To read this letter, click here:

Listen on Apple Podcasts
Listen on Spotify

You can also find Heather at:
YouTube
Bluesky
Instagram
Facebook
Threads
TikTok

For those of you just catching up, Cat and I are having a dialogue about how teams are changing in the era of AI.

Part 1: Where do AI norms and values come from? Where should people start?, by me.

Part 2: How social identity is constructed, and how to defang the threat of identity loss, by Cat.

At the end of Cat’s piece, she ended with a question for me and an observation of her own. She asked,

“What gets us so stuck on believing we can’t have both high performance and good norms?”

And observed:

“It’s hard to get teams to open up, hard to get our companies to see the merit in this kind of practice, and hard to get people to see this as the hard cognitive science of problem-solving instead of soft, squishy feelings.”

All of these, I believe, are related. If leaders think that “treating people well” means “nobody feels bad”, of course they assume it trades off against performance. If people associate learning with soft, squishy feelings instead of an uncomfortable growth process, they probably aren’t really learning.

And because we’re wired to see people where there really are systems, we keep looking in the wrong place for fairness and equity.

This is a weird timeline. I’ll tell you how I think we got here. It starts when the idea of psychological safety upended our mental model about what excellence looks like, just over a decade ago.

The dark days of mad ‘boy geniuses’ in tech

Psychological safety entered the tech lexicon in 2015, when Google published the findings of Project Aristotle, their two-year inquiry into engineering team effectiveness. The research showed that high performing teams were differentiated by five internal dynamics: 1) psychological safety, 2) dependability, 3) structure and clarity, 4) meaning, and 5) impact.

You kids won’t remember this, but prior to Project Aristotle (and DORA, which launched a year earlier), our collective idea of excellence in tech looked very different.

Nowadays everyone talks about high functioning teams, but back then, the spotlight was on individual output. Managers and executives really did heap praises on people for firefighting and sleeping under their desks. Brilliant jerks were not only tolerated but cultivated, because of how closely genius and antisocial behavior were twinned in our minds and pop culture.1

Back then, it was almost an article of faith that the rudest and most disruptive people were your top performers and should be catered to.2 But DORA and Project Aristotle began their research from first principles, asking “what leads to the best outcomes?" and crunching the numbers. Year after year, report after report, the evidence compounds: individual performance is critical, but delivery and impact are defined at the level of the team, not the individual.

Psychological safety came unmoored from performance

The academic study of psychological safety, defined as “a shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking,” has always been about achieving excellence. Researchers have long been adamant that psychological safety must be paired with accountability to be effective.

The research itself has a lot of complexity and nuance, most of which seems to have been lost on its journey to mass awareness. The one thing everyone remembers today is psychological safety, which is great. But the popular understanding of its meaning seems to have drifted far away from its origins in excellence, edging ever closer to “I should feel safe at work”, or even “I should never have to feel bad at work.”

I’ve seen people complain about their psychological safety being damaged due to hearing bad news, company layoffs, not getting an expected promotion, organizational reshufflings, their manager answering slack messages after 6 pm, even getting constructive feedback on their work.

But psychological safety isn’t important because it makes us feel safe, it’s important because it enables learning, which leads to higher performance.3 Somewhere along the way, we started putting the feelings ahead of the outcomes — a very 2010s thing to do, in retrospect.

“If your team is happy, you’re doing a good job”

The second time I became a manager, I kept asking my boss how he would know if I was doing a good job or not. His response: “If your team is happy, you’re doing a good job.”

This answer was typical of ZIRP-era management philosophy, when money was easy, growth was free, and headcount seemed infinite. The managers and directors of my generation went all in on things like psychological safety and “bring your whole selves to work”, which was progress, even if in practice this mostly got watered down into “please be nice” and “it’s okay to be openly gay at work now.”

In part, this was in reaction to the generation of managers we came up under, who mostly came in two flavors: the super-IC who didn't really want to be managing, and the command-and-control type who assigned tasks and checked boxes. Neither was big on feelings.

My generation of managers was determined to do the opposite, as I’ve written. And we did. We were coaches, sponsors, and support networks for our direct reports. We made time for people’s feelings and talked about our personal lives. We urged people to take time off, talked about “servant leadership”, and said things like “being a manager is all about people.”

But it’s not. It’s not all about people, it’s about achieving success at business and then, ideally, good outcomes for everyone involved.

As I recently wrote:

“The most effective leaders are the ones who are kind, caring humans and skilled business operators. The second most effective leaders are the ones who are crappy humans but skilled business operators. After that comes everyone else.”

Aristotle would like a word

“If your team is happy, you’re doing a good job” is not an answer that stands up to a whiff of scrutiny. If happiness was the goal, I should have just given everyone six months off, tripled their salary, and told them that “moving forward, your job consists of taste-testing fancy ice creams.” That would have made a lot of people very happy.

Or would it?

Aristotle — yes, he who the project was named for — didn’t think so. He distinguished between eudaimonia, the kind of happiness you feel as a result of a full and flourishing life, through action and virtue, and other, lesser types of happiness you feel as a result of chasing wealth, pleasure, fame, etc.

Vacation days and infinite ice cream are the type of happiness Aristotle would have sniffily dismissed as hedonic pleasure; a false joy, he would say, “fit for cattle”.

Granted, Aristotle lived a long time ago and didn’t have access to dopamine machines like video games and social media. But there is oodles of modern research (Gilbert, Kahneman) to back up his point, which is that we are bad at predicting what will make us happy or keep us happy. What we think we want looking forward into the future is almost never what we treasure looking back.

It’s easy to confuse “people’s feelings are important, and we should acknowledge and respect them” with “people’s feelings are a business outcome we should manage to.” The first one, yes; the second, absolutely not.

Making your team happy is not the job. Someone who can’t handle disappointing their direct reports or making them upset will never be an effective leader. Frustrating people and telling them “no” is part of the job, because growth is hard and part of your job is to challenge people. How they feel about this is under their control, not yours.

Learning feels terrible, which is why it builds trust

You know what else doesn’t always feel good? Learning. Learning involves introspection, which is often humbling, and expanding your boundaries, which means doing uncomfortable things.

It’s also deeply vulnerable. Towards the end of Cat’s piece she says,

I’ve seen even highly acrimonious teams start to soften the moment they allow themselves to ask: what did you learn last week? What did we learn together? Is there some way to approach this tough time with a focus on learning? Do we have any shared goals for what that learning will accomplish?

Showing up and not knowing the answers is a hard thing to do in front of our peers and colleagues. Which is exactly why it builds trust.

You can’t tell from the calendar invite

Furthermore, it’s awfully easy to clog up everyone’s calendars with meetings, conversations, and activities that look like learning, but actually just waste time.

If you ask ten or twenty people to step away from their work and have a discussion, what will it yield? Maybe it will be the most valuable hour of the month, or maybe it will be a total waste of time. Maybe it will become a distraction that derails people, sows confusion, and generates endless, fruitless slack debates.

You can’t tell by looking at the calendar invite. Worse, you can’t and won’t know until it’s over (if then). This makes a lot of leaders very skittish about spending on activities so loosely described as “learning”. For every leader that is overly skeptical of learning and development, there’s a leader who invests too much time, money and effort into learning and development, and gets nothing in return.

Learning pays off slowly. It is rarely a quick fix. Investing in learning is like investing in anything; you aren’t going to get great results if you spray and pray, you’re better off developing a thesis, testing it, investing in it, and measuring to see if you were right or not.4

(Here is where I was going to toss it back, saying “So Cat, why are metrics important?” But Cat complains that she has been writing about that for YEARS, and hey, I get it. Ask me “should I instrument my code?”, I dare you. 🔪🔪🔪 )

So let me try and end on a more interesting question.

We credit people for what structures do

People are walking, talking balls of weirdo biases. We are bad at knowing what’s good for us, worse at predicting how we will feel, and terrified of feeling bad about things, even though feelings are transient and can’t actually kill us. We project personality onto shitty products and faces onto grilled cheese sandwiches. We are all animists in a way, because we evolved to perceive individuals and intent in the unlikeliest of places.

Which brings us back to business.

People get cause and effect mixed up all the time. Winning feels good, and if you win at business, then you will feel good, and there will be more salary, raises, promotions, hiring, growth, products to build and operate, harder challenges to attack, all these things people love at work.

But we tend to attribute our joy or misery at work to people rather than structural factors. We think fondly of the manager who gave us a raise “because we deserved it”, rather than thinking fondly of the ones who were good enough at business to put more money in the pot for raises to be given out.

I can’t help feeling like we are holding managers to an impossibly high bar by expecting them to not only do their jobs capably but also make us feel good about ourselves while we’re doing ours.

Is that fair? Fairness matters a lot to us (another weird quirk of the species), yet it’s hard to know how to reason about systems where the outcomes are defined by the collective labor of hundreds or thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of people. We want to put a face on our experience so desperately that we give individuals too much credit and too much blame, and let the system off the hook.5

Cat, when you measure fairness, are you looking at people or systems? What do you actually look at?

In 1960, a team at the University of Illinois released the first version of their PLATO “computerized instruction system,” a network of what would eventually be thousands of computer terminals connected to large mainframe computers. Users of PLATO could use the system to learn about various topics, with courses on subjects such as chemistry, math, music, and foreign languages.

The first iteration of PLATO used a simple TV screen for a terminal display, but this was at best a stopgap measure. TV screens used cathode ray tubes (CRTs), which used a magnetically deflected beam of electrons to paint an image on a glass screen. This beam redrew the entire screen 30 times a second, which meant that a computer had to feed the CRT screen a constant stream of high-bandwidth video data. This was fine for broadcast TV, since the same signal was being sent to every TV that received it, but on the PLATO system every terminal needed to be sent different data, depending on what the user was doing. Not only would this require high-bandwidth data connections between the mainframes and the PLATO terminals, it would force each terminal to have a large amount of memory storage to hold the video data, which at the time was extremely expensive. CRT-based screens worked well enough for a small system with a few terminals, but it was felt that the technology wouldn’t scale to the thousands or millions of terminals the PLATO designers envisioned. What was needed was a new type of screen, one that had a built-in “memory.” On such a screen, only the things that changed on the screen would need to be redrawn, which would dramatically reduce the bandwidth and data storage such a screen required compared to a CRT.

Donald Bitzer, one of the architects of the PLATO system, considered possible methods that might be used to make such a display. One potential option was gas plasma — running an electric current through a low-pressure gas, which would cause that gas to glow. Scientists had been making low-pressure gases glow using electric current since the 1600s, and the phenomenon had been used in neon signs since the early 20th century. But no one had yet found a way to turn the phenomenon into a computer display, which would require an array of thousands or even millions of independently controlled tiny gas plasma lamps, one for each pixel on the screen. Bitzer decided it was worth trying.

In 1962, Bitzer’s graduate student Robert Willson built a one-cell model of a plasma display screen, the equivalent of a single pixel. It consisted of a “sandwich” of three thin sheets of glass, with wires on either side of a tiny pocket of argon gas contained in a hole in the middle glass sheet. When electric current ran from the wires through the gas, the argon would glow brightly. Willson’s model suggested that a plasma screen might work, but also that there were many problems that needed to be overcome: the brightness of the cell was inconsistent, components burned out quickly, leaks were rampant, and over time the electricity-excited gas would deposit itself on the electrodes, reducing the flow of current. Willson’s design also required each individual cell to have its own resistor to prevent an electric arc forming between the electrodes, which was projected to add significant manufacturing difficulties on a full-sized display: a 500x500 pixel screen would require 250,000 individually attached resistors.

A breakthrough occurred in 1964, when Bitzer’s team had the idea to move the electrodes to the outside of the glass sandwich, which eliminated the need for a separate resistor. When building a test display of the new model, the team made a serendipitous discovery: a small amount of air accidentally introduced into the cell gave the display the sought-after memory effect: the gas would continue to glow even when the voltage at the electrodes was reduced. By 1967, the team had scaled up their single-pixel display to a 16 by 16 array of pixels (weber 2006), but this was still little more than a fragile prototype: leaks and contamination remained common, and the extremely thin sheets of glass (originally used for microscope slides) broke easily.

In 1967 Owens-Illinois, a glass manufacturer, licensed this technology, known as a plasma display, and began working to turn it into a real, practical product. Owens-Illinois eliminated the middle sheet of glass and the individual gas-filled pockets along with it, and simply filled the entire space between the two outer glass sheets with gas. Even though the gas within the panel was continuous, it would only glow at the intersection of charged electrodes, allowing individual pixels to be controlled. In 1968 Owens-Illinois debuted a 128 x 128 pixel plasma display, far sturdier and more reliable than the University of Illinois prototypes, and in 1971 the company shipped the world’s first commercial plasma display panel, a 512 x 512 screen dubbed the “Digivue.” The PLATO system, which would shortly be scaled up to thousands of terminals worldwide, was its first customer.

But the newly released plasma screen wasn’t alone in the market for electronic displays. The plasma screen had originally been conceived as an alternative to CRT screens and the bulky and expensive external memory they required. But memory technology wasn’t standing still either: in the late 1960s, as Illinois researchers were building plasma screen prototypes, researchers at IBM developed DRAM, a type of computer memory that stored data using transistors and capacitors. Computer memory was soon being pulled along by Moore’s Law, getting smaller, faster, and cheaper with every generation, and before long the memory requirement for CRT screens was a minor concern.

Plasma screens did have other advantages, beyond the way their physical properties enabled a kind of “memory.” Unlike a CRT, which required a bulky glass tube, a plasma display could be made extremely thin. And plasma screens could potentially be much more rugged than CRTs, which had fiddly and easily disrupted electron guns.

But plasma screens also had drawbacks: they were very power hungry compared to CRTs, weren’t as bright, and were far more expensive. And while Illinois researchers tested a color plasma screen in the late 1960s, it would be many years before a color plasma screen robust enough to be commercialized was developed.

What’s more, plasma wasn’t the only new display technology that appeared in the early 1970s. During the 1960s, scientists at Westinghouse and RCA had experimented with displays based on liquid crystals: substances that were liquid but displayed organized, repetitive structure like a crystal. Liquid crystal molecules were found to change their orientation when an electric field was applied to them, and if polarized light (light oscillating within a single plane) passed through a liquid crystal, its plane of polarization would rotate. By the late 1960s, researchers had used these phenomena to construct a display. The first liquid crystal display (LCD) screens appeared in calculators and other small electronic devices in the 1970s, and by the 1980s were being used in portable TVs.

Plasma didn’t slow down either. Over the next several decades, plasma display technology steadily improved. Engineers developed better electrodes, reduced power consumption, and invented a method for creating grayscale by rapidly flickering the pixels off and on (the more a pixel was “off,” the darker the pixel). Grayscale, in turn, opened the door for full-color plasma displays, and these began to appear in the late 1970s.

As their capabilities improved, plasma displays began to carve out a small niche in the electronic display market. IBM introduced a line of electronics for banks with plasma displays in 1973, and in the mid-1970s plasma displays began to be used for various military applications thanks to their rugged, low-maintenance designs. In the 1980s, laptops and portable computers with monochrome plasma screens began to appear. By the 1990s, however, LCD technology had advanced to the point where high-quality color screens could be made for laptops, entirely displacing plasma from that market.

As it was forced from the laptop display market, plasma was finding success in a new market: large-screen, high-definition televisions. Up through the 1990s CRT had been the standard technology used to make TVs, but the size of the tube required made it difficult to scale CRTs up to very large screens of 40 inches or more: when Sony introduced a 45-inch CRT TV in 1988, it weighed over 400 pounds. Thinner plasma screens, by contrast, could more easily scale to very large screens. Japanese electronics manufacturer Fujitsu demonstrated a 31-inch plasma TV in 1990, and then a 42-inch plasma in 1995. US display startup Plasmaco debuted a 60-inch plasma screen in 1999, and Samsung displayed an enormous 102-inch plasma screen in 2005.

However, LCD was entering the large-screen TV market at the same time, and by the early 2000s LCD manufacturers were making screens of similar size as plasma screens. Plasma had some advantages over LCD TVs — they could offer richer colors and higher refresh rates — but also some disadvantages. Plasma screens consumed more power, put out more heat, and were less bright than LCD screens. And for a given screen size, an LCD screen could be made much higher resolution than a plasma screen.

But the most important issue was likely manufacturing: it proved harder to achieve high yields and low manufacturing costs with plasma screens than with LCD screens, possibly because manufacturers invested far more in LCD manufacturing than they did plasma.

By the mid-2000s, plasma’s screen quality advantages had either been whittled away or simply gone unnoticed by most consumers: in 2006 reviewers found them roughly equal in quality, and LCD was significantly outselling plasma screens. Plasma and LCD battled over the TV market through the early 2010s, but by 2013 plasma had lost nearly all its market share. By the end of the 2010s, plasma screen manufacturing had essentially ceased, and today the technology is all but dead.

The classic pattern of new technology adoption is something like an S-curve: it starts out serving niche uses for users who need its particular combination of attributes, but as the technology gets more capable and less expensive, it gets adopted more broadly, until it reaches some particular peak. When a technology gets replaced, in turn, it tends to follow this pattern in reverse, getting removed from more and more uses but continuing to be used by users who value its particular combination of attributes. Sometimes this combination allows an “outdated” technology to continue to be used far into the future; vacuum tubes were replaced by the transistor for most uses decades ago, but they’re still manufactured today for use in certain audio equipment. But sometimes this isn’t enough to save a technology; while some folks prefer the look of plasma screens, this preference evidently wasn’t enough to maintain production of it.

Pat Burns is up for re-election. He is a bully, a thug, a racist, a xenophobic piece of dog excrement.

Below this text is an ad I created.

Feel free to share, and hit me up at datruthoc@gmail.com if you’d like a copy to use on your own feeds. This turd needs to be exposed ASAP.

Fight, people!

Fight!

Jeff

As you read this, there appears to be a fairly (and bewilderingly) tight supervisor race for the Fifth District in South County between Katrina Foley, the energetic, always-on-the-move, wonkier-than-wonk incumbent, and Diane Dixon, the propped-up remains of a propped-up remain who, I am increasingly certain, died 56 years ago in Sand Springs, Oklahoma …

And while it all might sound a bit ageist, in this case there’s good reason. Among us are plenty of people in their 70s and 80s (and even 90s) who continue to stand out as wonderful and feisty public servants and deserve to hold positions in government. They are bold, productive, insightful, overflowing with energy and ideas. Hell, Jerry Brown ended his stint at governor at age 548, and bruh was still running marathons, collecting tin cans and hitting up the coolest clubs with Doja Cat.

Dixon, alas, ain’t Governor Moonbean.

Over the last bunch of months, as Dixon v. Foley heated up, the Newport Republican has earned her stripes as a Styrofoam salon head. Which is to say, she gets carted around from event to event, where she (without fail) says as little as possible while nodding and grinning and scratching her right ear as whichever on-duty puppeteer sees fit. She looks confused and overwhelmed and vacant and forced (by Will O’Neill, local GOP kingpin and eternal douche) into a battle she most certainly should not be waging. The scene is simultaneously sad and telling; expired milk desperate to be poured into one last sippy cup.

Dixon’s ads are cruel and often filled with half-truths, and while I suspect she hasn’t even seen them, the spots cannot hide the reality of a candidate vying for a job she can’t possible handle.

The latest development is the most telling. This, from Voice of OC …

•••

All jokes aside, this is serious stuff. Katrina Foley is great at her job, and in her absolute prime. She is George Brett hitting .390. She is Chaka Kahn belting out “Ain’t Nobody” with Rufus. She is Rocky—but the Rocky in “Rocky II,” shortly after Adrian nearly dies, then awakes, then tells her husband to “Win! Win!”

Dixon, alas, is washed. Not a bad person, not an ill-intended figure.

But, sadly, 50 minutes late for the last train.

Father Time, Michael Irvin famously observed, is undefeated.

It’ll happen to us all.

To read this letter, click here:

Listen on Apple Podcasts
Listen on Spotify

You can also find Heather at:
YouTube
Bluesky
Instagram
Facebook
Threads
TikTok

On October 7, 2016, in the run-up to the 2016 election, the Washington Post broke the story of the so-called Access Hollywood tape, a video from 2005 in which Donald Trump told television host Billy Bush about his approach to women. “I don’t even wait” to start kissing them, he said. “And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.... Grab ‘em by the p***y. You can do anything.”

On October 7, 2021, the Democratic majority of the Senate Judiciary Committee released a draft report of its investigation into Trump’s attempt to use the Department of Justice to overturn the results of the 2020 election. The report found that Trump repeatedly tried to get the Department of Justice to endorse his false claims that the election was stolen and to overturn its results, singling out nine specific attempts to change the outcome. Trump, the report says, “grossly abused the power of the presidency.”

On October 7, 2026, from the Oval Office, Trump told reporters: “I could have done very bad things to Hillary Clinton. I could have done very, very bad things to Joe Biden. I could have done very bad things to Barack Hussein Obama. I thought it was inappropriate to do so because you have to treat the office of the presidency with respect. Then I found out that they impeached me twice, and I certainly even, to this moment, I have, I can do whatever I want, if I want. They’ve done some very bad things. You just mentioned it. It was just mentioned in the form of a question, what they did, very illegal, what they did, many illegal things, but I view the presidency as a very sacred position.”

“I can do whatever I want, if I want.”

Ten years we’ve been at this.

I’m going to take an early night tonight. Will be back at it tomorrow.

—

Notes:

https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Interim%20Staff%20Report%20FINAL.pdf

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/the-caller-had-a-lewd-tape-of-donald-trump-then-the-race-was-on/2016/10/07/31d74714-8ce5-11e6-875e-2c1bfe943b66_story.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/08/us/donald-trump-tape-transcript.html

Bluesky:

atrupar.com/post/3mxciowktpy2d

Share

[Continued from yesterday. P.G.] … So, keeping myself warm, to the office, and at noon home to dinner, my pain coming again by breaking no wind nor having any stool. So to Mr. Holliard, and by his direction, he assuring me that it is nothing of the stone, but only my constitution being costive, and that, and cold from without, breeding and keeping the wind, I took some powder that he did give me in white wine, and sat late up, till past eleven at night, with my wife in my chamber till it had done working, which was so weakly that I could hardly tell whether it did work or no. My mayds being at this time in great dirt towards getting of all my house clean, and weary and having a great deal of work to do therein to-morrow and next day, were gone to bed before my wife and I, who also do lie in our room more like beasts than Christians, but that is only in order to having of the house shortly in a cleaner, or rather very clean condition.

Some ease I had so long as this did keep my body loose, and I slept well.

Read the annotations

Links for you. Science:

‘Complete devastation’—How NSF gutted its social sciences research
The Science That Has Oil Companies Running Scared
Don’t be fooled—LLMs don’t reason. Ten years after AlphaGo’s match against Go champion Lee Sedol, today’s AI still isn’t tapping into the machinery that made that win possible.
The wrong platform for science
What a homemade air quality monitor taught me about environmental justice in DC
The Dead Sea Is Creating Its Own Extreme Climate As It Dies
Possible plague death at a Siberian lab baffles scientists

Other:

Congressional candidate is raped while repairing her campaign signs
Inside Trump’s Plan to Fence Off a Historic Protest Site. The president’s proposal to enclose a park in Washington could alter how the space has been used for generations.
How Trump 1.0 Paved the Way for the “Cornell Seven” Case
Pete Hegseth: Bully, Bigot and the Biggest Loser Imaginable
How to Destroy a Reputation in Hollywood, as Told in 5 Women’s Lawsuits
A Cynical Reading Of Trump’s Big Hunting And Fishing Access Orders
Trump Mobile’s latest problem: Hackers just released customer information
Identity Crisis: Citizen access to public agencies is a basic public function. Why does government contract out the process of verifying identity to a for-profit monopoly company? (I hate ID.me)
Trump’s Meme Coin Firm Wants You to Buy. Insiders Are Preparing to Sell.
Trump Tirade over Shrinking Rally Crowds Emasculates MAGA
Kavanaugh Stops
Jewish federations are losing my generation — and future ones — over Israel and Netanyahu
‘Has flat buttocks,’ ‘cusses when scared’: Amazon keeps shockingly specific customer profiles. Here’s how to find yours
Credit Crunch
Democratic Senators Demand Answers on That Diamond Ring Trump Got
The Trump Administration is a Cesspit of Corruption. And fighting it should be at the heart of the Democratic agenda
WMATA Proposes Inflation-Based Metro Fare Increase
Kristi Noem was corrupt until the very end of her DHS tenure
Metro proposes fare increases for rail and bus riders
Infuriated CBS staff still can’t get through to Bari Weiss after scandals and ratings collapse
Why is Trump so unpopular? Because he lies about the war. He could bankrupt the GOP the way Herbert Hoover did.
Funding Cuts Aimed at Unauthorized Immigrants Are Hitting Americans, Too
James Talarico for Senate: Texans deserve better than Ken Paxton’s moral rot
Texas city demands $2M for public records on Flock usage
The Bond Market God
Why Republicans are desperate to hold on to Texas
We’d Be Better Off Without Nebraska
Lawyers for Olympian Cleared in Reflecting Pool Case Demand a Watchdog Probe
Google Accused of Illegally Killing a Massive Forest for Its New Data Center Project
Wild Andrew Tate claims include ‘extreme porn,’ bestiality pics with horse and eel as disturbing full allegations revealed

Links for you. Science:

A Plague Upon Siberia
CDC Is Moving Forward With a Previously Shelved Controversial Hepatitis B Vaccine Study
An AI “mind-reading” tool can reconstruct what you’re looking at from a brain scan
The Siberian Plague Scare Reveals That America Is Unprepared
Margaret Hamilton, computing pioneer who led software development for the Apollo program, dies at 90
One of America’s Last Chestnut Groves Is About to Be Destroyed for a Data Center
Herd immunity underlies homologous recombination in stationary phase bacteria

Other:

Why were Victorian elites so effective?
Texas Republicans Might Finally Lose. Will They Learn Anything?
Congress Is Supposed to Be More Powerful Than the Supreme Court. Why Isn’t It?
Here’s what the Democrats’ first bill should be if they win Congress (disagree re the campaign finance part: Congress should define what the illegal acts are and then strip the court of jurisdiction)
The Anti-Tyranny Backlash: These people think we owe them gratitude and votes in exchange for bribes and false promises, while they they govern like they answer to no one. That’s precisely why they’re losing.
The Washington Sun’s aggressive local marketing campaign swings at The Post
Bowser’s Plan for a Massive Spa Along the Anacostia River May Be Dead (good)
Depression, anxiety plague Black women a year after being fired by DOGE
Moldbug
Centrist Democrats are afraid of expanding the Supreme Court
Aramark Settles $4.5M Class-Action Lawsuit Over ‘Junk Fees’ at Capital One Arena
Ha Ha Ha He’s Just Kidding Again
Washington’s Bitter, Partisan Restaurant Divide — With Data
Paying for your neighbors’ utilities? New DC law limits what landlords can charge
The Southwest Waterfront is getting a radical new arts space
How Payment Will Work on the Upcoming Purple Line
University of Arizona suspends six fraternities, pauses activities for almost all others
JD Vance catches heat after his favorite pseudointellectual praises Hitler again
Trump’s Unlikely Strategy to Control History: Footnotes
Democrats call for probe into Kimberly Guilfoyle’s conduct
‘Honey Please’: Kimberly Guilfoyle Pushed Donor to Wire $100,000 to Her Amex Account
Homes Rule: In D.C., Music Has Always Found a Home in Ordinary Houses
The Battle to Pass a Billionaire Tax
The Deficit
The War Against Accumulated Capital
Alabama Makes State Workers Say ‘Gulf of America.’ Colleges Aren’t Spared.
NYC moves to spend nearly $9M of gender-affirming care fund for minors
Disloyalty
Democrats plot a midterms push for MAHA voters
The NFL’s $192 Million Bet on Flag Football Is Paying Off With Teen Girls

This polling result from YouGov showing that Bush the Younger seems to have rehabilitated his image is somewhat disappointing:

That said, at least Democrats seem to remember how awful he was:

To end on a happy note, the first figure has 48% of respondents saying Trump is a failure, with another ten percent saying Trump is below average.

In this episode, a panel of industry experts discuss what’s needed to build a moon base. During a live event at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg Center, leaders Astrolab, Firefly […]

The post What will it take to build a moon base? appeared first on SpaceNews.

From Ingar Haaland:

With math essentially being delegated to OpenAI, here’s what I predict for economics and the social sciences more generally:

The top tier of research will just become better and it will be normal human-led research where AI is used for scale (e.g. conducting qualitative interviews with relevant populations, running behavioral interventions in the field, analyzing massive text data, etc.)

Field experiments will rise in value and generally making “connections” with firms and being able to run stuff (potentially testing AI pipelines) will be in high demand

Research with administrative data will become even more valuable, but the benefits might be concentrated among some prolific authors who are allowed by the government agencies to use local models to analyze the data at scale. PhD students can probably forget about it

Economic history will have a very exciting boom and there will be an enormous race and big rewards for digitizing archives as a source to both identify new research strategies and document new descriptive facts.

Review and verification systems will become massively improved with AI assistance and it will become standard practice to do a 360 review of the paper + code + data at the *submission* stage.

Research that in principle can already be almost completely outsourced to the AI (download and analyze public data, run simple survey experiments, write theory models) is in for a big shock. This would be very bad from the perspective of researchers who depend on this “bread and butter” research, but I think this type of work will just be outsourced to public agencies who can answer their own questions without the need for “peer-reviewed” research.

All of those make sense to me.

The post Predictions for economics, given AI appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

Comments

• The AI models I am using, mostly Kimi K3, is pretty useful when ... by Screwtape
• Fischer Black: In the end, my response to the skepticism of ... by rsm
• In reply to Dismalist. Did they all sleep through the ... by rsm
• In reply to Dismalist. Did Chomsky have a theory of grammar ... by rsm
• —empirical researchers can now have AI do 3 papers in a week ... by DK
• Plus 10 more...

Related Stories

• Against Laissez-Faire Democracy
• Rising concentration for economics awards
• The Greg Clark Symposium

 

Rays    - 001 102 000 - 4  7  1
Yankees - 001 101 000 - 3  7  0

For the 17th straight year, the Yankees will not be World Series champions, this time falling woefully short . . . as they were swept out of the ALDS in three games by the Rays in a 4-3 loss on Wednesday night . . .

After their offense let them down in Game 1 and their defense joined in to fail them in Game 2, the Yankees' bats were held in check once again in Game 3 . . . resulting in an all-too-familiar feeling in The Bronx. . . .

And so, a year after they bailed out of the ALDS in four games against the AL East champion Blue Jays, the Yankees played their way into another early exit . . .

[T]he Yankees never led against the Rays. They mustered all of five runs across the three games . . .

Trent Grisham, with the tying run on second, chased a pitch well out of the zone to end it. . . .

[Max] Fried . . . was not his sharpest. Twice after the Yankees had tied the game, he gave up home runs to give the Rays the lead back.

The first came on Ryan Vilade's solo shot in the fourth inning, inches past the outstretched glove of a leaping Jones at the short porch, to put the Rays up 2-1.

Then in the sixth, Fried hung a sweeper and by the time Mesa put a swing on it, the left-hander had dropped to his knee because he knew what was coming. Mesa's two-run shot sailed high and far into the right-field seats, giving the Rays a 4-2 lead.

   

Yankees swept by Rays in ALDS after fan interference overturns Anthony Volpe homer in Game 3 loss
Peter Sblendorio, Daily News

With the Yankees on the brink of elimination, Anthony Volpe appeared to hit a game-tying two-run home run in the sixth inning . . .

But in a season-altering gut punch, an umpire review found that Volpe's clutch, two-out blast against reliever Griffin Jax had some help.

Replays determined a fan's outstretched hands aided the ball over the left-field wall. The initial call of a home run was overturned, resulting in an RBI ground-rule double for Volpe and leaving the Yankees trailing still, 4-3.

That proved to be the final score as the Rays completed a three-game sweep and extended the Yankees' World Series drought to 17 years.

"It's a broken clubhouse," manager Aaron Boone said. . . . "It's the worst."

Tampa Bay tagged Yankees co-ace Max Fried for four runs — all with two outs — over his 5.2 innings. . . .

But the lasting image Wednesday was Volpe's 357-foot screamer caroming off of the fan's hands — and Spencer Jones striking out moments later to strand Volpe at second base. . . .

Fried wasn't at his best Wednesday, permitting an RBI single to Jonathan Aranda in the third inning, a solo homer to No. 9 hitter Ryan Vilade in the fourth, and Mesa's go-ahead blast in the sixth. . . .

With two outs in the eighth, pinch-hitter Giancarlo Stanton struck out against Kevin Kelly with the tying run at first base. And in the ninth, Trent Grisham went down swinging against Rays closer Bryan Baker for the final out, stranding a runner at second.

The Yankees totaled just three runs and 12 hits in the ALDS, batting a collective .130 — their lowest average in a multi-game postseason series ever.

"This is my fourth season. It's four too many times having this taste in my mouth," Volpe said. . . .

This is the third year in a row that an opponent celebrated a playoff series victory at Yankee Stadium, following the Los Angeles Dodgers in the 2024 World Series and the Toronto Blue Jays in last year's ALDS.

The 17-year championship drought is tied for the Yankees' longest since they won their first World Series title in 1923.

   

 
(Twitter)

Fan interference at center of Yankees Game 3 . . .
James O'Connell, Daily News

The fans certainly made their presence felt on Wednesday night at Yankee Stadium.

Just not in the way they had hoped.

Fan interference was at the center of the Yankees' season-ending 4-3 loss to the Tampa Bay Rays in Game 3 of the ALDS. . . .

After a few attempts of identifying the correct spectator, NYPD officers escorted him out of the stadium. The fan was greeted with some unfriendly chants on his way out of the ballpark. . . .

The Yankees have had a bit of a run with fans interfering on the field. During Game 4 of the 2024 World Series, two fans essentially tried to rip a ball out of the glove of Dodgers right fielder Mookie Betts in foul territory — those two were indefinitely banned from all MLB stadiums.

(Twitter)


(Twitter)

Yankees fan booted out of stadium after home run interference controversy
Christian Arnold, Post

[A] Yankee fan . . . was escorted out of Yankee Stadium after he stuck his arm out over the ledge of the wall in left field to catch a ball hit by Anthony Volpe in the bottom of the sixth in ALDS Game 3. . . .

Video showed the Yankee fan, who was wearing a dark blue bomber jacket, being walked out of the outfield stands by a uniformed member of the NYPD and what appeared to be several members of Yankee Stadium security. 

He was also leaving with another fan, who was wearing a pinstriped Yankees jacket and cap. 

In another clip that circulated online after the controversial moment, security staff was seen approaching the fan in his seat almost immediately after the umpire ruled the fan interference call . . .

Yankee fans around them did not appear to have too much of a reaction toward the spectator as he exited with stadium staff.

The Rays got out of the inning with a 4-3 lead, the same score as the final. . . .

(Twitter; Rays fans in front; MFYfans in back)

Fan interference serves as a bitter reminder just how far away Yankees are from magic of dynasty years
Mike Vaccaro, Post

The Yankees lost the game 4-3. The Rays swept them in this ALDS. They were booed off the field in their own stadium. Nuclear winter awaits on the other side of the World Series, and who knows what the sport will look like whenever the labor wonks return it to us. . . .

"The ending is terrible," Aaron Boone said, his voice quiet, his mood chastened, his season over . . . "It's the worst. . . . The worst frickin' feeling in the world."

[T]he Yankees haven't been champions for a long time. It is now 17 seasons in a row without a title, so Hal Steinbrenner now has a drought to match the 17 empty seasons his old man oversaw between 1979 and 1995. Only the Yankees of 1903-22 — when they were mostly the JV team in town to John McGraw's Giants and were known as "Highlanders" for half of it — have known a longer championship Sahara. . . .

[W]hen the Rays recorded the 27th out Wednesday night, and began their celebration on the field before retreating to the visiting clubhouse where the champagne was waiting on ice, it continued what has become one of the more troubling — borderline inexplicable — patterns imaginable.

The Yankees watched the Rays dance on Bronx turf Wednesday. The Blue Jays did the same thing last year, the Dodgers in 2024, the Astros in 2022. The Red Sox, of all teams, have done it twice, after the catastrophic collapse in 2004 and again in 2018 . . . This has become as baleful an annual tradition as tax day.

sad bench

Trent Grisham can't provide leadoff spark for Yankees with uncertainty looming
Dan Martin, Post

Trent Grisham hit leadoff with the idea of getting more base runners on in front of Ben Rice. 

Instead, Yankees season ended with Grisham striking out for the third time of the night — with Rice in the on-deck circle — in a 4-3 loss to the Rays in Game 3 of the ALDS. 

With the Yankees fighting for survival, Grisham got the call to hit leadoff — despite being the worst leadoff hitter in the game this season. . . . [A]mong the 16 players with at least 350 plate appearances at the top of the lineup in the majors, Grisham had the lowest batting average (.199) and OPS (.680). . . .

He popped out in the first, struck out looking in the third, lined out to left in the fifth and whiffed looking again in the seventh, this time getting booed by the Stadium crowd. 

And in the bottom of the ninth, with Jazz Chisholm Jr. representing the tying run at second and two outs, Grisham was no match for lefty closer Bryan Baker.

Max Fried falters for Yankees and leaves Carlos Rondon a non-factor in ALDS
Dan Martin, Post

Just like the rest of the Yankees in this series, Max Fried wasn't good enough. . . .

[The lefty] allowed runs in three of his last four innings in Wednesday's season-ending 4-3 loss to the Rays . . .

The Yankees said prior to the game that there wasn't really a debate about whether to go with Fried or fellow southpaw Carlos Rodón [perhaps the rotation's best pitcher down the stretch outside of Cam Schlittler] . . .

[T]he Yankees head into the offseason with Rodón not having been a factor in the postseason. 

The real issue the Yankees had against their AL East rivals, whom they couldn't catch in the division and proved to be no match for in the playoffs, was their lineup. 

Fried, just like Gerrit Cole and Schlittler. . . was forced to be nearly perfect. 

And he wasn't.   . .

It was not the ace-like outing the Yankees were looking for . . . 

Fried has now had very mixed results in four playoff starts with the Yankees . . . struggling badly in the ALDS in Toronto last season before allowing four runs in less than six innings Wednesday.

This Yankees ending was sad and predictable — don't expect anything to change
Joel Sherman, Post

Welcome back, Red Zone Yankees.

You are Groundhog Day reliable.

Flip the calendar to October and here you are — and there you go. Annual. Dependable. Disposable.

I dubbed you the Red Zone Yankees last year after you . . . lost to the AL East champ Blue Jays in the division series. Just another year of journeying close enough to see the championship end zone — but unable to get in. . . .

[It's] another case of déjà Boone — running into a superior team at this time of year and crumbling before them. We have seen this movie. Too often.

This year the Yankees did not even bother to win a division series game — heck, they never had a lead in 27 innings in getting swept three games to none. . . . [T]he Yankees had to watch yet another team celebrate in front of them and their fans in The Bronx. . . .

[Yankee Stadium] is [now] a place for various foes to spill champagne. . . .

[T]he team that lived by the long ball was eliminated by it. Ryan Vilade . . . went opposite field just over the fence for a solo homer in the fourth inning, a 340-foot lob that just eluded the leap of 6-foot-7 Spencer Jones and that Statcast had as a homer in just one of 30 parks — this one.

Trying to maintain a 2-2 tie in the sixth, Fried gave up a no-doubt, two-run blast to Victor Mesa Jr. . . .

This is a 17th straight year now without a championship. A Boone team has made the playoffs eight times and been eliminated by an opponent with a better regular-season record all eight. This will lead to another rite of fall — calls for Boone's job and that of GM Brian Cashman.

No one should expect changes. . . . The reality is that they keep fielding teams short of the ingredient to get all the way through these playoffs. They are never playing their best at this time of year. Never playing loose, smart and well.

The Rays went into first place for good on June 27. The Yankees were put into position to play catch-up and were just not good enough. Not good enough for 162 games. And not for three days in October.

They lost Game 1 because they did not hit enough and Austin Wells made a baserunning gaffe. They lost Game 2 because they did not hit enough and played defense like they were wearing gloves on the wrong hand. They lost Game 3 because they did not hit enough and were let down by the strength of the team, a starter, Fried.

Yes, they were missing Aaron Judge. Yes, Giancarlo Stanton was limited to two pinch-hit at-bats and struck out in both . . .

There are always excuses. That is familiar too. This is what happens . . . Something happens to them when they get tantalizingly close to baseball heaven. When the calendar flips to October. When the best is needed.

But there was no best. They scored five runs in three games — or one more run than they had errors in Game 2. They could not get the big hit, make the big pitch, record the routine out when it was necessary.

So another year goes by in which they fall short again. Not good enough.

(Twitter)

(Twitter)

Once again, the Yankees’ season ends with a division rival partying at their place
Gary Phillips, Daily News

As their division rivals popped bottles inside Yankee Stadium’s visiting clubhouse, the home side filled with frustration and sorrow.

"It’s just heartbreaking," Jazz Chisholm Jr. said.

"We didn’t do our jobs, didn’t finish the goal," Aaron Judge chimed in.

"They do a little of everything," Max Fried added. "They put the ball in play, they get a bunch of hits, they run the bases well, play good defense, and they pitched. So they played a pretty complete series, and they beat us."

All of those comments were delivered a year ago, when the Blue Jays defeated the Yankees in a four-game ALDS, celebrated at midfield, and boogied in the Bronx. And yet, they are just as fitting now. . . .

The only major differences? It was the Rays who raged this time, and they were able pull off a three-game sweep.

"I don't like that," said Judge, who didn't play this postseason due to a calf strain. "I don't like other teams celebrating in our place."

Tampa already knew how to host a boozy bash at Yankee Stadium, as they also commemorated a division crown there a few weeks ago. . . .

The Yankees and their aging superstars — namely Judge, Gerrit Cole and Giancarlo Stanton — will watch what is left of the playoffs from home while getting another early start on the offseason. . . . [A] looming work stoppage hovers over the sport . . . A potential lockout could cut into another season for Judge, who is 34 and also missed 99 days with a fractured rib this year, and Cole, who is 36 and made 22 starts following Tommy John surgery. . . .

While Cashman’s deal is up after the season, it would be shocking to see anyone else in the general manager’s chair. And even after another sloppy postseason, Boone could remain as manager. He has survived disappointments like this throughout his ringless tenure . . .

For now, the Yankees can only lament another premature end. They can only reflect on why, time and time again, a roster that does enough from March through September falls short in October, or why their years-long reputation for poor play under bright lights persists.

If those issues do not get corrected, there will be more wallowing over early exits, and more Yankee Stadium parties that the home team isn’t invited to.

Anthony Volpe’s tying home run in Game 3 overturned after Yankees fan interference

Chris Kirschner, New York Times

Anthony Volpe sent Yankee Stadium into a frenzy for a few moments after what seemed like a two-run home run to tie the score . . . 

Volpe rounded the bases as fans threw drinks onto the field in celebration. But MLB’s video replay center determined a fan interfered with the batted ball by sticking his hands over the wall, hauling it into the stands above the outstretched glove of Rays left fielder Víctor Mesa Jr.

The home run was overturned and ruled an RBI double, which meant that instead of a 4-4 score, New York trailed, 4-3. . . . Rays reliever Griffin Jax then struck out Spencer Jones . . . to end the inning. The 4-3 score held and the Rays took Game 3 to eliminate the Yankees and advance to the American League Championship Series. . . .

Stadium security quickly reached the fan and whisked him out of the section, taking him up the steps and out through an exit on River Avenue.

Even after the fan was taken away, other fans in the section chanted expletives in the direction of the people he was seated near.

After the play, and as Volpe rounded the bases, fans threw trash onto the field in the direction of Mesa. Beer cans, cups and assorted debris were hurled from the stands and into left field. The fan who interfered with the play held the ball up high, raising it in his right hand in triumph while another fan wrapped him in a hug.

Junior Caminero brutally trolls with broom and 'da Yankees lose' chant after ALDS sweep
Christian Arnold, Post

Junior Caminero had no problem rubbing salt in the Yankees' wound after the Rays swept the Bronx Bombers out of the playoffs. 

The Rays third baseman taunted Yankees fans after Bryan Baker struck out Trent Grisham for the game's final out and secured the ALDS sweep at Yankee Stadium. 

The TNT broadcast captured Caminero mimicking a sweeping broom while looking into the stands before going over to join his teammates in celebration. . . .

MLB posted a video on social media of Caminero doing an impression of David Ortiz by saying his signature "da Yankees lose!"

Caminero did it while he was on the field, shouting the phrase and putting his hand against his head to mimic sleep. 

He shouted it again while speaking with Spanish-speaking media inside the Rays clubhouse and another time when TNT's Lauren Shehadi interviewed him. 

"The best! The best! Sweep!" Caminero shouted when Shehadi asked him about celebrating a series victory at Yankee Stadium. "Da Yankees lose!"

(Twitter)


(Twitter)

Aaron Judge was 'hating every single moment' of watching Yankees' ALDS loss from bench
Dan Martin, Post

Aaron Judge has been here too many times before: watching another team celebrate in front of him at Yankee Stadium. 

"Just hating every single moment of it,'' Judge said of his thoughts when he was sitting in the dugout after the Rays beat the Yankees 4-3 to complete a three-game sweep of the ALDS. . . .

Judge was forced to miss such a sizable chunk of the regular season due to a fractured rib that cost him over three months and then the strained calf that prevented him from playing in the postseason. . . .

Asked how close he was to being activated for the ALDS after missing the wild-card series . . . He said he was "feeling great" . . .

Judge was asked what the team needs to do to get better and avoid being in this situation again, as they have every year of his career. 

"We're the Yankees,'' Judge said. . . . "They give us a winning team every year."

Some Back Pages I Missed

They went home!

1. War in space?

2. How the math breakthroughs might matter.

3. Short proof of quasi-Riemann.

4. App for finding art exhibitions.

5. Podcast on African economic growth.

6. New and very good book: The Madrid Model: How Freedom and Openness Created an Economic Powerhouse, by Diego Sánchez de la Cruz.

7. This is only the beginning.

8. Democracy thwarted, pufffin to be featured on banknotes.

The post Thursday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

Comments

• In reply to Tom T.. They clicked the box that says “I'm not ... by A Yaqui
• #8. So sad that the Bank of England is shitcanning its current ... by boomersooner
• In reply to GA. I think some of the back-and-forth in the MR ... by Brent Buckner
• In reply to Hazel Meade. “You will be assimilated.” by Tom T.
• In reply to BC. How do they verify that they're human? by Tom T.
• Plus 10 more...

 

This is an update to my post from Tuesday about the “existential risk” panic. A good friend of mine reached out to me and said, in so many words, yes, all that techno-babble is weird. But that doesn’t mean these risks aren’t real. And as I tried to make clear in my piece, I agree with that, at least to the extent that if Group A isn’t made up of reliable narrators, I’m not clear who the reliable narrators are. He pointed me to this recent report put out by the Rand Corporation, which is kind of the original think tank and has always been closely tied to the U.S. government and for lack of a better word the U.S. military-intelligence-industrial complex. It’s an interesting report. Or at least I found some interesting and I think sensible prescriptions in it once I got through the first half or two-thirds of it, which contained very Randian decision trees, definitions and a lot of what seemed like assumptions about existential risk and coexistence with AI that I didn’t understand. It eventually sets out a sensible if hard-to-execute approach which generally amounts to a safety-first regime of governing AI (make sure new things don’t endanger us before we build them or make them widely available) and, critically, open the decision-making up to public institutions with public accountability.

This is sensible and obvious. And it’s so obvious and so necessary that it’s a little disturbing that it’s even up for debate. We don’t let munitions makers just fiddle around and experiment with no oversight or limits on who they sell things to. It was obvious from the git-go when we were developing nuclear weapons and nuclear power that we wouldn’t leave that stuff to just wildcatters or Zuckerberg-type nerds with no limits on or controls over what they were doing. To make this a little more concrete, it’s been treated as obvious from the beginning of the internet that certain kinds of cryptography count as munitions and the state is in charge of who you can give them to. I know from conversations I’ve had with people high up in the AI industry that a significant number of them say, we’re making decisions we shouldn’t be making. The public needs to be making these decisions or at least have a lot more visibility into them.

What I’m describing here is at a very high level of generality and leaves most of the key questions and decisions unsettled. But it’s at least the right framework.

But when I looked at the in-text citations and then at the footnotes to the study, I saw that they were to papers and studies authored, overwhelmingly, by the top-line weirdos I discussed in that post on Tuesday — Bostrom, MacAskill, Yudkowsky, Ord — as well as the cluster of institutes and centers which have grown up around their thinking and in their orbit. There’s a real garbage-in, garbage-out problem here. Or to put it slightly differently, the problem for me, as a reasonably intelligent person who is trying to understand and evaluate this as best I can with a view toward public accountability and the well-being of society, is a lack of reliable narrators.

I’ve seen too much about what these folks’ values are (highly questionable in ethical terms), and how they think (sloppy and even juvenile, a kind of scientistic wish- and doom-casting) to take their word for really anything. But I don’t know who the reliable narrators are. And that leaves my analysis, any guidance I can provide to myself or to others, very incomplete and inadequate.

To come at this slightly differently, places like Rand exist in the U.S. state-planning, national security space to look at the sciences, geo-politics, military technology, take the best info, chop it up and organize it so policy makers can make informed decisions. If you know the history of the last 80 years, the results of that process haven’t always been great. But that’s the idea. And reading this I experience a kind of needle-scratch moment where I suddenly realize, wait, you’re operating on the basis of what those dudes think and those are the baseline assumptions for decision-making? WTF?

What does seem clear to me is what I said in that earlier post and what a decent number of those issuing the warnings agree on: that we have a rapidly advancing technology that is already having a lot of deleterious effects on society and at a minimum could cause severe harms in the wrong hands and it’s being developed, controlled and deployed by a stereotypically start-up-y, move-fast-and-break-things kind of culture and mentality. And that alone is enough to tell us we’ve got a major problem and enough to act on without answering the big cosmic and totalizing questions.

If you ever spend time on YouTube, I hope you’ll take a moment to subscribe to our YouTube page, which you can find right here. We have a couple great podcasts with video versions as well as various conversations and interviews we’re publishing. But even if this isn’t for you, simply clicking the subscribe button on our page helps more new people find our videos, find out about what we do at TPM and potentially become new TPM members. That simple button click helps us a lot. If you could take 30 seconds right now, go to this link, and hit subscribe I would be so appreciative.

This is the weekly, free edition of The Backchannel. If you’d like to receive the free edition of The Backchannel in your inbox, you can subscribe here.

Donald Trump’s manic building and naming spree has been a core feature of his second term in office. And that’s saying something. Because if nothing else, you can’t say Trump hasn’t been active. There are wars, blowing up the international trade regime, the on-going attempted authoritarian takeover of the state, the bust-out rush to wrest as much money out of the presidency as he can, his significant role energizing the AI boom (and possible bust). But with all these things, the building and naming spree stands out, especially in 2026. I focus on this today. I return to this today because of news that Trump wants to turn his West Palm Beach golf club into a new Camp David, a permanent presidential retreat.

The details here are important. If Trump had some secluded property he wanted to donate to the federal government for this purpose, there might be some logic, though it’s hard to imagine Democrats wouldn’t put it up for sale at their first opportunity. What he wants to do is different. His plan is to donate a parcel of land at the private club for the Florida Camp David. So it’s really that future presidents would have there own private bungalow at Trump International Golf Club in Palm Beach. As an additional, rather comical, sweetener the club’s legal counsel, who is presenting the idea to Palm Beach County officials, says that future presidents will even be offered comped memberships to the club.

In other words, this new gambit seems to combine both Trump’s legacy and pecuniary ambitions, both further embedding himself into the permanent architecture of the presidency and adding a new feature — face time with the president — to his Palm Beach resort.

It’s always been a feature of Trump that he has these odd and glancing moments of candor, like a brief look into the personal quarters of a private railcar as it speeds by. Trump has said a number of times that he has to build monuments to himself because no one else will after he’s gone. This is both a monumentally vain statement and also a bracingly pessimistic, despairing one. Franklin Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy didn’t have to worry about this. FDR remains the face on the dime nearing a century after his death. Democrats have long been put off and even repulsed by Republicans’ former mania for naming almost literally everything after Ronald Reagan. But Reagan didn’t do it himself either. Indeed, the most striking thing is that notwithstanding the fact that Trump’s supporters have already tried to name all sort of things after him, he seems to realize or at least anticipate that all of that will melt away as soon as he and the hammer he can bring down on people are gone. However much you hate Trump — and you have so many good reasons! — this is a dark, despairing and fundamentally sad self-conception and effort.

America has no reputational entails. Whatever memories, reputation or sentiments of gratitude that remain after we’re gone are in other peoples’ hands. Over time, they are in the hands of people we never knew, people who never knew us. In a way it is the ultimate trust fall. These are realities we all face and, if we’re lucky, come to terms with as part of coming to grips with our own mortality and eventual deaths, our ultimate loss of ourselves. There are plenty of sobering studies which show that beyond the names of great-grandparents, most ordinary people know little or nothing about these individuals unless the details have been actively written down and preserved. Again, even with great-grandparents, people often know no more than a name.

What adds such pathos, patheticness if you will, is that the naming and building spree can’t really change this. Your monuments can be torn down, as I certainly hope his will. The over-sized metal letters with which federal buildings are named can be pried off as easily and quickly as Trump himself has done. He clearly realizes that he has to get his arch and ballrooms built absolutely as soon as possible or they will simply be cancelled if he’s succeeded by a Democratic president.

I am, I hope it’s clear, not remotely asking you to feel sorry for Donald Trump. But I do want to focus some attention on just how sad a tableau this actually is, in addition to arrogant, grandiose, illegal and all the rest. But fundamentally sad.

A few times I’ve noted that Trump started moving aggressively toward foreign policy and war just as his power and popularity were diminishing at home. That’s when the Greenland fury started, that’s when he went after Venezuela, that’s when, on the sugar high of Venezuela, he launched his catastrophically consequential war on Iran. No one likes unpopularity or flagging power. Trump is unable to handle it. Foreign aggression was a kind of compensating expression of power and dominance, which was possible because an American president’s war power is all but unlimited, a kind of presidential self-soothing. The naming and building campaign kicked off at about the same time and is largely the same thing. It’s an in-spite-of-himself admission that the permanent, almost statutory love he imagined would be his at the outset of the first administration and that he thought he had another shot at in the second will never happen, and he had to start mandating it in construction and name plates that could command it after he’s gone.

This is a cool car. It doesn’t look like anything else and it looks like it’s been pulled a few years from the future. I don’t know about this whole trend where cars don’t have rear windows though. I get it that you just use the camera but my old habits says I want to see out the back sometimes.

But the only reason I wouldn’t buy this thing is that turd of a new logo Jaguar went with. I could not abide driving around in something with this typographic calamity.

The incomparable Mark Gurman, reporting for Bloomberg:

Apple Inc.’s upcoming push into smart home devices will include a doorbell, thermostat and other accessories developed through an unusual partnership with LG Electronics Inc.

The products will be part of an ecosystem of devices that work with Apple’s new smart home hub, as well as an upgraded HomePod mini and fresh TV set-top box, according to people with knowledge of the matter. The new Apple devices are set to be introduced on Oct. 13.

The products developed with South Korea’s LG will also include a smart deadbolt lock, indoor security camera, outdoor security camera and floodlight camera, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the undertaking is private.

Though the two companies worked together to develop the accessories, the products will carry the LG brand. The South Korean firm is handling manufacturing and product support.

Gurman has more than “people familiar with the matter” (or Matter, for that matter) — he cites FCC filings from LG that have product names and illustrations of some of the devices’ rear panels (with the connectors).

As Gurman himself notes, this is somewhat unusual for Apple, but it’s not altogether new territory either. In Venn diagram terms, the circle for “peripherals Apple very much wants on the market” is a superset of “peripherals Apple wants to make itself and put the Apple brand on”. For some of these products that Apple doesn’t want to make under its own brand, Apple makes them through Beats. But for others they partner with other companies. They’ve long partnered with Logitech for keyboards, keyboard iPad cases, and even the Logitech Crayon, the only third-party alternative to Apple’s own official iPad Pencils. Unlike Apple’s Pencils, the Crayon works without pairing to a specific iPad — surely a godsend in classrooms. There’s also the Logitech Muse — an air-pencil/magic-wand peripheral for Vision Pro. (Vision Pro is a $4000 mixed reality headset that weighs 2 pounds, which Apple released in early 2024.) Apple does this with Belkin too — that’s another trusted partner for Apple.

And, in addition to serving as a longtime display component supplier for Apple, back when Apple had temporarily and foolishly exited the market for Apple-branded external displays, they worked with LG to make the LG 5K Ultrafine display, which for a while was simultaneously the best external Mac display on the market yet also an unreliable flaky product. Even at its best it had an unstable sub-par stand.

The thing that makes this partnership awkward for Apple is that these products — doorbells, cameras, deadbolt locks — are products that require the utmost of trust. What products could possibly require more trust than a camera with footage of what’s going on in or at your home, or a lock that controls who can get in? I think that’s why Apple wants to get into this market with products that they can put their stamp of approval on. But LG, of all companies, was just exposed in a scandal for shipping “smart” TVs that literally listen to the ambient audio in the room — even in standby! — and invade your privacy by tracking what content appears on screen. (I own a 2019 LG TV but I haven’t allowed it Wi-Fi access since, literally, 2019.)

This week’s guest is Brent Underwood, the proud owner of Cerro Gordo Mines.

That’s right. In 2018, Underwood bought the ghost town of Cerro Gordo, located near Death Valley in California, and its old mining operations for $1.4 million. This was a legit crazy thing to do. But, here we are eight years later, and Underwood has turned his sidequest into his mainquest, and he now has a booming YouTube channel in which he documents life at Cerro Gordo. This includes exploration of the mines and Underwood’s attempt to restore the ghost town into a habitable site that people can visit.

Subscribe now

You will notice (if you’re viewing instead of just listening) that the set for this podcast is awesome. That’s because we went to visit Underwood a couple of months back for this podcast and for a video that will be coming out on our own booming YouTube channel.

We spent a couple of nights at Cerro Gordo, living in an old miner’s house, and we explored the grounds with Underwood.

As you’ll hear in this episode, Cerro Gordo was a long-running silver mine and, at its peak, had 4,000 people living in the mountains and working the many miles of mines. It’s quite well preserved. You can see the old brothel, theater, and store. And Underwood has been rebuilding the American Hotel that once served as the centerpiece of the town.

Underwood does crazy things at Cerro Gordo. He’ll lower himself down the main mine shaft and then spend days underground. He’s used his exploring to help build out the history of Cerro Gordo and wrote an amazing book about Cerro Gordo and his adventures. You should probably buy it and read it.

We obviously get into all of the above with Underwood, who is a wonderful storyteller and a good dude.

Subscribe now

SPONSOR

Some of you will be wondering, “Is this episode sponsored?”. Yeah, it is. By the wonderful people at Brex.

I’ve worked at large companies like The New York Times and Bloomberg, and their expense systems were terrible. Brex’s expense management systems, by contrast, are fantastic. AI agents run around taking care of tons of stuff for you and give you back your time.

Your company should switch to Brex to make life better for everyone. Find out more here.

Share

Timestamps

0:00 Intro
4:53 How to Buy a Town
11:29 The American Hotel Burns
17:36 History Meets the YouTube Algorithm
22:46 Five Days Below Ground
28:29 The West Was Brutal
33:33 Who Actually Got Rich?
40:37 Where the Water Went
44:31 California Versus the Hotel
49:14 Can a Ghost Town Live?

France: 5 year CDS

Source

Suddenly, financial markets are treating France as the economic sick man of the Western world. Yes, interest rates have been surging everywhere. But the spike in interest rates on French government bonds over the past month has been especially large:

The rise in interest rates on French government bonds is largely driven by heightened perceptions of the risk that France could default on its national debt. The chart at the top of this post shows the price of credit default swaps on French government debt — that is, insurance against default by the French government. While still far below the CDS prices of the Club Med countries during the euro crisis of the early 2010s, the sudden rise of the current CDS price on French government bonds is very worrying.

Simultaneously, and not altogether coincidentally, France is being swept by large-scale, occasionally violent student demonstrations. Furthermore, Marine Le Pen, leader of the hard-right, Putin-friendly and EU-skeptic National Rally party — formerly known as the National Front — is leading in the polls to win the 2027 presidential election.

OK, before I go on, I need to talk about one big problem that affects how foreign observers discuss France: ideologically motivated reasoning.

If, like me, you closely followed the euro crisis 15 years ago, you know that financial media — certainly English-language financial media — had, and to some extent still have, a strong anti-French animus. Readers were constantly bombarded with claims that France was going to be the next domino to fall and that the fallout would be worse than Greece. Yet the data never backed those assertions. Instead, it was obvious that many commentators implicitly wanted France to fail because its high taxes and generous welfare state offended their conservative sensibilities.

Conversely, however, U.S. progressives like me are tempted to push back against this conservative bias by underplaying France’s problems, by noting, for example, that even now French interest rates are slightly lower than U.S. rates — but the important point is that French rates have risen compared with the rest of Europe, and are now above rates in Italy.

So I’m going to try to be objective here and acknowledge that France’s current situation is really worrisome. In particular, it’s not just a matter for France alone. France’s membership in the euro area creates the possibility of an explosive debt crisis — and such a crisis could be destructive to European unity.

What is France’s problem? France is on a fiscally unsustainable path. Debt is already very high as a percentage of GDP, and the French government is adding to that debt by running large budget deficits even though there is no emergency like a war, a severe recession, or a pandemic to justify such deficits. Furthermore, France has an aging population, which means that pension costs will, other things equal, grow much faster than revenue.

Now, everything I just said about France’s fiscal situation is true for other major advanced economies too, the United States very much included. But France does stand out, even among fiscally troubled nations, in one main way: its persistent inability to get realistic about retirement.

The official French retirement age — the age at which workers can collect full benefits — was only 62 in 2023. By comparison, the retirement age in Denmark, which is often held up by U.S. progressives as a model of a nation with a strong safety net, was 67 (which is also the age in the U.S.). The average actual age of retirement, which is always lower than the statutory age because some people choose to accept reduced benefits, was lower in France than anywhere else in Western Europe:

Macron’s center-right government was on track to gradually raise the retirement age to 64, still low by the standards of other advanced nations. But due to opposition by the extreme right and the extreme left parties in France, this rise has been frozen until after next year’s election. As a result, the retirement age is currently stalled at 62 years and 9 months.

You don’t have to be a conservative to see France’s early retirement as unsustainable, especially given that French life expectancy at age 65 is about 87 years of age, 2 years longer than in the US. Thus the fiscal pressure caused largely by France’s very generous government pension plan has led to cutbacks in other spending, notably on education. France is effectively handing over large subsidies to older French at the expense of everyone else. Mass national student demonstrations should come as no surprise.

The underlying problem, of course, is politics. Le Pen has pledged to roll the retirement age back to 62. This would be extremely expensive and is symptomatic of a general unwillingness on the part of France’s rising right to face reality. Again, this is hardly unique to France — think of all the false promises and claims Donald Trump has made. But for now, at least, financial markets believe that fantasy economics is an even bigger problem for France than for the rest of us.

And France’s reliance on the euro means that it’s all too easy to see how this loss of confidence could turn into an ugly crisis.

Before I describe how that might happen, another warning about perspective. While that surge in CDS spreads is alarming, the implied probability of French default over the next 5 years is still only 1.2 percent – which I think is too low.

But if it comes to that, we know how a French crisis will develop. We saw this movie in 2009-2012, first in Greece, then in Portugal, Spain and Italy. First, investors stop buying a euro-area nation’s bonds, raising the specter that the government will be forced into default because it simply doesn’t have the cash to pay interest and principal on its debt. Fear of default then leads to even more capital flight, which increases fears of default and the interest rate, and the vicious circle deepens.

This can’t happen to the U.S.: it can’t run out of dollars because we print them. But France can’t print euros.

The 2010s euro crisis ended when Mario Draghi, the president of the European Central Bank, said three words — “whatever it takes’. Markets took this as a signal that the ECB would, if necessary, lend enough money to troubled debtors to avoid default.

But it’s questionable whether the ECB could or would similarly rescue France. For one thing, in 2012 southern European nations were engaged in massive spending cuts. These cuts were wildly excessive from an economic point of view, but they did mean that these nations could in effect claim that they deserved to be rescued. France, by contrast, is moving even further from fiscal responsibility — which means that there would be huge political opposition from creditor nations, especially Germany, to a French bailout. And what would the countries that underwent painful austerity measures during the euro-crisis also say about the fairness of a French bailout?

And if France does need to be bailed out, it would be extremely expensive. As the second largest economy in the euro zone, France may have crossed the line from too big to fail to too big to save. In short, it’s all too easy to describe a really ugly scenario for a French crisis that would be extremely divisive within Europe.

Right now, financial markets are behaving as if the risk of such a scenario is real but small. Maybe the French center will stage a dramatic political comeback; maybe Le Pen in office will, like Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, be far milder and more realistic than feared, or maybe, like Trump, she will govern so badly that she quickly loses her political capital; maybe the ECB will, despite everything, be there if France needs it.

But I wish being optimistic about France didn’t require so much hope that maybe things will go right.

MUSICAL CODA

I've always been kind of into computers since I was young. And then when film started to move from analog film to digital, I became more interested in that aspect of it. And the visual effects workflow for many years has included machine learning.

So I can write like pretty shitty Python scripts and stuff like that because with convolutional neural networks, which were the sort of precursors to what the transformer can do, which is just much more computation simultaneously, you would do things like look at what's called a tensor, which is just the numerical translation of a visual image in numbers — like the batch number, the frame number, the red, green, and blue values of each pixel in each frame.

And a tensor, you use a convolutional neural network to identify patterns in that that would reveal what's called edge detection or feature extraction, which is just identifying patterns enough to know like this is where the window ledge is, so we can more easily take the green screen image out and replace it with something.

— Ben Affleck, Pythonista

Tags: machine-learning, python

As previously promised, here's Anthropic's new fast, low cost model: Introducing Claude Haiku 5.5.

The previous Haiku, 4.5, was very much showing its age. It came out almost a year ago, and was priced at $1/million input and $5/million output - relatively expensive even back then, and a full 10x the price of OpenAI's GPT-6 Luna, released last month.

The new Haiku exactly matches the price of GPT-6 Luna - $0.10/$0.50 - up to 100,000 tokens. Beyond 100,000 tokens the price increases 5x to $0.50/$2.50. Luna itself has a price increase at 272,000 tokens but only to $0.20/$0.75.

Haiku 5.5 also uses a new, less generous tokenizer. My Claude Token Counter tool shows that the same long prompt uses around 1.25x as many tokens with Haiku 5.5 compared to Haiku 4.5, so there's a hidden price increase there.

If your workloads fit in 100,000 tokens, Haiku is the same price as Luna and reports higher benchmark scores. Above 100,000 tokens, Luna looks like a much better deal.

The most recent release of llm-anthropic finally fixed it so I don't need to ship a new version of that plugin for every new model. I tested the new model like this:

llm install -U llm-anthropic
llm anthropic refresh
llm -m claude-haiku-5.5 "Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle" -o thinking_effort low

Pelicans

Here are pelicans for low, medium, high, xhigh, and max. The new Haiku doesn't let you disable reasoning, and defaults to medium. I got a good bicycle frame for everything beyond low. The low effort pelican cost 0.0936 cents and took 7 seconds.

This max effort pelican (with a reasoning trace that starts "This is the classic pelican-on-bicycle SVG test...") took 5 minutes 9 seconds to generate, but still only cost me 3.3826 cents:

(Since the reasoning trace exhibits awareness of the benchmark, here's Generate an SVG of an armadillo in fishnet tights jaywalking on Mars (on xhigh), and the same prompt against some other recent models. Background on that.)

For comparison, here's the pelican I got a year ago from Haiku 4.5 (for 0.7583 cents - Haiku 4.5 did not support reasoning levels). It sucked at drawing pelicans:

And a generous API credit scheme for subscribers

In addition to Haiku 5.5, Anthropic announced today that they are halving the price of cache reads for Sonnet 5.5. They've also added API credits to subscription plans:

Second, this week, we’ll roll out a new monthly API credit to all Max and Team subscribers for use on the Claude Platform. Max 5x users will get $100 in credits per month, Max 20x users will get $200, and Team subscribers will receive up to $500, pooled across their users.

Claiming this is pleasantly easy: navigate to Settings -> Billing and select the API organization that should benefit from the credits every month:

The API credits exactly match the cost of the subscription itself. This is really generous - it makes it much easier for subscribers to use the API. Anthropic also let you disable auto-reload for the API, with the consequence that "API requests will stop when your balance runs out" - exactly what you want if you're planning to burn through those API credits without risk of a nasty billing surprise.

Note that the monthly credits do not roll over - use them or lose them.

OpenAI still allow you to use your Codex subscription for personal API use, which works out as a better deal for heavy API users. This new credit scheme goes at least some way to overcoming that difference.

Tags: ai, generative-ai, llms, anthropic, claude, llm-pricing, pelican-riding-a-bicycle, llm-release

Anti-Patterns in Software Blogging

He also warns against overreliance on links as an excuse not to explain terminology. This one hurt! I do this all the time, but I have a nagging suspicion that almost nobody ever clicks on them.

(In a Lobste.rs comment Michael clarifies that "My rule of thumb is that my article should still make sense to the reader even if they don't click any links". That works for me.)

This point about using your own voice is crucial:

Beginner software bloggers suffer from a mass delusion that you have to write in a stiff, overly formal way for people to take you seriously [...]

Just write the way you talk.

With so many developers delegating their writing to AI, software blogging is becoming bland and homogenous. Readers are hungry for writing with personality.

Via Lobste.rs

Tags: blogging, writing, michael-lynch

This essay was written with Seva Gunitsky, and originally appeared in Foreign Affairs.

Two weeks after Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in March 2022, the Russian TV Channel One editor Marina Ovsyannikova burst onto the set of the evening newscast. She held up a hand-drawn sign behind the anchor’s head that read: “Stop the war. Don’t believe propaganda. They’re lying to you!” She shouted, “No to war!” until she was dragged away.

No one has protested the war on Russian television since then, partly as a result of tighter security and a general climate of fear. But in October 2024, Margarita Simonyan, one of Russia’s chief propagandists, gave another explanation. A growing number of the RT network’s anchors, she explained to an interviewer, are not real. “That face doesn’t exist. We generated the voice and everything else.” They were, she meant, produced by artificial intelligence. In a follow-up interview with the newspaper Vedomosti, she spelled out the logic: “These anchors don’t need a salary or insurance,” she said. “They won’t get arrested, and the police won’t search their homes. It’s all wonderful and terrifying at the same time.”

This is AI’s promise to every autocratic ruler: the ability to maintain control without delegating tasks to unreliable humans. It is an extremely attractive prospect. No matter how powerful, dictators have always needed subordinates—censors, propagandists, security guards, police officers, intelligence analysts, and local bureaucrats—to carry out their orders. But subordinates always pose a potential threat. They could shirk, steal, lie, leak, or conspire against their boss. As a result, one of the oldest dilemmas facing autocrats is how to empower agents to carry out orders without also enabling them to turn against their leader. Autocrats have usually managed the tradeoff by filling key positions with mediocrities whose incapacity is, as the political theorist Hannah Arendt put it, “the best guarantee of their loyalty.” But this inevitably makes it harder for dictatorships to govern and survive crises.

AI appears to offer autocrats two ways to resolve this long-standing dilemma. First, it means they can now easily monitor and discipline their followers in real time. A change in a local official’s spending habits or meeting schedules can be flagged automatically by an AI system, without any need for self-interested informants. Second, AI can eliminate underlings altogether. By automating tasks that once required human discretion, rulers can replace unreliable intermediaries with faithful algorithms that cannot be bribed or manipulated. Officials in autocratic regimes have said as much. AI “can definitely replace half of officials,” Russia’s Digital Development Minister, Maksut Shadaev, told a Moscow data forum in April 2025, adding, “maybe slightly more.”

Yet these promises of a self-running state are illusory, because AI is never truly autonomous. Systems have to be built and maintained by a cadre of engineers and data scientists whose expertise political leaders cannot evaluate. The ruler who turns to AI to reduce a dependence on unreliable humans may end up relying, more blindly than before, on the few AI specialists who keep the system running. And this new digital Praetorian Guard may have the same weaknesses as the old, which makes it a threat to the ruler.

Eyes and Ears

China is in the lead when it comes to developing AI systems that can monitor or replace subordinates. Smart city programs in Beijing, Shanghai, and other urban centers use AI to track performance and centralize oversight of local officials who once operated in comfortable obscurity, subjecting them to an algorithmic performance review. China also developed a “Zero Trust AI system,” which it deployed across roughly 30 counties and cities over the past decade. This system cross-referenced more than 150 government databases to catch embezzlement and nepotism by local officials. It worked a little too well, flagging 8,700 officials before local governments, under pressure from the bureaucrats it was monitoring, began rolling it back. But Beijing has not gotten rid of its new e-government portals, which use automated systems for issuing documents and permits, reducing face-to-face interactions that bred petty corruption or favoritism. The Chinese Communist Party, meanwhile, has plowed ahead with researching what it calls “thought management,” or how to use AI to create microtargeted propaganda. China’s army of Internet commentators, once composed of paid humans, is already being replaced by bots.

Russia has been pursuing the same goals with a similar fervor. Moscow’s citywide facial recognition system, deployed across 200,000 cameras, was used to identify and apprehend protesters during the 2021 antigovernment demonstrations. The central government has started using automated data collection and aggregation to bypass regional officials who could taint the data or use it to promote their own interests. In 2023, Russia’s Internet regulator launched Oculus, an AI system that scans hundreds of thousands of images per day for prohibited content, including political content—orders of magnitude beyond what human censors could process. The Russian security service’s Meliorator tool has been used to create over a thousand profiles of fictitious Americans, primarily on X (formerly Twitter), to spread Kremlin narratives at a fraction of the cost of human troll farms.

Other autocracies are following in Beijing’s and Moscow’s footsteps. In April 2025, the United Arab Emirates created a Regulatory Intelligence Office that uses AI to draft and amend federal laws, work once done by legislative staff. A year later, UAE Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum announced that autonomous AI agents would take over half of the federal government’s operations within two years and that “the performance of ministers, directors general, and entities will be assessed based on their ability to adopt this transformation.”

These innovations may reduce the number of bureaucrats autocrats need. But they cannot actually create what dictators want most: a self-running state. Even AI-generated television anchors need people to build and maintain them, and censorship systems need people to retrain them as the vocabulary of dissent shifts. Behind every AI model, there is a small group of engineers and data scientists doing essential maintenance, and their work is so technical that rulers cannot understand it.

This dependence thus becomes another form of power. The engineers who maintain an autocrat’s surveillance apparatus, for example, can shape what the ruler sees. They decide what information is important enough to pass along and in what form to present it. They determine which threats get flagged, and they can adjust the algorithms that select what content gets suppressed and who gets arrested. And they can do this without anyone in the palace noticing. Autocrats who turn to AI to escape a dependence on unreliable subordinates have only transferred their vulnerabilities onto a new group of officials.

In fact, this new Praetorian Guard could be more dangerous than previous elites. That is in part thanks to the opacity of AI technology but also because this clique is much smaller. Roman emperors typically had tens of thousands of people serving in the Praetorian Guard; modern autocrats rely on standing armies. But with AI, autocrats will need only a small clique of engineers to build and maintain large-scale AI systems. This might benefit rulers since they will have fewer people to watch, yet it also concentrates points of failure, since a devastating disruption requires only a handful of engineers and makes it easier for members to scheme against the leader. The new guard’s members may also be indispensable. A dictator can replace generals without destroying the army. But running complex machine-learning systems requires such a specialized set of skills that engineers can be difficult to replace without disruptions, giving these actors great leverage.

The Indispensables

The importance of tech workers to autocracies has already become apparent. When IT specialists began to flee Russia after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, for example, the Kremlin responded not with threats but with inducements, offering tech workers deferments from conscription. It exempted their firms from taxes and subsidized their mortgages. When Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the mobilization of 300,000 men seven months later, IT workers were granted full-on waivers. This might seem like overkill, given that an AI system needs only a few engineers to run it. But a regime cannot know in advance which engineers it will need, and it cannot train replacements quickly, so it has to hold on to the entire talent pool from which these few are selected.

These measures did not stem the outflow of roughly 100,000 specialists—about a tenth of Russia’s tech workforce—over the course of 2022. But Moscow stuck to bribery, because expertise is extremely difficult to conscript at gunpoint and because conscripted experts might be less likely to do as instructed. Even so, money and privilege cannot guarantee that these elites will stay loyal. Autocrats should recall the lesson of the original Praetorian Guard: for a time, it provided Roman emperors with protection and security. But then the praetorians discovered their own indispensability, and by the second century, they were auctioning off the empire to the highest bidder. This new set of elites can do the same. In June 2023, when the column of Yevgeny Prigozhin‘s Wagner paramilitary company moved up the highway toward Moscow, Putin depended on his security services to tell him what was happening. Future rulers in Putin’s position will receive such warnings through machines: intercepted communications sorted by software, camera feeds filtered through recognition systems, regional reports compiled into dashboards. The engineers who run those systems could strike a deal with an upstart challenger and then drag their feet. They could delay the data, let alerts arrive a few hours late, degrade feeds at inconvenient moments, or make a recognition system stop functioning. In that scenario, the ruler would be operating blind. The Praetorian Guard did not need to kill Emperor Nero to replace him. It simply had to abandon him for a rival.

These programmers are unlikely to seize power for themselves, because they are unlikely to carry what coup leaders ultimately require: guns. But there is already precedent for engineers using their power to shape leadership challenges. In 1991, when the Soviet army attempted to seize control from Mikhail Gorbachev, a handful of programmers at the Relcom network kept information flowing abroad and relayed Russian President Boris Yeltsin’s decrees to audiences inside the country and abroad. The plotters could not stop the news of Yeltsin’s defiance from spreading, and the coup collapsed within three days.

Slimming Down

AI will not let autocrats dismiss all their enforcers. Someone still has to make arrests and run the prisons, and autocrats can buy loyalty by offering supporters state jobs. But it will let authoritarians downsize, and the number of officials ultimately matters less than how the ruler oversees them. Keeping track of scheming or incompetent subordinates has always been the autocrat’s chief burden. AI could lighten it, letting rulers watch their officials more closely without paying as much active attention.

In the near term, then, AI may greatly benefit autocracies. Despite the many obstacles to deployment, the technology is already bringing autocratic regimes the upsides of cheaper surveillance, smarter censorship, and fewer human subordinates to fear and distrust. But for autocratic rulers, the temptations of artificial intelligence may re-create the same trap they are seeking to escape. The more a regime depends on AI, the more it depends on the people who keep AI running. And those people, like every other praetorian class in history, will quickly discover what their indispensability is worth.

 Semmelweis University announces the first 3-pair kidney exchange in Hungary. (HT: Péter Biró  ).

For the first time in Hungary, Semmelweisen performed triple living donor kidney transplants within the framework of a cross-donation program
Wednesday, 7 October 2026 Posted by: Eszter Csatári-Földváry
 

"The three kidney transplant patients who received a new organ at the same time two weeks ago as part of the so-called living donor kidney exchange program at Semmelweis University are doing well. The extraordinary medical feat is the result of six hours of coordinated work by thirty health care professionals. For the first time in Hungary, triple living donor cross-donation was carried out, when the immunological or blood group incompatibility between patients and donors was bridged by the medical team by swapping the donated organs between three pairs who were strangers to each other. 

...

"Until the summer of 2025, organ exchange was only possible between two couples, the first such intervention was performed at the beginning of this year at the Clinical Center in Pécs. However, with a legislative amendment last summer, several couples can participate in the – otherwise anonymous – organ exchange, which significantly increases the likelihood of optimal pairings and thus the chance of successful kidney transplants, added Dr. Attila Szijártó. He emphasized: As the number of donor organs from the dead is limited, the importance of living donation is increasing, as it can reduce the current average waiting time of 3.5 years. "

#######

Earlier:

Wednesday, February 4, 2026 Kidney exchange comes to Hungary

From Lenape land to sprawling metropolis, this detailed timelapse animation captures the making of Manhattan

- by Aeon Video

Watch on Aeon

Sixteenth-century Venice wanted to expel its Jews but couldn’t do without them. Its compromise was the world’s first ghetto

- by Alexander Lee

Read on Aeon

“Our nation was founded to perpetuate democratic principles. These principles are that each man is to be treated on his worth as a man without regard to the land from which his forefathers came and without regard to the creed which he professes. If the United States proves false to these principles of civil and religious liberty, it will have inflicted the greatest blow on the system of free popular government that has ever been inflicted. Here we have had a virgin continent on which to try the experiment of making out of divers race stocks a new nation[.]” — Teddy Roosevelt

The other day, Chris Rufo of the Manhattan Institute and right-wing pundit Jonathan Keeperman (also known as “Lomez”) aired an episode of their podcast entitled “The Indian Question”:

The title of the episode seems to be a reference to “the Jewish Question”, a term in 18th and 19th century Europe for the question of how Jews should be treated in European society. That term, of course, became notorious when it was associated with the Nazis’ “Final Solution”, which was billed as being a final solution to “the Jewish Question”. I assume that Rufo and Keeperman chose this rather incendiary title in order to grab attention. Well, they succeeded.

The episode was motivated by a debate that’s been raging across social media for weeks. It was kicked off by Bo French, the Republican nominee for Texas Railroad Commissioner, who tweeted outrage at a group of Indian American kids attending a University of Texas football game. I already wrote about that controversy three weeks ago:

Jonathan Keeperman (“Lomez”) invited me on his podcast to share my views and debate him, so I did. Here’s the episode that resulted:

Rufo was busy, so it was just Keeperman and me.1

Anyway, before I talk about the substance, I thought I should say something about the side debate of whether a liberal like myself should even go on right-wing podcasts like “Rufo and Lomez”. Throughout most of the 2010s, there was a popular notion that society should basically ignore and shun people like that, and that if we all simply shunned them, and pressured our friends and colleagues to shun them, they and their views would vanish from American society — or at least remain marginalized.

That approach failed. Anti-immigrant ideas didn’t remain marginalized — in fact, they took over the country, despite their continued unpopularity among the general American public. Are Rufo and Lomez pushing xenophobic ideas? Yes, of course they are. I’m not going to sugarcoat that fact just to be polite. But simply shouting “Those guys are XENOPHOBES!!” and keeping those guys out of polite society would be doubling down on a foolish, self-defeating strategy. The alternative was always to confront those viewpoints directly and defeat them in the court of public opinion, so that’s what I set out to do.

OK, anyway, on to the substance of the debate.

Keeperman and I began the debate by finding common ground. We both basically subscribe to the principle of nationalism — we believe that nation-states are exclusive clubs that exist for the benefit of their members, and that this is a basically good way to organize human society. We both think the United States of America is basically good — or at least, has been basically good throughout most of its history.

I explained my belief that liberal nationalism is the best ideology available — maybe for other countries, but certainly for the United States. All of our greatest successes as a country — victories in wars, successful policy reforms, integration of past waves of immigrants — have come from our use of the nation-state as a tool to promote individual rights, dignity, and empowerment. I told Keeperman that the Abundance Agenda is, at least implicitly, an expression of liberal nationalism — the movement is about creating abundance for Americans specifically, with the implicit premise being that Americans deserve abundance.

Keeperman disagrees about the liberal part, of course, but he does feel that he has the best interests of the United States in mind. His worry is that immigration is stoking ethnic conflict in America, because recent immigrant groups — for example, Indians — are not assimilating into American society like previous groups did.

To me, assimilation has always been about measurable behavior. If the children and grandchildren of immigrants act culturally American — if they speak English, intermarry, give their kids typical American names, go to college football games, climb the income ladder, move out of enclaves, and so on — then they’re assimilated. By all of these standards, the recent waves of immigrants — Mexicans, Chinese people, Indians, and so on — are assimilating just as fast as or faster than the East and South European wave did a century ago, or than the Irish and the Germans did two centuries ago.

The aspect of assimilation that Keeperman worries about most is national identity — the degree to which the children and grandchildren of immigrants feel bound up in a shared community and a shared identity with countrymen of different backgrounds. I agree that this is extremely important; many of the benefits of the nation-state, like the ability to provide public goods and welfare states, come from this sort of shared identity. It also probably leads to greater toleration of minorities (including immigrants). All of those goals should be very important to liberal nationalists.

Lomez — who is not a liberal, but cares about national cohesion nonetheless — worries that identity assimilation is lacking in the modern day. He argues that today’s immigrants retain their old-world allegiances much more strongly than the immigrants of a century ago — that second-generation Indian Americans in Texas still think of themselves as Indians rather than as Americans, and so on.

We do have lots of surveys about this, in fact. There’s a clear pattern — immigrants tend to identify more as their ethnicity than as “American”, but later generations are more likely to identify as “American”. Here’s a survey showing that third-generation Asian Americans are a lot more likely to identify as just “American”:

We see the same pattern even more strongly among Hispanics:

Second and third generation immigrants are also a lot less likely to describe themselves as “global citizens”.

Now, these could be generational effects — people identifying more as “American” as their families stay in America for longer — or they could be cohort effects. It’s possible that due to identity politics, plummeting patriotism, or to the ability to connect with co-ethnics abroad on the internet, recent cohorts of immigrants are less likely to want to identify as “American”.

In fact, we have some evidence that this is happening for Indians, specifically. In 2020, the Indian American Attitudes Survey found that the second generation was a lot more likely than the first (i.e., immigrant) generation to identify as “more American than Indian”:

But by 2024, that pattern was somewhat weaker, with more U.S.-born Indian Americans identifying as “more Indian than American” and “equally Indian and American” than four years prior:

This is just two survey snapshots, a few years apart. It would be helpful if we had had good longitudinal surveys asking people about American identity versus ethnic identity for decades. But we don’t, so we’re left to worry and speculate.

Without longer-term data, my guess is that this identity shift — to the degree that it’s real and not just survey noise — is a short-term response to political conditions. Indian Americans had full access to the internet in 2020, and they were just as able to talk to ethnic Indians in India or Australia or Canada. Identity politics — including institutions such as ethnic clubs at universities — had been around for decades, and the sentiment behind it was probably at its height in 2020.

Instead, my bet is that we’re seeing a reaction to the rise of the MAGA Right itself. It was in 2024 — right before the second survey wave — that anti-Indian attitudes became extremely popular among the online Right. 2024 is also when it became clear that a wave of anti-immigrant sentiment was sweeping the nation. My guess is that stronger ethnic identification among Indian Americans was probably a reaction to the perception that a substantial part of America was attacking Indians.

Keeperman — like other rightists I’ve talked to — seems to think that immigrant groups assimilate only under aggressive pressure from the majority. The model I usually hear is that of German Americans in World War I, who were the subject of feverish forced-assimilation campaigns — pressured to change their names, stop speaking German, and profess allegiance to America. In his discussion with Rufo, Keeperman argued that vocal anti-Indian racism was part of a “hazing process”.

My argument is that this is exactly backwards. Ethnic identity is fundamentally defensive in nature. Identity groups are like gangs — if you no longer feel like a part of the big gang (the nation), you’re probably going to turn to a smaller gang (your ethnic group) for protection and support. For this reason, forced-assimilation campaigns can suppress visible expressions of ethnic difference, but they strengthen ethnic identity itself.

There’s plenty of evidence to support this. Although forced-assimilation campaigns in WWI made some Germans change their names, they caused Germans as a whole to intermarry less and to volunteer less in World War II. Anti-Hispanic rhetoric tends to increase Hispanic identification, and perceived discrimination makes Hispanics more likely to identify with their ethnicity.

This pattern is likely to play out again, with the new rightist fad for anti-Indian bigotry. Bo French’s tweet, and the outpouring of support it received from the grassroots Right, is going to make some Indian Americans question whether America really accepts them — and whether they might have to turn to other Indians for support rather than their countrymen of other races.

Rufo and Keeperman’s “Indian Question” podcast is, of course, only going to make things worse. When your race’s mere existence in America is being described as a “question” by a senior fellow in the Manhattan Institute, you naturally tend to get a bit apprehensive — and a bit defensive. In the last ten minutes of my debate with Keeperman, I got very vehement and animated about the counterproductive nature of the anti-Indian rhetoric.

Keeperman argued that assimilation only worked so well in the 19th and 20th centuries because of “ethnogenesis” — we took a bunch of disparate European groups and made them all “White”. But I don’t think this is quite right. Yes, assimilation succeeded because of ethnogenesis, and yes, “White” ethnicity became more salient. But the ethnicity we tried to create in the 20th century was actually something else. It was “American”.

Attempts to create an “American” ethnicity date at least back to Teddy Roosevelt.2 These intensified in the New Deal years, and during and after World War II. This effort partially failed. Black Americans never became part of the “American” ethnicity, for a variety of reasons — geographic and legal segregation, linguistic differences, pervasive anti-Black racism, the memory of slavery, the rise of Black Nationalism, and so on. But for other racial minorities — Asians, Hispanics, and Middle Easterners — it partially succeeded.

The idea that the efforts of FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, LBJ, and other liberal nationalists of the mid 20th century were all about creating White identity is a recent conceit; if you read anything from the time period, you realize that this wasn’t the goal, even if it was one of the lasting results. To understand the mood of the time, you should listen to the patriotic song “Ballad for Americans”, by Paul Robeson, which was sung at the 1940 Republican national convention.3 Here’s a key excerpt:

Now hold on here.
What are you trying to give us?
Are you an American?

Am I an American?
I’m just an….
Irish, Negro, Jewish, Italian,
French and English, Spanish, Russian,
Chinese, Polish, Scot, Hungarian,
Litvak, Swedish, Finnish, Canadian,
Greek and Turk and Czech,
And double-check American!
And that ain’t all!
I was baptized Baptist, Methodist,
Congregationalist,
Lutheran, Atheist, Roman Catholic,
Orthodox Jewish, Presbyterian,
Seventh Day Adventist, Mormon, Quaker,
Christian Scientist,
And lots more!

You sure are something!

Our country’s strong, our country’s young,
And her greatest songs are yet unsung,
From her plains and mountains,
We have sprung to keep the faith
With those who went before.
We nobodies who are anybodies believe it.
We anybodies who are everybodies have no doubts!

This mood is utterly absent from both the modern Right and the modern Left. On the Right, there is no attempt at ethnogenesis — only perpetual fragmentation, suspicion, and finger-pointing. Here is what I wrote in my post three weeks ago:

It’s this pathological inability to understand alliances and coalition-building that will ultimately doom the New Right. Like the far Left, this is a movement built to exclude and divide and splinter — both because of the querulous personalities of rightists themselves, and because of the intransigence of a racial ideology that abhors any impurity. If they ever managed to see off the Hispanics and the Asians, the rightists would start in on the Greeks and the Italians, and so on. There’s no victory in sight — only eternal conflict. These are not nation-builders; they are nation-dismantlers.

Meanwhile, the progressive movement has tried its hand at ethnogenesis — POC and BIPOC were both essentially attempts to create new racial categories defined in opposition to the White category. But these attempts fell apart. And there hasn’t been an attempt to create a broadly shared American ethnicity, because the modern progressive movement is also obsessed with purity, exclusion, and tent-shrinking.

But if we are going to flourish as a nation, the project of creating an American ethnicity is essential. The rightist approach — bullying nonwhite people until they meekly suppress any evidence of their backgrounds — will backfire spectacularly. In fact, it is already backfiring. Instead, the right approach is the liberal nationalist one — to allow or even encourage people to value their roots, while also emphasizing that they’re all one unified people now. When it comes to assimilation, a big tent beats a small one, and carrots work better than sticks.

That’s why there is no “Indian Question”. There is only the question of what sort of nation America is to be. We must pick up the discarded project of our 20th century forebears, and make it work completely this time.

Subscribe now

Share

From Samuel Hughes, in Works in Progress:

The elites of Victorian Britain operated differently. Their schools and universities were not terribly academic and had very little STEM. As adults, they got up late, drank a lot, and spent a remarkable share of their waking hours partying. They loved feasting, sports, holidays, dancing, and dressing up. Contrary to their stodgy reputation, they were probably a lot of fun.

Here is some further detail:

Most socially elite Victorian boys began formal education at the age of seven or eight, spending about five years in a ‘preparatory school’ before passing on to a ‘public school’ (which, to the enduring confusion of international observers, is a kind of elite private school). There was a hierarchy of public schools, with the nine ‘Clarendon schools’ at the top, and just one, Eton College, clearly at the apex. About 30 percent of nineteenth-century cabinet ministers and 40 percent of prime ministers were Old Etonians.

Most students at both preparatory and public schools were boarders, meaning that elite Victorians were generally sent away from home by the age of eight and spent their childhoods more with peers than with family. In this respect they were distinctive even in their own time: elite families in continental Europe and the United States were far more likely to keep their children at home and educate them at small local private schools. It is plausible that this contributed to the lack of subnational loyalties in the British elite, in contrast to the distinct elites of, for example, the Southern United States, Catalonia in Spain, or Hungary in the Austrian Empire.

Nor did the Victorians wake up early in the morning.  Recommended, there is much more at the link, though the answer to the question remains somewhat of a mystery to me.

The post How and why did the Victorians succeed? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

Comments

• In reply to Erik Lidström. This was a period of global ... by BC
• I think that the elites controlled the political situation. ... by Mort Main
• Given the high level of alcohol consumption by both sexes, I ... by y81
• In reply to Kaleberg. Fair point. I’d have been a serf. A ... by Student
• In reply to Student. If you were born into the aristocracy, ... by Kaleberg
• Plus 10 more...

Related Stories

• Against Laissez-Faire Democracy
• The Great Accretion and the Great Depression
• The Greg Clark Symposium

 

It's no surprise that NASA's new tack toward foreign partnerships—good deals only, please—is challenging preconceived notions of international cooperation in space.

Without a massive budget hike, the US space agency's emphasis on building a Moon Base and winning a competition for lunar real estate and resources with China will inevitably leave lesser priorities behind.

Gone is the Lunar Gateway, a space station that was to be assembled in orbit around the Moon. For the United States, Gateway was an unnecessary distraction and expense as NASA goes all-in on placing a surface station near the Moon's south pole.

Read full article

Comments

I just gave the first two versions of a talk about how our augmented coding tools are making us feel bad & how they should be reoriented around human needs instead of technical capabilities. This is a similar argument to one we made in favor of XP. I’m anticipating an objection: are tools aren’t here to make us feel good.

Agreed. They call it “work” for …

Read more

1. Begoña Gómez Urzaiz, The Abandoners: On Mothers and Monsters.  A wonderful book about mothers who abandon their children, and properly unsentimental.  You will never think about Muriel Spark the same way again.  Vashti Bunyan gets a section too.  Recommended.

2. Evan Gershkovich, This Cursed Beautiful Land: A Russian-American Story.  Yes he is the WSJ reporter who was arrested by the secret service in Putin’s Russia and held for eighteen months before being traded back home.  He starts off naive, but does not finish that way.  A compelling read, with good background information on what it is like to live in Russia in recent times, namely early years of the war with Ukraine.  In prison it seems he was treated better than most.  Excerpt: “I remembered what Eugenia Ginzburghad written about her two years in a maximum-security Yaroslavl prison before being sent to the Gulag — that during this period she was the best version of herself, at her most patient, kind, and thoughtful.”

3. Reinier de Graaf, architect, verb: The New Language of Building.  A fun read, with chapters on the various prizes in architecture, Vancouver and city liveability, Richard Florida, and more.  The book closes with a fun list of b.s. terms often heard from both academics and bureaucrats.

4. China Mieville, The Rouse.  This novel is 1200 pp. plus, with pretty big pages, and I am on p.350 or so.  It seems very good.  At what point can I judge it?  Can it sustain itself?  Is “ah, but it fell apart on p.1137” actually a possibility?  Past what page number is it in the clear?  I guess I will find out.

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

       

Comments

• In reply to Thor. I’m a bit further in and have to say that ... by Treeamigo
• In reply to M. I for one love his endings. I think it's less ... by Mason masters
• In reply to da pra ver um ser. I think he's a bit like this ... by M
• In reply to Robert Benkeser. As Tyler might say, “Context ... by sumadartson
• In reply to Thor. At least in sci-fi mieville is a slog for ... by Billyboy
• Plus 10 more...

Related Stories

• My blurb for Ethan Mollick’s new book
• New issue of Econ Journal Watch
• What should I ask Tom Griffiths?

 

YED 2001 - November 4
YED 2002 - October 5
YED 2003 - October 25
YED 2004 - October 20
YED 2005 - October 10
YED 2006 - October 7
YED 2007 - October 8
YED 2008 - September 23
YED 2010 - October 22
YED 2011 - October 6
YED 2012 - October 18
YED 2013 - September 25
YED 2014 - September 24
YED 2015 - October 6
YED 2016 - September 29
YED 2017 - October 21
YED 2018 - October 9
YED 2019 - October 19
YED 2020 - October 9
YED 2021 - October 5
YED 2022 - October 23
YED 2023 - September 24
YED 2024 - October 29
YED 2025 - October 8
YED 2026 - OCTOBER 7

YEDs highlighted in red are seasons in which the Red Sox directly eliminated the Yankees.

They wrought in the morning, and I did keep my bed, and my pain continued on me mightily that I kept within all day in great pain, and could break no wind nor have any stool after my physic had done working. So in the evening I took coach and to Mr. Holliard’s, but he was not at home, and so home again, and whether the coach did me good or no I know not … [but having a good fire in my chamber, I begun to break six or seven small and great farts. – L&M] So to bed and lay in good ease all night, and … [pissed – L&M] pretty well to the morning … [but no more wind came as it used to do plentifully, after it once begun, nor any inclination to stool. – L&M] … [Continued tomorrow. P.G.]

Footnotes

Read the annotations

Listen on Apple Podcasts
Listen on Spotify

Get full, free access to Letters from an American here.

You can also find Heather:
YouTube
Bluesky
Instagram
Facebook
Threads
TikTok

Watch today's live recording here.

Listen on Apple Podcasts
Listen on Spotify

Get full, free access to Letters from an American here.

You can also find Heather:
YouTube
Bluesky
Instagram
Facebook
Threads
TikTok

Last night, while the sane and reasoned denizens of Southern California were watching an amazing playoff game between the Milwaukee Brewers and San Diego Padres, I found myself inside the chambers of Laguna Niguel’s City Hall, attending the City Council meeting.

There are three reasons for this:

• 1. God hates me.

• 2. I smoke crack.

• 3. I run a local political website.

Whatever the case, there I sat in the back corner, fighting to keep my eyes open as official city proclamations were presented to some Scouts and some civic-minded folks, followed by politician-spoken words no one will remember and more politician-spoken words no one will remember and more politician-spoken words no one will remember and (surprise!) Laurie Davies coming and going as quickly as hummingbird’s whistle—and then, finally … the BIG stuff.

The REALLY BIG STUFF!

THE SUPER BIG BIG BIG STUFF!

THE EARTH-SHATTERING STUFF!!!!

[Cough]

Orrrrrr … a meaningless debate on Proposition 39, the stupid voter ID initiative which Californians are voting on in the coming election.

By “meaningless,” I mean utterly, fantastically, dramatically meaningless. The five council members devoted an hour (or so) toward trying to decide whether to officially have Laguna Niguel back the proposition—which, if OKed by the majority of the board, would feature all the power and oomph of a dead squirrel’s left testicle.

Put differently, it was entirely for show.

Entirely, entirely, entirely for show.

There is no legal bearing whatsoever.

Lord, it was ponderous, especially when the board’s three MAGA members (Ray Gennawey, Gene Johns and Kelly Jennings) and one right-leaning moderate (Stephanie Winstead) felt compelled to express why Prop 39 is important. It was sorta like being in a Toledo-based meeting of a cardboard box company, where the CEO happens to be in town and everyone present tries to impress, so we go round and round the room and the employees (sensing their spotlight moment has arrived) regurgitate the same three points over and over and over and over and over and over again.

That’s precisely what happened last night: You see, they argued, voting is great. But sometimes voting isn’t great. Like, say, when people cheat. Or do bad. So we need Prop 39 to make sure everyone is happy. Because unhappy people aren’t happy. They’re unhappy. And we don’t like that.

Obviously, I’m paraphrasing—but not by much. In her remarks, Jennings reminded me of the substitute teacher who has to fill in on “The Grapes of Wrath,” but only reads “Twilight.” Johns felt like the dude who used to hang out at Archie Bunker’s house, drink Schlitz and complain about the neighbors. And Winstead seemed possessed by the wide-eyed terror of a one-legged duck crossing the 405.

For my money, though, the worst of the bunch was Ray Gennawey, the council’s dime-a-dozen nepo-baby who made the impassioned case that Prop 39 is needed—because people no longer trust elections, and it’s a national emergency. The three-time Trump voter proceeded to explain, with great passion, that Americans have lost faith in voting, only …

… Gennawey …

… Just …

… Couldn’t …

… Put …

… His …

… Finger …

… On …

… Why.

It was bizarre. Every summer, Ray’s mother appears at the Sea Country Festival, standing alongside a cardboard cutout of the orange rapist. Yet here was her boy, decrying a nation’s lost trust and simultaneously unable to identify the cause and culprit. I found myself wondering: Is this man more (A) naive, (B) stupid (C) incurious or (D) duplicitous.

I settled on (E) All of the above.

The proceedings were made palpable solely by a handful of impassioned speakers and, ultimately, Stephanie Oddo, the lone liberal on the board and a woman who took her colleagues’ collective reasoning to the woodshed …

When it all mercifully ended, I walked outside, where several attendees discussed the madness coop we now occupy. A Trump voter approached, identified himself as a veteran and explained why he believed Prop 39 to be vital. After a polite back and forth (the guy was far from a jerk), I asked whether he thought—should the Democrats win the House and Senate—Donald Trump would take the L with honor and grace.

“I don’t know,” he said with a shrug. “But Biden …”

I can’t remember the words that followed.

I needed more crack.

Judging from his social media posts, Trump is panicking.

Shortly after noon yesterday, he posted that it was “no longer the Strait of Hormuz” driving up gasoline prices, but Ukraine’s strikes on Russia’s refineries. In fact, some oil tankers have indeed been passing through the strait but, as Spencer Kimball of CNBC explains, “only due to a major U.S. military commitment and at a high cost to the lives of tanker crews.” That policy was already too expensive to sustain, and now increased strikes from Iran are threatening it altogether.

Then, clearly incensed at reports that people are not turning out for his rallies, he posted pictures to prove the arenas were full, but those pictures were carefully cropped to avoid the empty upper decks shown in news photographs. “I never have empty seats—Never have, and never will!” he posted. “The Rallies are “HOTTER” than ever.” He added: “The New York Times, and many other Artificial Media Outlets, should be arrested for their dishonesty and disservice to our Country.”

Then he accused the New York Times of doctoring a picture of his Miami club, Trump National Doral, where he has announced he will hold this year’s Group of 20 (G20) summit of leaders from the world’s major advanced and emerging economies this December. His attempt to hold the G7 there in 2019 created an uproar even from Republicans about the blatant self-dealing.

There is less uproar now, leaving Trump free to complain that the New York Times “is a CROOKED outfit that caters to Lunatics who want to see our Country fail” and to warn that “Some day in the not too distant future The Times will be forced to close its dirty doors, and that will be a Great Day for America!” Next to the New York Times image that showed a dirty, yellowed building looking out at the elbows, Trump posted one showing it gleaming white with immaculate gardens.

A New York Times spokesperson told Alice Gibbs of Newsweek that the 2020 photo was not doctored. Gibbs noted that multiple photos from 2023 to 2026 show the same weathering shown in the New York Times photo. The founder of the Photography Ethics Center, Savannah Dodd, told Gibbs that the image Trump shared appeared to be a promotional photograph, and “[c]ommercial photography has different standards for accuracy, which are less stringent than journalistic standards.”

Then Trump posted a wild attack on Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate from South Carolina, Annie Andrews, in an effort to boost his hand-picked candidate, Darline Graham, the late Senator Lindsey Graham’s sister. Begging people to vote for her, he wrote: “For years my dear friend Lindsey would say that, ‘Darline is the finest, most reliable, and one of the smartest people I have ever known.’ He would then always add, ‘Also, the most loyal!’ Oftentimes I would be upset with Lindsey for saying this, because I thought I had all of those qualities.”

Why is Trump suddenly interested in South Carolina? As William Kristol noted in The Bulwark today, new polls show that Andrews, a doctor who has refused to respond to what Kristol calls Trump’s revolting bigotry, is competitive against Graham, whose major qualification for the seat is that she is Graham’s sister.

Kristol notes that in response to Trump’s post, Andrews wrote: “As a mom and a pediatrician, I’m in this race to fight for my patients, my three kids, and South Carolina. And I’m going to work with anyone to put South Carolina first, because lowering costs and making life better for families across our state is going to take all of us working together. If you care more about your bills than the politics in Washington, this campaign is for you.”

Then, once again, Trump promised: “If Republicans win the House of Representatives and the Senate in the 2026 Midterm Elections, I’m going to give all Adult Citizens in the United States of America, $5,000.”

Then he acknowledged the bipartisan outcry over his using $20 million of taxpayer money to run ads boosting himself, writing: “The Radical Left is upset with the fact that I am taking Ads, which I consider to be a positive promotion for our Great U.S.A., and paying for them with U.S.A. money. This is a rather standard thing to do but, rather than doing that, although nothing will make them happy, I have decided to do the Patriotic Ads, among others, and pay for them myself, and with money I raised for MAGA, Inc. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

(This afternoon, Trump walked that back, telling reporters that “many presidents before” him had produced ads like the ones he’s been running that boosted himself, so “we’ll decide” if he should reimburse the American public for the cost of the ones he’s run. Tonight, the White House said he would not reimburse the American people, and his promise would only apply “moving forward.”)

Then, yesterday, he posted again about the Doral photo, saying “The New York Times DOCTORED the picture of the beautiful exterior facade of Doral, in Miami, trying to make it look as bad as possible. These people are STONE COLD LOSERS—Totally dishonest. That’s why they’re going TO HELL, and their subscription numbers are way down!”

With media stories noting that Republican candidates do not want to be seen with Trump, this morning he posted: “My Rally crowds and enthusiasm are unbelievable! Nobody has ever seen anything like it. We are flipping races all over the place. The Fake News knows it, but they don’t want to be truthful with their viewers. It’s all happening! The Dumocrats never counted on this. Thanks you [sic] to the great Networks that are covering the Rallies in full. They are being rewarded with BIG RATINGS. Watch for the ‘Midterm Surprise!’”

About an hour and a half later, he posted: “MY RALLIES ARE SAVING THE REPUBLICAN PARTY, AGAIN!!!”

That post was likely in light of the outrage today over his statement about oil prices at a rally in Nebraska last night:

“And again, remember, with the war it’s just artificial, it’s a little bit high, it’s a small price to pay for keeping the world safe, keeping our country safe. They can take out a city, let ’em take out Los Angeles. Let ’em take out San Diego. [crowd cheers] That’s, this is a very small price to pay, and it’s gonna be over with very soon. It’s essentially almost over with, and they might keep going a little long, you know? They always say they have a big threshold for pain. They need it, let me tell you, they need it. But it’s gonna end very soon….”

The outcry against a president suggesting a nuclear attack on U.S. cities has been rapid and profound. California governor Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, posted: “After sending the National Guard and Marines to occupy California, Donald Trump is now saying our foreign enemies should ‘take out’ Los Angeles and San Diego. He is deranged and dangerous.” Newsom’s press office followed up with: “Let’s be clear: The President is advocating for an attack on 10+ million U.S. residents in two of America’s largest cities. This is not normal. None of this is.”

Democratic San Diego mayor Todd Gloria posted: “San Diego is not collateral damage. We are not expendable. And we are never a ‘small price to pay.’ Keep our city out of your reckless war talk.”

Scholar of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder warned that Trump appears to be inviting a terrorist attack. “Telling Americans that it would be acceptable, or even good, if San Diego were destroyed, if Los Angeles were destroyed by Iran…tells us where his mind is. His mind is exclusively focused on staying in power. It’s exclusively focused on himself. There is no care for Americans there. There’s only an obsession with perhaps having less control over things than he has now. It’s a very clear sign of just how wrong things have gone, when the American president can stand in front of Americans and fantasize about millions of Americans being killed.” Snyder urged Americans to vote, organize, and be prepared to defend the results of the election.

Meanwhile, the administration appears to be pulling out all the stops to get MAGA voters to turn out. Sam Ogozalek of Politico reported today that the Federal Transit Authority is now saying it wants to steer grant money for local and state infrastructure to areas with higher-than-average birthrates and marriage rates. This plan reflects the administration’s embrace of the “Great Replacement” theory, the idea that white Americans must increase their birthrates to prevent being replaced by people of color.

In an event in May, after Centers of Medicare & Medicaid Services administrator Mehmet Oz said that “one in three Americans are under-babied,” Trump called himself “the father of fertility.” Senator Patty Murray (D-WA), the top-ranking Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, said: “Tying funding for transit projects to marriage rates and how many babies a woman has is the sort of bizarre and dystopian idea you’d expect in a TV show, not actual policy put forth by the U.S. government—yet here we are.”

Transportation consultant Peter Rogoff told Ogozalek: “It’s throwing a bone to these ideologues who want to incentivize child rearing and marriage, but it’s ludicrous on its face to try to achieve that goal through an infrastructure program. Does anyone really believe that there are couples out there saying, ‘Hey, sweetheart, you and I should get married and raise a passel of kids because a dozen years from now, maybe they’ll build light rail out to our neighborhood?’”

Wes Siler points out in Wes Siler’s Newsletter that the administration has also promised major changes in hunting and fishing regulations, most of which can’t possibly happen, including Trump’s promise to create a “task force” to kill sharks and seals “to reduce the economic and ecological impact of shark depredation on the recreational angling sector.” Siler notes that this would require changes to existing laws and both national and international fisheries and endangered species agreements.

“SHARK FORCE would be a lot cooler if it was actually like a team of highly trained sharks sent to remove naval mines from the Strait of Hormuz,” Siler writes. But while removing apex predators might benefit anglers in the short term, the whole reason we have all those agreements in the first place is that we know destroying the food chain breaks ocean ecosystems.

Felicia Schwartz of MS NOW reported today that the Trump administration has not invited monitors from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) from observing the U.S. midterm elections. This will be the first time since 2002 that the U.S. has not welcomed these observers. Until now, the only two countries of the fifty-seven in the organization that refused such observation were Russia and Belarus. Now the U.S. joins them.

Dan Baer, who served as U.S. ambassador to the OSCE during the Obama administration, told Schwartz: “Refusing election observers is usually something that countries in a position of weakness do, when they know that they have corrupt or unfair elections. It’s very strange for the United States, which has been historically a standard setter in free and fair elections, to refuse observers.”

On Monday, election denier Tina Peters reportedly met with Trump at the White House. As Matt Cohen of Democracy Docket reported, Peters and voter suppression lawyer Cleta Mitchell have been pushing the idea that Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick can seize voting machines because they use some foreign-made parts. As Cohen notes, election experts are crystal clear that no law gives Lutnick that power.

This afternoon, at a rally in Maryland, Trump called out Director of the Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought, a key author of Project 2025, saying: “We have some big surprises coming up in another few weeks, right Russ? He’s gonna be one of the very important people in the history of our country in my opinion. He’s got some great things happening.”

—

Notes:

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/10/06/crude-oil-tanker-strait-hormuz-iran-attack.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/04/us/politics/trump-moving-ethical-lines.html

https://www.newsweek.com/trump-accuses-nyt-doctoring-doral-photo-what-images-show-12527994

The Bulwark

Grandpa Trump Is Getting Desperate

The hot-mic moments just keep coming for Texas GOP Senate hopeful Ken Paxton. Last week, it was leaked audio of Paxton admitting that Trump’s ballyhooed midterm convention had actually hurt his numbers. This week, it’s audio of Paxton complaining about how little control he has over his own campaign strategy—since most of the money behind him is super P…

Read more

2 days ago · 934 likes · 292 comments · William Kristol, Andrew Egger, and Jim Swift

https://people.com/trump-suggests-allowing-iran-to-take-out-la-and-san-diego-during-campaign-rally-12160839

Meidas+

Tuesday Updates: Media ‘Sanewashes’ Trump, Plague Claims Another Victim, More Tankers Struck – 10/6/26

It’s Tuesday, October 6. There’s a lot to get through, so let’s get right into it…

Read more

2 days ago · 1085 likes · 179 comments · Brett Meiselas and MeidasTouch Network

https://populationconnection.org/learn/pronatalism-in-the-us/

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/10/06/babies-marriage-transit-funding-trump-01107399

Wes Siler’s Newsletter

A Cynical Reading Of Trump’s Big Hunting And Fishing Access Orders

“I don’t know what the hell that means, but I know one thing: You wanted it,” stated Dear Leader last month, announcing two executive orders benefiting public lands access for hunters and anglers. “You wanted it, and I’m here for you.” But in that ignorance lies the rub. Executive orders can change agency rules, they cannot change laws. And any order is only as good as its implementation, which requires competent, engaged staff and leaders at departments and agencies. Exactly the things this administration has devoted itself to destroying…

Read more

2 days ago · 29 likes · 9 comments · Wes Siler

https://www.ms.now/news/trump-midterms-osce-election-observers

https://www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/election-deniers-cleta-mitchell-and-tina-peters-want-trumps-commerce-secretary-to-seize-voting-machines/

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/06/us/politics/trump-taxpayer-funded-ads.html

YouTube:

shorts/t71MLcsUsiM

Trump’s Truth:

statuses/42164

statuses/42166

statuses/42167

statuses/42168

statuses/42169

statuses/42170

statuses/42171

statuses/42173

statuses/42177

statuses/42181

X:

GavinNewsom/status/2107288831112466787?s=20

GovPressOffice/status/2107308699509555244

MayorToddGloria/status/2107295637058494706?s=20

Bluesky:

atrupar.com/post/3mx63vpx2ms22

atrupar.com/post/3mxa57dh5my22

atrupar.com/post/3mxaanp6u3d2s

meidastouch.com/post/3mwwp3ft2522x

acyn.bsky.social/post/3mwww67in2i2f

Share

Links for you. Science:

How did Rosalind Franklin miss the helix in her iconic DNA image? She didn’t. New analysis refutes James Watson’s claim he was first to recognize significance of famed photograph 51 (paper here)
Whole genome sequencing of Yersinia pestis isolates from Central Asian natural plague foci revealed the role of adaptation to different hosts and environmental conditions in shaping specific genotypes
RFK Jr. Wants to AI-ify Health Care. Claude Says He’s Full of Sh*t.
Cyclospora found at Mexican farm linked to lettuce outbreak
Is coffee good or bad? Studies vary, but this New Orleans cardiologist has done the research.
This Worm Has No Ifs And Many Butts
Kenya confirms first case of Ebola Bundibugyo virus

Other:

What Is Zionism? To understand what the word means today, you have to go back to the beginning of the story.
‘Elon is my prophet’: how Musk’s Doge team took a wrecking ball to Washington. When the new ‘department of government efficiency’ sent young techies to disrupt federal agencies, not everyone complied. Here’s what happened when one worker fought to protect immigrant data
Lewis George says she won’t let the ‘loudest person’ hold up transit projects (““The loudest person doesn’t get to influence basic safety infrastructure that we know works,” Lewis George said. “It’s time that we stop believing that everyone has to love an idea in order for an idea to happen. That’s not what governance calls for us to do.””)
‘De-Trumpification’: America’s Ruler Is ‘Consumed’ by Fear His Self-Tributes Will Be Erased. As Dems flirt with tearing it all down, Donald Trump is forcing administration officials to brainstorm novel legal arguments for institutionalizing his personality cult forever.
PSA: Trump Continues to Commit Crimes
Trump loses favor with crypto fans who call him out for cashing in (lol)
ChatGPT is adding real cartoonists’ signatures to fake New Yorker cartoons
Reclaiming Worker Power in the Age of AI
Trump backs down on his taxpayer-funded political ads after fiery pushback (“It’s still unclear whether Trump’s new plan is entirely legal, since his proclamation seems to suggest some level of campaign coordination with his own super PAC, which by law is meant to operate independently.”)
Advocates Hold Another Rally in Support of East Potomac Park. Ex-Olympian David Hearn, who had been accused of vandalizing the reflecting pool in June, joined dozens of protesters at the rally.
Parking debate dominates first phase of Commanders stadium development (the Council and Mayor Bowser really fucked this up)
Polls and “fundamentals” basically agree about the blue wave
Sen. Roger Marshall has an ex-governors problem in reelection campaign
How the Government Forces Doctors to Defraud Our Seniors
If Amendment 3 passes, Florida will need city hospice
AI costs are rising for organizations, reports warn
Paychecks aren’t going as far. More Americans say they trust Democrats to help.
America Wants to Make More Generic Drugs. India Shows Why That’s Hard.
Rural MAHA followers say Trump health policies haven’t reached their communities
Lucien Lazare, Jewish Resistance Fighter in Occupied France, Dies at 101
Susan Collins Voted to Confirm Russ Vought. Is She Having Second Thoughts?
Fury in California After Trump Suggests Iran Could ‘Take Out’ L.A. or San Diego. Gov. Gavin Newsom called the president “dangerous and deranged” after his remarks at a political rally, where Mr. Trump said the Iran war was necessary to “keep the world safe.”
Make. Him. Cut. A. Check.
Swapping money for expertise
In Georgia, two trans candidates believe voters are ready for them
In Retrospect, the ‘Access Hollywood’ Tape Marked the End of the Gender Politics Debate
Trump drops longtime aversion to mail-in voting with GOP trailing in polls
A thirsty Patel juices FBI stats — and DOJ gets Watergate wrong
Putin’s dirty tricks reach Finnish lavatories. Russian spies accused of leaving faeces in homes of politicians to intimidate them
Megyn Kelly on Cornell’s Jane Doe: “I’m just going to be honest, she’s not the most attractive gal. She’s extremely beefy in her arms and her legs.” (Kelly has no idea how sexual predators operate, and that’s the kindest interpretation of Kelly)

While the AI safety cultists are worried about the singularity, what we should be concerned about is how AI can be used to make existing problems worse (boldface mine):

An explosive and newly partially unsealed court filing alleges that the US Department of Homeland Security built up dossiers on ICE observers—including their photos, license plate numbers, and other information—and stored them in a system called the Investigative Case Management database, which was built by Palantir.

Palantir did not immediately respond to requests for comment…

Plaintiffs allege in the filing, which is heavily based on documents produced by the government and depositions of DHS agents, that agents had a practice of intimidating protesters and observers. They did this, the filing says, by doing drive-bys of the observers’ homes and, in the case of at least one observer, requiring that she be referred to secondary inspection any time she tries to cross the border until at least January 2027…

According to the legal filing, that afternoon, J.C. called Williams on her cell phone, identifying himself only as “the Department of Homeland Security.” According to Williams, he told her she “should encourage” her spouse, Pantos, “not to do anything like that in the future because people who are doing things like that might get added to a domestic terrorism watchlist.” J.C. testified in a deposition that he warned Williams she would be arrested if she “continue[d] to do this.” Government attorneys asserted in a court filing that he denied referencing a “domestic terrorism watchlist.”

But you might think, well, this is just a database and it doesn’t involve AI. Nope:

Palantir’s role extends beyond field enforcement. ICE is using generative AI tools supplied by the company to assist with software development, database queries, and system diagnostics inside its Investigative Case Management System, a customized version of Palantir’s Gotham platform. DHS filings again describe the models as off-the-shelf systems rather than agency-trained AI.

Per FedScoop, “ICE added 25 AI use cases since its disclosure last summer, including to process tips, review mobile device data relevant to investigations, confirm identities of individuals via biometric data and detect intentional misidentification. Of the newly added uses at ICE, three are products from Palantir, which has been a notable — and at times controversial — technology partner for the U.S. government under the Trump administration.”

This is first and foremost a data privacy and civil liberties problem, but AI makes it worse, in that DHS minions can use and abuse this information far more easily. There are a whole slew of existing problems, from hacking* to deepfakes that various AI-based tools make worse, but they are longstanding problems–data privacy was a problem before 2022 (give or take), but it’s just easier to acquire and misuse data now.

Essentially, those that purport to govern us haven’t moved on a whole bunch of issues, and now those problems have become magnified by AI.

*From what I’ve read, most of the hacks are cribbed from hacks designed by people, and aren’t particularly novel in and of themselves, and are just applied by the various AI systems.

1. Palo Alto Networks (cybersecurity firm, check out YTD).

2. OAI doing math again.  Quasi-Riemann!  And just one metric of import.

3. The AI agents pitching literary magazines.

4. Redux of my 2022 post on the effective altruists.

5. Rude AI video about Europe.

6. Power constraints and the productivity slowdown.

The post Wednesday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

Comments

• In reply to Michael. Thanks for clearing that up — that's ... by Sinister
• In reply to Sinister. One issue with Lean verifications is ... by Michael
• In reply to Gilligan. oops, wrong thread by Gilligan
• 7. AI has reverse enginered a Fortune 100 software empire and ... by Gilligan
• In reply to M. I concede defeat, M:) by Kaz Stanczak
• Plus 10 more...

 

Meet the 43 leaders and accomplishments that exemplified excellence across the industry over the last 12 months

The post Announcing the finalists for the 2026 SpaceNews Icon Awards appeared first on SpaceNews.

A research team at the University of Warwick (UK) has turned up what may be a planet orbiting a white dwarf. That’s an interesting find given the lifetime of white dwarfs after the parent star has lost its outer envelope. Any life on such a world would have several billion years to work with (see White Dwarfs and Habitable Planets for more), although this planet is far too young for that. But this find has other implications. If confirmed, it would be the first planet thought to have formed through accretion of materials left over from the death of the red giant. It would be evidence of a second generation, a planet-hosting period that begins after the red giant phase is over.

The star is HS 0209+0832, a young and hot white dwarf maybe five million years beyond the red giant phase. The original discovery came in 1999 by way of the Hubble Space Telescope, although the data had remained little studied in the archives since then. It took examination by doctoral candidate Jamie Williams at Warwick to explain some of the unusual chemical signatures lurking in the data. Over 100 chemical features from the initial Hubble observations needed clarification, and Williams discovered that a primary player was niobium.

Image: This artist’s concept depicts a possible explanation for the unusual chemical abundances the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope detected in the HS 0209+0832 system: a second-generation planet orbiting the white dwarf star. The white dwarf is the “dead” core of a star that burned through all of its nuclear fuel and lost its outer envelope of gas and dust to space. The second-generation planet formed from that cast-off gas and dust, which is why its chemical content is very different from a planet that formed as its host star was forming. Credit: NASA, ESA, L. Hustak (STScI).

This is interesting not only because of the idea of planet formation in a kind of ‘rebirth’ of a planetary system, but also because it opens up new lines of research. Here’s Williams, who is now lead author of a paper on this work:

“Rather than the white dwarf stage being a kind of epilogue to the story of a star and its planets, this research points to the systems we are familiar with only being the first chapter of a potentially much longer tale, with some new characters showing up. That’s a really exciting prospect to pursue. What Hubble is showing us in this white dwarf system is something we haven’t seen before: a high abundance of the element niobium, the signature of which I was unfamiliar with when I first found it in the archival data.”

To clarify what was going on in this unusual system required that Williams and team study not just the Hubble data but also that of further observations from the Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer mission (FUSE), launched in 1999, the latter confirming the presence of niobium in the spectrum. Interestingly, the team looked at 33 other white dwarfs with signs of metal pollution in their atmospheres and found none with niobium. Further observations with TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) showed periodic brightness variations consistent with a planet orbiting at approximately 6 million kilometers.

The niobium signature is critical because it is an element that is not formed in a stellar core through fusion. “Instead,” says co-author Nicholas Stone (University of Wisconsin – Madison) “these heavy elements can only be synthesised in the exotic conditions that briefly emerge inside dying stars. The presence of niobium is a signpost of these ‘death’ throes, and the expulsion of the dying star’s innards into space.”

The supposition is that material ejected from the dying star, enriched by exotic chemistry, coalesced into what appears to be a gas giant. The team argues that it is likely the size of Jupiter, and probably losing atmosphere given that the white dwarf would be stripping its outer material in such a tight orbit. Says Williams: “If the second-generation planet is there, I think it is likely to survive. Eventually the white dwarf will cool and then maintain a consistent temperature, with the planet in its stable habitable zone for millions of years.”

But forming this kind of disk is itself tricky. If planets like this are as rare as they seem, that may be because forming them requires another companion that helps to shepherd the ejected material from the dying star into orbit, rather than simply shedding it into interstellar space. For that, let’s look at the paper:

Assuming spherically symmetric mass loss, a second-generation proto-planetary disc is unlikely to form around a single AGB star, but there are several mechanisms that can lead to a disc if a binary companion was present. Evidence for the formation of such a disc has been found at the post-common envelope binary NN Ser as well as several post-AGB binaries. In particular, a close-in low-mass companion to the progenitor of HS 0209+0832 would have entered a common envelope event during the AGB phase, resulting in the ejection of the envelope and the formation of a circumstellar disc rich in s-process elements. A second-generation giant planet could have formed within that disc via direct gravitational collapse close to the white dwarf. Alternatively, a first-generation sub-Neptune or super-Earth that was scattered towards the second-generation proto-planetary disc could have accreted a second-generation atmosphere around a first-generation core.

Image: This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope spectrum shows the unusual abundances of certain elements it found in the HS 0209+0832 system. Dips indicate where niobium, nickel, and calcium are absorbing light, so less light in that part of the spectrum reached Hubble. The reason the starlight is showing elements that astronomers attribute to a planet has to do with interactions between the white dwarf star and planet. The white dwarf is still hot and is blasting the planet with radiation, causing it to lose atmosphere to space. That atmospheric material is flowing back toward the white dwarf, forming a disk and then falling back onto its surface. Credit: NASA, ESA, L. Hustak (STScI).

So while we can speculate about the fate of the inner planets in our Solar System when our Sun goes through its red giant phase, we may have to add in a scenario where a new inner system forms around a hot white dwarf with a long lifetime of its own. That’s assuming a mechanism that supports planet formation there. A still viable Jupiter using its formidable mass to shape a growing circumstellar cloud/disk? The example of HS 0209+0832 makes this at least plausible, although again, we have no good idea of how often such processes produce new planets.

White dwarfs will continue to energize research. From an exoplanet standpoint, imagine an Earth-size planet in transit across a white dwarf. That would be a transit signature for the ages. From the astrobiological perspective, consider that a white dwarf gradually loses heat because it has no fuel. This is a process, however, that can take several billion years before the star’s surface cools to the Sun’s current temperatures. Even that long life-time is eclipsed by the star’s eventual death as a ‘black dwarf,’ an inert object of a sort never observed because to reach that state would take longer than the age of the universe.

The paper is Williams et al., “Discovery of a second-generation planet candidate accreting onto a white dwarf,” Nature Astronomy 5 October 2026 (full text).

Release: llm-openai-decisions 0.1a0

OpenAI released their new Jev-style Decisions API, as previously announced at last week's DevDay.

Since I already have an llm-typesafe plugin for talking to Jev, I had GPT-6 Astra read the new OpenAI API documentation and build an llm-openai-decisions plugin inspired by llm-typesafe.

Unlike Jev, the new gpt-6-luna decision model supports image input in addition to text. Both models charge for input it and not for output: OpenAI's is 10 cents per million input tokens, Jev's is 4.2 cents per million.

Otherwise the API shape is very similar to Jev, at least conceptually. Jev supports three question types for yes/no, choices, or scores. OpenAI Decisions supports the same three types.

Install the plugin like this:

llm install llm-openai-decisions

Here's an example query against an image attachment:

llm -m openai-decisions/gpt-6-luna \
  -a https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2025/two-pelicans.jpg \
  -s 'Does this image contain any mammals?'

And example output:

{"type": "predicate", "name": "evaluation", "probability": 0.0}

Consult the README for full details of how to run the other types of questions.

Tags: openai, llm, coding-agents, jev

There’s plenty to talk about, especially the mess in France. But I need some time to think before writing.

I was a graph theory junkie long ago and even moved to Budapest for awhile to study among the greats. While I was there I started working on Barnette's Conjecture which came to occupy my thoughts over the next 24 years of my life, on and off as I worked in many different fields. Last summer I even thought for a few days that I had actually solved it.

But it's supposedly proven here - problem 180. I don't know what to think exactly. I spent thousands of hours on that problem. I really enjoyed it. Hearing that it is solved somehow makes me sad in a far-off way, like hearing an ex-girlfriend died suddenly in a car crash. I don't know, there's probably a lot of people feeling odd emotions tonight.

— Jake Boggan, Hacker News comment on openai/math

Tags: openai, mathematics, deep-blue, llms, ai, generative-ai

OpenAI “rogue” agent activities found on Wikimedia projects

The Wikimedia Foundation conducted its own investigation to see whether Wikimedia websites had been similarly affected by AI agents, focusing on those operated by OpenAI. We can confirm that we have discovered some activity by these “rogue” OpenAI agents on Wikimedia platforms. The unauthorized bot activities included edits to our wikis, some unsuccessful attempts to exploit a public note-taking tool we host, and heavy traffic, which are described more below.

They found evidence of agents editing sandbox pages, trying to use pieces of infrastructure such as Etherpad to help proxy content from elsewhere, and saw widespread crawling and "hundreds of thousands of data queries" to their Wikidata Query Service.

My best guess is that most of this was a similar (or the same) swarm of agents as those that defaced that German wiki while training for research tasks.

The Wikipedia sandbox wiki edits appear to have started on May 12th, and the initial test edits to the UseModWiki Sandbox page reported by that incident started on May 11th.

Tags: wikimedia, wikipedia, wikis, ai, generative-ai, llms, ai-ethics, accidental-cyberattacks

Since the Medicare breach, OpenAI has put in place additional monitoring to allow “immediate intervention” by staff to stop training if the company’s models access the internet in ways they’re not supposed to, Mr. Kwon [chief strategy officer at OpenAI] said.

— Victoria Kim, Reporting from the Australian parliament

Tags: accidental-cyberattacks, generative-ai, ai-security-research, openai, ai, llms

In the wake of tragedy, an elderly couple must make a choice: should they let their son go to save the lives of others?

- by Aeon Video

Watch on Aeon

 Here's a controversial market with something for everyone to argue about: organ donation after euthanasia, including psychiatric patients, in the Netherlands.

van Dijk, N., Wijffels, S., Wind, T. et al. The first 100 cases of organ donation after euthanasia in the Netherlands: lessons from preliminary experiences. BMC Med Ethics (2026). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12910-026-01590-5 

"Background
Organ donation after euthanasia (ODE) is an evolving, patient-initiated procedure in the Netherlands. While it gives meaning to donors at the end-of-life, it introduces complex ethical and practical challenges for healthcare professionals. This study aims to describe the clinical characteristics and donation outcomes of the first 100 ODE procedures in the Netherlands, while outlining the practical and ethical dilemmas encountered.

Methods
A retrospective analysis was performed on prospectively collected data from the first 100 ODE procedures conducted between September 2012 and February 2023. To gain deeper insight into practical experiences and ethical themes, these data were discussed with organ donation coordinators and intensivists involved in the procedures. The analysis focused on clinical characteristics and donation outcomes, as on ethical and practical challenges.

Results
Neurodegenerative disorders were the primary underlying cause of suffering (52%), followed by psychiatric conditions (31%). The first 100 procedures resulted in 408 transplanted organs. Most procedures were performed in intensive care units, with general practitioners performing euthanasia. Key ethical and practical challenges included the tension between clinical protocols (e.g., fasting) and patient comfort, the medicalisation of the dying process through invasive monitoring, and the logistical barriers of starting ODE from home (ODEH). Furthermore, ethical concerns persist regarding euthanasia in psychiatric and dementia cases, and the emotional burden on healthcare professionals.

Conclusions
Patient-initiated ODE is feasible and allows patients to fulfil altruistic end-of-life wishes, but introduces complex ethical and practical challenges. Balancing organ donation with a dignified, non-medicalised death requires careful planning, especially as ODE expands to psychiatric and early dementia cases. Healthcare professionals face emotional and logistical burdens, yet are motivated by the positive impact on donors and recipients. Insights from these initial cases contributed to the development of the 2024 Dutch guideline, which supports both local and centralised procedures and which removed distinctions between somatic and psychiatric suffering. Further research should explore relatives’ perspectives to understand the broader impact of ODE(H). "

In a new paper, Brennan and Freiman argue persuasively that:

the arguments against laissez-faire capitalism apply in a rather straight way against laissez-faire democracy. This should be a rather startling result, considering that laissez-faire capitalism is widely rejected, yet laissez-faire democracy is widely accepted.

All the typical market failure arguments–externalities, asymmetric information, principal-agent problems, behavioral issues–apply to democracy. For example:

democracies also suffer from obvious externality problems. Indeed, this is the key difference between markets and politics. Market decisions are usually and mostly internalized; negative externalities are seen as an anomaly to be corrected. Political decisions are by nature public. For instance, about 37% of the eligible
voting public, and 26% of the entire population of the UK voted in favour of Brexit, but the effects of Brexit are borne by everyone else, including losing voters, eligible voters who abstained, children and other citizens ineligible to vote, future generations, and foreigners.

…The problem is similar to the pollution of individual automobile drivers or airline passengers. We drive too much and pollute too much because we bear the benefits of these actions but pass the costs onto others. Individually we matter little but collectively we matter a great deal. If externality regulation is prima facie justified in the case of pollution, it is prima facie justified in the case of voting.

They go on to suggest regulations that might apply to democracy. Noting first that:

…pretty much everyone already accepts some government actions which are plausibly seen as vote or democratic regulation. For instance, some issues are put directly to voters, while others are left to elected leaders, while others are left to judges and bureaucracies, and still others are removed from political consideration entirely. The timing and place of elections, who is permitted to vote (at what age), who is permitted to run for office, and so on are kinds of regulation. Government funding of public education is in part meant to be a non-laissez-faire subsidy meant to increase voter competence. Many readers are likely comfortable with government regulation of campaign donations, campaign expenditures and even which kinds of speech are permitted. Probably almost all readers reject straight up markets in votes (Freiman 2014). Each of these things is a kind of government regulation of democracy which inhibits laissez-faire democracy.

The authors sketch possible regulations while stipulating, for the sake of argument, universal, equal suffrage—no weighted votes or knowledge tests for voting eligibility. Possibilities include paying citizens to pass a voluntary civics exam; tracking campaign promises and fining deceptive claims; regulating political advertisements more like drug advertisements; and requiring supermajorities for certain decisions. See the paper for more.

You may object that these regulations would be captured by special interests, be administered by biased officials, or have unintended consequences. Indeed, welcome to the argument for laissez-faire.

The post Against Laissez-Faire Democracy appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

Comments

• What about government failures? by Mort Main
• In reply to Anti-Gnostic. Where two or three are gathered, ... by Mort Main
• In reply to M. Stop joking, let's consider your example here. ... by Sure
• In reply to Vulcidian. Yeah, what's weird about the paper is ... by Joseph Heath
• In reply to M. (Where are the late 19th century Brits going ... by M
• Plus 10 more...

Related Stories

• The Greg Clark Symposium
• New issue of Econ Journal Watch
• My excellent Conversation with Luis Garicano

 

Texas produces more than Canada with three quarters of the population. Rough numbers for 2025:

Sources: BEA (Texas GDP, preliminary 2025; regional price parity), Census Bureau (Texas population), World Bank and IMF (Canada). Texas PPP figures divide nominal GDP by the BEA regional price parity.

Hat tip: Chris Powers.

The post Texas-Canada Fact of the Day appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

Comments

• The greatest advantage Texas had and has is that it is part of ... by Agorabum
• In reply to Reader. Texas oil was much easier to get for a ... by Agorabum
• I’m curious how many Americans and Canadians on this forum ... by Jim
• In reply to Kaleberg. I am currently waiting 1 year ... by Jim
• In reply to sam. As an American, I am against bullying Canada ... by Tomas
• Plus 10 more...

Related Stories

• Rising concentration for economics awards
• The Greg Clark Symposium
• Against Laissez-Faire Democracy

 

Apple just released a system called “Reference Image.” It can verify the image is exactly as taken by an iPhone—new models only—without tying it to a specific iPhone or photographer. It can also verify that multiple images came from the same iPhone.

Other industry solutions require a photographer or institution to vouch for an image using their own credentials. We are concerned this puts some photographers, such as those operating in conflict zones, in a difficult position; it should not be necessary to forgo anonymity in order to prove image authenticity. We built Apple Reference Image to avoid using an explicit, public credential for photographers, and to avoid even implicit public association between different photos taken by the same sensor. The final reference image is instead signed by Apple’s signing service, after validation by PCC. That signature is backed by Apple’s strongest technical guarantees.

Our implementation also protects the confidentiality of the image itself, including from Apple. Merely capturing a reference image should never expose the actual pixels to Apple or anyone else. We achieve this through the exceptional privacy properties of PCC—the nodes themselves are architected so that not even Apple can access image data, just as Apple cannot see the information processed for Apple Intelligence in PCC. While the revocation service must maintain a private record of photo GUIDs and associated sensors to allow for revocation, it never has access to the image data, and does not allow for public access to this record. And as final revocation checks occur using on-device lists, a device never reveals to anyone which photo it’s looking at in order to find out whether it’s still valid.

The report makes for good reading; the details are interesting.

Stereotypes are a foundational construct in psychological science, often defined as beliefs concerning characteristic group attributes. We present a cognitive-ecological theory of social perception that predicts and explains why such characteristic attributes are likely negative, that is, why most stereotypes are negative. The theory assumes that, cognitively, people characterize groups by attributes that distinguish them from other groups. Ecologically, positive social information is more frequent (i.e., positivity  prevalence), and negative social information is more diverse (i.e., negativity diversity. If negative attributes are less frequent and more diverse relative to positive attributes, then they must be more likely to distinguish one group from another. Consequently, the attributes people see as characteristic of a group are likely to be negative. We illustrate the predicted stereotype negativity across two studies and two existing data sets. We then formalize the theory and illustrate it with simulations showing that rare attributes can be highly diagnostic of group membership while applying to only a minority of group members. Thus, the theory explains why most stereotype content is likely negative, despite the well-documented positivity prevalence, and why stereotypes may be diagnostic and comparatively accurate, despite being descriptively inaccurate. The theory explains stereotype negativity without requiring motivational derogation, essentialist group differences, or a general negativity bias, and it clarifies when positive stereotypes should occur. We also discuss the theory’s relation to dimensional models of stereotype content and consequences for interventions aimed at reducing stereotype negativity.

That is from a recent paper by Christian Unkelbach, Anne Irena Weitzel, and Hans Alves, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.

The post Why most stereotypes are negative appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

Comments

• But it isn't true that most stereotypes are negative. For ... by Michael
• In reply to Moral Panic. Good movie. Harrelson and Snipes are ... by Joseph Ferguson
• There is also a sense in which with tech advancements, ... by Joseph Ferguson
• In reply to nf. “People have negative impressions of others ... by Steve Sailer
• In reply to Michael Stack. Most white men aren't rapists, but ... by Steve Sailer
• Plus 10 more...

 

That is the theme of my latest Free Press essay, here is one excerpt:

I feel I am well aware of the limitations of effective altruism, and I have outlined many others in an hour-long dialogue I had with MacAskill, arguably the father of the movement, in 2022.

Nonetheless, at the margin I think more effective altruism would be a good thing.

First, I am not worried that the desires of current human beings will be devalued or ignored. Such desires rule the politics of all Western nations and many others as well. If anyone tried to pass a bill to advance shrimp welfare, I do not think it would get a single vote in Congress. In the meantime, we still do treat animals with excessive cruelty, relative to improvements we might make (you could start by eating less chicken and more beef, because a demand for beef kills fewer cows, given the larger size of the cow.) It would be better if people paid at least partial heed to the strictures of effective altruism on this and many other points.

What about the AIs? Well, artificial intelligence is going to fundamentally transform our world. Many connected to effective altruism may exaggerate its effects, or perceive a high risk of doom without sufficient evidence. Nevertheless, it would be a good thing if we paid more attention to AI issues, and to AI safety in particular. Score another point for effective altruism, at least if you make marginal rather than fully extreme adjustments.

As for aid to Africa and poor nations everywhere, I am not sure of the exact policy to pursue, but foreign aid is currently well below 1 percent of the U.S. federal budget, and the Trump administration pared it back. We are hardly sacrificing our seed corn in America to elevate the rest of the world. In the meantime, if you support some charitable public health programs in Africa and save some lives instead of donating to Harvard, that is probably a better decision.

Again, effective altruism is directionally correct, even if you should not follow its recommendations all the way.

Recommended.

The post Effective altruism is useful at the margin appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

Comments

• In reply to mkt42. I agree with this, which is why I said in ... by Dylan
• This sounds basically correct to me. I think EA is good at ... by me
• Foreign aid would do the most good promiting the kinds of ... by Thomas L Hutcheson
• In reply to Dylan. The biggest and most obvious example has ... by mkt42
• In reply to Clay. 1. Yes, if you had lived in Mongolia or had ... by Naveen_K
• Plus 10 more...

Related Stories

• Against Laissez-Faire Democracy
• Paul Graham Versus the Pope
• Don’t let AI make you dumber