
Dian Zhang and Ignacio Calderon, reporting for USA Today:
Even before Terry Rozier dropped out of the 2023 NBA game in which
he’s accused of rigging his statistics, computers at an “integrity
monitor” firm flagged a flood of bets that did not match a
mathematical model of how this game should go. The company, now
called IC360, alerted the NBA and sportsbooks about the unusual
bets coming in on Rozier’s performance.
The investigation that led to the arrest of the Miami Heat point
guard and dozens of others for illegal gambling started with math.
It ended Oct. 23 with Rozier charged with manipulating his
performance in that 2023 game so that gamblers in the know could
win tens of thousands of dollars.
Beep. Boop. Busted.
Federal authorities allege more than $200,000 poured in
betting that Rozier would turn in a below-average performance in
that game after Rozier told another defendant he would drop out of
the game early with an injury. Rozier played 9 minutes, 34 seconds
for the Charlotte Hornets in the game against the New Orleans
Pelicans before leaving with an injury and finished under his
usual totals for points, assists and 3-pointers.
A lot of these stories about cheating on sports betting involve characters who aren’t exactly the sharpest tools in the shed. Makes me wonder how many inside-info cheaters are getting away with it, because they’re not doing anything conspicuous like placing very large wagers on very obscure games or prop bets.
Adobe Design profiles Adobe’s new Premiere app for iOS, and interviews Christopher Azar, group design manager for Adobe Video, regarding the thinking behind the app and its design:
What was the primary goal when you set out to design Premiere
on iOS?
Christopher Azar: Our goal was to design a professional-grade
product that carried the powerful, precise spirit of Premiere
while feeling modern, approachable, and even fun. We call our
vision “intuitive precision”: a high-performance, intelligent tool
powered by cutting-edge AI that enables creators to work how and
where they want — in the field, experimenting, and honing their
storytelling craft.
That meant making this editing power available to a broader
creative community. Desktop software has traditionally been built
for professionals with large budgets. Our goal was not only to
make a professional tool easier to use, but to make it available
to more people than ever before. I would have wanted to use this
app when I was coming up as a creative, so I’m excited we’re
providing high-quality software for everyone who wants it — without a big investment in time or money.
It really does seem like a breakthrough app for the platform. An Android version is in the works, Adobe says, but for now, Premiere is an iOS exclusive. Kind of weird that Apple itself makes Final Cut Pro for both the Mac and iPad, but still hasn’t made a serious video editing app for the iPhone.
Total new-vehicle sales for October 2025, including retail and non-retail transactions, are projected to reach 1,249,800, a 6.9% decrease year-over-year, according to a joint forecast from J.D. Power and GlobalData. October 2025 has 27 selling days, the same as October 2024.
The seasonally adjusted annualized rate (SAAR) for total new-vehicle sales is expected to be 15.1 million units, down 1.1 million units from October 2024.
...
Thomas King, president of the data and analytics division at J.D. Power:
“October’s results reflect a notable, but expected decline in the new-vehicle sales pace, due almost entirely to sales of electric vehicles.
“The expiration of federal EV credits on Sept. 30 caused EV shoppers to pull ahead their purchases, driving a significant increase in EV sales and inflating the overall industry sales pace. In September, EVs accounted for 12.9% of new-vehicle retail sales, the highest ever, and well above the 8.5% recorded a year earlier. Now that the federal EV credit has expired, the industry is dealing with the consequences of those accelerated purchases. In October, EVs represent just 5.2% of new-vehicle retail sales. On a volume basis, EVs account for 1.0 million of the 1.2 million-unit decline in the industry sales pace compared with a month ago.
emphasis added
US light vehicle sales are forecast to decline 3.6% year-over-year in October, only the second downturn this year. However, downturns are forecast to continue due to lean inventory, a rising mix of higher priced vehicles, and the end of the EV credit.
Click on graph for larger image.
This graph shows actual sales from the BEA (Blue), and J.D. Power's forecast for October (Red).
On a seasonally adjusted annual rate basis, the J.D. Power forecast of 15.1 million SAAR would be down 7.9% from last month, and down 6.3% from a year ago.
All of Q4 will likely be difficult for vehicle sales.
In the last couple of weeks, the questions about Jews, Israel and Zohran Mamdani have rushed back into the news. It began with a dramatic speech from the pulpit from the rabbi of a prominent New York City synagogue, Elliot Cosgrove, and its been kept in the news by a public letter signed by 600 or so rabbis and cantors. I don’t know how much this has broken through into the mainstream press but it’s been on a loud speaker in Jewish communal publications. Cosgrove began his speech (you can call it a sermon if you want) saying he believes “Zohran Mamdani poses a danger to the security of the New York Jewish community” and a “danger to the Jewish body politic of New York City.” The public letter hit similar points and is generally the same message.
I don’t have anything unique or new to add but since I’ve written here and there over the last two years about Israel and Jews and Gaza, as well as once or twice about Mamdani, I thought I should share my opinion. More specifically, a growing number of TPM Readers have asked me to address these accusations, either from the perspective of agreeing with them or wanting me to denounce them.
So with that introduction out of the way, these claims not only strike me as wrong but as borderline absurd. Like absurd as in, What the fuck are we talking about? absurd. And I say this notwithstanding the fact that I disagree with Mamdani on numerous points tied to Zionism and Israel.
He claims that what happened in Gaza is a genocide. He has strong ties to Jewish Voices for Peace, a group whose leadership espouses and endorses many things I find beyond the pale. JVP is quite different from pro-peace groups like If Not Now and JStreet, both of which I’ve supported and in one case had a very small role in advising and helping in the past. In general I don’t think Mamdani sees the totality of Jewish history and how it intersects with Zionism.
But none of that is what this election is about or what governing New York City is about.
More importantly, none of this changes the fact that I have watched Mamdani closely over many months and I see zero evidence that he holds any animus toward Jews or is antisemitic in any way. I never thought he had any such hostility. And everything I’ve seen since the spring has deepened that conviction. I think he is committed to combating the very real upsurge of antisemitism in this country, which is caused by the twin forces of Trumpite radicalism and the more extreme/radical factions of the pro-Palestinian politics in the U.S. Of course that applies specifically to New York City with a program he’s laid out and discussed at great length. Viktor Kovner, a member of the JStreet board of directors, sets out his argument along these same lines in The Forward in a way that is more grounded and knowledgable than I’m able to present (“Jews are worried about Zohran Mamdani. Here’s why they shouldn’t be.”) I recommend it.
On the actual substance of Mamdani’s campaign, which has virtually nothing to do with the Middle East but is focused on cost of living in the city, I don’t know how much of it he will be able to achieve. But to the extent I have any doubts about the feasibility of specific policy ideas, what the times call for is experimentation. The situation the country is in is sufficiently dire that if you’re not trying out some new ideas that might not pan out, you’re not being creative enough, you’re not searching hard enough for the game-changing reformism of the future. If you can’t experiment with new policy ideas at the municipal level, where possibly can you?
I see a lot of lo-fi opposition to Mamdani saying things like, Well, his ideas sound great but where will he get the money? Or, It can’t possibly work! But there’s almost never any policy explanation for why this is the case. You could very easily make all public transportation in the city free if you wanted to. Just fund it out of general revenue. There’s nothing complicated about that. It’s just a policy decision. If states are meant to be the laboratories of democracy, cities should be its DIY workshops. We must experiment boldly and with an open and not an ideologically hidebound mind because public confidence in the power of government to positively affect society is at an all-time low and all the most important metrics of civic well being are going in the wrong direction.
Considering my own thoughts, I’m probably more pumped about Mamdani and his candidacy than this post suggests. I see his campaign videos. I like him. I want him to succeed. I gave a decent amount of focus here to my real disagreements with him first just because that’s the truth but even more because I want to be clear that I find these accusations wrong and borderline absurd even with these very real disagreements.
I would be remiss if I didn’t make one final point. The principle danger faced by Jews both in the U.S. generally and in New York City specifically is the imposition of fascist autocracy from the White House. Set aside whatever you think about Andrew Cuomo as governor during COVID or accusations of sexual harassment against him. In his effort to make inroads against Mamdani, Cuomo has increasingly allied himself with the MAGA movement and a president who is itching to unleash his lawless paramilitaries on the city. Trump is treating blue states and cities as conquered territory and trying to steal the republican self-government the federal Constitution guarantees them. That is the threat. And even if what I discussed above were a closer call (it’s really not), that would settle the question.
Apple abused its dominant position by charging app developers
unfair commissions, a London tribunal ruled on Thursday, in a blow
which could leave the U.S. tech company on the hook for hundreds
of millions of pounds in damages. The Competition Appeal Tribunal
(CAT) ruled against Apple after a trial of the lawsuit, which was
brought on behalf of millions of iPhone and iPad users in the
United Kingdom.
The CAT ruled that Apple had abused its dominant position from
October 2015 until the end of 2020 by shutting out competition in
the app distribution market and by “charging excessive and unfair
prices” as commission to developers. [...] The case had been
valued at around 1.5 billion pounds ($2 billion) by those who
brought it. A hearing next month will decide how damages are
calculated and Apple’s application for permission to appeal.
Dan Moren and I discussed this at some length in the new episode of The Talk Show that dropped over the weekend. What makes this ruling interesting isn’t that it’s particularly significant or different from other regulatory/antitrust investigations around the world. It’s the fact that it’s completely in line with other regulatory/antitrust investigations regarding the App Store (and Play Store) from around the world.
When is the last time an investigation regarding the legality of the App Store’s dominant market position went in Apple’s favor, in any country? I can’t recall one. Apple is clearly fighting a losing battle here. Whether Apple ought to be losing all these legal and regulatory battles regarding the App Store is, from a strategic standpoint, almost irrelevant. The obvious fact is, they are losing them.
Apple has approached all this regulatory conflict from a perspective that they’re right, and the regulators are wrong. That the App Store, as Apple wants it, is (a) good for users, (b) fair to developers, and (c) competitive, not anti-competitive, legally. But even if Apple is correct about that, at some point, after being handed loss after loss in rulings from courts and regulatory bodies around the globe, shouldn’t they change their strategy and start trying to offer their own concessions, rather than wait for bureaucrat-designed concessions to be forced upon them?
However Apple thinks all of this should work out is not the way it is working out. The best time to adjust the rules of the App Store — its exclusivity on app distribution for the entire iOS platform, the exclusivity of Apple’s IAP for purchasing digital content, the commission percentage splits on IAP — was over a decade ago. The next best time to make those adjustments is now.
Apple might be preparing iPad apps for Pixelmator Pro, Compressor,
Motion, and MainStage, according to new App Store IDs uncovered by
MacRumors contributor Aaron Perris. All four of the apps are
currently available on the Mac only. A quick overview of each app:
Passed along to me by the excellent Gonzalo Schwarz, I will not double indent:
“Against all odds, Javier Milei achieved a major national victory, surpassing the expectations of polls that had predicted a technical tie, and doing so in a context where markets were deeply pessimistic and heavily dollarized.
Despite having most of the media against him, the president obtained a resounding 41% of the vote, compared with 24% for Kirchnerism and 9% for the more moderate Peronists.
In total, 75% of Argentines rejected a return to populism and endorsed the path of structural reforms and economic openness.This result anticipates a day of strong market recovery: Argentine bonds and stocks are expected to rise sharply, interest rates in pesos to fall, and the dollar to drop significantly on Monday. The outlook points toward an economic recovery.
Even the U.S. Treasury—which invested in peso-denominated instruments under the management of Scott Bessent—will likely make a profit, as the appreciation of the peso will increase the value of those assets.
The message from the ballot box is clear: Argentines support a president who aims to move toward a modern capitalist economy, with the goal of placing the country among those with the highest levels of economic freedom in the world.
Election Results
• La Libertad Avanza swept the country with 40.7% of the vote, compared with 32% for Fuerza Patria (the Kirchnerist coalition), 7.1% for Provincias Unidas—which failed to win in any district—and 4.6% for the six local ruling parties.
• Milei gained 10 points compared with 2023 (when he obtained 30%), while Kirchnerism fell from 36% to 24%.
• LLA won in 16 districts, standing out in Buenos Aires City (Senate) and Mendoza with more than 50%, in Santa Fe and Córdoba with over 40%, and especially in Buenos Aires Province, where Santilli overturned a 13-point deficit from the September 7 election and won with 41.5%.
• Voters also reaffirmed the strategic alliance with the United States, which is now the most explicit in recent history.
• Unlike what happened in 2017 with Macri—when a similar victory was quickly followed by a loss of support—this time the outlook suggests a sustained economic recovery, driven by lower interest rates and accelerated investment.
New Balance of Power in Congress
• In the Chamber of Deputies (house of representatives), the LLA + PRO alliance becomes the largest bloc with 110 seats, followed by Fuerza Patria (the Kirchnerist coalition) + the Left with 100 and the dialogist bloc with 47.
The government will need to negotiate with 19 of the 47 dialogists to pass legislation (127 votes for a simple majority), but it already holds a guaranteed veto power with 85 deputies.
• In the Senate, Fuerza Patria (the Kirchnerist coalition) remains the largest minority, though it loses 7 seats and drops to 26; LLA and PRO reach 24 senators, obtaining the one-third threshold needed to block initiatives.
The dialogists, with 22 seats, retain negotiating power: the government must reach agreements with 13 senators for a quorum and 12 for a simple majority.
Outlook and Political Message
Milei’s post-victory speech was conciliatory and strategic.
He renewed his call for governors and rational political forces to discuss a package of key structural reforms—labor, pension, and tax—and invited them to revive the May Pact as a meeting point for a new institutional contract.
La Libertad Avanza thus emerges stronger than ever, positioned to build the majorities needed to advance the comprehensive modernization of the state and the economy, consolidating a new stage of growth, stability, and individual freedom.”
3. Chris Ferguson on the latest cellphone ban study: “No, the effect size is near zero. Unpublished study, not peer reviewed. And it conflicts with NAEP data which shows a Florida state-wide decline in standardized scores after implementing cellphone bans. It’s also not a “causal” study…there’s no control group.”
After the National Association of Realtors® (NAR) releases the monthly existing home sales report, I pick up additional local market data that is reported after the NAR. This is the final look at local markets in September.
There were several key stories for September:
• Sales NSA are down 0.2% YoY through September, and sales in 2024 were the lowest since 1995!
• Sales SAAR (seasonally adjusted annual rate) have bounced around 4 million for almost 3 years.
• Months-of-supply is above pre-pandemic levels (this is the highest level for the month of September since 2015).
• The median price is up 2.1% YoY, and with the increases in inventory, some regional areas will see further price declines - and we might see national price declines later this year or in 2026.
Sales at 4.06 million on a Seasonally Adjusted Annual Rate (SAAR) basis were at the consensus estimate.
Sales averaged close to 5.32 million SAAR for the month of September in the 2017-2019 period. So, sales are about 24% below pre-pandemic levels.
... In September, sales in these markets were up 7.8% YoY. The NAR reported sales NSA were up 8.2% year-over-year in September (close).
Important: There were one more working days in September 2025 (21) as in September 2024 (20). So, the year-over-year change in the headline SA data was lower than the NSA data suggested (there are other seasonal factors).
...
More local data coming in November for activity in October!
also available to preorder at other fine bookstores. (I'll be happy to autograph pre-orders that are mailed to me, btw...)
"A Nobel Prize–winning economist shows us why we have to deal in trade-offs when we can’t agree on what’s right and what’s wrong
"Some of the most intractable controversies in our divided society are, at bottom, about what actions and transactions should be banned. Should women and couples be able to purchase contraception, access in vitro fertilization, and end pregnancy by obtaining an abortion? Should people be able to buy marijuana? What about fentanyl? Can someone be paid to donate blood plasma, or a kidney?
"Disagreements are fierce because arguments on both sides are often made in uncompromising moral or religious terms. But in Moral Economics, Nobel Prize–winning economist Alvin E. Roth asserts that we can make progress on these and other difficult topics if we view them as markets—tools to help decide who gets what—and understand how those markets can be fine-tuned to be more functional. Markets don’t have to allow everything or ban everything. Prudent market design can find a balance between preserving people’s rights to pursue their own interests and protecting the most vulnerable from harm.
"Combining Roth’s unparalleled expertise as market design pioneer with his incisive, witty accounts of complicated issues, Moral Economics offers a powerful and innovative new framework for resolving today’s hardest controversies. "
Altos reports that active single-family inventory was up 1.0% week-over-week. Inventory usually starts to decline in the fall and then declines sharply during the holiday season.
The first graph shows the seasonal pattern for active single-family inventory since 2015.
Click on graph for larger image.
The red line is for 2025. The black line is for 2019.
Inventory was up 17.9% compared to the same week in 2024 (last week it was up 16.2%), and down 6.5% compared to the same week in 2019 (last week it was down 8.1%).
Inventory started 2025 down 22% compared to 2019. Inventory has closed more most of that gap, but it appears inventory will still be below 2019 levels at the end of 2025.
This second inventory graph is courtesy of Altos Research.
As of October 24th, inventory was at 868 thousand (7-day average), compared to 859 thousand the prior week. This is a new high for 2025!
The False Claims Act lets whistleblowers sue private firms on behalf of the federal government. In exchange for uncovering fraud and bringing the case, whistleblowers can receive up to 30% of any recovered funds. My work on bounty hunters made me appreciate the idea of private incentives in the service of public goals but a recent paper by Jetson Leder-Luis quantifies the value of the False Claims Act.
Leder-Luis looks at Medicare fraud. Because the government depends heavily on medical providers to accurately report the services they deliver, Medicare is vulnerable to misbilling. It helps, therefore, to have an insider willing to spill the beans. Moreover, the amounts involved are very large giving whistleblowers strong incentives. One notable case, for example, involved manipulating cost reports in order to receive extra payments for “outliers,” unusually expensive patients.
On November 4, 2002, Tenet Healthcare, a large investor-owned hospital company, was sued under the False Claims Act for manipulating its cost reports in order to illicitly receive additional outlier payments. This lawsuit was settled in June 2006, with Tenet paying $788 million to resolve these allegations without admission of guilt.
The savings from the defendants alone were significant but Leder-Luis looks for the deterrent effect—the reduction in fraud beyond the firms directly penalized. He finds that after the Tenet case, outlier payments fell sharply relative to comparable categories, even at hospitals that were never sued.
Tenet settled the outlier case for $788 million, but outlier payments were around $500 million per month at the time of the lawsuit and declined by more than half following litigation. This indicates that outlier payment manipulation was widespread… for controls, I consider the other broad types of payments made by Medicare that are of comparable scale, including durable medical equipment, home health care, hospice care, nursing care, and disproportionate share payments for hospitals that serve many low-income patients.
…the five-year discounted deterrence measurement for the outlier payments computed is $17.46 billion, which is roughly nineten times the total settlement value of the outlier whistleblowing lawsuits of $923 million.
[Overall]…I analyze four case studies for which whistleblowers recovered $1.9 billion in federal funds. I estimate that these lawsuits generated $18.9 billion in specific deterrence effects. In contrast, public costs for all lawsuits filed in 2018 amounted to less than $108.5 million, and total whistleblower payouts for all cases since 1986 have totaled $4.29 billion. Just the few large whistleblowing cases I analyze have more than paid for the public costs of the entire whistleblowing program over its life span, indicating a very high return on investment to the FCA.
As an aside, Leder-Luis uses synthetic control but allows the controls to come from different time periods. I’m less enthused by the method because it introduces another free parameter but given the large gains at small cost from the False Claims Act, I don’t doubt the conclusion:
The results of this analysis suggest that privatization is a highly effective way to combat fraud. Whistleblowing and private enforcement have strong deterrence effects and relatively low costs, overcoming the limited incentives for government-conducted antifraud enforcement. A major benefit of the False Claims Act is not just the information provided by the whistleblower but also the profit motive it provides for whistleblowers to root out fraud.
Mother Jones has a long article on surveillance arms manufacturers, their wares, and how they avoid export control laws:
Operating from their base in Jakarta, where permissive export laws have allowed their surveillance business to flourish, First Wap’s European founders and executives have quietly built a phone-tracking empire, with a footprint extending from the Vatican to the Middle East to Silicon Valley.
It calls its proprietary system Altamides, which it describes in promotional materials as “a unified platform to covertly locate the whereabouts of single or multiple suspects in real-time, to detect movement patterns, and to detect whether suspects are in close vicinity with each other.”
Altamides leaves no trace on the phones it targets, unlike spyware such as Pegasus. Nor does it require a target to click on a malicious link or show any of the telltale signs (such as overheating or a short battery life) of remote monitoring.
Its secret is shrewd use of the antiquated telecom language Signaling System No. 7, known as SS7, that phone carriers use to route calls and text messages. Any entity with SS7 access can send queries requesting information about which cell tower a phone subscriber is nearest to, an essential first step to sending a text message or making a call to that subscriber. But First Wap’s technology uses SS7 to zero in on phone numbers and trace the location of their users.
The evidence becomes overwhelming that Americans opposed seemingly light taxes, not because they were paranoid, but because the taxes were charged in silver bullion, a money few colonists used on a regular basis and most never had. Thomas Paine had outlined the logic of resistance in June 1780. “There are two distinct things which make the payment of taxes difficult; the one is the large and real value of the sum to be paid, and the other is the scarcity of the thing in which the payment is to be made.”…Adam Gordon, an MR for Aberdeenshire who was traveling in Virginia in 1765, wrote that he was “at a loss to find how they,” some of the wealthiest colonists in the New World, Virginia’s slave-driving tobacco planters, “will find Specie, to pay the Duties last imnosed on them by the Parliament.”
On Tuesday afternoon we went to Tesco to get Covid and flu vaccinations. I don’t think I’ve had much in the way of after effects before but this time my Covid arm ached a lot for a day or two, I felt slightly rough, and Tuesday night I lay awake for over four hours. Unable-to-sleep time is the worst, the darkest, of times.
§ Russell pointed me at a good podcast episode about crazy walls which I listened to despite my usual dislike of American podcast voices / intonation / style, and I learned from it that someone else has been maintaining a blog of the things for years and now has 1300 of them. Crazy Walls started first but Narrative String Theory has accumulated far more than I ever did.
I’m still surprised sometimes how big the internet is. I feel that 20+ years ago there would be no way that two people could run blogs about the same niche topic and not discover one another fairly soon. And yet here we are, and it’s taken six years. At least I can probably stop updating Crazy Walls now. One less thing.
§ I’ve been trying to find a bookshop who’d want all my parents’ books, nearly all my dad’s. I’ve had rejections from four so far. Given the number of books (around 2,000) I can’t see a small shop wanting them all, and even larger shops have their specialisms, and are only willing to travel so far. More frustrating than I expected.
§ This week I finished reading Red Plenty by Francis Spufford, a mostly fictionalised tale, jumping between various characters, telling the story of the Soviet “economic miracle” of the 1950s and 60s. It’s very good, a lighter read than the description might sound, with a mixture of real-life characters and fictional. Every chapter has a load of footnotes at the end that are also fascinating, describing exactly which things happened just like that, which are loosely based on what research, and which bits are entirely made up. Surprisingly few of the latter really.
My dad told me about going on an organised trip to Russia in, I think, the early 1960s and how one woman had a breakdown because she couldn’t cope with the reality of the place, having completely believed everything she’d heard about the wonders of this utopian planned economy. I’ve no idea if Dad ever read Red Plenty. I feel he must have, probably from the library because he didn’t own a copy, but I’ll never know.
Albania’s AI-generated minister, Diella, is “pregnant,” Prime Minister Edi Rama has announced. He revealed plans to create “83 children”, or assistants, one for each Socialist Party member of parliament.
“We took quite a risk today with Diella here and we did very well. So for the first time Diella is pregnant and with 83 children,” he said at the Global Dialogue (BGD) in Berlin. Rama said the “children,” or assistants, will record everything that happens in parliament and keep legislators informed about discussions or events they miss.
“Each one…will serve as an assistant for them who will participate in parliamentary sessions, and will keep a record of everything that happens and will suggest members of parliament. These children will have the knowledge of their mother,” Rama said.
Here is the full story, bizarre throughout. At least you cannot say they are anti-natalist.
Today's Picture of the Week portrays the Milky Way arching over ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT). Indulged in memories, the French astrophotographer Julien Looten, who capture this image, explains: “this picture has symbolic value for me, as it marked the closing of the night.”
Three of the four VLT Unit Telescopes are centred under the Milky Way, while the fourth is hidden on the right side of the image. The smaller telescope in the background, to the right, is the VLT Survey Telescope (VST).
The sky appears split in two: a greenish haze on the left side and a reddish one on the right. This so-called airglow is caused by chemical processes in the upper layers of Earth's atmosphere. Depending on the type of atoms or molecules excited, the glow can exhibit different colours.
Airglow is extremely faint and only noticeable in the darkest regions on Earth, such as the Chilean Atacama Desert, where the VLT is located. Artificial lights from even distant sources greatly outshine the faint airglow. Preserving these pristine skies is not only key to enable cutting-edge research, but also to allow more people to experience the magic of a perfectly dark night, like Julien Looten did with this image.
A notably wet (and also cool) October across nearly all of California and much of the Southwest 2025 has been a decidedly strange weather year in California–starting with January’s devastating Los Angeles-region firestorms amid a record-dry 6-9 period (and following near-record wet conditions over the 1-2 years prior). The spring and early summer were notably […]
Useful collection of examples by Shaun Pedicini who tested Seedream 4, Gemini 2.5 Flash, Qwen-Image-Edit, FLUX.1 Kontext [dev], FLUX.1 Kontext [max], OmniGen2, and OpenAI gpt-image-1 across 12 image editing prompts.
The tasks are very neatly selected, for example:
Remove all the brown pieces of candy from the glass bowl
Qwen-Image-Edit (a model that can be self-hosted) was the only one to successfully manage that!
This kind of collection is really useful for building up an intuition as to how well image editing models work, and which ones are worth trying for which categories of task.
Two Prussian soldiers wearing spiked pith helmets are facing each other and playing a game of ring toss by attempting to toss metal rings over the spike on the other soldier's helmet.
Tropical Weather Outlook NWS Central Pacific Hurricane Center Honolulu HI Issued by NWS National Hurricane Center Miami FL 200 PM HST Tue Oct 28 2025
For the central North Pacific...between 140W and 180W:
Active Systems: The National Hurricane Center is issuing advisories on Tropical Storm Sonia, located well west-southwest of the southern tip of the Baja California Peninsula.
Tropical cyclone formation is not expected during the next 7 days.
Tropical Weather Outlook NWS National Hurricane Center Miami FL 500 PM PDT Tue Oct 28 2025
For the eastern and central North Pacific east of 180 longitude:
Active Systems: The National Hurricane Center is issuing advisories on Tropical Storm Sonia, located well west-southwest of the southern tip of the Baja California Peninsula.
Tropical cyclone formation is not expected during the next 7 days.
![Badge Interactive REPL. Note: This tool requires the Web Serial API (Chrome/Edge on desktop). Connect to Badge, Disconnect and Clear Terminal buttons. Then a REPL interface displaying: Ready to connect. Click "Connect to Badge" to start.Traceback (most recent call last):ddae88e91.dirty on 2025-10-20; GitHub Badger with RP2350 Type "help()" for more information. >>> MicroPython v1.14-5485.gddae88e91.dirty on 2025-10-20; GitHub Badger with RP2350 Type "help()" for more information. >>> os.listdir() ['icon.py', 'ui.py', 'init.py', '._init.py', '._icon.py'] >>> machine.freq() 200000000 >>> gc.mem_free() 159696 >>> help() Welcome to MicroPython!](https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2025/badge-repl.jpg){kind=icon}
Lights, cameras, lunar action! 
the joy of sox
Market Design
